Frek and the Elixir (27 page)

Before long, Frek knew he liked Renata more than any girl he'd ever talked to before. He was glad to have met her on his own like this, without his friends around. If his friends saw him talking to a girl for this long, they'd say he had a girlfriend, and they'd ask him when he was going to kiss her and so on. Frek had very little experience in this area. Looking at Renata's smooth cheek so close to his, it did seem conceivable that he might kiss that cheek some day. He'd never thought that way about a girl before. Their two years' age difference didn't seem to matter one bit. Renata's cheek had fine down on it like a peach.

“Why are you looking at me that way, Frek? What are you thinking?”

“Um, you know.” And, without saying more than that, he felt that she did know, exactly.

“There's Unipusk,” said Renata after a long, thoughtful minute. “We're almost there. Too bad.”

Unipusk was a bright crescent off to one side of the dome. The sunlit part was green, blue, and white, just like Earth with her land, seas, and clouds. The darker part was itself dimly lit from Jumm's reflected light, with bright spots pricked out against it like lace. If the lights were cities, then Unipusk was very densely inhabited indeed.

In preparation for landing, they orbited Unipusk for a while, passing near the transport tube from Jumm. A very large cloud of icy crystals floated around the tube, and within the fog of the cloud, Frek could make out two other Unipusker saucers shining beams upon a rough-looking patch of the tube.

“They're annealing that hole in the tube's force fields,” explained Renata. “I think they're actually going to be done today. A bomb went off in the tube right before we got here, and ever since then the Unipuskers have been working on repairing the field. I think I mentioned that's why their branelink has been down? It runs off of the kenner gas that they extract out of the Jumm-stuff they pump through the tube.”

They angled down through the atmosphere, striking it near the terminator line between day and night. The saucer spiraled smoothly toward a coastline, a peninsula, a flat region, a spaceport. And there they settled to the ground.

“Disembark,” said Evawrt, doing something to the model saucer in his lap. One side of the cockpit wall opened up into a ramp that stretched all the way to the ground. “Bid you farewell.”

Frek and Renata stepped onto the ramp together. He felt a gentle breeze. The air smelled fresher than inside the saucer, less sulfurous, with a faint whiff of violets. Two suns were sinking below the horizon. One sun was large and red, already partly out of sight. The other sun was smaller and brighter, hovering just above the bigger sun's edge. It was dusk on Unipusk.

Looking around from the top of the ramp, Frek saw a spaceport with scores of spacecraft and dozens of alien hangars and warehouses. Some of the structures were domes and cubes, others had odder forms. The nearest building resembled a giant black sea-urchin, with hundreds of shiny spikes. Open doors punctuated its walls.

Ranged around the outer edge of the spaceport field were stylized green plants of an immense size—each of them had a tall, tapering shaft, with horizontal tubes sticking out for branches. These were giant versions of the rickrack plants they'd eaten for lunch. The branches were made up of sections, and each section bore round shiny dots: windows. Along the bottoms of the branches were dark sprinkles—spores? With the waning of the day, lights were becoming visible within the great rickrack trees.

“See that rickrack tree right there?” said Renata, pointing. “That's where Hawb and Cawmb live with their umpty-ump children. Like I said, the richest Unipuskers have their trees right beside the spaceport. Mom and your father are in there, too, eagerly awaiting us. If they're awake.”

Although half the craft visible at the spaceport seemed to be Unipusker flying saucers, the remainder must have been from other alien worlds. No two of them were the same. Among the alien ships, Frek noticed a steel pear resting on its small end, a rainbow-reflecting cube balancing itself upon one corner, a golden ball with black spots, a softly slumping gelatinous mass, a snowman-shape of three glowing spheres, a piled-up stack of immense copper chain links, two great matte-black cylinders crossing each other like a letter X, a silvery boomerang and, right beside the sea-urchin-shaped building, a house-sized green barrel with a fan of purple tentacles protruding from either end. The barrel had black ridges along it, dividing it into five sections. Like Ulla, this ship seemed to be independently alive.

All this Frek saw, walking down the long ramp from the Unipuskers' giant flying saucer. As they neared the bottom, Renata took his hand in hers. Her touch was warm and smooth. Holding Renata's hand was, in a way, even more amazing than landing on Unipusk.

Figures moved here and there across the spaceport. Not all of them were Unipuskers. Some things like starfish were busy by the nearby sea-urchin building and its barrel-shaped spacecraft. A few smiley-faced balls bounced around the snowman-shaped ship, and a half dozen large cockroaches could be seen crawling upon the matte-black X ship.

One particular figure was speeding across the flat spaceport field toward them: It was a single hulking Unipusker upon a hovering disk. The rim of the disk was decorated with metallic scrolls. As it drew closer, Frek could see that the little craft had a purple velvet railing held up by posts that were slim models of Unipuskers. The heavy-set pilot steered the hoverdisk by moving his foot against a low, stubby control.

As Frek and Renata stepped onto the hard-packed blue soil of Unipusk, the hoverdisk drew up to a particular spot on the great curved hull of Evawrt's saucer. The driver cocked an eye stalk at Frek and held out a stubby, finned rod that could have been a weapon. Presumably he was something like a chauffeur.

