More weightless? More words came everywhere. Locus. Cada. Templadas. Yet came from the local faldoream dividing and dividing an endless space from the descending electrode to where the shearow aimed it.
Weightless, he had gained. As had the salmonella bacteria years ago that multiplied faster weightless.
But he had crowded the capsule all by himself and though the Acrid Voice had made more space by talking the Good Voice out of the added weight of an on-board video monitor, Imp Plus knew where he would gain weight: Earth would give him weight.
For if Earth had made him less, still if Earth had not subtracted him there would have been zero growth.
Subtracted him from himself. Divided him by himself. But chosen him because he chose himself.
The project had gone to him because he had gone to it. Known to known. To be its ultraradius describing unknown by knowns. Describing ellipses yielding Sun milk and spiral braids and seabirds reflecting shadows that flashed crimson darts in the warm day but flashed infrequently in the cold night which now came on again like pulses of division impeding the sliver’s descent.
Until the shearow must question this division: and with a glimpse of a fresh fan or delta spraying charge through him from the open wire (and not looking different from the charge set off by the chemical juice spurted between neurons), and like a life for whose support he told himself he didn’t need a capsule that could change size — the shearow then proceeded with the help of the now hard-clamped morphogens to pinch the sliver back into place in the charged surface.
For at that instant Imp Plus had seen elsewhere what the wending shearow’s reflection was reflection in. It was his find. His discovery.
Ground was saying words. Words heard before. A voice itself reached up into memory — overheard? transmitted? part each — AFFIRMATIVE IMP PLUS WHAT WOULD BE ADVANTAGE OF CAPSULE THAT COULD CHANGE SIZE, AND HELLO AGAIN IMP PLUS HAVE YOU BEEN THERE LONG TIME NO HEAR. THOUGHT YOU DESERTED US.
But what was his discovery?
Out of the shearow the morphogens stuck thumbs unopposable, stiff, and together, and these also cramped the shearow. Imp Plus felt a symmetroid stiffening in the shearow with the morphogen but also in that other shearow that was again above the plant beds, and in other darkening shapes. He reported oxygen and glucose gauge readings stable and no undue accumulations of CO2. Imp Plus thought he answered Ground without giving Ground his discovery.
The discovery was water.
He recalled saying water, seeing water drop so tensely bonded that though it flattened into discs it hit the Earth like bombs. But the discovery was more than what the reflection had been reflected in; it was a discovery of time: time elapsed, time possible. Time ahead in the solar wind from which there was no lee.
The wending shearow had found a length of its membrane glittering not in the plastic cover over the algae but in water.
Vanity, came a dissolved voice up out of salt water from an Earthly sea.
Not this water. This water was Imp Plus’s discovery. Water.
Water so deep he became mindful for the first time of how little there was of him now when it was too late to answer that open-mouthed voice, Vain animal.
Water deep too considering all the solid hours spent here in a season of space that Imp Plus recalled like an eclipse of Earth.
Requests how long ago for enzyme action in chlorella.
Requests which looked now like tests merely of alertness in the odd fish cast toward chance hunger. A time of shadows more than birds. Bodies more than body. Shifts so new there were not words to show them. So all he did was reply to the great Sun each day and reply in the nighttime work of the plant beds and the looks and nets of communal and independent lumens changing through darks that were changed in turn by the lumens.
But time possible. For Project TL had launched him with water enough only to give the plants a fighting chance to be explored by rays. Sun rays free of Earth’s choking film yet finely latticed by new giant molecules built specially for this IMP’s mineral window.
Rays also greater, heavy, and unknown.
But water. How much could there be after how much time?
The shearow restored the sliver and before it found its bed again the sliver was already speaking.
Asking and again asking Imp Plus to check oxygen. As if Ground had not its own telemetry. And asking Imp Plus as it had not for years almost, or days and days, for frequency and orbit.
But before Imp Plus could say SYNCHRONOUS or hear Ground say NEGATIVE IMP PLUS, SAY AGAIN, and before Imp Plus could recall the camouflage cover of an orbit quite other than synchronous, and before he could see at once that Ground suspected an alien monitor, Imp Plus saw that moments ago he had transmitted the routine glucose and oxygen readings even before the shearow and its bone-firm clamp had had the sliver implanted. The sliver had been poised above its bed away from the streaming fan of loose power that went out into a substance of himself which he had no name for as yet but which, as one who recalled ultramicrons and a fence with a red sign telling him he would die, he had come to think was lattice acting like the crystal in the solar cells mounted outside. The word was lattice, he had gotten it all over again and now so that it conducted him Earthward.
He wanted to be away from the fence. Yet it could do nothing to him, for he was already it.
He must see the water. He must get into it. He must be in the plants. See what the Sun had done there. He persisted in this. This thought. Which was that the Sun had saved him as he had planned.
His parts still gave the crimson signal but not frequently. But they did not increase in size. And they had composed into a state that did not look like movement; yet this might be because, no more than he could re-form the particles of that hypothalamus the Dim Echo had named, could Imp Plus want to withdraw from multi-sight; and in the simultaneity of multi-sight there seemed an element of motion that seemed in turn to hold the object of its focus still. But there was the motion in his parts. He knew that the hypothalamus now lost through his substance had been a set of controls: and was this set then in a course of dissolution, or was it finely spread? The motion in his parts was spiral whether he stared at the plant beds or not. And slower, as if his compound eye closed in on what it only partly knew it wanted. It was what his laboring microsight examined and it was itself that microsight. He recalled tired. It was not wanting to go on, and he had been this during some time before launch.
It was when he had thought himself that fence.
Or the fence he was to be.
For he had thought this too. Though then it was — he was — a lattice the Project personnel moved through. He had thought this because of the place between the larger and the smaller green rooms, the place where he lay down and let go his controls. To sleep with a voice not Acrid, not Good.
A voice saying what to do: during launch, orbital insertion, orbit. Impressing him with a grid of acts to echo not himself but the Project. But more a lattice with glittering nodes for each angle of intersection: a lattice that data went back and forth through.
So he let this happen and he turned to a thing paralleclass="underline" the fence with the red high-voltage sign.