Joseph McElroy - Plus

But what end, or end of what, was magnified? And what made him imagine he remembered what the crimson was? And like the strange timing of his momentous transmission not long ago, he thought himself from one end of it to the other by way of what its strandings, unstrandings, loosenings, tightenings, coilings, uncoilings, recoilings lighted up — and by his origin and what was in back of it.

An end of what? Suddenly now an unforeseen end: of thinking he had not made an error in giving himself away to the Project. For what if he had held back and then recovered and had grown whole again: or at most propelled himself around without a skin or brain: or, legless, lived on his fingers: or advanced through normal Earthly life headless, as if bearing a black hole in last night: or like a figure he’d seen somewhere with a hole through his middle bevelled like upholstery round the edges so it seemed the absence of a cushion. But if on Earth he had recovered from irradiation instead of now waiting in the brain of Ground for a recovery area, he would not have grown.

Except old.

But how old?

And how old was he?

Ground did not answer his data. Ground must think what it would. About how he lived here, what he did for water and food. Ground could be now as silent as the dissolving dark had once been. Ground must think what it could about what Sun did to water and to brains. But was Ground mad? Had Ground been reconstituted? Imp Plus did not know mad; but Imp Plus had thought it when at some time past Ground had said, what Imp Plus had known Ground would say, though now Imp Plus rarely heard direct message words: CAP COM TO IMP PLUS, WHAT IS LICKING? WHAT IS LICKING? OR IS IT LICK OR LICKS? WE DO NOT READ.

He had told Ground (how long ago) that the flaming gland had dispersed, been licked up and absorbed, and that so had the hypothalamus — what he’d thought to be that — with its many controls — or were they forces — of pain and pleasure, cold and hot, appetite.

But lack of response from Ground was not why he didn’t now tell what the crimson strand’s loosening and tightening illuminated. The reason why held him between itself: so it was some likeness between seeing and himself. For in the radiance breathing from the crimson strand’s loosening and unstranding, or breathing then in the loosened, half-melted strand’s self-clutching return to its tight spiral coil, he found the great lattice colonies now unmoved, and he saw he had let his own spiralling deceive him. For the colonies were a fixed mass, a high block of lattice bleached blue and green, a coral as pale as the odd force of discolor long ago noted in the optic chiasma now dispersed along with flaming gland and hypothalamus, and all else, into this fixity. This fixity was layered with the folds of conical wendings, folds of elongated morphogen-nodes and of faldoream-ridges, folds of shearow. For all these four kinds were now a hard translucent record of their former life; they were not moving now; not moving even where they wove round the upper cables and also round those lower tubes in which there was still seed motion, tubes he had feared for in his muscles when Ground had sent the jolts.

His cells were a place for motion — that was it.

The ambering Sunbraids were everywhere in his fixed cells; and through these motions he could feel that the cells were holes held in a lattice, and were the lattice too; but they were also locus timers for tides of Sunbraid which were now harder to see although he felt no less timed or clear. The lattice was a field of times. He was as much the motion as its place. And the crimson process radiating (in his mind?) out from the two crossed lengths of bone which whorled hardness outward like light, illuminated the great lattice by driving the Sunbraids through the holes and beyond to the edges of himself where the equilibrium he must make Ground understand whirled its gyro-norm of seeming substance; but this was only part of the cycle, for then either the Sunbraids were sucked back by the crimson process tightening and restranding itself or they were themselves the cause of this helical recoiling.

Yet also both. Both. The word repeated, for he knew that he must hold on to whatever shot back and forth through a long ellipse of new pain — in order to see what this was inside the pain. Must hold on to. Or be held. Must hold on against new noise. Message pulses from Ground. Hold or he’d lose it. Lose what? Yet he did not have it: or he did: he had it to lose. Or had always had — even before radiation poisoning on Earth had had it: and now in the quantum moment at which he saw the secret mass of understanding, or rather saw he was the secret understanding, between the Sunbraids and the resilient strand, another thing happened: the wending-spirals round his edges were fading into fixity, fixed lattice, and he saw that their circuit had been fed by this bellows action between Sunbraids and crimson strand, which he now in the absence of that wending life could see shot back and forth and always had: and he saw on Earth a new jagged dot but a dot of particles that enlarged to his sight as if the old messy task of dissolving bodies into particles to transmit them elsewhere and reconstitute them had been solved: but the dot enlarged only to a formed, forced, milk of particles, and this was the Acrid Voice Imp Plus had brought into being. Ground had permitted the Acrid Voice to speak to him again and to ask questions and swap data, for Imp Plus if he was to be still more must know the more that he had become. And in answer to the Acrid Voice’s transmissions on glucose, water, growth, and the radiant seeds that Imp Plus saw he’d struggled to keep moving in their lattice-hungry cascades — he wished to tell the Acrid Voice that what he had was foresight, yes, foresight: and he had seen his own.

But something came between.

Was it doubt about the great fixed lattice of himself?

For the last perimeter motions had faded.

No. Not doubt.

For here in this lattice whose three-dimensional field was exactly as regular as Imp Plus now saw (like more dimension) that it also lacked boundary — here in this lattice that seemed impure only in motion visited upon it — the motion was no longer the life of animal or vegetative or some wendo-zoan grip moving: but was instead the lights whose pieces were broken conversely back into streams of flow and bent and conducted into spirals of spirals by this lattice of himself.

He was now his thought. Spinal motion of Sun and cells gripped like a sheathing jolt a length of lattice, then was elsewhere like a star of spines still one spine moving like a scope beam.

But the exchange with Ground that he had foreseen and forced into being began now at the precise instant he came into possession of what he then knew he had also foreseen but could not say.

For the IMP now lunged free of its new road and fell off again into lobs of spin.

Yet these did not jar.

Though then Imp Plus began to wish they would.

His thought turned upon wonderful words that pulsed and passed between him and the Acrid Voice on a Pacific island.

But what was it that had kicked the burners on and shut down the attitude stabilizer? Imp Plus had to ask the question. For whatever Cap Com had done to stretch IMP’s perigee lower then lower toward some recovery space contained in Cap Com’s uneasy brain, Imp Plus felt he was the one who had done it, and had done it through the semi-conductor he’d found all over again he was.

Done what?

Become what he had foreseen.

Or tried to become. Did he try?

He saw the chalked ellipse, the Earth one focus, the other empty but there, the Acrid particles fingering a green blackboard.

And then the particles of the Acrid Voice came together and Imp Plus saw the Acrid Voice as if it were his own particles. And the Acrid Voice said: WHAT GROWTH IMP PLUS, WHAT GROWTH?