Plus

5

But the two slivers.

Imp Plus did not think the slivers came from him; but before this thought, that chance had existed.

The slivers had drifted up before he had seen them. They hung near. But they could not have come out of the algae beds close by without passing through the oblong plastic that housed the beds. If the slivers were meant for him, he would have to see. The Good Voice had said, “It may be up to you.”

Imp Plus saw them, but now his sight toward them was not to be seen. That is, his sight of them was not to be seen moving toward them the way it moved toward the fraction that was himself. That is, it took no shape like the shapes of sight he could see reaching to his brain. Whereas between his sight and the slivers there was nothing except thin air.

And the slivers did not look like bits of those other sight shapes. His sight turned the slivers around so they gave off their gray-gold light. Through some vestige of pitch or yaw held tight now by different distances, the slivers leaned. But of themselves they did not move.

The slivers were so still they might belong.

They fit somewhere. There was no waste. Yet here were the slivers in the middle of the capsule as unsupported as a thing in orbit.

Imp Plus did not answer Ground.

The slivers were so small that at some angles their filament shine was more than they themselves. Yet they were not fractions, Imp Plus thought. Not like the tilted hemisphere adrift over near the bulkhead with a scrap dangling down.

But the equal slivers looked complete in themselves. Sheer pins. Clear needles. With lengthwise parallels of transparency inside each whole transparency.

In proportion long, in size the slivers were small. When he looked at them he could lose sight of everything else around him. So when he refocused on the rest around him, or then refocused on the slivers to see the silver points at each end, he got long tickles of ache, a polar axis trying to pivot in him.

Ground reported transmissions from numbered areas. But since Imp Plus had desired the Dim Echo not to answer, Imp Plus felt these new transmissions might be the spasms set off in him when he looked back and forth between the slivers and the rest around.

The spasms had length but were not long. This was true also of the crimson veins that glowed like light in caves briefly seen.

Now at one end of each sliver changes were piling in that were hard to see. Bird knees like grasshopper elbows riding in by the million folded up into a silver point on each sliver. Waves came.

There were other places to be.

Imp Plus was here.

Still, in the green and golden sunlight of the algae beds and their glassy cover, he found an idea that he was becoming someplace else.

For he saw this brain of himself from points and sides that were outside it. So for a second that stretched the burn of the cavings into the once-known other pain beyond burning that hummed waves along an axis of distance, he decided he was in a dream on Earth. He had dreamt it in several places before the start of Operation TL. He had dreamt he was looking at what was left; and when he tried to take in breath, he had no lung. But this dream had made the bare brain a lighted, scaleless specimen from a photo lens. While what he had here differed.

He fell toward his brain or away from it. This changed its size. He passed from spoke to spoke of his sight moving around the brain so it seemed to turn. And most of all it was open to floods of lumen, Sun streams of tracer nuggets each one so wholly precise it bent an additional, completing Sunlight along the flank of its intensity so overshadowingly more than intensity that it was dimension that might be frequency itself.

Ground did not ask for the differences; Ground did not ask if Imp Plus had stress. Ground requested readings, and Imp Plus let the Dim Echo answer. But the Dim Echo did not. And Imp Plus had to give the readings.

But what differences? Between the Earthly dream and what was here in orbit. Differences from more than dream.

Which were they?

Imp Plus informed himself. A flood of blinding quanta headed through the brain, yet stayed. This made the sea of glia cells shine into snow bedding the bursts of neuron fire, neurobodies firing forth thought that he saw but could only know was his. Imp Plus recalled flesh against a flashlight. And here in the brain’s four bellies the Sun flood bulged so the bellies touched and swelled their light into a single brimming, But beyond the ventricles — they were ventricles, the bellies — Imp Plus found in all the incandescence curls of clefts too and the sealed banks of canals like light laid upon the field of light. Saw them while now he saw further the fountain crown of optic radiations line by line. But below them, where Imp Plus on his prior trip had not been ready to go, he thought he saw where the Sun’s flood furled to a gland of flame.