A section of the hull dissolved, revealing Hawb, Cawmb, and Gibby. They were carrying a baby apiece, with Gibby's astride his tail. The three of them stepped onto the ornate hovering disk, which now lowered to the ground so that Frek and Renata could join the others.

Curious about the new world, Gibby hopped down off the hoverdisk onto the ground to pick at and sniff the soil. He gathered up a few of the blue pebbles and placed them in his pocket, all the while balancing the Unipusker baby on his tail.

“Request you to get back on our hoverdisk,” said Hawb to Gibby. “Explain that we're in a hurry to go to the house of Hawb and Cawmb.”

“Not so fast,” put in Frek. “Don't forget our dogs. You said I could keep the dogs in my room in your house, remember?”

Hawb narrowed the crack in his clamshell head and let out a staccato series of chirps. Invisible in the cockpit, Evawrt piped a response. A second patch of the saucer's hull thinned out, this spot a bit lower down. With a yelp and a thump, Wow and Woo dropped to the hard surface of the spaceport field. Wow sniffed the air, shook himself twice, and trotted over to Frek. Woo, however, took off full tilt toward the barrel-shaped spacecraft nearby.

Cawmb said something sharp, and the chauffeur shot a pulse of light after the fleeing dog. But he missed. One of the barrel's great tentacles twitched and fired back a warning shot, a green ball of light that bounced slowly up to them and burst in a vile-smelling puff of gas. Meanwhile, Woo had rounded the barrel and disappeared into one of the many doors in the sea-urchin-shaped building beyond the barrel ship.

Frek snatched up Wow and held him in his arms, both to keep him from bolting, and to protect him lest the Unipuskers chose to punish one dog for the other's escape.

But Hawb didn't seem very interested in the issue. “Regret your dog's defection to the Radiolarians,” was all he said. “Opine that nothing can be done. Caution that you steady yourself before our chauffeur Gawrgor flies the hoverdisk to our mansion.”

As they glided across the spaceport, the second sun went down. Brownish-red lights sprang into life upon the surface of the Radiolarians' sea-urchin structure, while their barrel ship's ribs took on a purplish glow. All across the spaceport, the other ships and buildings were lighting up as well. And the rickrack trees—the rickrack trees became canes of glowing green, the greens an artful composite of lighter and darker pinstripes, quite lovely. Above it all hung the vast red and yellow disk of Jumm, filling perhaps a fourth of the sky. And for Frek, a golden glow was overlaid upon everything; alien watchers were tasting the beauties seen through his eyes.

Renata squeezed Frek's hand. “I'm worried about what they'll do to you,” she whispered. “If you don't get them their deal with the branecasters.”

With the golden glow creeping up on him, Frek again tried his new head trick of making the glow as big as the sky, and of making himself as untouchable as air. It seemed to work, and now yet another mental exercise occurred to him, a way of correcting whatever changes the alien contacts had wrought upon him by their constant subtle questioning.

Odd as it sounded, the best phrase for the feeling Frek now had was
combing his brain
—a sensation of running invisible fingers though his gray matter, of restoring his mentality to its full infinite-dimensional glory, of uncollapsing his opinions, of letting his streams of thought recohere into their true, natural form. Combing his brain, yes. He seemed continually to be learning new mental skills.

“Don't worry,” Frek whispered to Renata, briefly letting himself savor the fact that another transport tube bomb was coming soon. And then, before the ever-grasping espers could come find the thought, he let the secret dissolve out into the air he was breathing. He thought only of the air, of the sweet, violet perfume from the rickrack trees. He crouched down to talk to Gibby and, so far as possible, to Wow.

“The Unipuskers are going to lock you guys up in my room,” he told them. “They say they'll kill us all unless I tell the branecasters to let
them
produce our channel instead of the Orpolese. But they're not going to do anything until their branelink comes back up.”

“Hope it takes a while,” said Gibby. “There's got to be a bar here somewheres. Maybe even a cowloon. It's thirsty work comin' halfway across the galaxy. Seems like a fella could settle in for a nice long party here.”

Frek didn't have the heart to tell Gibby the branelink was supposed to be coming up tomorrow.

Hawb and Cawmb's dwelling was the largest of the rickrack trees. The tree's outer walls were encrusted with architectural ornamentation—columns, arches, statues, balconies, friezes, spandrels, cornices, and more. Although the tree itself was clearly biotech, the elaborate ornaments around its base had a clarity of color and purity of form that indicated they were kennies. As in the saucer, the decorations were everywhere marked with representations of the faces and bodies of Unipuskers.

On either side of the building's enormous round door, for instance, was a giant statue of one of the clam-headed Unipuskers. Each statue bent to one side, so that the two of them made a pair of parentheses around the disk of the door. Frek had trouble telling the Unipuskers apart, but perhaps these guardian figures were images of Hawb and Cawmb. Little sloping cornice roofs shaded the statues like droopy stone awnings. The projecting roofs were shingled with squares and circles, each circle holding a bas relief of yet another Unipusker's clamshell head and eye stalks, each head slightly different. Kennies like colored porcelain chandeliers dangled from the undersides of the roofs, lighting up the heads of the statues who were themselves holding saddle-shaped surfaces bearing yet more faces of Unipuskers, mixed in with representations of vigs and Unipusker flying saucers.

