Jim and the Flims

by Rudy Rucker

  Meanwhile the snail had once again closed her door, using another of her shell disks. Just like in Santa Cruz, the round panel had a hand-shaped depression in the middle. I wondered if I’d be able to open this door, too. But—it suddenly occurred to me—maybe I’d want to stay in Flimsy for good. Start a new life in—was this heaven? If I could find Val or, failing that, get Ginnie to stick with me—

  “Easy there, big boy,” said Ginnie. “We haven’t even kissed yet.” This telepathy thing was going to take some getting used to.

  Each dome seemed to be a single room, with round windows on all except for the one that held the snail. I could see a few people inside: a man dozing in a shiny chair, a woman dandling a baby, a boy fiddling with what looked like a pair of ice skates.

  The sower from the plowed field walked over to greet us. He looked about twenty-five, with deep eyes and a sun-weathered face. He gave off a vibe of peaceful welcome, and spoke to us in accented English.

  “Hello, Weena,” said the man. “You made it back. And you brought two Earth beings with you. They’re...”

  “I present Jim and Ginnie,” said Weena. “And this is Monin, the keeper of the tunnel on this side. I installed him on this farm.”

  “He’s not a yuel, is he?” said Monin, peering closely at me. “He looks different from a normal ghost.”

  “Jim is an astral traveler like me, said Weena. “He has a living body back on Earth. And, on the subject of yuels, Monin, did you realize that when the Graf bribed your wife with kessence to open the tunnel door, he carried a yuel? Thanks to my interventions, the Graf’s kessence body on Earth was destroyed, yes, but I found that the smuggled yuel had survived, a creature called Rickben. To make things worse, the yuel had spawned a Rickben Junior. The two of them attacked me.”

  “I’m sure you held your own,” said Monin. “I know you, Weena. And don’t start yelling at us about the Graf again. This is our farm now, and we do what we want.”

  “Yes, I prevailed,” said Weena. “I only hope those yuels didn’t pop out any clouds of yuel spores. It will be well, when the time is ripe, to bring many more jivas to Earth. Sukie on her own is not enough for the long term. All would be lost if the yuels were to become established on Earth.”

  “The yuels aren’t all bad,” said Monin with a shrug. “So what happened to the Graf?”

  “Oh, did I forget to tell you?” said Weena airily. “Yes, an—acolyte of mine named Skeeves eliminated the Graf before I arrived. But the Graf ’s yuel was living in the skull of a vulgar man named Header. I terminated Header as well as the yuels. Header left me no choice.”

  “You conked Header with an axe while he was too stoned on sprinkles and dope to escape,” put in Ginnie. “Some choice.”

  “That sounds like Weena,” said Monin, his craggy face cracking in a smile. “That’s why she’s the Duke’s favorite agent. I want to hear more about the yuel getting inside Header.”

  “Elementary,” said Weena with a toss of her head. She loved being the center of attention. “To make room for himself, the yuel ate Header’s brain. A small meal.”

  “Those were tough yuels,” I bragged. “The jivas were having a hard time with them. It was my jiva and I who finished off the big one—Rickben.”

  “I see,” said Monin, not all that approvingly. “You should know that my son Durkle has a yuel-built body—he’s pure kessence. Some of the jiva-hosts here look down on flims like that. Of course I’m a jiva man, myself.”

  “Monin even sells copies of his body to the jivas,” remarked Weena. She gestured towards the plowed field. Indeed the older plants were shaped a bit like Monin. And round bumps like baby heads were showing in the soft dirt where Monin had been sowing the seeds.

  “Never mind all that,” said Monin, with a wave of his dirt-stained hand. “Enough work and worry. Come on inside for supper.”

  The snail’s door was shut tight. We found another entrance to the assemblage of mauve domes. It made me just a little uneasy to have that wall of living water nearby. Who knew how high it rose beyond the obscuring folds of the space-maze? But once we were inside Monin’s house, I stopped worrying about it.

  The rooms were larger than they’d appeared from the outside— perhaps the flims had stretched the internal space. The first room we entered was a sitting room, with the man I’d seen sleeping in an easy-chair. A globe hanging near the ceiling shed a faint light—I recalled Weena’s remark about Flimsy lamps being tunnels to nearby suns. The walls were festooned with gracefully draped vines, and a wooden shrine held a golden statue of a jiva with an earthenware oil lamp burning before it. Some kind of Jiva Bible sat beside the lamp. The floor was cushioned by a mat of what looked to be colored moss. And the chairs were elegant patterns of curved zickzack.

