Which were two inclinings among inclinings. Inclinings flooded by a slow-flaming gland that seemed like his sight unlimited.
And if joined like the microsight beyond the capsule into that length of blue afternoon space where somewhere some cloudy blue-mottled Ground hung like a preserved gland, then also connected to the sweet watering of some body’s eye feeding Imp Plus on the pulse of its color contracted across a pupil gap by rings of muscle celled like an Orbital Monitoring Station experiment able to change size.
Divided, Imp Plus in one dilated membrane heard the voice that said “Vanity” say “Glad I didn’t pack a bag.” He choked back something lost. And in another contracted membrane heard, with a pulse choke-bombing up and down his glorying head, a voice say, “But what would be the advantage of a capsule that could change size?” The same voice he also smelled saying (and so acrid that Imp Plus wanted to toss his head this way and that to get out of a chamber of chalk dust choking him), “The brain can signal lack of sugar but not lack of oxygen, so we’ll watch you for any accumulation of CO2.” The words were hard to wait for. He was choking even if he had no brain now but instead neck after neck unheaded and unlike a neck he had once prepared to save. Or had the operation at the last moment reversed the plan and saved the body not the brain?
He choked through the velvety waters of eyes whose enticing mesh was lost for good; he choked through the voice’s words Travel light. He choked through a last grind of disintegrating teeth meshed on an axis between axles — that was it. A grinding dividing of ill body by ill wilclass="underline" he saw it in the capsule window like the reticle they had left out — he saw
fade into the clear glass and recalled only the grinding dividing of ill body by ill will, geared through soft sand and hard road to outdistance the dune watcher gearing his overdrive: but away for what? to find all through the towering headaches of that last weekend body over will in constant mesh of want driving back to the Project called Travel Light only as it had become his own secret will over the body from which that willed secret was to be divided.
Back at the end of the weekend, then, to the secret field of growth, Imp Plus had choked as if he hadn’t meant to on those words accumulation of CO2. And now on the O that was all around him. And in him. But bonded into absence.
And now new-grown but standing away toward sleep, he knew only that he’d choke if he didn’t do one more thing. But then another. Many. That was it. Do them quick or else.
And in the midst of the great gland’s bomb that like his multi-microsight seemed boundless and therefore unengaged, he found it also not like his sight; for the gland could not have focus: if not in where it went at least a reverse focus in its source. For the gland sent its omnifluence out from the same old center of what had been but was not now the brain.
Yet more: this difference between gland and sight turned Imp Plus like breathing to and from the gland and its field of himself. Back or forth past the optic crossing. There discolor had now long turned nearby fibers palest olive. But been turned to pinwheels of radii so many he would not see with his sight for a moment that the wheels lacked rims and the radiant spokes of so many lengths extended many colors fixed for a passing moment upon the axle points of the pinwheels but then shot off like stalks pulled up or like long low animals with plates instead of membranes sliding into water, the waters of all the fields of flood.
Seeing that the strange words radii of color were true, he could not stop to know why.
For the difference he had found between great gland and multi-sight turned Imp Plus to a new difference. It was in the spindling Sunbraids of what had been the midday cells now midafternoon. What he saw in the slowed Sunbraids looked caused by the light of the milky standing smoke of his great thought but also making that blinding curdle and sponge of light as ultramicron particles give up the spring of their meshes and slick frameworks. How did he know ultramicrons? What he saw was that those reverse-magnet Sunbraids raying off out into the fields of his space were braids of two Suns not one.
And the new one was sun from him. His own.
Sun that was him.
He’d seen it in pieces and in waves longer than Ground’s but shorter than the long elbows and sailing legbones which were the great Sun’s rays, some greater some less, both greater than his own one kind.
Which they fit — and in a wonderful braid of angles that gave him for one last moment a darkening ratio of known body over known body and body under body under the eyes of the dune: so for that moment that he would know was his last and most enticing choke, he recalled her warm waves and his, free and loose together as if those bodies were not lost to him always.
Thereupon he knew what then he saw he had tried to know before. This thought took effect before he knew it, and the effect was a sourceless jolt that turned him like unfolding him nearside far, or like a thought that was his charge to learn. It ran through the thickening gel and blew the ultramicrons out with a crash the reverse of crash so they hung again dispersed in springy nets of mesh. And the Sunbraids and floods of Sun moved again, though Imp Plus was given pause by knowing what had caused the change of charge. For that was what it was, a change of charge.
And the cause was the jolt which was a thought.
The thought that not only could he think his own growth, he must.
Yet did not his changing limbs think him?
But the pause was a way of speaking, a dim sound of how someone once had spoken. Or how a thing had grown a name.
And now so much flowed from the new state, he could only think he must try to know what he knew. Silver lines — two — drew his thought; but not yet, for now he would think only about the Sun tubes. The tubes moved again, or what was along them. He was breathing.
The things in the tubes differed.
Knot-packets of double-Sun were not all that now raced down from his clear underhousing to the plant beds. What was not the packets was streams of another. Points within points that held each other off but did not defend against his reaming sight. Which came very close or not. Depending on what, he did not know. This lack of limit was not good. He went close, or brought the tubes to him, but did not know what was to be done with what he found.
For it made him think of himself. Of constant mesh gears on a seashore road. And he would not go back into that rich mixture that choked him into liking to be choked. But this time inclining toward the currents in the tubes, he would not think beyond them to what he had once thought was a thought he could handle. (He did not know handle.)
So for a time he saw only what he saw. Points of orbits within orbits. But one point or body of space repeated. And the unit was one smaller shell of orbits held — how? — between two slightly and equally larger shells of orbits to make a lot of empty space into a tight whole of spinning cross-orbits, in which the fastest of the bodies in the orbits stayed closer to the two larger shells than to the middle smaller shell yet so that all three bodies made one.
He followed both tubes at the same time. He liked this mere twofold motion more than the myriad radii his sight if he chose could bring to bear. For he thought of two eyes once and how their lines met always at a point you could see, like a line of chalk becoming an ellipse or bright pale teeth lighting the moist loin of mouth coming close to the focus of his mouth.
But he mustn’t think that way, he must see what was here: that the upward tube from the plant beds into his own being brought back only part of each body he’d seen flashing down the plantward tube: the outer parts or orbiting orbits, not the smaller shell of orbits in between: so the smaller stayed in the plant beds, and the larger came back: and if when the upward tube stopped flowing he choked, then the upward brought something to breathe: which did not mean that the slightly smaller in-between orbit left in the plant beds was not to breathe, though he did not know.