Joseph McElroy - Plus

He thought that if, as before during the choke of gear-dust, thought coagulated without more thought, still then there could come the need for a coagulation other than failure. And what Earth thought Imp Plus knew was misguided. So was Earth to think itself the center for Imp Plus’s radius.

The Acrid Voice must have known what was in Imp Plus’s head. Imp Plus had meant to live. A capsule — even a polyhedron IMP with an unprecedented window — might be built to enlarge; but it must stop somewhere. Imp Plus had grown to cram the capsule, then had done other things. Contracted, regrouped, been turned into other motions. Electrical motion, too, though if to control the capsule’s orbit he did not know. Meanwhile the great Sun in its forms fished where it would. And Imp Plus braided with it his sun he had brought to multiply from Earth. But if these suns braided in part from Imp Plus’s desire remembered from those last weeks of Earthly determination, and if those braids streaming down the plantward tube constantly ruptured the water bond of a given volume of water in order then to multiply and multiply the elements of the bond and then rebond them to make a net increase of water, he knew only that it could happen: not that it would.

But did he want it to always happen? What would he do if it did? Drips of sweet flow edged up the upward tube. He did not need but did not find any sweet-eye now to float him through to the microsight he unquestionably had.

What was a life-support system?

And then he saw what a question was. And did so by seeing he hadn’t known before. And by finding these specimen questions.

A question was what an answer was to.

A shudder rippled the diametric thing or axle the morphogen-knobs became, and he thought that the triple units sharing the downward tube with the Sunbraids were carbon dioxide. Imp Plus saw that oxygen (likewise not alone) kept coming back up the tube from the plants even now at night during the dark cycle. He saw mingling with suns and other powers in the plant housing bodies, he’d also seen in the main ring-system of the blue-black bodies of green idea deep inside the algae’s latticed chloroplasts.

But to see these half-knowns was not to find a way through to himself. He held and was held: he was the things he saw: the laminas were equally one: the way was through a lattice letting him see that as the chloroplasts could be electrical semi-conductors like solar cells mounted outside beside the solar telescopes and albedo receptors, so had his own substance a semi-conductor’s lattices of migrant electrons and migrant holes; and, weightless, it all might grow purer as other semi-conductors had through a generation of orbital work.

A semi-conductor. This was what Imp Plus was.

But the way he found was not the sight; the way was through it.

To a fence so Earthly far away that this fence would not be seen through.

Until then he heard the Acrid Voice see through it.

And Imp Plus had the meaning of the two salmonellas then. In weightless space, the one multiplied three times as fast as the other; for the three-times one, unlike the other, had been irradiated: was that radiant?

Which took him back: took him and rocked him back: jabbed him with such retro burn that his orbit deteriorated: took him back, but back to what was not radiant but subjected to radiation.

But the faldoreamic murmurings had begun to string a net of harmony. Music to his membranes. So he tried hard to see the sense of what now shot at him grid after grid volted from the Earthly fence but no longer with the pulsing flash of red: and these grids told him weightlessness speeds changes induced by radiation yet may also slow some processes and so give irradiated cells a chance to cure their injuries or at least make vital the proliferations these cells would not escape.

But through the music of the faldoreams Imp Plus found the refrain of albedo, albedo like a gentle retro drag, not heard, only recalled. And in what he took to be the drift of himself, he knew that albedo was no more than Sun radiation come back from Earth, and that the potion dispersed all through him dawn after dawn from the now-dispersed flaming gland and from the rest of him, had also been poison .

And so it happened that Imp Plus, sloping into another clarity of pulsion, could stand where he had stood one dawn on Earth. Particles not seen punched jots of him from one place to the next. Particles cut through him. Cutting through to burn what would be cut away later. And burn what would not.

Burn his knowing the burning.

Burn through a winter in which what was happening to him was to most others unknown. Unknown to a wintry windy red-eyed news vendor, who said he could have been a vegetable. And to a child who licked snow off a hand and said Your skin is red. (Did the child mind?) And to a dark amiga who sang amiga . Whom he had tried to be known by before and failed, and who was beautiful. And to another far away but on the same point who was beautiful too and who jolted him by using the words Travel light so that he had now to try not to suspect her while he went on trying not to tell her his truth about Project Operation Travel Light and the blood that came into his face was camouflaged by that irritation the child had seen months before reddening week by week setting him apart.

Once when he’d had a leg to stand on, he had stood under a roof at the end of many nights, he had stood upon a crust of Earth; and nothing seemed to happen for a moment.

Magma did not uncrust itself. Voices did not strike at once.

But in that moment which, once behind him, was the prospect of agony, a reticle of radii breathed into him. Once in, let go. Rods of gamma radii logging his blood, invaginating the veins, thinning the skin, replacing him with a buzzing meant to choke with nets of probability an absence still possible.

At last now he stood again on that potioned point upon Earth’s circle. Yet now his radius self made Earth itself no more than one point along his own unknown circumference.

Which like some future map took him where he had not known he’d planned to be.

So all he knew was that what life he was possessed of inclined him to give Ground answers. In return for answers that in turn might make him know the more that he had come to be.

Imp Plus recalled the Contingency Camouflage plan designed to deceive an alien monitor. Imp Plus concentered his crystal on the pulses of a frequency agreed on Earth. Imp Plus transmitted to Ground the false frequency. And as, at last, he let the milky skin along the billowing shearow at the window see out the window, he transmitted to Ground what Ground’s plan called for, the false orbital speed.

Jolts — what — jolts — what — jolts cracked his skull out of his brain. Jolts drained the bone out of his shoe. Jolts tipped him elsewhere. He jumped or fell, he spun, he was in a spin of gyro-lobs slow fast.

There was an awful lack of pain. Where? He was touched by slivers jarred within their weightless sky, and their pulsings recalled commands from when he had been little more than the Dim Echo. Jolts ripped his sight through the window. He’d lost his tubes, was that it, this it? The shearow at the window was so dislodged it recalled leaps it no longer inclined to take and it was jolted back against the glass in time to see through it far away a dark dot in a cloudy break. But the far dot was a line, tiny, slow, jagged. It tumbled sideways, but how did something far away tumble? He did not see it for a second.

But no, he’d seen more than it; for he’d seen it far away on an arc-edge of a greater thing also far away: a cloudy thing, cloudy blue.