Jim and the Flims (17 page)

I stood stock still, fighting for control, blanking out my mind. I had enemies on every side.

“Farewell for now,” said Weena in a breezy tone. She didn't seem to notice what was I was thinking. “Don't tarry too long.” She leaned over and kissed my cheek. “And remember, Jim, with your jiva inside you, I'll always know where you are. Hot and nasty.” She emitted a giggle. I wanted to kill her.

A tangle of jiva tendrils wove a nest or cocoon around Weena. And then a sheaf of extra tendrils writhed from her chest to stretch out into the distance, feeling for her jump target. Moments later Weena made an odd virtual gesture with her mind—and the woman who'd ruthlessly toyed with me for weeks was gone. Thank God.

Following the teeped guidance of the border snail, Durkle and Monin led us back through the ever-altering maze that hid their home. A few of the jiva eggs followed us, settling into some of Monin's smaller garden plants. The father and son paused by the plot, pointing and talking. The largest of the lumpy shapes seemed to be throbbing.

“Give them a couple of squirts of ultragrow,” Monin advised Durkle. “And a bucket of living water apiece. Tomorrow, I think seven of them will be ready to pop.” Moving fluidly, Durkle got to work.

Monin led Ginnie and me to the spare dome, where we settled in. The bed was a soft blob of zickzack. Living flowers shed dim, colored splotches across the room. One of the flowers brimmed with water, another had a drain hole that served as a toilet. And on the wall was another little shrine to the Earthmost Jiva.

Ginnie and I laid down side by side on the bed. After a minute I put my arms around her.

“So now we're a pair of ghosts in kessence bodies,” I said conversationally.

“I still can't believe I was murdered on Lover's Bluff,” murmured Ginnie, nestling against me. “That's so loser, so tacky, so trite. ”

“Poor Ginnie,” I said.

“Well, at least these bodies aren't so bad,” she said. “Do you like yours?”

Using my teep, I checked the vicinity for peeping Toms. “Grandpa's asleep. I don't suppose that—” I lost my courage, cleared my throat, started again. “Do you want to make love? Does that sound crass?”

“I don't know,” said Ginnie. “Maybe crass, maybe polite. But, no. Just hold me. That's all I'm up for.” She sighed. “I always thought that being dead would be more fun.”

In the morning Durkle woke us by lugging in baby Nyoo and dropping her onto our bed.

“I want to show you our garden,” Durkle announced. “Seven of the Dad-fruits are ready to pop. The jivas put eggs into them a few months ago.”

Thinking of Val's pregnancy and the horrible climax, I winced. Yet here I was trying to fuck Ginnie.

“Give us a minute, kid,” I said. “We have to wake up. Is there a shower?”

“Use the bell-blossom over there.” And with that, he trotted off, leaving the infant in our care.

The baby was in a cheerful mood, crawling around and cooing, two little teeth showing in her lower gum. It was nice to see her. I felt a pang, remembering my shattered dream of having children with Val. Was there really a chance that I'd find her ghost over here? I doubted if Weena would actually help me in the quest. And Flimsy seemed huge. But—maybe? The possibility provoked a mixture of longing and fear. What if Val's ordeals had warped her into something terrible?

“So it's been a year?” said Ginnie, reading my mind.

“And every day I've been saying goodbye,” I said, playing this up a little to get some sympathy.

Ginnie got right on me. She rubbed her thumb against her forefinger. “Look! The world's smallest violin.” She made a crackling noise. “Whoops! I stepped on it.”

“Why do men have to pretend to be nice, when women don't even bother?” I snapped.

“Because we
are
nice in the first place,” said Ginnie. “Most of us.”

“I
am
going to look for Val.”

“Fine,” said Ginnie. “When you're not busy trying to fuck me. Is this supposed to be Heaven, do you think? I always hated that bullshit.”

“I don't think our mass-market religions have any kind of handle on what we're seeing here. Maybe Val's already drifted to the center of Flimsy. But that might be a quadrillion miles away. Can you imagine taking a road trip that long? It could take, I don't know—a trillion years? With new scenery every single day.”

