But even before he was drawn up almost like the hand of the Sun in what the Dim Echo now called, at different moving distances, “Premotor cortex,” Imp Plus knew a sprinkling of centers but no one center.
This cleft was narrow still but Imp Plus felt on him a webbed bulge as he reached the lip of the capsule’s dark. Off by a bulkhead he made out a slope of the hemisphere where it had been hanging adrift before. A pale light touched the window. The first window ever built into an IMP. But no reticle had been imprinted on the window because no man would be there to—to land, said the words — no — to measure position. But the window thought for itself; he remembered that; but could not see if the window thought of him.
There was light through it. Imp Plus did not know if the light was stars or (and the word came on the old axis of distance) the Moon.
He could not spot the slivers now or recall the thing the woman had done with the syringe. But the turn he had felt before in the lighted heart of the brain, he now saw: the bend he had noticed still earlier out there in one spoke or reach had grown around and so far that now it nearly touched the adjacent limb. Or had it moved but not really grown?
But as if to prove Imp Plus was watching, the bend moved. And the Dim Echo very close by was saying to Ground, O.K.
For Ground had ordered Imp Plus to sleep.
7
But Imp Plus did not sleep. He let the Dim Echo do his sleeping for him, was that it? Yet also Imp Plus did not know sleep. The word for it from Ground felt like a line along a middle between sides. But he did not know sleep. He saw large and small. All that was new about this was that he knew he’d been doing it for many turns of day and night so he wanted words to count the turns and he thought to draw these words to him along the axis of distance.
But to where?
He was at the narrow cleft. It was a cleft of the brain. Back down the cleft when he looked the dim facets that had been in a line leaned away and withdrew to be again a cluster.
But a cluster now with a pollen shine and a glint of net.
Which had not been seen when this cluster of pump, oval, and other small motions had turned to a line just when Imp Plus had let himself be drawn out to the narrow cleft in what the Dim Echo had called premotor cortex.
Where to see the Dim Echo?
Imp Plus looked, and the clustered facets inclined again to this cleft he’d been drawn to. Other clusters everywhere did also, singling down to brief lines in his direction. They reached at him, and he could be the Sun out of sight around a corner and they were inhaling to drag out of the brain’s night this light that was left.
But then these lines of outflow slung their lengths back and were clusters. Imp Plus could have chosen to see the lines from many points, and points moving and not moving. He had chosen to. But he did not know if those lines, now withdrawn into clusters, had been as long as they had gone on.
All these works went on without him. Yet it was him they were.
A touch came. A message like the nurse’s needle. A point of force spread upon him to be a screen. The screen or plane had unfolded at the cleft except Imp Plus did not see how. For past the shadow of strands lax or tightening in the corners of his eyes, he could see out through the cleft as before to the capsule bulkheads and the glimmer of his growth. But wherever the plane or field was, once spread across it the force made him — or made him want to — move his eyes from one side to another and back.
Which made him want to have the eyes to do it with. Or want to think he had. For he knew he didn’t have.
Not eyes like those he’d lost that were like the woman’s other-colored eyes he’d smelled at the California shore.
Or seen and loved and wanted. Though not smelled, or not known he smelled, till here now tight or lax through sugars sliding from chamber to vein.
Not chamber or vein of eyes. Yet sugars. Lactic. Lactic sugars.
He had got somewhere almost.
And doubly. For he brought back, and instantly returned for an instant to, that after part of the brain through which the aft caliper of will had passed: the part which the Dim Echo sleeping nearby might give a name to and where the fine folds of muscle—muscle was the word — must wait and want for far-flung motions or motors to pass, seeking themselves. Not the rings of cell muscling the ends of the California woman’s rainbow iris in across the pupil’s gap in his memory, or one he thought was his. Instead, other muscles he could not find, but could want, but could not wait for.
He had come almost to see a thought. Which meanwhile like a constant map of him watched him, he thought, not he it.
Then the touch was gone, and he saw that it had not been like the nurse’s needle, which had made him lose sight of her. He looked to find the Dim Echo. But he found all the night cities of the brain as if he were not here. And he looked out past a brief, gray glitter at the lip of the cleft which he thought to be a membrane starting with the webbed bulge he had centered on, though he felt also everywhere. At an unknown distance hung a solid curve of dusky, blue-mottled pearl. He knew what he’d once seen on Earth but as quickly saw that he could not be seeing through the bulkhead — and the window was not in that direction. Beyond the lip of the cleft were the wings, necks, spokes, organs, exits, or entrances: which were maybe none of these, though he was sure of one thing, that they had gone from the brain.
But they had made the brain what he couldn’t find in himself to see: made the brain other than what they had come from. The map of how to get back changed.
The capsule was darker. Ground might have changed attitude. Over and in the chlorella beds a feeling of light constantly receded and was there. The outer light that was not the Sun but might be a distant milk of stars and had maybe named itself the Moon could itself have shifted.
The outlying parts were there, but they were him more than he could see them. Yet he saw what he saw. The bend curled in still more. For in the fine light of itself, it wanted to join the nearby limb, or keep going and curl back toward the brain.
The lights of the outlying membranes were under the membranes. Each light a layer of length going on holding the Sun that was not here now.
The cleft to which Imp Plus had felt drawn contracted as the outlying limb curled. But both stopped. Imp Plus had a slowness in the outlying limbs. Or did not now feel much of what was going on there. He was alone with himself. He thought this inside. The Dim Echo was near and inside, not off among the outlying plasms. The Dim Echo was asleep. With lights on. Asleep lighted by the glove of feelers the Sun’s departed hand had left. Did the wings sleep? What light disturbed their membranes? Light they gave themselves. Without eyes the Dim Echo was not disturbed by light. Here inside the brain — or what had been the brain from which whatever had sprung, the light stored from the Sun’s day was more than light.
Still, light helped Imp Plus see this. These flows.
In the gold shadow over each pale red flow he saw — but not till he should want to — a full galaxy of colors. They were what he’d seen when he’d first recalled the woman’s eyes. The gold shadow was also underneath. The gold shadow was what showed the other colors in the pale red. He could not tell if he now smelled the sweet flow or recalled the smell; he saw down inside and forward of the islands and the gland. Saw what he knew must be a different size — the tendrils not only glowing from the horseshoe lobes he and the forward rung had thought to be his broken smell, but also throwing toward these gold-shadowed pink flows motions like transmissions.