by Rudy Rucker
With nurse Alice along, nobody paid much attention as we wheeled my body across the lot and lifted it into the van. Droog pranced around, getting in the way.
The moment I laid my body in the sarcophagus, it looked better. My cheeks regained some color. My whole form seemed to relax and fill out. It was like tucking someone onto their own comfortable bed—instead of leaving them on a padded bench in a death-row cell.
I had the feeling that Alice was still wondering if this was for real.
“You’re wonderful,” I told her. “And just wait, that jiva will be gone later today.”
“Good luck,” she said with a tight, anxious smile. And then she was on her way back inside.
Thinking ahead, I rooted in the van’s accumulated mounds of grunge and found a jeans and T-shirt combo that could fit Val, should she return. I stuffed them into the casket with my clothed body.
Taking the wheel, I drove fast down some back roads and made it to a pull-out near Four Mile Beach. And then we had to maneuver the sarcophagus and my body across a meadow of summer-yellowed grass and Queen Anne’s lace—tall stalks with intricate green leaves and big compound flowers like white doilies on top. Droog was sniffing everything. By now the morning fog had cleared away—it was a sunny July day. Butterflies drifted across the flowers; grasshoppers buzzed and leapt.
As I didn’t want my body to be out in the sunlight where everyone could see it, we were pushing the closed sarcophagus across the meadow like a sled, with the plants tip-tapping the shiny sides. The ancient casket was gorgeous in the full sun, with its bands of hieroglyphs in gold, carnelian and lapis lazuli. Although the face of Amenhotep on the lid was serene it seemed in some sense watchful—with its large, embossed eyes. But there were no signs of that dark beetle who’d disappeared among the hammered ankhs and ibises along the base. Now and then the heavy box would fetch up against a tuft of grass and we’d have to redouble our efforts.
“This is ridiculous,” complained the feeble Ira at one such pause. “It’s way too hard.”
“Jim and I are doing the real work, bitch,” said Ginnie. “Why don’t you just walk along behind us and straighten up the plants. We don’t want to be leaving a big obvious skid track.”
“But why the fuck are we doing this?” asked Ira.
“Because I buried my wife’s ashes on the bluff here,” I said. “Okay? I want to be next to her.”
“How goth,” said Ginnie.
And so the two of us pushed on, bending down nearly parallel to the ground, making our legs firm and fat. The intense physical effort was depleting my supply of kessence—but my astral body still had plenty to spare.
We reached the bluff with its sandy hollows. In the midday sun, the glassy ocean waves were a brilliant shade of ultramarine blue. Droog seemed to remember about Val. He made his way to the little pyramid-rock that I’d set in place as her gravestone. Waving off the dog, I knelt down and dug with both hands until I’d reached the first dry white flecks of my wife’s cremated bones. I sat on the ground beside the little hole, collecting my thoughts. And then I drew the tube of Durkle’s ultragrow from within my left thigh.
“A method to his madness,” said Ginnie, understanding what was up.
“I’m hoping this will get Val’s body to start growing here,” I explained for Ira’s sake as I squeezed silvery goo from the tube. “I want to get her body ready for when I bring her spirit back.” I stirred the ultragrow into the sand, feeling a tingle in my hands. And then I covered the hole with a low mound of sand.
Ira and Ginnie watched, sitting on the ground and leaning against the sarcophagus. They seemed to have forgotten any worries about the beetle spirit.
“Now we get that thing out of sight,” I said. “I don’t want some gunjy freak to be stealing it. And I don’t want my body to get cooked by the sun. Look, there’s a long low spot right here. All we have to do is scrape it a foot or two deeper. Please?”
Ginnie, Ira and I got it done, with Droog joining in. The digging wasn’t all that hard—the sand was loose. And Ginnie found that we could reshape our kessence hands into trowels. The sarcophagus fit readily into the trench, and we heaped the sand up along its sides.
At the last minute, I opened the sarcophagus lid for a final check. My body was looking much, much better than in the stroke ward.
“Good night, Jim,” said Ginnie. I closed the lid and we scattered a thin layer of sand across the top. With any luck, I’d be back to reclaim my body quite soon.
We went across the meadow and got back in the van.
