by Rudy Rucker
“You rode here on that couch?” asked the calm blonde woman at Flam’s side. “And hi, by the way. My name’s Swoozie.”
I had a fleeting urge to drop to my knees and nuzzle the sexy Swoozie’s thighs like a dog. Seeing this in my mind, she favored me with a casual smile that said, “Thanks, but no way.” If you were a telepath, you were accustomed to other people’s extreme thoughts.
Meanwhile Flam watched Ginnie fashion us three long boards, each with a power plate on the bottom and a control lever in back. Ginnie was bright. She’d effortlessly picked the design details from my head. She decorated the boards with splashy pictures: jivas for me, pigpops for Durkle, and skulls with axes for herself.
“I’m a little worried about you, cousin Durkle,” allowed Flam. “You can teleport, yeah, so maybe you can hop back to the top when you need to. But I know how stubborn you are. If you actually hit the bottom—” Flam threw his hands in the air.
“What’s down there?” I asked. “A giant ant lion?” I pumped my hands like insect jaws, kidding around.
“A pool of hungry ghosts,” said Flam, not smiling. “It’s an underground lake that comes in from the Dark Gulf. The folks who go in there don’t came back anytime soon. That’s why it takes guts to ride the pit at all.”
“And, no, I’m not going to teleport when it’s time to bail,” said Durkle, eager to show off. “That’s for wimps. I’ll use this lever to bomb uphill.” He crouched on his new board, his snaky limbs wrapped into a knot, diddling the control. The board swung into motion, and Durkle carved circles around us.
“Whoo hoo,” muttered Flam sarcastically. I could teep that he was little envious of our cool rigs.
“Ready to race?” yelled Durkle, heady with his board’s power. “How about one of those chicken races, Flam?”
“What’s that mean?” I asked.
“Oh, that’s when you ride straight down and go faster and faster until someone falls off or bails,” said Flam. “But—”
“Durkle shouldn’t do that yet,” put in Swoozie. “Not on his first ride.”
“Should too!” shrilled Durkle, coming to a halt at our side. “I’m gonna be the pit master.”
Swoozie glanced over Durkle’s pigpop-patterned board. “That lever thing is radical.”
“Flashy trash,” said Flam. “Boards should be simple.”
“You’re weak, Flam,” hollered Durkle. “You’re lame!”
Flam’s mouth tightened. With a practiced move, he flipped his long board through the air and balanced himself on the edge of the cliff. Wordlessly he scowled at his cousin.
“We’ll ride full speed, and the first one in sight of the bottom wins,” babbled Durkle. “Right? I’ve been dreaming about this all year. I’ll be the new pit master, yeah. And if I beat you, Flam, you have to give me your board.”
“Like that’ll happen,” said Flam cracking a smile. It was hard to withstand Durkle’s gall. “And if I win—I get to keep Jim’s cruiser couch. He can always make a new one, right?”
“No problem,” I said. Flam wasn’t really a bad guy.
Swoozie said she’d wait up here—she wasn’t interested in little Durkle trying to prove himself. But Ginnie and I lined up next to the two boys. This seemed like too awesome an experience to miss.
“Remember that riding is supposed to be fun,” Flam cautioned Durkle. “Please don’t overdo it and get yourself killed. I don’t want your mother coming after me.”
“I’ll watch over him,” I said.
16: Under the Pit
And then the four of us were whizzing down the slope—Flam, Durkle, Ginnie and me. The sand rose behind us in plumes, the sky was a watery disk of blue, the Earthmost Jiva was watching.
Flam held the lead. He had a special way of crouching and rocking that set his board to bouncing. He arrowed down the slope like a skipping stone, moving his arms in rapid ideograms of grace.
Hell-bent on besting his cousin, Durkle lay down on his pigpopdecorated board, making his flexible body as flat as a fried egg. He pushed his lever all the way forward. Feeling a sense of responsibility for the excitable lad, I followed close behind, squinting against the flying sand.
Ginnie, to our rear, wasn’t so interested in the race. She was getting a feel for the ride and the slope. She stood erect like a surfer, swooping back and forth in huge slalom loops, having fun.