Imp Plus was ready to see these insides containing the Sun’s flow. From outside his brain he looked into it through a gray-amber flesh, through glaring oxides of saffron cytoplasm, through platinum-fired sheaths of glue cells, even to the edge of that gold gland of flame. Layer on layer swarmed with those ovals the cell’s power plants each with its path of particles breathed through blood-blanched locks of enzyme. Imp Plus might as soon use for these baked-potato ovals the Dim Echo’s stored and pointless and (he saw) now fading word mitochondria, as smell through it an acrid ill will now merely remembered: or see an alien ellipsoid feeding an Earthly fire.

Yet not as soon, maybe. For the Earthly fire was far away. And a memory unprepared.

Yet a frequency that went on mixing its signal of scrub and thorns until the fibers of crackling campfire came apart and he heard the signal.

Or saw: for the Earthly fire was in the night and in Mexico, unlike the Sun stream running through the brain, and unlike crimson veins winking life into tails of shadow.

Or smelled: for the potato shapes that neither fed the faraway fire nor were fed, had smelled like that for years and years.

But as they blackened into the mouthing coals, they were seen through: for amid the long potato shape — potato? mitochondrion! — was a daylight window; and a small bird black-white-and-gray with a touch of red on its side and a forked tail three times its body swept over a line drooping between poles against the plateau of sky: so a voice could say words about the sac hanging from the dark line: it was a nest woven by the cousin of the scissor-tailed bird, and both birds were called flycatchers.

The words were out loud. The voice had wanted to take a breather from Operation TL, get away from California for a few days and nights. The voice was his, and it was talking. The car’s daylight window had moved, like the glove compartment with its books of California matches, into the nighttime campfire where not one but two potato shapes roasted.

For there was a second voice. It had not come from California. It did not laugh and was not the same that had lain in the water, and it was dry but not acrid. She had seen the scissor-tailed flycatcher from the car window. And now waited for her potato among the thorns and scrub of the tierras templadas. And this voice said this was good — oh she’d wanted to get away to the Sun.

But the Earth with the campfire had turned away from the Sun. And the voice across the fire with its eyes closed would go away, and Operation TL would not. So Imp Plus had leaned along the ground and moved around the fire. The voice, hers, was not speaking; it sang: he heard templado, not templadas and not tierras.

Imp Plus got to her. Except he was not yet Imp Plus. With the start of Operation TL he would no more be what he had been, and maybe this had been why he had been moving around the fire toward the voice that sang with eyes shut.

When she was done she opened them. He had been touching her blue jeans and she had been holding a silver flashlight that shone in the fire.

He had been thinking what would come and remembering what he was to become in four weeks. This thinking had been clear and it had been touched by desire; so it came to him now in orbit. But he could move from spoke to spoke of his sight around the radiant brain. For this was new, this was not remembering. Or the spokes were new. For they were his sight, each one a solid. Yet where their light was dimmer they could be seen through, and yet his sight was maybe not sure.

His sight, though, was solid. But was not only spokes.

More wings or necks.

He didn’t know where they came from, but he knew they went to the brain.

Knowing this he saw there in the brain a blue dart come like the crimson veins in the shadows before. This blue was a line and then a radius. But a radius become the locus of a width. Which was how it plowed sideways broadside. He knew locus.

The knowing and seeing of these things went or came with the tearing twist of pain. It twisted round tight but did not untwist. For instead it found in its tightening spiral new dimensions by which it then burst inward. And was the reverse of torn. A thick new membrane. He stepped back to view the cloudy silk of it which was close to him on the way to the brain along his solid but unsure sight.

But he had nothing with which to step.

Yet now he went right over the membrane along the spoke to the brain. Close up he saw the blue line that had plowed or washed sideways between a cavernous canal and an infinitesimal drag or suck that he did not see why he could see. But the wash sank in, and its dim trace faded against the Sun’s flood charging the brain.

Imp Plus passed without thought from one spoke to another; he would see if he could see the blue trace. But it was not there, and in that field of absence the other, once-known pain that was not the burning twisting caving came to him along its axis of distance.

