Plus

12

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.

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.

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.

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.

And Imp Plus spoke slowly to Ground, and whether aloud or not he did not know. But knew he asked now what had been the flaming gland with the discolored crossing above.

But what was this the compound eye homed on, breathing near but then exhaling away like an elliptical orbit of whatever altitude? Not now a thing or gland.

For the brain was no more.

The substances had dispersed and re-formed, though with viscous, rank, strong process not smelled until now remembered.

But what the compound eye honed on was here amid the layers. It did not know what to call itself. Less towering, collapsing headache than its memory: thus also pain for its headlessness but a pain of such cascading wonder there was the recent memory of faldo-morph muscle laughing to foresee (layered still further back) a dim voice say the words Fifty percent pleasure fifty percent pain.

And Imp Plus found amid a warm woman’s seashore teeth mouthing Vanity the bad teeth of the news vendor biting the Atlantic wind, while I could have been a vegetable cut across Imp Plus’s remembered desire to follow his child, abandon Travel Light, but survive.

And at the selfsame moment that the Dim Echo was heard to say hypothalamus, the Acrid particles were seen to ask how had Imp Plus seen anything up there much less a discolored optic chiasma.

And now the great lattice was felt among its layers of cells to shrug and to exhale or decontract a muscle: shrug the spirally compound eye outward into reconstituents of oval that squared with this growing sense Imp Plus had: that he was allowed by the great lattice, only allowed.

Which he did not tell Ground. But to the glucose reading he added that water was now zero too but this was because it had become unnecessary.

Cap Com was saying Long time no telemetry on hypothalamus.

The lattice beamed to Ground that no hypothalamus existed now.

Imp Plus felt he too was nowhere. But then he found himself part of the Sun-wound oval of the lattice. At once he saw and could convey to the Acrid Voice — but did he? — that when the substance had shifted, the brain’s glands had been dispersed and absorbed. He heard the lattice like a sleep he was part of all around and in him say, No water needed.

Imp Plus came to be aware of not having existed. To be a gap. Not like the elsewhere that pain could wish for. Imp Plus was part of a foresight which was that he would again not exist but did exist now and would again. He was in other arcs of the oval and believed correctly that there were elsewhere other simultaneities like himself. It was an idea of them.

And he thought then that they were ideas or like ideas. And then he became aware of having just then not existed. And he thought he resisted a good in this. He wondered if the lattice layers knew Ground’s plan. Or could care. He had to tell all the truth he knew.

The Acrid Voice came along the lattice layers to say that if not both autotrophic and heterotrophic now, Imp Plus had been both in his time. But Imp Plus had been going to say that though no water existed now, water had existed once. And Acrid Voice nearby or congruent with this had said water had existed in Imp Plus but did not now.

Imp Plus woke to having not been; and at once felt the lattice convey to Earth the unthinkable news that there was no Imp Plus.

No Imp Plus?

BUT IF NOT NOW, ONCE (came the words — not from Cap Com, who said, What lattice, Imp Plus? — not from the Acrid particles, which wondered if the crimson and the braid structure persisted in the absence of glucose and water) — the words But if not now, once came from Imp Plus, and Ground said, IMP PLUS SAY AGAIN, and Imp Plus could not remember, except that while no help would come for the more that had become unless the Acrid particles knew fully the loss that went before the more, the truth was that this loss of water and of glucose had come late and went not before the growth of the more but after it.

What lattice? said Cap Com. What growth? said Acrid Voice. Why no brain? said Cap Com. Acrid particles? (thought the Acrid particles) — say that again.

Say that again.

And Imp Plus with all the force allowed by the lattice answered, THINK WHAT YOU’RE GOING TO LOSE.

So saying, he knew he had known for a long time they would lose him. Many times were spaced in the lattice layers but he had made his own instant-contingency camouflage: so he’d unwisely come to hold as sole truth these simultaneities that the lattice’s power could display in layers and motion. But they were not sole truth. For the Acrid Voice had said what Imp Plus had known: that if in his time Imp Plus had fed on others because not being able to use simple carbons he required complex organic molecules like glucose, and if in his time he had also on the contrary been able to make his own from sunlight — that is, if in his time he had been both heterotroph and autotroph — he had been one before the other, even if at some time both at once — he had gone from stage to stage. And these stages were now gone. Gone from him like the water which still occasionally dripped like an afterthought from the algae.