For a little while, Durkle and I were gaining on Flam. I started to have some hopes of passing him. But then he glanced back at us, laughed, and began bouncing harder, redoubling the lengths of his hops down the slope. Our boards’ power-drives didn’t seem to make much difference in the face of Flam’s skill at using the natural dynamics of the pit.
The miles flew by, and the pit grew steeper. In the process of our cat and mouse chase, we’d amped up to the speed of a Bonneville race car. I worried that if we wiped out and tumbled, we’d be sanded down to oozing scraps.
Up ahead, Flam rocketed into the shadowed zone near the cone’s base. Seconds later, Durkle and I entered the gloom as well. Deep below, a wet patch twinkled. The cone was but a half-mile across here, and the walls were nearly vertical. The cavity murmured with the echoes of our headlong chase.
Something clunked and shattered against my board—shit, that was an abandoned zickzack skull! Flam continued accelerating down the tightening cone, continued increasing his lead. I was seeing damp spots and sparkles of color in the sands, and further down, the colors flowed into a sinister, glowing pool of living water. Flam had warned us about the bottom. Time to bail.
I hoped I could figure out how to teleport myself. Imitating what I’d seen Weena do, I wove an invisible cocoon of tendrils around myself. And then, reaching upward with some longer tendrils, I felt for a suitable a target zone at the cone’s lip. Flam was still ahead. The race was done.
As if to confirm this, Flam disappeared. He’d jumped back to the top. And behind us, Ginnie had jumped too. But that crazy little Durkle was still racing straight ahead—what was he thinking? The pool below us flickered with pearlescent light.
Somehow I felt responsible for the boy. I decided to stay with him a little longer. I asked Mijjy if she’d delay the jump I’d just prepared. Mijjy gave me an answer of sorts, but not what I’d expected.
“Funnel puddle ecstasy death,” she said, and showed me the image of a ghost-like Jim with his kessence smeared across an acre of gravel and his jiva wriggling free. The jiva in the image was giggling with titillation, savoring the sensations of the man’s last spasm.
In plain words, my jiva was in this for kicks, and she didn’t really care if I pulled out of my dive or not. Fine. For now I still had time to catch up with Durkle.
I pushed my board lever the last possible bit forward. With aching slowness, I drew even with the boy, coming up on his left. The converging walls of the dim pit were flying past in a blur, with more and more streaks of living water in the sand. Durkle grinned over at me, his eyes squinted to slits. He was loving his ride. Like kids everywhere, he imagined he was invulnerable.
I couldn’t speak over the roar of our tobogganing, nor could I use jiva-teep to reach the boy. And so I fell back on gestures. I indicated that Flam was gone, and that the glowing, shifting walls were closing in on every side. I put my hands together as if in prayer, and bowed to Durkle, to show him that he was the true pit master. I pointed to the pool of melding pastels just below.
Finally Durkle relented. He pulled back on his lever and swung his board hard to the right, expecting to carve an upward path to the top of the pit. Too sharp a turn? For now it was okay—his board held steady. His right edge carved a deep furrow into the lambent sand. Durkle was going to make it.
I still wished he’d just hop himself out of here, using his yuel-style teleportation, however that worked. But for now I was stuck shadowing his moves. I steered to the right like Durkle had done. I was already imagining the ride to the top, the reunion with Ginnie, and the tongue-lashing I’d give my jiva. But just
then—I screwed up.
I was tired, scared, over-excited. Eager as I was to escape from the bottom of the pit, I’d gunned it a little too hard—and my board scraped the side of Durkle’s. We wobbled, bumped once more and—oh hell—rolled.
Mijjy hadn’t entirely abandoned me. My tendril cocoon were still in place. I grabbed hold of Durkle, and my jiva firmed up my cocoon enough to keep our kessence intact as we bounced down the final meters of the pit’s slope.
If I’d been fully accustomed to teleportation, I probably could have hopped the two of us up to the top. But, remember, I’d never actually teleported before. I wasn’t quite sure how to pull the trigger. And Mijjy showed no inclination to coach me along. I think she was curious what might happen when we hit bottom.