There were shoes of yellow hide standing by the fire. They had marks on them that were a map of how to get back. In California a shoemaker’s axle had spun against a rim of sole, but the shoemaker was not making the shoe. Imp Plus took steps through the night in Mexico, he was following the voice and the flashlight that bobbed ahead of him. The voice was not singing or speaking, the sound she made broke between breathing and humming at once. He stepped on thorns which he did not see. The shoes were back at the fire. He cried out “Ow.” The light stopped bobbing and the beam wheeled, hitting the car which was at a distance elsewhere. The light passed a pale thing close to it, and then the beam came to him. The woman was not making the sound now. She said, “All I wanted was some sun.” He wanted to tell her about TL but she was afraid she had nothing to give back. The empty shoes of yellow hide were back by the fire near the baking potatoes. He wanted to lick a honey-sweetness but it was in himself. He was thirsty but for what was already in him. One desire filled the place of another; a thing tightened on him like shoes.

Feet came to him along the axle of the other pain that was not the crashing, caving pain, and was barely out loud. But then they were his own feet in daylight. Toes stroked a throat, and they went on under the California water to a mass with a nipplelike knob he squeezed. The toes under the Sun-drenched cloud of water were his. He was up to his shins and not in Mexico.

The toes that squeezed were under the water somewhere and under the basking woman. The bigger toe he knew had an oval hornlike plate set into its end. Next to it, a thinner longer toe had a small square plate. A long weekend was what he and the woman had ahead. Yet she was travelling light, she said, as if she knew something about Operation TL. Or was glad to have only themselves. Now she rested wafting face down in the shallows of the sea. He pinched, not tight. She rolled her head back out of water and said, “What you want.”

It was the face that rolled back. Did he know face? The pale thing the flashlight beam had passed in Mexico not four weeks before had also been a face. Another woman’s face. Pale and not California. Though when seen close up, wet like this. Though not so wet. Wept. Tear-damp.

But this woman half sunk in the Pacific sea let water run over the wide-set eyes of her turned-back head. They were blue where his were brown, he could see them. And her whites were clear blue-white.

His sight of her had come to him through the nipple fixed out of sight between his two toes. His sight of her had spiralled up to him. It had come through parts of him he was going to lose at the end of the long weekend and had begun to miss.

The sailing shearwaters and the flapping, crook-winged, hook-billed diver osprey had gone away into the open sea air. The woman had turned on her back.

He had seen swirls of foam and felt twists of ill will clouded in acrid smoke, and he had dragged a long breath in. So long he caught a film of spray and his front swelled out, and she said, “Vanity.” She laughed and the blue-green water tipped into her mouth and was her color. She coughed and sat up in the shallows and held him. Her breath woke a knee. Below her shoulder which was cool, her gentle gland turned outward pressed against his shin stem. Her armbone wet the back of his knees, and the end of her arm came around in front reaching up higher.

These good things came to him. And she coughed some more, and many gaps in his sudden and towering headache raced independently back and forth bringing the acrid camouflage of smoke — and when she got to her feet she rose up that axis of distance that was the once-known pain that was not the crab twist of cave-crash. What came to him out of the air and the distant glint of his car and of hard glassy particles in the sand of the dunes, were bodies of her nipples and then dark-blooded pores of her nipples and her whole face. And before he knew it he had followed the curve of her lower lip up over the sea-bright chap creases dried and cut in fine puffs, and in beyond the fleshy skin into the ingrown body the shining loin of the mouth saying the Sun was warm.

What had come to him then came now on a wing or spoke of his sight. And with it came the grinding crackle that turned him into a new blast-burnt hollow, and with it came the blue dart. And of all things the Dim Echo was saying, “Hypothalamus active.” The blue dart was this time so much into the brain that the blue line was right above the gland of flame he had stopped short of before. And so deep that the dart itself might have been what jabbed into him the caving rip of burn-pain. But Imp Plus knew that this time the pain was on the next spoke over. Where he saw he also was. Though this next spoke or neck of sight stood below and ran from another pole.

