The light was less and less; so the sparks firing from twig across to branch made more glow. But dropping over opposite hills he wanted to reach and get the rungs back. For what he reached was that small hand from a distance he could not use. That hand was what he reached, a small hand seated on a huge, singing wheel that turned beside the sea. The small hand he reached was seated in a falling rung on a seat he could not now use.
The rungs arced out and down and in. The fore rung dropped more slow and not so deep as the after rung. It was like unequal growing. But his own. But what happened now made Imp Plus recall being tired, because he must be tired now by the twilight bedding the lantern canals and the colonies as if they did not know him going about their work whose gloaming use he would try to feel without the power of that pain now absent. For when both rungs reached a long chasm dividing everything gray, white, blue-green, and amber-red narrowly in two — and what lay below was not the brain — the rungs straddled the divide. But kept on moving. Now in. Working like bridges on rollers, on tracks along the banks of the chasm, and what lurked below and was not the brain could still be seen from the frontal rung but not now from the rear rung. But what happened to tire Imp Plus was that he felt not in two places at once. Except this was not what was tiring, but offered the reverse. While what he saw ought to be tiring was the rungs. Which bridged a divide he now saw down through only by working through the cells where the two sides of the fissure met. But what was worse than tiring was then not really the difference between fore and aft; not between the same nerve and glue cells in front, and these and new cells in back; or between the new, long bulb-tipped horseshoe limbs inside which the fore rung now ran — and the climbing fibers and mossy fibers, radiating stars, baskets, and seaweed tuning forks among whose frequent right angles the rear rung passed like air in foliage. (He did not know foliage.) What was other than tiring was that the rungs thought their way along all this independent of him.
Or what was tiring was the need to be at two points when he felt in one. He was not equal to it. But they in their increase or motion were not equal to each other.
These two. Fore and aft, through which two arms or ends or pincers moved now toward each other. And absently: for what did he get from this will to grip? Or what did it touch or do up among the tangled backward-tending tendrils split out from the horseshoe limbs he thought (and knew he thought) were old nerves of smell; and what did this gripping will touch or do back among planes of tree-branch folia, planes like flattened leaves, and among folds so many, so packed, so fine their slowed cycles and endless-fingered special bodies were ready to be reached by many motions at once and be the monitor or balance or union of these things.
But the rungs of his grip also looked forward for something to do and closed toward each other, the backward-bound forward rung a bit higher than the forward-bound after rung. But they slowed.
They were approaching the gland of flame. It had now spread out powering the islands above. A power thought that Imp Plus felt was not only light.
Yet he knew that it was not for fear of that stored power that the rung ends of his caliper grip came to a halt here. Rather they were being dragged outward. Dragged by fatigue and by its opposite. Dragged by the sight of the smell tendrils in the frontal brain homing back out of the bulb-tipped horseshoe toward other tendrils coming laterally from the truncated eye tracts. Dragged too by the joint leaning which, closer, was the finest movement up toward those buoyed islands and out toward the widening clefts of dusk in the capsule. Dragged also then by a memory grown new in the rungs by a reach of act’s breath taken, inhaled, used, and given back by desire for act to then inhale.
Each rung now was an old radius turned spindle: turning free of the uncompleted ellipse of his pincer grip to spin through the evening spaces of the brain.
Till the grip itself turned, and was the sweep arc of this oval hemisphere: the place he had felt himself in when he could feel himself in one place not two.
Some eye tendrils had joined some smell tendrils. Some of these had divided into the sea hairs, and some had swayed away from pause as if slowly to surprise themselves with what they would think — and had reached up through the flanks of the brain to lean in parallels near the gorge of certain more active clefts. New hollows leaned not toward the light which had all but gone, but to each other.
The sweep arc was the hemisphere in motion.
A locus helmeting his home.
Housing in its course if not a true hemisphere a whole flash of relations flowing through every distance which idea would reach to touch, flowing as all the sides of his sight. From this center he would see now more clearly than any pulse from Ground would tell him what had gone on in the large green room on Earth where the Good Voice and others agreed on unknowns, and in the small green room where the Acrid Voice coughed up knowns. See now more clearly than the Acrid hand sweeping back around and down and in along the bottom to complete a chalk ellipse.
Imp Plus from his new center with its layers of trees and skeins of light headed through ventricle reservoirs, saw what the woman did with his pulse. She took it and went away and came back with a syringe instead. A disposable syringe.
For what?
Imp Plus felt a turn that was not this locus turn. He did not know where it was. It did not fit. It came with what he knew was the growth pain; but it wasn’t painful. He would look for the Dim Echo. He would find words in the Dim Echo that would tell what the California woman’s syringe did. He knew he had known. But he did not know why he did not now know. He knew there were two California women, the beach one and the nurse. He was losing them. Or a way between them.
He thought what the gland below the island had done with its flame. He tried to know what now a clear cluster of dim edges did turning into a line to lean toward the new turn — this new turn — that he’d just felt but could not place.
However, he might try to know what the cluster did, the cluster spilling into a line knew what to do, he thought. Yet it was some part of him, he knew — the cluster, the line, and the doing. He looked into the cluster that had turned into this line and he saw the tiny suck that he’d seen before, or its process, or slide, and near it he saw ovals. They were for nourishment and had a name he could not place and had smaller things going on inside where not so many had been before. His sight found sugar and in the same row its resulting absence. A net narrowed and drew through him, like that cylinder or like that gut. Drew through him toward the distant turn or bend that was not here any more than he was the center. He let himself be drawn out looking back to the nonetheless near oval shapes and the membrane suck, itself unseen not because Imp Plus failed but because it was a gradient event. It pumped against the gradient flow, this suck, as if needs of some potential blood remembered from the Sun wished to open constantly some wondrous inequity between inside the cell and outside in the sea about it. So the suck slid its charges across the skins of cells. A smell of sugar and burning came with Imp Plus, who was not home and knew he was not lost but did not understand the brain or his sight of many sizes.
Except one thing — as Ground, asking what was GLUCOSE BEAUTIFUL, requested another reading since glucose was too high: one thing Imp Plus knew was that they would not give him this sight of many sizes if they had it to give.
Down through great thicknesses of pulses Imp Plus looked back to the chasm which the rungs had bridged and he found now through the chasm a motion that was not his, and for a moment the chasm parted him into a fear that was neither the broken, divided operating table becoming a chair or the breaking of his body from what would be kept, but was the dividing of him from himself. He thought he would be glad of the Dim Echo’s presence. He heard Ground speak of sleep, and he was of two minds but did not know mind.