by Rudy Rucker
I looked down at the limp arm I held. It’s not as if Weena were really my friend. And without any zickzack skeleton I was flexible enough that my mouth could open really wide. I braced myself and wolfed down the arm. What a bizarre thing to do.
Ginnie fed me more. I needed it. My ghostly body took on solidity and form.
In a minute or two we’d reduced Weena’s ghost to a sprinkle. Like an angry gnat, she buzzed around us, teeping maledictions.
“I’ll punish you for this, Jim!” rasped Weena’s voice within my head.
“Bitch,” said Ginnie, flicking her fingers like frog-tongues. With a lucky grab, she managed to snag the sprinkle that was Weena’s spark of soul. And now Ginnie bared her kessence-made teeth, raising her hand to her face.
“Are you sure that—” I began.
“It’s thanks to Weena that a parasite came through the hole to kill your wife,” said Ginnie, holding the trapped sprinkle tight. “Weena was the one who sent Skeeves to kill me with an axe. Weena lured you here to get infected with those jiva eggs. And now she’s told Skeeves to trash your meat body back home. It’s enough.”
And with that, Ginnie bit into the shuddering mite that was Weena’s soul. It cracked and melted against Ginnie’s tongue. Weena was gone.
“Yes,” I said. “Oh yes.”
A great weight lifted from me with the knowledge that Weena was no more. I had some hope of charting my own course in Flimsy now. One way or another, I’d flout the jivas and find my way to Val.
“So now let’s hop to Yuelsville,” said Ginnie. “We’ll regroup there and make a plan. I already met up with the Graf there.”
“The Graf made it back to Flimsy?” I asked.
“Yeah. And I think he’s basically on our side.”
In the near distance, the Earthmost Jiva had flushed an angry shade of red. Her tendrils were lashing the air in fury.
“One thing before we go,” I told Ginnie .“Teach me your yuel lullaby and I’ll blast that frikkin’ beet to bits.”
Ginnie and I got a subliminal resonance thing happening, just like I’d done with Charles last night. This yuel-style form of telepathy worked pretty well, especially for something like a song.
Even though I’d heard yuel lullabies several times before now, I’d been unable to internalize any of them. But now, with my resident jiva gone, I was open to the information. In just a few moments Ginnie had taught me her tune. It felt like an anthem.
I pinched off a ball of kessence from my body. I set the yuel lullaby to vibrating within the ball like a standing wave—I thought of the glob as a yuelball now. Running solely on instinct, I widened my mouth and throat so much that my floppy body became an erect tube. I chucked the yuelball down my throat, cradling it in the bottom of my gut like a cannonball in a cannon. I tensed my throat, preparing for a rapid rush of contractions.
And now, as if on cue, the jiva swooped towards us, blazing with hate and menace. And, like a living bazooka, I hocked my yuelball into her fat flank.
I maintained a subliminal linkage to my yuelball, and I could feel how it expanded like a star within the Earthmost Jiva’s form—sending the sweet, insufferable music of my yuel lullaby into her tiniest parts.
The monster jiva tried to flee in every direction at once—and exploded into a million gobbets of jiva-flesh, each fragment flaming and crackling with her stolen energies.
I’d been a rebel my whole life, but never with this kind of success.
“Hog roast with fireworks,” said Ginnie, her elfin face lit in reds and yellows. She looked calmer and more powerful than when she’d been hosting a jiva. As the remnants of the Earthmost Jiva fizzled out, the world around us turned to night.
I’d killed the sun.
24: Yuelsville
"Kick ass!” said Ginnie in the dark. The Duke’s castle was lit from within, with a few of the nobles buzzing around, trying to figure out what had happened. Scraps of the Earthmost Jiva were burning on the ground.
“So let’s go to Yuelsville now,” continued Ginnie.“I bet the yuels can help you get rid of those eggs. They’re nice, even if they talk funny.” “Nice? The yuels back on Earth were snarling and charging at us. And when we got to the castle here, they kidnapped you.”
“I’m better off now,” said Ginnie gently. “We had it backwards all along. The jivas are evil and the yuels are good. The yuels love me now. I helped them resurrect Rickben.”
