Joseph McElroy: Plus

And so at one point in the shades of light that ran, sank, thickened, lived through (and seemed to soften into swarms, coils, and warp-blots) the hard lattice of himself, he did not explain his NEGATIVE, NEGATIVE, NEGATIVE: while at another point, layered above a moment’s sway of chalky, milky particles pulsing an Acrid Voice transmission so the Acrid Voice was there in the lattice layer itself — Imp Plus saw in the tube that came up from the plants a brilliance that was not glucose: it was light.

The glucose had stopped.

But the deeper feeling he’d had was all at once the layering knowledge of these layers: which was what he now saw he had meant when he had seen foresight: for just when the Acrid Voice in that very transmission asked how Imp Plus saw, Imp Plus found he was not seeing the stopped brilliance in the upward tube: but more: the shifts of substance had turned the membrane to scales and then lattice cells — and he had felt the tube stoppage not seen it.

What then, now, did he see? The brilliance he recalled.

Also the difference between Acrid Voice and Cap Com. Yet the one was right here in the reefs and wrapping warps the lattice made with the mutual light, and the other one — Cap Com — was not seen but was another way of speaking. But before and after Cap Com came between Acrid Voice and Imp Plus’s request to identify a flaming gland near the hypothalamus that had now been dispersed, Acrid Voice came between Imp Plus:

(between Imp Plus’s NEGATIVE NEGATIVE and his joint need to know how water kept appearing)

and came between his doubt that lumen arcs, thinking limbs, shifting substance, Sunbraids, and shearow, faldoream, morphogen, or wending could ever be communicated, and his request to know how his power could have been kept up:

the Acrid Voice came between not to ask again What growth? (for the Acrid Voice had asked this from its reconstituted particles on Earth and in several momentary areas shaped in the lattice light) but instead (O.K., Imp Plus) for reception by the many million cells conducting life from the mutual light with which they worked these chances: so, given (said Acrid Voice) this glut of glucose, given hence more than our and the Project’s chlorella could make between them, the photosynthesis must be abnormal and might be new: yet even so there would be water. But while the Sun can blow up clean energy, the Sun could never in a million years even through the nitrogen slides layering the IMP window make water by itself. SO—

besides despair and curiosity over the particles of recalled things now falling beyond grasp (for Imp Plus now found the Acrid transmissions again shaped in the layers of his own lattice cells while the oscillant Earthbound beam at the general bidding found and refound at each instant the chalky, milky ovals of particle that were the Acrid Voice on Christmas Island; and Imp Plus had swarmed into the Acrid guessworks to barrage them with a pointlessness equal to what, at this corner of any new lesser orbit the IMP tossed into, Imp Plus saw as a cooperative chaos of collusion: to wit, Cap Com’s Contingency suspicions plotting Imp Plus’s recovery, Travel Light’s Good Voice passing on to new projects, solar cookers in pueblos, the race for the Reversible Reaction, trans-world power ponds pooling greater areas narrowing greater space, the fight for power which was the fight to find, beyond perfectly imperfect semi-conductors or beyond an element out of which to make wasteless black bodies for solar receivers, the clue to Reactive Reversibility by which to bend spent Energy through the interface of its own use and thence refract it rewound rebound) — Imp Plus fell toward forms that inclined to hold cities and color, blood streams and water, yet forms that had their meaning in patterns of power holding an emptiness into which Imp Plus’s myriad crystal cells in this momentary shaping of despair could swarm the words SO WHAT—

one had to see (went on the Acrid Voice, having not stopped) an extra force at work that was another element that seemed beyond the sequence of the old Earthly words (but words which all the lattice cells in transpersed cooperation divided into meaning), an element or force precipitated by that which was close and was painfully obvious, precipitated in volume, precipitated in rains, Imp Plus, rains — precipitated winding among reams of what there already was — which the brain’s gray and white matter and a fine humor of cerebrospinal fluid—

And light! — the words met: the two words, but more two pairs — two lattice shapes layered one over the other: the Acrid Voice and Imp Plus said them together, so the very congruence of the pairs made them distinct, like…

The shade of collusion passed at a slant among the pale, hard cells. It multiplied or divided into change. Imp Plus was thinking: I have invented the inclined lattice. But (on the private particle-line direct between them) the Acrid Voice went on: and if this light from the Sun in the brain’s substance has body, the strange element precipitated in volume might meet this light — and had Imp Plus turned from heterotroph to autotroph? — if there really is water. And what growth, Imp Plus, what growth? — the words layered their light through what he thought, and the Acrid Voice asked again, and then asked if Imp Plus had possibly kept his power up through having compressed or compounded such sun-windings as the Acrid Voice had postulated, into focuses, focuses as concentrated as the techniques originally programmed through hypnosis for the Concentration Loop,

CAP COM TO IMP PLUS (came instantly the harsh TL line instantly spread in warps of lumen that gave the look of motion to the fixed prints of the fossil faldoreams once rippling the humorous distances among morphogen-knobs), DISREGARD LAST TRANSMISSION AS UNUSED CAMOUFLAGE MATERIAL FROM ORIGINAL CONTINGENCY PLAN, CAP COM TO IMP PLUS, POWER, GLUCOSE, WATER SHOW EXPECTED DECREASE.

But there is water, said Imp Plus as if to the Acrid Voice, and the familiar ovals struggling with their patterns of particle on the island of the Pacific responded. The struggle spoke but thought itself alone: The readings were not what Cap Com said, but how could the Acrid Voice transmit this—?

Imp Plus knew.

— or convey that Cap Com had ordered Acrid Voice to confine himself to getting facts from Imp Plus?

So Acrid Voice did not yet know it was actually communicating on a private line to Imp Plus!

Yet now that he could reach Acrid Voice only directly and not by Cap Com, Imp Plus wanted any paltry or false test from Cap Com — even a false test of alertness, to show the old loop mode still worked. But then this chance of losing Cap Com dispersed among the lattice layers, and somewhere Imp Plus had already explained that once unbound the separate atoms of the water molecule found themselves caught, spun, slung out, and blown round into spiring orbits by the Sun skeined upon his own sun, and they multiplied into a sky of birth so that when the now far more numerous atoms rebonded, water level had measurably increased, and perhaps Ground could tell why and tell if the difference between Ground’s and Imp Plus’s water reading was due to a Camouflage Contingency plan Imp Plus did not know about.

And although he happened now into a long dark cycle, Imp Plus found in shaped areas of himself that he had also said to Ground that the unthinkable amounts of glucose coming from the plant beds nonetheless did not begin to equal the glucose levels in Imp Plus, and all indications were that glucose, perhaps through priming from the brainward plant tube, perhaps through a winding process already indicated, was being produced directly in what had been the brain but was not the brain now for that was utterly changed.