But what had come was this: that in the Sun of that spring seashore, he’d seen the ingrown body of her mouth: seen edges, tips, grooves, and arches of a tongue laid he only now saw with a velvet of cones or nipples small like light-receptor cells that did their own winking, each one: and here was the point, the point which had not hurt here except with the hum of distance but now with the other pain ground him and twisted him into an instant: the point was that he had looked into the mouth to find a formed emptiness that was the ingrown body and he had known he did not fear an unknown and brain-scrambling loss that would take place on an operating table the next week: and instead had had a new desire. There were words he had not prepared to remember for the point of the desire he now saw.

But the space of the desire that seashore afternoon on Earth had been he now saw as unknown as the tongue’s bed of velvet nipples had been to his eyes. The difference (and again pain came on the heels of the blue dart) was that here now in orbit the desire was a thing not lost. It was not the pale strip across the pores of her back and the groove of her spine, and it was not the fine smoke of rehydrated sweat from the armpit that far down his body his calf hairs had brushed while she sat in the sea and that had then gone up toward him along that axis of distance. No. What he understood now in orbit was that the desire’s aim had been unknown. And where his present microsight came to him by division upon division, this unknown desire that was in place of fear divided its long vacancy into the non-burning pain of waves that even then had always hummed an axis of distance.

And as the brain from several — how many? — spokes, wings, necks, or routes as if it had no scale — or, for that matter, thought of him — came at him and went back, came large and went back to less, he got the product of this multiple division.

The product was the other pain of the caving.

But as he got this product it changed.

For the blue discharge showed its dart at once and more than once not just in the spot the Dim Echo might have been calling hypothalamus right above the furled flame now still more tightly furled. This time the discharge of line or dart went on longer or stronger against the Sun’s flood.

But this was not the change. The change was that from the caving-out, the caving-in, the breakage like a stretch where cushions of blood shot into cords that twisted narrower and narrower into instants like quanta, there was no pain.

Though the pain was there. But held inside his knowing: and the knowing was that the caving blasts were a quotient got from dividing the old non-burning pain of distance by the desire-of-unknown-aim.

The car at the edge of the beach was the same that had gone from California to Mexico and back. It was not new but it had become an unknown quantity. This had caused the woman when she had been standing behind him to laugh a spiral up his spine. “Come swim,” she said, and then “your eyes are bloodshot.” He was going to leave the car behind, but not yet. They had to get from the beach to other places they were going. But at the end of the long weekend when the operation was to get under way, he would be glad to leave the car behind. But that was not what she laughed at. But if her words Travel light meant she knew of the project, then she might know he was leaving the car behind. But that would not have been what she would be laughing at. He knew her. But what did he know? The car was not new but the spokes were new. They did not have horny plates like toes. The spokes were several and he saw by all of them. The spoke of the cloudy membrane had moved, but so had another, but he could not tell if this other had moved down or up or out.

He had to change his thinking.

This thought restored the torn burn-pain, the tear of cave-crash. But so fast he didn’t spot the blue dart. For the Sun’s flood was now less. The gland of flame where he had not ventured had furled even more tight and thin.

But he remembered the launch. And that he was weightless now. Yet felt such a weight as he had not known.

Maybe it was the blind news vendor’s radar. The man had said, “I took hold, and now I got a regular radar.”

Imp Plus had said he felt the radar.

The blind man said, “I see more than you think.”

Imp Plus had asked him what was the more he saw with his radar. Imp Plus had felt the whole weight of the launch and had lost hold of a hold he had had whose presence he knew he had not then needed radar to name.

He had heard a dull gleam of metal clank into the funnel in front of a stack of newspapers. The funnel was tin, and what went into the tin was silver, his quarter but not dropped by him. “How much you give me?” said the blind vendor. “Somebody else put it in, right?”

“Right!” said another voice.