But Imp Plus knew that the losing to be done would be done by him. It had even now been brought back by him. From a towering pain that existed still in the absence of its head. Brought back in words that were themselves brought back as exactly as they were exactly reversed. For Say that again had been Imp Plus’s words on Earth, twice out loud, third time silent; and now, brought back by the phrase Acrid particles he’d thought forth to Christmas Island in the Pacific to the very being that the words Acrid particles named, say that again had come instead from the Acrid particles. And from Imp Plus now had come Think what you’re going to lose. Which was what the Acrid Voice had once said. In a pale green room. The one time Say that again had been unvoiced. For in the emptiness of that frequent, towering headache, some new membrane had sprung such a run of gaps chasing each other in him, that he could let a whole series of cascades take him through their annihilating yields: so that anguish over death had been camouflaged, yet also caused, by anger at the Acrid Voice’s supposed ill will, anger caused also by, yet also camouflaged by, Imp Plus’s own entwined ill will and desire in turn caused by, yet also camouflaged by, possibilities proliferating in the barrage of emptiness that was his towering headache: possibilities, chances, that took him apart from the wounding words Think what you’re going to lose as his memory took him now away from the Acrid probing and Cap Com’s threats — and took him almost away, yes, from war between the two.

War over him.

Over his past. Over his chances. What he’d fallen into.

After having made it out of mad anguish and inclined gaps that chased. Made it himself of some multiple twining that towered into headache, so he’d had to get to Sun and get to water. A twining in his head that primed what had been getting ready to happen. To happen whatever Earth did. To happen describable or not. He and the Sun described what happened. This describing was being. How could it be described like a cubed ellipse or a starfish-like hydra becoming four functions becoming what held and wholed them like remembered possibilities at will?

Yet the great lattice let him not forget the twining that had choked his head until it broke into the multiple gapping chase.

The twining here now at what Ground wanted to be the end of things was only a choking like the lattice whose idea he now was, clothing and dimming him. The twining now was with the Acrid Voice, for the Acrid Voice — the gibbous voice — had spun a net of map across the capsuled process of the last (how long am I into mission?) four months; and the Acrid Voice would not let up.

Also Imp Plus thought the lattice must have put him through nonexistence again. For he was missing now the means, whatever they had ever been, to distinguish the Acrid Voice on the main beam from the direct thoughts of its milky reconstituted particles on the other beam. Imp Plus wanted to find the foot he had put in the yellow leather shoe; to find the voice in which he had told the blind news vendor in that cold place on another sea, “That’s my daughter,” as she ran down the pavement to meet the dark-haired woman. He wanted to find the shouldered spine to be laughed up by the beach woman’s touch; find the eyes to see spilt blood, spilt smells, the point of jokes, things not so beautiful as what had come to him through growth that was now (he thought) possibly stopped. Yet the Acrid inferences would not let up; because Imp Plus recognized them. They pumped against his other gradient. Like what drew charged particles of sodium uphill through the skin of cells. Or like the very carbon atoms these inferences jumped through to get back to nitrogen, glucose, water, the crimson process that was more crimson when warm. Carbon, so small the shell of its electron cloud gets unthinkably close to the nucleus of other atoms; and so strangely able to both give up electrons and take them on that it can form bonds left and right.

But the growth, said Cap Com (but not on the beam!), the growth, the growth.

Now if out beyond the Earth (continued the Acrid thinking) the ten-times-greater carbon bombardment is largely lost on IMP’s shield, we still have solar wind.

But wait — who said anything about Acrid particles — braid structure — who is feeding you data the rest of us are not getting?

