Frek and the Elixir (42 page)

“I see her, too,” put in Gibby.

Dad looked around a little more. “I always thought I'd like the old days,” he said, sadly wagging his Mohawk. “Now I'm not so sure.”

In silence the three stared across the City Hall square of Node G.

The passing crowds of Hubs—it was hard not to think of them as people—the Hubs were quite physically diverse, which was an interesting change from home, where genomics had everyone looking pretty much the same. But none of the Hubs smiled, none of them spoke to each other. Their clothes were dull: whites, grays, tans, neutral blues, and black. Moreover, viewed as people, the passersby seemed diseased. They were obese, compulsively smoking cigarettes, twitching with neuroses, blowing phlegm from their noses and coughing in every direction; their blotchy skins were pocked with suppurating infections, they had missing and damaged teeth, many of them were balding, half wore brittle external corrective lenses, all of them stank of bacteria and decay. Their auras were stained, pale, and partly worn away, looking like little more than dirt in the air near their heads.

The ground was covered with dead artificial slabs of concrete, the buildings were lifeless blank glass and steel. The sky was gray, the air stank, the constant noise of the cars bounced back and forth from the office buildings' unornamented walls. It was nearly unbearable. How could people live this way? The old-time environment was a lot less pleasant than Frek would have imagined.

Another tram clanged past, its sides painted over with incomprehensible ads. Even though the words seemed to be English, Frek couldn't string them together into meaningful phrases. It was like trying to read inside a dream.

A dream. That was a chilling thought. The Hubs weren't people; Node G wasn't a Y2K Earth city. What they saw here was an illusion, a way of viewing something even less conceivable than life inside a star. Frek didn't want to see what lay behind the illusion. He only wanted to skate as rapidly as possible across the thin ice of this false reality, to finally finish his quest, and to leave Node G before the dream became a nightmare. Chainey had hinted that things might turn ugly very soon.

“Let's do our thing and go home,” shouted Gibby over the roar of traffic. “Back to where it's green.”

“We'll start with this,” said Dad, holding up the key, excited about the archaic technology.

“I think the cell's back here,” said Frek, leading the others around to the side of the City Hall.

The dirty sidewalk led right to a gray-painted metal door with a handle and a keyhole. Dad insisted on being the one to open the lock; he really liked the idea of using a key.

As soon as Dad yanked the door open, a dozen of those muddy demon things came flying out, slimy iridescent fish with gaping cat mouths that showed four fangs, two above and two below. The fishes' buzzing, chitinous wings danced with glaucous highlights.

Compared to the blind, dead machineries of the street, the ill-favored demons seemed almost homey, like some kind of new model NuBioCom kritters. But they were vicious little beasts. If Wow hadn't barked and snapped at them quite so savagely, they might well have attacked the Earthlings. But thanks to the dog, the devilish flying fish buzzed away.

The doorway brightened—and a shiny, fat, purple wheel came rolling out. One of the dimpled hubs irised into a triangular window, and out popped a glowing, branching shape that congealed into a floating green cuttlefish.

“Ulla and Professor Bumby!” cried Frek, glad to see the familiar forms in this uncanny place.

“Frek!” said Bumby, still orienting himself. “You sprung us from decoherence? Yes! I can think again; I know I'm me! How long has it been?” He began ticking off facts on his corkscrew tentacle tips. “You crashed our yunch, we fell into the Planck brane, the flying Hub demons jailed us and—good morning, darling!” Ulla had just interrupted him with a red heart of tweet followed by a little black cloud. He ran a tentacle across her and glanced up at the glowing gray sky. “No sun in the Planck brane, did you notice, Frek? But that doesn't mean they don't have weather. Ulla smells a storm.” His voice grew urgent. “Tell me how many days we've been on ice.”

It took a bit of effort for Frek to mentally order the recent events. “I ran away from Middleville on Thursday, May twelfth,” he said. “On Friday, I went to Stun City with Gibby. Saturday we hooked up with you at Gov's puffball and yunched. That's when you got decoherent. We slept in space and then the Unipusker saucer came for us. With Renata. And Sunday night we got to Unipusk. We were there all day Monday. They were going to kill me because I wouldn't make a deal for them though the branelink. But then their branelink went down, so they just locked me up.”

