Plus

7

But Imp Plus did not sleep. He let the Dim Echo do his sleeping for him, was that it? Yet also Imp Plus did not know sleep. The word for it from Ground felt like a line along a middle between sides. But he did not know sleep. He saw large and small. All that was new about this was that he knew he’d been doing it for many turns of day and night so he wanted words to count the turns and he thought to draw these words to him along the axis of distance.

But to where?

He was at the narrow cleft. It was a cleft of the brain. Back down the cleft when he looked the dim facets that had been in a line leaned away and withdrew to be again a cluster.

But a cluster now with a pollen shine and a glint of net.

Which had not been seen when this cluster of pump, oval, and other small motions had turned to a line just when Imp Plus had let himself be drawn out to the narrow cleft in what the Dim Echo had called premotor cortex.

Where to see the Dim Echo?

Imp Plus looked, and the clustered facets inclined again to this cleft he’d been drawn to. Other clusters everywhere did also, singling down to brief lines in his direction. They reached at him, and he could be the Sun out of sight around a corner and they were inhaling to drag out of the brain’s night this light that was left.

But then these lines of outflow slung their lengths back and were clusters. Imp Plus could have chosen to see the lines from many points, and points moving and not moving. He had chosen to. But he did not know if those lines, now withdrawn into clusters, had been as long as they had gone on.

All these works went on without him. Yet it was him they were.

A touch came. A message like the nurse’s needle. A point of force spread upon him to be a screen. The screen or plane had unfolded at the cleft except Imp Plus did not see how. For past the shadow of strands lax or tightening in the corners of his eyes, he could see out through the cleft as before to the capsule bulkheads and the glimmer of his growth. But wherever the plane or field was, once spread across it the force made him — or made him want to — move his eyes from one side to another and back.

Which made him want to have the eyes to do it with. Or want to think he had. For he knew he didn’t have.

Not eyes like those he’d lost that were like the woman’s other-colored eyes he’d smelled at the California shore.

Or seen and loved and wanted. Though not smelled, or not known he smelled, till here now tight or lax through sugars sliding from chamber to vein.

Not chamber or vein of eyes. Yet sugars. Lactic. Lactic sugars.

He had got somewhere almost.

And doubly. For he brought back, and instantly returned for an instant to, that after part of the brain through which the aft caliper of will had passed: the part which the Dim Echo sleeping nearby might give a name to and where the fine folds of muscle—muscle was the word — must wait and want for far-flung motions or motors to pass, seeking themselves. Not the rings of cell muscling the ends of the California woman’s rainbow iris in across the pupil’s gap in his memory, or one he thought was his. Instead, other muscles he could not find, but could want, but could not wait for.

He had come almost to see a thought. Which meanwhile like a constant map of him watched him, he thought, not he it.

Then the touch was gone, and he saw that it had not been like the nurse’s needle, which had made him lose sight of her. He looked to find the Dim Echo. But he found all the night cities of the brain as if he were not here. And he looked out past a brief, gray glitter at the lip of the cleft which he thought to be a membrane starting with the webbed bulge he had centered on, though he felt also everywhere. At an unknown distance hung a solid curve of dusky, blue-mottled pearl. He knew what he’d once seen on Earth but as quickly saw that he could not be seeing through the bulkhead — and the window was not in that direction. Beyond the lip of the cleft were the wings, necks, spokes, organs, exits, or entrances: which were maybe none of these, though he was sure of one thing, that they had gone from the brain.

But they had made the brain what he couldn’t find in himself to see: made the brain other than what they had come from. The map of how to get back changed.

The capsule was darker. Ground might have changed attitude. Over and in the chlorella beds a feeling of light constantly receded and was there. The outer light that was not the Sun but might be a distant milk of stars and had maybe named itself the Moon could itself have shifted.

The outlying parts were there, but they were him more than he could see them. Yet he saw what he saw. The bend curled in still more. For in the fine light of itself, it wanted to join the nearby limb, or keep going and curl back toward the brain.

The lights of the outlying membranes were under the membranes. Each light a layer of length going on holding the Sun that was not here now.

The cleft to which Imp Plus had felt drawn contracted as the outlying limb curled. But both stopped. Imp Plus had a slowness in the outlying limbs. Or did not now feel much of what was going on there. He was alone with himself. He thought this inside. The Dim Echo was near and inside, not off among the outlying plasms. The Dim Echo was asleep. With lights on. Asleep lighted by the glove of feelers the Sun’s departed hand had left. Did the wings sleep? What light disturbed their membranes? Light they gave themselves. Without eyes the Dim Echo was not disturbed by light. Here inside the brain — or what had been the brain from which whatever had sprung, the light stored from the Sun’s day was more than light.

