Dual was control. Control was being taken from him. Did he recall dual control because he was a machine? The crimson flash was not frequent now and it flashed beneath crystal laminations that made it retreat like inhaling. But if control was dual, wait. He thought of what was out the window, thought of it fixed: then thought of his own chain of morphogen-knobs, a diameter without question but centerless and bounded not by circumference or perimeter, but by a dimensional breath that was more than spiral wending and less and less and less like respiration.
But then he thought this because dual (he saw) only went with “control.” Dual was two.
And together.
Two ends, for one thing.
He looked along two like ends of what he took for a shearow inclined sideways into a faldoream. But they twisted and twined here and camouflaged their differences: for this faldoream and this shearow were independently of him merging the one’s draping weight and the other’s bounding reach into a line, into alignment, a second diameter across Imp Plus’s growing fixity of substance — and across also the spine of morphogen-knobs: and he thought he could not tell faldoream from shearow now any more than either end of each pair of ends of length which across the hardening skin were fibers as pale as the lines the Acrid Voice had drawn on a slate wall, fibers tensed by sheaths of arrayed salts yet tensile in their give and bend with the jolts which now turned Imp Plus back: turned him to the shadows Ground had once read in Imp Plus’s thought untransmitted: for somewhere he knew that Ground had followed its own query WHAT SHADOWS, IMP PLUS? with the command CHECK DUAL ATTITUDE STABILIZER.
So control of attitude was dual.
If so, Imp Plus had earned it, it had not been given.
Given words were at all points of himself but so fixed in statement that he thought of the Dim Echo: and of words given not in the small or the large green room but between the two, in sleep, a statement learned: “Spin-stabilizer rocket orients spin axis at right angles to plane of Sun’s apparent path.”
So maybe Imp Plus could do a thing or two to halt or unspin the jump and tumble of this reefless shipwreck — if he could just remember where his own on-board attitude stabilizer worked.
His own: for it was one experimental operation that like the Concentration Loop or exchanging CO2 for oxygen and glucose used Imp Plus himself. Manual backing up automatic. Back-up. Manual. He thought he laughed with a ripple of cartilage along the morphogen-axle. Manual O Manual. OM2.
Manual tried to grip: he heard knuckles snap far away across a four-dimensional grid of laughter. Laughter not only his, but when he thought whose else, he saw ahead sand and heat and more sand that refracted parts of what he once had been.
And then two things happened. First — if it was first — this utter throw of spin and kick and jam and tumble of gyrate torque came round to what proved this skid through broken orbits to have been not whole: for what he now was in was an equilibrium: unique equilibrium refracted through his more and more rigorous form — equilibrium which gave to that forgotten, stiffly billowing shearow watching through the window — yet gave to all of him — a firm glance at the cloudy mottled bluish thing far off with its jagged dot seen like a thrust through a break in the cloudiness of the lopsided hemisphere which (having so termed the cloudy mottled thing) he saw it was — so seeing it he named it what it was: the gibbous Earth.
But second, he saw that, now calmly orbiting, the IMP had now stopped. That is, spinning.
Jolts and all.
Which stop he announced to Ground yet saw then what this seeing meant: that that prior equilibrium yielding a view of gibbous Earth and a still stranger completion of what had proved suddenly partial in the wild jam and throw spinning and kicking him down out of his bright shell of synchronous orbit, had been nothing like the true halt the IMP had now reached at a velocity not only greater than the former 1.9 of synchronous orbit 22,300 miles from Earth but greater than the 2.4 he had given Ground in case of eavesdroppers, never thinking Ground would act to make not just the camouflage at once come true but velocities still greater which threatened him with Earth and brought on new cycles of dark and light that divided and divided times until Ground came and went like a pulse of pulses.
He could not think. Or, not as he would. For Ground asked what spin Imp Plus meant, and asked Frequency check complete with Operation call letters all over again.
But then Ground asked how had Imp Plus stabilized IMP’s attitude.
Imp Plus found the firmness to think as he would. To think of that first equilibrium: it continued: it had seemed a counter-turn inside Imp Plus recalling the current that cascaded a tissue of spindles along an upstream middle, though when the tumble stopped, the equilibrium held; so he would have thought it to be disengaged from the rest or circuit or lattice of himself had not this poise been also lattice. And also not separate from the bed, banks, bones, field, and hardening lights it had seemed to be disengaged and disinclined from.
But the bones and Ground would not let him think as he would about this beautiful gyro-norm he had made himself amid the former jolting spins. But now he saw that that was what the diametrical morphogen-axle and the salt-sheathed faldo-shear spine were: they were bone.
Did he wish a return of the jolting to set wheeling these bone-lines that intersected but at no center for he had none? Such spin would show again how free from it all his new-found equilibrium was. Yet if by being in the equilibrium he could then have left the spin to kick itself down stairwell after stairwell of burst orbits, still the spin unquestionably had stopped; and Ground’s queries like shadow went round this unknown while they went round also what Imp Plus saw for himself: that contrary to what the Good Voice had said attitude stabilizer had not been under dual control.
Ground had planned to have it all.
But he said to Ground now neither that attitude had been under dual control — nor that it had not. He tried to think as he would. He tried to contemplate the poised moments of force compounding the interior equilibrium — that interior and multiplied division of spirals that also stood still in their own no less breathing braids. Yet try as he would, he no more lost Ground than he could unbind the calcium and phosphate salts from the protein fibers they made bone, nor than unbind these two settling bones of his from the differences between their ends. He had to begin in his own way but knew what would be, and partly because the beginning was not now but long before.
He timed the following momentous transmission:
IMP PLUS TO CAP COM. NERVE FIBERS INCLINED TO ORIENT BY CONVERGING ON CENTERS OF GROWTH THAT ARE ACTIVE. VISION HARDENING TOWARD MILKY AND TOWARD BONE, CAP COM, BUT A WHILE AGO GIBBOUS EARTH WAS VISIBLE THROUGH WINDOW BY MEANS OF SHEAROW MEMBRANE. ALSO SEVERAL ELECTRODES ADRIFT ARE VISIBLE AS IS BRAIN HOUSING ADRIFT.
He had timed this transmission to end as one of the new dark cycles enveloped the Interplanetary Monitoring Platform. But tremors answering from Earth bent round the rushing waves of dark and he would have it his way after all and he would think as he would whatever he had his way.
He missed the Sun. He saw sand. He saw reflectors dug in holding the Sun among the sands — dividing and multiplying the Sun. He saw Ground divided.
So that he would know himself, Ground must know him.
He wouldn’t really see himself reaching Ground but he could see himself dividing Ground. He had a force he had not had and did not know; but he did not have the give that he had had. He’d felt this during light as well as dark. He had, he saw, passed through many darks lately — the briefer darks of his lower orbit. But then through these more frequent darks he had felt alien pulses go in the slivers that were adrift. The slivers hung like flameless candles, length illumined by Imp Plus — by star-pocked polyp-scales that all across his sight membranes in curls and subsiding spikes jelled toward horn.