“You can go just so far with glucose levels,” Imp Plus thought, and Ground came back, NEGATIVE IMP PLUS NEGATIVE. GLUCOSE LEVELS HIGH AND YOU’LL GO FAR. HOW DO THEY READ UP THERE, IMP PLUS?
The Dim Echo read glucose back to Ground: Imp Plus let it happen. Glucose was not just high. It was so high that Ground asked for another reading. Glucose seemed so much the reverse of low that maybe the gauge print-out was in error.
Imp Plus let the Dim Echo go and when it was gone felt like a touch what this Dim Echo was to him.
Imp Plus was seeing more of the green thing. Seeing more than that it had eyes. And he had been seeing these turns of shape in the green thing without having to name them as you name the ocean that contains a spacecraft’s recovery area. Imp Plus remembered having prepared to remember that eyes came from a need for nourishment. But he had not prepared to remember the cell’s power plants, so called by the Acrid Voice which added, “Mitochondria to you,” as mitochondria would be more clear to Imp Plus than power plants. And Imp Plus had not prepared to remember, yet now couldn’t help remembering, the Go-Between of the High-Energy Bond-World, words of the Acrid Voice, which added, “ATP to you,” as if Imp Plus would know.
In these reversals the Acrid Voice’s ill will had grown like an elastic breath of protective coating Imp Plus couldn’t get through. The ill will persisted like the shape of his blood after being let into a clear sac. Imp Plus found many words he knew.
“Better bone up,” the Acrid Voice had said.
But Imp Plus had had to know a lot for Operation TL, and he had prepared so much else that those reversals could no more command him than what the Acrid Voice had said to the Good Voice in the larger green room at the end of things. The Good Voice had told of the semiautomatic nature of Contingency Camouflage, how it defended against an alien monitor. The Good Voice had added, with that signal concern kept for Imp Plus, that Imp Plus of course would have more than enough to monitor without being responsible for Contingency Camouflage as well.
The Acrid Voice said, “After those mechanics get through with him, what will he have left to monitor?”
No hands, no elbows, no instep, no neck, no tail, no spleen, sweat, pancreas, nor amid the cells of the pancreas those ductless insulin-creating Islets of Langerhans. And would there be no blind spot where retina gives optic nerve entry or exit or a living chance?
What then would Imp Plus do?
Monitor an echo. An echo that went on communicating knowns by knowns. For here again was the Dim Echo reporting synchronized cultures not now synchronized, reading down to Ground figures to match Ground’s. Readings for nitrogen reaction in the nutrient test and for the lively swing of glucose levels. Dilatometer — he knew dilate—readings for liquid expansion. Galvanometer readings for activity in chlorella populations and in the cortical surface.
Ground said to say again how low glucose had gone before rising to a new but short-lived high. Ground said to check chlorella cultures again, they should still be synchronized. Ground said, SAY AGAIN PLEASE TRANSMISSION TOO FAST TOO DIM HARD TO TELL WHICH, and the dim but near Dim Echo went on so with the glucose ups and downs that the Dim Echo did not hear Ground’s request to go slower.
But when Imp Plus heard Ground now report electrical activity in prefrontal areas 9 and 12, then come between its own areas to ask if in the prefrontal lobe the Dim Echo (here called IMP PLUS) was giving back some of the kicks it had been getting from Ground in the temporal lobe — and by the way, said Ground, what pleasure did he feel in 9 and 12 right now? — Imp Plus did not have to hear out the Dim Echo’s unfolding reply about like patterns of activity surfacing—50 % pleasure, 50 % not — lobe-source sensors now hard to tell apart.
For Imp Plus found in all the folds whose fibers gripped each lens of those eyes he had held with his own lost eyes a sweet humor of sugar and blood which unfolding flowed over him.
It was a fluid ground laid down upon furrows, fissures, ridges, rolls.
It flowed over Imp Plus’s body, except he had no body now. Flowed onto folds that were his as surely as one of them now parted to make him glimpse what he had not known he wanted to see.
And this thing he saw was hers. Or must be hers, because the nourishing smell was that smell from her eyes. That slow serum mulled of sweet color and grains or globes of infant meal.
But then the smell faded as if turned down by an alien pulse at a distance. Yet the smell went like a trace that will come back. And what Imp Plus saw was a fine tangle of light veined against a fine darkness. Veins fixed as a map but everywhere winking.
This too was fading, but by increase: that is, blurring brighter and brighter. Like the light Imp Plus had wished for during a dark cycle where there was no good Sun. The bright blur was from the tangle of light and was one of the veins and he was closing fast on it like one of the smaller and smaller pieces his lost body had divided into as if in order to privately weigh itself.
Imp Plus went in. He passed through the brightness. And the Dim Echo was heard to have long finished responding that these nerves in the iris of that eye stood out upon their dark membrane because of the transmitter substance noradrenalin fluorescing in the neurons.
But the dark into which Imp Plus went through the vein of bright blur could not be her dark. True, the field of aqueous humor had been hers. For it came from folds where fibers guyed the lenses of her eyes. It flowed and singled out and filled and opened the new fold among the fissures and ridges. But like the fissures and ridges and cols and rolls that were his, this new fold was also his. It was part of all that the serum of sweet particles had spread its field upon.
Which was body. And was his. Yet not his body. Most of which was gone. And so could not react.
The smell of her eyes at the seashore was gone now too and gone the trace net of iris nerve light through which Imp Plus had passed into a dark he now heard caving toward him.
A dark which was his, he knew.
Because in what was his.
Which was one fold of many folds, many cols, clefts, fissures.
The dark was his because it was breaking. It caved and broke into parts he found he had wanted. But here was a breakage so great his cells for hearing it broke too; and his cells for seeing it were eyes jammed into sockets till the sacs split and aqueous humor spilled; so the eyes would stay sunk, which was what happened in a thing he now knew he had prepared not to remember but remembered just the same though not the word for it. It was like a thing he had been feeling that was here too. It he could not get the word for either. He knew only that it asked. Beyond this thing he had been feeling, he found out what was in turn beyond the words for what he did find. The cells for hearing and seeing the breaking were other than the breaking itself. The breakage was as soft as glue. A gluey unit lapsing into many units of sponge which then became many, many more and then became glue units, again. But ten to one it was glue. Ten glue to one gray. But the glue should be white, and this was darker. And there was a deep crackling unheard as if forestalled.
He wanted the word for the thing he’d been feeling: the word that was more a question. He wanted to stop, please. But now found that upon the dark he himself could place and place again what had faded or been turned off: the sweet smell and the nerves full of light. So there they were again, recalled here. He thought it was a thing he could do, and without words. Which was not the other thing that he’d felt and that was a word that was more a question.
But now from the center out the breaking dark was breaking up.
Into more and more corners, but reversed to point in at the growing center from which all the corners slid away like a star of darkness turned outside in, in angles. And the parting dark took away with it the iris nerve nets he had made reappear, and took away the sweet smell of her eyes at the shore.