Jim and the Flims (20 page)

I touched his shoulder, gave him a pat, and then a hug. Although he was bendy and rubbery, he was good and solid. He had a lot of kessence.

“We'll be fine,” I told him, hoping this was true. “We'll have a look around and then find our way out.”

Despite the crash, I felt relatively fresh and healthy. I stretched my arms, savoring the supple strength of my kessence and my jivaenhancements. My hand happened to block the ghost of a flat-faced woman wearing a shiny pink dress. She slid around me like a scarf of mist. A hip-looking man in a purple suit danced by, giving us a probing look.

“I hear that a lot of these ghosts never make it out of here,” remarked Durkle. “If someone manages to eat your sprinkle, it's curtains. Or you can get stuck on a treadmill, bouncing back and forth between being a sprinkle and a newbie ghost. They say that eventually the global current might catch you, and sweep you into the sky. And it's hard to get down from there. Supposedly if you end up at the center of the sky, the goddess of Flimsy might recycle you. The sprinkles have it rough.”

I thought back to the two times I'd eaten sprinkles. Those voices I'd heard while I was eating—they'd been real. Sprinkles were tiny souls. The ones that I'd eaten had merged into me, I supposed, melted into me like drops of ink in a glass of water.

“And how do they ever escape?” I asked.

“It's like we were telling you before,” said Durkle. “They crawl up through the dirt of Flimsy. Or they get back into the Dark Gulf and follow one of the walls up into the sky. Either way, they make it to the surface of Flimsy, and have a shot at getting a zickzack body from the jivas or a kessence body from the yuels.” He shook his head. “I wish we weren't down here.”

“Your parents went through all this?” I asked, wondering what Val's odds were.

“Yeah. They died on Earth about five hundred years ago. They started out in the Dark Gulf like everyone does, and they worked their way up through the underworld. Once they were topside, they got some jivas and started a farm. And about a year ago, Weena got them to move into her border snail's maze.”

“The stores down here are so weird,” I said, looking around. “You notice how each place only stocks one kind of thing?”

We studied the Root shop beside us. Its racks, bins and shelves were filled with nothing but gnarly variations on the store's single theme: fat rutabagas, slim carrots, ferny flower rhizomes, tulip bulbs, tree stumps, and so on and on. It was hard to make out how far back into the wall the store went.

The next store was Ball, and it held floating balloons, metal ball-bearings, bouncy rubber kick balls, blown-glass ornaments, wooden croquet balls, and much more. I could see the hip purple-suited man in there making a deal with the clerk. The clerk was a mauve jiva the size of a woman. Her hide was decorated with embossed pink daisies.

The jiva used her tendrils to craft the man a copy of a reflective disco ball that hung from the shop's ceiling. The zickzack planes of the ball's facets were tweaked to reflect light.

“Gift return,” the jiva told the man.

The man let her dig a tendril into him. Evidently the jiva extracted a design from the man's memories, for right away she crafted a zickzack version of a red and yellow soccer ball, using subtle zickzack diffraction gratings to produce the colors.

The flowered mauve clerk stood admiring her new creation, and the man exited the store, happy with his mirror ball. Thanks to Mijjy within me, I could make out the faint outline of the jiva clerk's extensible tendril, still attached to the shopper.

“Let's check that store up ahead,” said Durkle, pointing out a place with a sign that showed the platonic ideal of a Sandwich. “I'm hungry again.”

“In fairy tales it's bad luck to eat the things they offer you in the other world,” I remarked. “Just saying.”

“This isn't any fairy tale,” said Durkle dismissively. “This is my actual life.”

“You know more about it than I do. But I don't think we should stay down here for too long. We want to find the way out.” Checking inwardly, I saw that Mijjy wasn't presently interested in helping us escape. She was excited about all the shopkeeper jivas in here—apparently they were extensions of the Earthmost Jiva herself.

Through a side-door in the hall, I saw a crooked little staircase leading down. It was lit by the ubiquitous glow, but I couldn't make out how far down it led. I shuddered at the thought of going any deeper into this Stygian mall.

Glancing up at the shimmering ceiling of living water, I realized that pushing upwards might not be so useful either, at least not precisely here. The way the hallways kept swaying and turning, I had no idea about how to get back to the spot where we'd entered this nightmarish zone. By now we might be beneath miles and miles of Flimsy's crust.