The door itself was decorated with concentric rings of heads: an outer ring of Unipuskers, then a ring of heads of creatures from alien worlds, within that a band of vig heads surrounding another ring of Unipuskers, then more aliens, more vigs, more Unipuskers—more rings than it really seemed there could be room for. The center depicted a final triumphant Unipusker with his eye stalks pointing right at you. Shiny branching hinges held the door in place; the bronze kenner of these brackets writhed in among the hundreds of heads, sending a curlicue or a tendril around each and every one.

Gawrgor the chauffeur prodded the hoverdisk control stick with his foot; the hoverdisk sounded a triplet of notes like a French horn's. The immense door swung slowly open. A heavy smell of sulfur wafted out, pungent as sewer gas. Frek held his breath for a minute, but then he was out of air, and he had to start the task of getting used to the Unipuskers' stench. The hoverdisk floated in and settled to the floor of the mansion's single ground-floor room. Breathing through his mouth, Frek dismounted with the others.

The room was fully a hundred meters high, a round, tapering shaft with a helical kenner staircase wrapped in great turns around its inner wall. A Unipusker head was carved in relief upon each stair step, and no two steps were alike in texture or color. The floor was ankle deep in plush kenner carpeting, with overstuffed chairs and elaborate spindly tables to every side, each table's sides covered with friezes of tiny Unipuskers.

The room held a dozen flickerballs. Though most of them were simply showing the branecasters' blue-edged logo cube of the six imbecilic happy customers, three or four of the balls were active. It was enough to fill the room with a steady vibe of buzzing and blinking. To stare at one of the active balls for more than a few seconds was to feel your viewpoint drawn off to another world; seen even from the corner of your eye, a turned-on flickerball would send a constant stream of alien landscapes your way, doing its best to suck you further in.

Kenner statues of Unipuskers and of vigs ringed the bases of the walls, and in the very center of the room was an immense onyx statue of two Unipuskers in what seemed to be a domestic situation. Possibly Hawb and Cawmb. They were sitting up to their waists in a tub of—mud? Their hands were raised in the air, supporting a flickerball two meters across. Standing to one side as a pendant to this monument was a statue of a nobly proportioned vig. The vig was of kenner trained to resemble orange-tinted marble. The vig's eye stalks were tipped with glowing green jewels and it bore a great golden bowl upon its back.

Gibby had never seen a flickerball before. It was only a matter of seconds till the big one in the center of the room had reeled him in. He stood rooted to the spot, staring up at the hypnotic sphere. His mouth was slack and his tail was slightly twitching; his Unipusker baby slipped to the floor.

The muscular Gawrgor prodded the hoverdisk's control stick with his foot, piloting the disk off into a kind of garage set into the room's wall beneath the high round door to the outer world. As the garage door opened, Frek could see that Gawrgor had an apartment for himself in there. And then chauffeur and hoverdisk were gone from view.

Another Unipusker servant came trotting to pick up Gibby's neglected baby. He introduced himself as Angawl; he seemed to be something like a butler. Taking Hawb and Cawmb's charges as well, Angawl bustled toward a thick vertical column of light on the far side of the room. It seemed to be a zone of negative gravity, for when the butler stepped into the shaft, he and the three clam-headed babies floated upward. Peering after them, Frek saw young Unipuskers and vigs darting in and out of the negative gravity like birds swooping around a thermal, appearing and disappearing amid the tunnellike mouths feeding into the high reaches of the great hall's walls, occasionally swinging themselves from the scattered vines that seemed to grow across the narrowing shaft. Faint sounds of sibilant gurgling drifted down, along with sharp liquid creaking noises that might have been Unipusker laughs.

“Here they come,” said Renata, giving Frek a nudge.

Frek looked and saw someone sweeping down the staircase that circled the wall. Renata's mother. Frek recognized her from the turkle drawing Renata had shown him. She wore a watch-me boa, which was a once-popular NuBioCom kritter that surrounded its bearer with flashes of light from its tail and with the chiming of gongs and the piping of flutes from its mouth. She had long, tangled hair, mostly blond. Her face was unbeautiful, with small eyes and a tense mouth. Six breasts ran down her chest and belly, arranged in three pairs. Like the watch-me boa, multiple breast pairs were a fashion that had gone out of style on Earth five or even ten years ago.

“That's my mother,” said Renata. “Yessica Sunshine to you.”

A lean, rangy man was coming down the stairs behind Yessica, picking his way across the embossed Unipusker faces, a man with weather-beaten skin, a large beak of nose, crinkles around his eyes, and a long, twitching line of a mouth. A half-meter Mohawk crest protruded evenly from the center-line of his head. The smeared blue tattoo molds in his temples were patterned like Unipusker UFOs.