He drew parts of his sight out of different, stranded distances, he thought; but he wanted to only after he saw they had come of themselves, yet they were always himself, so he drew. Drew them so that using them together to view window or muscle or cleft-fold he found each was the radius of a color: of diamond-brown (from a membrane-knuckle bent against a bulkhead), of leaning olives (from inside the brain where the old eye ways crossed), or of bare reds (where a sinew of contraction solved the morning Sun): for the radius of a color is not everywhere the same, he saw. It drew these certain parts of his sight together into a point as brief as the space was large that he had once found he could make by division and division when he tried to see between the white gel of a glue (or glial) cell and the twig cells that fired their bud ends from time to time across this divisible space and sometimes split into other twig cells that did not fire but only divided.
This brief point was bright.
A moment in sequence, a sequence so packed it looked like fluid. So grand a moment that for its focal time the different distances came in into the axis of single seeing with a sound: a compound he had not prepared to remember. A host of fluids lengthened into bonds of vibration that slid into so near a body he started to forget he could not rest in its music. But stopped. No. He did not want to rest there, and he would not.
He found he had known music; but this music of his seeing kept the voice of Ground as dim as another frequency. But what he was seeing he saw now he had seen before. Seeing a skin of flesh now, then seeing into some sponge of blond lumen blood, then now seeing clear through what he saw he’d already decided was transparent. These he saw now as before though more clear and with a weight of knowing.
Where was this weight? It was gathering.
But gathering everywhere; that is, spreading.
The weight inclined at all angles, and slid. The slides were of substance, but the weight was separate. The substance could be of granules, with greater space between each the more he desired to see. Granules that were slick rolling masses shifting from outer to inner, he had thought, and inner to outer.
He would not stop the motion to see the wavings of spines joined at their soft, blurred bulb-tips into angles in which a wing came into being to tread a wind of space. But unless he stopped the many motions he might not see this glassy meat, this aerial act, and this whole slow-armed cup whose wing points — whether or not it was when they bumped the bulkheads — then flattened into sides.
With corners.
Which became new tips pointing off as if to do what then they did do.
Which was stretch and stretch the substance of a wing limb till it felt not thinner but the reverse — thicker — and was thicker, and split into two. Which with other twos around himself leaned across.
To make web-folds nothing like the folds of brain which had unfolded as the brain grew what it grew.
But he kept not seeing his body. Was that it? Or kept not seeing it as he thought he ought. Then a dark streak he could see down through showed on its surface a width of slick. So he thought a wing had passed a strip of wind across the streak. But the wings that had not divided into folded arms waved so little they looked still enough to be their own thought.
He was pinned on the end of the axis which was ready to turn like a radius, but now he felt not its pain, only a spray of foamy limbs making him wish to be not there — which was the same as the pain feeling but now was not pain. The axis stuck in him in his midbed: the axis of distance: a windmill stirred the Sun above him: the axis telescoped down close to an ocean: he was aiming at fish: he was the animal end of the axis which was a radius; audible words (not now) spoke of one-celled stuff layered below the sea surface thus causing upon it a slick; the axis was a tube coming up into him in his midbed like wind and the ocean end of this axis of distance he was stuck on had no vegetable news vendor but had vegetable nutrient. Until Imp Plus understood what was happening. Then the axis — which was distance — telescoped out the other way thousands of miles into audible words not of the first voice but of a second which was a woman not of the Mexican night or California beach or the dark woman of the syringe — and the new one was telling how from space fishermen could find what they could never see close up and could drop axis into whole green schoolrooms of plankton, but the first voice was both known to him and not here or now, and struck an unknown through him, for if the second was right the Earth end of the axis of distance was the animal pole and Imp Plus’s end or Imp Plus himself was vegetative; so he said again himself and him.
Whereupon with shifts of sliding substance the grains of lumen and the known pieces of brain now refractions swimming — as if growth were separated travel — in what he’d taken to be the body grown solely from the brain, made it hard for him to hold that first voice that came on the axis of distance. But he held on long enough to see it was the Acrid Voice talking low above an ocean under a mill that stirred the Sun, which he now saw was the kind of wind his body stirred. A solar wind.
This wind in turn laid across the dark streak the width of slick that came and went all around the body. For the streaks were of the same body that stirred the wind to make the slicks, through which when Imp Plus looked he saw motion though not any motion. Also the motion of new crowds of points, bright but as if deflected from brightness, maybe dissolution that was the shadow of a wholeness elsewhere. And because he saw blue darts in the limbs now he saw he gathered several distances into the one stranding of single sight — the gathering of flows into strains that hugged themselves long, then let go then hugged and hugged again till all their songs fell into one resolve: the gathering turned this compound membrane-sight at once back to the still unfolding head of growth, node of nodes, crown of clefts. And this in time to see and feel a wish to have to see a new sliver rise from a lobe bed spraying elbows or grasshopper knees into the Sun’s massing stream. And saw through the now nearly opened and flattened Premotor cleft a raft of once outlying membranes bend up through an arm-join into the brain and, having got in, plow up broadside slowly toward the brain’s gray-amber roof-skin pushing to get out onto it.
While somewhere else in the brain the crimson flashed warm that Imp Plus had seen before only in the outlying bodies.
He had no choice but to go on to understand what was going on. No choice he thought but to be centered and to see out from the brain hub, but then in from the body bonds; see meanwhile from the rounds of tendril bendings up out of cells near an open cleft to those message rounds pressed small in the bulb-bun of branchings at the rear of the brain, to (then) the fine turn of a limb tip finding a nearby limb to join or a bulkhead shine to brush. He thought in the pieces — he did not know how except that the pieces whether refracting in toward a center he hardly had any more or aiming each its own moves separate along a many-sided tissue of inclination were him. So Imp Plus tried to take heed, tried to think — was that it?
But a given focus in its spasms of gathering drew from various distances only some membranes, not all.
And looking sometimes through the brain’s bright work, he wondered why sight-gathering into the focal axis did not take in all membranes, all distances. But he thought the brain was like the body in being not always transparent.
Ground was asking Imp Plus to answer. Ground read maximum power and maximum glucose level, yet read rapid action in cortex. ARE YOU ALERT IMP PLUS? Rapid activity in motor and sensory areas. DO YOU READ IMP PLUS? PLEASE COME IN IMP PLUS. ARE YOU THERE?