Frek and the Elixir (49 page)

A hundred imaginary faces seemed to bloom around him, bland and doughy, pressing forward, staring, asking questions—all at the same time. Willy-nilly, Frek was unable to do anything but answer the voices in his head.

“How old are you?”

“Are you happy?”

“What's your name?”

“Do you miss home?”

“How tall are you?”

“Are you frightened?”

With each response, Frek became a bit less himself and more of a statistic. The questions were flattening him out. On and on they came.

“Rate your feelings about the following on a scale from one to five, ranging from dislike very much to like very much. My mother Lora, rainy weather, my sister Geneva, the River Jaya, my sister Ida, the Goob Dolls show, my father Carb, the color of my bedroom's walls, Kolder Steiner, the smell of roseplusplus blossoms, Gibby the Grulloo, the taste of amplified trout, my dog Wow, the feel of turmite silk, Sao Steiner, the stairs in my family's house tree.”

“Let's explore your relationship with your mother. Rate your perceived frequency of the following classes of events on a scale from one to five, ranging from almost never to extremely often. Lora smiles at me. Lora scolds me. Lora shows affection to me. Lora has high expectations of me. Lora talks to me. Lora punishes me for small things. Lora makes me feel cozy. Lora yells at me. Lora acts unpredictably toward me. Lora asks me to do chores. Lora doesn't understand me.”

“Let's analyze your opinions about the branecasters. Specify your agreement with the following statements on a scale from one to five, ranging from disagree strongly to agree very much. The branecasters are evil. There are six branecasters. The branecasters are parasites. Chainey is the leader of the branecasters. The branecasters are dangerous. The branecasters help the human race. The branecasters are dishonest. The branecasters promote personal growth. The branecasters are like gods.”

The questions came at him so thick and fast that he never thought of using his autopoiesis. In a few minutes, every spark of Frek's own true self had been sapped away. All he felt now was a faint ache all through his bones, like the pain from a bad tooth.

While Frek was being decohered, the branecasters unwound into separate bodies again. And when the questions finally stopped, they were standing over him, looking down contemptuously. They were humanoid again, albeit with wings of leather and bone.

Lights wriggled in the sky. Flinka, Aunt Guszti, and scores more of the flying fish. And now heavy glowing balls began raining down onto the nest. One of them struck Sid in the head and exploded, sending Sid crashing down through the branelink tree. The flying fish were trying to drive the branecasters away.

Frek had no opinion about any of this. He was a rag doll, an automaton, a thing. He contained no mysteries. He was fully decoherent.

Cecily flew off and reappeared with the wounded Sid. More glow-bombs fell, but none of them came near Frek. After one of the bombs hit Chainey, the branecasters took wing and circled up to fight the flying fish. The last to depart was Batty. Just before leaving, he lowered his mean, crazy face down to Frek's.

“I'm your keeper,” he said. He had fangs like Jayney. “I'll be back every so often to decohere you some more. I'll eat every last qubit you make.” He gave a jittery chuckle and was gone. The clouds flickered with lights as the branecasters fought the flying fish.

Still Frek thought nothing one way or the other. He was an object, a transparent toy, with less inner life than the sticks he lay upon.

He ached. He was breathing. Eventually it would stop. It didn't matter.

Something tingled on his finger. At some level Frek knew it was Carb trying to call him. But he didn't answer. Why would he? How? Nobody home.

More time passed, and then something bumped the nest. Batty coming back to decohere him some more? Not that Frek cared. But, no, it was Carb. Not that Frek cared.

Carb leaned over him and began talking.

“Come on, Frek. Get it together! Climb down from here and get into the branelink. Gibby and Wow are waiting at the first fork.”

Frek said nothing. He could smell his father's breath and his sweat. His reaction was zero on a scale of one to five.

Carb studied him for a moment, then seemed to reach a decision. “I'm going to help you, Frek. You're my heart. Comb your brain and recohere yourself!”

A red glow trickled out of Carb's ring and into Frek's. Like a stream of blood running from one to the other. Frek felt the faintest spark of strength. Comb his brain? Yes. He hadn't been able to think of that before. He visualized running his fingers through his brain, fluffing his thoughts back up. And now the autopoiesis kicked in, the quantum error correction. The numbness began ebbing away.

