That is, where field had found a way to be a reach, or reach had found a way to know its difference from bulkhead, skin, or radiance it touched, and thus leaned its axis athwart itself to go sideways to join a reach so the reach was suddenly apt to burst and take and be its own neighbor plasm, he saw what a remembrance of caving burn and blood crack disinclined him to see.
He saw the previous leaning that had been present enough to grow into itself. And seeing this not distant past — the earlier tendings and extendings, the dark red or pale green ripples more gradient than motion, the turning of nets of micro-orbits of surface into silk films to see the Sun, yet cloudy silks to slow it — Imp Plus must incline away from the moment of those near memories; for they offered to slide him right down the axis of distance into all the shapes of Earth that could not be his now and would choke him in the words they threw up to him, shadows of what he saw and was and what he meant now instead to see and be, here in itself — that is, apart from Earth.
So limbs by inclination spread to others sideways and were not limbs. So such joined and thus disapparent bodies saw their way clear then to spread their membranes over across a body that had seemed to think itself equidistant from all the capsule. So more could seem less, in the reach of co-motion — only then to break its reply to the Sun’s radiation into all lengths of wave: so that along the membranes’ long reds, brief blues and violets, or medium greens but stranger also medium golds that were also everywhere, the one fastness of sight thus divided yielded all frequencies.
But frequencies of what, he was not sure.
A crimson vein came and went so fast it mapped a spiral and so fast the seeming spiral looked like two, and others in synchronous fields or seeming trains of ahead-thrown need approached what then seemed right to have approached. It was not growth so much as movement. Not a move so much as gradient inclination.
The shapes of the breathings round and round changed but continued, continued to change.
He did not add to himself as before.
Except to find that when a larger breath and a glutting web among many passing limbs crowded the arc of the capsule bulkhead to smell the acrid society of their thought, a contraction was always possible which was as much growth as were all those addings.
Which had gone with cave-crash and vein-flashes of crimson.
But now with more change than adding and more motion than change, the crimson continued in the bright heart of the late day which was many days, and, now Imp Plus came to think of it, the crimson died down at night when cold came, or Ground said it came. But what was cold?
A flank — the only flank and with new pores of moisture — the only flank for the moment (having been a wing, a neck, a finger of nose) — curled now about one plant bed assuming the oblong angles of the housing. And for that moment of brown shadow Imp Plus saw a shiver of coiling under the milky orange membrane and felt in his whole being the plant bed’s partial loss of Sun. But he felt it in the nesting curl of the shivering sweet smell of the coiling which was laughter he remembered up a spine he did not have.
And from the humor of this gland-warm, shade-chilled hug of a giant Micronesian clam fed unseeing by the hunger of light-hungry algae growing inside it, Imp Plus chose to recoil. But before he could do so, he saw the limb of himself not in the plastic housing which he was touching but in some substance below in the beds. What was it?
Yet the flank or limb slowed into orange-red like the optic crossing’s sometime glimmer, and the flank removed itself from around the clear housing so slowly Imp Plus found that this was what he had wanted.
To have the laugh at the giant clam fed by its own tongue of garden? Yet thus slide down the rains of distance not to Micronesian seas containing a blue-green recovery area, but to shearwater shores he could not reach.
He had another answer. The shiver of brown over the test beds. Shaded into chill by his flank. The shiver itself, yes, tested by the very slowness of his removal. Tested to see if the shiver of chill in these particular beds of algae had been really where he had thought.
The tubes between himself and the algae shone with action.
That must not stop.
Plantward in one tube ran two kinds from himself: first, the spinning units each one a small shell of micro-orbits held between two equally larger shells of micro-orbits; and second, the spindles — spindles spun of glancing knots radiating sun.
Sun he’d first thought glanced wildly because it was the great Sun caught in the tube track, then later because it was his own sun radiating force against its vegetable journey; but now Imp Plus saw the spindles were his own sun bombing the clear canal of plantward tube to rebraid with the lost joints of Sun quanta, and then he found that in the race plantward some spindle-radii did draw the other Sun into the tube track to rebraid, while some did this upon reaching the plants, and some others of the red and amber-gold spindle-radii of his myriad did not rebraid but, reaching the plant beds, hit the algae in a spray, shredding green and light from the damp plants into circles he had not seen till now and did not want to stop to dwell on.
Except to see that the red and amber-gold frequencies of this sun of his had been for a long time observable across the growing dispersion of the once-fiery gland’s once-central glow.
He did not care.
The thought came all of a sudden.
So much so that the motions of the wendings increased to a steady spiral as if speed changed kind. Then he did not care.
But the spiral oscillated. The thought of this colored its cause like a radius sweeping and fading, sweeping, fading, so that seeing himself whole he could say he was alone, and hence did not care for connections. Ground would say, “It looks like a starfish becoming a rainbow shoe, a featherless bird becoming a gland, a body becoming an orbit.” But Ground would not know what had happened.
The Acrid Voice had argued against video monitors inside the capsule.
Imp Plus did not care. They had wanted a life form to support, that they could afford to lose. A brain becoming information.
He and the silent Sun had folded to fool them, was that it? He did not care but could not rest. What he saw here had caused him pain.
Had cost him.
He let his sight multiply. So an amber-scaled shearow in its peninsular leap paused, or seemed to pause, in mid-reach and drooped long margins of blue tissue that returned to the more sluggish and productive faldoreams like neurons to their earlier selves, while morphogens bounding onto, but up from, the axes of the wendings touched shearow-leaps and faldoream-causeways to draw them among the wendings.
And the wendings in the solid of their spiral up and down yet as well under the full reach of multi-sight that Imp Plus relented into, gathered radiance of motion into a fixity like his own orbit: or, beyond his orbit, a possibility he wanted not to think of.
Wanted not to think of.
Was what he was. For Ground, for Project Travel Light, for the Good Voice.
Wanted, he had been. So then they would not have to think of him. Which led to a possibility he wanted not to think of.
Wanted not to think of.
But think or not, he had to see what now went on. Why had he to see, why attend? Words stalled into opposition, and his substance could have become morphogens freed from the axial plasm of the wendings, for he almost saw himself — itself a changing thought — wholly parted into all possible parts, divisor and dividend.