“Please help me, sir,” said the flame girl, her voice rough and skippy as an old LP. “I am of the folk, come down on the bolt. I need a flow to live on. When this fire goes out, I’m gone.”
“I,” said Rex. “You.” He thought of Moses and the burning bush. “Are you a spirit?”
Tinkling of laughter. “The folk are information patterns. I drift through the levels doing this and that. Can you lend me a body or two? I’ll make it worth your while.”
The rain was picking up, and the fire was dying out. A siren approached. The little figure’s hot, perfect face stared at Rex. She reached out towards him beseechingly.
“I have an idea,” said Rex. “I’ll put you in Candy…my wife. Just for a little while. Right now she’s probably asleep, so she won’t notice anyway. I live just over there …”
“Carry me in a coal,” hissed the little voice.
Rex tried to pick up part of the burning heartwood, but it was all one piece. On a sudden inspiration, he drew out a Kool and lit it by holding it against the dying flames. He puffed once, getting it lit, and the elfgirl entered him.
It felt good, it felt tingly, it felt like being alive. Quick thin fractal pathways grew down his arms and legs, spidering out from his chest, where the girl—
“My name is Zee.”
—had settled in.
“It’s nice in here,” said Zee, her voice subvocal in Rex’s throat. “No need to introduce yourself, Rex, I’m reading your mind. I’m going to keep your body and give Candy to Alf.” Rex’s lips moved slightly as Zee spoke. The reality of this hit Rex—he was possessed! He began a howl of surprise, but Zee cut him off toot sweet. She took over his motor reflexes and began marching him home. Rex’s nerves felt thick, coated, crustacean.
“Sorry to do this to you, Rex,” said the voice, “but I really don’t have a choice. It’s the only way I can get rid of Alf, the little spirit who possesses me. He’s been insisting I get him a human body. But I like you, so we’ll put him in your wife instead of you.”
Candy was stretched out on the couch, softly snoring. Rex put the Kool in his mouth and leaned over Candy so that the ash end was just inside her mouth. He blew as she inhaled. A tiny figure of smoke— a little man much, much smaller than Zee—twisted off the cigarette tip and disappeared into Candy’s chest.
Gazzzunk
. She snorted and sat up, eyes unnaturally bright. “So you’re Rex?” It was Candy’s voice, but huskier, and with a different pronunciation.
“Rex Redman. And you’re in my wife Candy. We’re both possessed, me by little Zee and she by smaller who? Who are you? You haven’t hurt Candy, have you?”
“Hi Zee. Tell him shut up, Candy’s here asleep, and I’m Alf. Let’s shake this meat, Zee.” Candy/Alf stretched her arms and pushed out her chest. “Hmm.” She undid her blouse and bra and examined her breasts with interest. Her motions were pert and youthful, and her features had a new tautness. “Do you want to make love?”
“Yeah,” said Rex/Zee. “Sure.”
Up in their second-floor bedroom, the sex was more fun than it had been in quite a while. The only reason Candy kept bugging Rex about Marjorie was, Rex believed, because Candy wanted to be unfaithful herself. Lately she’d been sick of him. Pumping in and out, Rex wondered if this was adultery. It was Candy’s body, but Candy’s mind was asleep, or on hold, and, for his part, Zee was calling the shots so good Rex wanted them all: come shots, smack shots, booze shots in the sweaty night. Eventually Candy woke up halfway and was happy. It became almost a fourway scene.
The way Zee told it, flaked out on the mattress there, she came from a race of discorporated beings consisting of pure patterns of information. The folk. They could live at any size scale or ideally, at several size scales at once. Each of the folk had a physically real ancestor on some level or another, but the originals were long lost in the endless mindgaming and switching of hosts. Before entering Rex’s nervous system, Zee had been a pattern of air turbulence up in the sky, a pattern that had wafted out from the leaves of a virus-infested bamboo grove in Thailand. The virus—which had been Zee—had evolved out of a self-replicating crystalline clay structure in the ground, which had been Zee, too.
Alf was a kind of parasite who’d just entered Zee recently. There were folk throughout the universe, and Alf had arrived in the form of a shower of cosmic rays. He’d latched right onto Zee. It had been his idea to get Zee to come down and possess a person—the folk didn’t usually like to do that. Alf had gotten Zee to possess Rex so Rex would help put Alf into a person, too. Zee was glad to get Alf out of her—she didn’t like him.
