A block of light blasted him. It gulped around him closing him. It made him a new nerve past breathing.
But the neurobody that had blasted him was not just outside him. He was banging and bursting into himself; the word was pain, and the question whatever it was was lost like that tree — a tree elsewhere — whose absence encouraged moss to grow on it. A pain that twisted the blood, twisted it around the sugar if that was what gave the flow a sweetness like what had been folded in the chambers of her eyes, for that aqueous humor his memory had smelled the forms of with a magnified attention never possible on Earth was so like the smell of fluid somewhere near here he could almost himself have made the fluid out of desire. Which was not the pain. It was a pain that was terrible. He knew terrible. It was a word. The neuroblast about him had made him one, and it swelled and split. But the division had come from his want. And the discovery of this turned out to be a division itself. Neuroblasts happened but they were also things, and came out of distances and skipped along cells and stopped or did not stop. And then he knew something else in the pain of moving at so many points: he thought this was sticky, sloppy thought: and the Dim Voice spoke so close that the Dim Voice was in Imp Plus, saying, “Severed optic nerve inoperative has receded into wall of optic tract.”
But a word from Ground was too dim to jam out the shore. There were the shearwaters, an empty-mouthed osprey about to dive, and the eyes of her who had touched him with laughter on his blind side and turned him and had spoken and placed an open-eyed tongue between words she said dividing them — between “Glad I didn’t pack a bag” and then subsequently so low and mild that a seabird’s cry and the osprey’s sharp dive contained her words, “Travel light.” And he had knelt, knelt was like an elbow, knelt below her eyes and mouth, distant from them. And had done a thing which he could now get pain to forget for him.
For all the points of these optic fibers were blindly sprouting sideways outward in his pain. But pain that did not kill and was all he had but made him more.
What he was in might well be not other than he.
Even if he had lost his body.
Imp Plus thought he would not stop pain by being someplace else, or wanting to be. But he would react. And reach toward whatever he would want.
He was in a motion of other sizes; he saw he had wanted them. On one hand, he passed through a silent white glue, or numberless glues. And each let out tongues onto stems that had long roots and short feelers, and the stems sent off and got many glints of bond to or from other stems. Yet at the places where the glue cells tongued onto the stems, there were not these sparking glints. Instead a fine sheath of spiral layers. The sheath absent in places where Imp Plus could see into the stem. And inside the stem floated shapes he knew. They were baked-potato shapes, or ellipsoids with two skins, a smooth one and an inner skin or membrane with ingrown tufts and puckers and folds and therefore much more surface area. And he waited for the Dim Echo to specify something, for the Dim Echo was present.
Sizes passed him, coming and going. Yet he did not just stay while they went. And they did not seem his.
Imp Plus moved in those sizes. He flew through stems where nothing happened, no sparks at the feelers, spines, and twigs, no glints spurting off roots. Impelled to speak he watched instead a capacity increase. Capacity for speech. In these stems or him. Capacity for silence which was a solution in which these growing stems as if breathing in but then not out divided.
Imp Plus was moving out but through a new fold.
He could not see himself but knew the fold’s crease widened, saw the brightness and knew he had never stopped seeing it.
He was seeing the hide and fur of the Sun even before he was out onto the outside.
But on the outside through the looser waters like the sweet humor round the rainbow in her eyes, Imp Plus was still held back in the glue cells below and inside. For these were not only a sea for the stems; these glue cells did something.
If Imp Plus let them.
Yet they did not seem always his.
“It may be up to you,” a voice in the large green room on Earth had said. “There’s action in every reaction, don’t forget.”
Well, if Imp Plus let the glue cells drag him back into their slow adhesive, then he wanted to.
He was outside in the light where the Sun drew from the plant-nutrient test-beds a shivering inhale. But he was held at one end of himself inside among the stems. Both those that fired and those that were quiet. Inside also among the soft impeding other things, the glue cells.
But only if he let himself.
For though impeding, they were not so sticky as they had seemed. They floated and nursed the branchlets and tendrils and shoots and strings of their neighbor cells.
Imp Plus stared through the tendrils, shoots, hairs of the neighbor stem cells, and the motion of his gaze stirred dim strands in the corners of all his eyes, strands stirred he thought by sight, strands loosening and tightening, strands of resilience — and his gaze also stirred sound among the hairs as if he caused some to twitch with fire but the sound was not of her speech, for among some of these stems and glues there was only the capacity for speech; the sound was of a wind like the rays of the seashore Sun swinging grains of salt water out onto the air and sand. And seeing as not before that in the moment of his passing through this sphere to the outside and then — as if he were the map — being drawn back by a part of himself impeded by the smooth glue cells, some of these had spread, he then found his own Earthly speech and was telling her her hair was dry, stop shaking it, it gave him a headache; and the laughter spiralling like ribs all the way up not his blind side but his open front he found to be not her laughter but his. And looking close again at the glues or gels, he saw these cells flash.
As if, through Imp Plus reaching down from outside to inside, the Sun had flared down through the fold. He had known down but he thought he did not know it now.
The flash lit up a new flow. Gold fiber loosened or dissolved, and once more in the corners of all his eyes he thought he saw the strands of resilience loosening and tightening but did not know what they were. The glue cells were again a cushioning sea of white but there were more of them, this was the thing, and looser in themselves so the neighbor stems leaned into the bland gel like a finger into flesh.
He did not say when but wished to and would. But slipping back up the fold, he looked at the masses of stems and more at the white sea cells so much more numerous, and now saw one thing come before the other.
The flashes came from some but not all of the stems. From the hairy or twig ends. And each flash swelled and thinned and dispersed a glue cell, and then — so that Imp Plus thought his being outside and inside had hit him with an impedance of double vision, for a glue cell breathed in and breathed out at the very same time, and did so with a blast that recalled Imp Plus to Earth and the Earth word pain and with a blast that sent waves of decrease up Imp Plus and to the outside to make the bright shadows on the capsule bulkheads turn and stretch so he again saw high, crying shearwaters eyeing now the skin of two bare upright forms on the beach — what the flash from the stem end had started in the glue cell opened there a cleft which had unfolded but unfolded a division.
So that the smaller green room on Earth and the larger green room were at first further apart. Then they were present, there was more of them. Which crammed them and made them communicating rooms.