Cap Com was saying Long time no telemetry on hypothalamus.
The lattice beamed to Ground that no hypothalamus existed now.
Imp Plus felt he too was nowhere. But then he found himself part of the Sun-wound oval of the lattice. At once he saw and could convey to the Acrid Voice — but did he? — that when the substance had shifted, the brain’s glands had been dispersed and absorbed. He heard the lattice like a sleep he was part of all around and in him say, No water needed.
Imp Plus came to be aware of not having existed. To be a gap. Not like the elsewhere that pain could wish for. Imp Plus was part of a foresight which was that he would again not exist but did exist now and would again. He was in other arcs of the oval and believed correctly that there were elsewhere other simultaneities like himself. It was an idea of them.
And he thought then that they were ideas or like ideas. And then he became aware of having just then not existed. And he thought he resisted a good in this. He wondered if the lattice layers knew Ground’s plan. Or could care. He had to tell all the truth he knew.
The Acrid Voice came along the lattice layers to say that if not both autotrophic and heterotrophic now, Imp Plus had been both in his time. But Imp Plus had been going to say that though no water existed now, water had existed once. And Acrid Voice nearby or congruent with this had said water had existed in Imp Plus but did not now.
Imp Plus woke to having not been; and at once felt the lattice convey to Earth the unthinkable news that there was no Imp Plus.
No Imp Plus?
BUT IF NOT NOW, ONCE (came the words — not from Cap Com, who said, What lattice, Imp Plus? — not from the Acrid particles, which wondered if the crimson and the braid structure persisted in the absence of glucose and water) — the words But if not now, once came from Imp Plus, and Ground said, IMP PLUS SAY AGAIN, and Imp Plus could not remember, except that while no help would come for the more that had become unless the Acrid particles knew fully the loss that went before the more, the truth was that this loss of water and of glucose had come late and went not before the growth of the more but after it.
What lattice? said Cap Com. What growth? said Acrid Voice. Why no brain? said Cap Com. Acrid particles? (thought the Acrid particles) — say that again.
Say that again.
And Imp Plus with all the force allowed by the lattice answered, THINK WHAT YOU’RE GOING TO LOSE.
So saying, he knew he had known for a long time they would lose him. Many times were spaced in the lattice layers but he had made his own instant-contingency camouflage: so he’d unwisely come to hold as sole truth these simultaneities that the lattice’s power could display in layers and motion. But they were not sole truth. For the Acrid Voice had said what Imp Plus had known: that if in his time Imp Plus had fed on others because not being able to use simple carbons he required complex organic molecules like glucose, and if in his time he had also on the contrary been able to make his own from sunlight — that is, if in his time he had been both heterotroph and autotroph — he had been one before the other, even if at some time both at once — he had gone from stage to stage. And these stages were now gone. Gone from him like the water which still occasionally dripped like an afterthought from the algae.
But Imp Plus knew that the losing to be done would be done by him. It had even now been brought back by him. From a towering pain that existed still in the absence of its head. Brought back in words that were themselves brought back as exactly as they were exactly reversed. For Say that again had been Imp Plus’s words on Earth, twice out loud, third time silent; and now, brought back by the phrase Acrid particles he’d thought forth to Christmas Island in the Pacific to the very being that the words Acrid particles named, say that again had come instead from the Acrid particles. And from Imp Plus now had come Think what you’re going to lose. Which was what the Acrid Voice had once said. In a pale green room. The one time Say that again had been unvoiced. For in the emptiness of that frequent, towering headache, some new membrane had sprung such a run of gaps chasing each other in him, that he could let a whole series of cascades take him through their annihilating yields: so that anguish over death had been camouflaged, yet also caused, by anger at the Acrid Voice’s supposed ill will, anger caused also by, yet also camouflaged by, Imp Plus’s own entwined ill will and desire in turn caused by, yet also camouflaged by, possibilities proliferating in the barrage of emptiness that was his towering headache: possibilities, chances, that took him apart from the wounding words Think what you’re going to lose as his memory took him now away from the Acrid probing and Cap Com’s threats — and took him almost away, yes, from war between the two.
War over him.
Over his past. Over his chances. What he’d fallen into.
After having made it out of mad anguish and inclined gaps that chased. Made it himself of some multiple twining that towered into headache, so he’d had to get to Sun and get to water. A twining in his head that primed what had been getting ready to happen. To happen whatever Earth did. To happen describable or not. He and the Sun described what happened. This describing was being. How could it be described like a cubed ellipse or a starfish-like hydra becoming four functions becoming what held and wholed them like remembered possibilities at will?
Yet the great lattice let him not forget the twining that had choked his head until it broke into the multiple gapping chase.
The twining here now at what Ground wanted to be the end of things was only a choking like the lattice whose idea he now was, clothing and dimming him. The twining now was with the Acrid Voice, for the Acrid Voice — the gibbous voice — had spun a net of map across the capsuled process of the last (how long am I into mission?) four months; and the Acrid Voice would not let up.
Also Imp Plus thought the lattice must have put him through nonexistence again. For he was missing now the means, whatever they had ever been, to distinguish the Acrid Voice on the main beam from the direct thoughts of its milky reconstituted particles on the other beam. Imp Plus wanted to find the foot he had put in the yellow leather shoe; to find the voice in which he had told the blind news vendor in that cold place on another sea, “That’s my daughter,” as she ran down the pavement to meet the dark-haired woman. He wanted to find the shouldered spine to be laughed up by the beach woman’s touch; find the eyes to see spilt blood, spilt smells, the point of jokes, things not so beautiful as what had come to him through growth that was now (he thought) possibly stopped. Yet the Acrid inferences would not let up; because Imp Plus recognized them. They pumped against his other gradient. Like what drew charged particles of sodium uphill through the skin of cells. Or like the very carbon atoms these inferences jumped through to get back to nitrogen, glucose, water, the crimson process that was more crimson when warm. Carbon, so small the shell of its electron cloud gets unthinkably close to the nucleus of other atoms; and so strangely able to both give up electrons and take them on that it can form bonds left and right.
But the growth, said Cap Com (but not on the beam!), the growth, the growth.
Now if out beyond the Earth (continued the Acrid thinking) the ten-times-greater carbon bombardment is largely lost on IMP’s shield, we still have solar wind.
But wait — who said anything about Acrid particles — braid structure — who is feeding you data the rest of us are not getting?