In this turn he did not see why he dwelt upon that fence for it told him he was dying. He did not know dying. But when the voice let him get up again, he felt a split. And now to Ground that saw no advantage in an enlargeable capsule he would not explain that even if after programming he was not exactly in clover, the secret split embraced him: it was the fence terrible in its promise: its promise to use him.
Two promises. One if he served as the fence. One if he did not. What could Ground know of such a fence? To Earth Imp Plus might as well be one of those old experiments with salmonella.
He stared into the plant waters. What came back was a desire for a part: desire compounding nothing but what had become of him — a segment of plasm turned as by an elbow bone; a section of plasm shadowed out of color but clear-skinned of scales he saw were cells grown to the surface; a strip of glow, a faldoream membrane sending mild light after the falling face of the Sun from which it had learned. Amid this composite a thirst for circles said that centers had returned. And then in with the fires running down the plantward tube from the housing, he saw potato shapes glisten and drop from the cups of algae no longer green in the blue-brown evenings which had fused outward with days in a field. And the field was him, grown to no scale but the alpha of the great Sun eclipsing the drag of all the magma underneath Earth’s Ground.
But if the scale was imponderable and tiring, the shape looked to be the same potato-shaped power plant he’d found in the cells of what had been his brain. The power plants called mitochondria staring through the saffron cytoplasm and platinum-sparked sheaths of glia and breathing each a path of particles through locks of light. And here now in the plants what looked to be the same potato shape. For had he and the Sun, then, brought the power plants of his own cells together with the power plants of the algae? Each potato shape with two membranes, the inner inwardly folded.
But the folds here varied from those in the brain’s mitochondria. These folds lay deep within the shadows of each alga, each fold like the gill of that Micronesian clam, slow folds some thickened into sac-discs stacked so that Imp Plus, staring through membranes and interior baths of sluggish-flowing tissue-cover, found not just the same charged bodies he’d seen rolling down one tube bound in shell orbits bound one smaller between two larger. He found then, deep within the lamina of the stacks, the bodies he then knew he had been looking to find. For they were the idea of green that he had thought to himself so long ago that he had almost the power to forget the name of these bodies which he saw now were really blue-black as if because the Sun had gone away. But the darkness down here was another light, not just the hand and face of the Sun at work in the evening communities of himself. For this darkness here deep within the potato-shaped chloroplasts, was a lumen of force as needed as all their daytime work. For through the semi-fluid which bathed the folds and their stacked discs, Imp Plus saw drop after drop globe out into the being of an independent pulse of flow and saw it was the same sugar he lived on and pumped through his system, and saw again amid one field of radiating particles that his desire had been to see this sweetness and more. And the more he was and saw was more than he had desired. For the potato shape lay also near shoes of yellow hide, and was also a drop that rose over a ridge and leaned along a hair and arced thousands of miles into a fire whose face — his own — gave light to another face wet with failure.
The potato shape of the algae’s chloroplast power plant was not the first potato shape glistening on a leaf and dropping into water. This potato shape that dropped was water. And this was what made the target drops into systemed rings mapping (as if to get back to) an inside with other potato shapes within the leaf’s chloroplast he had prepared to remember or had been prepared by a voice he’d heard to remember — the rings of each blue-black molecule that held the idea of green: rings concentered, though, as that molecule at the heart of the chloroplast was apparently not. For the molecule had a tail.
A gradient inclination. A want containing enwrapped within itself radii to come.
It was beautiful as the face that wept halfway between the automobile and the shoes of yellow hide beside the fire. But he’d said You are beautiful to the other face too — that had opened the sweet lids of its mouth to him and said, “Vanity,” and laughed.
Ground asked again for orbit and speed. Imp Plus saw that with the Sun and with the plants and with desires that divided him even from the memories designed to keep those desires at work, he had grown water. He had grown water to support the substance he had also grown.
But his sight held him, and so did the bone-knob morphogens fixed round the Concentration electrode. This electrode was fixed in the gray-amber anti-fold at the solar wire.
So he must see through whatever his sight joined and collabored.
Be drawn between the three sizes of body with all their infinitesimal orbiting point-bodies in the tail of the blue-black idea of green and what he found in the waters and in the airs above, through which the periodic drops rammed the water surface to fix craters there and centers becoming circumferences. And what he saw was what he had seen but not made clear to himself: namely, that, with Ground treating him now like some alien monitor, he wanted only to live on. But not name. Yet the fence on Earth would not go away. For he was the fence. And so he knew that two of the bodies in the blue-black tail rebonded in the plant beds to be water; and that the third body in the blue-black tail though changed from its look in the plantward tube had arms like valences of memory which told him it was the smaller middle shell of the unit flowing in such numbers plantward.
Which told him in turn that the large shell with its arms, and its electrons — they were electrons — was the same body that helped form the water.
But not the same as the now-amber Sunbraids flowing also plantward which after bursting into the plant house divided above and below the waters. And below blasted some of the bonds apart — apart, up, and out, lowering the surface of the water. But then (with another body not from the tail of the blue-black inner molecule but from its main ring-system) the Sunbraids increased both parts of the water bond immeasurably in volume and rebound them so as to make of the water a net increase.
And he knew through the recollected pain of the nets of charged fence that those Sunbraids that did so much had once come from Earth and had been of Earth even if not in their bonds of braid now.
But not giving Ground what it wanted, Imp Plus found his way back by way of the musing faldoream to the prior transmission. Step by step. Like steps in tests: deep unmanned tests to the asteroids, that was it. For what? A drogue of concentration jammed, thickened, and slowed him toward what he foresaw as solid with one and only one number of crests or crusted angles. Thus, he felt the risk of sleep in the faldoream’s musing words “Nuclear fishing.” So he told Ground Ground had been right that there would be no advantage in a capsule that could enlarge, for after all it was not as if this was one of the old Biosatellite experiments with salmonella that multiplied.
But when Ground replied that Imp Plus had not given the requested information, Imp Plus felt a further frequency in Ground’s transmission.
Like a pause for thought.
Imp Plus did not know pause. He could wonder what his limits were.
But then the transmission did go on and in all his being Imp Plus found symmetroid increase that was not the old growth.
This increase was result but cause of the words that came from Ground. They came in the known pulses. But they bore an unknown bond. But a bond he understood he must take the charge of, for then he remembered the bond and it was in his memory of the future, and the words carried a voice he knew: IMP PLUS REMEMBER TWO KINDS OF SALMONELLA NOT ONE. EVEN THE ONE THAT MULTIPLIED ALMOST THREE TIMES FASTER THAN THE OTHER DID NOT GO ON FOREVER IMP PLUS.