“Rickben the yuel?” “Remember how I ate a little piece of him that was drooping across my foot? Back at the Whipped Vic?” “I don’t know. Maybe. I don’t want to see Rickben again.” I was feeling a little dizzy from my bazooka push.
“When I ate that noodle of Rickben’s flesh, it put all his information inside me,” said Ginnie. “His life, his shape, his memories—all hidden in my kessence. Somehow the yuels here could sense it. That’s why they were so glad to abduct me for the Duke.”
“Did the yuels tell you to kill Weena?”
“Weena wanted me out of the way. And the Duke and Duchess wanted the yuels to send a hit-woman to terminate Weena. It was a swap. But when the yuels mentioned the second part of the gig, I decided I should be the one. Double reverse! I was happy to take down that snotty Weena for once and for all. How could you have been that horrible woman’s lover?”
“I was lonely. Who are you to talk? You were with Header, for God’s sake.”
“All Weena’s fault,” said Ginnie. “She got what she deserved.”
I pointed across the fields to a spot where a light had begun to glow. “Look over there. That’s the mouth of the burrow where the Earthmost Jiva lived. I bet a replacement’s coming soon.”
“I know how to hop without a jiva,” said Ginnie, all amped up. “The trick is that you merge into the One Mind of Flimsy.”
The leading bulge of a fat yellow jiva was already rising from the Earthmost Jiva’s burrow. The root hairs of the new jiva’s tendrils were reaching toward my mind, talking to me. The new Earthmost Jiva just so happened to be the former clerk of the platonic Sandwich shop in the underworld.
Apparently, there’d been a quick dog-eat-dog battle for succession. The ambitious clerk had eaten her rivals and claimed the prize. She knew exactly who I was and what I’d done. The only reason she wasn’t killing me right away was because of the eggs buried in my body and soul.
“We’re outta here,” said Ginnie wrapping her arms around me. “I’ll carry you.”
Everything seemed to turn inside out and then—we were standing up to our knees in living water, with soggy mud underfoot.
“This is Yuelsville?” I asked.
“Well, I missed by a few hundred yards,” said Ginnie. “I was rushing.”
The sky was bright with the day’s second dawn. We were amid odd trees, their reflections shaky in the swamp water.
“I don’t want a showdown with that new jiva sun,” I said. “I don’t have the energy to be killing one after another.”
“It’s pretty safe in Yuelsville,” said Ginnie. “We might as well to walk. We’ll be there in a minute. It’s on an island that rises up like a dome. Relax and enjoy the swamp.”
The living water was green with sprinkles, as if verdant with algae and duckweed. We were amid trees like cypresses, bulbous at the bottom, and with roots that arched into knees. Ghosts were living in the trees, in flat nests and in huts wedged into the forks of the branches. The spaces within these nooks were oddly large. A little dome the size of a birdhouse might hold a whole extended family.
There must have been thousands of ghosts here, perhaps millions. They seemed to come from all over the Earth—India, Asia, Africa, Europe, Oceania and the Americas. None of them had jivas. Some had warped their bodies to resemble tree-sloths or parrots or jaguars. It was a haunted jungle here, with everyone companionably squawking and jabbering and singing out.
Lacking any zickzack, my body was quite floppy. Using my willpower to firm it up, I sloshed forward at Weena’s side. Soon we sp
otted a fat blue elephant with long sharp tusks and a trumpet-shaped trunk. He was just like the creature that had kidnapped Ginnie near the castle. A group-yuel. Ginnie halted me with a cautioning gesture.
“He’s on patrol,” she whispered. “I don’t think we should go near him.”
So we circled around the elephant. But he heard us anyway. He raised his head and gave us a sour look, preparing to charge. Weena sang out a snatch of her yuel lullaby. The elephant went back to slurping water with his funneled trunk.
We splashed along, and soon the intersecting patterns of the trees had shifted to reveal a dramatic prospect onto the isle of Yuelsville. A shaft of the new jiva’s light illuminated the curved slopes. It was like a Garden of Eden amid the teeming jungle.
I could make out a pair of yuels as large as men. They were shaped like bats with kangaroo tails. They flapped their ragged wings, and rubbed their toothed faces together. Each of them had a swelling bulb at the end of his tail. It was a courting ritual.