  “This here is my father,” said Monin, nudging the old man’s chair with his foot. “Wake up, Grandpa! Dinnertime.”

  “Eh?” said the man, stirring himself. Like Monin, he looked youthful. But his youth was only a cosmetic effect. He’d been around for a long time. In fact Grandpa’s mind had decayed beyond the point where his resident jiva could fully smooth things over. He stared at us with confused, truculent eyes, resenting the disturbance.

  “I’m five hundred and twenty years old,” said Monin, picking up on my thoughts. “But Grandpa’s six hundred. Those eighty years make all the difference. And I live right, too. Some day soon we’ll plow the old man into the garden, right Grandpa?”

  “Bastard,” hissed Monin’s father with senile venom. He lurched to his feet. “Eat?”

  “Eat,” said Monin. “Right through this passageway, you newcomers. Just follow Weena. She knows the way.”

  In the kitchen we were greeted by a lively woman with a crying baby in a carrying sling. “Hi, I’m Yerba,” she said over the infant’s wails. “Can you hold the baby now, Monin?”

  Monin took the button-eyed baby, blubbed his lips at her to make her laugh, and gave her a crust of kessence to wave and to slobber on. The baby’s name was Nyoo.

  “I’m the lady of this charnel house,” added Yerba as she set out the meal. The oven was a striped tube of zickzack with bright light within. The table was a sort of wooden mushroom, and the plates resembled shells. “I’ve roasted a joint that we got from the garden this morning,” continued Yerba. “Don’t grab the whole thing with your hands, Grandpa, I’ll cut you a slice.”

  “Your grew this thing in the ground?” said Ginnie, admiring the crisp brown roast. “So if I eat it, I’m still a vegetarian?” She smiled at me. “Hey, I have an appetite again!”

  “It’s not really a vegetable either,” said Yerba. “It’s plain old kessence with a touch of zickzack. Like you and me.”

  “Why do we even eat?” I asked. “If we’re just globs of ether and folded pieces of space?”

  “We do need to take in fresh kessence every so often,” said Yerba. “And I, for one, like it to resemble proper food.”

  “Come in here, Durkle!” called Monin over his shoulder, dandling baby Nyoo and helping himself to the imitation meat and vegetables. The baby focused on a bit of kessence shaped like a string bean.

  With a clatter and a whoop, a boy ran in and took a seat. We’d glimpsed him through the window earlier. The motions of his limbs were rubbery and fluid, as if he lacked a skeleton. He looked about fourteen years old. “You people came here from Earth just now?” he asked. “And you’re ghosts?” He had a pinched, yearning face, and I felt an immediate sympathy for him.

  “Hi,” I responded. “I’m Jim and this is Ginnie. Sure we’re ghosts, but in a way, I’m still alive, too.”

  “What’s he mean, Dad?” asked Durkle, looking anxious.

  “What’s that smooth wall outside?” interrupted Ginnie.

  “Flimsy is like a vast bubble,” said Weena. “The bubble is a skin of living water, a hundred meters thick. And bottom of the bubble is awash with living water, too. Like a spheroid goldfish bowl: air above, water below. There’s a fringe of land
around the water’s edge. And we’re here where the land touches the bubble.”

  “But there’s a hole in the wall right here?” said Ginnie. “For your tunnel?”

  “Not a hole,” said Weena. “A thin part. Two meters across. You saw how we had to push our way through. It’s thin because of Jim’s nicked electron. And Snaily’s been keeping it thin ever since I brought her here.”

  “So, okay, Flimsy is a rim of land around a pool of water in a ball,” I said, trying to get a coherent mental image. “What kind of sun do you have? A light in the center?”

  “We have lots of suns,” said little Durkle in a knowing tone. “All along the edge. They go straight up and down every day. In and out of their holes.”

  “What happens if you jump into a sun’s hole?” asked Ginnie, giddily.

  “That would be a stupid thing to do,” said Monin with a shrug. “Maybe you’d end up in the underworld or the Dark Gulf and the hungry new ghosts would eat you. More roast?”