“Keep it up,” his father urged him.

When Jayney had decohered Frek, she'd kicked the legs out from under his personality, taken away his sense of self, collapsed his inner entanglements. But now he was rebuilding his own unique mixed state. Combing it back up, nice and high.

The strengthening flow of red from Carb's ring to Frek's continued. “Those are self-entanglement qubits,” said Frek's father, noticing Frek's glance. “That's what they sucked out of you to make you decohere. The Magic Pig told me I could save you by giving you my own self-entangled qubits.” He was breathing deeper and slower. He sat down on the sloping edge of the nest. Frek thought of the old days, how his father would tuck him into bed.

“Is—is this hurting you, Dad?”

“I want to help you, Frek. It's all right. I'm glad to make up for the bad things I've done.”

Above them, the battle in the sky proceeded, with colored flashes filtering through the clouds. But now here came a branecaster swooping back down. Batty. He landed on the other edge of the nest, observing them with his glittering vampire eyes. Frek stood up. He was feeling much stronger now. He dialed his blaster to its highest tight-beam intensity, and tried shooting a hole in Batty's face. The ray had no more effect than a pocket flashlight.

“Get going,” breathed Dad. The flow of red from his ring had dropped to the merest trickle. “It doesn't matter what happens to me now.” He struggled to his feet and positioned himself between Frek and Batty. “Run, Frek. I mean it. Otherwise this has no point.”

Frek backed to the edge of the nest and peered down. He saw an easy series of handholds he could use to make his way to the ground. Down there the branelink entrance was gently strobing. The branecasters other than Batty were still in the clouds. This was his chance.

Frek glanced back at his father, who was crouched in readiness for Batty's attack.

“I swear I'll come back and save you, Dad.”

“No problem,” said Dad, his familiar smile visible on the side of his face. “As long as you're around, I'm still alive. And Frek? I know you won't believe this, but—when we were surfing across the Orpolese archipelago the other day? Those were the happiest hours of my whole entire life.”

Batty lunged toward Frek, but Dad blocked him. The winged branecaster sank his teeth into Dad's neck.

Eyes blurry, Frek scrambled down the tree. Some of the demons headed toward him, led by the giant squealing bagpipe undulating across the ground like a high-speed carnivorous slug, using its sticks like crutches, and with its furiously blasting horn aimed directly his way.

But Frek made it into the hole before the bagpipe got to him. The space in there was filled with yellow-orange light. He felt an upward-pointing force as in Hawb and Cawmb's negative gravity column; he fell up. But not for long.

A double mandala of concentric circles loomed ahead. Perched unsteadily at the figure-eight juncture of the two circles was a trio of familiar forms. Gibby, Wow, and the Magic Pig. Frek alighted next to them. The branelink tree's inner surface was tingly and slippery. Frek had to balance carefully to keep from being pulled into one of the two branches that led up from here.

“So your father saved you,” said the Magic Pig. “Good. Zed Alef and the branecasters were determined that one of you had to stay. It's better for you to be the one to escape, Frek. You're the hero.”

“Carb?” whined Wow.

“There was a man,” said Gibby and fell silent.

“No time to waste,” urged Rundy. “The others might come in here if you stay too long. Let me tell you what to do.”

Frek tuned out. He was thinking of Batty clutching Dad. Deep inside his ring finger he could feel that same numb ache he'd felt before. An echo of Dad's decoherence. Just then it crossed his mind that perhaps he should throw the ring away, lest the branecasters find some way to use the connection to come after him. But the impulse felt selfish, unworthy. Dad had used the rings to save Frek. There was an outside chance that Frek could eventually repay the favor. The ring should stay.

Rundy was still talking. “You'll pass a lot of branch points. No use telling you the pattern, just follow your sense of what's right. You'll find your way back to Bumby and Ulla in Orpoly and they'll yunch you home. The Orpolese have to get you back before they can finish closing their deal.”

“How can I get in touch with you again from Earth?” Frek asked the Magic Pig. “How can I get back here to save Dad?”