In their growing excitement, the mating yuels stumbled down the island’s bank to wallow in the shallows of the living water. They splashed and roared with pleasure, brandishing their distended tails. I had a clear sense that the tail-pods were on the point of spewing out clouds of yuel spores.
But now the water churned and grew muddy. A great yellow root shot upwards, twining around the amorous pair. A jiva tendril!
One of the yuels screamed as the fierce tentacle raked away his kessence flesh. The other yuel managed to break free, and, beating his leathery wings, rose into the air, crying out for help. A herd of four or five trumpeting yuel elephants converged on the scene.
As Ginnie and I watched, the elephants tusked into the muck and unearthed a buried killer beet—perhaps she’d tunneled up from the underworld. After numbing the jiva with yuel lullabies, the elephants fastened their funnel-shaped trunks to the jiva and drained her substance away.
“See?” said Ginnie. “It’s safe here.”
“More or less,” I said.
Ginnie tugged my hand, urging me onward. Angling past the elephants and the remains of the vanquished jiva, we made it ashore. To our left was a muddy village, to the right was—an amusement park?
“Funger Gardens,” said Ginnie. “Even people with jivas can come there. The yuels run it as a business.”
“How do you know so much?” I demanded. “You were only in Yuelsville for about ten minutes before you turned into a hottie and hopped back to hump the Duke and the Duchess.”
“Jealous much?” said Ginnie with a light laugh. “I learned so fast because I used yuel telepathy. It’s that subliminal thing that you and I did when I gave you that lullaby. And I can tell that you used yuel teep with Charles Howard, too. You’ll be better at it after we get you a yuel-built body. Hey, how are those eggs?”
I shrugged. I felt no fresh signs of life within me. The eggs were waiting for Earth. Not that I was planning to take them there.
Smells of food drifted from Funger Gardens, along with tinkling carnival music and the throbbing rumble of the rides. Looking into the park, I saw merry ghosts riding on surreal devices crafted from marbled slabs and beams of kessence. Everyone was whooping it up.
Flims were feasting on pigpops, waffle cactuses, and hanks of spun kessence candy. An Iron Maiden ride impaled ghosts within chambers full of spikes—the clients screamed and thrashed, but once they exited, their bodies healed up. A roller coaster swept its riders to improbable heights, with the rails held in place by warped spatial geometries. And I even saw the upside-down ride that Weena had talked about. I felt a slight pang, remembering how friendly and relaxed she’d been on the Boardwalk beach a few days ago. And now she was beyond dead—her very soul had been annihilated.
Suddenly a little fortune-teller’s tent appeared near us, popping up out of nowhere. The kessence fabric of the tent was displaying an image of drifting clouds. As I studied the apparition, the clouds grew darker. A virtual bolt of lightning raced jaggedly down one of the tent’s walls, rending it in two. The halves rolled back like curtains and a curious little figure came hopping out.
She was something like a plump woman—but more abstract than that, more like a sculpture assembled from spheres: butt, belly, boobs, chin, eyes and topknot. Bouncing like a sack of rubber balls, she made a beeline for me.
“What is that thing?” murmured Ginnie. “Be careful.”
This particular creature had a vibe unlike that of anything else I’d met in Flimsy thus far. She wasn’t a jiva, nor a yuel, nor a ghost. She seemed austere, inevitable, elemental—like a boulder or a river or a molecule.
“Greetings, mailman Jim,” said the figure in an amused, womanly voice. “You’ve made quite a mess. And it’ll get worse.”
“You’re talking about the tunnel between the worlds?” I responded uncertainly.
“A tunnel like that can spell a planet’s end,” she said. “Once you’ve got an open channel like that, there’s no keeping out the jivas and yuels.”
“Who are you?”
“I’m the goddess of Flimsy,” she said. “I’ve appeared here to advise you. The tent is dramatic, no?” Her component balls jiggled. “And I love spheres. In order to preserve Earth, you’ll need to close that tunnel by forcing the border snail back from your world. And before that, you’ll need to drive out any invading jivas and yuels. I know that Weena left at least one jiva loose on Earth.”
“But I’m full of jiva eggs. I shouldn’t go to Earth at all.”
“Yes, I see the eggs within you,” said the lively balls. “Perhaps you can melt them before you go through. If not, you may have to call in an army of yuels to help fight the ten thousand jivas. But go to Earth you must. That’s how the story-line runs.”