There had been more than Imp Plus there at the newsstand. There had been the other that the blind man had seen. Seen? Not out of his cold eye sockets covered by loose bandages. Imp Plus did not know right. But he knew the high voice. But then another voice had spoken different words hard to know, and tiempo was the word Imp Plus caught and remembered. This new voice was lower than the one that had cried, “Right,” and the blind news vendor was saying, “You got your kid with you.” And smacked his lips.

And Imp Plus saw not the lower voice that had said tiempo and moved on covered in fur, but the person round the Mexican fire and baked potatoes. For this was not California.

She was coming along the sidewalk, for this was not Mexico. Though Mexico had sidewalks though not around the campfire in the plateau. It was cold at the newsstand. As the person advanced, a smaller person went toward her which was away from Imp Plus and was like rising from the bottom of a scope to the top. The news vendor had said something in Mexican to the voice that had passed and now another voice that was also the news vendor said, “What’s your name? You like chewing gum?”

And Imp Plus now slid away from, then toward, the small then large crown, head, wig, vehicle of his own not scaleless yet now less heavily lighted brain. Leaned and staggered round the brain from spoke to neck to limblike stabilizer of what must be his solid sight which saw clefts, glints, craters, and full, pulsing flats potential in what were or had been clefts. But he couldn’t get off the chill axis of this distance-pain till the words came to him. Words once said to the blind news vendor: “She’s not here, she ran to meet her mother.”

For before seeing her rise from a low rim to the top of some scope of his, yes Imp Plus had been holding his child’s hand, his child. And while he had not yet been Imp Plus, he’d thought of being. For soon he had been back in California seeing crushed shells that had been remade into tubes, sticks, dowels of chalk draw angles that beamed like a flashlight right out to the curve of a flat ring. Beamed from one center on the Acrid Voice’s green blackboard. But the flat ring had two centers. And the second had the chill of space and the Acrid Voice called it empty. But from the first center he drew those angled segments that got wider and wider and like a searchlight beam hit the lip of the flat ring—ellipse, he knew ellipse — and that first center was the Sun, and the Acrid Voice was showing Imp Plus arcs of Earth’s orbit round the Sun.

And now as if from all four spokes of his solid sight — for several he found was four—Imp Plus found he saw like those white segment beams angled by the moving nest of the Acrid hand on a green slate. That is, saw with an equalness of spread down from the roof of that brain that he had half stopped thinking his, down down to the membranes along the solid limb of his sight right here close and toward him to the very brink of wherever on the four variously aimed limbs he looked from but then might see through in spots, for his sight was unsure. And he remembered dreaming his way through all the shapes and data on that slate, for it was a map to get back by. Yet instead he saw himself receding from his child, again his child running to meet her mother: to figure what hope had let go, he had to figure from the empty center of this ellipse: that is, see from the center unused by the Acrid Voice.

Until the Good Voice was telling at another time of the unknown force of solar light, the goodness of the project despite but also through its strange addition, telling also of the future and its goodness, while leading Imp Plus who was not yet Imp Plus out of the large pale green room on Earth though not to the smaller green room but to a place where he was to stretch out.

Which was what Imp Plus — with, behind him, birds, two women, potatoes, feet, and child — was doing now. Stretching out.

Else he could not have seen where a cleft now widened to show a silver pin like the points on the two floating slivers, and could not once more have gone into what he thought was his own brain. Looking for the crimson vein he found not crimson and not the shadows. He found what he then thought had made the shadows. He recalled the crease or cleft he’d half thought of, half hoped for. The Dim Echo was asking again to be laughed at. It reported 50 % increase in activity equally throughout Imp Plus which might include oscillation between hypothalamus and unknown areas. The Dim Echo reported capsule temperature lower.

Ground replied, WE HAVE BEEN GETTING THAT, IMP PLUS.

Imp Plus moved.