What a week it had been! A far cry from: I went to school, I went to school, I went to school. Frek felt proud, telling all his adventures.

“Tuesday at dawn we escaped Unipusk with some Radiolarians,” he continued. “But then we had to ditch them, too. They wanted to enslave Earth with a plug in everyone's head. And then your children Whaler and Tusky showed up just in time to rescue us and bring us to Orpoly. We slept for a while inside a sun with them, which brings us up to today. Wednesday. Today we surfed the solar flares and gravity waves to the Orpolese branelink and dived in. So I guess that means you've been decoherent for four days.”

At the mention of Whaler and Tusky, Ulla sent a quick, interrogative tweet-icon of the two. Frek hated to give her the bad news. But Gibby didn't seem to feel any such compunction.

“Whaler's dead,” said Gibby. “Torn up and et by Yonny. Tusky's new flame. A rassen.”

Ulla's tweets darted through their heads to winkle out the full story. In the process she noticed something Frek hadn't bothered to mention.

“Ulla says we're grandparents?” exclaimed Bumby, not seeming all that upset by the death of his son. “Whaler and Tusky pinched off a clone before they broke up?”

“Yeah,” said Frek. “It happened when we were yunched up to the size of the galaxy. They were called Tagine and Vlan. They took Yessica, Renata, and Woo back to Middleville on Earth.”

“Whaler passed the torch,” said Bumby in a satisfied tone. “He got over. That's what it's all about. Make a copy before you die or divorce. Not that we two will ever stop our endless boogie, hey Ulla?” Tenderly he laid some tentacles upon his wife and let them begin sinking in. For her part, Ulla deepened the dents in her middle, taking on a form more and more like a donut. She sent out a bright yellow ball of tweet.

“That's a picture of a sun,” explained Bumby. “Meaning she's hungry for some good loofy. We're gonna mount up and ride to reality, Frek. We have to do some groundwork about getting the humanity show set up. It won't actually click until you shake hands with an Orpolese on Earth. Are you and your friends ready to board the Ulla/Bumby luxury liner? Ulla will make you some new spacesuits. Once we're through the link, we'll yunch up to the right size for surfing the suns. I'll be stoked to see you boys do the spaceman freestyle.”

“I want to get the elixir to restore Earth's biome,” said Frek stubbornly. “Chainey said you'd help.”

“I'm sorry, but we're outa here for now, kid,” said Bumby in a careless tone. Neither the branecasters nor the branecast producers seemed to take their contractual obligations very seriously.

“You promised!” cried Frek. “That was part of the deal for letting you produce the humanity channel.”

“Earth's still on open access,” said Bumby in a peevish tone. “Strictly speaking, I don't have to pay you till our show comes on line. And, like I said, the show doesn't come on line until we ferry you all the way back to Earth. Bit of a legal thicket, eh? But I'll tell you what, we can come back here in two or three days and get your elixir then.”

“No!” said Frek. “I want to go to the Exaplex right now.”

Bumby wobbled his tentacles in a negative way. “You don't want to be here when the renormalization storm hits. The Planck brane gets especially weird at the end of each yuga. A yuga lasts fifty-two days, and this is day fifty-one. Nothing here is factually real, you understand, and when there's a storm it all gets changed around. We can tell because the branecasts always go whack-a-doozy. Come with us now, this isn't the right time to be poking around, especially not for Ulla and me, weak as we are. We'll regroup in Orpoly. Eat some loofy, lay more groundwork for our little production deal, and meanwhile spend a few more nights inside a star. That loofy's good stuff, isn't it? And, fine, this weekend when the storm's over we come back to the Planck brane and pick up your elixir, then Ulla and I yunch you back to Middleville, safe as a magic school bus, and the ultragaud Ulla/Bumby humanity channel begins.”

“Branecasting sucks,” put in Dad suddenly. “We don't want you to set up the production deal at all.”

“That's right,” added Frek. “Earth shouldn't be on branecast. I found out how bad branecasting is. Your guys would be playing us like characters in a game. We'd be your monoculture. You're not really on our side at all, Bumby. You don't care if I get the elixir.”