It was Cap Com speaking to Acrid Voice — Cap Com, who could not interfere with the Acrid inferences about rays from the Sun’s corona hitting plant-bed nitrogen to form carbon-14 or light quanta hitting carbon in the brain breaking bonds to make a new state so reactively rich in energy as to be new — but Cap Com did break in upon the Acrid questions asked of Imp Plus: to say, IMP PLUS WE QUESTION WHETHER YOU HAVE ANY POWER LEFT, READ ANY, IMP PLUS, ANY.

For though Imp Plus had barely answered the Acrid inferences these had transmitted data Cap Com might not wish to fall into the wrong hands — he saw hands moving away from each other: that research into brain-cell regrowth had seen far enough to see that the splitting of neurons led nowhere unless it was to some embryonic regress; that the lattice repeatedly referred to might be giving to photon potential a radically receptive new grid or charged fence; that the nitrogen window of the IMP might have accelerated carbon recompounding; that given a jump in glucose, hence a jump in oxidation and energy, the sodium pump would work harder and faster, the sodium concentration be even more unequal either side of the cell with increase likewise of potassium, which binds and hence may bear upon growth just as the resting membrane potential caused by uphill sodium flow may relate growth to electrical power.

But asking again about the braid structure and whether in the absence of glucose and water this lattice could be organic and if not what of the crimson process, the Acrid transmissions went away, went away with some breath of Imp Plus.

There was nothing, then.

And afterward Imp Plus saw there had been not even a memory of the suns, his own which was now the lattice’s, and the great Sun.

For Imp Plus had been blinked out by the lattice. The lattice evolved from Imp Plus had taken Imp Plus in. Such a way in he had been forgotten. Which he knew, having been brought back. For he was back but into — for the IMP was into — a new driving stumble. And as if Imp Plus had been given by the lattice knowledge necessary to it as an idea, Imp Plus knew that the fading form of the spinelike conduit leading as if to Imp Plus himself though he had no place, had been the lattice destabilizing the IMP to show Cap Com the real power still here. But from Cap Com’s response Imp Plus knew it had been a several-times-on-and-off demonstration and thought again of where he could have been and the thought came with what he took to be a memory of pain because it felt like understanding and relief, and the understanding sucked into it the dream he thought he had had while just now not existing, and it was that he would die but the others would be there, Cap Com, the Acrid Voice, the Acrid particles, the great lattice, and the Sun. For was his growth not over? And was he not at the mercy of the being he had once become only then to lessen into a part of?

No dream. It was that last breath Acrid Voice had taken away from Imp Plus.

But the Acrid word had been fence—a new grid for photon potential. To receive rays. A brain. No, the lattice the brain had become. Imp Plus had recognized so much of what the Acrid had said that he had been he saw one reason the Acrid had not let up. But had let up now, and only dimly did Imp Plus hear the war on the Ground.

He tried — did the lattice let him? or in some new power he had, was he the gift which the lattice was glad to allow? — to push one more time the phototelic beam to the particles of reconstituted Acrid Voice, to try to say what he did say: Your enemy Cap Com is right: you are being fed data that Cap Com and the others are not getting: it is a force of concentration gradient far greater than any loop you think still operates here. You don’t know exactly that this is what is happening, but you incline and you recall and you know — you know—

He could not complete.

He did not know why the lattice did not restabilize the IMP. The spine of power conduit felt closer, but Imp Plus did not know if it still gripped the attitude and retro rocket systems. Ground had dropped the orbit still more.

Getting back to Earth was the journey. Or Earth’s crust of atmosphere. The memory of morphogen-knobs made the memory of wendings shake so hard that the shearows and faldoreams cast shadows nearer to confirm this a monitor-compound of humor over what was ahead: a landing: a soft landing to feel out the surface: acres of radiant Sun-collectors, desert spectacles with monitored properties, gibbous Earth with that jagged dot he could nearly recall.

