Yet also both. Both. The word repeated, for he knew that he must hold on to whatever shot back and forth through a long ellipse of new pain — in order to see what this was inside the pain. Must hold on to. Or be held. Must hold on against new noise. Message pulses from Ground. Hold or he’d lose it. Lose what? Yet he did not have it: or he did: he had it to lose. Or had always had — even before radiation poisoning on Earth had had it: and now in the quantum moment at which he saw the secret mass of understanding, or rather saw he was the secret understanding, between the Sunbraids and the resilient strand, another thing happened: the wending-spirals round his edges were fading into fixity, fixed lattice, and he saw that their circuit had been fed by this bellows action between Sunbraids and crimson strand, which he now in the absence of that wending life could see shot back and forth and always had: and he saw on Earth a new jagged dot but a dot of particles that enlarged to his sight as if the old messy task of dissolving bodies into particles to transmit them elsewhere and reconstitute them had been solved: but the dot enlarged only to a formed, forced, milk of particles, and this was the Acrid Voice Imp Plus had brought into being. Ground had permitted the Acrid Voice to speak to him again and to ask questions and swap data, for Imp Plus if he was to be still more must know the more that he had become. And in answer to the Acrid Voice’s transmissions on glucose, water, growth, and the radiant seeds that Imp Plus saw he’d struggled to keep moving in their lattice-hungry cascades — he wished to tell the Acrid Voice that what he had was foresight, yes, foresight: and he had seen his own.
But something came between.
Was it doubt about the great fixed lattice of himself?
For the last perimeter motions had faded.
No. Not doubt.
For here in this lattice whose three-dimensional field was exactly as regular as Imp Plus now saw (like more dimension) that it also lacked boundary — here in this lattice that seemed impure only in motion visited upon it — the motion was no longer the life of animal or vegetative or some wendo-zoan grip moving: but was instead the lights whose pieces were broken conversely back into streams of flow and bent and conducted into spirals of spirals by this lattice of himself.
He was now his thought. Spinal motion of Sun and cells gripped like a sheathing jolt a length of lattice, then was elsewhere like a star of spines still one spine moving like a scope beam.
But the exchange with Ground that he had foreseen and forced into being began now at the precise instant he came into possession of what he then knew he had also foreseen but could not say.
For the IMP now lunged free of its new road and fell off again into lobs of spin.
Yet these did not jar.
Though then Imp Plus began to wish they would.
His thought turned upon wonderful words that pulsed and passed between him and the Acrid Voice on a Pacific island.
But what was it that had kicked the burners on and shut down the attitude stabilizer? Imp Plus had to ask the question. For whatever Cap Com had done to stretch IMP’s perigee lower then lower toward some recovery space contained in Cap Com’s uneasy brain, Imp Plus felt he was the one who had done it, and had done it through the semi-conductor he’d found all over again he was.
Done what?
Become what he had foreseen.
Or tried to become. Did he try?
He saw the chalked ellipse, the Earth one focus, the other empty but there, the Acrid particles fingering a green blackboard.
And then the particles of the Acrid Voice came together and Imp Plus saw the Acrid Voice as if it were his own particles. And the Acrid Voice said: WHAT GROWTH IMP PLUS, WHAT GROWTH?
12
So he began to answer and to ask. And while the IMP twisted, tumbled, spun, and pushed into lesser orbits, Imp Plus talked to the familiar ovals of the Acrid Voice. And not knowing where to begin, he used old words the Acrid Voice used. Words sometimes that the Acrid Voice had been going to use. But more wonderful than this in all the words that passed was what they lacked. It was far more than the words were equal to.
Imp Plus felt it all around. If he did not wish to tell Ground that what had been at first a body grown like a starfish of mouthless hydra seemed now other than body, wish faded into inability which was in turn only a shadow thrown by his sense that he could preserve what the Sun hoped they might become.
He looked ahead to what would be; and then — already there — he would look back from all he half saw he had become. To find all those words to be just pictures that fell as short of what the words inclined to point to as the Acrid Voice’s new-gathered body-particles were beyond that body Imp Plus had once shared with the Acrid Voice. That is, two bodies, but alike. Now, faced with the question What growth? Imp Plus did not know where to begin.
But he would know what he had become — not half know but wholly. For to know what was his, he must know the more that he’d become. So he talked to the Acrid Voice, while the Acrid Voice answered with questions and answers. Which were better than what had come before from Ground. For then Ground had said only that the crimson flares now stranding and unstranding might be trace particles from space. But now the Acrid Voice went further and Imp Plus replied that though sometimes he had to guess if the IMP was hot, yes when the crimson increased so did the heat. The Acrid Voice—
It was the Acrid Voice, the Acrid Voice as it must have been but only now was seen: Imp Plus knew because of the remembered salmonella detail, but more because he saw the Acrid Voice now dissolved into a milk of particles firing in steady, interrupted ovals struggling but firing, as if the Acrid Voice had caught some of the radiant motion that had first brought Imp Plus to Travel Light.
He wanted to say this and ask if the Acrid Voice had had cave-in or cave-out pain and say, too, that through a long ellipse of new pain a thought shot back and forth that must be held on to. Shot between IMP and Earth. But he would not find words equal to this or to this power’s heart that was (or was in) the suck of breaths holding the field that was the preserving future of the same breaths between the crimson strandings and the Sunbraids.
The new pain was not a burning, but he wanted to lose it. Lose it as smoothly as glucose shone in streams up the tube from the plant beds. But telling the Acrid Voice about this glucose movement, he knew the new pain promised more of itself. And Imp Plus saw not only that the Acrid Voice must ask how he saw; he saw when the Acrid Voice would ask. But Imp Plus saw that to lose this pain he might have to lose also the chance that it sprang as much from the use of this power shot forth to a divided Ground and back, as from the act between Sunbraids and crimson. This act was more than a blowing and sucking of Sunbraids and a helical recoiling in the crimson process: the act included the great lattice too whose fixity was beautiful where light thought its way through, invited, uninvited, but not in vain. For this light that was the new pain and was the new beam oscillant between here and Ground also here and now combed the lattice cells into sight, feeling, constant change whose forms of particle motion passed tongue through shoe and fire through tears, risking all he’d thought he’d lost but now saw flicker here and there with meaning whose power was their final loss.