At this instant the crimson flash occurred near the core, and the thumb or head of the inside-out limb threw out a luminous emptiness to touch that red and instead drew from the core one of the small island bodies located above the gland of flame, and retracted this island body out into itself; And then into the outer area of the capsule — for the limb rebodied itself and lay out, wing or spoke, toward the shining gray bulkheads where the blue-mottled pearl of the hemisphere hung adrift, and Imp Plus had desired the limb to do this.
He had desired that one of his limb bodies suck itself into the brain to catch the crimson flashings that he had used to see in the outlying parts and that seemed to have been supplanted out there by the blue darts that had once been in the body of the brain.
Red and near-blue neared and fell back somewhere under where the islands of the core stood afloat, those that were left after the two had been sucked out into the long substances of outlying body which he could no longer call body. A thing he thought must be a thought was coming to him. It came also from him. It was a sight, too. Not the sight he now saw he wanted to get away from into doing. No, not that sight. Yet that kind of sight he would not get around. So he thought he would stop trying to get around it. It was kind of how he focused. What kind? He knew but must say. To say, he must start, but this could never be the start, for he could never see or have seen the start. He could go on, only, and in pieces, pieces that did for him, or, that is, pieces that would do. But as he did, he felt divided and redoubled into several places of himself, inside and out. How did he focus? There wasn’t one center. He gathered himself to see the algae beds and other plant tests he now saw he had lived with but not thought of. And he gathered himself to see now the radius-spindles of his own changing Sun flow down the tube from that underhouse near what had been the bun or little brain. He gathered himself as suddenly to see sight membranes that had gone from the limbs into the cerebrum and grown or ranged to the top, and the membrane that had the gray-glittering point in the middle. Gathered himself to see among the limb bodies now armed with substance parts of the brain lean toward focus.
And he gathered, or came to feel, that the gathering of different distances into focus was like the muscle pricks of spasm-flows of charge. So at each moment of sight on some tip end of growing, his sight would be a center, or not a center, or lead toward the thing seen and draw other membrane-eyes after it all angling toward the thing to be seen, angling even through all the bodies inside what had been the brain for they could be transparent or not. At will, if not his. He found that many things at once were his — but to see or think. And when it came to saying, why he could not say many things at once. And if like an old lost center he gathered, was it just because the pieces, some of them, consented?
The limb body that had sucked away the two islands from above the gland of flame and resleeved out into the capsule’s space had now for the time being merged with bodies on either side, and the islands were not to be seen. The brain and what layout beyond felt more one. The dividing went on, but he had gotten used to the pain which was like the old sense of blood running around his body.
Now a limb body reached the window, for he thought he had long wanted to. The sprout tip tried the thick waters of the glass which he could nonetheless also see was so easy to see through it was like an absence of obstacle, so the Sun’s touch on the plant beds could work itself through without any shifting net of impurity. But water was not thick. He knew water. There was water here, but not a sea.
His sprout tip seemed at the aching instant before it bumped the glass to fold inward to make a suction cave. From the several other distances (which were membranes) from which he saw this event, the frond of himself waved and headed its snout toward the window lengthening.
Moving what it was already.
But somewhere lengthening, though through the flesh of its skin that got harder to see through in the morning light.
It moved. But also grew.
Both.
And in some compound he did not know except it was his.
Yes, he had wanted to move to the window. The going part, the frond or limb, he came to see in its fine growing light of outline and its shifting substance, was a fresh beginning. So were the others. Alone or when they joined to be bowl-sides exhaled from a floor that was what had been the brain.
But if some of those islands now more than two that had been (by him himself) sucked from the brain core had flowed away into what he’d once thought the new body or bodies, and if tendrils and nerve-twig firings and snowy glues and other matter and what had been centers had shifted from brain to bodies, surely the gland of flame stayed.
And near it the blocks of cells in which were plugged fibers — color-coded, he thought, though saw only olive; and under these two blocks all those radiant areas he had left alone in double distance of red and violet, left alone like the gland of flame or glimmer, while looking so closely at the block of fiber-plugged connections near the optic tracts that he had missed, or desired to miss, a salt-sweetness of connection so plain he tried to turn away from it to see if the Dim Echo knew the right words for it, for each block of plugged-in fibers was a layered depth of what elsewhere he had sighted in a cup so membrane-thin he felt it now as a flat map. But he had no right, for each of the two cups plugged point-for-point to the two layered depths could not be his own and must be hers, the woman at the beach, and each flat-spread map was a cup-curved thinness a part of him could not call the retina.
And ahead he understood that he had called for the Dim Echo to give him that word, but had found only the word itself, retina, not the Dim Echo, and not any word for the block of plugged-in fibers, color-coded he heard more than saw — and he heard again the words What happens to the brain’s three-dimensional map of the retina when there is no more retina to send to? And he felt an arm and a leg sitting in him folded so he could concentrate on the retina question, concentrated until there were two retinas, the second outside of him and invisible and an idea — a prepared memory, was that it? That had been it.
But the question had preceded the memory. The question came from Earth, but not now.
Who had asked it?
He would look out the window his limb body had reached for. For in his bones he felt that all he saw here in himself was just what he had prepared to see.
He used the small, insucked tuck at the tip of this body to suction the tip onto the glass, and he arched this limb body toward where the bulkhead curved into overhead. So doing, he saw that he made the move he felt and he felt what he’d wanted to feeclass="underline" the cave-in of growth, the very cave of growth. So when he saw out the window by training his milky membrane, a thought spread and he gave himself the feeling of turning, for he thought he wanted to find that thought in its full whereabouts. But found instead that he wanted to breathe himself into sleep, to sleep — and found that he had not been equal to the thought which had occurred in all his substance.