Joseph McElroy - Plus

But then as if making visible what might have gone by telepathy to the Acrid particles, Imp Plus put to Earth the question WHY DO I WANT YOU TO BELIEVE ME?

Yet as he spoke, and received a host of questions alternately from Cap Com and the Acrid Voice — did he have any waste to get rid of from this body they didn’t yet have a clear picture of? had he actually seen neuroblasts back-formed or reverse-embryo’d from mature neurons and what was solid sight? — fatigue choked him and he wanted the lattice to locate for him in himself his own answer to his own question skewering him as an electrode had once skewered a membrane and made it dilute.

The body did not exist now. It had opened from the brain’s folds. (Cerebral body? Brain bairn?) Perhaps, but it went on to shift with the brain into an undivided substance. (Where’s the power coming from? But the solid sight — is there power there?)

The memory of anger and dread choked him toward merging the voices of the question. But he had to divide them, one from the other. Cap Com bursting ahead, Acrid Voice trying to understand.

Yes, there had seemed to be power in the solid state. The limbs had changed, but for a long time they’d had, or even been, membranes. Cloudy as the hemisphere adrift, silky and slick and of a power that was not the same as the contractile sheaths of length by which the photovoltaic power system was supported and even replaced and through which the attitude control system could be engaged at will. (You’re controlling it right now, aren’t you! YOU KNOW I AM NOT. YOU KNOW I AM ALLOWING SPIN, TUMBLE, ORBITAL DECAY.) (But the membranes — what did they do? And if powers of contraction and release, contraction and release exist here — the words carne to Imp Plus not as an Acrid question but as an Acrid thought unspoken — then ATP is being turned by hydrolysis into ADP, which means that actomyosin is coming from somewhere.) Well, what the membranes did was more than Imp Plus could tell. They had been four, when the limbs had been four hydralike spokes, four routes leading to cliffs, four necks reddening and paling, reddening and paling. Sight had been multiple or central or both. Sights of one or many came simultaneously from many angles and distances. (Like bits into a computer? But you also saw small and inside, yes?) Yes. The Sunbraids urging the bodies to split; the optic nerves seeking sideways out of the tract and into gray areas; bodies breathed down a chain to squeeze through a bending membrane screen but by becoming bigger not smaller; water in the plant beds divided into what it once had been and multiplied and re-formed so it was more; the green that was blue-black; the yellow-soak along a seam at the rear of what had been the brain, yellow that fluoresced — yes — he stopped — yet when the woman’s repose acted upon him he inclined to know he only projected that yellow with his sight — his sight only a reflector of the yellow of the flaming gland’s power.

Nothing came back to him. Had the lattice dissolved his existence again or was he waiting for Ground to finish dividing what he had said and said to be believed?

He could never explain how his sight had dispersed into true multiples beyond center if not locus.

But why should even he believe the yellows he’d seen? Who had seen them?

Or the crimson.

The Sun had come round many times. The Sun went round the IMP, and the IMP went round the Earth, and the Earth went round the Sun.

It was not Cap Com speaking of the crimson. Cap Com needed to know how finely Imp Plus controlled the IMP’s attitude power, and Imp Plus asked for a full range of descent angles and their effects; then two voices seemed to skein together and Imp Plus could hardly pry them apart; for the Acrid Voice was saying that if the yellow-soak had appeared on the join of what had been the brain’s halves (had been! — for the Acrid Voice believed what Imp Plus had said! believed the shift from brain to material beyond), then this location indicated that this yellow was the hormonoid serotonin which if increased might account for Imp Plus’s apparent sleeplessness.

Voices tangled where Cap Com was in the midst of not only saying cell respiration had already been seen by electron microscope, but also giving Imp Plus an angle reading for re-entry. Through this choking garble Acrid Voice was saying that, when heated, letters Imp Plus did not understand turned red — not Vitamin D but D and N and A —and while Imp Plus was not clear if Cap Com wanted to convey re-entry angle or drown out the Acrid guess that the red was a double spiral stranding Sunlight, now without question but by question someone believed Imp Plus, who now had no doubt that the plan was to try to recover him, no doubt that the ovalling maps of sound took in new alien frequencies, and no doubt that the secret (though now, like a great breath, not the only) reason he had wanted to be believed was to get from Ground not the angle for re-entry but, given a burst of inclined new velocity, the angle at which Imp Plus amid the great Sunbound lattice in turn within the IMP would carom off the Earth’s returning atmosphere and at some oblique angle slide off into deep space if not into the creases of the great Sun’s hand.

But in telling of the membranes and how they unfolded, in telling of another not so solid leaning of his sight that seemed a mutual inclination into emptiness that was a chance of place which force inclined to find, he thought he saw that he had been with — or been — his sight, not had it. And that was gone, like glucose, like water, like all but the memory of those wendings, faldoreams, shearows, and morphogens that could please him with a clear play of being, former being, being inclined.

In some memory of the Acrid particles he was nonetheless receiving Cap Com’s admission that even with the tightest security he might have learned of a pituitary tumor — and that a tumor of the pituitary gland results in discoloration of the optic chiasma.

But the Acrid Voice would not let up:

Pituitary disruption, though, could not account for growth like this.

Like what?

More than brain, more than body, other than either. Imp Plus could not see the Sun. He was blind. He tried to see how far away Cap Com and Acrid Voice must be from each other.

SAY THAT AGAIN ACRID VOICE.

But Imp Plus did not exactly hear the answer more than brain, more than body . For he had found his way back to that moment that now grew to take in a green room and the Acrid words No telling what the Sun will do up there — don’t listen to all they tell you next door , and to take in smoke winding into sinus and the words I’m ill and an ill being divided by an ill will that suddenly was his too, but, more, was aimed beyond the smaller green room; and in that moment when he’d been drawn into some greater range through a mutual torque, he had refrained from saying Say that again —an emptiness of reciprocal failure to be remembered between them in which they began to share if not know what was escaping each other’s thought.

And with such torque in mind, Imp Plus tried to tell the Acrid Voice of the breathing between the helical crimson strands and the Sunbraids, how they hit each other, drove, swelled, loosened, and threatened and reskeined as if no breath generated but to more future, and he saw now that he had already heard this cadence of potential and loss.

Cap Com’s commands passed through the ambering ovals of the lattice and were not found by obedient or other reactions in a one-time control center but felt as known — the knowledge of that now-dispersed center’s name, hypothalamus , and its near neighbor the flaming gland — knowns not equal but equable: thus Cap Com at a closing but now pointless distance: