Jim and the Flims (36 page)

I seized the moment to teleport myself to the hole in the gall and to dive inside before Boss Blinks could think to stop me. As before, I was surrounded by intricate sheets of sound. I'd landed on a wobbly trellis of nautilus-shells linked by richly embossed hawsers. As before, I saw crevasses and spires on every side.

The Atum's Lotus seemed, in some sense, to recognize me. As if resuming an interrupted conversation, the thing's choral voices segued into a variation on the ladder-to-heaven chant that Charles had ridden towards to the core of Flimsy. This was exactly what I was after.

Although the subtleties of the tune had eluded me before, this time I was able to integrate it into my psyche. It was a somewhat strange and slippery sequence of sounds. So now to rescue Durkle!

I clambered up the mutating gnomic forms within the Lotus and poked my head from the hole in the gall. Boss Blinks was directly before me, with poor Durkle lying inert on the blimp's upper surface. Was I too late?

Giving it everything I had, I sang the supernal ladder-mantra. The Bulber spun like a top, casting Durkle's limp form onto the heap of kessence. I formed my face into a trumpet bell and sang the ladder song still louder. And now Boss Blinks went arcing through the air—towards the core of Flimsy.

A second Bulber was snout-down on the kessence mound, feeding. But now, noticing what I'd done to Boss Blinks, he fled. And no further aliens appeared.

I hopped down to where Durkle had landed on the baby blue pile of kessence. Vivified by the stuff 's energies, he was already sitting up.

“We did it,” I told him. “We saved the castle.”

“Here,” said Durkle, handing me his sword. “I want you to take this with you.”

“You love this sword,” I protested. “I can't—”

“I'll get a bigger one,” said Durkle with his pinheaded, unquenchable, lovable optimism. “I'll go back to the swamp and trick one of those offer caps again.”

“I actually believe you will,” I said, smiling at him.

It was time to leave—if I waited much longer, I'd forget the ladder-mantra. But now a voice called to me.

“Big thanks, big guy!” It was the Duchess, gliding down from the geranium-castle's upper leaves. She was as elegant as ever—and as coarse.

“I don't want to talk to you,” I told her curtly.

“Oh, aren't
you
the important muckity-muck!” said the Duchess, dimpling her perfect cheek. “Carry a grudge much?”

“I'm leaving in ten seconds,” I said flatly. “If you'd like to repay me for getting rid of Weena and Boss Blinks, why don't you take young Durkle into your castle for a tour. Or, better yet, let him move in. Those ten thousand jiva-tubes ruined his house. Let Durkle's parents come, too.”

The Duchess drew herself up. “I don't particularly feature inviting trashy goobs with no jivas into my—”

“The parents have jivas, even though Durkle doesn't,” I interrupted. “They're solid workers. Be good to them or I'll bring Boss Blinks back.”

This last bit was a bluff, but the Duchess fell for it. “Well—maybe,” she said. She regarded the handsome fourteen-year-old appraisingly. “Why don't I show you our orgy room for starters, hmm?”

Durkle waved a cheerful good-bye as the Duchess swept him into the geranium's leaves. He'd do fine.

I got my ladder-mantra going—it was kind of like an “
Om mane padme hum
,” only backwards and inside out and with ribbons on it. It got good to me. The vibrations percolated into my arms and legs. I spun thrice and I was gone, baby, gone.

The human-inhabited zone of Flimsy flashed beneath me, and then I was speeding across the Dark Gulf towards the core.

There was a sense in which all I was doing was flying to the center of an electron or, perhaps more accurately, to the center of the Platonic Electron that underlies each of our universe's instances of the form. So maybe the trip wasn't all that far.

But I was scaled to a tiny size, and the Electron felt vast to me. Perhaps I even got smaller as I moved along. For me the core seemed as far as—what can I say?—as far a red-shifted galaxy cluster half-way across our astronomical universe.

Not that I got bored on the way to Flimsy's core. The Atum's Lotus ladder-chant had quite taken me over, and time passed as in a dream. At some point I became aware of a bright, vertical column ahead of me. Sensing its importance, I broke the rhythm of my chant—and my trance was done. I tumbled heavily into a calm, turquoise sea.

The living water was warm against my naked body. Great green lily pads and their beautiful blooming flowers bedecked the sea's surface. Bright specks hung above the flowers like gnats. Up ahead, a steady rain was drizzling from the domed sky into the gulf—this was the column that I'd seen. The continual shower seemed to outline a hazy form. Surely I'd reached Flimsy's core.

Pausing to take in my immediate surroundings, I was glad to see no sign of the Bulber whom I'd sent this way. My only cause for worry was a substantial jiva tendril that hung in the clear waters like a sea snake. The orange, thickening tube descended into the Gulf 's profound depths, and the narrow tip twitched restlessly on the surface. But the jiva was making no moves to seize me.

I hauled myself onto a lily pad. Studying its pale yellow flower, I saw tiny plump eggs along the stamen. The eggs were splitting open to release fresh sprinkles—newborn souls that lingered above the flower. Flimsy's core was a fountain of new life.

I returned my attention to the luminous form that stretched to the sky. As I gazed, she came into full focus—a misty, titanic woman, the goddess of Flimsy. She was a pattern in the rain of living water that drizzled from the sky, transient yet stable, an enduring part of Flimsy's flow.

“Hello,” I said, knowing she would hear. “It's me.”

The goddess's voice sounded in my ears like the whisper of a breeze. “Val awaits you. Look and see.”

The air seemed to shimmer, and yes, there was Val's ghost, sitting on a lily pad not more than fifty feet from me. It was as if the goddess had been hiding her behind a wrinkle in space. I paddled over to my wife. She watched me, her face happy. Her peach-colored cloak was gone. She was nude, beautiful, the very image of her old self.

“You made it!” said smiling Val. “My hero with his sword. Am I still mad at you?” It was wonderful to see her beloved curves. And her voice was balm to my soul.

“I got rid of my jiva,” I said. “I've been busy fixing things so you can come back.”

“Rise from the dead?”

“I have a clone of your old body growing on the bluff by Four Mile Beach.”

“I don't like science experiments,” said Val, fluffing her shiny brown hair. “Don't you ever learn?”

“It won't be like that again,” I said. “Nobody's gaming us now. Forgive me for making the hole to Flimsy. I had no idea. I love you, Val. Please let me bring you back.”

“Okay,” she said simply. I studied her intelligent eyes, olive-green with flecks of brown. She'd always been unpredictable. “Let's go,” she added. “And stop staring like that.”

“Drinking you in,” I said, reaching out to touch the tingly substance of her face.

“I'm glad you came for me,” said Val. “The goddess brought me here all at once.”

“It's been a wild trip.”

“Do me one favor now,” said the murmurous voice of the air. “It's what all of this has been for.”

“What?” I said.

“That jiva tendril in the water,” said the goddess. “Chop off the tip. That's why you're here with your special sword. I can't cut the tip myself. That's an immutable rule.”

“Won't the, uh, jiva be mad?” I temporized. “She's a big one.”

“The biggest of them all,” said the goddess. “The Core Jiva. She's hooked into all those bobbling bulbs in the Dark Gulf. The jivas pass sprinkles up the chain to her. Every now and then, I load myself up with sprinkles from the Core Jiva, so that I have a good supply for sowing the septillion worlds with souls. You beings keep multiplying. I get some new sprinkles from the lotus flowers, too. But not enough.”

“And you recycle sprinkles from the sky's living water,” I said. I wasn't eager to rile the incalculably large Core Jiva.

“I use many of those, yes,” said the goddess. “And many of them drop back into the Dark Gulf and pass through another cycle. This is all as it should be. Maybe they get themselves kessence bodies, maybe they stay in the living water and coast back to me, maybe they get swallowed by jivas. But now and then I draw off the accumulation in the Core Jiva.”

“How often?” I asked, still stalling.

“It takes me awhile to arrange a visit from a determined ghost with a special sword. The last one to open the Core Jiva's tail for me was a lizard-being—some three thousand years ago. I do have some control over your universe's flow, but the outcomes are far less direct than you might suppose. It took a very long chain of events indeed to bring you here to cut these few meters off the Core Jiva's tail.”

Long chain of events—she was talking about Val's death, about Skeeves, about Weena and Charles, and even about Amenhotep! My mind boggled.