“I don't think they don't have cars here,” said Ginnie in a practical tone. “It's more like a network. People teleport. I say we go outside and start exploring.”

“First we shower,” I said.

After my night's rest, I was able to take in our room a little more clearly. It had an Art Nouveau look to it, with a braid-patterned wooden headboard behind the plump zickzack mattress. Blooming vines bedecked the walls, with a particularly large ultramarine flower across from the bed, a long narrow bell, hanging from the ceiling to the floor. I slipped inside it through the slit between two petals. The flower drizzled water onto me, and a mat of root hairs at my feet soaked up the drips.

A moment later, Ginnie joined me in the shower, cool and resilient. Her eyes were a rich brown, with soft flecks of gold. I held her naked body and now, for the first time, we kissed.

In a way this was like a dream of Eden. But the kisses didn't feel quite right. The insides of our two mouths were dry, and remained so. At least our bodies had genitals, although we didn't get into the details of that. For now, the kissing was enough.

On our way outside, we handed baby Nyoo off to Yerba who was sitting at the dining table, staring into space while absorbing information from her jiva. Although Yerba took the baby, she acted like she didn't see us. And farmer Monin was still asleep.

The sun—that is, the Earthmost Jiva—must have been high in the air by now, for a pleasant yellow light was making its way through the space warps that concealed Monin's farm.

The plants at the far end of Monin's garden resembled seven nude men, knee-deep in the dirt, with full-grown torsos and heads. I hadn't really gotten a good look at them the day before. Ever so slowly, they swayed their arms and twitched their fingers, as if they were asleep and dreaming. Their eyes were closed, their skins pale and nearly translucent. Their faces looked exactly like Monin's.

“See?” said Durkle, who was waiting in the yard, excited about our travel plans.

“Are these for eating?” I asked about the things in the garden. “Don't tell me that roast we had last night was a human leg!”

Durkle thought this was funny and, wriggly imp that he was, he bent double as if to bite me in the thigh.

“Look closer,” he said when he straightened up. “Look under the Dad-fruits' skins.”

The garden-grown globs of kessence had colored shapes in their swollen bellies, slowly writhing forms like fetuses—or like parasitic worms.

Pop.

One of the bodies burst open, and a newborn jiva wriggled out, glistening with slime. It shook out its tail, basking in the filtered rays of the Earthmost Jiva, hovering by the ruins of the body it had grown in.

“Life,” it teeped. “Light.”

More pops ensued—and now seven of the flying beets were hovering above the slaughter-ground of the garden. There was no blood—just pools of living water and scraps of kessence—but it was uncanny just the same. Ginnie backed away, taking shelter against the dome.

“I'm supposed to dig the leftovers into the ground,” said Durkle. “To help the next crop grow. Some of the little guys got new eggs in them last night.”

“Why do jivas have to reproduce in such a disgusting way?” asked Ginnie.

“They don't have enough kessence on their own,” said Durkle. “The adult jivas are mostly zickzack. But an embryonic jiva needs a fair amount of kessence to nurture its growth. So the jivas need to plant their eggs somewhere juicy—like in my family's all-kessence Dad-fruits.”

“Or in living human flesh,” I added, thinking yet again of Val's fate, trying to fill in the ghastly details. One thing that puzzled me was why the eggs in Dick Simly had come to term so much faster than in Val. I asked the boy how long the eggs took to grow.

“The jivas are always changing things around,” said Durkle. “It can be days or it can be months. The jivas are smart and sly. I'll tell you one thing, we don't let them stick their tails in here to implant the eggs directly, or they might make a rush for Snaily's tunnel. We make our deals outside the maze and we lead in the eggs ourselves.”

Durkle fastened his translucent ice skates to his feet. The blades were long rectangles, with little levers at the rear ends. These were the things I'd seen him messing with when we'd arrived.

“How sharp are they?” I asked, just to keep talking, trying to bury my horror with words. “Can you actually push them through the dirt and—and the other stuff?” The garden was littered with twitching kessence models of human limbs. The expressionless Monin-heads were strewn about like goth soccer-balls.

