But only almost — or was that it? — for what had now been going on looked a power of “almost.”
For ultrapoints stood each other everywhere swirling but not meeting. Fields of points. Imp Plus knew field. Fields leaned together like planes of chances but the ultrapoints did not touch, they stood one another off though close. Imp Plus tried to know what they were points of. He said to himself they were in his mind. But when he once more confined the source of his sight to the ridge of optic membrane on a spine of shearow that he once more stationed beside the window, and the fields were even more thin and sheetlike than before with multi-sight but seen now to intersect each other, he knew he had been seeing these fields since long before the great thought’s suspended ultramicrons of milky smoke, and had thought these fields shadows of the light.
And shadows, now he thought about it, from those particles of his own sun that had not braided themselves with the great Sun.
And so they might yet be.
But seeing from out the wide length of his halted shearow’s membrane beam, he saw many of these fields coming from one surface source, high above which hung an expelled electrode-sliver adrift; and these fields of ultrapoints streamed forth thence in the form of a cone and it was volute because spiralled into an endlessly uncompleted funnel — till they broke off and flattened followed by others. But now Imp Plus saw the once-hidden wire that ran from the pump’s and plant tubes’ housing on the brain — or what had been the brain — across the cortex to this site-source of the funnel fields. And at this site on what had been the cortex, that sliver in the air above had once been stuck.
These fields of charge, then, came from the open wire that ran from the nutrient tubes’ brainward housing on the brain rim. And the wire’s charge came from the thickly insulated cables running to this underhouse across brief space from the box on the capsule bulkhead opposite the window. And now he knew the box. He had heard echoing in a giant shell of a place where the Good Voice had shown just where the IMP skin’s facets of narrow-panelled Sun-receptor cells fed into the capsule to this inside box. Bus, the voice had called it, having already said, “Go ahead, feel free to look around, it’s all yours.” And the giant room — the facility, the voice called it — echoing round the beached IMP capsule, had clamped shut the meshing waves of valve shell on Imp Plus, but on the Good Voice too maybe, so that Imp Plus wished to be alone with his desire.
Which led not where but how: or so he’d thought, not knowing he would think his own growth and be apart from Ground in chances more curious than he himself would foresee. For wait: that choking gel of the great thought that he could think his own growth had stopped not just the dual plant-tube streams but the disc-shaped pump inside the underhousing, and the pump had not begun again till after the welcome charge had run through the thickening gel and blown the ultramicrons or what else they were out to hang dissolving and dispersed in nets of springy work.
But wait: what had stopped the pump had stopped what ran the pump, and what ran the pump would be watts from solar cells in the great panels mounted outside with the albedo receptor and infrared camera.
He thought he wanted not to think about it. It brought back Ground that said, MAXIMUM POWER IN ACCUMULATOR. GLUCOSE UP. It brought back the Good Voice that had said — not “Vanity,” which had come later from the woman combed and beached, but—“You don’t want to go on forever.” It brought back Ground saying WHAT IS GOING ON UP THERE? and thinking Imp Plus had gone on too long. (Though how long? or how much too long?)
He was one thing.
For better or worse.
The Sunbraids pivoted along the outer stream-lines and routes of the wendings and across the transverse lip-swells of the faldoreams, their pores aglint with late mineral crusts of the great gland’s force itself seen everywhere both in this late crust and in the shapes of glow. And his own sun sprayed slow in banks of particles. He liked them slow. They had caused him pain. They must have.
And he loved the functions of sight and taste and thought and smell and chances desired and held in memory. Loved the morphogen-eruptions paired now at either end of many runglike axes — not along the wending-motions but along faldoreams which seemed thus to trim the draping fringes of their golden hides, and change their sluggishness into dark shearows one of which, with two morphogens bulbing up again and again in a flesh that turned opaque, reached down again to embrace now two connected plant-bed houses. And Imp Plus knew he could not even want to stop what he also knew might lead him to why he had stood away, turned away, from the great thought that he could think his own growth.
For the shade over the algae and anabaena beds chilled him to the bone, contracted the wendings, clouded the crusts of force that glinted from the pores of the faldoreams. But most — the spindle-radii of his own radiance raced through him toward the plantward tube as if against a thing so like them he’d not seen different motions. And the morphogen beats now snapped that growing shearow out of its embrace to test by contrast what the shade-chill had done; for Imp Plus saw that the plant-tube currents ran full tilt again, likewise the pump in the housing at what had been the brainward end.
So the pump slowed when the plant-works lost their Sun. But the particles of radiance not already bound with the great Sun into braids raced through Imp Plus to get to the plantward tube. But if the pump — pumping what? — got its power through the volt circuit from the solar cells, the only thing that could make that pump slow (or stop, as it had stopped when Imp Plus had choked) was a change in that power.
The loss of power had come with the loss of Sun when Imp Plus had shaded the plant beds. Only one thing connected the two losses: the race of unbraided radiance through all parts of him including the parts where lay sections of the bus cable from the solar arrays mounted outside.
The radiance was rays, was brightness, was his own sun. But in the radiation of its promise he did not know what it could be, this sun of his. A race of radiance, but an impeded race to the plantward tube.
From his angle at the window seeing inward he thought he saw transmission waves had stopped coming in to all the hanging slivers but one. Yet other slivers might remain. Shallow, deep. If deep, maybe now mobile through all streams and intersections of his work. Which he found hard to sense without the multi-sight he was trying not to use.
There seemed more, but it seemed slower. Racing for the underhousing to get into the plantward tube, the spindle-radiations of his own sun seemed impeded by a thing — a potion: until Imp Plus saw this was the old radiant force from the once-flaming gland which for the moment he did not find.
He found his microsight burned into action and found the gland’s flood all over again now pulsed of particles and meshed so fine that as he understood why his spindle-radii had such wading impedance to breathe their way through, and as he saw the flood’s charged and deviant lattices through which the radiant spindle-radii fought to pass, he barely understood in the opening of all the pain he had ever known which now burned whole in breath after breath that pulsed away his very name — barely understood — that the particles of the gland’s flood, though infinitesimal next to the spindle-radii, were in every other way and every place identical and the same.
This turn — this motion or mind — came in him not from a site-source like that of the funnel fields; it came all over him at once; so he felt equal to himself at the same time that he had nowhere else to turn.
And at this moment he was trapped in a multi-sight that felt the reverse of trapped because it was not stop but passage, though sieved through lattices and lattices inside and out. And he could not stand off the one lattice fixed like potion crystal that came at him.