He did not know how long the dark cycles were.
Yet how then — while he would seem not to know each time just how long Ground could go on receiving and answering him before a new dark came between — how had he timed his transmission to end at that point? He’d timed more than one, he now saw, or was seen. Was seen.
Was seen by the crimson glimmerings he’d described to Ground; was seen — or not seen — by the glial and neuronal cells no longer regressing to glioblast and neuroblast in order then to multiply to more and yet more glia and neurons; was seen by now-homogenized fragments of what he could only describe to Ground as a once-central, once-flaming gland; was seen — or at any rate held — among other, slowing elements by the ambering Sunbraids that moved no less fast than before among his substance: his substance that itself no longer shifted except to breathe spiral waves round its lopsided limits. And these seemed as easy to describe to Ground as their wending origins were hard — and harder still the gathering into their functions of the faldoream languor, the thought of leaping shearow, the morphogen prods’ lasting inclination.
But the two bones! What did they do in their loose, lopsided X-shape, and where did they go? They had differing ends.
The Sun came round.
Whatever the IMP’s attitude with respect to Sun and Earth, two of Imp Plus’s crossed bone-ends lay away from the one window, and two lay toward it.
Inside the hot and hotter capsule, he saw the window had been altered. One clearness had supplanted another, which had slid away like rain.
He tried to tell Ground a number (yes, a number) of things. What was yes? He felt ahead of him without finding its words a thing above all other descriptions that he must tell Ground. But Ground made no response to wending or morphogen, faldoream or shearow, water level or once-flaming gland — though the crimson flashings, Ground said, might be mere memory or trace particles from space. Ground asked so often for orbital speed and call letters: until, through these words with nervous Earth that were more empty than silence, Imp Plus saw — and crimson flashed as he saw — that alien or blind as Ground must think him, Ground must at last ask, What growth, Imp Plus, what growth?
Crooked question, divided question, for Ground guessed that the transmission from Imp Plus was an alien monitor’s. But over growth the division of view would be greater still. Yet just as Imp Plus would think as he would, so too he would make divided Ground see him.
And now, monitoring this outgrowth of what Earth’s central nervous system called fine movement, the crimson came forth doubly aligned along both bones as far as their crossing point. But from that crux, it so leapt on alone that it bisected the remaining space between the windowward lengths of morpho-spine and of whorled faldo-shear. And he knew it would tell him what he did not know he knew — but this he had not quite retrieved. For what the crimson line — twine — skein — glowed — melted into sight (or was it being?), went on he could not tell how long; for besides having already winked red where morphogen-knobs joined inner to outer wendings, it lasted, in his tingling touch of it, beyond whatever bodied insight he had of it at the moment when the crimson flash became now first fork and then a joined line and twine and coil that, on closer look, constantly unstranded and stranded and was pieces and gaps of itself, in which if there had been a point in doing so, Imp Plus could have sighted limitless disjoining.
Yet taking no microsight, he saw some end. It was so magnified he knew again how small he was. Even how small he was long ago under a high, huge roof. Its inside had been ridged and crusted with tracks and levels and hooks. A roof whose floor was underfoot. While looking at the IMP his cylinder — hardly a “Platform”—he heard the Good Voice announce to him its precise height and heard a voice answer that that precise height was roughly (as was the voice) his own.
But what end, or end of what, was magnified? And what made him imagine he remembered what the crimson was? And like the strange timing of his momentous transmission not long ago, he thought himself from one end of it to the other by way of what its strandings, unstrandings, loosenings, tightenings, coilings, uncoilings, recoilings lighted up — and by his origin and what was in back of it.
An end of what? Suddenly now an unforeseen end: of thinking he had not made an error in giving himself away to the Project. For what if he had held back and then recovered and had grown whole again: or at most propelled himself around without a skin or brain: or, legless, lived on his fingers: or advanced through normal Earthly life headless, as if bearing a black hole in last night: or like a figure he’d seen somewhere with a hole through his middle bevelled like upholstery round the edges so it seemed the absence of a cushion. But if on Earth he had recovered from irradiation instead of now waiting in the brain of Ground for a recovery area, he would not have grown.
Except old.
But how old?
And how old was he?
Ground did not answer his data. Ground must think what it would. About how he lived here, what he did for water and food. Ground could be now as silent as the dissolving dark had once been. Ground must think what it could about what Sun did to water and to brains. But was Ground mad? Had Ground been reconstituted? Imp Plus did not know mad; but Imp Plus had thought it when at some time past Ground had said, what Imp Plus had known Ground would say, though now Imp Plus rarely heard direct message words: CAP COM TO IMP PLUS, WHAT IS LICKING? WHAT IS LICKING? OR IS IT LICK OR LICKS? WE DO NOT READ.
He had told Ground (how long ago) that the flaming gland had dispersed, been licked up and absorbed, and that so had the hypothalamus — what he’d thought to be that — with its many controls — or were they forces — of pain and pleasure, cold and hot, appetite.
But lack of response from Ground was not why he didn’t now tell what the crimson strand’s loosening and tightening illuminated. The reason why held him between itself: so it was some likeness between seeing and himself. For in the radiance breathing from the crimson strand’s loosening and unstranding, or breathing then in the loosened, half-melted strand’s self-clutching return to its tight spiral coil, he found the great lattice colonies now unmoved, and he saw he had let his own spiralling deceive him. For the colonies were a fixed mass, a high block of lattice bleached blue and green, a coral as pale as the odd force of discolor long ago noted in the optic chiasma now dispersed along with flaming gland and hypothalamus, and all else, into this fixity. This fixity was layered with the folds of conical wendings, folds of elongated morphogen-nodes and of faldoream-ridges, folds of shearow. For all these four kinds were now a hard translucent record of their former life; they were not moving now; not moving even where they wove round the upper cables and also round those lower tubes in which there was still seed motion, tubes he had feared for in his muscles when Ground had sent the jolts.
His cells were a place for motion — that was it.
The ambering Sunbraids were everywhere in his fixed cells; and through these motions he could feel that the cells were holes held in a lattice, and were the lattice too; but they were also locus timers for tides of Sunbraid which were now harder to see although he felt no less timed or clear. The lattice was a field of times. He was as much the motion as its place. And the crimson process radiating (in his mind?) out from the two crossed lengths of bone which whorled hardness outward like light, illuminated the great lattice by driving the Sunbraids through the holes and beyond to the edges of himself where the equilibrium he must make Ground understand whirled its gyro-norm of seeming substance; but this was only part of the cycle, for then either the Sunbraids were sucked back by the crimson process tightening and restranding itself or they were themselves the cause of this helical recoiling.