The pale one on the night plateau.
Slept with her. He had said SLEEP. What he had meant, he could ask the Dim Echo, but the Dim Echo had not been there around the fire and it was Imp Plus who had said to the woman when they had come back out of the dark and he sat warming a foot that hurt and taking something painful away from the foot until the woman wanted to do it, and it was not fingers she took away from the foot because the fingers were in what he was telling her, the fingers had been his own but meshed and tangled by the child who was not there in the Mexican night with them and who made him try to move the finger she pointed to and he moved the wrong one — and after telling the pale woman this, he had said words that made her laugh and she said he made her feel like a new widow ready to start over again. The words he had said were “Sleep with me.”
But he could not remember what this had meant, if it had meant SLEEP.
He had been very close to her on the ground by the colors of the fire, and his yellow shoes were near her dark hair. There were shifts of substance.
The lumens of the glucose arcs had spread through the night and would have looked lower like the levels of light along the outlying membranes but, more than lower, they were spread. But then Imp Plus understood.
His lights could be lower now because they were being answered.
But the transmission everywhere was not on a frequency. It was too slow or too fast to speed. It came from more than just its own places, and it was first another darkness but it was more a kind of change, and it was not something that Imp Plus himself did, but it visited and stayed with the substance of what had been done, and divided this not into two but into all the mornings Imp Plus had known.
It was the Sun, and the first far thought of the Sun’s breathing.
The Sun was coming back.
And Imp Plus was coming back to the Sun.
This was his deed? He would show the Acrid Voice.
The deep gland flamed out at his sight, and along the seam that slanted down behind the gland the yellow-soaked field of cells had faded. And behind it and deep below the gland brief sections of stripe showed through the crevice which one rung of his will had once passed over. And seeing through the crevice to these sections of stripe — they were tubes — he understood that the tubes were not him but went from him; and were the same tubing he’d seen going into the algae; understood that if the algae and anabaena and other test beds had no Concentration Loop to speak through, they did have loops to Imp Plus.
He could watch through the crevice and yet, like a breathing from all sides, feel waves of substance go through him, which was also the recollection of what had gone on in the night.
When he looked off to the window that he recalled could think for itself and where no grid had been printed for no man would be here to use it to map position, Imp Plus could hardly say what he saw in what he had once seen as the outside body growing from a thing he had thought his brain.
He wanted to say.
But he could not speak to Ground, for what would Ground do? And he had to get something from the Dim Echo and wasn’t about to join the Dim Echo in sleep to get whatever he found he wanted.
Dawn deepened the tube loops. A thing was there which, going far back to the woman in the night plateau or his madness and towering, twisting headache at the Acrid Voice’s parting words, was a wonderful thing: it was that the currents in the tubes moved two ways. They fed from the test beds to him. And they moved out also from him.
And knowing he was all but ready to face the new growth that was now to be seen after this night that sometimes seemed to hold many nights, he was an inclined field of racing independent parts or gaps wanting to tell the Acrid Voice that Sun without doubt came also from himself, from Imp Plus — wanting so much that he called back from the smaller green room words to the effect that he might find a way to use the Concentration Loop to talk to himself: but the words had not been said by the Acrid Voice; they had been said by Imp Plus, and then the Acrid Voice softly added, “You will,” just as less than a year later he would softly reflect the Good Voice’s word recreation.
The Good Voice’s permission had probed the midbed of Imp Plus’s known body, but mainly through the dune-watcher-to-come with his dark glasses reflecting where one known Imp Plus met one known woman with skin that would never be his but that if he wanted with enough force he could have.
He felt knowns waking in him. Known solar panels over a known project’s known power needs.
But known divided by known gave unforeknown increase.
Earth was calling, but Imp Plus felt for the fingers of the Sun which were his own fingers too. But not his old ones, the ones that came together out of space to join to make a parchment shine of crisscross called the palm of his hand.
New fingers of Sun and himself. Tracts of unknown begun from the widowing of a brain.
Or what came to him as ill body over ill will, known over known he had thought, but not so: for the ill will was not just in how the Solar Energy Project Operation Travel Light had used him out of the goodness of its voice — the ill will had been his own as well. Desire that all that smoke fall back into the Acrid Voice and choke it, and only because the Acrid Voice did not smile upon him like the Good Voice, for whom Imp Plus must have had another and unknown fire of hate.
Desire had met the Sun. The arcs of lumen and glucose lumen wheeled not from Imp Plus and not from the Sun, but from their mingling that was deeper than touch.
Near the bulkhead the dislodged hemisphere stood adrift. When he had seen its segment glimmer in the dark night of the capsule he had recalled a picture of the Earth, and he thought what he saw he hadn’t thought before: that the hemisphere did not heed him.
Earth could go on calling forever.
Earth had woken the Dim Echo.
What Imp Plus saw now in the light of dawn was more than he had seen, and in a spasm at the unfolding premotor cleft he was glad Earth did not know.
Imp Plus saw himself.
8
Him.
He found it on his mouth and in his breath. Him. A thing in all of him. But now he wasn’t sure. He saw he’d felt this him in the brain. But where was it now? In too many centers.
And there was a shifting like the subtraction of a land mass so two or more seas that had been apart now slid together. What happened to this him?
Then it fell away into the damp muscles of light. He saw them from this cleft-fold that had been through so much. Saw with angles of the fold itself. Its angles spread while he looked with them.
Wait.
He did not.
That is, he would not. If he would not wait, did he then go?
He was Imp Plus and had no name before Imp Plus. But he was not a vegetable, In the word of the blind news vendor who had said he would not be just a vegetable.
Imp Plus gave light, though he was no star. His light answered the Sun and came from the Sun. But more, for it went to the Sun too and was a thing Imp Plus did. He was no star but a being that did not look like a star yet was called one. And the earlier shadows of his body on the capsule bulkheads — he knew body—had looked like starlings. The wings and tails, not the motion.
But there had been motion in the shadows. And more than the red glowing at points around the body which he was using to look at the red. He remembered red-cell ghosts; not from the green-and-white blackboard of the Acrid Voice mapping what might be ahead but from his own thought — he had thought about ghost cells with the red missing, for the red breathed. Was it the red glowing here at points?
Starfish. The standing woman had folded herself to bend down to take its sandy arms and legs out of the underwater and he had felt its stiff flesh and put it back in the water. The starfish was hard to see now. He could find it in himself if he tried not to see the motion in his own webbed membrane limbs; but he was no starfish.