He had said ultramicrons. He had known.
From the Dim Echo now absorbed.
Or from what the Dim Echo had known from. From Earth once. Fences once — that was it — fences around ultramicrons, or of them. The ultramicrons were all the particles of his thought, his great thought from which by a slight change of charge from could to must he had now moved on, but which had dispersed suspended and at a point had gelled toward choking thickness till he had reversed the charge and reversed the feeling the particles had for one another: so instead now they held apart, and this dispersed suspension faded into his being — neither up nor down nor back — and was seen no more. But what did the word ultramicrons do?
Ultraviolet he knew from the Dim Echo, but the word was albedo, and he’d been briefed to recall it; albedo was being measured by Operation TL. But albedo was a cover. Camouflage, said the Good Voice. And ultraviolet was not only from the Dim Echo, it was from the Good Voice’s briefings, and it was from the Sun and they had said you could not see it or the D that, beyond Earth’s envelope, its angstroms might help to bring — angstroms were not langleys much less henrys — Imp Plus recalled remembering langleys by the dozen — and if the ultraviolet was from the braid-bright Sun, the D was not Dim, but if ultraviolet came like thought in ultramicrons, Imp Plus could see it and maybe had seen it.
Which Ground for all its monitoring would not know. But Ground was not monitoring now. Or if monitoring, not by Concentration Loop. Which Imp Plus had popped from one or more folds. Though which of the hanging slivers with their incoming waves rooted the Concentration Loop Imp Plus didn’t need to know.
But then, from the window he had touched without seeing out of, like a sheer dream of the changing neck or limb that touched it, he saw now back over the whole capsule. He saw what he had been becoming. He remembered not understanding time. He looked away again at the window that he did not want to look through. Then names for his parts came to him, and he looked back on himself where he saw still more time. For the crimson that flashed in brief veins that he had begun to see all over himself during the shifts of substance and that flashed in the warm of the day not much at night, he now saw in the darker reach of the bridge body that wound layers across one warp of what had been the brain. This sharp crimson flash reminded him he had not been seeing crimson flashes much now. And seeing this was so, Imp Plus though wending elsewhere to two silver lines he could not place found a moment of many crimson flashes everywhere over himself.
Which was the same, he now saw, as the spread feeling of his great thought of growth just before it became particles rising and falling in solution that from free coequal spread changed toward gel. He knew gel, just as he had thought he would be able to handle that great thought of growth. But as he saw the crimson flash equally over all of him equalling the thought that in fact he had not been seeing the crimson, he saw too that the one crimson that suddenly veined in the bridge end had been so sharp because it was in shadow — the shadow himself against the window that was between himself and Sun. But when he bent away removing the shadow and felt the cell nets of that warp dilate — which was what he felt was warmth — the crimson did not flash.
He looked more and at last he did not see, for the seeing membranes dilated. So he thought this close looking had made centers in each of them like the skewering electrode, and each center had dilated.
No: that is, he saw into the flesh of motion and elastic reticles of cells, and closer stilclass="underline" so a new, delimited aim aisled out, and he found himself falling as if he had been able to see the future by looking so close at the flesh of cell walls; and at that moment he found the fall as cramping in its plummet as the choking had richly been before, and he felt wrenched and yanked back on the end of an elastic sleeve or eye string he then would not look for.
And the pain reminded him.
But of what?
That he was in a bath of elastic. Elastic skin made for him. And the pain reminded him of cave-crash and himself — though him he was not sure of and would not seek.
He was reminded of the cave-crash, the stretching over an emptiness he did not know till he had passed it and had seen he’d brought it into being to fill it so he saw what he had not been able to do when he had stared his microsight so deep into his substance he reached past depth into potential. Saw what he had not been able to do. Saw because the enticing aisle offered to fall him into all final possibility. Saw also because parts here in this capsule, parts he needled his sight into, parts whose stuff was fired by braids of his and his Sun’s radiance, had peeled him from himself. Microsight had more power than he had known. It held him. The brown fingers with a gold ring peeled a sleeve back to put in a point. A syringe. But here in space he it was who had done the job, nobody else.
Which was to penetrate — he must (he saw he must) say what he’d done — peel and penetrate through microsight to such infinitesimal interiors of himself that he’d turned himself away from the whole thing he now was.
Had he wanted to see it so?
Looking, he did not know what to say. He had more than stretched and prodded the elastic skin the Project had designed to wrap him; he had turned it out of itself. The sheen he had now was not that skin that Project TL had fitted to him. That skin had melted into him.
Looking, he did not know what to say of the whole thing he saw he was, whose seeing he also was.
Where once there had been four wendings or faldoreams or shearows or morphogens, division had made many, and many one. What he had to see was that its only firm center was what went round it: the capsule sphere. This arc was joined to the plant-tube housing under what had once been the brain by two thickly silver-insulated wires running from an oblong box fixed at a place up the capsule bulkhead opposite the window beside which Imp Plus had now tried to station and confine his sight. What were wendings, faldoreams, shearows, morphogens?
Four kinds of his body and himself.
Words remembering other words, but new words for what he had become.
He watched his rims soften and rise all together to hold: but with nothing to hold, he thought: but as he thought this, the one great rim of substance humped into several oval holdings.
An amber-scaled shearow leapt up his being yet left its nether extension where it had come from; and he saw that this shearow, which had the drape-drop cover-lap edges and nightlike transparency of the faldoream it had once been, leapt across to the bulkhead to listen at the box where the heavy-wrapped wires came from. A control box.
But if wendings were now one, Imp Plus found by bounding a morphogen off either end of an axis visible in one part of the wending, that the wending had once been many and in some way still was. Many what? He felt he could not say, for see was the need or effect of say: many ports. But three, four, or many wendings had turned into their own motion.
He had to see his being only as it was now; for in the rise and fall of its glassy sheen of meat, making a wave of itself round or then across and back in every circuit, spiral, or skew of flowing interruption and many a skew he did not know until then in the fall or rise he knew he’d been prepared, he found himself full of what had been.