by Rudy Rucker
“And now that you’ve set up that border snail, we’ve got our tunnel, Weena,” said the Duchess. “So—face it—your and Charles’s boondoggle is done.”
“Charles’s goals have moved beyond any mere tunnel,” said Weena. “We’ve discussed this, Your Grace. The ladder, as you term it. A discreet and non-destructive pathway to the core of Flimsy. That’s what the current iteration of Atum’s Lotus is for.”
“Look, if someone wants the goddess of Flimsy to clean their clock, all they gotta do is sink into the Dark Gulf and ride the current across the sky,” said the Duchess. “Or just teleport there if they want a frikkin’ V.I.P. route to the drain hole.”
“It’s not possible to teleport to the core,” said Weena firmly. “The goddess and the jivas don’t allow for that. At present, the only beings who see the goddess are the sprinkles and destitute ghosts who are swept there by the living waters. They rain onto the goddess, perhaps to be sluiced through her navel into the white hole of reincarnation.”
“But you’re offering something better?” said the Duchess.
“Charles feels those who reach the center via the chants of Atum’s Lotus will have the ability to orbit the goddess,” persisted Weena. “You might say that Charles and I are presenting a new touristic possibility for our upper-class flims. Our Atum’s Lotus will bring yet more cachet unto the Ducal residence. I implore Your Grace to ponder this new benison.”
“I’m not saying it’s all crap,” grunted the Duke, finally speaking up. “Look at the Duchess’s brooch, Jim. A bud from Atum’s Lotus.”
He gave a little tap to the pin that the Duchess wore upon the lapel of her coat. At the moment, it resembled a gem-encrusted orchid—but the brooch’s form was continually changing. The orchid lips opened and folded back, the pistils pushed out and grew tiny reflective spheres, and now these spheres blossomed into starbursts of spikes. A faint little song came from the thing, hauntingly sweet.
“Amazing,” I dutifully said. “Lovely.”
“An ever-renewing form,” said Weena. “A satellite fragment of Atum’s Lotus. Charles trained this bud to accompany the Duchess wherever she goes.”
“I’m proud to have Charles working here,” said the Duke to his wife. “It gives our castle a high tone.” Studying the brooch, he sighed with pleasure. “This thing is amazing.”
“Yeah, yeah,” said the Duchess impatiently. “My point is that we’ve got the nice, solid Earth tunnel we were looking for in the first place. So we don’t need these expensive flourishes anymore. I could ditch this brooch in a minute. What’s amazing is that you let busy little Weena write up a contract for a loan from the sleazy frikkin’ Bulbers. And now they’re in a position to be making threats?”
“There were certain terms that the Bulbers sought,” said Weena, smoothly. “I was merely a facilitator.”
“Facilitating a fifteen percent commission for yourself,” said the Duchess, stamping her foot. “You’d already be a gone goose, Weena, if you hadn’t of found that snail tunnel. At least we can use your tunnel to bail us out. We’ll pay off the debt and close down Atum’s Lotus for good. Enough’s enough.”
“I humbly offer the thought that Wizard Charles’s work has justified any and all expenses, Your Grace,” said Weena. “And I admire the ingenuity of your solution. It is well if the Earthlings pitch in! Though they know it not, Atum’s Lotus is the shrouded peak of their civilization’s creations, a flower of song that blooms from their history’s mud.”
“Oh, you just act all high-flown about that Lotus because you’re screwing Charles,” said the Duchess dismissively. “For a while there, you were talking the same way about the Graf.” The Duchess studied Weena for a moment, as if thinking something over. “Too bad you didn’t let that little Durkle boy come in here. You never do anything right. I could have jumped the kid and eaten his tasty little soul.” The Duchess laughed harshly.
“I—I hadn’t realized...” stuttered Weena. This was the first time I’d ever seen her on the defensive.
“Did I tell you we’ve got a woman with a yuel-built body coming for a little stay?” continued the Duchess. “A hot little tramp. She’ll be here soon. It’s gonna be wild, hooking into that pure kessence funk. The yuels are sending us this girl to repay us for giving them that ghost who’d glommed onto Jim.” The Duchess regarded me coolly, waiting to see my reaction.