He spun round the four necks of his largely solid sight: and since at the same time he constantly opened and closed the brainward angle of his up-and-down scope, he made a spiral. Not the spiral of the blue-eyed woman’s laugh up his heavy spine that had turned him from his car engine; no, not that spiral but his own oscillating spiral. It was, first, all over. And a field more equal than that sweet humor of her blood and sugar laid once upon his ridges, his fissures. But what his spiral did now — though not with that polar spasm of refocusing like a funny-bone jab — was to spin in on a frontal crease which he’d half hoped half thought could get to be instead a crater or rich flat; and with the spiral’s contracted circuit but thus greater force, the spiral then stroked and spread that frontal crease, opened it much further.

A flash like a thought apart from him popped up.

It was a silver sliver. Like the slivers that hung in the light lowering near the algae. Crook-winged waves folded into it long distance. (The light was lowering everywhere.)

The sliver Imp Plus had popped out sailed on. It moved at a lean.

A figure shining through the heavens at an angle.

Proud filament launched by Imp Plus, its motion a long long breath drawn in.

Was why it moved why it kept moving?

“Vanity,” the woman said in the water. Lying there, she had not seen all he’d seen. But while she did not know his anger against the Acrid ill will much less the reach it had drawn him into by some mutual torque, she had seen his long deep breath swell him. It came in through his face. (He knew face.) She had said, “Vanity,” when he had taken in his deep breath; but he had also felt his face stretch and the flesh grow. (Vanity?) The growth was the mouth. He had made up his mind to smile — because he hurt again. (Where was the time going?) Particles of afternoon dune sand glinted closer.

One glassy facet a hundred meters from the car moved. It was somebody’s dark glasses. Imp Plus did not want the woman to know. (He wanted her the way she was.) Her figure folded and she leaned into his shadow. She sat up. Her breast pressed his shin stem. Her mouth came up. (Time went.) Sunlight passed in through his hair which was barely going gray; he did not do anything but stand inert; but not in vain, for in her slow rise up the axis of distance he too was in motion.

He said, “This morning”—but he wanted the quiet between her and him, so he stopped his words: though they had already launched his thought: it hung that morning between the smile of the Good Voice and the smile of the Acrid Voice. Imp Plus had been thinking between: that was it: thinking between these two: so it was thinking like a blindfold, thinking like an emptiness that didn’t exist all that much, an emptiness of attention: he wanted time off this last weekend but he camouflaged his wish (that was it) as the will to know: to know all that they in the pale green rooms could tell: about day and night, about glucose level, concentration loop, electrode monitors (“But so much is up to you,” the Good Voice beamed), G stress during launch, gyro rings in the inertial guidance system: “Ah, inertia,” said the Good big grin (knowing much that Imp Plus did not know); but the Acrid Voice said, “Inertia’s just self-preservation.” (His smile was short.) For the first time in a long time Imp Plus had not felt ill this morning. He wanted to get away from the green rooms and all the eyes full of wonder. Yet later at the beach he did not care if the eyes in the dark glasses saw.

If vanity was inertia, inertia might be vanity.

If inertia was self-preservation, self-preservation might be vanity.

“Vanity,” she said into his mouth.

But if it did not matter that the dark glasses saw him, it did not matter if he saw them.

Imp Plus’s approaching sliver slowed and hung. It did not keep moving like the light that lowered.

But as it stopped it made a length of shadow on the milky membrane below it. Imp Plus now saw the sliver’s true or longer length not from the shadow site above which the nearly vertical sliver, like the shadow, was little longer than a point; no, Imp Plus saw the true or longer length from another place as if the eye corners where he often saw the strands of resilience loosening and tightening looked back at him.

What would he do?

This was a question, but was it the right one?

One thing he could do he found by having done it.

This was to hear Ground’s transmissions as silence. Yet when and how weren’t sure.

Ground asked the meaning of This morning, but Imp Plus eyed the new sliver instead.

