Joseph McElroy - Plus

So he began to answer and to ask. And while the IMP twisted, tumbled, spun, and pushed into lesser orbits, Imp Plus talked to the familiar ovals of the Acrid Voice. And not knowing where to begin, he used old words the Acrid Voice used. Words sometimes that the Acrid Voice had been going to use. But more wonderful than this in all the words that passed was what they lacked. It was far more than the words were equal to.

Imp Plus felt it all around. If he did not wish to tell Ground that what had been at first a body grown like a starfish of mouthless hydra seemed now other than body, wish faded into inability which was in turn only a shadow thrown by his sense that he could preserve what the Sun hoped they might become.

He looked ahead to what would be; and then — already there — he would look back from all he half saw he had become. To find all those words to be just pictures that fell as short of what the words inclined to point to as the Acrid Voice’s new-gathered body-particles were beyond that body Imp Plus had once shared with the Acrid Voice. That is, two bodies, but alike. Now, faced with the question What growth? Imp Plus did not know where to begin.

But he would know what he had become — not half know but wholly. For to know what was his, he must know the more that he’d become. So he talked to the Acrid Voice, while the Acrid Voice answered with questions and answers. Which were better than what had come before from Ground. For then Ground had said only that the crimson flares now stranding and unstranding might be trace particles from space. But now the Acrid Voice went further and Imp Plus replied that though sometimes he had to guess if the IMP was hot, yes when the crimson increased so did the heat. The Acrid Voice—

It was the Acrid Voice, the Acrid Voice as it must have been but only now was seen: Imp Plus knew because of the remembered salmonella detail, but more because he saw the Acrid Voice now dissolved into a milk of particles firing in steady, interrupted ovals struggling but firing, as if the Acrid Voice had caught some of the radiant motion that had first brought Imp Plus to Travel Light.

He wanted to say this and ask if the Acrid Voice had had cave-in or cave-out pain and say, too, that through a long ellipse of new pain a thought shot back and forth that must be held on to. Shot between IMP and Earth. But he would not find words equal to this or to this power’s heart that was (or was in) the suck of breaths holding the field that was the preserving future of the same breaths between the crimson strandings and the Sunbraids.

The new pain was not a burning, but he wanted to lose it. Lose it as smoothly as glucose shone in streams up the tube from the plant beds. But telling the Acrid Voice about this glucose movement, he knew the new pain promised more of itself. And Imp Plus saw not only that the Acrid Voice must ask how he saw; he saw when the Acrid Voice would ask. But Imp Plus saw that to lose this pain he might have to lose also the chance that it sprang as much from the use of this power shot forth to a divided Ground and back, as from the act between Sunbraids and crimson. This act was more than a blowing and sucking of Sunbraids and a helical recoiling in the crimson process: the act included the great lattice too whose fixity was beautiful where light thought its way through, invited, uninvited, but not in vain. For this light that was the new pain and was the new beam oscillant between here and Ground also here and now combed the lattice cells into sight, feeling, constant change whose forms of particle motion passed tongue through shoe and fire through tears, risking all he’d thought he’d lost but now saw flicker here and there with meaning whose power was their final loss.

These waves of the mutual light sifted one another like the rains drawn by horizontal winds. Rains he knew — but when he tried to explain he stopped before he started. This light he had or was in blew into brief view the lattice cells so they were felt to be massed shapes rather than veins of line nor like the beam that also would go from them here to Ground and back like a bodiless spine.

At one point in these massed shapes the Acrid Voice was observing that glucose had stayed at maximum. Which meant (the Acrid Voice observed) that glucose was being made in unthinkably greater quantity than would be explained by any known photosynthesis: Now granted the process was new (observed the Acrid Voice) of focusing into insulated parallels of flow oxygen and glucose here going side by side up the brainward tube — still, if something had happened to this glucose, it would more likely have burnt away against the oxygen than become more.

Imp Plus dreamed of a sleep in which he had known photosynthesis.

A divided sleep long ago in an orbit in phase with Earth’s GO-system, when he knew photosynthesis and used such words — a time when glucose was decreasing and he had been a Dim Echo of himself. Yet had also known with ill will and desire that photosynthesis even when it made sugar in the dark could no more save him than even the Good GO Voice had ever said it could.

And now as if the oscillant beam to Earth were the body of his despair over not being able to give what he knew was here, Imp Plus could no more show to the Acrid Voice those shadows that had once lengthened like cranes and contracted like elbows, than callout to the Acrid Voice that the word brainward was now wrong; nor show the Acrid Voice what Imp Plus had only half known he meant when he’d said GLUCOSE BEAUTIFUL (Ground’s word). He’d said it just now, it seemed; but really he’d said it many times ago through arcs of sugar raining light and color down the dark slides, through sweet muscles too that opened a rainbow flow to the chances of his own desire: the flow an aqueous humor on Earth while become here in orbit as if by his very seeing sugar food. If he would not communicate these strange things, still Imp Plus — his old hypothalamic control-gland dissolved into other being — did not cut off Cap Com’s commands that intruded on the Acrid particles. Yet he hardly knew what the point was of showing the Acrid Voice on this their private and direct particle-loop the spectrum of the small arcs and the gold shadow of the one big arc thrown by the Sun and its body and hand of light in Imp Plus.

CAP COM TO IMP PLUS, READ FREQUENCY, CALL LETTERS, AND WORDS FOLLOWING CAMOUFLAGE. Light found a pattern in the crystal cells: it was his plain reply but larger understanding. But to Cap Com he must speak in the old way by Concentration Loop.

Oh here was a test, a test like asking to identify what was located next to the gauge registering nitrogen reaction in the beds — namely, dilatometer registering liquid expansion.

How often had Imp Plus in answer said the frequency, the letters TL, and these test words such as Contingency Plan , seeing himself a ghostly camouflage in Ground’s uneasy mind? Did he then doubt also his equilibrium? For it could seem mere disengagement from the action of the IMP’s jolts of skid that jabbed new, lower and lower orbits each an ellipse, the diameter the pain, the foci Earth and the other — the other focus once empty on the Acrid Voice’s chalked board, now clearly Imp Plus and the Sun.

Or —the Acrid Voice had observed at another point — glucose maximum might mean on the contrary no glucose was being used, which could indicate Imp Plus was dead and speaking from beyond, or more likely had outgrown glucose — maybe water too — But NEGATIVE, NEGATIVE, NEGATIVE, Imp Plus heard himself say, like the lost Dim Echo. But say with such feeling that it seemed more and deeper than what he told the Acrid Voice was to be seen: namely, the currents in the tubes, of which the one that moved to him was a live line of glucose flooding up the duct from the dripping green, blue-green, damp-brown plant beds: for up in the substance of himself how could the Acrid Voice conceive of the arcs of lumen sugar and how they wheeled so beyond the desire of the plants that Imp Plus desired not to say it in words — he knew hate from the acrid green rooms — hated the Acrid Voice’s close attention now striving to receive and understand, and hated Ground because it would not see.