Lying there spent, fondling Candy and listening to Zee in the dark, Rex began to think he was dreaming. Dreaming a factual dream of the folk who live in the world’s patterns—live as clouds, as fires, as trees, as brooks, as people, as cells, as genes, as superstrings from dimension Z. Any type of ongoing process at all would do.
Fractal
; the word kept coming back. It meant something that is endlessly complex at every level—like a coastline, with its spits within inlets within bays; like a high-tree habitat where the thick branches keep merging to thicker ones, and the thin ones split and split.
“Would you really have died if I’d let your fire go out?” Rex asked. It was dawn and this was no dream.
“No,” laughed Zee. “I’m a terrible liar. I would have gone down into the wood’s grain-patterns, and then into the sugars of the sap. But I just had to get rid of Alf. And I like you, Rex. I was aiming for you when I rode the lightning down. You smelled interesting and…thick like extra space.”
“You could smell me all the way up in the sky?”
“It’s not really
smelling
. For us nothing’s so far away, you know. Your whole notion of space and distances is…a kind of flat picture? The folk are much realer than that. We live in full fractal Hilbert space. You think like a flat picture, but the paper, if you’ll just look, is all bumpy like a moonscape of bristlebushes covered with fuzzy fleas. There’s no fixed dimensions at all. Does it feel good when Alf and I do this?”
“Yes.”
Candy’s wordless smiling daze ended when the first rays of the sun came angling in the window. She jerked, rubbed her eyes, and groaned. “Rex, what have you been doing to me? I dreamed …” She tried to sit up and Alf wouldn’t let her. Her eyes rolled. “There are things in us, Rex, it’s real, I’m scared, I’m SCARED
SCARED
oooo—”
Her skin seemed to ridge up as Alf’s tendrils clamped down. Her mouth snapped shut and then her face smoothed into an icky pixie grin. She got out of bed and dressed awkwardly. Rex didn’t usually pay much attention to what women wore, but Candy’s outfit today definitely did not look right. A cocktail dress tucked into a pair of jeans. Where did she think she was going so early?
“I’ll call in sick,” said Alf through Candy. “Just a minute.” She went to the phone and tried to call the school where she worked. Alf didn’t seem to realize it was summer vacation.
“Mommy’s up!” shouted Griff, hearing the call.
“Where’s breakfast?” demanded little Leda.
“LOOK OUT, KIDS!” shouted Rex. “MOMMY AND I HAVE BEEN TAKEN OVER BY—” Zee’s clampdown hit him like a shot of animal tranquilizer.
“Just kidding,” called Zee/Rex. The kids laughed. Daddy was wild. Zee/Rex went into the kitchen to look for food and Leda asked for breakfast again. “Feed yourself, grubber,” mouthed Rex. Hungry. Zee had him brush past Griff and Leda and fill a bowl with milk, sugar, and three raw eggs. Zee/Rex leaned over the bowl and lapped the contents up.
“Daddy, you are eating like a pig!” laughed Leda. She fixed herself a bowl of milk and sugar and tried lapping it up like Daddy. The bowl slid off the table and onto the floor. Griff, upset by the disorder, grabbed some bread and headed out the door to play with the dog. Leda cleaned up halfheartedly until she realized that Daddy didn’t care, and then she went to watch cable TV.
“Do you want to fuck your wife some more?” said Zee. The voice was subvocal.
“Uh, no,” said Rex, beginning to wonder what he’d gotten his family into. “Not right now. Do you remember saying that you’d make it worth my while if I gave the use of our bodies, Zee? What kind of payment do the folk give?”
“As a rule, none,” said Zee, making Rex nibble on a stick of butter. “I told you I’m a terrible liar. Isn’t having me in you payment enough? Don’t you like being part of the Zee fractal?” Rex didn’t understand, but Zee helped him and then he did. Folk like Zee were long thin vortices in the fractal soup of all that is. Or like a necklace strung with diverse beads. Rex was a Zee-bead now, and Candy was an Alf-bead. Alf’s thread passed up through Zee, too, and up through Zee to who knew where.
It was dizzying to think about, the endlessness and the weird geometry of it all. To hear Zee tell it, every size scale was equally central, each object just another crotch in the transdimensional fractal world-tree. Zee and Alf were in them, above them, and maybe below them now, too: in their genes and in their memes. Rex’s thoughts felt no longer quite his.
He’d made a terrible mistake picking Zee up. He kept remembering the desperate expression on Candy’s face as Alf made her stop yelling. And the puzzled looks the children had given their terribly altered Dad.
“Can’t you and Alf move on, Zee? Leave your fractal trail in us, but move on down into the atoms? Can I drive you anywhere?”