“I'll root out a connection,” said old Rundy. “I'm good at rooting. Get home, repopulate your planet, and work on your Plan B. You'll hear from me. And now I better go and make another distraction.” The Magic Pig gave one of his stuttery squeals and scrambled down out of the branelink tree.

“We're gonna need spacesuits out there,” said Gibby.

“That's right,” said Frek. So he kenny crafted spacesuits for him, Gibby, and Wow. Only the three of them now. Poor Dad.

“These look right flimsy compared to the ones the Orpolese made,” said Gibby, hefting his transparent kenner wrapping. “You think they'll do?”

“I hope so,” said Frek. He was too upset to think clearly.

“Home,” said Wow, pointing his nose into one of the two ring-striped tunnels leading farther up into the branelink tree.

“Yes,” said Frek.

“That's the one I'd pick, too,” said Gibby.

They went falling upward, past branching after branching. Ten, twenty, thirty times the mandalas broke into submandalas; each time it took but the slightest twitch of will to pick the next one. Fortunately, the three travelers always agreed. In their hearts, they all knew the way home.

When they reached the final stretch of the branelink tunnel, Frek once again seemed to hear the sound of branches breaking, of foliage tearing away. And then they were back in their own universe, the plane brane, somewhere near the center of the Milky Way galaxy, in the heart of the Orpolese archipelago, amidst the suns circling the bloated sullen mass of the galactic black hole.

The passage through the link had angled them out at such a velocity that they entered a tight orbit around the branelink sun, which still resembled a colorized Bodhisattva.

For the moment at least, their spacesuits seemed to be doing a decent job at feeding them air and keeping out the insanely intense radiation. Frek scanned the space around them, looking for their ride home. And then, with a sigh of relief, he spotted the green-veined maroon donut of Ulla/Bumby orbiting toward them from the region of the star that represented the topknot upon the Bodhisattva's head. Ulla would probably surround them and give them fresh spacesuits and—

Right about then Gibby spotted the other aliens.

“Three kinds of 'em!” cried the Grulloo. “They done tracked us down. Looky toward the galactic rim, that's a Unipusker saucer, ain't it? With a geevin' Radiolarian barrel-ship followin' right after! And, over there we got an Orpolese donut comin' in from the edge of that giant black hole! It's the same pink and yellow ring that Carb shot at before. These folks ain't comin' our way just to say how-do!”

Sensing their panic, Wow began barking and wouldn't stop.

The only good news was that Ulla/Bumby was closer than the other aliens. A few of Bumby's green tentacles hung free from the donut's outer surface, and even as they approached, the mobile palps were busily twisting about, firing warning blasts toward the hostile pink-yellow Orpolese, the shiny Unipusk saucer, and the Radiolarian barrel-ship.

Ulla/Bumby considerately yunched themselves down to a size commensurate with the human scale, and then Ulla made herself into a flattened sphere not much bigger than a house tree. Opening a triangular door in her side, she scooped Frek and his companions out of interstellar space as adroitly as a songbird catching gnats.

The inside of Ulla looked much the same as before. Her stubby inward-projecting masts emitted polyhedral tweets that flew repeatedly through the Earthlings to find out everything they'd seen and thought—though surely Ulla could already have learned most of this via the branecast feeds from Frek, Wow, and Gibby's mind worms.

Rather than appearing as a free-floating cuttlefish inside Ulla's body, Bumby remained fully merged into his partner's flesh. The air-filled space vibrated with the familiar sound of his voice.

“Congratulations on scoring the elixir,” was the first thing Bumby said. “And condolences in the matter of your lost father.
Sunt lacrimae rerum.
These are the tears of things.”

“I'll miss him,” said Frek simply.

Sounding in the background were the explosive blasts from Bumby's tentacles. An incoming bolt of energy rocked Ulla from side to side.

“Too little too late, losers,” shouted Bumby, his words vibrating out toward the enemies like a fusillade of miniature suns.

“Get us outa here!” cried Gibby.

“We'll yunch now,” said Bumby in a chatty tone. “We're eager to get you to Earth and finally switch on our production. It'll be nice to meet Tagine and Vlan as well. We've been talking to them through a hyperspace tube. Our grandchildren and our newest heirs. They're on the job, staking out your home turf.”