Plus

1

He found it all around. It opened and was close. He felt it was himself, but felt it was more.

It nipped open from outside in and from inside out. Imp Plus found it all around. He was Imp Plus, and this was not the start.

Imp Plus caved out. There was a lifting all around, and Imp Plus knew there was no skull. This lifting was good. But there had been another lifting and he had wanted it, but then that lifting had not been good. He did not want to go back to it. He did not know if that lifting had been bad. But this new lifting was good.

Imp Plus remembered there was no skull. Yet knew there was no need to be thinking this. Nor to think of message pulses coming from Earth on the frequency. No need to think about the other pulses going to Earth from Imp Plus.

There were birds around, and they were still as shadows. Imp Plus knew birds, but not so still. Birds with tails longer than they were. The tails were right.

There was a brightness. It was more outside than inside. It was also everywhere.

Imp Plus knew he had no eyes. Yet Imp Plus saw. Or persisted in seeing.

With sprouts, maybe.

Imp Plus did not have sockets, for if there were sockets where would they have been? There was no skull.

Sockets was a word.

Impulses from Earth had kept coming on the frequency like an absence of obstacle. They were messages and Imp Plus had inclined to receive them. They asked for levels of light and of glucose.

Imp Plus had no sockets and knew it. No sockets to hold or lose the light. No sockets to man.

But there was a brightness, and it folded. Or Imp Plus folded it.

These sockets in the skull were called orbits. Imp Plus remembered there was no skull.

None but the place Imp Plus was in.

Imp Plus remembered having prepared to remember. And the word vegetable. And a green thing like an idea. Imp Plus remembered words that he did not know.

The brightness bent off and came back. But what were the birds around in the shadows? The brightness could move. It had always been there. Now it was new. He knew he was right. It had come out of darkness that was not new. Imp Plus had not wanted words for the brightness, and now the words Imp Plus needed were not the message pulses coming on the frequency from Earth asking for glucose readings.

But the brightness was not only brightness. It also turned to something else reaching Imp Plus. The green thing was not to eat. Imp Plus knew eat. Imp Plus made the grade. The green thing was not to eat. It had eyes and they ate.

Maybe not eyes. Yet as much so as those of Imp Plus, who did not have eyes.

Imp Plus inclined to think the green thing ate light. Imp Plus had prepared to remember that eyes developed from a need for nourishment. That was the way, but the word for it did not come. Not at first.

Imp Plus saw a shape and used a word, vegetable. It was not a man.

The shadows were not birds. They were shadows. He did not get rid of them.

Brightness was not the impulses that kept coming from Earth. Imp Plus had been in another shape, its word now gone. Imp Plus knew the word word and the word idea, but not what one was. Imp Plus made the grade.

Yet as for sockets, Imp Plus knew there were no sockets, for there happened into the head of Imp Plus the picture of a man. The man had years of bad teeth and he had loose white pads on each eyehole. The holes were running. But the eyes weren’t seeing. There were sockets there, not here in Imp Plus.

Imp Plus had no skull. He had grids.

Some of what he had meant to remember he did not for some time. He recalled stalks. They were long and he did not see any around.

The impulses drew Imp Plus with their messages. And Imp Plus drew them. Through the brightness the messages inclined along a gradient. Imp Plus inclined to receive them. He inclined through the brightness. The brightness was good. It folded. It folded the messages. He could send messages. He could talk on the Concentration Loop. The brightness packed around him. A part of the brightness became him.

The brightness was the Sun.

Impulses piled up in the head. Imp Plus had no skull. Imp Plus had no head. Imp Plus had always had a head for figures. Now what were the shadows if not the figures of birds? Imp Plus was in many parts and could fall toward them all at once. It was hard but he could not help it. It was seeing.

If it was by sprouts that Imp Plus persisted in seeing without eyes, then there were optic stalks. Imp Plus must have those. If not optic stalks, what?

Were such questions travelling in answer to the impulses?

Negative, negative.

A difference leaned between.

It was a change that inclined to and from the green thing. A change Imp Plus felt he made. But not to make the grade. A change that gave him an edge, so that through the message pulses Imp Plus knew a thing more than what they told. The message pulses came through this change.

The change was a gradient because Imp Plus had been told gradient and the pulses came down along it and he inclined to receive them.

From the message pulses through this change he knew his loss was real. His loss of all but a fraction.

All but a fraction of what?

Imp Plus had lost the knowledge of what had been lost.

The impulses he had had so long on the frequency from Earth asked for levels of light, of glucose. But he received them at many points, so there were many gradients. The impulses asked for a galvanometer reading — quantum yield of light radiation — which Imp Plus knew but also now for the first time did not. And the green thing was being named. But the names slid down a gradient that opened and inclined to be many gradients.

Imp Plus could give the answers. Now there were other things beside the answers.

Everywhere he went there was a part just missing. A particle of difference. And in its place an inclination. A sharp drop.

