The brown woman who had brought the large sliver to his arm had first come and taken his pulse. Pounding pain was what he’d had, but she had taken his pulse and gone away.
What she’d brought back was not his pulse, it was the sliver, the large one that went into his arm at the bend.
But where was his pulse? He had asked the brown nurse for it. He recalled her, and recalled nurse.
And now in orbit the stranded optic fibers had re-aimed themselves by pulsing sideways out through the tract wall making the code map of where they were going as they went. Imp Plus wondered if this was Earth giving back his pulse. And there was his sight outside the brain. It shifted between fine haze and the single clarity of contours drawn on a blackboard that was green. But the point was that it shifted by pulsing. The pulse came from a place.
Imp Plus looked for the waves folding into the slivers. But he saw only the slivers. Imp Plus thought to answer Ground but did not open his Concentration Loop to the gauge in the agreed way, and said only: GLUCOSE GOOD. GLUCOSE BEAUTIFUL.
Imp Plus wondered if he knew how to activate that Concentration Loop to the gauge any more. The Dim Echo knew, but Imp Plus had let the Dim Echo go.
Imp Plus found, inside the lantern of the brain, hairs like sea threads that beat together. But together as separate sets. That is, one set beat slowly, the next fast, another uneasily yet in its own back-and-forth flow. So Imp Plus singled the Earth line and this was harder now than concentrating to the glucose gauge line, but then he stopped wanting to report the hairs to Ground. He had seen the hairs less long but noticed them only now in the lower light when they were not growing. He let the Earth line go, though Ground might answer his good and his beautiful. He wanted to look. But when he did, the beatings divided and divided and divided into a feeling that was greater than what Ground and the Dim Echo could count, and greater than darkness.
When he became aware all at once of many sets of hairs each steady in its own slow, fast, even or unvaryingly uneven beat, there turned out to be more. He went from an end to another end of his sense so some sets made a line. Then he moved back a rank or up a rank. When the rungs seemed parallel to each other, the angles began to turn. So the ladder became a round ladder. But the roundness veered somewhere and was more a net. The net spread its sets or knots of tiny hairs so that as he looked, this motion was a run of space curved along an ever reopening chance of gradients.
Which, by looking to see more, he multiplied.
He looked for where the pulse of many pulses came from.
Below — as if far below — the dart was not to be seen where its blue discharge had accompanied the Dim Echo’s last report (Hypothalamus active).
Below that was the gland of flame from which he kept his distance furled. The flame was now less furled yet far less bright. But with a light not only lower but more a different light.
The fields of swaying beating tufts of sea hairs went all over. But Imp Plus did not.
He did not look outside for the limbs and the slivers. Did not check algae and the window that had no reticle on it to measure position. Did not see if he could now work the lines to the gauges. Or to Earth.
He made himself into a grip. He was on the soft gray and the glue-white.
Once not long ago he had gone down one side and up out the other. But now he reached fore and aft. The heart that pulsed the pulses was, he thought, the brain. That must be it.
He alone knew. Then he would tell Ground. To see what Ground would say. Yet he wanted not to tell Ground.
The fields of many-waving tufts touched Imp Plus as he opened his grip along a fore-and-aft axis. He did not know where on him these sea hairs touched him, that were part of him. The soft gray and the glue-white still held amber lumens of Sun. These lumens were not packets now. They were one suction everywhere. The hand of the Sun was withdrawing, but it left what its light had become in the store of the brain.
His grip took the lead of his own sight. He did not know what led what, though he was in on it. And now the undulant fields of tufted net-space that had grown by discovery from ladderwork that was straight, then round, then everywhere, now singled out at each end of the curved calipers of his grip into a plow like cross-rung of force.
Yes. A rung, a bar. But a space. A short space alive. Between poles more live than the separated bulbs of an electric eye. Poles fed by a charge of process turning each constantly from positive or negative to both.
Rung or bar impaled on each fork of will plowed silently down and in. Rung, bar, or detached radius.
While way below him, below a fibrous head of membrane nibbling a long gap, below also a point of pink ventricle shimmering between two outer ventricles which now with the ebbing of the Sun seemed distinct, separate, equal shapes of upright fish or ripe-tailed dolphins facing to dance — and below and in front of the once discolored, now shadowed crossing of the eye tracts was the unfurling and more banked gland of flame which still warmed into brown, maroon, and amber boundaries four bodies which were one and were where the blue dart had once brightly cut.
At that point of the blue dart’s pain the Dim Echo had said some part was active. If those bodies or islands down above the flame were where the Dim Echo had meant, the word for the part did not matter. Round the straight line of the Dim Echo’s data Imp Plus could spin a spiral even if he could not laugh. The California woman’s hand had run a spiral ladder up his spine. Later she brought the small brown of her nipples up to him to turn into one whole face then the loin of its open mouth then the multiplied nipplets of her velvet tongue: and all brought with them that desire that dissolved into its own unknown the fear of what was to come: the divided operating table that bent up from table to chair and back to table at the end, and earlier the brown-faced nurse slipping a hypo in the bend of his arm as if to take out of him what it was that made him not go with everything else.
He had many bends — he saw them — but no arm. And if the part the Dim Echo had named was what the blue dart had been in, these bodies down above the gland of flame were not one part but four. And clusters at that. For the time being.
From these families and from all the turning cavities and colored motions Imp Plus saw, the Sun’s ray was retiring. Imp Plus recalled that the blond and ash-red, green-gilded or silvered yellow did not belong to the planes and chambers, spindles, gaps, sacs, drops, and pored skins that held them like a million bloods of the Sun. But some of the sea hairs got thick, then narrowed in a relay other than their swaying, and thickened into a lenslike transparency as if pumping the color elsewhere only to contract into color again. And the color here or down the planes or swelling the drops might show orange or blue-green from a point beneath, but then be chalky brown or singed pink from higher off — say, ten o’clock. Ten o’clock came to him. A word for a place to see from. Did the colors belong to all these parts? The parts and their colonies, whose color varied with where they were seen from, knew how to hold their color or if not their color their ties to it and to the Sun’s running airs.
But to Imp Plus?
His grip came into being. It was what he wanted. Fore and aft. Heading out, down, in. Leading the way the fore and after rungs arced out and away over hills made of the same twigs, spines, and feelers as before, and the same glue cells tonguing onto stems as before, when Imp Plus moved through the sides of the brain.