So out the window he saw what was inside. For he had to face eyes. Eyes before seeing. Eyes not of sight but of red and violet: firing in the double-deeps radiating below the fiber-plugged bodies but with each firing wink spreading (he thought) quick shades through all the cortex. Eyes he must face for they were not hers, but his. Yet not his but the absence of his. Which he had known all along. But without following the optic fibers where they diverged from the disused tracts because there were no eyes to home on.
Looking back, now, from the window, Imp Plus found more Sun. It swam as on other days and in other weeks and over months, swam in itself, but no more through the same brain and body.
How many days Imp Plus did not know, but knew one day was light, another light and dark.
He would not ask Ground how long the project had gone on.
Ground did not know how glucose held at maximum.
Ground could not see the radiating red and violet below the fiber plugs.
Ground took away.
Imp Plus saw the substance in the brain and in the outlying bodies shrug, and Imp Plus had recalled shoulders spoken of, but did not tell when he had recalled shoulders, before or after the big shrug of substance. Looking close he could not see the big shrug, and the breath cycle hung unmoving and in that moment of equals between brain and body which he could not call brain and body any more, Imp Plus out ahead of himself knew Ground would take away the radiations, stake out the new-found optic membranes, tick off the limb-bound islands lost.
Islands of the limbs, but how long among the shifts of substance could true islands stay limb-lost? Limbic, for short. But Imp Plus had not thought up limbic; it had come out to him; and not from Ground.
But through parts so empty he tried to look down at himself in a way he therefore now recalled. From head to toes, down curves of his old body, its curves that tried to come up to him but must keep their distance. Yet now there was no point in the memory, and what there was of him he saw from many equal points or slides of membrane which dilated as he used them so that the old body came back to him but in the shape of distance increasing for which there was a word discomfort that came out to him but not from Ground. The word came in a voice once his though now just pulses on a frequency reaching further and further back to Earth, for that was the Ground where his body was except a piece which he must call brain but was a piece of body blown off up the tube and axis and distance of distance where the curves of his chest would not return to him nor his chest hairs like fingers, fingers in the Sun if he could only stop but he could not. Distance where the curves of chest were as free of him as of sutures, and curves of stomach so flat he could almost not see its good shape though it was not good like the Good Voice and was even bad because ill though even then dividing into an unknown. Distances dividing down faint dual troughs of belly that were not those lighted bellies of the brain now stretched like limbs seeking to become their source. Bellies curving in along beside suddenly much more hair which also was not fingers but then became fingers with blood red that loved him, someone else’s fingers: and up at the final spinning end of that exploded axis which became then fixed as the axis of distance, he knew the voice; and the voice was his, steadily giving information back like a terminally stranded astronaut to Ground that some future sense dimly present then told him was not his Ground now: but there amid the multiplying distances of the launch, the launch, it was his voice that reported to Ground discomfort—the voice Imp Plus now light-years later heard signal inside him discomfort, so in retort to the Dim Echo’s prepared word discomfort (for it was the Dim Echo), he said: pain, sad, alone, distance.
And the Dim Echo in a sigh it could not have wanted to make at the time of the launch where there had been no separation between a well-drilled Dim Echo answering to the name Imp Plus, and what had here come to be a new Imp Plus, observed that light-years was wrong, for the distance was that of a synchronous Earth orbit 22,300 miles from Ground.
But the sigh Imp Plus then saw was silent, and the information was unsaid. Likewise information he’d not known he had: that the on-board dilatometer measured expansion due to heat; that the Concentration Loop communicated from conscious brain to Ground by electrodes; that limbic was a system in the core that was connected to the nerve bodies of the hypothalamus.
Wait.
He would not stop for these packets of Ground-bound data banked into him by Dim Echo. They brought Ground back to him probing for why glucose held at maximum and whether connection between water gauge and water had stopped working, for water must be much lower than Ground’s reading.
Imp Plus did not want to know.
But as he recalled the Good Voice’s “Go ahead, feel free to look around, it’s all yours,” he found himself gathering, like the gatherings of his multi-membrane microsight, that the island bodies that had been sucked from the brain into the limbs were parts of the hypothalamus, and that the wildly glancing knots or packets of his own sun spindling down the tube from brain to algae were units of radiance. He knew radiance, but not he felt from the Dim Echo. And he gathered also that the other brainward tube was for nourishment. And looking for the now flattened brain the cerebrum (which then swelled a bit as he looked but not back into the cerebral wig-shape) and looking, too, for the flattened little brain the cerebellum behind, he felt the Dim Echo separate inside him and make him like a memory wonder if the body he had grown unhelped by Ground was the conscious brain’s opposite.
But no — he found substance not mainly different from substance beyond, he found centers but no center; new fields of streaming points slid or deflected everywhere dissolving some one dark source into bright shadows; his body-probe thumbing the window glass smelled sea sands running through a salt-sweet porous hand which was her hand. He found the flaming gland still where it had been, but its glimmer dispersed into all of him, and not only the breathing motion which was himself expanding and contracting, but a tide of equally growing inclination spread all over with each motion of his breath.
But more than breath, and here was almost the thought he had not been equal to before. It was a thought he inclined toward but it had been in him always and he must think it. So he looked at the radiation units that spun into radii for the algae gases to embrace. And he looked both near the gland of flame and at the pearly hemisphere adrift at a bulkhead, and seeing at the same time blue dart and crimson flash about his shifting substance, he saw Ground’s words make a mouth on Earth: and when Imp Plus wished Ground to vanish, his sight blew a hole in itself and shot up to hang by no thread, and was a sliver. Which he saw was an electrode that had been the gray glinting button in the middle of the very sight membrane which itself had worked and mulled its way up into the scalp of the brain and thus skewered itself.
He inclined toward the thought he must think by looking at several things at once which he had been able to do before, for his sight was multi and micro and threatened to be too powerful to help and must be limited. Ground was silent as Imp Plus inclined toward the thought he thought he could now handle. Imp Plus’s just digested Dim Echo helped him project pulses into the Concentration Loop to test Ground on the red and the blue that the Dim Echo did not answer. But Ground did not either.