He saw the sliver’s longer length with a ray of brain behind it. Yet then at once he saw another still longer length from a new angle’s height so his view had for background an arc of capsule bulkhead and the cool shadowy end of one of the spokes on which now no crimson vein showed here and there. But this was not enough. A desire once part of him now acting alone for him brought one more view, small and not leaning at all and smaller than it really was because the view was cut into by a spoke whose length was unclear because of the angle of the view which seemed to be from the far and under side of the brain. Yet now this set of four views moved into one, with the pain of caving-out which was not as keen now though more painful than the other distance-pain that maybe did not hurt. And with the pain came a shimmer. It was a pulse and was a new brightness of haze and so less clear, yet a new size which was not bigger and not smaller. It was the whole sliver, the all-sided thing now milky-hazed, now crystal clear, but whole as a memory he could not put his finger on. He knew memory, but saw that it was not the same as remember.

But the new whole sliver was not now any one of the four co-views.

But was their sum. Their product. Their home. Their figure.

Here a pain worse than cave-crash skewered him on a cylinder he did not see. Cylinder and pain were an axis fine as a blade that being a locus was also the curve of cylinder wall. Pain so bad. Pain like splitting the speed of light where he was light, and it was silent — what? — and so bad it seemed final: but was not. And when it passed shivering back down its axis of distance, he remembered a shade of what he had remembered at the endless point of that pain: it was a light called coherent light banked, divided, remade, in a dark room not as far from the newsstand as were California and then Mexico. And he as he then had been had been in charge. Not the Good Voice planning. Or the Acrid Voice chalking. Not the brown woman with a gold ring who had brought a long sliver in to his arm when he was in pain. The pain had come so soon after the day at the shearwater beach that he could not understand how his body whose illness was a beginning of Operation TL could change so fast.

What could he do?

Hear words from Ground: THIS MORNING WHAT, IMP PLUS. YOU SAID THIS MORNING. THIS MORNING WHAT? COME IN IMP PLUS.

He (who was you) had the stretch-cave burn again all over and an idea that was not green came to him, that from the spoke-limbs his solid sight to the brain had found more than was being found from here in the brain outward. Here he looked from chance angles and corners. A fort so living you did not know where you would chance to see out of it next. The spoke-solids of pointless sight had wonderful colors of thickness. They moved away from him, he thought. Spines of membrane, spines fattening. He felt he saw in one and then another a budge. Like a thing inside. Had shoved another. But more came after. Or he thought he could see this, and thought he could be there in them more clearly than he could have them by looking from the brain and its configuring changes outward.

Ground asked a new question: Was he not remembering as much?

A wave felt like a collar going through him, and it left him less. And a voice that was the Dim Echo said, “Wonderful, wonderful. Say again.”

But the wave was a thought. A thought that everything would be taken away from him. A feel would be taken from his flesh as already flesh from feeling. A hand taken from his hand, a Mexican song retracted from his ear. A salmon-nippled tongue subtracted from the fork of his legs.

Ground asked if Imp Plus felt O.K.

Ground added: FRANKLY IMP PLUS WE ARE GETTING NOTHING FROM CERTAIN AREAS. ARE YOU INTEGRATING SENSORY INPUT?

Pale green ripples rose in the middle of a limb. He wondered if the Dim Echo was trying to speak.

But the ripple wasn’t quite a motion. More a gradient. A bony gradient that layover something but also was that something.

And was matched elsewhere on the outlying spoke by another gradient form as alive but this time darkest red. Which stretched like a mouth going to open.

The milky membrane was most slick and thick between these two areas.

Dark blue and pale brown were on the spoke or wing adjacent. (Or did he only remember?) And on it lay the long point or brief rung of shade cast down through the capsule’s empty space by the now more leaning sliver Imp Plus had sprung.

Rung. He did not know rung. But with its cast shadow, it was an idea. Yet not like the green thing, the algae.

Though, like the green thing, someone else’s idea. But rung or not, Imp Plus had had the feel of that shadow across his seeing before: and now knew he had already known that the membranes were what he saw with. Though not eyes.

Sometimes he saw through; sometimes not.

If the news vendor kept his mouth open because he saw with his teeth, maybe the colored and discolored and loose and also absent teeth came and went and came again.

Beyond the ripple districts the membrane tissue began to fade.

The limbs were not all membrane. Their sticky shine was sometimes hard as plating.

One of the spokes seemed to move away from him, he was not sure. What could he do? But the center district between the green and dark red ripples was now bigger.

