Joseph McElroy - Plus

And the new one was sun from him. His own.

Sun that was him.

He’d seen it in pieces and in waves longer than Ground’s but shorter than the long elbows and sailing legbones which were the great Sun’s rays, some greater some less, both greater than his own one kind.

Which they fit — and in a wonderful braid of angles that gave him for one last moment a darkening ratio of known body over known body and body under body under the eyes of the dune: so for that moment that he would know was his last and most enticing choke, he recalled her warm waves and his, free and loose together as if those bodies were not lost to him always.

Thereupon he knew what then he saw he had tried to know before. This thought took effect before he knew it, and the effect was a sourceless jolt that turned him like unfolding him nearside far, or like a thought that was his charge to learn. It ran through the thickening gel and blew the ultramicrons out with a crash the reverse of crash so they hung again dispersed in springy nets of mesh. And the Sunbraids and floods of Sun moved again, though Imp Plus was given pause by knowing what had caused the change of charge. For that was what it was, a change of charge.

And the cause was the jolt which was a thought.

The thought that not only could he think his own growth, he must.

Yet did not his changing limbs think him?

But the pause was a way of speaking, a dim sound of how someone once had spoken. Or how a thing had grown a name.

And now so much flowed from the new state, he could only think he must try to know what he knew. Silver lines — two — drew his thought; but not yet, for now he would think only about the Sun tubes. The tubes moved again, or what was along them. He was breathing.

The things in the tubes differed.

Knot-packets of double-Sun were not all that now raced down from his clear underhousing to the plant beds. What was not the packets was streams of another. Points within points that held each other off but did not defend against his reaming sight. Which came very close or not. Depending on what, he did not know. This lack of limit was not good. He went close, or brought the tubes to him, but did not know what was to be done with what he found.

For it made him think of himself. Of constant mesh gears on a seashore road. And he would not go back into that rich mixture that choked him into liking to be choked. But this time inclining toward the currents in the tubes, he would not think beyond them to what he had once thought was a thought he could handle. (He did not know handle.)

So for a time he saw only what he saw . Points of orbits within orbits. But one point or body of space repeated. And the unit was one smaller shell of orbits held — how? — between two slightly and equally larger shells of orbits to make a lot of empty space into a tight whole of spinning cross-orbits, in which the fastest of the bodies in the orbits stayed closer to the two larger shells than to the middle smaller shell yet so that all three bodies made one.

He followed both tubes at the same time. He liked this mere twofold motion more than the myriad radii his sight if he chose could bring to bear. For he thought of two eyes once and how their lines met always at a point you could see, like a line of chalk becoming an ellipse or bright pale teeth lighting the moist loin of mouth coming close to the focus of his mouth.

But he mustn’t think that way, he must see what was here: that the upward tube from the plant beds into his own being brought back only part of each body he’d seen flashing down the plantward tube: the outer parts or orbiting orbits, not the smaller shell of orbits in between: so the smaller stayed in the plant beds, and the larger came back: and if when the upward tube stopped flowing he choked, then the upward brought something to breathe: which did not mean that the slightly smaller in-between orbit left in the plant beds was not to breathe, though he did not know.

He had said ultramicrons . He had known.

From the Dim Echo now absorbed.

Or from what the Dim Echo had known from. From Earth once. Fences once — that was it — fences around ultramicrons, or of them. The ultramicrons were all the particles of his thought, his great thought from which by a slight change of charge from could to must he had now moved on, but which had dispersed suspended and at a point had gelled toward choking thickness till he had reversed the charge and reversed the feeling the particles had for one another: so instead now they held apart, and this dispersed suspension faded into his being — neither up nor down nor back — and was seen no more. But what did the word ultramicrons do?

Ultraviolet he knew from the Dim Echo, but the word was albedo , and he’d been briefed to recall it; albedo was being measured by Operation TL. But albedo was a cover. Camouflage, said the Good Voice. And ultraviolet was not only from the Dim Echo, it was from the Good Voice’s briefings, and it was from the Sun and they had said you could not see it or the D that, beyond Earth’s envelope, its angstroms might help to bring — angstroms were not langleys much less henrys — Imp Plus recalled remembering langleys by the dozen — and if the ultraviolet was from the braid-bright Sun, the D was not Dim , but if ultraviolet came like thought in ultramicrons, Imp Plus could see it and maybe had seen it.

Which Ground for all its monitoring would not know. But Ground was not monitoring now. Or if monitoring, not by Concentration Loop. Which Imp Plus had popped from one or more folds. Though which of the hanging slivers with their incoming waves rooted the Concentration Loop Imp Plus didn’t need to know.

But then, from the window he had touched without seeing out of, like a sheer dream of the changing neck or limb that touched it, he saw now back over the whole capsule. He saw what he had been becoming. He remembered not understanding time. He looked away again at the window that he did not want to look through. Then names for his parts came to him, and he looked back on himself where he saw still more time. For the crimson that flashed in brief veins that he had begun to see all over himself during the shifts of substance and that flashed in the warm of the day not much at night, he now saw in the darker reach of the bridge body that wound layers across one warp of what had been the brain. This sharp crimson flash reminded him he had not been seeing crimson flashes much now. And seeing this was so, Imp Plus though wending elsewhere to two silver lines he could not place found a moment of many crimson flashes everywhere over himself.

Which was the same, he now saw, as the spread feeling of his great thought of growth just before it became particles rising and falling in solution that from free coequal spread changed toward gel. He knew gel , just as he had thought he would be able to handle that great thought of growth. But as he saw the crimson flash equally over all of him equalling the thought that in fact he had not been seeing the crimson, he saw too that the one crimson that suddenly veined in the bridge end had been so sharp because it was in shadow — the shadow himself against the window that was between himself and Sun. But when he bent away removing the shadow and felt the cell nets of that warp dilate — which was what he felt was warmth — the crimson did not flash.

He looked more and at last he did not see, for the seeing membranes dilated. So he thought this close looking had made centers in each of them like the skewering electrode, and each center had dilated.

No: that is, he saw into the flesh of motion and elastic reticles of cells, and closer still: so a new, delimited aim aisled out, and he found himself falling as if he had been able to see the future by looking so close at the flesh of cell walls; and at that moment he found the fall as cramping in its plummet as the choking had richly been before, and he felt wrenched and yanked back on the end of an elastic sleeve or eye string he then would not look for.