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.