Jim and the Flims

by Rudy Rucker

  So Weena passed around her stash. Some of the sprinkles were considerably bigger than the others—maybe the bigger ones had managed to eat some of their fellows. Ginnie was still upset, but she took some sprinkles too. And then the sprinkles came to me.

  The last time I’d eaten these things was when Weena had put them on my ice cream—and I’d ended up in the hospital. But I was out of my usual body now, and, hell, I didn’t want to miss out.

  So I had a few.

  As before, the living gems were amazingly rich in flavor, like a whole case of tropical fruits. After my dose I was hearing fresh voices in my head, as if by eating the sprinkles I’d assimilated some strangers’ minds. The voices were rapidly telling me their life stories. Probably it was just a hallucination, but what a rush. I felt calm and optimistic, enjoying my meds.

  “I’m closely connected with the Duke of Human Flimsy,” bragged Weena. “Given that Jim’s on an important mission for the Duke, I can guarantee that there won’t be any fuss about Ginnie gaining her body so easily. And it’s acceptable to me if Jim and Ginnie stay here tonight.” I glanced over at Weena, wondering if she had some secret ulterior motive. “In any case, the materials for Jim’s parcel aren’t quite ready,” she continued. “You’ll come straight to the castle tomorrow, correct, Jim?”

  “If it’s really allowable, I suppose that—” began Yerba.

  “I’ll watch them fuck!” interrupted Grandpa, clapping his hands.

  “Time for bed,” Monin told the old man. He poured two shots of clear living water from a finely patterned zickzack decanter. He tossed off one drink and handed the other to his father.

  “Toot,” said Grandpa, downing his nightcap.

  “Toddle off to sleep now,” Yerba told him.

  “Toot, toot.” Docilely, the geezer shuffled from the kitchen.

  “My father’s jiva will run his body for him now,” explained Monin, taking a second drink. “The jiva will undress him, wash him and tuck him in.”

  “Otherwise I wouldn’t let the old coot live here,” said Yerba, shaking her head. “If the Duke’s guards turn up here, we’ll give them Grandpa first.”

  “Why does a jiva bother with a blown mind like that old man’s?” I asked. “If that’s not too rude a question.”

  “The less of a mind the host has, the more the jiva gets to do,” said Monin with a shrug. “When jivas are breeding, or at war, they fly around on their own, but most of the time they like to be nestled into a ghost’s body as a partner. They’re bossy and gossipy. They like being involved with another being’s mind.”

  “I’m putting the baby to bed now,” said Yerba. “Monin can show you to the extra dome when you’re ready. I’d rather not be involved.”

  “I’ll be off too,” said Weena in a polite tone. “Farewell and heartfelt thanks, Yerba. I’ll see that you obtain some extra kessence. And Jim will be back soon. We’re not done with our business on Earth. We have grand plans.”

  14: The Garden

  Rather than going to bed right away, Ginnie and I followed Weena outside to watch her take off. Monin and Durkle came along as well, striding ahead of us across the meadow, leading us out of the maze.

  We only had to walk about a hundred yards until we were free of the space warps that hid the farm. For the first time, I could begin to see the true size of Flimsy. The beauty of it made me catch my breath.

  The wall of living water rose like a cliff, gradually arcing over towards the impossibly distant zenith of the Flimsy night sky. The towering dome was filled with rivers of faint pastel light, ever so slowly changing as I watched. The patterns were a bit like our Northern Lights—pinks, yellows and greens, branching and merging, streaming upwards and across the sky.

  “Fabulous,” breathed Ginnie.

  “What causes it?” I asked Monin.

  “It’s all living water with sprinkles in it,” said Monin with a cursory glance upwards along the wall. “I think we told you that Flimsy is inside a hollow shell of living water. The water is where the ghosts start out. If they do well, they make it into our underground caves, and then maybe up to the fields of Flimsy. If they don’t do well, they’re swept inward to the core and recycled.”

  “The colors are so wonderful,” persisted Ginnie. “All veils and sheets...”

  “Hungry ghosts looking for a main chance,” said Monin dismissively. He was blandly accustomed to his night sky.