Still, light helped Imp Plus see this. These flows.

In the gold shadow over each pale red flow he saw — but not till he should want to — a full galaxy of colors. They were what he’d seen when he’d first recalled the woman’s eyes. The gold shadow was also underneath. The gold shadow was what showed the other colors in the pale red. He could not tell if he now smelled the sweet flow or recalled the smell; he saw down inside and forward of the islands and the gland. Saw what he knew must be a different size — the tendrils not only glowing from the horseshoe lobes he and the forward rung had thought to be his broken smell, but also throwing toward these gold-shadowed pink flows motions like transmissions.

Waves.

Which he saw made what was not a flow at all but many single bodies of rainbow red that were even more a flow through the shadow gaps of gold between. And each body now turned, but in a smaller size, and flexed like a single muscle shorn to a weightless space on its own until with a sweet burn that did not pain Imp Plus each body receiving the waves became two bodies of a thicker but paler hue but soon were hard to see and came back as other bodies of that dilute red.

The light had been stored. But there was more and more.

And as if he had heard Earth before Earth spoke, he heard: CAP COM TO IMP PLUS CAP COM TO IMP PLUS ARE YOU COLD ENOUGH UP THERE IMP PLUS?

Again, touch came. It was a spasm, a jab of dryness on his tongue, and with it a need to move eyes he did not have from one side to the other and back and so forth. And so he did.

But then Imp Plus fixed his look upon the bodies and their flow and the rainbow range surfacing like a shadow of the gold, and he was able to stop the rapid eye motion set off by the touch. But there were so many bodies, his attention was drawn back to the lip of the cleft. Yet not just by the bodies and the unpleasant force that jabbed him to motions he knew he could not make alone, and not by the Dim Echo’s slow words (which Imp Plus kept to himself) SLEEP, SLEEP, LIGHT SLEEP PRECEDES DEEP SLEEP. COLD WILL COME WITH DARK CYCLE. No his attention was drawn back to the lip of the cleft by his own desire to have if not those lost eyes a hand.

Though not the hand he had looked at — a last look, a last look, for that hand was lost on Earth. No, another hand that he could only think at the long moment when the nurse’s syringe went in his arm at the bend which was unbent to receive it, and he looked away from the point to the palm with its parchment shine of crisscross and the fingers curving larger and larger the further they sank beyond. And he tried to hold his eyes but couldn’t.

But now there were no eyes like that. And he could push back the jabbing touch by wanting to. Or by looking down on the button glint of gray at his cleft’s lip in the premotor cortex.

See at the same time waves from Earth on course enter that gray-glinting crystal point.

Then he knew what it was. It was another sliver implanted here to touch Imp Plus. For Earth to touch him. The waves stopped. But the gray crystal now stirred above the dilating bulge.

Imp Plus waited he did not know how long, and then he made the rapid eye movements to see if he could without the electrode’s prompting. But he could not recall what this had been, for now he could not pass the one whole flesh and wedge of watching from here to there without seeing that he was already there waiting for himself. And yet as he hit upon this, he thought he became one more shift different. He was steadily not the same; or if not he, what had been his brain.

The Dim Echo Imp Plus could not look down upon but only look for. But more.

For Imp Plus had felt somewhere by him an opening like a growth radiate outward. He had held this for himself, not let it go far outward.

Imp Plus had the words of the Dim Echo asleep or half awake, like stored work of the Sun’s hand in the membranes.

The words were: “O.K., optimum warmth. Solar flow holds. Glucose stable. Glucose beautiful. Cold will come when dark cycle comes. Sleep.” Imp Plus had not let the words go to Earth.

So cold had not come.

Yet the Dim Echo who when dark cycle had come had O.K.’d the order SLEEP, now did not seem to know the dark cycle had come. Imp Plus tried an answer. The Dim Echo did not know the dark cycle had come, because the Dim Echo slept.

The flows did not know either. If there was anything to know. Imp Plus saw as many as he wanted or expected, though not as few. He saw through the gold shadow’s colors to the business of the bodies within bodies. The skins of the larger were screens. They pulsed so clearly Imp Plus remembered breathing.

They were membranes bending in and out. Screens that the smaller bodies squeezed through. Squeezed through where no holes were until Imp Plus saw them. And these bodies in order to squeeze through got larger not smaller.

