Joseph McElroy - Plus

Asking and again asking Imp Plus to check oxygen. As if Ground had not its own telemetry. And asking Imp Plus as it had not for years almost, or days and days, for frequency and orbit.

But before Imp Plus could say SYNCHRONOUS or hear Ground say NEGATIVE IMP PLUS, SAY AGAIN, and before Imp Plus could recall the camouflage cover of an orbit quite other than synchronous, and before he could see at once that Ground suspected an alien monitor, Imp Plus saw that moments ago he had transmitted the routine glucose and oxygen readings even before the shearow and its bone-firm clamp had had the sliver implanted. The sliver had been poised above its bed away from the streaming fan of loose power that went out into a substance of himself which he had no name for as yet but which, as one who recalled ultramicrons and a fence with a red sign telling him he would die, he had come to think was lattice acting like the crystal in the solar cells mounted outside. The word was lattice , he had gotten it all over again and now so that it conducted him Earthward.

He wanted to be away from the fence. Yet it could do nothing to him, for he was already it.

He must see the water. He must get into it. He must be in the plants. See what the Sun had done there. He persisted in this. This thought. Which was that the Sun had saved him as he had planned.

His parts still gave the crimson signal but not frequently. But they did not increase in size. And they had composed into a state that did not look like movement; yet this might be because, no more than he could re-form the particles of that hypothalamus the Dim Echo had named, could Imp Plus want to withdraw from multi-sight; and in the simultaneity of multi-sight there seemed an element of motion that seemed in turn to hold the object of its focus still. But there was the motion in his parts. He knew that the hypothalamus now lost through his substance had been a set of controls: and was this set then in a course of dissolution, or was it finely spread? The motion in his parts was spiral whether he stared at the plant beds or not. And slower, as if his compound eye closed in on what it only partly knew it wanted. It was what his laboring microsight examined and it was itself that microsight. He recalled tired . It was not wanting to go on, and he had been this during some time before launch.

It was when he had thought himself that fence.

Or the fence he was to be.

For he had thought this too. Though then it was — he was — a lattice the Project personnel moved through. He had thought this because of the place between the larger and the smaller green rooms, the place where he lay down and let go his controls. To sleep with a voice not Acrid, not Good.

A voice saying what to do: during launch, orbital insertion, orbit. Impressing him with a grid of acts to echo not himself but the Project. But more a lattice with glittering nodes for each angle of intersection: a lattice that data went back and forth through.

So he let this happen and he turned to a thing parallel: the fence with the red high-voltage sign.

In this turn he did not see why he dwelt upon that fence for it told him he was dying. He did not know dying . But when the voice let him get up again, he felt a split. And now to Ground that saw no advantage in an enlargeable capsule he would not explain that even if after programming he was not exactly in clover, the secret split embraced him: it was the fence terrible in its promise: its promise to use him.

Two promises. One if he served as the fence. One if he did not. What could Ground know of such a fence? To Earth Imp Plus might as well be one of those old experiments with salmonella.

He stared into the plant waters. What came back was a desire for a part: desire compounding nothing but what had become of him — a segment of plasm turned as by an elbow bone; a section of plasm shadowed out of color but clear-skinned of scales he saw were cells grown to the surface; a strip of glow, a faldoream membrane sending mild light after the falling face of the Sun from which it had learned. Amid this composite a thirst for circles said that centers had returned. And then in with the fires running down the plantward tube from the housing, he saw potato shapes glisten and drop from the cups of algae no longer green in the blue-brown evenings which had fused outward with days in a field. And the field was him, grown to no scale but the alpha of the great Sun eclipsing the drag of all the magma underneath Earth’s Ground.

But if the scale was imponderable and tiring, the shape looked to be the same potato-shaped power plant he’d found in the cells of what had been his brain. The power plants called mitochondria staring through the saffron cytoplasm and platinum-sparked sheaths of glia and breathing each a path of particles through locks of light. And here now in the plants what looked to be the same potato shape. For had he and the Sun, then, brought the power plants of his own cells together with the power plants of the algae? Each potato shape with two membranes, the inner inwardly folded.

But the folds here varied from those in the brain’s mitochondria. These folds lay deep within the shadows of each alga, each fold like the gill of that Micronesian clam, slow folds some thickened into sac-discs stacked so that Imp Plus, staring through membranes and interior baths of sluggish-flowing tissue-cover, found not just the same charged bodies he’d seen rolling down one tube bound in shell orbits bound one smaller between two larger. He found then, deep within the lamina of the stacks, the bodies he then knew he had been looking to find. For they were the idea of green that he had thought to himself so long ago that he had almost the power to forget the name of these bodies which he saw now were really blue-black as if because the Sun had gone away. But the darkness down here was another light, not just the hand and face of the Sun at work in the evening communities of himself. For this darkness here deep within the potato-shaped chloroplasts, was a lumen of force as needed as all their daytime work. For through the semi-fluid which bathed the folds and their stacked discs, Imp Plus saw drop after drop globe out into the being of an independent pulse of flow and saw it was the same sugar he lived on and pumped through his system, and saw again amid one field of radiating particles that his desire had been to see this sweetness and more. And the more he was and saw was more than he had desired. For the potato shape lay also near shoes of yellow hide, and was also a drop that rose over a ridge and leaned along a hair and arced thousands of miles into a fire whose face — his own — gave light to another face wet with failure.

The potato shape of the algae’s chloroplast power plant was not the first potato shape glistening on a leaf and dropping into water. This potato shape that dropped was water. And this was what made the target drops into systemed rings mapping (as if to get back to) an inside with other potato shapes within the leaf’s chloroplast he had prepared to remember or had been prepared by a voice he’d heard to remember — the rings of each blue-black molecule that held the idea of green: rings concentered, though, as that molecule at the heart of the chloroplast was apparently not. For the molecule had a tail.

A gradient inclination. A want containing enwrapped within itself radii to come.

It was beautiful as the face that wept halfway between the automobile and the shoes of yellow hide beside the fire. But he’d said You are beautiful to the other face too — that had opened the sweet lids of its mouth to him and said, “Vanity,” and laughed.

Ground asked again for orbit and speed. Imp Plus saw that with the Sun and with the plants and with desires that divided him even from the memories designed to keep those desires at work, he had grown water. He had grown water to support the substance he had also grown.