Joseph McElroy - Plus

He could not think. Or, not as he would. For Ground asked what spin Imp Plus meant, and asked Frequency check complete with Operation call letters all over again.

But then Ground asked how had Imp Plus stabilized IMP’s attitude.

Imp Plus found the firmness to think as he would. To think of that first equilibrium: it continued: it had seemed a counter-turn inside Imp Plus recalling the current that cascaded a tissue of spindles along an upstream middle, though when the tumble stopped, the equilibrium held; so he would have thought it to be disengaged from the rest or circuit or lattice of himself had not this poise been also lattice. And also not separate from the bed, banks, bones, field, and hardening lights it had seemed to be disengaged and disinclined from.

But the bones and Ground would not let him think as he would about this beautiful gyro-norm he had made himself amid the former jolting spins. But now he saw that that was what the diametrical morphogen-axle and the salt-sheathed faldo-shear spine were: they were bone.

Did he wish a return of the jolting to set wheeling these bone-lines that intersected but at no center for he had none? Such spin would show again how free from it all his new-found equilibrium was. Yet if by being in the equilibrium he could then have left the spin to kick itself down stairwell after stairwell of burst orbits, still the spin unquestionably had stopped; and Ground’s queries like shadow went round this unknown while they went round also what Imp Plus saw for himself: that contrary to what the Good Voice had said attitude stabilizer had not been under dual control.

Ground had planned to have it all.

But he said to Ground now neither that attitude had been under dual control — nor that it had not. He tried to think as he would. He tried to contemplate the poised moments of force compounding the interior equilibrium — that interior and multiplied division of spirals that also stood still in their own no less breathing braids. Yet try as he would, he no more lost Ground than he could unbind the calcium and phosphate salts from the protein fibers they made bone, nor than unbind these two settling bones of his from the differences between their ends. He had to begin in his own way but knew what would be, and partly because the beginning was not now but long before.

He timed the following momentous transmission:

IMP PLUS TO CAP COM. NERVE FIBERS INCLINED TO ORIENT BY CONVERGING ON CENTERS OF GROWTH THAT ARE ACTIVE. VISION HARDENING TOWARD MILKY AND TOWARD BONE, CAP COM, BUT A WHILE AGO GIBBOUS EARTH WAS VISIBLE THROUGH WINDOW BY MEANS OF SHEAROW MEMBRANE. ALSO SEVERAL ELECTRODES ADRIFT ARE VISIBLE AS IS BRAIN HOUSING ADRIFT.

He had timed this transmission to end as one of the new dark cycles enveloped the Interplanetary Monitoring Platform. But tremors answering from Earth bent round the rushing waves of dark and he would have it his way after all and he would think as he would whatever he had his way.

He missed the Sun. He saw sand. He saw reflectors dug in holding the Sun among the sands — dividing and multiplying the Sun. He saw Ground divided.

So that he would know himself, Ground must know him.

He wouldn’t really see himself reaching Ground but he could see himself dividing Ground. He had a force he had not had and did not know; but he did not have the give that he had had. He’d felt this during light as well as dark. He had, he saw, passed through many darks lately — the briefer darks of his lower orbit. But then through these more frequent darks he had felt alien pulses go in the slivers that were adrift. The slivers hung like flameless candles, length illumined by Imp Plus — by star-pocked polyp-scales that all across his sight membranes in curls and subsiding spikes jelled toward horn.

He did not know how long the dark cycles were.

Yet how then — while he would seem not to know each time just how long Ground could go on receiving and answering him before a new dark came between — how had he timed his transmission to end at that point? He’d timed more than one, he now saw, or was seen. Was seen.

Was seen by the crimson glimmerings he’d described to Ground; was seen — or not seen — by the glial and neuronal cells no longer regressing to glioblast and neuroblast in order then to multiply to more and yet more glia and neurons; was seen by now-homogenized fragments of what he could only describe to Ground as a once-central, once-flaming gland; was seen — or at any rate held — among other, slowing elements by the ambering Sunbraids that moved no less fast than before among his substance: his substance that itself no longer shifted except to breathe spiral waves round its lopsided limits. And these seemed as easy to describe to Ground as their wending origins were hard — and harder still the gathering into their functions of the faldoream languor, the thought of leaping shearow, the morphogen prods’ lasting inclination.

But the two bones! What did they do in their loose, lopsided X-shape, and where did they go? They had differing ends.

The Sun came round.

Whatever the IMP’s attitude with respect to Sun and Earth, two of Imp Plus’s crossed bone-ends lay away from the one window, and two lay toward it.

Inside the hot and hotter capsule, he saw the window had been altered. One clearness had supplanted another, which had slid away like rain.

He tried to tell Ground a number (yes, a number) of things. What was yes? He felt ahead of him without finding its words a thing above all other descriptions that he must tell Ground. But Ground made no response to wending or morphogen, faldoream or shearow, water level or once-flaming gland — though the crimson flashings, Ground said, might be mere memory or trace particles from space. Ground asked so often for orbital speed and call letters: until, through these words with nervous Earth that were more empty than silence, Imp Plus saw — and crimson flashed as he saw — that alien or blind as Ground must think him, Ground must at last ask, What growth, Imp Plus, what growth?

Crooked question, divided question, for Ground guessed that the transmission from Imp Plus was an alien monitor’s. But over growth the division of view would be greater still. Yet just as Imp Plus would think as he would, so too he would make divided Ground see him.

And now, monitoring this outgrowth of what Earth’s central nervous system called fine movement, the crimson came forth doubly aligned along both bones as far as their crossing point. But from that crux, it so leapt on alone that it bisected the remaining space between the windowward lengths of morpho-spine and of whorled faldo-shear. And he knew it would tell him what he did not know he knew — but this he had not quite retrieved. For what the crimson line — twine — skein — glowed — melted into sight (or was it being?), went on he could not tell how long; for besides having already winked red where morphogen-knobs joined inner to outer wendings, it lasted, in his tingling touch of it, beyond whatever bodied insight he had of it at the moment when the crimson flash became now first fork and then a joined line and twine and coil that, on closer look, constantly unstranded and stranded and was pieces and gaps of itself, in which if there had been a point in doing so, Imp Plus could have sighted limitless disjoining.

Yet taking no microsight, he saw some end. It was so magnified he knew again how small he was. Even how small he was long ago under a high, huge roof. Its inside had been ridged and crusted with tracks and levels and hooks. A roof whose floor was underfoot. While looking at the IMP his cylinder — hardly a “Platform”—he heard the Good Voice announce to him its precise height and heard a voice answer that that precise height was roughly (as was the voice) his own.