He saw the body like a bad-angled spacecraft bounce on the screen and not get through. Then it found and grabbed and was held by what became a carrier. Then was joined by another thing. This thing was barely there. And not on or in, but off. It was a function pried off. Pried off the very small suck pumping an inclination, a gradient, and he knew the pump but could not see it except in its idea across the pulsing membrane. The body embraced by the passive carrier and joined by a piece of the familiar pump could then slide inside the skin. Then, once inside, glow and part. Be two. And fade into a light that was Imp Plus himself. And breathed through and back through the snowy glue cells and the cells that sparked, and what went on was that these firing cells were split into cells that did not fire and that seemed earlier, but grew and then divided without being hit by the breathing glow of those other divisions inside membranes. And as for those — the body, the carrier, the pump piece, their passage through a skin and their united division — he thought he knew what he was seeing. Or smelling, or remembering the smell of. And as he thought he was seeing glucose events, though he did not know the cells that did not fire, he could see for a moment into the fade itself. And what he saw was a great part of a bow or arc.

Slow sugars rained down it. Their grand soft light was outlined by the dark of the cycle. Some of these firing cells split into cells that didn’t fire but divided — which seemed a reversal. Imp Plus swung his look rapidly here and there, turned elsewhere in order to think: to think that since the Dim Echo was wrong about dark, it could be wrong about cold. Imp Plus did not know cold. He wanted the Dim Echo to tell him where to find it.

Ground spoke again, and as if Earth had turned away with the Sun, the distance was more: CAP COM TO IMP PLUS ANSWER IF YOU CAN. IMP PLUS YOU ARE ALREADY IN DARK CYCLE BUT WE READ TEMPERATURE STEADY AT ONLY FOUR DEGREES BELOW DAYTIME.

Imp Plus held on to the answering words of the Dim Echo and did not let them go: cold will come with dark cycle.

IMP PLUS WE READ NO DROP IN POWER STORED IN ACCUMULATOR. WE READ HIGH CORTICAL ACTIVITY, LOOKING LIKE R.E.M. SLEEP IN ALL AREAS WE MONITOR. BUT THIS IS LIGHT SLEEP PERIOD IMP PLUS TOO EARLY FOR R.E.M. SLEEP.

Imp Plus held on to the slow answering words of the Dim Echo and did not let them go: cold will come with dark cycle. Light sleep precedes R.E.M. sleep. Sleep.

ARE YOU ASLEEP OR NOT, IMP PLUS. DO NOT BREAK SLEEP CYCLE BUT ANSWER IF YOU CAN.

Imp Plus did not know accumulator; but he did not know power either. Yet it had been in him. At the last words of the message the huge arc which was only a part of an arc could be seen for what it was: countless arcs each with its own aiming rain of sugars. Did he know how he had kept the Dim Echo from answering Earth? Imp Plus saw these many arcs were what he had seen before: each had its own center and its spokes: yet spokes radiant not from each center but from the dark-outlined arc itself as if each arc could be a locus center in the form of a curved line.

Seeing these many parts of arcs also so many, he smelt a sweet burn of his own pain and he slid down the one huge cycle out of the countless small, and saw that he had both.

The one huge one was also just a part, not more whole than the elongated circle of his will come round with its fore and aft caliper rungs but not meeting. Though come maybe closer than the ends of this one huge arc now. The many making one. The one huge. But also a part. So all the more huge. Yet made of the burning countless small. Made by — he could not say it — he was in the mist of gold shadow — the staggering spectrums of countless whole new colors were like the many small arcs, and the gold shadow where they sheltered was the one huge arc—made by—he could not say it — not only because it was not only him (he said it) but what had been given him, the stored gold blood from the Sun’s late hand: but also then for him itself, and here he saw his doubt had been golden, he’d felt it like stored flesh; and not knowing how to want the Dim Echo not to answer Ground, he had been given his desire. Which was part.

A part he must come to know.

He wondered what that would be.

The Dim Echo, which was not so dim, had said, “Cold will come.”

But what was will? Maybe he had known.

Imp Plus would like to ask the Dim Echo.

How long had it been asleep? It had been asleep when it said, “Cold will come.”

Will come was come, but not now. Come then.

Now was any point of the gold-pink sugar slides. Now was the gray glint of the sliver head here in the cleft which was one of many Imp Plus centered on.

He concentrated on the sliver head and then he saw that Earth’s last message had sunk into the night and he had been feeling the old sweet ripping burn of the pain and now was not.

That was then. Like the cave-crash of burn that had stopped for the time being or been turned now into the night work of the stored Sunlight. But not like the sugars that had slid past him down one of the dark cycles; for though that was then, too, the sugars slid now as well, they were not different, though what he did — if anything now — was different: what he’d done then when the sugars slid down a dark cycle, was stick up arms he did not have and press against the clear-curved skull he did not have, until it lifted off.