“Let’s not unpack every goddamn bit of our dirty laundry,” chided the Duke. “Let’s tell Jim about his delivery job now.”
“Uh, yes,” I said, fighting to control my anger. I could hardly even hear or see. “About the—the eggs?” I temporized. “I’m still not sure if—”
“You’ll be upping the quality of people’s lives,” said the Duchess, in a tone that brooked no contradiction. “Forget about it! Jivas are great. Tonight you sleep in Weena’s room, and tomorrow we’ll be ready with the eggs. End of story. And don’t go thinking there’s any way to skeeve out of this. The jiva inside you is keeping close watch. Right, Mijjy?”
“Indeed, Your Grace,” said my voice, taking on a fruity, obsequious tone. Mijjy was making me play the courtier. “Your will is mine.”
And that was the end of my briefing. I would have liked to say something else, but Mijjy clamped shut my throat. The Duke and Duchess turned away, distracted by a noble doing a handstand.
Within my innermost self where Mijjy couldn’t see, I decided that, come what may, I wouldn’t be carrying any jiva eggs for these bastards. Before I’d do that, I’d lose my Earthly flesh, let my soul shrivel to a sprinkle, and let the sprinkle itself be ground into dust.
“Come, Jim,” said Weena. “Don’t look so distraught. We’ll tour the attractions of the castle. With a special visit to my room.” She gave me a suggestive nudge.
I forced a smile and nudged back. If I was going to survive, I’d need to work every possible angle that I had.
21: Weena’s Tale
The geranium slung a pair of tendrils around our waists and we sailed up through the hole on the leaf ’s top surface. I could see the mouth of the Earthmost Jiva’s burrow nearby. She hung in the sky like a great flaming beet, colored like a child’s top, festooned with dangling tendrils. She was excited by the thought of me bearing a load of ten thousand jiva eggs to Earth. Now that she’d overheard my mission directive, she regarded me with the mixture of lust and cruelty that a thug might feel towards the intended victim of a rape.
“There are no passageways through the stems,” chirped Weena, cheerful at my side. “We fly from leaf to leaf, using the geranium’s tendrils. Some of the leaves are halls, and others hold apartments, with ample windows and lovely light. It’s a shame you’re not likely to move in with me long-term. I’d enjoy having two lovers to draw upon. We’re terribly open-minded here.” She paused to giggle. “In fact, I’ll show you the group encounter room. That heart-shaped leaf down low? Fly us there, oh great geranium! Softly and sweetly.”
“You’re not fooling me with the happy talk,” I said, my voice harsh. “You and the Duchess sent Ginnie to a second death. And now I’m supposed to infect Earth with jivas?”
“The yuels merely took Ginnie to Yuelsville,” said Weena. “The yuel settlement in the swamp? She may find it congenial there. It’s more her kind of place than any castle, I’d say. You don’t that common little girl anyway. Not when you’ve still got me.”
“But let’s talk about the eggs,” I continued, unable to stop myself. For now Mijjy wasn’t blocking me. She didn’t much care what I said to Weena. “I saw the jivas busting out of the Dad-fruits in Durkle’s garden,” I continued. “I saw what happened to Val. Hatching ten thousand jivas will tear me to bits. There won’t be an atom of me left.”
“Oh, poor Jim,” cooed Weena. “Is that really what you think?”
“It’s a suicide mission, Weena. That’s why you want to send the eggs with me.”
“The eggs will be dormant, Jim. They won’t hatch into your flesh. You’ll release th
em, and they’ll home in on every living human on Earth. One egg per person.”
“So I’ll be killing everyone in the world at once. Great.”
Sensing the intensity of our discussion, the geranium had thoughtfully paused our progress. We were hanging in mid-air among the plant’s lovely green leaves. Guards and cheerful nobles were flitting past. And here Weena and I were, discussing death and the end of the world.
“You’re behaving like a sulky child,” Weena told me. “Although farmer Monin’s kessence Dad-fruits fall apart when hatching jivas, it’s doesn’t have to be that way.”
“So what happened to Val and to Dick Simly?” I yelled, by now of point of bursting into tears.
