Jim and the Flims (15 page)

The darting sprinkles were landing in myriads upon my astral form. They seemed to be drawing off bits of my kessence, which didn't seem like a big deal. But now, as if in reaction to the sprinkles' onslaught, my ghostly form went abruptly to pieces, shattering into a solid jigsaw puzzle with each piece at a tiny remove from the next. And I hadn't even begun to swim.

The water between the worlds flowed through me, dusting my innards, and it was only my resident jiva's tendrils that were keeping me together at all. With an all-out effort, I pulled my body together and kicked my way across the two meters, fighting the current.

On the way, I inadvertently drew some of the living water into my lungs—but it didn't seem to matter. Evidently you had a lot of leeway if you were a ghost. Flailing wildly, and twisting away from the sprinkles and the feeder-fronds, I made it to the rubbery membrane at the other side. I pried a crack into it, and wriggled through.

And there I was, on the other side of strange. Coughing out the living water and drawing in air, I managed a whoop.

“All right!”

“You look divine,” said Weena, waiting there.

Ginnie followed us through the narrow wall of water. Thanks to the assaults of the sprinkles, her ghostly body also unraveled and reassembled itself en route.

“Sweet,” she enthused, standing beside me now, even more fetching than before. “It felt like—you know how a light ray tightens up when it goes through a lens? I feel like I've been focused. My new jiva body was feeling like scratchy dress-up clothes—but now it's just right. It's almost like I'm really alive again.”

I touched Ginnie's face. She was cool and smooth. Maybe a little bit like a plastic mannequin. But, still...

“Come on,” ordered Weena, standing by the exit. “Stop lollygagging.” She was all business again.

I could see another pair of eyestalks silhouetted against the faint disk of light that lay ahead, and the green of a field. And now Ginnie and I stepped forth into the other world, out through the border snail's other mouth—

13: Meet the Flims

A
nd found ourselves in a fresh patch of meadow. The air was moist and sweet. In front of us, the meadow rolled off towards a jumble of confusing reflections, and behind us, the meadow was bounded by a vertical wall of living water, a wall that arched upwards towards a shimmering tangle that obscured the sky.

It seemed we were hidden by a space-maze on this side as well. The light which filtered through the maze had an amber quality—perhaps it was dusk here.

Tight up against the vertical wall was a family of five mauve domes interconnected by shiny tubes—we'd stepped out of a door in one of the domes. I surmised that the border snail had grown the domes just like she'd grown the Whipped Vic.

Orange flowers bloomed amid the nearby meadow grasses. A man with a tight felt cap was sowing seeds into the furrows of a plowed garden patch, scattering pink specks from his hand, and squirting some kind of fertilizer into the furrows with the seeds. The fertilizer was silvery stuff from a squeeze-tube. In the further reaches of the garden were half-grown and fully mature plants; they were lumpy things shaped like… people.

Meanwhile the snail had once again closed her door, using another of her shell disks. Just like in Santa Cruz, the round panel had a hand-shaped depression in the middle. I wondered if I'd be able to open this door, too. But—it suddenly occurred to me—maybe I'd want to stay in Flimsy for good. Start a new life in—was this heaven? If I could find Val or, failing that, get Ginnie to stick with me—

“Easy there, big boy,” said Ginnie. “We haven't even kissed yet.” This telepathy thing was going to take some getting used to.

Each dome seemed to be a single room, with round windows on all except for the one that held the snail. I could see a few people inside: a man dozing in a shiny chair, a woman dandling a baby, a boy fiddling with what looked like a pair of ice skates.

The sower from the plowed field walked over to greet us. He looked about twenty-five, with deep eyes and a sun-weathered face. He gave off a vibe of peaceful welcome, and spoke to us in accented English.

“Hello, Weena,” said the man. “You made it back. And you brought two Earth beings with you. They're...”

“I present Jim and Ginnie,” said Weena. “And this is Monin, the keeper of the tunnel on this side. I installed him on this farm.”

“He's not a yuel, is he?” said Monin, peering closely at me. “He looks different from a normal ghost.”