“No. It’s ugly here in Killeville. I just came down because of you. When I’m through eating, I want to get back in bed with Candy and Alf.” Rex watched himself open the fridge, hunker down, and begin using a stick of celery to dig peanut butter out of the jar. Crunch off some celery each time. It tasted good. Whenever he relaxed, the nerve-tingle of Zee’s possession started to feel good. That was bad.
“What was it about me that attracted you so much, Zee?”
“I said I could smell you. You were thinking about your magic box called Reverso. It makes your flat space get thick, and it spins things over themselves. I told you the higher dimensions are real; you can build up to them with fractals. I bet I could make Reverso really work. I could do that for you, dear Rex.”
“Well, all right.” Rex went back in the bedroom and talked things over with Candy, who was busy putting on a different set of clothes. “I think I’ll drive down to my office, Candy,” said Rex. “Zee says she can help me get the Reverso working. And maybe then they’ll leave.”
“I’m going to stay in bed all day,” said Candy, making that pixie face. She had taken all her clothes back off, and one of her hands was busy down in her crotch. “I love this body.” Her voice was husky and strange. Rex felt very uneasy.
“Maybe I shouldn’t leave you like this, Candy.”
“Go on, go downtown to your Marjorie. I won’t be lonely, Rex. You can count on that.”
“Do you mean—”
Zee cut him off and marched him out of the bedroom and back down the stairs.
“And take the kids,” called Candy in something like her normal voice. She sounded scared. “Get the poor children out of here!”
“Right.”
Rex rounded up the children and took them over to the Carrandines’ house. Luanne Carrandine was a little surprised when Rex asked her to babysit, but after the usual heavy flirting, she agreed to help out. She was a charming blonde woman with a small jaded face. Some of the suggestions which Zee forced out of Rex’s mouth made Luanne laugh out loud. If her husband Garvey hadn’t been upstairs, Rex and Zee might have stayed on, but as it was, they headed downtown.
Last night’s storm had left Killeville gray and steamy. Kudzu writhed up the walls of the abandoned building Rex rented space in. The other renter—the famous Marjorie—didn’t usually show up till ten. Rex/Zee’s footsteps echoed in the empty space. He walked her up the filthy stairs to his little office. There on his desk sat the Reverso: a silver-painted, wood box with a hidden trapdoor in the bottom.
Rex felt foolish showing his crummy trick to a truly magical spirit like Zee. But she insisted, and he ran through the patter.
“This is a handy little box that turns things into their opposites,” said Rex, putting a right-handed leather glove in the chamber. “Suppose that you have two pairs of gloves, but you lose the left glove to each pair. No problem with Reverso!” He lifted the box up and shook it (meanwhile sneaking a hand in through the trapdoor to turn the special glove inside out). He set the Reverso beck down. “Open it up, Zee. You see! Right into left.” He took out the left glove and put in a fake saltshaker. “But that’s not all. Reverso changes all kinds of opposites. What if you have salt but no pepper?” He shook the chamber again. (A hidden curtain inside the “Saltshaker” slid down, changing its sides from white to black.) “Open the chamber, Zee—salt into pepper! Now what if you’re short on shelf space and your coffee cups’ handles keep bumping into each other?” He drew out a (special) coffee cup and placed it in the chamber. “Simple! We use Reverso to turn inside to out and put the handle on the inside for storage!” (He opened the chamber, moving the suctioned-on cup handle to the cup’s inside as he drew it out.) “See!”
“I know a way to do the first and last tricks without cheating,” said Zee. “I know how to really turn things inside out. Look.” Rex’s hand picked up a pencil and drew a picture of two concentric circles. “See the annular ring between the circles? Think of lots of little radial arrows in the ring, all leading from the inner circle to the outer circle.” His hand sketched rapidly. Think of the ring part as something solid. To turn it inside out means to flip each of the arrows over.” Zee stopped drawing and ran a kind of animation on Rex’s paper to point inwards. All of them turning together made a trail shaped like a torus. “Yes, a torus, whose intersection with the plane looks like two circles. Think of a smoke-ring, a torus whose inner circle keeps moving out—like a tornado biting its own tail. A planecutting toroidal vortex ring turns flat objects inside out. What we need for your real Reverso is a hypertorus whose intersection with your space looks like two spheres, a big one and a little one. I know where to get ‘em, Rex, closer than you know. These hypertoruses have a fuzzy fractal surface and a built-in vortex flow. You won’t believe where …”