And through this Imp Plus thought: or was suddenly looking back at having thought: that those particles that were just missing were driven away by the aim of his looking: and that his sight was the Sun’s force turned back into light in him by means of an advanced beam. He had many aims. He? Imp Plus had the word operation. The pulses did not stop; and often Imp Plus would hear the words read me, but then now through an alternative vent he would sometimes get the other order, me read, and wonder if it came from him or Earth. The Sun in Imp Plus was one eye; and if so what might be two? It was the chance of something.

What came to Imp Plus amid the brightness was that some of him was left.

So some of the gradients were Imp Plus. Which was why he could fall into himself.

He heard the word hear. It was direct from the impulses, or it was by his coming between. Divide molecules reacting by photons absorbed, and get quantum yield. The words were not much inclined.

The news vendor with gauze loosely over the blind eyes was not here. Imp Plus knew that. And Imp Plus was here.

So were the shadows which were not of birds. Or magpies or flycatchers with tails longer than themselves. And the shadows were too slow to be the shadow of the frequency; and having thought this Imp Plus saw that as with the eyes of the green thing before him so with the frequency propagating waves, Imp Plus made acts of observation.

The brightness went and came, and bent and came. On gradients. And now the shadows had moved both away and closer. Imp Plus could see this.

The brightness came along lines. When he looked they turned and spun around and around.

The brightness that was the Sun or from the Sun passed him many times between what he knew and what he nearly knew. Sleep was on one side, then on the other, never on both, also at times on neither. The word for sleep was on only one side but now had come to be an audible line along the middle between the two sides. Audible because impulses from Ground said the word. But audible now along some middle because Imp Plus had the word. And when Ground said SLEEP, the word occurred also as that line along the middle so that only one side sank into sleep and not both. But this was new, and for a time Imp Plus did not need to know why Ground ran Gs — ran EEGs — thinking both sides of him were asleep when in truth during any given EEG — which Imp Plus now made into electroencephalogram—only one side had responded to Earth’s transmission SLEEP. Or both had, but only one side slept. But then he did not have just two sides, or so he thought — which meant he was in error. The Sun passed many times between sleep and not-sleep, and the impulses in Imp Plus were outside of him, and he recalled arriving here, and thought that soon now here for the first time sleep would occur, which meant waking too. He repeated here, for there was something in it.

Here.

Imp Plus recalled being in charge. And being changed. And falling into himself but then being put in mind of the impulses by means of the impulses.

Imp Plus knew more. Knew it through what he could have called sleep, which was sleep with something missing, sleep itself. Starlings flew by the Sun. They lengthened like cranes, and contracted like elbows. Too slow to be starlings. So slow, they didn’t move. And too big to be inside, which was what they were.

There was such a brightness arrayed round Imp Plus that there was heat. Or must be. There was a window that obeyed Earth and could keep the Sun from burning. The thought came to Imp Plus with one of the particles once just missing and now hunting him down, that since he had no eyes he was not seeing the brightness but only remembering it like the word array — solar array. The particle finding him vanished sharply in a charge of brightness.

Which remained as a flare of many single lines arrayed which would spin if Imp Plus looked. But when he tried to recall what they were from, they fell away from him and were themselves gradients — gradients adrift.

But gradients were here, while solar array was not. Yet solar array received the long lights of the Sun, for solar was Sun—and the long lights were here. If the solar arrays were not here, where were they? Solar arrays—they became more than one, like gradient, when he thought of them. So he, Imp Plus, made them more. So then in some way they were here. How long were the long lights of the Sun that were both here and received by solar arrays? — arrays that were both here and not here. Here and there Imp Plus found the absences where particles were just missing; and when these absences that were his went after those darting particles, they found them just at the moment when each particle came so close to one of another inclination that the two, meeting, vanished — into an absence so close to his heart he thought he saw it: a shared line, a line spinning around yet circleless into the chance of many lines, a radius gradient alight with absence that was motion for which gradient was only a name long years on Earth.

Imp Plus recalled years but not what one was. Or when.

How long was the start and where was the beginning? The last Apollos had left. But there are no beginnings, Imp Plus thought.

The last Apollos had left the Moon. They had raised their faceplates, lifted off their helmets with the gold sunshades, taken off their hoses and their boots. They had begun not to be new, not needed — though who knew what had got inside them through their suits to stay. Or to go out the other side after blazing a trace inside them.

A trace that would stay in a wall inside — inside what? — in a gradient — but stopped — in the wall of what? — stopped in a cell wall until a pulse could use that trace. But particles that passed thus through bodies might, as through grids, leave nothing.

Could that be?

Impulses on a frequency from Earth raised questions but not that question. Earth had raised Imp Plus and could be rid of him.

Something had been taken away.

From Imp Plus.

Yet he had wanted to get away, he remembered. The impulses drew him in again away from the shadows like birds cast on what could be a skull or grid if he had one. Small white birds with pink sides and black scissor-tails twice as long as their bodies. And after them a greater bird. Like a high, dark shearwater with wings three times the rest of it.

