In the silence, Imp Plus could handle the hemisphere by lengthening himself and by moving himself. But as he moved from where he’d smelled the window, the cave-crash pain was worse than before; for on an axis of distance and of vegetable and animal, he had been grinding a mesh of wheels of teeth — ground the mesh away into a dust which he must then save by breathing.
And choking, and lightly tapping the hemisphere with the part of him that could smell and could thumb, he was able to handle that thought.
That before had turned him from the window.
Like a drawing in of all his sense.
Here.
He was glad Ground was through. Glad that after reaching orbit he had sprung his own housing. For that was what the cloud-blue-mottled hemisphere was. The safe housing over what had been the brain.
The thought he could handle now was more cause to cut Ground off. For Ground would use him. Use even the thought.
Which was that with the help of the Sun he could think his own growth.
9
He stood away from this thought. It came over him everywhere. Newer parts of him nudged each other’s outlines of light and sometimes joined. So he was not just increasing.
He could become less, when two skins of lumen inclined together and were one skin and then this filament between dissolved. He stood away from the great thought that he had thought. But it had settled over him and covered him. So he rid himself of it by letting it do what it would do. So it was falling as slowly as snow once had seemed to fall, lowering so slowly he took long to see that its slow movement was also a lifting. From below, a lifting up but not away.
He stood away, he thought, from this thought: the thought that he could think his own growth. But he found it all around, growth and thought, thought and growth, it opened and was close and he felt it was himself but felt it was less.
But still he stood away. He had to.
Sometime he had said the words sad and alone, but he did not know them and wondered if he could think them onto him but wondered where they were stored if he could recall.
He stood away from the thought that he could think his own growth.
How could he have choked on the dust those axes had ground? For he had nothing to choke with. No head and neck — for that was where choking choked. Blue in the face. Yet heads had eyes that saw. And he saw.
He saw the thought of his own growth risen and fallen, land and lift.
But he stood away from it. He tried to know it was there and done by him. But to stand or be away he found himself thinking again why choked. What did choke mean? He had nothing to choke with. Still there was what was choked on: for he saw that where his tucked frond tip thumbed and smelled the window, the window shifted and poured and dropped the sands it was made of, dropped them into blue morning space. Meanwhile, at the same time, so easily he thought what was the use, the slow-flaming gland that was a last centering sign of what had been the brain now bulbed its flux up over the dulled tints of the optic tracts and their crossing.
All of a sudden the gland’s force had flooded and slowed the wheeling Sunbraids of the midday cells. So Imp Plus found no point to this ease of the gland’s power. At the same time the wings or spoke-fronds had paused in their many forms, and one was now grown into and through what had been a main land and luminous reservoir of what had been the cerebrum: so this wing or neck at this moment of sluggish halt was a body of bridge pinning or belting a lower cross-lamina of substance illumined in turn by the two glancing tubes that entered the underhousing where the disc pump was. But the tubes’ streams brainward or for that matter plantward barely moved now, any more than the other reaches of flesh, pinions, outline, or fronds of him moved. And the dropping of the sands to clear the window glass joined the stubborn glimmering gland’s pointless force thickening impedance, and joined the gathering fixity of his unengaged new being’s range of differences to think as if for him; and he choked.
He knew choked but not what it meant, so he could not choke on the word, but he choked.
On an absence.
Though choked not on that old absence of obstacle which was how the impulses had once come on the frequency from Earth. Choked now on an absence that was obstacle.
Absence he didn’t want, which swelled him into glut.
What did?
While what he saw despite some need to stop using ultrasight was the reverse of swelling. It was shrinking he would incline to act on. For he was choking without knowing what choking was. But was disinclined, except to be.
So through all the milky smoke of the great thought fallen, risen, standing dispersed, the Sun’s flow made the only move. Or almost only: for, disinclined to act, Imp Plus yet inclined the other way, and when the Sun then grew less light Imp Plus knew this could not be the Sun itself, not the great hand withdrawing; for the glial cells and neurons — he knew neurons — and those other cells by some offsprung reversal like the neurons’ earlier selves unfiring but able to divide — had all been at their midday. For he had thought so. And since therefore the Sun had all the time from noontide yet to flow, the lessening light was due to Imp Plus not the Sun.
Imp Plus inclined to sleep. An early night was sliding across the slowed flood of Sun. Was what he choked on light that was forced to stand slower and slower?
For he choked. And what swelled, and swelled toward sleep, mixed him richer he felt and richer as the slowed and long-standing light enfolded and embraced him so he breathed its gas forever but stopped.
But stopped and stopped.
For he could not breathe; for what lung had he to breathe with?
But it did not take a lung to look, he thought: for, looking closer through the light that clearly he could not breathe, he saw the shrinking all over lean out of itself to swell like breath drawn in. That is, he swelled a bit but felt less choked. But then he was back where he began. Yet, having looked, seemed to breathe when he looked again out of his inclination to sleep; and in the great milky suspension which was the thought of his own growth, he saw parts larger than any the milky suspension had held when he’d first seen it occupy him like a shade. But the sizes were not all the same. He saw that the larger ones were made of smaller, and as he looked these smaller stopped avoiding one another and leaned suddenly together, split their flowing shells, and stuck and joined.
Elsewhere, remembering that looking made him breathe which meant he did not choke, braids of the Sun spindled their light; and particles of the milky smoke rebounded from each other without hitting; and larger particles — he knew blast—blasted back into smaller.
And Imp Plus swelled and inclined also to shrink and swell or shrink again, and crowds of off-blasted particles of particles slid back together, and the spindling Sun slowed.
Imp Plus saw that no, it was just because he could breathe that he could choke. But because he could choke he could sleep, which was — wasn’t it? — one more inclining among inclinings. But choke was sleep, sleep was night, night not see. Since see and look were both sight, hence in part the same, and look made him breathe, and he could not choke if he could not breathe — why he must look.
Which meant he must not sleep.
Though look was not see. And the big and small particles were undecided to gather or disperse.