Until he saw it was an Earthly fence.
Inside was one thing, outside another.
And the fence with a red high-voltage sign told him that here, in the capsule and his being, the silver insulation about the solar-power cable had not been strong enough against the lattices of his own field, his radii seeking use.
He was sieved back and forth through the fence but the pain went into his knowing he was the fence.
If potioned by the lattice, he became the lattice. Dissolved, reconstituted.
It was hard and he needed help, but he had had it.
He was hardening but not choking.
What had saved him from choking was that he must think his own growth. But in the last long while he had not grown. He had moved, reached, contracted, and held up. But he had not increased.
Yet chances to go further led to chances. A chill from the plant beds had told him he was a part of them. A child coughed in winter smoke. Strands loosened and tightened in the corner of eyes, turned red when warm and then resiliently resumed their x-ray breath. The blind news vendor said he could have been a vegetable. The Acrid Voice said something that was not bad. Imp Plus saw he himself was the Micronesian giant with algae inside — though why not brown from the Sun? — but while the big clam could open its shell with its adductor muscle he could not enlarge his capsule.
He was tired but warm. The words reminded him: but of almost nothing: then the spines of the shearows drew a ripple of morphogens down their length like a hand under a cover and Imp Plus saw that though lacking lips he had laughed.
There were more spindle-radii but not more of himself. The spindle-radii found themselves braiding equally with the streaming quanta radiating from the Sun’s early-evening hand.
He must take hold, vegetable, animal, or himself. In daylight he knew the algae, anabaena, and other plants worked with what came to them to work with, and something came back up the upward tube. At night the dark upon the plants should have chilled him but had not. And while the pump had slowed or stopped when the plants were dark, and when the pump had stopped he had choked, while when he choked the pump stopped — he did not choke at night. At night, glucose and other life signs were high. But the cable from the solar-power bus ran to the pump house — pump house? — the morphogens rippled down the slow faldoreams and then the wendings waved the living knobs of the morphogens — he was laughing — so, chill or not, the pump pumped at night by Sun power stored from the day. But Ground had said that at night electricity remained at maximum.
He must think to grow, but what now happened he must watch.
A sleeve of orbiting Sunbraids shrank around the silver-sheathed cable and became hard. The pump paused. The sleeve flew slowly off. The pump went on.
He had the power. So he could kill himself. Perhaps with help.
The wendings turned slower and a pale grid of vacancy made a move counter to the wendings. Some new returning center was gearing into him.
He felt himself everywhere latticed. To counter this he moved. But only sleeved the cable and saw the funnel fields of charge stop spraying from the open end of the wire that came from the pump housing into which the solar cable went.
And then the pump did not stop.
For though he did not know how, he now knew the power could come from him, which was why the solar batteries did not lose juice at night.
He found he had known already.
The sleeve let go, and the solar circuit took over, but the radiant particles had done that sleeving to show him what he half knew. He knew half.
But must know more. Must know what down in the plant beds reflected his limb when it lay touching the plant housing.
He had known ultramicron, and thought he had not known it from the Dim Echo or the Acrid Voice. The fiery fence was himself as he had been, and the project engineers had handled him with kid gloves for he was to be hooked up to their system and then spent. But he would use them too.
He had looked into an ingrown body of mouth upon grooves and arches of a tongue laid with velvet nipples of light-receptor cells: he saw he had been the point of the dune watcher’s long, unknowing gaze, for Imp Plus had looked into her mouth—her not him, but how to mouth the difference, for was there a difference between a her mouth and a him mouth? — and he had known he did not fear loss on an operating table the next week: had known that as his microsight came to him by division upon division, the unknown desire that had come to him on the beach in place of fear divided its long vacancy to yield the pain of caving, the knowledge that contained the pain, and a lasting division of body-brain by will, to yield what he was and would be.
But which will?
He must know more.
Electrical power sprayed in his substance again. It sprayed from the open line below the hanging sliver. He saw that his new being — for all its impurity and potion — was a lattice that could take these sprays of the great Sun with whom he was in league and conduct them hither and yon.
But he did not know why, then, a slow, slow shearow reached out and, in its hardening state unable to divide its aim into fingers, guided the sliver electrode down toward the open wire where it lay partway down what once would have been a left frontal slope of folds, had there now or then been anyone here to face away from the bulb-bun cerebellum and thus have a left and front. And Imp Plus knew that where the sliver was to be reimplanted was not only the site-source of the funnel fields in what had been the cortex of the brain; it was also the site of the Concentration Loop.
10
Which meant Imp Plus would be in touch with Ground again.
If Ground was still talking.
And if, more to the point, it was to the Concentration Loop that the live wire from the pump house extended the cable’s solar juice.
But aiming the sliver down at this site the shearow divided the descent. Divided it not so much by stages of adapting or distance or the nights of time he had lost among more and more glial cells, but divided it by simultaneous attentions all around.
So the descent took time. Like steps in orbital tests long ago. Tests? Specimen growth arrested periodically by chemicals so the growth could be studied.
Another shearow not so adept as the one engaged in reimplanting the electrode got caught up in a wending-motion and found its image now darker in the chlorella beds. Two morphogens slipped with the look of a kiss-suck from a slow-rolling faldoream whose ciliary fringes radiated messages around Imp Plus. And when the morphogens like muscles or spasms seeking muscles joined the shearow, they burrowed in to bulge out just when Imp Plus found the shearow’s pressure on the sliver crystallized into a grip: whose prongs were the morphogens prodding out of the plasm they’d just joined.
Which, like the slowness of the wendings over the reflections from the chlorella beds, made it all seem heavier. He was being kept, he thought, from seeing it all. Kept too by the very equalness of feeling whole; of thinking all over; not centered. He had stood away from the whole view of his new being. But now he would not. Yet to grip what he had, he must go on being more; and to hold what he had unfolded and had, he must know what it was he knew. A wave passed through him. Albedo. Salmonella. Ultramicron. Opti-chlorella. The kiss of breath. His attentions found no one source-site of the words, but his shearow with its bone-tight hold of morphogens pressed the sliver closer to where it had once been implanted in a fold that had dilated. He had had a head for figures, had known ultramicron, had felt the bright cells of his tongue nibbled by the mouth of a being who said, “Vanity”; and he had eaten olives with the Acrid Voice that transmitted the pits out of its mouth by making them vanish into the thumb end of a fist. Through days and nights of a synchronous orbit that kept to Earth as a circular hand keeps to a clockface dial fixed to it, Imp Plus had feared Earth; for he might lose breath as he had lost weight. Weightless he had grown more and more.