Quite soon all the yuels were gone, and the shell-shocked neighbors cheered. A rackety noise sounded from the sky. The police and the news teams were hereânow that the show was nearly over.
I had only one more task to do here. I had to close the snail's tunnel. But first I sent Droog away.
“Go ocean,” I told him. “Dig sand. Val bury. Jim sleep.”
Uncertainly he sniffed at me. All this drama had disturbed him. And he didn't want to leave my side, even though I was but a ghost of his old master.
“Go on,” I urged him again, taking hold of his body and pushing him towards the sea. “Jim come later.” I was able to reinforce my message with some low-level teep.
Droog loped off. Goddess willing, I'd be with him soon.
Now for the snail. I put the flute back to my lips and began warbling a snake-charmer-style melody based on my memories of a certain Frank Zappa song, “It Must Be a Camel.” I'd practiced this tune back in junior high. It was like the slow undulating tune that a circus orchestra plays while a glistening acrobat vaults to alight atop the pyramid formed by his fellows. I swayed my piccolo back and forth, getting into it. The snail's eyestalks perked up, she was fully focusing on me.
Moving very smoothly, I stepped into the snail's mouth. By now her throat was lax and roomy, and I could have marched straight through. But I paused to stick my head back out, playing the flute as cajolingly as I knew. First one, then another of the snail's eyestalks bent down and poked inside her own mouth to watch me.
Playing ever more sweetly, I backed deeper into the snail's gullet. Her entranced eyestalks followed me. Her snout came along too, and, bit by bit, the rest of her body, flowing into her mouth from every side, with the mouth moving along after me as well. It was as if someone were to swallow their own jaws, lips and faceâbeginning a process of turning inside out.
In other wordsâI'd lured the snail into crawling down her own throat! Yes, it was paradoxical, but it was happening. The border snail faltered for a moment when we reached the wall of living water within herâshe was on the point of drawing back. Quickly I molded one of my legs into a fishnet and scooped a nice load of sprinkles from within the watery wall. Still playing my undulating snail-charmer music, I dangled the net of sprinkles near her eyestalks. She followed me right through the water wall, fully withdrawing from the Earth-bound snail-shell that had been the Whipped Vic.
But I still needed to do something more if I was to prevent the snail from returning to Santa Cruz later on. I thought back to the stroke of lightning that had started this mess last year. I'd felt a tingle in my spine that time, and when the lightning had hit, it had been like an echo of a process within my own nervous system.
At some level I'd called down the lightning that had made the hole. Perhaps my terrible power had come from those electric eel genes I'd been handling at Wiggler Labs. Be that as it may, if my thoughts had caused the lightning then I should have the ability toâplay the lightning backwards.
Not quite knowing what I was doing, I groped down into my memories of that terrible night with Val. Once again I felt a kind of effervescence in my spinal cord, as if it were full of ginger-ale. This time, instead of letting the energy boil into my brain, I sent it into the tips of my fingers, and thence into my flute.
I played the sound of a backwards thunderclap, and the sound of a lightning bolt that congealed from the Earth and leapt into a cloudy sky.
A gong sounded, an unblemished, spherical gong.
I'd healed the single damaged electron that had opened the tunnel from Flimsy to Earth. The border snail would never be able to push through at this spot again.
28: The Goddess
I
emerged through the snail's other mouth, entering the afterworld once again. Ginnie and Ira were standing there with Durkle and his family. It looked like mid-afternoon.
“We did it!” enthused Ginnie, unusually effervescent. “We saved Earth!”
“Glad you made it, Jim,” said Durkle.
I stood there grinning; I felt elated and dazed.
The space-maze around Monin's farm was gone. I could see the yuels heading across the rolling, flower-dotted meadows, freed into the vast realm of Flimsy. A lot of them seemed to be headed for Yuelsville.
As I walked across the grass, the border snail kept on crawling after me, flowing through her Flimsy-side mouth, turning herself partly inside out. But now that I'd ceased my flute song, she seemed to think better of this. She bucked and squirmed, withdrawing her head and backing up through her body. Probably she hoped to crawl back through to Earth, but I'd eliminated the weak spot that she'd used. As she thrashed about righting herself, Snaily shattered her dome.