“Growing a jiva need do no harm to a living human. It’s—it’s a process that’s still being fine-tuned. We lost Val, yes, but I understand that Dick Simly is doing very—”
“Sure, sure,” I snarled. “And the point is to leech kessence from Earth?”
“You might frame it that way, yes. The Duke has to pay his debts rather soon. Otherwise we’ll lose much more than planet Earth. The Bulbers threaten to annihilate all the spirits in the entire Earth-zone of Flimsy. And, given the terms of their ninety-day loan, this is within their rights.”
“Why not just turn off Atum’s Lotus?” I said, still groping for a way out.
“Do you never listen to anyone?” said Weena impatiently. “Yes, the Duchess wants to halt Atum’s Lotus. But this does nothing for repaying the Duke’s ninety-day loan. And the kessence that we borrowed is gone. The Duke needs to redeem his debt, Jim. We’re depending on you and your eggs.”
The geranium tendrils resumed lowering us closer to the ground, wobbling back and forth like drifting feathers. Working the dirt below us was the same crew of flims that I’d noticed before. They were grubbing trenches into the soil and shoveling in shiny goo from a mound of pure kessence. Most of the mound was gone.
And now, as I watched, a pair of very strange creatures appeared and began spewing more kessence onto the mound. These guys weren’t like any of the flims I’d seen thus far. They were purple teardrop-shaped blimps, not overly large, and with eyespots all over them, red dots in yellow irises. Ammonia-smelling clouds of steam drifted our way as they pooted kessence from their pointed rear ends.
“Those are the ones you’re borrowing from?” I asked Weena.
“Boss Blinks Bulber and his assistant,” said Weena. “Our contract is with Boss Blinks—a stinky blimp. And now Blinks wants to foreclose.”
“The Bulbers are ghosts of aliens?”
“Boss Blinks was an aeroform on Jupiter,” said Weena.
“Another race in our own solar system!” I exclaimed. “And the Bulbers have their own little terrain in Flimsy? How come I never knew any of this?”
“What do ants know of airplanes?” said Weena. “Rhetorical question. Never mind the Bulbers for now. Here comes something pleasant to distract you!”
We dove into the heart-shaped leaf—and found a large orgy underway. Flexible bands connected pairs, triples and larger clusters of flims, some in the throes of intense conjugation, some languidly blissed out. The air was perfumed with a rich smell of ozone and decaying plants. Landscapes of light played along the leafy walls. The oversweet sounds of orchestral strings drooled through the air like fermented honey. A laughing male noble proffered Weena his crotch tube, with writhing feelers on its tip, a-drip with kessence. He even introduced himself to me. His name was Sandy.
Weena made as if to nestle Sandy’s shaft between her legs, but then flipped it back to him, wrapping her arms around me and feigning besotted devotion. The man gave me a cheerful wave, then did a flip and let his organ merge into the band connecting a pair of moaning female flims.
To many newly-arrived Earthlings, the scene might not have seemed erotic. But I confess that it turned me on. After last night’s embraces with Ginnie, I understood what conjugation was all about.
“Ready for my room?” Weena breathed into my ear.
I was aroused. And remember that I’d almost been in love with Weena in Santa Cruz. Her astral body was impeccable, and I knew her to be inspired in bed. And for now, of course, it was in my best interests to play along.
“Of course I want to go to your room,” I said, caressing her.
Weena’s apartment was a pie-slice of a very large geranium leaf nearby. She had the place furnished with Victorian-inspired furniture that had been tweaked and amplified into more extreme colors and shapes. Her bed frame, for instance, was a dark mahogany ellipse, with fluted posts and a perpetually rippling canopy of star-patterned kessence-cloth.
Weena and I lay together and found a sensual pleasure as great as any I’d ever known. But it was all ashes to me. I knew Weena to be the enemy of all life on Earth. Once our flood of passion had receded I began to question her, hoping to find a way out.
“So you’ve known this Charles Howard for over a hundred years?”
“Since the early 1900s,” said Weena reflectively. “I was Charles’s lover in Berkeley, as I told you. I was a statistician, on the cusp of becoming an old maid. I was helping him with his historical analyses. Not that his losing his job was all my fault. He was always getting fired.”
“I suppose he was married?”