“Jim is an astral traveler like me, said Weena. “He has a living body back on Earth. And, on the subject of yuels, Monin, did you realize that when the Graf bribed your wife with kessence to open the tunnel door, he carried a yuel? Thanks to my interventions, the Graf's kessence body on Earth was destroyed, yes, but I found that the smuggled yuel had survived, a creature called Rickben. To make things worse, the yuel had spawned a Rickben Junior. The two of them attacked me.”

“I'm sure you held your own,” said Monin. “I know you, Weena. And don't start yelling at us about the Graf again. This is our farm now, and we do what we want.”

“Yes, I prevailed,” said Weena. “I only hope those yuels didn't pop out any clouds of yuel spores. It will be well, when the time is ripe, to bring many more jivas to Earth. Sukie on her own is not enough for the long term. All would be lost if the yuels were to become established on Earth.”

“The yuels aren't all bad,” said Monin with a shrug. “So what happened to the Graf?”

“Oh, did I forget to tell you?” said Weena airily. “Yes, an—acolyte of mine named Skeeves eliminated the Graf before I arrived. But the Graf 's yuel was living in the skull of a vulgar man named Header. I terminated Header as well as the yuels. Header left me no choice.”

“You conked Header with an axe while he was too stoned on sprinkles and dope to escape,” put in Ginnie. “Some choice.”

“That sounds like Weena,” said Monin, his craggy face cracking in a smile. “That's why she's the Duke's favorite agent. I want to hear more about the yuel getting inside Header.”

“Elementary,” said Weena with a toss of her head. She loved being the center of attention. “To make room for himself, the yuel ate Header's brain. A small meal.”

“Those were tough yuels,” I bragged. “The jivas were having a hard time with them. It was my jiva and I who finished off the big one—Rickben.”

“I see,” said Monin, not all that approvingly. “You should know that my son Durkle has a yuel-built body—he's pure kessence. Some of the jiva-hosts here look down on flims like that. Of course I'm a jiva man, myself.”

“Monin even sells copies of his body to the jivas,” remarked Weena. She gestured towards the plowed field. Indeed the older plants were shaped a bit like Monin. And round bumps like baby heads were showing in the soft dirt where Monin had been sowing the seeds.

“Never mind all that,” said Monin, with a wave of his dirt-stained hand. “Enough work and worry. Come on inside for supper.”

The snail's door was shut tight. We found another entrance to the assemblage of mauve domes. It made me just a little uneasy to have that wall of living water nearby. Who knew how high it rose beyond the obscuring folds of the space-maze? But once we were inside Monin's house, I stopped worrying about it.

The rooms were larger than they'd appeared from the outside— perhaps the flims had stretched the internal space. The first room we entered was a sitting room, with the man I'd seen sleeping in an easy-chair. A globe hanging near the ceiling shed a faint light—I recalled Weena's remark about Flimsy lamps being tunnels to nearby suns. The walls were festooned with gracefully draped vines, and a wooden shrine held a golden statue of a jiva with an earthenware oil lamp burning before it. Some kind of Jiva Bible sat beside the lamp. The floor was cushioned by a mat of what looked to be colored moss. And the chairs were elegant patterns of curved zickzack.

“This here is my father,” said Monin, nudging the old man's chair with his foot. “Wake up, Grandpa! Dinnertime.”

“Eh?” said the man, stirring himself. Like Monin, he looked youthful. But his youth was only a cosmetic effect. He'd been around for a long time. In fact Grandpa's mind had decayed beyond the point where his resident jiva could fully smooth things over. He stared at us with confused, truculent eyes, resenting the disturbance.

“I'm five hundred and twenty years old,” said Monin, picking up on my thoughts. “But Grandpa's six hundred. Those eighty years make all the difference. And I live right, too. Some day soon we'll plow the old man into the garden, right Grandpa?”

“Bastard,” hissed Monin's father with senile venom. He lurched to his feet. “Eat?”

“Eat,” said Monin. “Right through this passageway, you newcomers. Just follow Weena. She knows the way.”

In the kitchen we were greeted by a lively woman with a crying baby in a carrying sling. “Hi, I'm Yerba,” she said over the infant's wails. “Can you hold the baby now, Monin?”

Monin took the button-eyed baby, blubbed his lips at her to make her laugh, and gave her a crust of kessence to wave and to slobber on. The baby's name was Nyoo.