He felt under the membranes levels and laminations that he was going to see, and he could feel right down to the vegetative and animal poles of one cell lucky enough to be part of what the membrane was becoming part of.

Vegetative was not the vendor’s vegetable. Imp Plus did not know animal, but only recalled it. What could he do?

“Remember to survive of course.” That was what the Acrid Voice had said into the chalky greenboard in a pale green room as if he did not mean the words to go to Imp Plus. But remember what?

The woman at the California beach was all flesh. She stood straight against him and he forgot his ill body. Forgot the Mexican thorn that had cut his feet (near the silver-leaf flower that sprang up under the flashlight) — and the fingers that went away from his hand at the winter newsstand in which the hooded vendor with always open half-laughing mouth and rotten teeth had a bandage so loose you could see in one socket a pale red purse like a body hole. All came together loosely arrayed by a force. It was there and touched Imp Plus who could feel it but not reach it.

It was like an idea, other ideas besides resilience: like the resilience the strands were of — the strands in corners of all eyes loosening and tightening, loosening and (now he thought with the full closeness of his former look) losing a process of strand before tightening back. The chlorella bed had seemed to him an idea long ago. But then he tried to stop himself, for he did not know idea. He had recalled it; but he did not know it. He knew the green chlorella, knew that it gave him part of his air. Wasn’t that all? And now also knew that the spokes had membranes with sight. But he persisted in feeling that the spread and the poles and the open chances of this sight were more than sight and more than what they’d felt like.

Here in Earth orbit he leaned out in all the axes of his spines to this force that had him but that he had not learned to touch. The force was dispersed in the outlying parts. It was like an idea if Imp Plus only knew idea. It was the idea of his sight. Or the force of place where sight grew. Or the chance of place which force inclined to find. He leaned down the one axis of distance. But then he could not. For he had seen how he had slipped toward a secret he would have from himself, a secret kick he would have from himself by recalling the woman’s moist touch all round him by the body he once had had but did not now have. This secret leaning had seen itself, brain and limbs merging in a mutual inclination of sight, or change of chance: so the first leaning was displaced by the second leaning: this second leaning was not one axial incline but a spread from one of several possible centers, and a spread of the caving-pain that made him laugh back and budge the four outlying limbs or necks bedded with membranes and their growth and with that underlying offer feeling its way through their plasm. Before, from outside, his brain had been, he now saw, small or then huge only because motion in his membrane-sight had made that so. And what he’d thought to be sight projected solid toward the luminous vessel of brain was really a solid that happened also to have sight. And the shifting look of the brain-stuff as he’d leaned round and round the brain, was real change in the brain’s face.

But what could he do? What of the light? It had lessened. It still wound into all the parts like smoke into sinus. But the light had lessened.

He did not know. But he felt a lip of fold unwind that he could only have seen had he put himself forth onto an outlying limb membrane. And he wished not to do that. For the lowering Sunlight still warm in flood gave him a feel that was not alone the Sun’s movement but his too. A feel of many mouths opening that had not been before.

Imp Plus had laughed into the smiling mouth that had said, “Vanity.”

For he had seen through the glinting peeper of the dune: it was a shadow monitor, a person from the Project: so perhaps they had not implanted a monitor in his car that was drawn up at the end of the dune road.

But that was it! His slivers were electrodes! He had known them long ago. Though not where they’d be implanted.

For a moment the limbs or necks or wings seemed to know.

Know what?

Ground said Imp Plus should begin to think of getting ready for some shut-eye, but would Imp Plus please give latest glucose readings. And Imp Plus wondered Ground should say such things when Ground had never needed Imp Plus for such data.

Or had not till now, with the electrodes popping out.

The sliver that the brown woman had brought to his arm in California had been big and not small like the slivers here. Not an electrode. Though with a needle at one end.

Now the limbs or wings or necks or spokes pulsed a milky glow so the cycling of the late light received a salute.

Imp Plus knew that the more that was all around and was from him was growing from his brain.