“Yes. He felt terribly guilty about our affair, but he couldn’t give me up. He’d visit my rooming house every day. We’d make love and talk about mathematics and the Egyptian gods. Charles said I have a spiritual mind. It was wonderful to study with such a master.”
I pressed on. “How does your chant work? How did you and Charles learn how to leave your bodies?”
“After his teaching job, Charles had started work for Randolph Crocker, figuring out the story of Amenhotep’s gold casket. The chant is all written out on the sarcophagus in hieroglyphs. But it took Charles’s genius to decipher it.”
“Why did you two want to leave your bodies in the first place?”
“Charles’s wife had, over the years, learned of our affair. A sweet woman, a poet. Charles didn’t want to hurt her, and, even more, he couldn’t bear the thought of another scandal. He’d had woman trouble before, back in England.” Weena gazed into the distance, remembering. “I formed the far-fetched plan of learning astral travel. I studied some books of my grandmother’s, consulted a scoundrel of a guru, and mastered certain techniques. But it was Charles who understood how to make the process truly work—thanks to Amenhotep’s chant.”
“And then you two left?”
“Well, Charles made it appear as if he’d dropped dead of a cerebral hemorrhage, directly outside the annual banquet of the Society of Philanthropic Inquiry in San Francisco. I was at the banquet as well.” Weena laughed fondly. “Charles had just delivered a toast to female philosophers, all the while smiling at me. Once outside he went into a trance and dropped to the sidewalk. I helped him escape from the hospital.”
“You’re good at hospitals,” I said sourly.
“Only when men are involved.” Weena smiled at me. “Charles and I hastened to Randolph Crocker’s mansion and enshrined ourselves in Amenhotep’s sarcophagus. We performed our chant and—we were off.”
“Just like you and I did the other day.”
“Not exactly,” said Weena. “It was much harder that first time. Charles and I were mere sprinkles, with no kessence to our names— and no jivas to help us. As is the norm for purely conceptual entities, our sprinkles jumped immediately to the afterworld, that is, to the Dark Gulf of Flimsy. Fighting our way to the surface of Flimsy was a years-long struggle for us.”
“You weren’t tempted to give up and come home?”
Weena sat up now, gathering her clothes together. “We soon learned that it would be much harder than we’d imagined to return to Earth—all but impossible. Traditionally, the only way to get out of Flimsy is to go all the way to the center, pass through the goddess of Flimsy, and therewith be erased. But in this process, even the internal structure of your sprinkle is d
estroyed. Only the barest notion of a soul is recycled. But of course Charles and I wanted to return with our memories intact.”
“Before you and I left, you told me it was going to be easy to come back.”
“It is easy, now that we’ve set up Snaily with a tunnel. And that’s all thanks to Charles figuring out that Flimsy is inside every electron on Earth. That’s the esoteric secret that we hadn’t realized before. The Kingdom of Heaven is like a grain of mustard seed!”
“Skeeves already told me that,” I said. “And you’ve talked about it, too.”
“Skeeves,” said Weena thoughtfully. “Every time I’d teep back to Earth to see how our bodies were doing, I’d see that horrible man taking unseemly liberties with me. So I got into his head and made him my slave.”
“And then you sicced him on me.”
“Well, yes. Once I learned about the mustard seed, I had to teep around Santa Cruz for someone who might pop a hole in an actual electron—and that’s what led me to you, Jim. And I told Skeeves to help you find an exceedingly sharp tip.”
“Our big experiment killed my wife,” I said. “A glowing spore came into our house. It was a jiva egg.”
“Yes,” said Weena quietly. “I suppose that’s true.”
My voice caught. “The pathetic thing is that I was looking at a strand of Val’s DNA. We were planning to have a baby.”
“Yes, yes, it was very sad for you two,” said Weena, obviously not giving a shit. “But it’s not the case that I was monitoring your every move. When I heard about your wife’s death from Skeeves, I realized that you really had broken the wall of an electron. So for me, in a way, it was good news. I had Skeeves fetch your test sample. The electron had healed over, but its wall was thin. I had access to a spot where a hungry young border snail could tunnel through.”
“Good news,” I echoed bitterly, hating Weena more than ever. Within me Mijjy stirred, on the ready to stop me from going too far.