He was standing at one point.
And he did not chase why light turned into light.
For it came to Imp Plus that support was so close at hand it was nowhere else, and he had been here before; or had seen these jots or particles punched out of cells by drops of light because he had seen missing from his own cells parts or particles which when their resulting absences overtook them looked identical to these particles or jots though these had been punched out by Sun drops and those others in himself expelled by radiance Ground could not understand was everywhere here and so had no need to be hunted down.
He could not hold the tan woman. She faded back into the dune watcher’s glancing glasses, but also into whole tan terrains of Earth implanted with fields of reflectors dishing up the Sun. More and more reflectors subtracting terrain, so that the future held fewer and fewer persons.
Subsisting.
But the fields of reflectors with their competing black bodies caught the Sun so slowly the Good Voice came between these fields with the project.
The last Apollos had long left the beaches of the Moon.
Where to go?
Man the Moon.
Over my dead body, said the Good Voice.
The Acrid Voice coughed and coughed, but wanted nothing of the kind.
The Sun was the thing, the Good Voice was always saying.
A beautiful living bomb of a cow, the Good Voice and the Acrid Voice said when Imp Plus drew their words together. Milk it, said one. Feed it, said the other; and acrid laughter joined ill will, and Imp Plus saw the ill will was not against him.
Saw then?
Saw now.
But if they didn’t milk it, said the Good Voice, where was the milk going to come from? The fields? The shining sands? Ovals chalked on greenboards by minds?
Imp Plus did not know mind. But now in the long night whose length held other nights spent in space with the Dim Echo, he knew the Acrid Voice’s answer: Give the Sun an outside chance.
Man the Sun, said the Good Voice.
No, coughed the Acrid Voice, just let the Sun show us.
Let it support us, said the Good Voice. Fix nitrogen in the beds, crash solar wind into it, get carbon in an energy-rich reactive state.
Let the Sun, said the Acrid Voice, dream up a life-support system.
Manned missions are over, said the Good Voice.
But over what? thought Imp Plus now, wanting to see: what he now at once then did see: a round of micropumps that had become one run conduct themselves toward wherever the heart was that pumped his clear life-humor.
Over what? came his own answer — and the failed run retracted into the rounds and rounds of tiny pumps he had thought to find the start of.
Over what?
For what had Imp Plus been, at the last, but an ill body over an ill will? Divided then, but into what? Divided into orbits.
He got ahead of himself but was afraid he had stopped. And the thought of light that he had leaned into unknown inclinations to chase now spun or spread all ways away from him, except that he saw that he was it. He got the idea that there was less spin per thought now, but the idea did not change what he looked at.
What was Imp Plus to have done out among these orbits?
Read readings Earth read too. Get some Sun. Be weightless. Subsist. Travel light. He picked what to see and he saw large and small, but he could not have less than this power, and what use was it?
The woman had said “Travel light,” but that wasn’t Operation TL. Her wants were not of Operation TL.
Were his?
He was expected only to react. Like the algae.
But not like the algae, for the algae had no Concentration Loop to speak through.
It is all for you, the Good Voice said.
There were other tests in the dark capsule. What was the hemisphere adrift?
Imp Plus thought how to use the Concentration Loop and thought that he might not know how any more.
Earth’s transmissions had gone away.
And here, there was less motion per thought; let Earth come round the other side when it was ready.
All for you, the Good Voice said.
But all what?
Look, said the Acrid Voice in the other room, it’s the algae and the other test beds — that’s what it is — and they don’t need you, you need them. You could turn green like a broccoli.
Like a hand of spinach. More likely, spun into some substance, some unmanned substance.
The Concentration Loop to which the Acrid Voice had introduced Imp Plus should become second nature; but what it was for was Earth: to get Imp Plus’s reactions by frequency impulse back to Earth.
That’s all you get out of it, pure and simple, a voice had said, and Imp Plus had reacted against the smile that had come with the voice because he could not bear it. He had foreseen himself alone. That was it.
There in the smaller green room and the capsule-to-come, he had foreseen himself alone. For the voice that said, “That’s all you get out of it,” was the Acrid Voice that later had said, “You can’t go on forever,” and Imp Plus saw only now orbiting the night that he had turned toward the door leading to the large green room where the Good Voice made plans — but Imp Plus had not gone to that door. And Imp Plus had known something besides the words “I’m ill” coughed back at the Acrid Voice. He’d known that the Acrid Voice was more alone than the Good, and had made himself so.
And this had made Imp Plus more mad than had the Acrid Voice’s parting remark: which was that Imp Plus might find a way to use the Concentration Loop to talk to himself.
The desire to show them grew in Imp Plus like the drift of substance which he saw now was just what he desired to show. In the outlying membranes the layers of light were lower but had spread. He wanted to say what he thought had been happening through the night. But he might not see this till he tried to say it. He wanted to have what the Dim Echo had.
He would tell better where the Dim Echo was when the Dim Echo stopped sleeping. He thought when the time came Ground would draw the word SLEEP back, for Imp Plus had once felt it as a line along a middle and saw he had not stopped feeling this.
But did not want to do things by halves.
And did not see halves when he looked. Yet did not see the Dim Echo at all. Yet through another night saw that once there had been no Dim Echo.
The night with the woman by the Mexican fire.
Not the woman at the California sea.