Jim and the Flims (30 page)

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 spotted 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.

A few ghosts in curbside booths seemed to be working as prostitutes, that is, they were massaging the tails of yuels. I didn't see any of the tail tips actually popping, but I did see some yuel spores go drifting by.

Like the jiva egg that I'd seen at Monin's, the yuel spores resembled glowing balls with tiny, dark shapes at the center. But the yuel spores were blue instead of yellow, and they had a swooping style of motion that was quite dissimilar from the jittery hunting of the jiva eggs.Yet again I thought of the jiva egg that had floated into our bedroom on the night of the lightning strike—the jiva egg that had infected and killed Val. And now, somewhere deep inside me, I myself was carrying dormant jiva eggs. How horrible.

I tried to calm myself, remembering the goddess of Flimsy's suggestion that I might somehow melt the eggs. And then I was supposed to go to Earth, drive out any jivas or yuels that I found, close down the tunnel, return to Flimsy, and make my way to the core. How was all that going to work?

“Poor Jim,” said Ginnie, seeing the tension on my face.

Gritting my teeth, I started walking again, following after Rickben. Turning down a side street, we passed a half-finished house. The air around it was alive with glinting, darting sprinkles. These well-fed sprinkles were like masons using millimeter-sized stones.

We passed a vast barn where the guardian elephants had broken apart into individual soldier yuels. They sat at a long table, feeding upon troughs of kessence. Indentured human ghosts brought the food, and sponged off the soldiers after their meals.

Rickben led us up a little slope, and we came to a stop before a yuel-built mansion with slitty windows and arched doors. Misshapen balconies adorned the sides, and a crooked tower had sprouted from the top, complete with a flying buttress. Rickben pounded on the house's crooked door. It swung open to reveal a pale, slender ghost with calculating eyes. He was swathed in a sumptuous and velvety cape of kessence.

“Hello, Graf,” said Ginnie, not missing a beat. “This is my friend Jim.”

“I'm glad you are returning, Ginnie,” said the Graf in an old-world accent. “And of course we all know of Jim. The mailman who made the hole for Weena's tunnel between the worlds. You are creating interesting opportunities, Jim. Normally the border snails' tunnels are but fanciful rumors. Never in the human zone of Flimsy have we freely accessed such a tunnel before.”

“I didn't mean to make it,” I said. “I was just playing.”

“Perhaps you don't know your own powers,” said the Graf with a piercing gaze. “You opened the tunnel—and within you lies the power to close it. But please come in and take your ease. And then we are talking.”

The Graf led us into his great hall. The windows held something like stained glass, although the images were alive and flowing, a little like the petals of the Atum's Lotus. A great bank of stalagmites grew along one wall, with a keyboard in front of them—it was like some old-school church organ. Ginnie skipped over and struck a few chords on the keys. The undulating rumble made Rickben the yuel howl with delight.