“Now for Sukie, and then it’s back to the Whipped Vic,” I said.
“Check this out,” said Ginnie. She’d found a couple of filthy old towels on the floor. She draped one over her head and tossed one on me. “This way it won’t look like the van’s empty while we’re driving around town.”
“Salaam.”
On the drive into town, Ginnie and I taught Ira how to sing the yuel lullaby. We found it pretty easy to teep with Ira, maybe because he’d absorbed kessence from both of us. The three of us were in synch.
I hadn’t been exactly clear on which car lot Sukie was hovering over, so when I pulled up to it, I had a jolt of surprise. Sukie was above, of all places, Simly The Best—the car dealership owned by my landlord Dick Simly, the very guy that Weena had—
“Is Dick Simly dead or not?” I asked Ira.
“What?”
“The guy whose body Sukie and those other jivas hatched from?”
“I’m way outta the loop,” said Ira, hunching down low in the back seat. “Don’t bother me right now. I want to be sure I remember that yuel lullaby.”
I threw off my towel and got out of the car, invisible to most of the people here. Sukie’s long tapering tail trailed down to the ground where it was rooted in the asphalt of the lot. She was a sitting duck. And sure enough, there was sleek, earnest Dick Simly inside the dealership, showing an electric car to a granola yuppie woman with frizzy hair.
So far, neither Dick nor the jiva had noticed me. I set my yuel lullaby to vibrating within my mind and body. I scooped a glob of kessence from my belly and I molded it into a yuelball. I had a teep connection to the yuelball, and I was able to keep the yuel lullaby going inside it. I was about ready to—
Oh shit, here came Dick Simly, striding across the asphalt, wearing his full-gospel salesman’s grin. A slender tendril from Sukie ran into the center of Dick’s scalp—like a remote control cable.
“Haven’t seen you around,” boomed Dick. “Diane and I assumed you’d left town. Did you know that your eviction went through? The papers are on the front door. The sheriff put your stuff in a warehouse. I hope you’re okay with this.” He stepped forward as if to lay his hand upon my shoulder.
I took a quick step back. I didn’t have time to think about the eviction. “I know what happened to you with the jivas,” I said. “I’m surprised you survived.”
“I’m a latter-day jivaic saint,” said Dick. His manic grin grew still wider and he pointed to the heavens—or to Sukie.
And now the big jiva took action. Like a smooth-moving snake, her tail wriggled free of the ground. She sent an odd, slide-whistle chirp in my direction, an unpleasant sound that cut through my yuel lullaby and dug deep into my head. And then the giant beet began rising into the sky, perhaps hoping to get out of range.
Quicker than it takes to tell it, I let my body go slack and opened my mouth wide. I merged my kessence legs into my butt, taking on the shape of a cannon. I shoved my singing yuelball into my mouth and swallowed it down.
Dick Simly guessed what was coming. He crouched as if to tackle me, but Ginnie and Droog were at my side to back me up. Droog sank his teeth into Simly’s calf, and Ginnie began singing a yuel lullaby right into the man’s face, driving Sukie’s tendril from his head. Dick Simly gave a sharp yell—but then he looked relieved.
Not wasting any time, I pulsed an intense washboard of ridges along the length of my throat. My yuelball sh
ot upwards at the speed of sound.
Sukie veered to one side. But my yuelball had a stubby pair of fins, and I used my teep to steer it directly for the jiva, no matter how she zigged and zagged.
The impact was good, even orgasmic. I could feel my yuelball blossoming into the crannies of Sukie’s ungainly form. And now the stinky tinkle of my lullaby tore her into flaming chunks. The lumps of kessence rained like brimstone upon Simly’s fuel-efficient cars.
Victory!
Dick Simly had run inside. Ginnie and Ira began scavenging among the fallen scraps of kessence, stamping out the flames and eating what they could. I returned to my humanoid shape and followed their example, bulking up for the rest of my mission.
But hold on—something was wrong. The slide-whistle sound that Sukie had made—it had started a change way down inside me. Something was awakening within the sprinkle that lay at my core. The jiva eggs. They’d been hiding there in infinitesimal form.
My neck swelled into a spiky ruff. Jiva eggs flew from the ruff ’s tips like popcorn from an overheated pan, like sparks from a log, like glowing thistledown.