“Why don’t you just reach through the tunnel and get rid of that one jiva and then close the tunnel yourself? If you’re really a goddess.”
“My powers don’t extend that far through my shell. Nobody but you can set Earth to rights, Jim. And nobody but you can close the tunnel. You’re the one who made it.”
“Alright, fine. I want to do all that. But—”
“But you also want to find the soul of your wife,” said the bouncy balls. “I know this. You want to grow a flesh body for Val, and bring back her soul to live with you on Earth.”
“That’s—that’s it exactly,” I said. “Can you help with that part?”
“Yes,” said the goddess of Flimsy. “But first secure Earth’s safety. I love my jivas and my yuels. But my jivas and yuels are very greedy. They can destroy a planet. I’ve lost a number of my world-fruits this way.”
“I’ll do what I can,” I said.
“You can,” the little figure. She carried an aura of extreme supernatural power. “Be on your way and soon you’ll reach your mission’s end. You’ll meet my truer form at Flimsy’s core. Val is there with me. I helped protect her on the long ride across the sky. When we’re all together, you’ll carry out one last task—which is the true meaning of all these machinations. And then you and Val can go home.”
“Thank you, goddess,” I said.
Some elephant-yuels behind us let out a roar, and my focus on the goddess wavered. In that moment the little figure’s orbs collapsed into a single ball. The ball darted back into the tent—and the tent disappeared. I felt a wave of exhilaration.
“Always talking about the dead wife,” said Ginnie, but not in a critical way. She’d been quietly listening in.
“Yes, I’m still hung up on Val,” I agreed. “I’m gonna get her back too!”
“I heard what the ball-woman promised,” said Ginnie. “She claimed to be the goddess of Flimsy? I like that we never really know what’s going on here. Flimsy is wilder than it seemed at first.” She took me by the arm. “Good old Jim.”
“Can you help me get back through that tunnel to Earth?” I asked. “Do you think you can teep Ira to open the door on the other side? Could—could you come with me?”
“We’ll
see,” said Ginnie. “Dial back on the plans. Be here now.”
We made our way through a line of yuel-elephants that protected the village. The trumpet-nosed group-yuels snuffled at us and, sensing no jiva vibes, they let us pass.
Awaiting us in a little clearing on the near side of the village was a yuel of a more familiar form: a blue baboon on all fours. He had snaggle teeth and hairless skin. His yellow eyes focused on me.
“Shit,” I said. “Is that—”
“Am Rickbenning,” confirmed the yuel, loping forward. “Thanking Ginnieing resurrecting.” He studied me for a moment, his large yellow eyes warm. I picked up some faint yuel teep from him—an image of myself wielding a cruelly sparking jiva tendril.
“I’m, uh, sorry about—” I began.
“Forgiving tremble Jimming,” said Rickben.
I bowed. “You’re very kind.”
“Lead, tour, introduce. Incinerate.” The yuel teep that accompanied these words showed a termite mound, a cloaked man hunched over a keyboard, and a floppy mannequin blazing in a fireplace.
“What’s he mean?” I asked uneasily.
“Remember that yuels don’t use nouns,” said Ginnie guardedly. “They make everything into a verb. Rickben is taking us to the Graf ’s house.”
“To Jim is to seek,” I said, hoping for the best. “To Jim is to dare.”
Rickben showed his sharp teeth in a grin, and scampered ahead of us, holding high his blue tail, with the crimson pucker of his anus on display.
The buildings of Yuelsville resembled pointillist sand castles—irregular spires assembled from bright grains. The walls were a shimmering mixture of dun browns, lemon yellows, and pale reds. They were rough to the touch, with a drippy, poured quality, like cement.
The streets of Yuelsville were crowded with yuels and with ghosts in yuel-built bodies. They mingled freely, gathering in taverns to swill tankards of watered-down kessence.
A glowing orb on the street-corner showed an image of Flimsy like the one I’d seen in the Duke’s situation room. And, to my surprise, a second orb was showing a map of Earth. A pack of several dozen yuels were staring at this display, jabbering about where on the green planet of the humans they’d like to live. Some of them were pointing at a red dot that marked the location of Santa Cruz. Probably they knew about my tunnel.