The water at the bottom was flickering like the Flimsy night sky, or like the wall I’d passed through in the tunnel. I realized it was filled with sprinkles—hungry ghosts.
It was as if death had been stalking me across the worlds. It had already taken my wife, and it had nearly nailed me at the Santa Cruz Hospital. Perhaps to escape, I’d travelled out of my body for this great adventure. But now this. Too bad.
The shimmering waters splashed up around us and the sprinkles set upon us like tiny piranhas. As in the tunnel, the sprinkles’ onslaught broke me into a flock of scraps—but once again my body pulled itself back together. Durkle and I drifted down through a few meters of living water, and emerged into air, dropping onto a floor.
Stunned by the sudden transition, we two remained silent for a time.
We were in a place that resembled—what a letdown—a ramshackle, cobbled-together shopping mall. A layer of living water floated above us like a ceiling, filled with sprinkles fighting their ceaseless battles. And here amid this collection of walls and corridors was a crowd of human-shaped ghosts—milling around, plucking at us.
The touches of their hands were feathery and insubstantial—these puny spirits had no jivas in them, and no zickzack bodies to their name. I flailed my arms and sent them tumbling like dry leaves. One of them, a man in green, hit his head on the floor. The other ghosts tore him apart, devouring the wispy scraps. The man’s last remains shrank into a glittering emerald speck that arced up to enter the thick blanket of living water overhead.
The man’s fate scared off our attackers. They lost interest in us for a time.
My jiva, Mijjy, was eagerly running exploratory tendrils into this reality. And Durkle was at my side. It occurred to me that Val might be somewhere down here. The thought was both alluring and creepy. There’s a reason why we bury our dead. We can’t bear to see our loved ones so terribly transformed.
Still silent, Durkle and I began to walk.
Narrow corridors veered off at crazy angles, holes pocked the floors. The ceiling was a continuation of that same sheet of living water. Durkle had called it an underground lake—presumably it was fed by the great Dark Gulf that filled the lower hemisphere of Flimsy.
Crooked store fronts lined the walls, none of them quite straight, nothing quite level. For some reason, the stores’ signs were graphic icons: Chair, Fish, Vase—like that. This place felt less like a building than like an organically grown reef. The halls were evenly lit by a feeble, greenish glow, as if from the energies of decay.
To every side, the pastel ghosts darted in and out of nooks and passages, some nimble as insects in a colony, some streaming past us with hooded eyes, lost perhaps in memories, or intent upon power quests. The fainter figures were presumably the newer arrivals. Often the more experienced ghosts would set upon a newcomer, siphoning energy from their victim until he or she collapsed into a sprinkle that darted up to that sheet of living water overhead, perhaps to drift into the depths of the Dark Gulf.
Now and then a particularly vigorous sparkle in the living water overhead would eat so many of its fellows that it was able to blossom out and drift down in the form of a humanoid ghost.
All was in flux.
“The underworld of Flimsy,” said Durkle softly. “I’ve never been here.”
I touched his shoulder, gave him a pat, and then a hug. Although he was bendy and rubbery, he was good and solid. He had a lot of kessence.
“We’ll be fine,” I told him, hoping this was true. “We’ll have a look around and then find our way out.”
Despite the crash, I felt relatively fresh and healthy. I stretched my arms, savoring the supple strength of my kessence and my jivaenhancements. My hand happened to block the ghost of a flat-faced woman wearing a shiny pink dress. She slid around me like a scarf of mist. A hip-looking man in a purple suit danced by, giving us a probing look.
“I hear that a lot of these ghosts never make it out of here,” remarked Durkle. “If someone manages to eat your sprinkle, it’s curtains. Or you can get stuck on a treadmill, bouncing back and forth between being a sprinkle and a newbie ghost. They say that eventually the global current might catch you, and sweep you into the sky. And it’s hard to get down from there. Supposedly if you end up at the center of the sky, the goddess of Flimsy might recycle you. The sprinkles have it rough.”