  Weena was finally ready to leave. “When you want to teleport, just consult your jiva,” she instructed me. “She’ll know how to find the Duke of Human Flimsy.”

  “Could Ginnie and I just walk to the castle?” I ventured. “It’d be nice to have a look around.” I gestured at the mad splendor of the wall and the sky. “We’re still not used to any of this.”

  “In principle you can walk,” said Weena carelessly. “It’s a bit of a trek from here, but I’ll be busy for a couple of days talking to the powers that be. And the Duke’s castle is easy enough to find. You head for the nearest sun—the Earthmost Jiva. She hovers near the castle like a tethered blimp. Or if you walk at night, follow the direction of the sky’s flow.”

  “What an adventure!” said Ginnie, whose sprits were beginning to rise.

  “Don’t stir up trouble with the locals,” cautioned Weena. “There’s much about Flimsy that you don’t know. If you walked, you’d be in need of a—”

  “Guide!” exclaimed Durkle. “Let me do it, Dad. I can find the castle, and I know all about the yuels and their elephants and the offer caps. I’ll bring Jim and Ginnie to the Duke’s castle, and then I’ll come home on my own. I can teleport, too, you know. Even without a jiva. I can do yuel-style teleportation.”

  “Let’s ask your mother in the morning,” said Monin in a noncommittal tone. “Speaking of jivas, you’ll notice a few jiva eggs out here, Jim. Wanting to come inside.”

  “There’s one right now,” said Durkle, pointing.

  The free-floating jiva egg happened to drift fairly close to me. It was a glowing orange-yellow spot with a mauve tadpole shape at its center. It moved with a zigzag motion as if sniffing around for a good site to land. It reminded me of—oh, shit.

  The jiva egg was the very image of the bright dot that had floated into our bedroom on the night of the lightning strike. In other words, a jiva egg had gotten inside of Val. And the loathsome tumor that the doctors had incinerated on sight—that had been an embryonic jiva.

  I stood stock still, fighting for control, blanking out my mind. I had enemies on every side.

  “Farewell for now,” said Weena in a breezy tone. She didn’t seem to notice what was I was thinking. “Don’t tarry too long.” She leaned over and kissed my cheek. “And remember, Jim, with your jiva inside you, I’ll always know where you are. Hot and nasty.” She emitted a giggle. I wanted to kill her.

  A tangle of jiva tendrils wove a nest or cocoon around Weena. And then a sheaf of extra tendrils writhed from her chest to stretch out into the distance, feeling for her jump target. Moments later Weena made an odd virtual gesture with her mind—and the woman who’d ruthlessly toyed with me for weeks was gone. Thank God.

  Following the teeped guidance of the border snail, Durkle and Monin led us back through the ever-altering maze that hid their home. A few of the jiva eggs followed us, settling into some of Monin’s smaller garden plants. The father and son paused by the plot, pointing and talking. The largest of the lumpy shapes seemed to be throbbing.

  “Give them a couple of squirts of ultragrow,” Monin advised Durkle. “And a bucket of living water apiece. Tomorrow, I think seven of them will be ready to pop.” Moving fluidly, Durkle got to work.

  Monin led Ginnie and me to the spare dome, where we settled in. The bed was a soft blob of zickzack. Living flowers shed dim, colored splotches across the room. One of the flowers brimmed with water, another had a drain hole that served as a toilet. And on the wall was another little shrine to the Earthmost Jiva.

  Ginnie and I laid down side
by side on the bed. After a minute I put my arms around her.

  “So now we’re a pair of ghosts in kessence bodies,” I said conversationally.

  “I still can’t believe I was murdered on Lover’s Bluff,” murmured Ginnie, nestling against me. “That’s so loser, so tacky, so trite. ”

  “Poor Ginnie,” I said.

  “Well, at least these bodies aren’t so bad,” she said. “Do you like yours?”

  Using my teep, I checked the vicinity for peeping Toms. “Grandpa’s asleep. I don’t suppose that—” I lost my courage, cleared my throat, started again. “Do you want to make love? Does that sound crass?”

  “I don’t know,” said Ginnie. “Maybe crass, maybe polite. But, no. Just hold me. That’s all I’m up for.” She sighed. “I always thought that being dead would be more fun.”