There was a project.

Against the gradient grid of the impulses drawing Imp Plus in from these now larger shadows with requests for enzyme action in chlorella, there was laughter.

Yet laughter then, not now; vibration bent out of its source.

The shadows around were more than birds.

Chlorella: that was the green, the vegetable. Inside the head of Imp Plus if there were a head, the blind news vendor said he himself could have been a vegetable but instead he’d taken hold.

The impulses seemed to bear their own answers for Imp Plus to free from the questions. The impulses made shadows on the gradient grid. Not the shadows coming around that were now more than birds, but shadows not seen. Yet also shadows that fell beyond the gradient grid and were the difference between the impulses now and then.

Yet nothing like the shadows Imp Plus saw around him on the inside of his skull that was not a skull.

ME READ reversed reads READ ME. The impulses themselves weren’t the reversal. Some other operation reversed them.

But new force had come in the impulses. It conveyed itself to Imp Plus in measures of new impedance, and the force wasn’t only the impulses from Earth which went on and on.

IMP PLUS CHECK GLUCOSE LEVEL. WE READ GLUCOSE UNSTABLE UP AND DOWN.

GROUND I READ YOU, said Imp Plus.

But his next answer seemed new. For he told Earth glucose levels had dropped. He took time to know this answer after he had given it to Earth.

IMP was said, and then PLUS.

And Imp Plus responded.

So did Earth.

IMP PLUS IMP PLUS DO YOU CONNECT LOWER GLUCOSE LEVEL WITH SLOWER RESPONSE TO TRANSMISSIONS? REPEAT: DO YOU CORRELATE YOUR SLOWER RESPONSE AND THOSE LOWER GLUCOSE LEVELS?

He thought of not answering, and this was a new thought, and he felt a trace of the thought all over, and like a ray he fell everywhere after the trace which was the absence close to his heart but alight with inclination that was more than gradient though it was gradient.

WAIT IMP PLUS. GLUCOSE UP NOW. GLUCOSE UP.

Imp was a word. So was Plus. On the Concentration Loop Imp Plus had answered messages from Earth that used the words Imp Plus. Imp Plus could talk.

IMP PLUS TO GROUND: ARE SPROUTS FROM OPTIC STALKS?

But from inside somewhere and not from Earth came an answer he had not requested in so many words: IMP was Interplanetary Monitoring Platform. The answer came from inside. From Imp Plus. Not from Earth.

But what (he asked inside his own new circuit and not to CAP COM on Earth), what is IMP PLUS?

And before he had the answer, Ground was heard in the impulses which Imp Plus now found harder to understand saying after a pause: NEGATIVE. NO OPTIC STALKS AFTER STAGE ONE OF OPERATION TL.

Laughter went up the grid, shadows more than lines. Laughter past. What was TL?

IMP PLUS DO YOU READ? DO YOU READ? REPEAT WHAT IS SPROUTS? WHAT IS SPROUTS?

The shadows on the walls were more. Not larger, not exactly smaller. But more. Like a tree grown out of birds. Now two birds: a bird with tail much longer than the rest of it seen from a car one early spring on Earth; and a bird with wingspread three times the rest of it seen once on Earth one late spring, seen by somebody who stood outside a car.

Imp Plus had not prepared to remember these.

And now desired only to obey his Operation TL frequency and answer Earth’s transmissions.

SAY AGAIN IMP PLUS. WHAT SHADOWS? CHECK DUAL ATTITUDE STABILIZER. WE READ NO CHANGE. CHECK ATTITUDE STABILIZER. IF YOU HAVE CHANGED ATTITUDE YOU MAY BE GETTING SHADOWS.

But Imp Plus had not said shadows to Ground.

The answer was that Imp Plus was able to think in transmission. Yet that was what the Concentration Loop was, to begin with.

Glucose level up: he had known that already. And as if Ground read his thought, Ground paralleled his answer: CAP COM TO IMP PLUS. GLUCOSE UP AGAIN. DO YOU READ?

And Imp Plus did not tell what was felt in all the holes, for each was its own: holes that x-rayed and darted after the particles that had made the holes until then the particles met a match in other particles of contrary lean and each pair in a new mutual gradient vanished as if becoming the hole that had been darting after them: and what was left after the new mutual gradients of all the pairs of magnet particles was more than absence and other than attraction. Then he knew what it was. It was a radiance. Radiance he thought he had not prepared for. And so instead of reporting the packed shadows all around or asking was it true he could change attitude, Imp Plus answered only himself, not Ground, and knew as he answered Travelling on light that he was answering with the Sun.

But Ground had read Imp Plus again without a transmission from Imp Plus.

But what came to him was Travel light. Operation TL was Operation Travel Light.

When did Ground read what he thought, and when did Ground not?

But what was here was the thing. And Ground was not here. Imp Plus was here in the gradient grids of light. And what there was more of was not only glucose.

There was more all around.