Ground was after him again but he had to be here now and he looked again at this premotor cleft. The bulge at its brink was now bigger. The cleft had dilated more. So the here and now were not now the same.

He had nothing to stand on; the bulge he was on was him. The bulge was on the brink of the cleft, the cleft was in a fold, the fold was more open, and when it was all open it would not be a fold. He could not help wanting this, but with each unfolding a fold was gone. Ground knew that the capsule was not as cold as expected and that there had been no drop in power stored in the accumulator, but Ground did not know other things. Imp Plus could keep answers from going to Ground but he could not keep the woman at the seashore. But this was not it: he meant instead that he could not keep the woman at the seashore from coming on the axis of distance; could not help her from unfolding him, yet he had wanted it.

And had always known the axis of distance was coming.

Always was then. Yet now, too.

Though not just here, though he was here. The night felt like many nights — nights of nights. The night divided and went on.

He could not bear something. Another pain. This pain was not the cave or split of growing, nor the axis of distance. But the axis of distance was one turning spoke of it. The new pain was as small as silence, but now, he saw, as large — a silent stretch, the absence of crash. But more still: an absence in general, but gold and many-colored.

An absence which he found then that he filled: by looking from all the night arcs of blood sugar whose idea he smelled; and by looking and straining from them beyond the one huge arc-part with its wheeling falls; staring unequally to where all these wheeled from. He felt what he saw — was that it? He found himself both seeing from all his membranes’ unequal distances and simultaneously waiting to receive his sight. It — was this it? — was waiting for itself before it got there: he was what he was seeing: so was this why he could take the sights beamed from the membrane-limbs’ unequal distances and receive this sight’s gathering onset and (wait) by being what he saw, both pin his sight into a point as small as (wait) a nerve head, as small as a pump pried by sight itself off the act of its own suck into infinitesimal function: and through it, in turn, see big too, because it held invisible inside its sight an idea of enlargement. See greater than big — far greater than the spreading large-scale sight he felt even at instants when he saw micro-small.

Maybe he was getting warmer, but his look or wish was turned before it got far enough.

For Ground asked if Imp Plus was asleep, and asked again, like a child aiming to wake a grownup. Asked if Imp Plus’s gauge showed a drop in temperature, asked for temperature but asked so that Imp Plus thought in a way he now recalled. Or smelled: for it was the ill will dividing him up: for Ground said Imp Plus could take those readings in his sleep, and the crackling Imp Plus thought he knew in the transmitted words was acrid laughing all over again: not the humor that once flowed from the bare woman’s eyes in California — no, the crackling humor now from Ground was what Imp Plus had smelt in the large green room when the Good Voice answered the Acrid Voice and gave Imp Plus time off the last weekend, “away from this goldfish bowl,” the Good Voice had said; “remember all that overtime ahead, day in day out, catching the Sun. A little private recreation is called for.” For the Acrid Voice had first said what if Imp Plus changed his mind, and now in answer to the Good Voice the Acrid Voice had said like a dim reflection, “Recreation,” and smoke came out of mouth and nose. So now Imp Plus felt the Acrid crackling when Ground said Imp Plus could take the temperature readings in his sleep.

Warm or cold was what the readings were. But was no temperature drop like no power drop in the accumulator?

Cap Com said the capsule couldn’t be so warm as the Ground gauge read. Warm was what Imp Plus thought the Sun was. The woman at the California seashore had said so when she rose out of the water. But the Sun was not here now. Ground was also not here.

The Sun came and went.

But Ground was always there.

The Sun could be where Ground was, but not always. There was more to it, and Imp Plus thought the Dim Echo knew. But the Dim Echo slept.

Not Ground. Its messages kept coming on the frequency. The frequency could not be the waves coming into the slivers that were adrift, for these slivers were not now implanted in Imp Plus.

IMP PLUS IMP PLUS DO YOU READ DO YOU READ?

He could not stop receiving but he did not have to answer.

CAP COM TO IMP PLUS CAP COM TO IMP PLUS WE READ MAXIMUM POWER IN ACCUMULATOR. WHAT’S UP? ARE YOU CONSERVING POWER?

He thought he would answer Ground. But he could only seek this other pain that offered. So he went on leaning to get where all the arcs of flow rolled from. To do this he must stretch across something inside him. A distance. Yet he did not see the distance till he had stretched. The brain with its scattered centers seemed to find the power to disperse still more. The distance inside did not make him feel good. The distance he straddled kept unfolding in what he had been feeling was the brain. He defended against the distance; but the distance was not more — not there — unless he stretched for the pain.