  “You can’t see the suns from Monin’s house,” put in Weena. “Because of the border snail’s space-maze. The border snails conceal themselves for self-protection.”

  “But here’s what the view should look like,” said Monin, teeping an image my way. I saw miles of rolling green meadow, and a fat, pale orange sun sinking towards the horizon. There was something odd about the sun—it had a thin spike of light projecting from its bottom, seemingly reaching all the way to the ground. A solar flare?

  I could make out some secondary suns in the distance, smaller and smaller—each of them resting upon a line of light.

  “Our suns are huge jivas,” put in Weena. “Powerful living beings. The vast atoll of Flimsy is like a roulette wheel with a septillion slots. Each slot holds the afterworld of some intelligent civilization. And each slot hosts its own jiva-sun.”

  “A septillion?” I numbly echoed, trying to absorb the image of the world she described.

  “We rarely see the other beings,” said Weena. “Although I have occasionally met some of our nearest neighbors. Grasping and aggressive races. But now’s not the time to talk about them.”

  “But what’s in the middle?” asked Ginnie.

  “I haven’t gone there,” said Weena curtly. “And I don’t want to.”

  “It’s vast glassy ocean of living water,” said Yerba. “The surface of the Dark Gulf. And the goddess of Flimsy is a beautiful glowing figure at the core. Unimaginably far away.”

  Weena gave a derisive snort. “I say the middle can be closer than you deem,” she insisted. “Flimsy’s space is warped in very odd ways.”

  “Are you some kind of mathematician?” I asked. I was remembering how smoothly this woman had compared zickzack to hyperdimensional origami, and her talk about gluing together bits of space.

  “What if I am?” said Weena, cocking her head. “Is that another thing to hold against me?”

  “Why didn’t you tell me back in Santa Cruz? We could have talked about my genetics research.”

  “My aim was to seduce you, Jim, not to conduct a seminar. I discuss science with my regular lover Charles, perhaps more than I’d like. He’s an Egyptologist turned linguist, and he expects me to help with his calculations. With you, Jim, I was after something more—how should I put it? Something hot and nasty.” She smiled coyly, as lithe and charming as a fashion model.

  “Don’t talk sex in my kitchen,” interrupted Yerba. “Let’s keep a high tone.” She traced a reverent circle in the air with her finger and mimed an extra squiggle for a jiva’s tail. “We call our local sun the Earthmost Jiva,” she told me, smiling like a church-school teacher. “We like to say she’s the most important jiva of all.”

  “At least that’s what we say if we know what’s good for us,” said Durkle sarcastically. “The jivas inside my parents eavesdrop on them, and every time we go outside the maze, their jivas blab to the Earthmost Jiva about whatever we’ve been doing. I don’t have a jiva in me. I’m just plain kessence. I think the Earthmost Jiva is a disgusting leech.”

  An uncomfortable silence filled the room.

  “Holy holy,” said Grandpa and made an indecent gesture that was a parody of Yerba’s. He was poking his forefinger in and out through a loop made with his other hand’s finger and thumb.

  “See that?” Yerba scolded Weena. “You got the old man started, talking smutty.”

  “That must be a hella big hole the Earthmost Jiva burrows in,” said Ginnie.

  “One has a fine view of the Earthmost Jiva’s sacred burrow from atop the Duke’s castle,” put in Weena smoothly. “We’ll be hopping to the castle after supper, Jim. The Duke and the Duchess are most eager to prepare you for your mission.”

  “Oh, do stay the night,” said Monin hospitably. “We don’t get enough visitors here.”

  “Isn’t there a steady stream of humans and flims asking to go through your snail’s tunnel?” I asked.

  “We don’t publicize our border snail,” said Yerba. “And, even for those who know of her, we’re hard to find—thanks to Snaily’s maze.”

  “But you guys can always get in? Like—if you go for an outing, you can find your way home?”

  “Snaily likes to see her friends,” said Yerba. “And if she feels really special about you, she’ll let you open her doors.”

  “Jim’s special,” said Weena. “Jim opened the Earth-side door for me twice.”

  “But why couldn’t I find the Whipped Vic the second time?” I asked.

  “Snaily has her moods,” said Monin.

  “I have to wonder who opened the door on Earth for the Graf,” said Yerba, looking around the circle of faces.