  In the morning Durkle woke us by lugging in baby Nyoo and dropping her onto our bed.

  “I want to show you our garden,” Durkle announced. “Seven of the Dad-fruits are ready to pop. The jivas put eggs into them a few months ago.”

  Thinking of Val’s pregnancy and the horrible climax, I winced. Yet here I was trying to fuck Ginnie.

  “Give us a minute, kid,” I said. “We have to wake up. Is there a shower?”

  “Use the bell-blossom over there.” And with that, he trotted off, leaving the infant in our care.

  The baby was in a cheerful mood, crawling around and cooing, two little teeth showing in her lower gum. It was nice to see her. I felt a pang, remembering my shattered dream of having children with Val. Was there really a chance that I’d find her ghost over here? I doubted if Weena would actually help me in the quest. And Flimsy seemed huge. But—maybe? The possibility provoked a mixture of longing and fear. What if Val’s ordeals had warped her into something terrible?

  “So it’s been a year?” said Ginnie, reading my mind.

  “And every day I’ve been saying goodbye,” I said, playing this up a little to get some sympathy.

  Ginnie got right on me. She rubbed her thumb against her forefinger. “Look! The world’s smallest violin.” She made a crackling noise. “Whoops! I stepped on it.”

  “Why do men have to pretend to be nice, when women don’t even bother?” I snapped.

  “Because we are nice in the first place,” said Ginnie. “Most of us.”

  “I am going to look for Val.”

  “Fine,” said Ginnie. “When you’re not busy trying to fuck me. Is this supposed to be Heaven, do you think? I always hated that bullshit.”

  “I don’t think our mass-market religions have any kind of handle on what we’re seeing here. Maybe Val’s already drifted to the center of Flimsy. But that might be a quadrillion miles away. Can you imagine taking a road trip that long? It could take, I don’t know—a trillion years? With new scenery every single day.”

  “I don’t think they don’t have cars here,” said Ginnie in a practical tone. “It’s more like a network. People teleport. I say we go outside and start exploring.”

  “First we shower,” I said.

  After my night’s rest, I was able to take in our room a little more clearly. It had an Art Nouveau look to it, with a braid-patterned wooden headboard behind the plump zickzack mattress. Blooming vines bedecked the walls, with a particularly large ultramarine flower across from the bed, a long narrow bell, hanging from the ceiling to the floor. I slipped inside it through the slit between two petals. The flower drizzled water onto me, and a mat of root hairs at my feet soaked up the drips.

  A moment later, Ginnie joined me in the shower, cool and resilient. Her eyes were a rich brown, with soft flecks of gold. I held her naked body and now, for the first time, we kissed.

  In a way this was like a dream of Eden. But the kisses didn’t feel quite right. The insides of our two mouths were dry, and remained so. At least our bodies had genitals, although we didn’t get into the details of that. For now, the kissing was enough.

  On our way outside, we handed baby Nyoo off to Yerba who was sitting at the dining table, staring into space while absorbing information from her jiva. Although Yerba took the baby, she acted like she didn’t see us. And farmer Monin was still asleep.

  The sun—that is, the Earthmost Jiva—must have been high in the air by now, for a pleasant yellow light was making its way through the space warps that concealed Monin’s farm.

  The plants at the far end of Monin’s garden resembled seven nude men, knee-deep in the dirt, with full-grown torsos and heads. I hadn’t really gotten a good look at them the day before. Ever so slowly, they swayed their arms and twitched their fingers, as if they were asleep and dreaming. Their eyes were closed, their skins pale and nearly translucent. Their faces looked exactly like Monin’s.

  “See?” said Durkle, who was waiting in the yard, excited about our travel plans.

  “Are these for eating?” I asked about the things in the garden. “Don’t tell me that roast we had last night was a human leg!”

  Durkle thought this was funny and, wriggly imp that he was, he bent double as if to bite me in the thigh.

  “Look closer,” he said when he straightened up. “Look under the Dad-fruits’ skins.”

  The garden-grown globs of kessence had colored shapes in their swollen bellies, slowly writhing forms like fetuses—or like parasitic worms.

  Pop.