27: Pied Piper
Within seconds, I’d spawned ten thousand eggs. They were lavender specks, tiny globules with threadlike tails. Each of them was haloed by a golden aura the size of a grape. They drifted with the air currents, jittering along their paths, guiding their progress with the motions of their hair-thin tails. Right now three them were circling my head as if wanting to settle back into me.
I began chanting my yuel lullaby, and the jiva eggs zigzagged away. So long as I kept the song going, I could carve a safe space for myself within the swarm of parasitic eggs. I was a clumsy fool to have carried them over here—but I didn’t have to let any of them incubate and grow to maturity inside me as well. Ginnie and Ira stood beside me, both of them singing as well.
Droog had no understanding of the situation. When an egg drifted near his nose, he snapped at it. With a quick darting motion, the egg made its way inside the dog’s mouth. Droog widened his eyes and sat back on his haunches, listening into himself.
All around us the eggs were dispersing past the cars and the smoldering remnants of Sukie. Although Dick Simly was safe inside his air-conditioned showroom, a few salesmen and customers had been infested. These men and women were standing quite still, with their hands resting on their bellies—like statues of the expectant Madonna.
Across the street, the jiva seeds drifted in through the open windows and swinging doors of shops, finding hosts. And thousands of their sisters were riding the sea-breeze across the roofs to the blocks beyond.
Still humming the yuel lullaby, I returned my attention to Droog. The egg within him was maturing very fast. His belly was swollen, as if he’d eaten a week’s worth of garbage. His sides jiggled with motions of the quickening jiva within.
And now Droog heaved himself to his feet. He stretched out his neck, coughing deep in his throat. A strand of drool hung from his lower jaw. He retched, and a pale purple tendril appeared beside his tongue. He strained and gasped, forcing something up. The mauve tendril lengthened. And then a shape like a wriggling parsnip slid from Droog’s toothy snout.
The dog shook his head hard, flapping his ears to demarcate the end of his ordeal. He seemed quite unharmed, although—I now noticed— an ethereal control-thread led from the new jiva to Droog’s head. Using the kessence-forces in my fingers, I yanked the tendril from my dog’s skull. He looked glad.
Meanwhile, across the lot, the infested salesmen and customers were bent forward, vomiting up jivas of their own. These eggs were incubating within their hosts’ stomachs, and growing to adulthood in less than three minutes. Evidently the jivas now viewed us as a valuable resource, and they’d learned to parasitize humans in a non-destructive way. If only that first jiva egg had treated my Val so gently.
Droog’s newly hatched jiva drifted across the car lot to join the others. The jivas clustered together as if conferring, bumping each other like party balloons. Rather than flying immediately into the sky, the little group dug their tendrils into the asphalt. Rapidly they plumped up, as if feeding upon the kessence inherent in ordinary matter.
Looking up and down the street, I could see hundreds of people puking up jivas. The jivas emerged as lean and pale as white radishes, but quickly they swelled and took on colors.
“I like those big jivas,” said Ira. “They’re as pretty as Easter eggs.”
Each jiva had her own special look. Their beet-like bodies were shaded in pairs of harmonious tones, usually with an elegant row of contrasting spots. They’d grown themselves topknots like party hats—imagine domed miters, floppy tams, rubbery crowns, and striped stovepipes. And the jivas’ long, writhing tendrils were bedizened with balls, donuts, and disks.
“You screwed the pooch on this one,” said Ginnie, sardonically amused. “You came here to kill one single jiva and you made ten thousand more. See how the jivas have little kessence threads leading to their former hosts? Slaves of the puppetmasters, dude. We’re exiles in zombietown.”
I glared at her, humming my protective lullaby like some far-gone monk obsessing on a mantra. “We’ll drive to the Whipped Vic for Plan B,” I said finally.
I got Skeeves’s van started and we drove off. Dick Simly was in his showroom, watching us. He shook his fist at me. That was my thanks for getting Sukie out of his head. An asshole all the way.
I drove very fast, slewing the car this way and that. A few of the jiva-controlled humans threw rocks or bottles at us as we passed. Seemed like we had a bad rep on zombie street. At least they weren’t going all out to stop us. I figured the jivas didn’t know about my Plan B. They didn’t realize that, hopeless as things now looked, I was still planning to win.