  “It was me,” volunteered Ginnie gloomily. “The Graf’s voice got into my head. And then it got worse. Two guys killed the Graf and me with a green-handled axe.”

  “Rough way to die,” said Monin conversationally. “Me, I was hung on the gallows.”

  Ginnie stared across the room, lost in her memories. “And they set the Graf on fire. I’d been blanking it out for the longest time, but today it came back. The Graf and I were in a car and he was getting ready to do me—but I could tell it wasn’t gonna be sex. I saw the tip of a blue slug peeking out of his mouth, swollen up like a seed pod. The car door flew open and it was Header and Skeeves—”

  “I could still pick up that vibe on Header,” I said. “The yuel in his head must have kept some of his personality.”

  “It was Skeeves who had the axe,” said Ginnie slowly. “Skeeves who lit the match. But, yeah, Header was egging him on.”

  “And Weena,” I said. “She was in Skeeves’s head.”

  “They were so surprised when the yuel oozed out of the Graf ’s body and crawled up Header’s nose,” continued Ginnie. “They chopped up the Graf before they lit him. There were some pieces they didn’t burn. And then Skeeves axed me. I became a tiny dot—one of those sprinkles. And there just enough pieces of the Graf left over for me to make myself a kessence body. Somehow I knew how.”

  “I didn’t tell Skeeves to kill you, Ginnie,” said Weena very quickly. “That was his own inititive. All he was tasked to do was to eliminate the Graf.”

  “Why would I believe you now?” said Ginnie, glaring at her. “You’ve lied about so many things. Maybe one of these days I’ll get a chance to kill you and Skeeves both.”

  “So—Ginnie’s a brand new ghost with a jiva in her body?” said Durkle, skipping right past all the human drama.

  “Putting it that way makes me think maybe Ginnie should leave now,” said Yerba, suddenly uneasy. “And you go finish fixing up your plow shoes, Durkle. You’ve had enough excitement.”

  Durkle slid bonelessly under the table and lay there like a mound of dough, making moany-groany ghost noises. Grandpa leaned over to peer at him and fell out of his chair. Baby Nyoo started crying. Monin bent over to help his father off the floor.

  I looked around, taking in my surroundings. It was dark outside now. The dome’s walls had a faint glow on th
e inside, and little round lights glowed each of the rooms. I was starting to like the fanciful lines of the zickzack and the organic shapes of the bio-grown furnishings.

  “We are grateful for dinner, Yerba and Monin,” said Weena, rising to her feet. “Come outside with me, Jim and Ginnie. We’ve disturbed this kind family for long enough. Now I’ll show you how your jiva can teleport you the fifty miles to the castle.”

  “Isn’t anyone even listening to me?” said Ginnie, bursting into tears. “I’m having a crisis! I need to lie down.”

  I went and put my arms around her.

  “Poor little thing,” said Yerba, her kindly face softening. “I do feel sorry for you, Ginnie. But I have to think of my family. It’s against protocol for a new ghost to get a jiva and a zickzack body right away. You’re supposed to appear in the depths of the Dark Gulf and work your way up from there. If the Duke’s guards were to find out about—”

  “I say these two are welcome to stay,” said Monin firmly. “We’re hidden here in the snail’s maze, Yerba. We don’t have to be scared of those murderous, conniving nobles and—” Suddenly he put his hands to his throat, as if he were being choked. Perhaps the outer jivas couldn’t see Monin, but he had one living inside of him as well. His family members seemed to take his anguish in stride—as if ectoplasmic choking were fairly routine in Flimsy. I was glad that, so far, I wasn’t hearing much of anything from the jiva within me.

  “I don’t ever want to have a jiva in me at all,” said Durkle, peering out from under the table.

  “Of course you want a jiva,” Weena told the boy, even as his father was gasping for breath. “Be a proper citizen. With a zickzack skeleton, you wouldn’t be so floppy.”

  “Maybe you should bribe me with a dessert,” replied Durkle slyly. “Did you catch some sprinkles inside the snail, Weena?”

  “I have a supply,” said Weena, gracing her symmetrical face with a perfect smile. “Pleasantly fresh. If your mother permits, I might dole some out before my hop to the castle.”

  By now Monin had recovered, not that he was saying anything more about the nobles. “Let’s all have some sprinkles,” he croaked, holding the baby against his shoulder and patting her on the back. “I could use a lift.”