“Get away from there before you ruin our whole house!” cried Monin's wife Yerba. She was holding baby Nyoo against her shoulder. Stepping closer, Yerba sweetened her voice and called, “Here Snaily, here you go girl, come to Yerba for your treat!”
The border snail slimed forward into the yard again, right-side out and lacking a shell. Yerba tossed her a ball of kessence dusted with sprinkles. Seen bare, Snaily was but a ten-meter-long slug with eyestalks on either end, her body striped in shades of purple and yellow. She wasn't as large as I would have expected, but the size question was, to say the least, iffy. After all, how far
is
it from an empire inside an electron to a vacant lot in Santa Cruz?
The snail raised one of her heads, looking us over, and then she began stolidly to crawl past Monin's domes and towards the nearby wall of living water that sloped down from the sky.
“Don't leave!”Monin called to Snaily. “We need your space-maze, or the jivas will be pillaging my garden. They'll plant their eggs without bothering to pay me.”
“Maybe you should start gardening something instead of host-bodies for jiva eggs,” I told Monin. “Jivas suck.”
“You're a troublemaker,” Monin snapped. “Get out of here and don't come back.”
“My plans exactly,” I said.
“I'm going with Jim,” said Durkle. “More adventure!” He ran into the house to fetch his little sword.
“Let's not be cross with each other,” said Yerba. “You're upsetting the baby. If we have to move, Monin, we'll move. With Grandpa gone, it'll be easy.” She turned to me. “One of those jivas ate Grandpa because he kept messing with their tubes. Just as well. I'd rather be in a village or a town than on a farm, Monin. Or maybe at court.”
“Farming's all I know,” grumbled Monin.
Durkle reappeared with his sword. Yerba insisted that we all have a snack before any of us set out. So we sat down in their kitchen for a chat and some kessence. I held baby Nyoo in my lap.
Yerba was heating up a lump of kessence in her angular zickzack oven, while Monin set the one-legged table with shell-like plates. Vines like honeysuckle ran along the edges of the ceiling, perfuming the room. A niche in the next room held a glowing model of the new Earthmost Jiva.
“This is so amazing!” exclaimed Ira, lounging in his elegant zickzack chair. “I always thought I'd end up in Hell with pitchfork devils, or singing hymns on boring clouds, orâlikeliest of allâno place at all. Flimsy is good.”
“Wait till you see the night sky,” I told him. “Flimsy is like a giant organism. Living water flows through the sky like sap in a plant.”
“Whatever you do, don't swallow a jiva,” Ginnie told Ira. “We'll be safe from them in Yuelsville.”
“Do people have sex here?” asked Ira.
“Sort of,” said Ginnie. “We do it paramecium-style. Sharing kessence through bands of slime. It's sick, but it's hot. I'm sure you can find a cute guy to conjugate with. There's millions of them in the swamps around Yuelsville.”
“Better all the time,” said Ira.
“So where are you planning on going, Jim?” Yerba asked me, as she set a turkey-shaped lump of kessence on the table for us. “With my little boy tagging along.”
“I'm going to the core of Flimsy,” I said. “I'm hoping to find my wife's ghost.”
“Durkle is
not
going to the core,” said Yerba decisively. “Most of the flims and sprinkles who go there get their minds wiped out. The goddess sends their naked souls into the septillion worlds for reincarnation.”
“I don't know how Jim even thinks he'll get to the core,” said Monin sourly. “Nobody can teleport that far. The only way to go there is to ride the living water inside the wall, and you probably starve or get eaten by sprinkles before youâ”
“Correction,” I interrupted. “Ever heard of Atum's Lotus?”
“Of course,” said Monin. “That's what those ten thousand jiva tails were for. Pumping kessence through our Snaily to the Duke's castle so he can repay his loan from the Bulbers. And now Snaily's sick of working with us. And Grandpa's gone. And this is all your doing? Thanks a lot, jerk.”
“Is Atum's Lotus as beautiful as they say?” asked Yerba, lost in her own thoughts. “I'd love to see it, Monin. Maybeâmaybe if we give up this farm we could go work for the Duke.”
“No,” said Monin curtly. “We'd go live with my brother. I'm thinking that Durkle and Flam could help me start farming pig pops.”
“Pig
head
,” said Yerba. “That's what you are. None of us wants to farm. We're not in Flanders.”