“So cut off the tail-tip,” said Val, unfazed by the metaphysical baggage. “It's like we're stealing a dragon's hoard of gems.”

The task was far easier than I'd expected. Val held the thin end of the tendril steady and I chopped it off with my sword. The tendril gave a heavy twitch as I cut through. My magical sword twisted out of my hand and sank—down and down into the clear, unfathomably deep water.

Val tossed aside the tail-tip I'd cut loose. Sprinkles were gushing from the main part of the tendril, filling the air with rainbow fog. Gracefully the goddess reached towards us, her arm growing to an unnatural length and reaching down to touch the sea. I felt the cool mist of living water on my face, and the gulf 's surface riffled into chop. The goddess's arm was a waterspout.

The supple winds took hold of Val and me—and drew along the sprinkle-spraying jiva tendril as well. Twirling in the twinkling haze, we approached the goddess's body, zeroing in on the glowing navel at the center of her gently mounded belly. This was the door back to our world.

“Will our personalities be erased?” I asked.

“No, no,” said the goddess. “You two amuse me. You're legends now. I'll give you a special spin.”

The navel was almost upon us as, large as the Coliseum. We rode the vortex curves down into it, accompanied by the twinkling rain and the torrent of extra sprinkles from the Core Jiva's tail.

“All together now,” said a breath in my ear.

Was it the goddess talking—or Val?

29: On the Bluff

H
and in hand, Val and I floated down from the foggy sky. We were spirits above the bluff overlooking Four Mile Beach. The odd perspective made it feel like a dream of flight. Directly below us was a dark-haired woman standing with her legs buried to the knees in the sand—Val's flesh body, full grown, her face blank and slack. Droog sat at her side. Sensing our ghostly presence, Droog looked up, his tongue lolling, his jaws open in a doggy smile.

“Go ahead,” I urged Val. “You just slip in and you'll stick.”

Moments later her new body was beautifully in motion, waving her arms, dancing with the surf, her breasts bouncing. Her feet still seemed rooted in the ground. Over the waters, the mid-morning July sun was breaking up the mist.

Droog and I scrabbled at the sand beside Val, uncovering the buried sarcophagus. I pried off the lid and slid into my waiting flesh. With a series of tingles, my soul locked into place. Once again I was alive in the usual sense of the word. It took some effort to rise to my feet. My joints were stiff and achey, my flesh clammy and cool. I was already wearing my jeans, red T-shirt and flannel over-shirt. I began waving my arms in a celebratory hula like Val, then tossed her the extra jeans and T-shirt that I'd stashed in the gold box.

“Come hug me,” she called.

I stepped out of the casket, only to have a spiky, chitinous claw lash out from the sarcophagus's surface to trip me up. I staggered, regained my footing, and turned to face Amenhotep's six-legged beetle-spirit. He'd popped out from his virtual lair within the embossed golden designs on the side of the casket.

Growing to the size of a man, the scarab chewed the air with his mandibles, making a hideous twitter. His smooth back glistened in iridescent greens and lavenders; his belly was striped in elastic bands. Three of his claws held symbols of pharaonic majesty: a crook, a flail, and an ankh, gleaming as if with gold and lapis lazuli.

Droog was at my side, barking hard. The beetle moved towards us, with ghostly streamers of liquid kessence pouring from the hideous intricacies of his jaws. He was preparing to eat me whole.

“Not me!” I yelled, landing a kick to his belly. “I'm not Skeeves. And—dude—enough is enough.”

“I can't get loose,” cried Val behind me.

“I've got this,” I assured her.

My long trip to the core of Flimsy had grooved the Atum's Lotus chant deeply into my mind, and now, almost automatically, I began singing the magic spell, directing it at the monstrous beetle. Although my body's unused voice was husky, it quickly grew in force.

The psychic forces of the ladder-mantra impacted Amenhotep with a powerful effect. He lost his balance and tumbled into the sarcophagus. He lay there rocking on his domed back, fretfully clawing the air with his skinny legs, chirping even more petulantly than before.

Drawing on the remnants of my occult powers, I warped my chant to compress the sarcophagus into a golden glowing ball—with the Egyptian beetle at its core. And then, with a final effort, I vaporized the orb, sending it over to Flimsy and towards the core—but without making a hole. The goddess could handle Amenhotep now.