I thought back to the two times I’d eaten sprinkles. Those voices I’d heard while I was eating—they’d been real. Sprinkles were tiny souls. The ones that I’d eaten had merged into me, I supposed, melted into me like drops of ink in a glass of water.
“And how do they ever escape?” I asked.
“It’s like we were telling you before,” said Durkle. “They crawl up through the dirt of Flimsy. Or they get back into the Dark Gulf and follow one of the walls up into the sky. Either way, they make it to the surface of Flimsy, and have a shot at getting a zickzack body from the jivas or a kessence body from the yuels.” He shook his head. “I wish we weren’t down here.”
“Your parents went through all this?” I asked, wondering what Val’s odds were.
“Yeah. They died on Earth about five hundred years ago. They started out in the Dark Gulf like everyone does, and they worked their way up through the underworld. Once they were topside, they got some jivas and started a farm. And about a year ago, Weena got them to move into her border snail’s maze.”
“The stores down here are so weird,” I said, looking around. “You notice how each place only stocks one kind of thing?”
We studied the Root shop beside us. Its racks, bins and shelves were filled with nothing but gnarly variations on the store’s single theme: fat rutabagas, slim carrots, ferny flower rhizomes, tulip bulbs, tree stumps, and so on and on. It was hard to make out how far back into the wall the store went.
The next store was Ball, and it held floating balloons, metal ball-bearings, bouncy rubber kick balls, blown-glass ornaments, wooden croquet balls, and much more. I could see the hip purple-suited man in there making a deal with the clerk. The clerk was a mauve jiva the size of a woman. Her hide was decorated with embossed pink daisies.
The jiva used her tendrils to craft the man a copy of a reflective disco ball that hung from the shop’s ceiling. The zickzack planes of the ball’s facets were tweaked to reflect light.
“Gift return,” the jiva told the man.
The man let her dig a tendril into him. Evidently the jiva extracted a design from the man’s memories, for right away she crafted a zickzack version of a red and yellow soccer ball, using subtle zickzack diffraction gratings to produce the colors.
The flowered mauve clerk stood admiring her new creation, and the man exited the store, happy with his mirror ball. Thanks to Mijjy within me, I could make out the faint outline of the jiva clerk’s extensible tendril, still attached to the shopper.
“Let’s check that store up ahead,” said Durkle, pointing out a place with a sign that showed the platonic ideal of a Sandwich. “I’m hungry again.”
“In fairy tales it’s bad luck to eat the things they offer you in the other world,” I remarked. “Just saying.”
“This isn’t any fairy tale,” said Durkle dismissively. “This is my actual life.”
Through a side-door in the hall, I saw a crooked little staircase leading down. It was lit by the ubiquitous glow, but I couldn’t make out how far down it led. I shuddered at the thought of going any deeper into this Stygian mall.
Glancing up at the shimmering ceiling of living water, I realized that pushing upwards might not be so useful either, at least not precisely here. The way the hallways kept swaying and turning, I had no idea about how to get back to the spot where we’d entered this nightmarish zone. By now we might be beneath miles and miles of Flimsy’s crust.
Some of the ghosts were watching us, probably waiting for a chance to move in. One hooded, peach-colored figure in particular was tracking my every move. Although I couldn’t see her face, I sensed she was the ghost of a woman. What if I confronted her and asked her to leave me alone? As if sensing my willingness to go on the offensive, now she ducked into a store labeled with the image of an idealized Shoe.
“Come on and help me get my sandwich,” said Durkle, nudging me out of my thoughts.
“Fine.”
The Sandwich place had a pleasant smell, like an old-timey Italian deli that I liked in North Beach. Apparently the jivas had gone so far as to craft microscopic zickzack shapes that drifted through the air and locked into the simulated olfactory receptors of my nose.
Impeccable sandwiches rested on plates in glass cases, one of each kind: a turkey and bacon on a bun, a mortadella and provolone hoagie, a steak and pepper sub, a white-bread cucumber tartine with the crusts trimmed off, a baguette with red peppers and brie, a pastrami and sauerkraut on rye, a baked tofu on three-seed, a sesame muffuletta with olive salad and salami, an egg-salad with lettuce on whole wheat, and more.