Joseph McElroy - Plus

But which will?

He must know more.

Electrical power sprayed in his substance again. It sprayed from the open line below the hanging sliver. He saw that his new being — for all its impurity and potion — was a lattice that could take these sprays of the great Sun with whom he was in league and conduct them hither and yon.

But he did not know why, then, a slow, slow shearow reached out and, in its hardening state unable to divide its aim into fingers, guided the sliver electrode down toward the open wire where it lay partway down what once would have been a left frontal slope of folds, had there now or then been anyone here to face away from the bulb-bun cerebellum and thus have a left and front. And Imp Plus knew that where the sliver was to be reimplanted was not only the site-source of the funnel fields in what had been the cortex of the brain; it was also the site of the Concentration Loop.

Which meant Imp Plus would be in touch with Ground again.

If Ground was still talking.

And if, more to the point, it was to the Concentration Loop that the live wire from the pump house extended the cable’s solar juice.

But aiming the sliver down at this site the shearow divided the descent. Divided it not so much by stages of adapting or distance or the nights of time he had lost among more and more glial cells, but divided it by simultaneous attentions all around.

So the descent took time. Like steps in orbital tests long ago. Tests? Specimen growth arrested periodically by chemicals so the growth could be studied.

Another shearow not so adept as the one engaged in reimplanting the electrode got caught up in a wending-motion and found its image now darker in the chlorella beds. Two morphogens slipped with the look of a kiss-suck from a slow-rolling faldoream whose ciliary fringes radiated messages around Imp Plus. And when the morphogens like muscles or spasms seeking muscles joined the shearow, they burrowed in to bulge out just when Imp Plus found the shearow’s pressure on the sliver crystallized into a grip: whose prongs were the morphogens prodding out of the plasm they’d just joined.

Which, like the slowness of the wendings over the reflections from the chlorella beds, made it all seem heavier. He was being kept, he thought, from seeing it all. Kept too by the very equalness of feeling whole; of thinking all over; not centered. He had stood away from the whole view of his new being. But now he would not. Yet to grip what he had, he must go on being more; and to hold what he had unfolded and had, he must know what it was he knew. A wave passed through him. Albedo. Salmonella. Ultramicron. Opti-chlorella. The kiss of breath . His attentions found no one source-site of the words, but his shearow with its bone-tight hold of morphogens pressed the sliver closer to where it had once been implanted in a fold that had dilated. He had had a head for figures, had known ultramicron , had felt the bright cells of his tongue nibbled by the mouth of a being who said, “Vanity”; and he had eaten olives with the Acrid Voice that transmitted the pits out of its mouth by making them vanish into the thumb end of a fist. Through days and nights of a synchronous orbit that kept to Earth as a circular hand keeps to a clockface dial fixed to it, Imp Plus had feared Earth; for he might lose breath as he had lost weight. Weightless he had grown more and more.

More weightless? More words came everywhere. Locus. Cada. Templadas . Yet came from the local faldoream dividing and dividing an endless space from the descending electrode to where the shearow aimed it.

Weightless, he had gained. As had the salmonella bacteria years ago that multiplied faster weightless.

But he had crowded the capsule all by himself and though the Acrid Voice had made more space by talking the Good Voice out of the added weight of an on-board video monitor, Imp Plus knew where he would gain weight: Earth would give him weight.

For if Earth had made him less, still if Earth had not subtracted him there would have been zero growth.

Subtracted him from himself. Divided him by himself. But chosen him because he chose himself.

The project had gone to him because he had gone to it. Known to known. To be its ultraradius describing unknown by knowns. Describing ellipses yielding Sun milk and spiral braids and seabirds reflecting shadows that flashed crimson darts in the warm day but flashed infrequently in the cold night which now came on again like pulses of division impeding the sliver’s descent.

Until the shearow must question this division: and with a glimpse of a fresh fan or delta spraying charge through him from the open wire (and not looking different from the charge set off by the chemical juice spurted between neurons), and like a life for whose support he told himself he didn’t need a capsule that could change size — the shearow then proceeded with the help of the now hard-clamped morphogens to pinch the sliver back into place in the charged surface.

For at that instant Imp Plus had seen elsewhere what the wending shearow’s reflection was reflection in. It was his find. His discovery.

Ground was saying words. Words heard before. A voice itself reached up into memory — overheard? transmitted? part each — AFFIRMATIVE IMP PLUS WHAT WOULD BE ADVANTAGE OF CAPSULE THAT COULD CHANGE SIZE, AND HELLO AGAIN IMP PLUS HAVE YOU BEEN THERE LONG TIME NO HEAR. THOUGHT YOU DESERTED US.

But what was his discovery?

Out of the shearow the morphogens stuck thumbs unopposable, stiff, and together, and these also cramped the shearow. Imp Plus felt a symmetroid stiffening in the shearow with the morphogen but also in that other shearow that was again above the plant beds, and in other darkening shapes. He reported oxygen and glucose gauge readings stable and no undue accumulations of CO 2. Imp Plus thought he answered Ground without giving Ground his discovery.

The discovery was water.

He recalled saying water , seeing water drop so tensely bonded that though it flattened into discs it hit the Earth like bombs. But the discovery was more than what the reflection had been reflected in; it was a discovery of time: time elapsed, time possible. Time ahead in the solar wind from which there was no lee.

The wending shearow had found a length of its membrane glittering not in the plastic cover over the algae but in water.

Vanity , came a dissolved voice up out of salt water from an Earthly sea.

Not this water. This water was Imp Plus’s discovery. Water.

Water so deep he became mindful for the first time of how little there was of him now when it was too late to answer that open-mouthed voice, Vain animal .

Water deep too considering all the solid hours spent here in a season of space that Imp Plus recalled like an eclipse of Earth.

Requests how long ago for enzyme action in chlorella.

Requests which looked now like tests merely of alertness in the odd fish cast toward chance hunger. A time of shadows more than birds. Bodies more than body. Shifts so new there were not words to show them. So all he did was reply to the great Sun each day and reply in the nighttime work of the plant beds and the looks and nets of communal and independent lumens changing through darks that were changed in turn by the lumens.

But time possible. For Project TL had launched him with water enough only to give the plants a fighting chance to be explored by rays. Sun rays free of Earth’s choking film yet finely latticed by new giant molecules built specially for this IMP’s mineral window.

Rays also greater, heavy, and unknown.

But water. How much could there be after how much time?

The shearow restored the sliver and before it found its bed again the sliver was already speaking.