Joseph McElroy - Plus

And the pain reminded him.

But of what?

That he was in a bath of elastic. Elastic skin made for him. And the pain reminded him of cave-crash and himself — though him he was not sure of and would not seek.

He was reminded of the cave-crash, the stretching over an emptiness he did not know till he had passed it and had seen he’d brought it into being to fill it so he saw what he had not been able to do when he had stared his microsight so deep into his substance he reached past depth into potential. Saw what he had not been able to do. Saw because the enticing aisle offered to fall him into all final possibility. Saw also because parts here in this capsule, parts he needled his sight into, parts whose stuff was fired by braids of his and his Sun’s radiance, had peeled him from himself. Microsight had more power than he had known. It held him. The brown fingers with a gold ring peeled a sleeve back to put in a point. A syringe. But here in space he it was who had done the job, nobody else.

Which was to penetrate — he must (he saw he must) say what he’d done — peel and penetrate through microsight to such infinitesimal interiors of himself that he’d turned himself away from the whole thing he now was.

Had he wanted to see it so?

Looking, he did not know what to say. He had more than stretched and prodded the elastic skin the Project had designed to wrap him; he had turned it out of itself. The sheen he had now was not that skin that Project TL had fitted to him. That skin had melted into him.

Looking, he did not know what to say of the whole thing he saw he was, whose seeing he also was.

Where once there had been four wendings or faldoreams or shearows or morphogens, division had made many, and many one. What he had to see was that its only firm center was what went round it: the capsule sphere. This arc was joined to the plant-tube housing under what had once been the brain by two thickly silver-insulated wires running from an oblong box fixed at a place up the capsule bulkhead opposite the window beside which Imp Plus had now tried to station and confine his sight. What were wendings, faldoreams, shearows, morphogens?

Four kinds of his body and himself.

Words remembering other words, but new words for what he had become.

He watched his rims soften and rise all together to hold: but with nothing to hold, he thought: but as he thought this, the one great rim of substance humped into several oval holdings.

An amber-scaled shearow leapt up his being yet left its nether extension where it had come from; and he saw that this shearow, which had the drape-drop cover-lap edges and nightlike transparency of the faldoream it had once been, leapt across to the bulkhead to listen at the box where the heavy-wrapped wires came from. A control box.

But if wendings were now one, Imp Plus found by bounding a morphogen off either end of an axis visible in one part of the wending, that the wending had once been many and in some way still was. Many what? He felt he could not say, for see was the need or effect of say: many ports . But three, four, or many wendings had turned into their own motion.

He had to see his being only as it was now; for in the rise and fall of its glassy sheen of meat, making a wave of itself round or then across and back in every circuit, spiral, or skew of flowing interruption and many a skew he did not know until then in the fall or rise he knew he’d been prepared, he found himself full of what had been.

That is, where field had found a way to be a reach, or reach had found a way to know its difference from bulkhead, skin, or radiance it touched, and thus leaned its axis athwart itself to go sideways to join a reach so the reach was suddenly apt to burst and take and be its own neighbor plasm, he saw what a remembrance of caving burn and blood crack disinclined him to see.

He saw the previous leaning that had been present enough to grow into itself. And seeing this not distant past — the earlier tendings and extendings, the dark red or pale green ripples more gradient than motion, the turning of nets of micro-orbits of surface into silk films to see the Sun, yet cloudy silks to slow it — Imp Plus must incline away from the moment of those near memories; for they offered to slide him right down the axis of distance into all the shapes of Earth that could not be his now and would choke him in the words they threw up to him, shadows of what he saw and was and what he meant now instead to see and be, here in itself — that is, apart from Earth.

So limbs by inclination spread to others sideways and were not limbs. So such joined and thus disapparent bodies saw their way clear then to spread their membranes over across a body that had seemed to think itself equidistant from all the capsule. So more could seem less, in the reach of co-motion — only then to break its reply to the Sun’s radiation into all lengths of wave: so that along the membranes’ long reds, brief blues and violets, or medium greens but stranger also medium golds that were also everywhere, the one fastness of sight thus divided yielded all frequencies.

But frequencies of what, he was not sure.

A crimson vein came and went so fast it mapped a spiral and so fast the seeming spiral looked like two, and others in synchronous fields or seeming trains of ahead-thrown need approached what then seemed right to have approached. It was not growth so much as movement. Not a move so much as gradient inclination.

The shapes of the breathings round and round changed but continued, continued to change.

He did not add to himself as before.

Except to find that when a larger breath and a glutting web among many passing limbs crowded the arc of the capsule bulkhead to smell the acrid society of their thought, a contraction was always possible which was as much growth as were all those addings.

Which had gone with cave-crash and vein-flashes of crimson.

But now with more change than adding and more motion than change, the crimson continued in the bright heart of the late day which was many days, and, now Imp Plus came to think of it, the crimson died down at night when cold came, or Ground said it came. But what was cold?

A flank — the only flank and with new pores of moisture — the only flank for the moment (having been a wing, a neck, a finger of nose) — curled now about one plant bed assuming the oblong angles of the housing. And for that moment of brown shadow Imp Plus saw a shiver of coiling under the milky orange membrane and felt in his whole being the plant bed’s partial loss of Sun. But he felt it in the nesting curl of the shivering sweet smell of the coiling which was laughter he remembered up a spine he did not have.

And from the humor of this gland-warm, shade-chilled hug of a giant Micronesian clam fed unseeing by the hunger of light-hungry algae growing inside it, Imp Plus chose to recoil. But before he could do so, he saw the limb of himself not in the plastic housing which he was touching but in some substance below in the beds. What was it?

Yet the flank or limb slowed into orange-red like the optic crossing’s sometime glimmer, and the flank removed itself from around the clear housing so slowly Imp Plus found that this was what he had wanted.

To have the laugh at the giant clam fed by its own tongue of garden? Yet thus slide down the rains of distance not to Micronesian seas containing a blue-green recovery area, but to shearwater shores he could not reach.

He had another answer. The shiver of brown over the test beds. Shaded into chill by his flank. The shiver itself, yes, tested by the very slowness of his removal. Tested to see if the shiver of chill in these particular beds of algae had been really where he had thought.

The tubes between himself and the algae shone with action.