“I'm the lady of this charnel house,” added Yerba as she set out the meal. The oven was a striped tube of zickzack with bright light within. The table was a sort of wooden mushroom, and the plates resembled shells. “I've roasted a joint that we got from the garden this morning,” continued Yerba. “Don't grab the whole thing with your hands, Grandpa, I'll cut you a slice.”

“Your grew this thing in the ground?” said Ginnie, admiring the crisp brown roast. “So if I eat it, I'm still a vegetarian?” She smiled at me. “Hey, I have an appetite again!”

“It's not really a vegetable either,” said Yerba. “It's plain old kessence with a touch of zickzack. Like you and me.”

“Why do we even eat?” I asked. “If we're just globs of ether and folded pieces of space?”

“We do need to take in fresh kessence every so often,” said Yerba. “And I, for one, like it to resemble proper food.”

“Come in here, Durkle!” called Monin over his shoulder, dandling baby Nyoo and helping himself to the imitation meat and vegetables. The baby focused on a bit of kessence shaped like a string bean.

With a clatter and a whoop, a boy ran in and took a seat. We'd glimpsed him through the window earlier. The motions of his limbs were rubbery and fluid, as if he lacked a skeleton. He looked about fourteen years old. “You people came here from Earth just now?” he asked. “And you're ghosts?” He had a pinched, yearning face, and I felt an immediate sympathy for him.

“Hi,” I responded. “I'm Jim and this is Ginnie. Sure we're ghosts, but in a way, I'm still alive, too.”

“What's he mean, Dad?” asked Durkle, looking anxious.

“What's that smooth wall outside?” interrupted Ginnie.

“Flimsy is like a vast bubble,” said Weena. “The bubble is a skin of living water, a hundred meters thick. And bottom of the bubble is awash with living water, too. Like a spheroid goldfish bowl: air above, water below. There's a fringe of land around the water's edge. And we're here where the land touches the bubble.”

“But there's a hole in the wall right here?” said Ginnie. “For your tunnel?”

“Not a hole,” said Weena. “A thin part. Two meters across. You saw how we had to push our way through. It's thin because of Jim's nicked electron. And Snaily's been keeping it thin ever since I brought her here.”

“So, okay, Flimsy is a rim of land around a pool of water in a ball,” I said, trying to get a coherent mental image. “What kind of sun do you have? A light in the center?”

“We have lots of suns,” said little Durkle in a knowing tone. “All along the edge. They go straight up and down every day. In and out of their holes.”

“What happens if you jump into a sun's hole?” asked Ginnie, giddily.

“That would be a stupid thing to do,” said Monin with a shrug. “Maybe you'd end up in the underworld or the Dark Gulf and the hungry new ghosts would eat you. More roast?”

“You can't see the suns from Monin's house,” put in Weena. “Because of the border snail's space-maze. The border snails conceal themselves for self-protection.”

“But here's what the view should look like,” said Monin, teeping an image my way. I saw miles of rolling green meadow, and a fat, pale orange sun sinking towards the horizon. There was something odd about the sun—it had a thin spike of light projecting from its bottom, seemingly reaching all the way to the ground. A solar flare?

I could make out some secondary suns in the distance, smaller and smaller—each of them resting upon a line of light.

“Our suns are huge jivas,” put in Weena. “Powerful living beings. The vast atoll of Flimsy is like a roulette wheel with a septillion slots. Each slot holds the afterworld of some intelligent civilization. And each slot hosts its own jiva-sun.”

“A septillion?” I numbly echoed, trying to absorb the image of the world she described.

“We rarely see the other beings,” said Weena. “Although I have occasionally met some of our nearest neighbors. Grasping and aggressive races. But now's not the time to talk about them.”

“But what's in the middle?” asked Ginnie.

“I haven't gone there,” said Weena curtly. “And I don't want to.”

“It's vast glassy ocean of living water,” said Yerba. “The surface of the Dark Gulf. And the goddess of Flimsy is a beautiful glowing figure at the core. Unimaginably far away.”

Weena gave a derisive snort. “I say the middle can be closer than you deem,” she insisted. “Flimsy's space is warped in very odd ways.”

“Are you some kind of mathematician?” I asked. I was remembering how smoothly this woman had compared zickzack to hyperdimensional origami, and her talk about gluing together bits of space.