Which took him back: took him and rocked him back: jabbed him with such retro burn that his orbit deteriorated: took him back, but back to what was not radiant but subjected to radiation.
But the faldoreamic murmurings had begun to string a net of harmony. Music to his membranes. So he tried hard to see the sense of what now shot at him grid after grid volted from the Earthly fence but no longer with the pulsing flash of red: and these grids told him weightlessness speeds changes induced by radiation yet may also slow some processes and so give irradiated cells a chance to cure their injuries or at least make vital the proliferations these cells would not escape.
But through the music of the faldoreams Imp Plus found the refrain of albedo, albedo like a gentle retro drag, not heard, only recalled. And in what he took to be the drift of himself, he knew that albedo was no more than Sun radiation come back from Earth, and that the potion dispersed all through him dawn after dawn from the now-dispersed flaming gland and from the rest of him, had also been poison.
And so it happened that Imp Plus, sloping into another clarity of pulsion, could stand where he had stood one dawn on Earth. Particles not seen punched jots of him from one place to the next. Particles cut through him. Cutting through to burn what would be cut away later. And burn what would not.
Burn his knowing the burning.
Burn through a winter in which what was happening to him was to most others unknown. Unknown to a wintry windy red-eyed news vendor, who said he could have been a vegetable. And to a child who licked snow off a hand and said Your skin is red. (Did the child mind?) And to a dark amiga who sang amiga. Whom he had tried to be known by before and failed, and who was beautiful. And to another far away but on the same point who was beautiful too and who jolted him by using the words Travel light so that he had now to try not to suspect her while he went on trying not to tell her his truth about Project Operation Travel Light and the blood that came into his face was camouflaged by that irritation the child had seen months before reddening week by week setting him apart.
Once when he’d had a leg to stand on, he had stood under a roof at the end of many nights, he had stood upon a crust of Earth; and nothing seemed to happen for a moment.
Magma did not uncrust itself. Voices did not strike at once.
But in that moment which, once behind him, was the prospect of agony, a reticle of radii breathed into him. Once in, let go. Rods of gamma radii logging his blood, invaginating the veins, thinning the skin, replacing him with a buzzing meant to choke with nets of probability an absence still possible.
At last now he stood again on that potioned point upon Earth’s circle. Yet now his radius self made Earth itself no more than one point along his own unknown circumference.
Which like some future map took him where he had not known he’d planned to be.
So all he knew was that what life he was possessed of inclined him to give Ground answers. In return for answers that in turn might make him know the more that he had come to be.
Imp Plus recalled the Contingency Camouflage plan designed to deceive an alien monitor. Imp Plus concentered his crystal on the pulses of a frequency agreed on Earth. Imp Plus transmitted to Ground the false frequency. And as, at last, he let the milky skin along the billowing shearow at the window see out the window, he transmitted to Ground what Ground’s plan called for, the false orbital speed.
11
Jolts — what — jolts — what — jolts cracked his skull out of his brain. Jolts drained the bone out of his shoe. Jolts tipped him elsewhere. He jumped or fell, he spun, he was in a spin of gyro-lobs slow fast.
There was an awful lack of pain. Where? He was touched by slivers jarred within their weightless sky, and their pulsings recalled commands from when he had been little more than the Dim Echo. Jolts ripped his sight through the window. He’d lost his tubes, was that it, this it? The shearow at the window was so dislodged it recalled leaps it no longer inclined to take and it was jolted back against the glass in time to see through it far away a dark dot in a cloudy break. But the far dot was a line, tiny, slow, jagged. It tumbled sideways, but how did something far away tumble? He did not see it for a second.
But no, he’d seen more than it; for he’d seen it far away on an arc-edge of a greater thing also far away: a cloudy thing, cloudy blue.
The jolts came over again. He shook on his pins and he did not stop spinning. The jolts would not stop. He had forgotten he had no skull. For his skull was trying to get out from inside his brain, and he had no brain now.
The cloudy blue thing fell into the window and then out. The dark dot he’d picked out became a jagged line again. So small he thought he might be only remembering and not seeing.
The dot-line far away out there through the window was an opening.
Into another jolt.
The jolt spun out the window. And he thought his skull in trying to get out from inside his brain broke a needle of bone through the dot that was a jagged line again now in the spinning window. But was as far away as a voice that had said the brain feels no pain.
He had no skull. He had no brain. He had left it in orbit. He was still in orbit, but around himself. But no parking orbit. Orbit jarring into orbit.
Braking. That was what the jolts were.
Ground was braking him. But into greater speed. Into lower and lower orbit. Ground was bringing him in.
The dot-line came by again. A mark on the greater cloudy blue thing. He had to blink, but the need trickled in toes he could not reach to scratch. Across the window of mist that he tried to blink against slid a molecular shift the equal and opposite reaction to which was the jagged dot’s transit out of sight again and with it the cloudy break through which it had been seen in the cloudy blue thing.
He was in launch all over again, was that it? Or on a spring end of someone’s thought launching him back in reverse launch. Sorry, too cramped to turn around, got to back up, burn one, burn two, don’t ask, don’t look behind you at what’s about to skewer you, just get into the right attitude.
The Good Voice had said, “You’ll get some rest up there.”
The back-firings unhinged him; they did not hurt. If this was reverse launch he was in, it was not the idea he’d had of orbit decaying. The tumbling turned and when he found that the turning tumbled he saw clearly like speech to himself that the decay was hastened and multiplied by Ground.
And reverse launch without the housing. The housing over Imp Plus that had eased the suck of speed but had not kept his face from being dragged away.
The housing hit him like a thought, took him tangent as the buzzing slivers adrift had bumped off him aiming commands he could receive if he wanted to reimplant the slivers as he’d done the sliver for the Concentration Loop. Think of all he could do. The jolts jammed him back, and took him over himself over and over — but did they cause the rolling tumble of spin? The jolts had been set off by his own words giving the Contingency Camouflage formula. And in turn by chance the jolts had caused the housing to hit him and the slivers which he and no one else had sprung adrift in the first place. He had given the Camouflage formula but not with the attitude Ground thought.
He could see Ground’s viewpoint, but others also. He saw one shearow aligned now with the long weight of a faldoream. Ground’s viewpoint was that it did not want a take-over. Of IMP or of IMP’s work or the data. Hence the dual plan for Contingency Camouflage. But here now it was not duaclass="underline" he did not jolt or tumble Ground (did he?) — Ground jolted him.