“I'm trying to tell you that I'm teleporting to the Duke's castle right now,” I said. “And then I'll use Atum's Lotus to catapult me to Flimsy's core. Durkle, you can come as far as the castle with me. But your mother's probably right about you not going to the core.”
“Fine,” said Durkle readily. “The core is annihilation, man. But, yeah, I'd like another look at castle. This time try harder to get me inside.”
We finished off the food and downed a few shots of living water, which gave me a nice buzz. And then we went outside. “
Adios
,” said Ginnie, giving me a hug. “I hope you find her, Jim. And I hope she's worth it. You're a good guy.”
“And youâI hope you have fun in Yuelsville,” I said. I'd grown quite fond of Ginnie's street-wise looks and her quirky chatter. “I'll miss you.”
“So come look me up.”
“I'm going to Earth.”
“Not forever,” said Ginnie, drawing out the final word in a raised pitch, as if it were a question. California uptalk. She stepped back from me and turned to Ira, taking a gruffer tone. “Yo, I'm gonna show you how to teleport.”
A minute later the two of them were gone. Meanwhile the border snail had inched a hundred feet up the wall of Flimsy. She seemed to have found a spot where she might settle down for bit. One of her ends was rooting into the wall, delving through its rubbery skin. The ten-meter Snaily had no hope of tunneling all the way through the hundred-meter wall, but nonetheless, she could seine for sprinkles.
I bid a brief farewell to Monin and Yerba.
“See if you can get us all invited to the castle,” Yerba urged Durkle. “Never mind what your father says. I'm sure the Duke needs more retainers.”
And then the boy and I teleported on our way. We found a substantial mound of jiva-delivered kessence slumped beside the Duke's giant geranium, quite near the gall on its stalk that held Atum's Lotus. The torn-off top of the gall had healed over, and there was still a little entrance hole near the top. That's where I needed to go.
Remembering the former Earthmost Jiva's attack on Atum's Lotus, I turned to study her replacement, who was glowing like a sun nearby. I could tell that she was watching me. Fortunately, she didn't seem inclined to attack. Maybe she was a little frightened. After all, I'd killed the previous Earthmost Jiva with a yuelball.
The thuggish alien mini-blimp, Boss Blinks Bulber, was hovering over the faintly glowing heap of kessence, annoyingly blocking my path to the hole in the gall. The kessence was like pale-blue gelatin; it looked vaguely radioactive. Members of the Duke's court were doing their best to haul off bits of it for themselves, and the Bulber was brushing them back by shooting sparks from his rear.
The sparks didn't seem to be lethal, but they were definitely keeping the flims at bay. With his two dozen jiggly eyes, Boss Blinks didn't miss much. All the while, his sleazy Bulber pals kept teleporting in and out, making off with great scoops of the kessence.
“Hi, Jim,” said a handsome flim man standing in the field near the geranium. “We met in the orgy room? I'm Sandy. I was flirting with Weena, but she wanted you.”
“Jim's saucy,” piped Durkle.
“Yeah, yeah,” I said. I kind of recognized this Sandy guy, but I didn't want to get into a big talk about Weena. “What's up with the Bulbers?”
“The jivas pumped enough kessence to repay Boss Blinks, but he keeps saying we owe him even more. He says that he and the other Bulbers plan to eat our castle, too.”
I didn't feel a great deal of loyalty to the Duke and Duchessâafter all, they'd saddled me with that load of jiva eggs. But the Bulbers pissed me off. And Boss Blinks was in my way.
“What do you think?” I asked Durkle.
“Maybe I can pop that farty blimp,” said Durkle, swiping at the air with his two-foot-long sword.
“He'll try and crisp you,” said Sandy. “You'll want to thicken your hide.”
“If you can distract Boss Blinks for just a minute, that'll be enough,” I said, fixing my gaze on the gall. “You go after him, and I'll bail you out.”
“Berserker time,” said Durkle, puffing himself up. Swaggering a bit, the boy made his way to the other side of the kessence mound, with Boss Blinks watching him all the while. And then, with a shrill whoop, Durkle did a teleportation hop right onto the back of the five-meter blimp and began hacking at the gasbag with his sword. A nest of electrical sparks blossomed forth. Durkle hung tough and continued chopping.