But the equal slivers looked complete in themselves. Sheer pins. Clear needles. With lengthwise parallels of transparency inside each whole transparency.
In proportion long, in size the slivers were small. When he looked at them he could lose sight of everything else around him. So when he refocused on the rest around him, or then refocused on the slivers to see the silver points at each end, he got long tickles of ache, a polar axis trying to pivot in him.
Ground reported transmissions from numbered areas. But since Imp Plus had desired the Dim Echo not to answer, Imp Plus felt these new transmissions might be the spasms set off in him when he looked back and forth between the slivers and the rest around.
The spasms had length but were not long. This was true also of the crimson veins that glowed like light in caves briefly seen.
Now at one end of each sliver changes were piling in that were hard to see. Bird knees like grasshopper elbows riding in by the million folded up into a silver point on each sliver. Waves came.
There were other places to be.
Imp Plus was here.
Still, in the green and golden sunlight of the algae beds and their glassy cover, he found an idea that he was becoming someplace else.
For he saw this brain of himself from points and sides that were outside it. So for a second that stretched the burn of the cavings into the once-known other pain beyond burning that hummed waves along an axis of distance, he decided he was in a dream on Earth. He had dreamt it in several places before the start of Operation TL. He had dreamt he was looking at what was left; and when he tried to take in breath, he had no lung. But this dream had made the bare brain a lighted, scaleless specimen from a photo lens. While what he had here differed.
He fell toward his brain or away from it. This changed its size. He passed from spoke to spoke of his sight moving around the brain so it seemed to turn. And most of all it was open to floods of lumen, Sun streams of tracer nuggets each one so wholly precise it bent an additional, completing Sunlight along the flank of its intensity so overshadowingly more than intensity that it was dimension that might be frequency itself.
Ground did not ask for the differences; Ground did not ask if Imp Plus had stress. Ground requested readings, and Imp Plus let the Dim Echo answer. But the Dim Echo did not. And Imp Plus had to give the readings.
But what differences? Between the Earthly dream and what was here in orbit. Differences from more than dream.
Which were they?
Imp Plus informed himself. A flood of blinding quanta headed through the brain, yet stayed. This made the sea of glia cells shine into snow bedding the bursts of neuron fire, neurobodies firing forth thought that he saw but could only know was his. Imp Plus recalled flesh against a flashlight. And here in the brain’s four bellies the Sun flood bulged so the bellies touched and swelled their light into a single brimming, But beyond the ventricles — they were ventricles, the bellies — Imp Plus found in all the incandescence curls of clefts too and the sealed banks of canals like light laid upon the field of light. Saw them while now he saw further the fountain crown of optic radiations line by line. But below them, where Imp Plus on his prior trip had not been ready to go, he thought he saw where the Sun’s flood furled to a gland of flame.
Imp Plus was ready to see these insides containing the Sun’s flow. From outside his brain he looked into it through a gray-amber flesh, through glaring oxides of saffron cytoplasm, through platinum-fired sheaths of glue cells, even to the edge of that gold gland of flame. Layer on layer swarmed with those ovals the cell’s power plants each with its path of particles breathed through blood-blanched locks of enzyme. Imp Plus might as soon use for these baked-potato ovals the Dim Echo’s stored and pointless and (he saw) now fading word mitochondria, as smell through it an acrid ill will now merely remembered: or see an alien ellipsoid feeding an Earthly fire.
Yet not as soon, maybe. For the Earthly fire was far away. And a memory unprepared.
Yet a frequency that went on mixing its signal of scrub and thorns until the fibers of crackling campfire came apart and he heard the signal.
Or saw: for the Earthly fire was in the night and in Mexico, unlike the Sun stream running through the brain, and unlike crimson veins winking life into tails of shadow.
Or smelled: for the potato shapes that neither fed the faraway fire nor were fed, had smelled like that for years and years.
But as they blackened into the mouthing coals, they were seen through: for amid the long potato shape — potato? mitochondrion! — was a daylight window; and a small bird black-white-and-gray with a touch of red on its side and a forked tail three times its body swept over a line drooping between poles against the plateau of sky: so a voice could say words about the sac hanging from the dark line: it was a nest woven by the cousin of the scissor-tailed bird, and both birds were called flycatchers.
The words were out loud. The voice had wanted to take a breather from Operation TL, get away from California for a few days and nights. The voice was his, and it was talking. The car’s daylight window had moved, like the glove compartment with its books of California matches, into the nighttime campfire where not one but two potato shapes roasted.
For there was a second voice. It had not come from California. It did not laugh and was not the same that had lain in the water, and it was dry but not acrid. She had seen the scissor-tailed flycatcher from the car window. And now waited for her potato among the thorns and scrub of the tierras templadas. And this voice said this was good — oh she’d wanted to get away to the Sun.
But the Earth with the campfire had turned away from the Sun. And the voice across the fire with its eyes closed would go away, and Operation TL would not. So Imp Plus had leaned along the ground and moved around the fire. The voice, hers, was not speaking; it sang: he heard templado, not templadas and not tierras.
Imp Plus got to her. Except he was not yet Imp Plus. With the start of Operation TL he would no more be what he had been, and maybe this had been why he had been moving around the fire toward the voice that sang with eyes shut.
When she was done she opened them. He had been touching her blue jeans and she had been holding a silver flashlight that shone in the fire.
He had been thinking what would come and remembering what he was to become in four weeks. This thinking had been clear and it had been touched by desire; so it came to him now in orbit. But he could move from spoke to spoke of his sight around the radiant brain. For this was new, this was not remembering. Or the spokes were new. For they were his sight, each one a solid. Yet where their light was dimmer they could be seen through, and yet his sight was maybe not sure.
His sight, though, was solid. But was not only spokes.
More wings or necks.
He didn’t know where they came from, but he knew they went to the brain.
Knowing this he saw there in the brain a blue dart come like the crimson veins in the shadows before. This blue was a line and then a radius. But a radius become the locus of a width. Which was how it plowed sideways broadside. He knew locus.
The knowing and seeing of these things went or came with the tearing twist of pain. It twisted round tight but did not untwist. For instead it found in its tightening spiral new dimensions by which it then burst inward. And was the reverse of torn. A thick new membrane. He stepped back to view the cloudy silk of it which was close to him on the way to the brain along his solid but unsure sight.