Once we were off the main drag I felt safe enough to stop my chant. What with the van windows rolled up, we were protected from any laggard eggs that still hadn’t found a host.
By now there were jivas growing from each stretch of pavement, and above every meager plot of grass. The jivas had sunk thick tendrils into the soil, and sometimes I had to steer around them. With the jivas bobbing on every side, Santa Cruz had an undersea feel, like a kelp forest. Away from the town center, the jiva-controlled humans were content to stare through the stalks—like wary fish.
I headed towards the general location of the Whipped Vic, expecting to get precise instructions from Ginnie in a minute, the usual odd-ball sequence of lefts, rights, and double reverses that that would lead in though the snail’s protective maze of space warps.
“Do you notice how all the trees and bushes are wilting?” observed Ginnie for now. She was staring out of the van’s window. “Much worse than this morning. Everything looks—wan.”
For that matter, the pavement beneath the car’s tires was less solid than an hour ago, more cracked and crumbly. I recalled Weena saying that the jivas could weaken the structure of ordinary matter by drawing off its vital forces. Their prime mission here was, after all, to pump kessence from Earth to the Duke’s castle in Flimsy. And presumably the border snail was willing to serve as their conduit.
Glancing upwards, I saw that some of the bigger jivas had sprouted extra tendrils that ran out horizontally like bright-colored phone wires. Up ahead of us, the feeder tendrils converged like power lines leading to a transformer station. And the node’s location was on Yucca Street, the home of the Whipped Vic.
“Turn right, then left, then back up,” said Ginnie.
“We’ll follow the flow,” I said, pointing to the ever-denser bundle of jiva tendrils overhead. They gave off a low drone. Faint undulations moved along the colorful tubes—successive gulps of kessence. “Never mind giving me directions.”
There were thousands of the low-hanging jivaic power lines. I swerved back and forth, tracking their turns. I approached the hazy zone around the Whipped Vic—and the pulsing cables led us though the maze.
We pulled into the driveway and hopped out of the van, once again sin
ging our protective yuel lullabies. In the back yard the snail’s door lay discarded on the ground, covered by a massive tangle of the humming pastel jiva tendrils. There was a smell like elephants and kerosene. The tendrils had twined themselves into a fat cable that led into the basement and through the border snail’s mouth.
Presumably they led through the snail to Monin’s farm, and thence to the Duke’s castle in the land of Flimsy—which was hidden down inside one of the Whipped Vic basement’s electrons.
Ira was kind of elated by the scene. “This feels like a sinister factory surrounded by chain-link fences with graphical images of trespassers knocked dead by implacable stylized sparks,” he said. “An alien industrial site involving forces yet more weird than e-lectricity.”
“It’s dangerous for sure,” said Ginnie. “Hurry up and get help, Jim.”
I pulled the magic flute from my leg. Its chrome-like substance glinted with colored highlights from the jiva tendrils. Fitting my fingers to the little flute’s elegant keys, I blew across the mouthpiece, playing the catchy jingle of the summoning call. Getting my rhythm, I began playing the tune over and over, each time a little louder, directing my toots towards the border snail’s stuffed mouth.
Droog didn’t like my noise or the tendrils; he was lying down flat on the ground. No yuels had appeared as yet, but the jivas were noticing the disturbance. Daughter-tendrils branched from the pipeline tubes, deceptively slender vines that felt their way towards me, surely hoping to do me in.
Ginnie and Ira redoubled their yuel lullabies. They’d found a way to vibrate their whole kessence bodies, pulsing out sound with the energy of a low-rider’s thuddy bass units. The delicate attack-tendrils drew back a few feet. I played faster and more forcefully. Just then, aha, the wad of cables parted. Two yuels came wriggling through, both of them shaped like blue baboons.
Their great golden eyes locked upon mine. I could pick up their yuel teep—it was Rickben and his boyfriend Gaylord. They were singing yuel lullabies too. Agile as acrobats, the two yuels began a wild session of sex play, rolling on the ground at our feet. Droog went and hid under the back steps. He didn’t like any of this.