“You are entering on a new life,” the Good Voice had said pointing to a green wall with white fissures drawn on it that spread now into particles of seashell, which Imp Plus could not have known had not the Dim Echo known what the seashells were made of — but which Imp Plus could not himself have seen, he felt, like the other new things he had sensed or seen down in the folds and tracts without a thing that was happening to him. Happening where? In the corners of all his eyes? the loosening and tightening strands?
And whether by glue or its dissolving, the green rooms recalled became more. He remembered hearing the Acrid Voice say, “No telling what the Sun will do up there, no telling; so don’t listen to all they tell you next door.” Remembered hearing this but thinking that far off in another place on Earth the blind news vendor might have something; for he said to Imp Plus, “I could have been a vegetable but I took hold; my liver’s good; I made up for what I lost; I think I see shadows sometimes, know what I mean; but what it is, it’s all over, that’s what I feel and so that’s what I decided.”
The green chlorella and the blue-green anabaena had not been in the fold, he had only thought them there. They were out here. Yet he saw the folds there, the one he had passed in, borne by her aqueous humor that had become his, and the one he had passed out. And in between the folds, Imp Plus saw where, as the Dim Echo had said or if not should have said, each optic nerve had been cut, and each hole at the head of the tract was that disc of nothing, the blind spot. The glue drew him to her. He had said he had no blind spot, and she had laughed but like the Acrid Voice, and then she had not laughed, but then had done a thing to him that he then could not take hold of in his remembering.
But now he had no blind spot, no question.
Because he had no socket for an eye to be in to have a retina. No blind spot to monitor therefore.
He had not enough to do. Was that it? So Ground had given him these small things to see. But some were not here in orbit. They were on Earth.
Ground had been saying, REPEAT COME IN IMP PLUS. COME IN COME IN.
The transmission cut across a length Imp Plus now saw was his. And from a point on this length the Dim Echo rose like a need for nourishment: READ YOU, GROUND.
CAP COM TO IMP PLUS. WE WERE ABOUT TO SEND A REPAIRMAN.
Imp Plus could feel the Dim Echo like a held breath that is spread, dispersed, and absorbed, but never let out. The Dim Voice said, IMP PLUS TO GROUND. ACTIVITY IN OPTIC TRACT. (But then Imp Plus found he had withheld the Dim Echo’s next words, which were Discoloration at optic chiasma.)
That was the crossing where the pale olive of the fibers had faded to no color; the Dim Echo had stored the word chiasma, and Imp Plus had prepared to remember optic chiasma, where the eye nerves cross.
He tried to think why, but what he saw was that the Dim Echo was of him while also between him and Ground. What crosses crosses from one side to the other. So there were sides.
IMP PLUS YOU ARE IN ERROR, Ground was saying to the Dim Echo. NO MONITOR IN OPTIC TRACT. MAYBE YOU MEAN ALGAE READINGS OR IS IT DILATOMETER, IMP PLUS?
Imp Plus stretched to see the shadows on the capsule walls move larger.
Ground said: IMP PLUS WE WANT TO GO BACK WHERE WE WERE WHEN YOU REPORTED LOBE SOURCES OF PLEASURE AND OTHER REACTIONS HARD TO TELL APART. WHAT HAPPENED BETWEEN THEN AND NOW IMP PLUS? LONG TIME NO HEAR.
Imp Plus stretched. The pain itself stretched, and this was a decay like breath breathed in but never out. But could he be reaching and stretching to see the shadows? The shadows happened at the same time as he stretched.
Ground said where and when together. Thirst got rusty. The decay cracked. It was more and much more than a reaction other than pleasure. Imp Plus saw the shadows move a little larger, a very little that was as small as what he had seen when he had been down through the folds where Ground had now said on the contrary no monitor was.
IMP PLUS WE READ OTHER THAN BUT AFTER THAT WE DO NOT READ. SAY AGAIN.
The shadows grew larger but also nearer. This shadow growth was not after he stretched, and not before. When was it?
Ground said where and when together. They did not belong together. The shadows happened at the same time as the stretching burning pain, but not in the same place. The larger shadows were of the larger pain. The pain did not get exactly worse; it was larger, it held more. The Acrid Voice and the blind news vendor with years of bad teeth were both on Earth but not together. Why had Imp Plus not thought of that? The answer was, he had; but he had stopped thinking of it.
When?
Pain did not give up the answer. The vendor sold today’s papers with yesterday’s news. The pain was other than the stretching, burning pain that went on crackling. The blind man said, “I could have been a vegetable, a head of cabbage rotting on the ground living off my disability.” He grinned wet like an animal awake and bit then into some nourishment he had manipulated from behind the layers of papers, and maybe he didn’t mind his gapped teeth brown, yellow, black, blue, gray, green, hard enamel cream, because he could not see them. This was at an earlier time that was a very different time from when the Acrid Voice had drawn figures on a framed green wall of slate that told what did, would, but also could, go on in the algae beds in orbit. For if there would be no bent knees, no hungry neck, and no perspiring pancreas to monitor, there were still chlorella and other reactions; and Maybe, said the Acrid Voice — coughing so hard it caved out and groaned in—maybe you’ll turn green.
Imp Plus felt the terrible stretch was now between the blind bad teeth and the Acrid Voice, but was glad.
What was it he felt in between? The absence of what the Acrid Voice had said Imp Plus would not have left when those mechanics finished with him: spleen, liver, gland, heart.
What were they?
Ever seen, then or now?
Never, maybe. Yet then perhaps never any more than he had ever stopped monitoring them, there or not. But they didn’t seem ever to have been his own. He had not seen much even of his bones.
On Earth he had thought of stalks. His insides caved out, they cracked like bone strands. He saw her laugh and he had to want the pain if he wanted to see. He came so close to her laugh it became absorbed in her face which he lost; and in the cracking of new very small parts he found what had come between her two sets of words, and at first it was a like sound and a word and the word was kiss but then a wordless gap where flesh and even bone met and moved like making words. The association took him unforeseen. As if he were an object astounded by brightness.
“No telling what the Sun will do up there,” the Good or not-Acrid Voice had said. “It may be up to you.”
But at a later time and in the smaller green room on Earth, “No telling what the Sun will do up there” were words said by the Acrid Voice, “don’t listen to all they say next door.” So now, unforeseen, the ill will that almost a year before the operational launch Imp Plus had smelt in the Acrid Voice’s smoke winding into the folds of Imp Plus’s sinuses so that he did not wait for the Acrid Voice to answer his “Say that again” but instead had burst out, “I’m ill”—the ill will by which yes Imp Plus had known his ill body was being divided as if in one of those chalk figures on the green slate, this ill will instead seemed aimed at the next room and the Good Voice; and as in the moment here when he’d said, “I’m ill,” Imp Plus felt drawn into some reach of his own not the Acrid Voice’s ill will through a mutual torque.