Since he could not stop, and could not stop wanting, and could not place the word for the thing he had felt here which made him want to stop, he wanted then to be not here. But what caved up out of the cracked dark was also here, though of distances that divided into more and more and smaller and smaller distances. So seeing inside the fold that was his because it was part of what was his, he was also seeing into the green and blue-green beds of luminous bright algae, bright too because wet. Seeing more the green than the blue-green. Though he found more of both.
More than what?
More than before.
He saw more of the green but now also saw lesser things in the more. He saw spheres as small and separated as the wink of the eye, and they were in motion and in many motions. The less small of these spheres breathed faster, the more small so slow the other motions inside these spheres were clearer. The green spheres were chlorella, because he had prepared to recall chlorella. But now there was some more while he looked, as if some members of the green population had been huddled out of sight and now stood up pushing others aside.
It kept happening.
But the bigger the chlorella population got, the more Imp Plus could divide it on sight and so Imp Plus’s vision was finding the smaller and smaller.
And the smaller things that he saw in each sphere of chlorella were discs or eggs flattened and, more important, inclined so as they moved around the cell their edges caught the light. Imp Plus could tell this because the brightness which was everywhere, even in the shadows along the walls which were the walls of the capsule even more than of the fold, was not one but many running in individual packets so small they had more light than shape, and the discs and eggs turned their edges to receive these packs of light.
The discs and eggs were just green till Imp Plus looked at the still more small packs of light flown in to hit the discs and eggs, and then the discs and eggs were also as orange as the inner flesh of raw carrot slice and as yellow as what he did not recall but at once all green, and he could see the orange and yellow or not see it.
Which Imp Plus thought was a thing he could do.
He called back the sweet odor of the eyes and with it the map of nerve light. But he knew that whatever he could do, he could never do what had been done.
Here, that is.
That is, to fit into one of his folds not only the beds of green chlorella and blue-green anabaena algae, but as well what could be seen deep through the slick ball of membrane that had made the darkness part before it. For what could be seen far down through the great membrane past bends that Imp Plus could never have seen around with eyes yet saw around by some bending force that drew him to what he knew he would want, was a slowly waving matter of layers. There were six — and pale bonds like wires that had been softened into fibers came down from the wall of the path to join the layers. But through these six layers Imp Plus found his vision divided like a substance that needed holes to pass through a block; and way below the six layers, a radiance went like distance, and most near its spread were packed fibers arched radiating — sweeping then toward a far place where memory promised maps of bark and maps of space that were all one map of motion — a place, though, that memory said was too far for him to want or be.
Below that a yellow area spread with a power he saw had once flowed across his car. Think of what this one fold held, then; think how far he had come. But he could not breathe. He was drawn where he did not know how to think to breathe. He wanted to be severed from here; and wondering if he could be, he found again the bad thing whose word he did not recall except as a question and now he found he did not know question.
He saw divided light back along the path. He had come from his fold into a path that went many ways. Up there the cave got big, and the walls and overhead were cut into like a step. Downward — or, at least, the other way — toward the six layers, there was less light. But he now saw the overhead and walls pulsing to press the long cave outward to make its space more.
This pulsing came from what was not the walls and the overhead, but on them: glossy, taut fibers. These were what at the end down by the six layers reached off the shoulders of the long cave to plug into the layers, for Imp Plus was looking both directions. He traced the fibers downward to the layers that were blinking into the points where the fibers arrived.
But Imp Plus was reacting, he was wanting to be not here: for something would happen to him that must not, but the word would not come with its question which might not help anyhow, and the fibers pulsed inward as if they too, though plugged below to the layers, wanted to get out.
Out of what? His fold? Out of what was body and, like the darkness that got thrust off by the grand, glistening membrane, was his?
Was body; was his; but not his body, yet seen by sight that seemed the cells seeing themselves, which took him back where he would not go, the body of smaller and smaller pieces thinking themselves.
He could not yet go beyond those layers below to the radiant areas arching away into red and violet double distance. But he could be in many places, and he knew this better than he knew the red and violet down there with their alien promise of green if Imp Plus looked away fast and then back at them. Yet he found a wonderful blind spot. It was in his new chance to be more than one place at once. Lower along this optic tract an intersection led to the layers; he saw (then saw no more except to recall) not one body but two of layers down there. They were tied point for point like a charted code to fibers coming down the tract. He had to go back somewhere and draw this map so others could follow it. The brief sight of it was like a blink with a different eye, if Imp Plus had had eyes, and from this sight he saw that while he could be and see two or more places at once, he might get a blind spot if he contemplated two separate places that happened to be just the same.
But no, when he looked back upward now from this crossing which he now saw was colorless unlike the pale olive fibers, he saw two tracts not one. The tracts were the same, with a bright hole at the end of each and beyond the hole colors of the Sun that filled the glistening green and blue-green of the algae beds; and these were visible at a distance other than the close range at which Imp Plus had maintained the chlorella and anabaena right here in this one of many folds, though not at this point of crossing whose discoloration had made him see that the rest of the fibers were palest olive.
The fold was his. The wound fibers lined this reach of it, or tract that the fold led out into. Or the fibers clung to the sides and the overhead. Yet from the crossing upward were two tracts of fibers. With a hole at the end, and each tract had been cut before the hole. The fibers pulsed. The cave did not get bigger. The shadows of tucks appeared, and some part of the fibers was prodding through at right angles to the cave or tract walclass="underline" some part of the fiber substance moved away in spurts or sprouts.
The fibers breathed or pulsed: they fidgeted like animals asleep; but the fibers worked; but sideways through points along their length, like the overhead sprinklers in the green room on Earth. And Imp Plus did not want to be here, and he smelled the odor of sweet eyes and followed the smell of aqueous humor to where the fibers had been cut just at the entrance or exit through the hole, or two holes from two tracts. But the odor of the eyes increased what he felt, this thing the word for which was a question but he had lost the question but he knew the word now and it did not help except to make him move against the packed, breathing fibers, each a bundle of fibers, and get where their sideways tendrils inclined toward being.