Some of the ghosts were watching us, probably waiting for a chance to move in. One hooded, peach-colored figure in particular was tracking my every move. Although I couldn't see her face, I sensed she was the ghost of a woman. What if I confronted her and asked her to leave me alone? As if sensing my willingness to go on the offensive, now she ducked into a store labeled with the image of an idealized Shoe.

“Come on and help me get my sandwich,” said Durkle, nudging me out of my thoughts.

“Fine.”

The Sandwich place had a pleasant smell, like an old-timey Italian deli that I liked in North Beach. Apparently the jivas had gone so far as to craft microscopic zickzack shapes that drifted through the air and locked into the simulated olfactory receptors of my nose.

Impeccable sandwiches rested on plates in glass cases, one of each kind: a turkey and bacon on a bun, a mortadella and provolone hoagie, a steak and pepper sub, a white-bread cucumber tartine with the crusts trimmed off, a baguette with red peppers and brie, a pastrami and sauerkraut on rye, a baked tofu on three-seed, a sesame muffuletta with olive salad and salami, an egg-salad with lettuce on whole wheat, and more.

The garbage-can-sized amber jiva behind this place's counter bobbed up even with us. She had a cute teal band of trim around her waist, and a shiny gold ball on top. Her tail was like an extension cord, winding off into the store's dark recesses. She wore a name tag that said, “May I Help You?”

“I want that one,” announced Durkle, pointing to a triple-decker club sandwich. “How do I pay?”

“Sandwich dream food,” said the clerk jiva. Extruding a tendril as delicate as a cucumber vine, she reached across the counter towards Durkle and—

“Get back!” I cried, shoving the boy to one side and getting Mijjy to dart out her own tendril to engage with the clerk's.

The clerk was disappointed not to invade Durkle's fresh young body. But she was willing to deal with me, as long as we had a tendril hookup. It was the same kind of deal as in the Ball story. She wanted me to think of a sandwich that she didn't have in stock. She was working to enlarge the universality of her store, which was meant to become a repository of every variation upon the Sandwich form. You had to add a new exemplar in order to access one of the existing ones.

I explained all this to Durkle.

“Mutton plant on bread-flower petals?” he suggested. “Does she know about that?”

“Yesterday bread,” said the jiva. With an insolent toss of her topknot, she pointed a tendril to just such a sandwich, resting on a shelf in the next glass case.

“I bet you don't have red caviar on pumpernickel rounds with minced onion,” I said to the clerk. But yes she did, that item was already tucked into a shelf on the wall behind us.

“Roast pigpop on toasted waffle cactus!” cried Durkle. “She won't know about that. My family made it up.”

“Surprise food,” said the yellow jiva clerk. She hung there motionless, waiting for more information. I passed her the image via Mijjy. Thanks to our picnic on the bluff, I knew very well what this kind of sandwich looked like.

The jiva clerk created an archival pigpop sandwich for her display case, and crafted a club sandwich for Durkle. He snagged the offering with his long, flexible arm.

“It's all just zickzack,” I told him. “Folded up scraps of space. Can't you get that through your head? You really shouldn't eat that thing. With no kessence in it, it's not going to nourish you at all.”

“It's delicious,” said the boy, biting in. “Those jivas can wrinkle up the zickzack so it tastes as good as kessence. Thanks.”

The amber beet-shape bowed.

“I just hope that sandwich doesn't hatch inside you,” I muttered to Durkle. “Like those eggs inside the Dad-fruits.”

17: Deeper

W
e drifted out to the hallway, with the boy stubbornly munching away. Almost right away I bumped into the hipster in the purple suit.

“Can you hear me?” I asked him aloud. I was hoping to learn a bit more about this place.

He looked me over, still clutching his disco ball. After a moment he nodded and showed his teeth in a smile. “It's a goof to see a fat ghost in here,” he said. “Bursting with flavor-rich kessence! Give me a taste.” He held out his hand.

I shook the ghost's hand, and as soon as we touched I felt him drawing off energy—although not enough to really affect me.

“Wiggy!” said the ghost, savoring the dab of energy that he'd extracted. “I'm guessing that you just died and came here from Earth. You must be a hell of a fighter to be so fat so soon. Why don't you and the kid fall by my pad?” He twirled his disco ball invitingly.

