Joseph McElroy - Plus

Say that again .

The lattice absorbed the words.

The words went together into an unsaid emptiness where, having been said more than once before, they were left unsaid. Oh what did that mean? Anguish, anger, ill will, vacancy, pain old and new dissolved to make something between the Sunbraids and a fusion they almost embraced.

He was being thanked. For what?

Yes, a braid structure, the Acrid Voice agreed; and if visible, where? and did it in some way go with the previously mentioned red that increased with heat?

Imp Plus was being thanked for responding to say that again by saying — but it had been the lattice gathering — the pain old, the pain new — the Sunbraids and fusion and the something between.

He wanted to say cascades . He did not know himself even after the Cap Com voice stranded with the first stark friendly voice demanded to know what had ever been said about braids, and was Imp Plus telling them Sunbraids and the red had actually been seen?

He could not explain the sight membranes.

But they had been him. No, they were him now.

Cap Com was demanding again.

Now where was the other voice?

In the silence the lattice layers were busy. Somewhere hard to recover in the lattices the other voice out loud had asked what cascades. For cascades had been conveyed direct to the particles of Acrid Voice ovalling on Earth yet also here in the lattice as if parts severed there to be chalked up to experience had been in body still here too among the layers of charged, hard, blanched comb-work. And this time the particles of Acrid Voice had not said Say that again . For, having been said more than once before, say that again was left unsaid. There was static infecting the friendly particles; it was in a lattice layer and it was also on the Earthly island where the Acrid Voice was also a companion body working with Cap Com; the reason for the water remained unknown while each fresh ellipse slung the IMP harder at Earth; more static invaded the friendly particles; a voice was claiming that nothing had been said about braids or cascades; the lattice drew more Sun into what it and the Sun each seemed to want — an inward spiral like a compound eye hunting (though here was no more insect than vegetable); but elsewhere in the particles of Acrid Voice cascades swirled but did not stop the static: cascades and salmonella swirled but swirled inward among the particles’ own ovalling swirls yet the static came between and the static was from outside but not the pale lattice but there on the Earthly island; the photons spiralled inward compounded with lattice cells which could seem to move by holding motion — compounded into an eye whose corner by turning and turning hunted the place in the layers where one caving might lead past the pains of all that would be lost and on to all sweet humor in a sheer sea of Sun; but something came between and it was not the static but the thought that the static was Cap Com and that the friendly particles were in danger; and in a sudden spinelike move that the fixed lattice made by drawing Sun into a conduit to grip and jolt the Earthbound attitude circuit, the IMP was stabilized, its tumble toward Earth’s threat stopped, and lattice intervened between the friendly particles of Acrid Voice and the static which had to be Cap Com and thereupon from Earth could just be heard old words: Think what we’re going to lose .

The words were weirdly more known even than if one had said them. How so? Because they had been said to one.

Yet not this time.

Words shown by a shift of the friendly particles: as if one fold of ovalled ultra-crossings had given outward in a moment’s pouring lean: but those words Think what we’re going to lose which went not from but to Cap Com (how did one know they went to Cap Com?), went not in form of thought transmitted direct as to or from the friendly particles or thought existing as the new orbital altitudes were contained in inner thought, but as emanation launched from the friendly particles of formerly Acrid Voice’s thought into what the great lattice held as a circuit no stronger, no stranger than speech aloud by Acrid Voice to Cap Com.

The Acrid Voice needed more still. More help. The ovallings leaned out, for they flowed faster but to spill free of a center only to draw from it still tighter particling as if force were focus when, as an oval has not one focus but two, so this ovalling leaned or bulged outward at once on Earth and here in the lattice which felt in its layers both that great inflowering flight into a center, an absent center whose absence was made out of two foci dividing this absence between them — and in the same rush that great efferent flight away (by centrifuge — he recalled centrifuge —it recalled itself) for to get free was the point: but who? not just a skein of Acrid Voice: free of that lattice? Like skin out of brain? Neither. But a name. Things to be said if the name would come. Could be gotten out of the lattice.

What things? What name?

Cap Com spoke: CAP COM TO IMP PLUS. ORBITAL CHECK, WE THOUGHT WE’D LOST YOU. WHERE ARE YOU NOW IMP PLUS? DO YOU READ ALTITUDE?

Cap Com had been the one Acrid Voice had been speaking to when Acrid Voice had said Think what we’re going to lose . And it was from those friendly particles that the lattice had the altitude to give back to Ground. Slowly. So slow the old name Imp Plus said by Cap Com nearly escaped again. Which was not the escape that had been meant by what had wanted to get out. A wound could always be found to get out by. But where was one here? Imp Plus was what had wanted to get out of the lattice.

Or not out — out from under. Like a layer. Or to one side to speak to the Acrid Voice which would be then on another near side of the lattice and not in the way, speaking now over the main beam, breathed oscillant out from between crimson process and Sunbraids — speaking electromagnetic cascade (was that it, Imp Plus?) (the name again) and explaining that the dynamic decay process was as Imp Plus well knew having been an engineer (ultramicrons, reddening signs, the fence) electromagnetic cascade, an expelled positron seeking and finding an expelled electron to annihilate each other in a moment of violence yielding something.

But the old Imp Plus must say something, for help would come for the more that the lattice was only if the Acrid Voice knew the loss that went before the more. And from the lattice layer now was heard on Christmas Island in the Pacific without call names of sender or receiver the slow message that: the glucose did not go beyond what was in the tube that came from the plant beds, there was no glucose beyond that for there was lattice, there was lattice.

SAY THAT AGAIN.

Now the brain making glucose independently was a strange autotrophism (so said the “cascade” voice compounding words on the main Ground beam with others transferred direct from the particles). But no glucose in the brain at all meant here was autotrophism of a different water.

And harder to swallow (said further words passed also direct from the particles into whose thought they had charged in a volt the ever-present lattice held clearly as speech aloud from Cap Com to the Acrid particles).

But no brain, returned the lattice twice, no brain.

Whereupon, of answers swirled among Acrid Voice, Cap Com, reconstituted particles, and twin beams, one answer came most clear to Imp Plus:

IMP PLUS, IMP PLUS, SAY AGAIN, IMP PLUS, SAY AGAIN.

Hard, so hard. For what was that old name Imp Plus now in the face of the lattice layers?

Allowed. The name was allowed. But how?

Allowed by the lattice. But among the sprung swirls of the layers allowed what? inside a bright eyelid of layers successively imprinted with swirls of charge, allowed what? Hard to see: though then allowed was off to one corner of the lid, and was that heavier feeling, a gravity cubed, a cramped, clothed feeling, and coughing out of a winter throat into one hand that wasn’t the hand now let go by another hand hidden from a blind news vendor who had spoken to it as it then went away from Imp Plus toward somebody who approached who had let Imp Plus be there. No, not be there but be there with the hand that in its turn had been allowed to be with him: a child, a wintry kid, a headache, his child, a female with a pale throat unbuttoned to the wintry wind not red as she said his was — the throat he was going to lose — nor towering like his headache with its cascading allowance of connections shifting from what was unbearable only to what was unbearable turning through simultaneous spaces this eye the lattices compounded with the Sun to hunt what Imp Plus had been allowed to think led past one cave of pains to a humor of sea, the sea as long as space, but — no! — homed in on a memory of flame nearer and nearer to being seen by the inward spiralling compound eye which was only a part of the lattice layers. A scent of meal, of the dilute salt stuck into blood that was going gamy and viscous in the air. A smell of waste-pain. Or of growing.