“These are zickzack plow shoes,” said Durkle, crouched over his special footwear. “Dad's jiva made them. The blades slice through whatever they touch. And the tops of the blade are space-linked to their bottoms. You use these levers in back to warp the shape so that the bottom's ahead of the top, and then the top keeps trying to catch up so—”

With a lurch and a wobble, Durkle slid into motion, skating smoothly through the dirt of the garden, his blades mincing up the remains of the Dad-fruits, with smooth curls of soil flopping out to either side. Back and forth he sailed, avoiding the younger plants, but taking particular delight in slicing the discarded limbs in two. His boneless motions were smooth and rubbery.

“What a brutal little boy that Durkle is,” Ginnie murmured to me.

“He's a farmer,” I said. “In touch with the wheel of life.”

“Ugh.”

The seven newborn jivas were drifting around, shaking out their tails, getting the feel of the air, talking things over. Via teep I could pick up the faint skritchy buzz of the their signals, a mix of nouns and of thought forms that I couldn't comprehend.

“And the jivas pay you guys for the use of the Dad-fruits?” I asked Durkle as he whizzed past. He was skating playful figure eights in the garden.

“Sure,” answered the boy, “Dad gets a big wad of kessence for each egg that we hatch. Hey, did you ask Mom if I can be your guide? I'm hoping we can leave before Dad even wakes up. He's going to be crabby today. He drank that whole bottle of living water last night.”

“Yerba didn't want to talk to us,” I said. “She's tuned into some kind of teep.”

“That's her court gossip channel,” said Durkle disgustedly. “It's like everyone who lives in the Duke's castle is supposed to be so interesting that we country bumpkins are excited to find out who they're kissing and what they ate. Mom can zone into that stuff for hours. She walks out of the maze every day to let her jiva load up a supply of the latest news.”

“What if we leave here without asking permission?” suggested Ginnie. “I mean—your father practically said okay last night. And we don't really need any supplies. With our jivas, Jim and I should be able to find all the food and drink we need.”

“Yeah,” I chimed in. “Let's skulk off.”

Durkle grinned. “You two are great.”

“I have another idea,” I said. “It's quite a long walk to the castle, right?”

“Three or four days.”

“Come here and let me look at your plow shoes.”

Durkle skated out of the garden, hopping over a line of tiny, baby-sized Monin heads at the edge. He sliced through the meadow's turf and came to a stop at my side. Twirling his rubbery leg, and handed me a shoe. “Careful of that sharp edge.”

I used my jiva tendrils to feel all over the device, teeping into its details. When I pulled back on the rear lever, the rectangular blade sheared into a lozenge shape. It took all my strength to keep the shoe from darting away, as the top edge tried to keep up with the bottom.

I was getting an idea for an invention.

Teeping into the house, I examined the design for Grandpa's chair, and I got my jiva to manufacture a zickzack copy that was three times as wide—like a sofa. It felt very elegant to work with the jiva, as if I had a zillion delicate tendrils issuing from my hands.

When the new couch was done, Ginnie flopped onto the iridescent cushions and made herself comfortable. But I still had more to do.

Mijjy and I put a support plate under the couch, a kind of sled. Using the plow shoes as a model, I constructed a pair of levers that could shear the shape of the sled, and implemented the subtle trick of linking the sled's top to its bottom. The topological moves were a little more complicated for this plate-like shape than for the narrow edges of the plow shoes, especially since the shear factor could be different along the plate's two sides. I was aided by my biotech experiences with folding long-chain molecules into proteins.

“What's all this about?” demanded Ginnie. “I thought we were ready to leave.”

“I've invented a replacement for Flimsy's missing cars!” I crowed a moment later. “The cruiser couch. Hop aboard and we're on the road.”

15: Cruiser Couch

W
e three settled onto my cruiser couch. I pulled back on the levers, balancing them so we'd go straight ahead. We chugged along, scraping a wide furrow into the ground. Pausing to think things over, I hit upon the idea of adding a second layer of tweaked space beneath the sled—a slab with its top glued to its bottom the wrong way round.

The new layer created an effect like antigravity. The couch jiggled above the ground as if on springs. We were really ready to travel now. We tooled onward across the rolling meadow that lay before Monin's dome house, making easily thirty miles per hour.