So that splitting he thought himself in two, thought of how Ground’s word SLEEP was like a line along a middle, and tried to see if the Dim Echo was on one side. The more he stretched the more he straddled, but straddling he was not on two sides of the lean over which he persisted in being, he was on many. When he was stretched too far, he recalled legs. And when he did, he dropped and was burned at a distance by that deep gland that once had furled and unfurled its fire. The gland was below the bodies or islands. But seemed to enrich and power them by filling the spaces up between them. Yet he was not seeing the power of the now flameless gland, for reaching at him into his straddling fall it caught him in an underfork of himself exposed. Then his stretch collapsed back into itself and with it distance it had leaned to cross. But as it did so, and also thought to do the opposite and open and stretch again, he knew that he had brought the gland to him.

By demanding time.

And he knew that the cool wet woman rising along his Sun-warm legs was some of the time-off though she didn’t know that what she found on him was more than California Sun. For the bright glint off there in the dune was more than one; it was two. And each lens of the dune watcher’s dark glasses reflected more than Sun and the woman and Imp Plus as he was: they reflected as well the large green project room and the shadow cast after Imp Plus that last weekend in order not to give him what he wanted — time alone.

They had not trusted him.

To be outside.

The pain that was not the split and not just the axis of distance offered itself again.

Imp Plus stretched to meet across the void.

Like trust, it was a void he resisted but brought into being.

Along its new edges the arc-flows rolled. He could not follow them yet to where they began but must see that the void came into being just because he went against it. Knowing this, he did not drop, this time.

Again, the gland below fired some underpart of him.

Which underpart? In reply, he remembered a wonderful wanting cup of himself. It had once been a midpoint — now no more mid than point. But wanting still.

To do something.

Which proved to be: first think what it had once wanted and done at the same time when it had been a midbed of the body.

The body the woman had climbed in the Sun. Bringing all the salt out of the sea with her. To pause on that midpart of him for a time: a time that like this night divided and divided into its own measure of her: of her repose. Hence, a time so set off from the glint of the dune watcher that, seeing down through the optic crossing and through the lower islands named by the Dim Echo and now, behind the radiant gland whose force fired him, to a backward-slanting seam along which a field of cells shone yellow-soaked as if due to something else, Imp Plus felt her repose acting upon him and inclined to think he projected that yellow with his sight and inclined to find his sight solely a reflection of the gland’s warm power.

But thought so because of the woman. Because what she gave — the time she gave — that threw the project’s glinting dune shadow light-years away — had made him think his desire all hers.

Which was not so. For, like the Sun got by her from his body, the desire which the dune glasses in a flash fixed in him came from far behind those glasses. It came from a bolt probed into being in the midbed of his body in the large green room where he had asked for time off. Probed into being by that word recreation — a plan for the man they did not trust.

Where was Cap Com?

Yet the word recreation that came from the Acrid Voice only reflected from the Good Voice. Though further back it was the Acrid Voice: saying, “You don’t want to go on forever.”

Said with an ill will.

While the Good Voice, always so sure, always stuck to the point: Overtime day in day out, to catch and milk the Sun.

That was the project. Capture.

In the dark cycle Imp Plus recalled the force of the Sun and what he had known before launch.

There was more of him now than at launch: more of him to do the remembering: yet did he now remember less?

But in other words.

The project was the Sun. Here was what he had been looking for when Ground had broken in: he’d been looking for where all these arcs of busy lumen wheeled from.

Ground spoke. Ground spoke. Imp Plus was believed to be in part awake. Imp Plus was asked if in the absence of a carbon-reaction gauge Imp Plus could feel a high coming from the algae conduits, for there was an outside chance nitrogen from the plants was getting into Imp Plus’s system raw so Imp Plus would be getting what water divers called rapture of the depths.

Imp Plus did not answer and felt no motion in the Dim Echo to do so.

Ground asked if Imp Plus was not answering in order to conserve power; Ground said waking and deep sleep were not possible at the same time, yet Ground read rapid low-voltage waves, which were waking, at the same time that it read volleys of high-voltage spikes and R.E.M. equivalents, which meant deep sleep; and Ground, in strange, patient detail, pointed out that the accumulator storing electrical energy from the cells in the solar arrays continued at maximum: but this could not happen, Ground said.

Imp Plus did not answer.

ARE YOU RECEIVING US IMP PLUS? IF YOU ARE RECEIVING US YOU MUST BE USING UP POWER.

In the dark, Imp Plus saw the paddles turning the wind, turning the wind into force. That was it.