“Oh, you and your elixir,” said Bumby. “I never should have mentioned it. You're obsessed! Yes, Earth with her full Noah's Ark will make for a better show. But can't you wait till later—like after the next yuga begins? Open your thinker, stinker. Thanks to you we've been decoherent four days. Ulla and I are too weak to risk facing a storm.”

“Then we'll get the elixir on our own,” snapped Dad.

Bumby turned his attention to Carb. “This is the father, hey? I thought you were all set to sell out your boy to the Unipuskers, Dad. Since when are you brave-little-trumpeting against branecasting?”

“Just tell us how to get out of the Planck brane on our own,” interrupted Gibby. “Since it looks like you're not gonna help us get the elixir, and since it seems as how that's what we're fixin' to do, come hell or high water. Where's the branelink outa here, you double-crossin' space-squid?”

“Tough guys, huh?” said Bumby. “All right then. The last time I was here the link looked like a branching solar plume. But it'll be different this time around. Everything changes in the Planck brane after each of their storms. What you see here has a lot to do with who you are. Right now the branelink might look like, I don't know, a fountain.” Bumby pointed a tentacle across the street. “But it's always in the same place. On that little hill near the far edge of that park. Pig Hill. Pig Hill's always there, no matter how many renormalization storms they have. You're really not coming with us now?”

“No,” said Frek. Dad shook his head, backing Frek up. Gibby said nothing, though he looked a little wistful. Wow was busy staring at the passing Hubs.

“Well, bighearted energy vortices that we are, we'll wait in the plane brane for you poor forked radishes,” said Bumby. “I mean, first we'll eat, and then we'll do just a little business, and
then
we'll wait. You'll find us in a polar orbit around the star with the branelink—Ulla says you thought the star looked like a god? The Hubs do that, they turn every glass of water into wine. They're grand masters of reality hacking; you can't beat them. So spare me the snide snoot-tooting against branecasting. Oh, before we go, don't you at least want spacesuits?”

“I can make our own,” said Frek loftily. “A Unipusker showed me how to craft kenner. Maybe I forgot to mention that Dad and I kenny crafted ten trillion tons of gold to bail you out. So we don't owe you a thing. And we're
not
done talking about the branecasting deal.”

“Ducky dander,” said Bumby in a slightly amused tone. “Go ahead, dabble around Node G for your elixir. You've got a good chance of finding it in that Exaplex. But do mind those proud white tail feathers of yours and watch the time. If you die here, we'll have to set up a whole new deal—and the Unipuskers could end up running the humanity branecast after all. There's sucking and there's
really sucking,
Carb. Whatever you boys do, get through the branelink before the storm.” Ulla popped out another yellow ball of tweet. “Yes, yes, dear, we're on our way. Good luck, Frek!” Bumby sank the rest of his branches into Ulla, and the ever-rolling veined donut sped toward the hill at the end of the park.

“I'm takin' that key,” said Gibby, pulling it from the lock and putting it in one of his pockets.

“Fine,” said Frek, who'd grown used to Gibby's acquisitiveness. He and the others walked down the dirty stone steps to the paved square. A tram was just coming by. It was long and yellow, a sleek construct of glass and metal. Frek found it odd to see machines that had been built one piece at a time. Not like back home, where things just grew.

Though it didn't seem quite logical, the tram was driven by the same Hub they'd seen going by a few minutes before; she looked like a woman, with blond hair cut into chunky bangs. Her tight little aura didn't extend much beyond her hair. As they stepped forward, she brought the tram to a screeching stop and opened its door.

Wow pushed ahead of Frek and ran right in. Gibby was next, nimbly rocking up the steps. With Dad at his side, Frek addressed the conductor. She was sealed off in a little transparent cabin. A window with a counter was set into the glassy cabin door.

“Do you go to the Exaplex?” asked Frek.

As the Hub turned to face Frek, her head underwent a subtle warp and flicker. It was as if in this world, anything could change into anything else at any time. A disturbing possibility. But for now, at least, the Hub kept her humanoid appearance.

“I go right past it,” she said.

“Do—do we need tickets?” asked Frek, though he had no idea how he might pay.

“You ride free,” said the woman, waving her hand toward the rear of the tram. “The end of the line, if you like.” Were there webs of pink membrane between her fingers? Before Frek could decide, the Hub pushed a great metal crank to lurch the tram into motion.