Jim and the Flims by Rudy Rucker Page A

me for awhile, but not if you continually bullshit me.”
    â€œHow much truth can you handle?” Weena produced one of her giggles and held up her hands as if measuring the variable size of a fish. “A wee scrap? A vast lump?”
    â€œLet’s start with that crumbling Victorian house. You came from there, right?”
    â€œVery well then, yes. You opened the portal from my world. And when we met face to face in Mahalo Gelato, I became quite sure that you’re the man I seek. You’d already acted as my doorman, and I realized you could be my, my postman as well. So I—” She made a gesture of shaking on sprinkles.
    I felt odd, as if my living room were stretching away from me, with Weena’s face a pale disk at the other end.
    â€œYou—you drugged me?” This part hadn’t occurred to me before. “You deliberately gave me those seizures?”
    â€œI’d wager the sprinkles saved your life,” said Weena. “They enriched your personality and gave you strength. You would have had the apoplectic fit in any case—this was your fate.”
    â€œWhat are the sprinkles?” I asked, more and more confused.
    â€œSouls? Oh, never mind that. I’ll just tell you that I harvested sprinkles on my way here from Flimsy. And that they served as a tonic to give you pep. And now you’ll be able to host a jiva, and you’ll be fit to battle that horrible yuel. The Graf must have smuggled the yuel over here. Do you know that right now the yuel is rutting under the Santa Cruz pier? The imbecilic sea lions believe him to be one of them! But soon the yuel will attack us and...”
    Weena stopped, clapped her hand over her mouth and bulged her eyes at me. I couldn’t tell whether it was a laugh or a scream that she was holding back. Obviously she liked being dramatic.
    â€œFlimsy?” I echoed, groping for the right question. “Yuel?”
    â€œI’m sure you take me for a madwoman,” she said, lowering her hands. “I’ve chattered enough. Consider instead—the alabaster mounds of my breasts.” Weena pulled her T-shirt over her head and unhooked her bra. “Alluring, yes? Caress me, Jim. We’ll recline on your bed.”
    So we did that. The love-making was great, once I got up to speed. Weena was patient, and funny, and then hot. And that old-fashioned accent of hers made it the more exciting.
    Afterwards, lying in bed next to her, I stared at the old frosted-glass light fixture on my low ceiling. I seemed to see the tint of the glass changing in slow waves, the faint pastel hues amping up and down, as if I were diddling the world’s color balance sliders.
    â€œI can teep what you see,” murmured Weena.
    â€œTeep—” I said. “Is that supposed to mean telepathy?” I kept having the uneasy feeling that Weena was a little crazy, or that she was totally putting me on. “If you can teep me, why can’t I teep you?”
    â€œYou have no jiva as yet,” said Weena. “This I will soon remedy. And then your mind will unfold like a spring jonquil. And you’ll have the strength of three men. For now, the action of the sprinkles has already raised your vim. Swaying your inner vibrations is an occult technique for glimpsing the inner essence. Flimsy lies inside every electrical particle, you see. As you oscillate your vibrations, fix your attention on one particular object—perhaps that lamp on your dresser. And observe.”
    So I relaxed, and let the swaying begin again, and now I noticed that as the colors shifted, my lamp began to look like a cloud of bright dots. It was as if I were seeing the swarms of electrons around the lamp’s atoms—as if my mind were a scanning-tunneling microscope. In my trance-like state, I perceived that each of the electrons was the same, and that each of them was somehow very vast. One single hidden form lurked within each. The