But no, there was a difference: between what he saw when he looked at the arc-parts cycling the lights of the brain’s land and what he saw when he saw the great grid panels milling the wind outside in the black land of space. For there was no wind. There was no air where the panels milled the solar wind.

And they were not here, though they were of Imp Plus.

They were not inside the brain. But they were not inside the capsule, whose bulkheads were outside the brain or what he had thought the brain. The panels receiving the solar wind, which was no wind but a rain of rays, were of the capsule, but not in it, and he only thought he was seeing them.

Ground was outside the capsule, but it made sounds Imp Plus received inside. That was it. The oblong cells on the panels caught Ground and got Ground from outside inside. The oblong cells on the panels might not be the cells of Imp Plus, but they were part of what he was part of.

The cells were of the capsule but outside.

The oblong cells he saw, the grids of cells, the panels of grids of cells, he recalled pictures or other models of other craft maybe not IMP with windmill paddles that bore the panels of grids of cells; but did he really see? He heard them in the mixed voices Acrid, Good, and other.

He did not really see the cells because they were outside and he was always inside. Though on Earth he had been outside them once, and there were panels of cells but no windmill, the windmill was in his head, and a project voice not Acrid and not Good had been speaking into the head Imp Plus did not now have. The cells received the Sun and gave the capsule power to receive the Ground.

But now it was night — a night of nights dividing itself yet turning toward an end. There was no Sun outside, except very far outside: around a curve like the axis of distance, but greater: for this curve moved.

Which meant, he saw, that what Sun there was from the solar cells was saved from when there had been Sun. Saved as power.

With rapture, the Good Voice had said, “The Sun hits the arrays; it can’t get away. We got it.”

But was this trapped Sun the same as the Sun’s hand Imp Plus had found inside himself?

The Acrid Voice mingled more words, but said what Imp Plus was now able only to see: a rain of airless wind struck light through a mesh scraped from Earth’s skin; each drop of light punched a jot out of what the light hit, then each jot went for a hole but was made to go into a waiting stem. He thought himself divided between what he saw and what he had once only thought. He saw some jots skid off into space like a spacecraft whose bad angle re-entering is not bad enough to burn it up in the Earth’s atmosphere. He saw light turned into grains moving. But turned also into light.

Yes: light turned into light. It was not what anyone Acrid or Good had said happened, and so Imp Plus radiated waves of doubt that came along the axis of distance. But radiated them from himself, through and to himself. He saw that this light whether tapped for use or stopped was turned to just motion: but doubt or not, the light hitting the panels of gridded cells had turned to light. Imp Plus went across the field of what he thought was his brain wanting some sight that what he’d seen was true. Not sight of light so much as a thing about the light. But every turn along which he inclined to find support for what he’d thought, gapped into sudden holes: he might chase over an inner eyelid-skin of limit for what he knew was there, only to get fresh absence; or he leaned steeply into each subordinate void of hole to find it then gone and gone in such a speed of light he saw instead he thought a network lattice quite without speed. Or beyond speed, so the lattice bent always away from limit. Bent back constantly to what he might have thought to be himself, had not this deep substance been already him everywhere in all its grids and jots. His thought leaned after itself but was evaded. Not like the Sun’s many-fingered hand withdrawing, for what it left it left, and these lumens — fall, flow, pass as they must — still stayed put. What escaped was motion of himself. So the very brain, if it still was the brain, slid its canal beds — or, if he could have fixed himself at one point, seemed to slide and distribute its canal beds — and radiant layers of spark-smeared glue field and amber inclination away from themselves and toward some aim their nearing presence might have sent ahead.

He was standing at one point.

And he did not chase why light turned into light.

For it came to Imp Plus that support was so close at hand it was nowhere else, and he had been here before; or had seen these jots or particles punched out of cells by drops of light because he had seen missing from his own cells parts or particles which when their resulting absences overtook them looked identical to these particles or jots though these had been punched out by Sun drops and those others in himself expelled by radiance Ground could not understand was everywhere here and so had no need to be hunted down.

He could not hold the tan woman. She faded back into the dune watcher’s glancing glasses, but also into whole tan terrains of Earth implanted with fields of reflectors dishing up the Sun. More and more reflectors subtracting terrain, so that the future held fewer and fewer persons.

Subsisting.

But the fields of reflectors with their competing black bodies caught the Sun so slowly the Good Voice came between these fields with the project.

The last Apollos had long left the beaches of the Moon.

Where to go?

Man the Moon.

Over my dead body, said the Good Voice.

The Acrid Voice coughed and coughed, but wanted nothing of the kind.

The Sun was the thing, the Good Voice was always saying.