The Acrid — the friendly — particles did not return Imp Plus a message. But Acrid words aloud with Cap Com were real enough, telling in detail what was in danger of being lost. And the threat to cut off the Acrid Voice from this and future projects beamed out to Imp Plus like the false Sun of some other day when he’d let himself be scoffed into thoughts of survival. Was it the Good Voice thwarting the Acrid? Imp Plus did not know — for he was tired, or the lattice let him feel tired — but now in a last try that made him suddenly doubt he could ever show the Acrid particles the telepathic — he knew telepathic—beam between them but made him think that he and the lattice could go on together for a long time, he broke into the Acrid Voice’s protest before it had finished as the Acrid Voice said We must go on—

IMP PLUS TO GROUND, IMP PLUS TO GROUND. WHAT HAPPENS TO BRAIN’S THREE-DIMENSIONAL MAP OF RETINA WHEN NO RETINA IS LEFT TO PLUG INTO? WHAT HAPPENS TO FLAMING GLAND BELOW DISCOLORED OPTIC CROSSING WHEN BRAIN DISPERSES? HAVE SEEN AND BEEN BUT DO NOT KNOW.

He had them again, he thought; and he went on. The lattice, he felt, also wished to know; or Imp Plus was one part of the lattice’s wish. But answering Cap Com that the sight he had had had been solid yet possibly not had but something else, Imp Plus saw into the flesh of his past motion: only deep enough to think what would make them believe. Yet then deep enough to let him feel further, as if a sliver had been implanted in him out of sight by him himself., why did he want them to believe him? So they would not kill him? They had their reflectors cooking water in villages, smoking in the deserts of the gibbous Earth. Maybe not gibbous now, where from orbit the one familiar mark had been the Great Wall of China, he knew for never having seen it before. And the search went on for the intermediate compound — he recalled that! — that might store electrons dislodged by radiation — how much later? — after some Sun-turned molecular change and the evolution of light these particles could produce thermoluminescence — when let go, like birds, thoughts, micropumps primed by future chance, infinitesimal maps seeking a place to be of.

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:

Re-entry window narrow.

Recovery area no longer secure. Stabilize, please, Imp Plus. Countdown to manual stabilization. A ripple up the memory of a spine.

Cap Com confused secure with secret. Words dispersed. Imp Plus heard the future tuning the past as the Earth fell toward him. Others tried to reach him. But the chance of angles that would neither bring IMP in nor burn it up, but carom it off along a long clarity of sliding space to be chased by interceptors whose own contingency launch plans at this moment were riding at their own mad cost into position — this came to Imp Plus not from all the others trying to reach him to get him and see him, but from the Acrid particles that knew so much — knew what was then suddenly shared up the spine of their private beam in Imp Plus’s thought that he would not be a bone of contention.

Cap Com vouchsafed the new Contingency Mode.

But the Acrid Voice had intervened; and in this brief break the words that went through the lattice wheeled as if to pass on by reflection to the Sun — seeking a future. Sought it in two foci drawing between them from past to future a memory of Imp Plus.

It was the radiation sickness. It had found and been a window to reverse itself. Reverse what had always happened: what should happen: for ionizing radiation rams out electrons, wrecks molecules, switches their cells which die.

But cascade had been turned around.

The radiant poison found its host potioned how? So its host was able — how? — to chase parts from particles, cadence from decay, to grasp a dispersion that was always breathing contagious divisions into loci that then freed contagion to multiply its touch.

So this had been the other sun. Imp Plus’s sun. Escaped from the very radiation that had escaped into him, flooded him.

KEEP IN CONTACT IMP PLUS. PLEASE CONTACT GROUND.

Words came also from the Acrid particles: beta emitted from carbon-14, calcium-45, strontium-90; gamma slowing to attach to an atom; radio-isotope tracers in the blood; fences flowing through blood: words from the Acrid particles bombarded one slope of the lattice layers finding there one small and signal orbit now lessening: and as it lessened, this orbit that had been Imp Plus gave off into the Sun feelings that were their own response: the Sunbraids had glanced wildly, had they not? were a wonder, were they not?

But to the Acrid particles went other questions: the Sunbraids had joined out of desire and bleeding anguish broken by blood’s absence — out of a breathtaking inclination between their spiral and the crimson memory of the future: did this all go out the window with the water, glucose, semi-conductor volts, and the dissolving and reconstituting swirls and milks of particles?