“Where is it?” I asked.

“On the bottom level, looming into the Dark Gulf. Ask any hipster about Bart's pad. Lots of the shades know me. I've been on this scene for fifty years.”

“Maybe you could explain something to me,” I said. “What are these stores all about? Why are the jivas accumulating all these examples of every possible form?”

“Jivas are the brain-cells of the Flimsy mind,” said Bart. “They drone away at digging dirt and cataloguing facts. To fully understand, like, ‘Cactus,' a jiva wants to see one of each. Every jive-ass cactus that there is.”

“And they're willing to give you things just for telling them that kind of stuff?”

“Nothing's ever free from a jiva,” said Bart. “You'll be digging that bye and bye. Me, I avoid the hoo-haw, hanging in my pad down on level three. Fall by, man. It's cool, don't worry. We won't cannibalize you. But, uh, could give me one more taste?”

“Okay. If you answer another question.”

“Always ready to help a greenhorn,” said Bart, drawing off another smidgen of my kessence.

“Have you met a lot of famous dead people here?” I asked him, thinking of some of the old-time SF writers I admired. “Like Robert Sheckley or Philip K. Dick? Or Philip José Farmer?”

“Never heard of them,” said Bart shaking his head. “It takes a while to dig how big this place is. Like—the first time I went to L.A., I was sure I'd be jamming guitar with Tawny Krush, or eating Lureen Morales's snatch. But all I saw was crowds of goobs. It's the same here but more so. Here comes everybody. I gotta split now. Come see me.”

Bart strutted down the hall, jazzed on the energy he'd leeched. And then he ducked into a staircase and was gone.

At this point my jiva, Mijjy, called for my attention. She'd been busy stretching tendrils to explore this sloppy maze of tacked-together rooms.

“Queen bed,” she now told me, which meant very little to me. But by studying her teep imagery, I quickly learned that she'd found the lair where the Earthmost Jiva herself spent her nights.

“But—isn't her burrow by the Duke's castle?” I objected. “And that's supposed to be fifty miles from the monster pit.”

Mijjy pulsed me a sound like a laugh. “Journey hop,” she teeped. “Burrow hall corner.”

Guided by Mijjy, Durkle and I continued on our way. The shops and side-corridors shifted in odd perspectives. We were passing stores of increasingly high-end categories—a Gem, a Violin, and an Orchid. The walls were encrusted with ornament, sporting bronze wreaths and panels of colored marble.

The hallway ended at a sloping lip that marked the edge of a vast, nest-like depression in the mall. And the living water overhead was arched in a static dome, its upper surface patterned with the agitated sprinkles.

The great round chamber was perhaps a mile across. A tassled crimson cushion covered half the floor, an absurdly large thing, mounded with what I initially took to be golden braid. But now, as the glowing tangles upon the cushion shifted, I realized they were the branchings of a monumental jiva tail, a thick tube that led up through the domed ceiling like a kelp stalk—presumably connecting to the Earthmost Jiva above.

Even as I grasped this, a vibration pulsed through the chamber. Everything got shorter, then taller, then shorter again. A wash of musical tones cascaded over us, and the space flickered with veils of color, shading ever higher into the bright. Amid a rising blare, the great jiva lowered herself into view. She passed through the living water ceiling as readily as an arm through a soap-film.

The Earthmost Jiva's enormous bristly bottom turned my vision dark with light. But rather than going blind, I went past white, past black, and into a new mode of sight. Call it a higher octave. I could still see the mall and the ghosts and the jiva—but everything had an ultramarine tinge to it, and seemed a bit translucent. Maybe it would be like this to see with X-rays.

“And, yea, when dusk falleth upon the world of flim, Her Serenity doth renew herself in the caverns of the underworld,” intoned Durkle. “The Book of Jiva.” Evidently he was quoting a scripture that he'd been forced to memorize.

Twenty times the length of a whale, the Earthmost Jiva was a brilliant pale shade that I may as well call yellow, with a marginally darker stripe around her middle and a reddish-tinged hump upon her top. She settled onto the vast crimson cushion, resting on the heaped tangles of her tail. She looked like a golden beet in a catcher's mitt. I noticed that one thick branch of her tail led down past the cushion and through the floor to the levels below.