These waves of the mutual light sifted one another like the rains drawn by horizontal winds. Rains he knew — but when he tried to explain he stopped before he started. This light he had or was in blew into brief view the lattice cells so they were felt to be massed shapes rather than veins of line nor like the beam that also would go from them here to Ground and back like a bodiless spine.
At one point in these massed shapes the Acrid Voice was observing that glucose had stayed at maximum. Which meant (the Acrid Voice observed) that glucose was being made in unthinkably greater quantity than would be explained by any known photosynthesis: Now granted the process was new (observed the Acrid Voice) of focusing into insulated parallels of flow oxygen and glucose here going side by side up the brainward tube — still, if something had happened to this glucose, it would more likely have burnt away against the oxygen than become more.
Imp Plus dreamed of a sleep in which he had known photosynthesis.
A divided sleep long ago in an orbit in phase with Earth’s GO-system, when he knew photosynthesis and used such words — a time when glucose was decreasing and he had been a Dim Echo of himself. Yet had also known with ill will and desire that photosynthesis even when it made sugar in the dark could no more save him than even the Good GO Voice had ever said it could.
And now as if the oscillant beam to Earth were the body of his despair over not being able to give what he knew was here, Imp Plus could no more show to the Acrid Voice those shadows that had once lengthened like cranes and contracted like elbows, than callout to the Acrid Voice that the word brainward was now wrong; nor show the Acrid Voice what Imp Plus had only half known he meant when he’d said GLUCOSE BEAUTIFUL (Ground’s word). He’d said it just now, it seemed; but really he’d said it many times ago through arcs of sugar raining light and color down the dark slides, through sweet muscles too that opened a rainbow flow to the chances of his own desire: the flow an aqueous humor on Earth while become here in orbit as if by his very seeing sugar food. If he would not communicate these strange things, still Imp Plus — his old hypothalamic control-gland dissolved into other being — did not cut off Cap Com’s commands that intruded on the Acrid particles. Yet he hardly knew what the point was of showing the Acrid Voice on this their private and direct particle-loop the spectrum of the small arcs and the gold shadow of the one big arc thrown by the Sun and its body and hand of light in Imp Plus.
CAP COM TO IMP PLUS, READ FREQUENCY, CALL LETTERS, AND WORDS FOLLOWING CAMOUFLAGE. Light found a pattern in the crystal cells: it was his plain reply but larger understanding. But to Cap Com he must speak in the old way by Concentration Loop.
Oh here was a test, a test like asking to identify what was located next to the gauge registering nitrogen reaction in the beds — namely, dilatometer registering liquid expansion.
How often had Imp Plus in answer said the frequency, the letters TL, and these test words such as Contingency Plan, seeing himself a ghostly camouflage in Ground’s uneasy mind? Did he then doubt also his equilibrium? For it could seem mere disengagement from the action of the IMP’s jolts of skid that jabbed new, lower and lower orbits each an ellipse, the diameter the pain, the foci Earth and the other — the other focus once empty on the Acrid Voice’s chalked board, now clearly Imp Plus and the Sun.
Or—the Acrid Voice had observed at another point — glucose maximum might mean on the contrary no glucose was being used, which could indicate Imp Plus was dead and speaking from beyond, or more likely had outgrown glucose — maybe water too — But NEGATIVE, NEGATIVE, NEGATIVE, Imp Plus heard himself say, like the lost Dim Echo. But say with such feeling that it seemed more and deeper than what he told the Acrid Voice was to be seen: namely, the currents in the tubes, of which the one that moved to him was a live line of glucose flooding up the duct from the dripping green, blue-green, damp-brown plant beds: for up in the substance of himself how could the Acrid Voice conceive of the arcs of lumen sugar and how they wheeled so beyond the desire of the plants that Imp Plus desired not to say it in words — he knew hate from the acrid green rooms — hated the Acrid Voice’s close attention now striving to receive and understand, and hated Ground because it would not see.
And so at one point in the shades of light that ran, sank, thickened, lived through (and seemed to soften into swarms, coils, and warp-blots) the hard lattice of himself, he did not explain his NEGATIVE, NEGATIVE, NEGATIVE: while at another point, layered above a moment’s sway of chalky, milky particles pulsing an Acrid Voice transmission so the Acrid Voice was there in the lattice layer itself — Imp Plus saw in the tube that came up from the plants a brilliance that was not glucose: it was light.
The glucose had stopped.
But the deeper feeling he’d had was all at once the layering knowledge of these layers: which was what he now saw he had meant when he had seen foresight: for just when the Acrid Voice in that very transmission asked how Imp Plus saw, Imp Plus found he was not seeing the stopped brilliance in the upward tube: but more: the shifts of substance had turned the membrane to scales and then lattice cells — and he had felt the tube stoppage not seen it.
What then, now, did he see? The brilliance he recalled.
Also the difference between Acrid Voice and Cap Com. Yet the one was right here in the reefs and wrapping warps the lattice made with the mutual light, and the other one — Cap Com — was not seen but was another way of speaking. But before and after Cap Com came between Acrid Voice and Imp Plus’s request to identify a flaming gland near the hypothalamus that had now been dispersed, Acrid Voice came between Imp Plus:
(between Imp Plus’s NEGATIVE NEGATIVE and his joint need to know how water kept appearing)
and came between his doubt that lumen arcs, thinking limbs, shifting substance, Sunbraids, and shearow, faldoream, morphogen, or wending could ever be communicated, and his request to know how his power could have been kept up:
the Acrid Voice came between not to ask again What growth? (for the Acrid Voice had asked this from its reconstituted particles on Earth and in several momentary areas shaped in the lattice light) but instead (O.K., Imp Plus) for reception by the many million cells conducting life from the mutual light with which they worked these chances: so, given (said Acrid Voice) this glut of glucose, given hence more than our and the Project’s chlorella could make between them, the photosynthesis must be abnormal and might be new: yet even so there would be water. But while the Sun can blow up clean energy, the Sun could never in a million years even through the nitrogen slides layering the IMP window make water by itself. SO—
besides despair and curiosity over the particles of recalled things now falling beyond grasp (for Imp Plus now found the Acrid transmissions again shaped in the layers of his own lattice cells while the oscillant Earthbound beam at the general bidding found and refound at each instant the chalky, milky ovals of particle that were the Acrid Voice on Christmas Island; and Imp Plus had swarmed into the Acrid guessworks to barrage them with a pointlessness equal to what, at this corner of any new lesser orbit the IMP tossed into, Imp Plus saw as a cooperative chaos of collusion: to wit, Cap Com’s Contingency suspicions plotting Imp Plus’s recovery, Travel Light’s Good Voice passing on to new projects, solar cookers in pueblos, the race for the Reversible Reaction, trans-world power ponds pooling greater areas narrowing greater space, the fight for power which was the fight to find, beyond perfectly imperfect semi-conductors or beyond an element out of which to make wasteless black bodies for solar receivers, the clue to Reactive Reversibility by which to bend spent Energy through the interface of its own use and thence refract it rewound rebound) — Imp Plus fell toward forms that inclined to hold cities and color, blood streams and water, yet forms that had their meaning in patterns of power holding an emptiness into which Imp Plus’s myriad crystal cells in this momentary shaping of despair could swarm the words SO WHAT—