To the lessening orbit in one slope of the lattice layers came an answer from the Acrid particles: that is, questions fed back by what (alone with the Acrid Voice) Imp Plus (before he had been Imp Plus) had almost known once in a small green room like an idea:

Reciprocal focusing — yes, reciprocal focusing on what was not there: namely, the Other: which was the absence-to-be of Imp Plus’s body.

But what focus (asked now the Acrid particles) had turned radiation’s breath out of poison into seed? how had the speed of this contaminant light wound to itself such streams of photons from the Sun? but now what focus (for, having stood up and looked down at white data blinking on a green screen, the Acrid Voice felt in his height a shadow of annihilation recede into recent memory), what focus had drawn their minds so close — so close to fusion?

Down into the cloudy shell of Earth on the main frequency went the words THOUGHT FELT LIKE IT, and if such words went from the great lattice which now stabilized the IMP, the words passed on Earth as those of Imp Plus.

The same voice — it equalled its clear words — answered Cap Com’s transmission DO YOU HAVE POWER (that came twice again — a past blankly out to refract a future) DO YOU HAVE POWER?

YES AND NO.

But to the Acrid ovals pierced by static from Cap Com’s grasshopper elbows on an island in the Pacific came a power raised to wholeness, raised by camouflage that was not other than the words the Acrid particles alone received now: Have they power to intercept a deep-space trajectory?

Answers swarmed the lattice, but whether from the Acrid friendly Voice on the island or from the questioner in narrowing orbits could not be told.

The questioner? His name had gone, he was still he, he swarmed with answers and doubts. He foresaw a fiery carom, he saw his own IMP containing the lattice like a planar field step into space so deep its garden of foci grew an endless orbit stranded helically of helium and positrons — and he was drawn by this chance until he saw that it really was his if he wanted. But then he thought of the Acrid particles on the island below and thought that what he and they had together drawn into a circuit of conception could best hold elliptically distinct if he became an absence.

The IMP must hit Earth’s outer atmosphere neither to skip off into space nor trick the fire of those first frictions and slip through to recovery in the sea airs of the Pacific.

The lattice dipped pale and still and contained what it yet might not wholly have: an idea of itself: itself not wholly self-possessed, for a power of it beamed to and fro from Earth, a line-thin loop of particles so fine they gave back sight to the Sun.

Into the Acrid ovalling particles on the Pacific island came a power raised to wholeness by camouflage: camouflage not other than the dim, distinct transmission from space, as from the open center of an idea: No desire to carom into space, no desire for re-entry: camouflage received by the ovalling particles like the breath of thought: thought knowing that the hot crash of what was broadcast as re-entry static was not re-entry — the IMP had burned up in the first friction of the atmosphere: thought wondering then what chances now turned upon this fresh absence that would be as lasting as the glint of its arrival must have been brief for any who saw it in the sky: thought wondering, too, if at the last the great lattice had let this happen or had been surprised.

Joseph McElroy is the author of nine novels—A Smuggler’s Bible, Hind’s Kidnap, Ancient History: A Paraphase, Lookout Cartridge, Plus, Women and Men, The Letter Left to Me, Actress in the House, Cannonball. Also two novellas, Preparations for Search and Taken From Him (available as a Kindle Single), and a volume of short fiction, Night Soul and Other Stories (Dalkey). A volume of McElroy’s essays, Exponential, has been published in Italy and in expanded form will be forthcoming as an e-book from Dzanc. A long-in-progress nonfiction book about water is near completion. Three short plays are forthcoming, and a children’s book. McElroy received the Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and fellowships from the Guggenheim, Rockefeller, and D.H. Lawrence Foundations, twice from Ingram Merrill and twice from the National Endowment for the Arts. He has taught at Johns Hopkins, Columbia, Northwestern, CUNY, and other universities. Born in Brooklyn, New York in 1930, McElroy was educated at Williams College and Columbia University. Further information at www.josephmcelroy.com.

Sarah Gridley is an associate professor of English at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio. She is the author of three books of poetry: Weather Eye Open (University of California Press, 2005) Green is the Orator (University of California Press, 2010), and Loom (Omnidawn Publishing, 2013).