A beautiful living bomb of a cow, the Good Voice and the Acrid Voice said when Imp Plus drew their words together. Milk it, said one. Feed it, said the other; and acrid laughter joined ill will, and Imp Plus saw the ill will was not against him.

Saw then?

Saw now.

But if they didn’t milk it, said the Good Voice, where was the milk going to come from? The fields? The shining sands? Ovals chalked on greenboards by minds?

Imp Plus did not know mind. But now in the long night whose length held other nights spent in space with the Dim Echo, he knew the Acrid Voice’s answer: Give the Sun an outside chance.

Man the Sun, said the Good Voice.

No, coughed the Acrid Voice, just let the Sun show us.

Let it support us, said the Good Voice. Fix nitrogen in the beds, crash solar wind into it, get carbon in an energy-rich reactive state.

Let the Sun, said the Acrid Voice, dream up a life-support system.

Manned missions are over, said the Good Voice.

But over what? thought Imp Plus now, wanting to see: what he now at once then did see: a round of micropumps that had become one run conduct themselves toward wherever the heart was that pumped his clear life-humor.

Over what? came his own answer — and the failed run retracted into the rounds and rounds of tiny pumps he had thought to find the start of.

Over what?

For what had Imp Plus been, at the last, but an ill body over an ill will? Divided then, but into what? Divided into orbits.

He got ahead of himself but was afraid he had stopped. And the thought of light that he had leaned into unknown inclinations to chase now spun or spread all ways away from him, except that he saw that he was it. He got the idea that there was less spin per thought now, but the idea did not change what he looked at.

What was Imp Plus to have done out among these orbits?

Read readings Earth read too. Get some Sun. Be weightless. Subsist. Travel light. He picked what to see and he saw large and small, but he could not have less than this power, and what use was it?

The woman had said “Travel light,” but that wasn’t Operation TL. Her wants were not of Operation TL.

Were his?

He was expected only to react. Like the algae.

But not like the algae, for the algae had no Concentration Loop to speak through.

It is all for you, the Good Voice said.

There were other tests in the dark capsule. What was the hemisphere adrift?

Imp Plus thought how to use the Concentration Loop and thought that he might not know how any more.

Earth’s transmissions had gone away.

And here, there was less motion per thought; let Earth come round the other side when it was ready.

All for you, the Good Voice said.

But all what?

Look, said the Acrid Voice in the other room, it’s the algae and the other test beds — that’s what it is — and they don’t need you, you need them. You could turn green like a broccoli.

Like a hand of spinach. More likely, spun into some substance, some unmanned substance.

The Concentration Loop to which the Acrid Voice had introduced Imp Plus should become second nature; but what it was for was Earth: to get Imp Plus’s reactions by frequency impulse back to Earth.

That’s all you get out of it, pure and simple, a voice had said, and Imp Plus had reacted against the smile that had come with the voice because he could not bear it. He had foreseen himself alone. That was it.

There in the smaller green room and the capsule-to-come, he had foreseen himself alone. For the voice that said, “That’s all you get out of it,” was the Acrid Voice that later had said, “You can’t go on forever,” and Imp Plus saw only now orbiting the night that he had turned toward the door leading to the large green room where the Good Voice made plans — but Imp Plus had not gone to that door. And Imp Plus had known something besides the words “I’m ill” coughed back at the Acrid Voice. He’d known that the Acrid Voice was more alone than the Good, and had made himself so.

And this had made Imp Plus more mad than had the Acrid Voice’s parting remark: which was that Imp Plus might find a way to use the Concentration Loop to talk to himself.

The desire to show them grew in Imp Plus like the drift of substance which he saw now was just what he desired to show. In the outlying membranes the layers of light were lower but had spread. He wanted to say what he thought had been happening through the night. But he might not see this till he tried to say it. He wanted to have what the Dim Echo had.

He would tell better where the Dim Echo was when the Dim Echo stopped sleeping. He thought when the time came Ground would draw the word SLEEP back, for Imp Plus had once felt it as a line along a middle and saw he had not stopped feeling this.

But did not want to do things by halves.

And did not see halves when he looked. Yet did not see the Dim Echo at all. Yet through another night saw that once there had been no Dim Echo.

The night with the woman by the Mexican fire.

Not the woman at the California sea.

The pale one on the night plateau.

Slept with her. He had said SLEEP. What he had meant, he could ask the Dim Echo, but the Dim Echo had not been there around the fire and it was Imp Plus who had said to the woman when they had come back out of the dark and he sat warming a foot that hurt and taking something painful away from the foot until the woman wanted to do it, and it was not fingers she took away from the foot because the fingers were in what he was telling her, the fingers had been his own but meshed and tangled by the child who was not there in the Mexican night with them and who made him try to move the finger she pointed to and he moved the wrong one — and after telling the pale woman this, he had said words that made her laugh and she said he made her feel like a new widow ready to start over again. The words he had said were “Sleep with me.”

