Plus

one had to see (went on the Acrid Voice, having not stopped) an extra force at work that was another element that seemed beyond the sequence of the old Earthly words (but words which all the lattice cells in transpersed cooperation divided into meaning), an element or force precipitated by that which was close and was painfully obvious, precipitated in volume, precipitated in rains, Imp Plus, rains — precipitated winding among reams of what there already was — which the brain’s gray and white matter and a fine humor of cerebrospinal fluid—

And light! — the words met: the two words, but more two pairs — two lattice shapes layered one over the other: the Acrid Voice and Imp Plus said them together, so the very congruence of the pairs made them distinct, like…

The shade of collusion passed at a slant among the pale, hard cells. It multiplied or divided into change. Imp Plus was thinking: I have invented the inclined lattice. But (on the private particle-line direct between them) the Acrid Voice went on: and if this light from the Sun in the brain’s substance has body, the strange element precipitated in volume might meet this light — and had Imp Plus turned from heterotroph to autotroph? — if there really is water. And what growth, Imp Plus, what growth? — the words layered their light through what he thought, and the Acrid Voice asked again, and then asked if Imp Plus had possibly kept his power up through having compressed or compounded such sun-windings as the Acrid Voice had postulated, into focuses, focuses as concentrated as the techniques originally programmed through hypnosis for the Concentration Loop,

CAP COM TO IMP PLUS (came instantly the harsh TL line instantly spread in warps of lumen that gave the look of motion to the fixed prints of the fossil faldoreams once rippling the humorous distances among morphogen-knobs), DISREGARD LAST TRANSMISSION AS UNUSED CAMOUFLAGE MATERIAL FROM ORIGINAL CONTINGENCY PLAN, CAP COM TO IMP PLUS, POWER, GLUCOSE, WATER SHOW EXPECTED DECREASE.

But there is water, said Imp Plus as if to the Acrid Voice, and the familiar ovals struggling with their patterns of particle on the island of the Pacific responded. The struggle spoke but thought itself alone: The readings were not what Cap Com said, but how could the Acrid Voice transmit this—?

Imp Plus knew.

— or convey that Cap Com had ordered Acrid Voice to confine himself to getting facts from Imp Plus?

So Acrid Voice did not yet know it was actually communicating on a private line to Imp Plus!

Yet now that he could reach Acrid Voice only directly and not by Cap Com, Imp Plus wanted any paltry or false test from Cap Com — even a false test of alertness, to show the old loop mode still worked. But then this chance of losing Cap Com dispersed among the lattice layers, and somewhere Imp Plus had already explained that once unbound the separate atoms of the water molecule found themselves caught, spun, slung out, and blown round into spiring orbits by the Sun skeined upon his own sun, and they multiplied into a sky of birth so that when the now far more numerous atoms rebonded, water level had measurably increased, and perhaps Ground could tell why and tell if the difference between Ground’s and Imp Plus’s water reading was due to a Camouflage Contingency plan Imp Plus did not know about.

And although he happened now into a long dark cycle, Imp Plus found in shaped areas of himself that he had also said to Ground that the unthinkable amounts of glucose coming from the plant beds nonetheless did not begin to equal the glucose levels in Imp Plus, and all indications were that glucose, perhaps through priming from the brainward plant tube, perhaps through a winding process already indicated, was being produced directly in what had been the brain but was not the brain now for that was utterly changed.

A pause came from somewhere, and was in one place not another. And Imp Plus could not tell if what he had in momentary areas of lattice warp was the image of activity in Acrid Voice’s particles on the Pacific island. But the flattened long oval of their personal circuit embodied his own current ellipse so exactly he recalled dance—mapped on some sweet grid of humor for those coming after to follow.

And through the going darkness of the long cycle came instead of Acrid Voice Cap Com’s static division: between possible and alien, need and doubt: CAP COM TO IMP PLUS, ROUTINE IN-FLIGHT ALERTNESS TEST: IDENTIFY PROJECT TL DIRECTOR BY NAME, COME IN IMP PLUS.

But as, in his layers, he felt like an opposite of jolt a slower fixity, though a finer fixity — earned — and knew he would give Cap Com another, better answer than what it wanted, he found what he had foreseen beyond the Acrid Voice’s main question What growth? that had been put into the Acrid Voice by Imp Plus. He found he had in one near-congruence of layers foreseen that he would not know how to answer the question.

And Imp Plus, who did not remember the other name of the Good Voice, answered Cap Com: THE ONE WE HAVE BEEN TALKING TO IS ACRID VOICE. REPEAT, THE ACRID VOICE.

On the Pacific island, ovals that felt like lost limbs yielded to bombardment, and this was Cap Com at the Acrid Voice, until WHY ACRID? came back from Ground.

But what Imp Plus had said had been the thing to say, because it helped.

For though Ground amid an accelerated swirl of reconstituted particles answered SAY THAT AGAIN IMP PLUS (and was ignored) Imp Plus knew that because the swirl of Acrid particles was more curious, to give the Good Voice’s name would have made Cap Com think then that the name had after all been known as far outside the tight security of TL as Imp Plus at this point was bent past the communication line from that dry island in the Pacific. Cap Com would learn now from Acrid Voice why “Acrid”; and, learning this, Cap Com would believe that the transmission came from Imp Plus, and would credit the water, glucose, and power data; and Cap Com would accept that Imp Plus had a way to communicate to that point in the Pacific during a long dark period.

But wait: they would not: wait: the Acrid Voice proper and Cap Com were together now.

Yet Imp Plus held with the particled Acrid Voice a private frequency, which the Acrid Voice still sensed as its own thinking on that island but which yielded for Imp Plus, here in the shaping play of lattice light slowing toward growing fineness of fixity, both the particled image of Acrid Voice and its responses in layers like foresight. But as Cap Com twined with the other, bodily Acrid Voice on the beam oscillant from the breaths between Sunbraids and crimson coil, the lattice fields of Imp Plus became aware of what they had always inclined toward: that their private beam to the particled Acrid Voice had been carried by the main skein of beam, not the other way round. But though twined upon that skein of Sunbraids and crimson coil, the voices unwound as the lattice cells desired. And the Acrid Voice in slow-massed figures of the mutual light was flowing faster and faster as if it might, by gyrolibrium, map one single field or solvent for all the events of glucose, water, sight (which the lattice layers were capable of recalling), and of the whole growth—What growth, what growth? — while when Imp Plus, as yet unwilling to give, like a positional fix, data on star arms that lived like unmouthed hydra, data on membranes that polyped on light and even on sight itself, increases through which his shifting substance had swelled and divided and multiplied, asked if it was conceivable for brain cells to go back into their prior embryonic forms in order then to yield exponential multiples before developing into adult form all over again; and the Acrid Voice observed that Imp Plus although transmitting almost too slowly for clarity again seemed to have seen the phenomena in question and added that in fact for some years—which years? thought Imp Plus — projects had sought to split the neuron though to his knowledge not the neuroglia, i.e. glial cells — Cap Com broke in again demanding to know what the word “WE” had meant in the transmission THE ONE WE HAVE BEEN TALKING TO, and Cap Com who might have sounded like the Good Voice if all the crystal layers of lattice cell had inclined to care, asked if there was someone else—something else — up there with Imp Plus, and asked twice more.