  One of the bodies burst open, and a newborn jiva wriggled out, glistening with slime. It shook out its tail, basking in the filtered rays of the Earthmost Jiva, hovering by the ruins of the body it had grown in.

  “Life,” it teeped. “Light.”

  More pops ensued—and now seven of the flying beets were hovering above the slaughter-ground of the garden. There was no blood—just pools of living water and scraps of kessence—but it was uncanny just the same. Ginnie backed away, taking shelter against the dome.

  “I’m supposed to dig the leftovers into the ground,” said Durkle. “To help the next crop grow. Some of the little guys got new eggs in them last night.”

  “Why do jivas have to reproduce in such a disgusting way?” asked Ginnie.

  “They don’t have enough kessence on their own,” said Durkle. “The adult jivas are mostly zickzack. But an embryonic jiva needs a fair amount of kessence to nurture its growth. So the jivas need to plant their eggs somewhere juicy—like in my family’s all-kessence Dad-fruits.”

  “Or in living human flesh,” I added, thinking yet again of Val’s fate, trying to fill in the ghastly details. One thing that puzzled me was why the eggs in Dick Simly had come to term so much faster than in Val. I asked the boy how long the eggs took to grow.

  “The jivas are always changing things around,” said Durkle. “It can be days or it can be months. The jivas are smart and sly. I’ll tell you one thing, we don’t let them stick their tails in here to implant the eggs directly, or they might make a rush for Snaily’s tunnel. We make our deals outside the maze and we lead in the eggs ourselves.”

  Durkle fastened his translucent ice skates to his feet. The blades were long rectangles, with little levers at the rear ends. These were the things I’d seen him messing with when we’d arrived.

  “How sharp are they?” I asked, just to keep talking, trying to bury my horror with words. “Can you actually push them through the dirt and—and the other stuff?” The garden was littered with twitching kessence models of human limbs. The expressionless Monin-heads were strewn about like goth soccer-balls.

  “These are zickzack plow shoes,” said Durkle, crouched over his special footwear. “Dad’s jiva made them. The blades slice through whatever they touch. And the tops of the blade are space-linked to their bottoms. You use these levers in back to warp the shape so that the bottom’s ahead of the top, and then the top keeps trying to catch up so—”

  With a lurch and a wobble, Durkle slid into motion, skating smoothly through the dirt of the garden, his blades mincing up the remains of the Dad-fruits, with smooth curls of soil flopping out to either side. Back
and forth he sailed, avoiding the younger plants, but taking particular delight in slicing the discarded limbs in two. His boneless motions were smooth and rubbery.

  “What a brutal little boy that Durkle is,” Ginnie murmured to me.

  “He’s a farmer,” I said. “In touch with the wheel of life.”

  “Ugh.”

  The seven newborn jivas were drifting around, shaking out their tails, getting the feel of the air, talking things over. Via teep I could pick up the faint skritchy buzz of the their signals, a mix of nouns and of thought forms that I couldn’t comprehend.

  “And the jivas pay you guys for the use of the Dad-fruits?” I asked Durkle as he whizzed past. He was skating playful figure eights in the garden.

  “Sure,” answered the boy, “Dad gets a big wad of kessence for each egg that we hatch. Hey, did you ask Mom if I can be your guide? I’m hoping we can leave before Dad even wakes up. He’s going to be crabby today. He drank that whole bottle of living water last night.”

  “Yerba didn’t want to talk to us,” I said. “She’s tuned into some kind of teep.”

  “That’s her court gossip channel,” said Durkle disgustedly. “It’s like everyone who lives in the Duke’s castle is supposed to be so interesting that we country bumpkins are excited to find out who they’re kissing and what they ate. Mom can zone into that stuff for hours. She walks out of the maze every day to let her jiva load up a supply of the latest news.”

  “What if we leave here without asking permission?” suggested Ginnie. “I mean—your father practically said okay last night. And we don’t really need any supplies. With our jivas, Jim and I should be able to find all the food and drink we need.”

  “Yeah,” I chimed in. “Let’s skulk off.”

  Durkle grinned. “You two are great.”

  “I have another idea,” I said. “It’s quite a long walk to the castle, right?”

  “Three or four days.”

  “Come here and let me look at your plow shoes.”