Joseph McElroy - Plus

The jolts came over again. He shook on his pins and he did not stop spinning. The jolts would not stop. He had forgotten he had no skull. For his skull was trying to get out from inside his brain, and he had no brain now.

The cloudy blue thing fell into the window and then out. The dark dot he’d picked out became a jagged line again. So small he thought he might be only remembering and not seeing.

The dot-line far away out there through the window was an opening.

Into another jolt.

The jolt spun out the window. And he thought his skull in trying to get out from inside his brain broke a needle of bone through the dot that was a jagged line again now in the spinning window. But was as far away as a voice that had said the brain feels no pain.

He had no skull. He had no brain. He had left it in orbit. He was still in orbit, but around himself. But no parking orbit. Orbit jarring into orbit.

Braking. That was what the jolts were.

Ground was braking him. But into greater speed. Into lower and lower orbit. Ground was bringing him in.

The dot-line came by again. A mark on the greater cloudy blue thing. He had to blink, but the need trickled in toes he could not reach to scratch. Across the window of mist that he tried to blink against slid a molecular shift the equal and opposite reaction to which was the jagged dot’s transit out of sight again and with it the cloudy break through which it had been seen in the cloudy blue thing.

He was in launch all over again, was that it? Or on a spring end of someone’s thought launching him back in reverse launch. Sorry, too cramped to turn around, got to back up, burn one, burn two, don’t ask, don’t look behind you at what’s about to skewer you, just get into the right attitude.

The Good Voice had said, “You’ll get some rest up there.”

The back-firings unhinged him; they did not hurt. If this was reverse launch he was in, it was not the idea he’d had of orbit decaying. The tumbling turned and when he found that the turning tumbled he saw clearly like speech to himself that the decay was hastened and multiplied by Ground.

And reverse launch without the housing. The housing over Imp Plus that had eased the suck of speed but had not kept his face from being dragged away.

The housing hit him like a thought, took him tangent as the buzzing slivers adrift had bumped off him aiming commands he could receive if he wanted to reimplant the slivers as he’d done the sliver for the Concentration Loop. Think of all he could do. The jolts jammed him back, and took him over himself over and over — but did they cause the rolling tumble of spin? The jolts had been set off by his own words giving the Contingency Camouflage formula. And in turn by chance the jolts had caused the housing to hit him and the slivers which he and no one else had sprung adrift in the first place. He had given the Camouflage formula but not with the attitude Ground thought.

He could see Ground’s viewpoint, but others also. He saw one shearow aligned now with the long weight of a faldoream. Ground’s viewpoint was that it did not want a take-over. Of IMP or of IMP’s work or the data. Hence the dual plan for Contingency Camouflage. But here now it was not dual: he did not jolt or tumble Ground (did he?) — Ground jolted him .

Dual was control . Control was being taken from him. Did he recall dual control because he was a machine? The crimson flash was not frequent now and it flashed beneath crystal laminations that made it retreat like inhaling. But if control was dual, wait. He thought of what was out the window, thought of it fixed: then thought of his own chain of morphogen-knobs, a diameter without question but centerless and bounded not by circumference or perimeter, but by a dimensional breath that was more than spiral wending and less and less and less like respiration.

But then he thought this because dual (he saw) only went with “control.” Dual was two .

And together.

Two ends, for one thing.

He looked along two like ends of what he took for a shearow inclined sideways into a faldoream. But they twisted and twined here and camouflaged their differences: for this faldoream and this shearow were independently of him merging the one’s draping weight and the other’s bounding reach into a line, into alignment, a second diameter across Imp Plus’s growing fixity of substance — and across also the spine of morphogen-knobs: and he thought he could not tell faldoream from shearow now any more than either end of each pair of ends of length which across the hardening skin were fibers as pale as the lines the Acrid Voice had drawn on a slate wall, fibers tensed by sheaths of arrayed salts yet tensile in their give and bend with the jolts which now turned Imp Plus back: turned him to the shadows Ground had once read in Imp Plus’s thought untransmitted: for somewhere he knew that Ground had followed its own query WHAT SHADOWS, IMP PLUS? with the command CHECK DUAL ATTITUDE STABILIZER.

So control of attitude was dual.

If so, Imp Plus had earned it, it had not been given.

Given words were at all points of himself but so fixed in statement that he thought of the Dim Echo: and of words given not in the small or the large green room but between the two, in sleep, a statement learned: “Spin-stabilizer rocket orients spin axis at right angles to plane of Sun’s apparent path.”

So maybe Imp Plus could do a thing or two to halt or unspin the jump and tumble of this reefless shipwreck — if he could just remember where his own on-board attitude stabilizer worked.

His own: for it was one experimental operation that like the Concentration Loop or exchanging CO 2for oxygen and glucose used Imp Plus himself. Manual backing up automatic. Back-up. Manual. He thought he laughed with a ripple of cartilage along the morphogen-axle. Manual O Manual. OM 2.

Manual tried to grip: he heard knuckles snap far away across a four-dimensional grid of laughter. Laughter not only his, but when he thought whose else, he saw ahead sand and heat and more sand that refracted parts of what he once had been.

And then two things happened. First — if it was first — this utter throw of spin and kick and jam and tumble of gyrate torque came round to what proved this skid through broken orbits to have been not whole: for what he now was in was an equilibrium: unique equilibrium refracted through his more and more rigorous form — equilibrium which gave to that forgotten, stiffly billowing shearow watching through the window — yet gave to all of him — a firm glance at the cloudy mottled bluish thing far off with its jagged dot seen like a thrust through a break in the cloudiness of the lopsided hemisphere which (having so termed the cloudy mottled thing) he saw it was — so seeing it he named it what it was: the gibbous Earth.

But second, he saw that, now calmly orbiting, the IMP had now stopped. That is, spinning.

Jolts and all.

Which stop he announced to Ground yet saw then what this seeing meant: that that prior equilibrium yielding a view of gibbous Earth and a still stranger completion of what had proved suddenly partial in the wild jam and throw spinning and kicking him down out of his bright shell of synchronous orbit, had been nothing like the true halt the IMP had now reached at a velocity not only greater than the former 1.9 of synchronous orbit 22,300 miles from Earth but greater than the 2.4 he had given Ground in case of eavesdroppers, never thinking Ground would act to make not just the camouflage at once come true but velocities still greater which threatened him with Earth and brought on new cycles of dark and light that divided and divided times until Ground came and went like a pulse of pulses.