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 telclass="underline" 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 finaclass="underline" 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.