Joseph McElroy - Plus

A pause came from somewhere, and was in one place not another. And Imp Plus could not tell if what he had in momentary areas of lattice warp was the image of activity in Acrid Voice’s particles on the Pacific island. But the flattened long oval of their personal circuit embodied his own current ellipse so exactly he recalled dance —mapped on some sweet grid of humor for those coming after to follow.

And through the going darkness of the long cycle came instead of Acrid Voice Cap Com’s static division: between possible and alien, need and doubt: CAP COM TO IMP PLUS, ROUTINE IN-FLIGHT ALERTNESS TEST: IDENTIFY PROJECT TL DIRECTOR BY NAME, COME IN IMP PLUS.

But as, in his layers, he felt like an opposite of jolt a slower fixity, though a finer fixity — earned — and knew he would give Cap Com another, better answer than what it wanted, he found what he had foreseen beyond the Acrid Voice’s main question What growth? that had been put into the Acrid Voice by Imp Plus. He found he had in one near-congruence of layers foreseen that he would not know how to answer the question.

And Imp Plus, who did not remember the other name of the Good Voice, answered Cap Com: THE ONE WE HAVE BEEN TALKING TO IS ACRID VOICE. REPEAT, THE ACRID VOICE.

On the Pacific island, ovals that felt like lost limbs yielded to bombardment, and this was Cap Com at the Acrid Voice, until WHY ACRID? came back from Ground.

But what Imp Plus had said had been the thing to say, because it helped.

For though Ground amid an accelerated swirl of reconstituted particles answered SAY THAT AGAIN IMP PLUS (and was ignored) Imp Plus knew that because the swirl of Acrid particles was more curious, to give the Good Voice’s name would have made Cap Com think then that the name had after all been known as far outside the tight security of TL as Imp Plus at this point was bent past the communication line from that dry island in the Pacific. Cap Com would learn now from Acrid Voice why “Acrid”; and, learning this, Cap Com would believe that the transmission came from Imp Plus, and would credit the water, glucose, and power data; and Cap Com would accept that Imp Plus had a way to communicate to that point in the Pacific during a long dark period.

But wait: they would not: wait: the Acrid Voice proper and Cap Com were together now.

Yet Imp Plus held with the particled Acrid Voice a private frequency, which the Acrid Voice still sensed as its own thinking on that island but which yielded for Imp Plus, here in the shaping play of lattice light slowing toward growing fineness of fixity, both the particled image of Acrid Voice and its responses in layers like foresight. But as Cap Com twined with the other, bodily Acrid Voice on the beam oscillant from the breaths between Sunbraids and crimson coil, the lattice fields of Imp Plus became aware of what they had always inclined toward: that their private beam to the particled Acrid Voice had been carried by the main skein of beam, not the other way round. But though twined upon that skein of Sunbraids and crimson coil, the voices unwound as the lattice cells desired. And the Acrid Voice in slow-massed figures of the mutual light was flowing faster and faster as if it might, by gyrolibrium, map one single field or solvent for all the events of glucose, water, sight (which the lattice layers were capable of recalling), and of the whole growth— What growth, what growth? — while when Imp Plus, as yet unwilling to give, like a positional fix, data on star arms that lived like unmouthed hydra, data on membranes that polyped on light and even on sight itself, increases through which his shifting substance had swelled and divided and multiplied, asked if it was conceivable for brain cells to go back into their prior embryonic forms in order then to yield exponential multiples before developing into adult form all over again; and the Acrid Voice observed that Imp Plus although transmitting almost too slowly for clarity again seemed to have seen the phenomena in question and added that in fact for some years— which years? thought Imp Plus — projects had sought to split the neuron though to his knowledge not the neuroglia, i.e. glial cells — Cap Com broke in again demanding to know what the word “WE” had meant in the transmission THE ONE WE HAVE BEEN TALKING TO, and Cap Com who might have sounded like the Good Voice if all the crystal layers of lattice cell had inclined to care, asked if there was someone else— something else — up there with Imp Plus, and asked twice more.

But the dark cycle was ending. The Sun warmed the strands. They breathed more easily with the braids. And while the lumen quanta streamed over the lattice, the Sun seemed now not so much fingers as palm. A palm or fist Imp Plus could collide with and carom off. A palm infinitely inclined and blindingly and vastly creased, and, whether by Imp Plus’s memory or foresight, a palm faintly cupped.

Not knowing the creases except that they were motion, Imp Plus nonetheless through them felt a shape of shapes among the lattice cells yielding the answer he needed, which old and new pain dissolved into itself to make an unknown between the Sunbraids and a fusion they almost embraced. But in the Acrid Voice’s continuing thought this answer’s question had been overlain and lost. The shape of shapes was that swirling chance he had inhaled in pale green rooms on Earth. Inhaled having seen through the particles of smoke. Particles which had come he now saw as much out of the strange voice with its fossil foci in an oval in an oblong green chalkboard as the smoke had come at his own ill body. He had seen through the particles to forms which were not beyond the particles — forms of acrid loss which if it could be made good could yield clear process but must be areas left truly empty by the loss which the stark voice had hardly sensed it meant in the ill will of Think what you’re going to lose . Words privately conveyed to Imp Plus, who coughed in time to a towering headache. And in that moment that was more like an area rising through his reddening throat to be in reality more a locus Imp Plus concentrated in his racing brain than ill will and a mad anguish over a future dead or vacant, so the one chased the other: he saw it now through the bone-hard energy of the lattice that was himself: saw the warm concentration of the moment in the pale green rooms fail or fall into this chase: so that the gap that moved between the chasing two became their multiplying.

But in whatever part of his cells Imp Plus was seeing this — it had foreshadowed itself in pale green rooms at the moment of entwined division, ill will, anguish, anger, and cascading inclination. The chase was in him, and the migration of the gaps drew — had drawn — into forms of process cleared of everything impure except ahead-thrown possibility whose locus was the paler and paler coral lattice in whose simultaneous community he passed — had passed — through what he was: damp muscles of light; rains of nourishing; caves of growth and of the emptiness brought into being by the very escape stretching over it; the look of thought standing dispersed; glucose made or thought along a pulse of rainbow color contracted across a pupil gap; forms of equilibrium he was more than saw amid the tumbling IMP attitudes of Ground’s unknowing plan; forms of stranded breathing within breathing in and in, and elsewhere paths of particles breathed through locks of light by oval power plants so nearly crossing the lives of brain and algae that in the shadow of the idea of green Imp Plus could seem to the Acrid Voice to be photosynthesic — and if heterotrophic at will, autotrophic in root form — seem, that is, to this stark presence that was yet another form, this Acrid presence transolved by Imp Plus somehow to particle patterns so like his own cascades of spindling axis-parts broken down into fresh motion that the Acrid Voice could look to Imp Plus like his own substance. But caves, color, form, power — now what he must have was the way to keep the more he had become — whereas the Acrid Voice seemed persistently to want that more.