But he could not remember what this had meant, if it had meant SLEEP.

He had been very close to her on the ground by the colors of the fire, and his yellow shoes were near her dark hair. There were shifts of substance.

The lumens of the glucose arcs had spread through the night and would have looked lower like the levels of light along the outlying membranes but, more than lower, they were spread. But then Imp Plus understood.

His lights could be lower now because they were being answered.

But the transmission everywhere was not on a frequency. It was too slow or too fast to speed. It came from more than just its own places, and it was first another darkness but it was more a kind of change, and it was not something that Imp Plus himself did, but it visited and stayed with the substance of what had been done, and divided this not into two but into all the mornings Imp Plus had known.

It was the Sun, and the first far thought of the Sun’s breathing.

The Sun was coming back.

And Imp Plus was coming back to the Sun.

This was his deed? He would show the Acrid Voice.

The deep gland flamed out at his sight, and along the seam that slanted down behind the gland the yellow-soaked field of cells had faded. And behind it and deep below the gland brief sections of stripe showed through the crevice which one rung of his will had once passed over. And seeing through the crevice to these sections of stripe — they were tubes — he understood that the tubes were not him but went from him; and were the same tubing he’d seen going into the algae; understood that if the algae and anabaena and other test beds had no Concentration Loop to speak through, they did have loops to Imp Plus.

He could watch through the crevice and yet, like a breathing from all sides, feel waves of substance go through him, which was also the recollection of what had gone on in the night.

When he looked off to the window that he recalled could think for itself and where no grid had been printed for no man would be here to use it to map position, Imp Plus could hardly say what he saw in what he had once seen as the outside body growing from a thing he had thought his brain.

He wanted to say.

But he could not speak to Ground, for what would Ground do? And he had to get something from the Dim Echo and wasn’t about to join the Dim Echo in sleep to get whatever he found he wanted.

Dawn deepened the tube loops. A thing was there which, going far back to the woman in the night plateau or his madness and towering, twisting headache at the Acrid Voice’s parting words, was a wonderful thing: it was that the currents in the tubes moved two ways. They fed from the test beds to him. And they moved out also from him.

And knowing he was all but ready to face the new growth that was now to be seen after this night that sometimes seemed to hold many nights, he was an inclined field of racing independent parts or gaps wanting to tell the Acrid Voice that Sun without doubt came also from himself, from Imp Plus — wanting so much that he called back from the smaller green room words to the effect that he might find a way to use the Concentration Loop to talk to himself: but the words had not been said by the Acrid Voice; they had been said by Imp Plus, and then the Acrid Voice softly added, “You will,” just as less than a year later he would softly reflect the Good Voice’s word recreation.

The Good Voice’s permission had probed the midbed of Imp Plus’s known body, but mainly through the dune-watcher-to-come with his dark glasses reflecting where one known Imp Plus met one known woman with skin that would never be his but that if he wanted with enough force he could have.

He felt knowns waking in him. Known solar panels over a known project’s known power needs.

But known divided by known gave unforeknown increase.

Earth was calling, but Imp Plus felt for the fingers of the Sun which were his own fingers too. But not his old ones, the ones that came together out of space to join to make a parchment shine of crisscross called the palm of his hand.

New fingers of Sun and himself. Tracts of unknown begun from the widowing of a brain.

Or what came to him as ill body over ill will, known over known he had thought, but not so: for the ill will was not just in how the Solar Energy Project Operation Travel Light had used him out of the goodness of its voice — the ill will had been his own as well. Desire that all that smoke fall back into the Acrid Voice and choke it, and only because the Acrid Voice did not smile upon him like the Good Voice, for whom Imp Plus must have had another and unknown fire of hate.

Desire had met the Sun. The arcs of lumen and glucose lumen wheeled not from Imp Plus and not from the Sun, but from their mingling that was deeper than touch.

Near the bulkhead the dislodged hemisphere stood adrift. When he had seen its segment glimmer in the dark night of the capsule he had recalled a picture of the Earth, and he thought what he saw he hadn’t thought before: that the hemisphere did not heed him.

Earth could go on calling forever.

Earth had woken the Dim Echo.

What Imp Plus saw now in the light of dawn was more than he had seen, and in a spasm at the unfolding premotor cleft he was glad Earth did not know.

Imp Plus saw himself.