Ground stopped and went on, but there was a disturbance around the solar feed wire. Or rather there had been a disturbance and now was none: CAP COM TO IMP PLUS REPEAT PLEASE GIVE ORBITAL SPEED.
This second transmission seemed designed to do away with the first.
But the bond came back. And with a force it hadn’t had chance to have on Earth for it had been unknown by Imp Plus. But clear now: clear as aqueous humor in an Earthly eye that led in memory through sugar systems to microsight.
The bond had been drawn on a green blackboard by bone-white chalk. Drawn frequently. In numbers and words. And in an ellipse that talked. With two foci, one not there but one the Earth.
Drawn by a hand from which Imp Plus in the smoke of death had withdrawn dividing known illness by known desire until, instead of multiplying, the particles of illness seemed to dissolve in a resolution to proceed.
The bond was with the Acrid Voice.
The Acrid Voice had given him attention. Had briefed. Had smoked because it could not stop. Had talked smoke which drove Imp Plus out of his mind into a towering headache, then out of a green room into the Sun to a telephone. But the Acrid Voice had been talking from known point to known point without promises. Had stopped short of goodness. Not like the repeating Good Voice advancing into emptiness.
“You don’t want to go on forever,” the Acrid Voice knew how to say, and “What would be the advantage of a capsule that could change size?”
Maybe the Acrid Voice had known what Imp Plus had in his head. The Acrid Voice anchored itself to fact.
The bond had been there in fact. Imp Plus had known it.
But what bond now?
None but the interruption of the Acrid Voice by Ground to put Imp Plus again to the test whether it was he there or an alien monitor. No, the bonds were not there but here. With the Sun. With the power of braid. Bonds among himself.
But bonds he desired only to be — was that it?
Bonds he need only be. Albedo, said the faldoream among the turns of Imp Plus’s being; said softly or hoarsely through ciliary fringes slowly conversing into structures of saffron salts—Albedo, albedo.
And from one direction came the old choking, and Imp Plus said to himself that maybe nothing he thought to find here was a thing but was only recalled from the windy drogues of Earth: but this thought was not brisk enough to solve the choking coagulation—coagulation was the word to use. But it was Ground’s word. He was picking up some of Ground’s words which asked to be used. But for what?
But then in the choking and the converse chasm of not caring, the coagulation that like further processes had been slowing, stiffening, thickening, fixing him from function into a thing of crusted angles, gathered and carried the stalled presence of the Sunbraids into light that now opened the chloroplasts deep within the plants. Which Imp Plus saw so well he saw electrons and holes. In a rush. A promised migration that seemed to let him outside the IMP to see how the Sun hit the photovoltaic cells in the solar panels and drove electrons out of those cells into a circuit of power.
Which the Acrid Voice had not had to tell him. For Imp Plus had been somebody. That is, who had known ultramicrons.
Two faldoreams at right angles tried to shake with humor. The longitudinal drapings crystallized away from saffron toward a discolor like that of the long-dispersed optic chiasma.
But the night warmth came not from such fun. The warmth came upon this now almost wholly interior spiral so constant now that it did not come back because it did not go away.
It had to go somewhere: or go nowhere except the faldoream’s “Nuclear fishing.” He did not get away from fish. The osprey off the beach plummeted and was pulled under briefly by its prey. Imp Plus’s sight of the wendings speeded up or the wendings slowed down: so they were fixed past motion — and past color — functions thus then recalled into a new solid. Certain wendings — inside themselves at least — moved like circumferences one way; certain inner wendings diametrically narrower moved the other way. A string of morphogens, more than he’d known he had, inclined across two or three faldoreams (exactly two or three) grown close together, and the train of morphogen-knobs having joined inner to outer wendings winked red so slow the train spread into milder and milder light until Imp Plus wondering why it spread no more saw that it spread no more.
He thought that if, as before during the choke of gear-dust, thought coagulated without more thought, still then there could come the need for a coagulation other than failure. And what Earth thought Imp Plus knew was misguided. So was Earth to think itself the center for Imp Plus’s radius.
The Acrid Voice must have known what was in Imp Plus’s head. Imp Plus had meant to live. A capsule — even a polyhedron IMP with an unprecedented window — might be built to enlarge; but it must stop somewhere. Imp Plus had grown to cram the capsule, then had done other things. Contracted, regrouped, been turned into other motions. Electrical motion, too, though if to control the capsule’s orbit he did not know. Meanwhile the great Sun in its forms fished where it would. And Imp Plus braided with it his sun he had brought to multiply from Earth. But if these suns braided in part from Imp Plus’s desire remembered from those last weeks of Earthly determination, and if those braids streaming down the plantward tube constantly ruptured the water bond of a given volume of water in order then to multiply and multiply the elements of the bond and then rebond them to make a net increase of water, he knew only that it could happen: not that it would.
But did he want it to always happen? What would he do if it did? Drips of sweet flow edged up the upward tube. He did not need but did not find any sweet-eye now to float him through to the microsight he unquestionably had.
What was a life-support system?
And then he saw what a question was. And did so by seeing he hadn’t known before. And by finding these specimen questions.
A question was what an answer was to.
A shudder rippled the diametric thing or axle the morphogen-knobs became, and he thought that the triple units sharing the downward tube with the Sunbraids were carbon dioxide. Imp Plus saw that oxygen (likewise not alone) kept coming back up the tube from the plants even now at night during the dark cycle. He saw mingling with suns and other powers in the plant housing bodies, he’d also seen in the main ring-system of the blue-black bodies of green idea deep inside the algae’s latticed chloroplasts.
But to see these half-knowns was not to find a way through to himself. He held and was held: he was the things he saw: the laminas were equally one: the way was through a lattice letting him see that as the chloroplasts could be electrical semi-conductors like solar cells mounted outside beside the solar telescopes and albedo receptors, so had his own substance a semi-conductor’s lattices of migrant electrons and migrant holes; and, weightless, it all might grow purer as other semi-conductors had through a generation of orbital work.
A semi-conductor. This was what Imp Plus was.
But the way he found was not the sight; the way was through it.
To a fence so Earthly far away that this fence would not be seen through.
Until then he heard the Acrid Voice see through it.
And Imp Plus had the meaning of the two salmonellas then. In weightless space, the one multiplied three times as fast as the other; for the three-times one, unlike the other, had been irradiated: was that radiant?