Frek and the Elixir (13 page)

“I imagine that's quite a valuable ring,” said Phamelu, nodding toward the shiny cup with its dot of red light, then tossing her head a bit to get her blond hair away from her eyes. “You're lucky to have it.”

“I got it from my dad,” said Frek carefully.

“I wonder what you look like without the mods Gibby put on you,” said Phamelu in a dreamy tone, as if she were just thinking out loud. “I bet you're a nice-looking boy. I wonder what your real name is.”

“Frek,” said Frek, before he knew what he was saying. And then he put his hand over his mouth and giggled. The moolk was seriously getting to him. He reached for the apple and, as usual, knocked over the mug. The moolk rushed across the counter and dripped onto Phamelu's lap.

“Oh oh,” she said mildly, not acting a bit mad. She drew out a rag to wipe up the moolk. But as she glanced up from the rag, Frek saw something hard and mean in her face. He remembered what Gibby had told him: there's razors in that apple pie. He was in way over his head.

“I better go to bed,” said Frek. “We can talk about this tomorrow. I'm sorry about the spill.”

“Good night, Frek.”

 

The counselors came just before dawn.

Frek woke to a great croak from the watch-toad, followed by the sound of a man screaming. The wall lights came on. The counselor who'd been bitten by the watch-toad was on his knees clutching his hand. It was Zhak. And the other counselor was PhiPhi. She needled the toad with a pulse from a fat laserbug mounted on one of her fingers. Phamelu stood blocking the door. PhiPhi drew out her webgun and aimed it at Frek, once again ready to tangle him up.

But she hadn't reckoned with Gibby. With a snap of his tail, the little Grulloo sent himself flying out of his bed and into the wall. He caromed off the wall into PhiPhi's head, knocking her flat on her back.

“You gleeps ain't stealin' my eggs this time!” hollered Gibby. “Stun City's a free trade zone!”

Phamelu had the door covered, but the window was wide open. In seconds Frek had his feet out the smooth aircoral window hole. He paused to glance back, bracing himself with his flipper arm. Desperate though things were, it was wonderful to see his friend back to his old self again, not like the pitiful unconscious figure of last night.

“Come on, Gibby. We gotta run!”

“I ain't done nothin' wrong,” protested Gibby. “I'm stayin' to protect what's mine.” Zhak and PhiPhi were still on the ground. “Take this,” said Gibby, passing Frek the sticky purse-fungus with his chameleon gel and his Aaron's Rod. “Now git.”

Right then PhiPhi sat up and splatted one of Gibby's legs with a glob of goo from her webgun. Gibby whirled and grabbed her wrist with his free hand, shaking the webgun loose, all the while arguing with her about his rights.

Frek slid down the slightly slanted wall, his ring clattering on the coral. He took off running toward the river. The sky off to the left was the faintest shade of pinky gray. Some birds were starting to chatter.

When Frek got to the high, dew-soaked grass, he encountered two wet, prancing shapes. Dogs. He started to dodge around them, then stopped.

“Wow!”

“I smell you,” squeaked Wow from the back of his throat. “I wait.” He sniffed the stub where Frek's arm ended and whined in sympathy.

“Run away,” said the other dog. “Follow me home.” She looked much like Wow, though her hair was perhaps a bit curlier. She might have been a 3000 or a 3001 model.

PhiPhi was yelling from the inn window, but she wasn't coming after him yet. Gibby was probably still hanging onto her. And there was no sign of Zhak. Frek had been thinking he might need to use the chameleon mod, but now it was looking like he could just run away.

He followed Wow and the other dog down to the river's edge, the tall grass rippling around them. They turned left and cut under the abutments of a bridge that crossed the River Jaya less than a hundred meters downstream. Beyond the bridge, the waterfront got complicated.

In the growing light of dawn, the dogs led Frek through a maze of wharves, boatyards, warehouses, and ruined old dwellings, finally coming to a stop in a big ironwood culvert just behind the Kritterworks. If anyone had been following, Frek and the dogs had lost them on the way.

“This Woo,” said Wow, introducing his friend. “Woo have heat.”

“Home,” said Woo. “Woo den.” The culvert held piles of rags and bedding, some bones and chewed-up old shoes, and a pervasive doggy aroma. Wow and Woo had long since shaken themselves dry. They lay down side by side, tongues lolling, looking calm and friendly.

“Thanks, Woo,” said Frek. “You came by at just the right time, Wow. How did you get here?”

“Run in water,” said Wow, meaning that he swam. “I smell Woo.” He gave Woo's muzzle a lick.

“I smell Wow,” said Woo. “Wow strong. Make good puppies.”

“Puppies!” exclaimed Frek. He didn't have the heart to try to tell the dogs that they couldn't have puppies unless someone gave them doses of the latest update of the NuBioCom antidote for the ever-changing knockout virus. Not that the dogs would understand. All over the planet, plants and animals were fruitlessly trying to reproduce themselves the same way they always had, enjoying sex as much as ever. But these days—unless the would-be parent or parents owned a paid-up NuBioCom reproduction license and installed the latest twenty-four-hour wetware upgrades into themselves—making babies didn't work. The knockout virus threw a monkey-wrench into reproduction's intricate genetic dance, fouling up the proteins used in meiosis.

Frek patted Wow on the head. “Tell me, Wow, did the counselors do anything bad to Mom when they came to get you?” Wow didn't understand, so Frek made the question simpler. “Lora okay?”

“Lora lie down,” said Wow simply. “Lora crying.”

Frek felt an anger stronger than any he'd ever felt before. He had to do something to stop the counselors, something to show Gov he couldn't ride roughshod over everyone forever. Frek wasn't going to run off down the river. He was going to fight Gov here and now. Yes. What had the alien cuttlefish told him? “You're the one. You'll save the world.” Somehow, some way, the cuttlefish had come to help Frek smash Gov's power. Even though the counselors had incinerated the alien being, there just had to be some remaining trace of what he'd come to do. Maybe that funny seed had already made a difference. And the answer would lie in the Anvil.

“Can you take me to the puffball?” Frek asked Woo. The curly-haired dog didn't answer. Frek gestured with his arms. “Big, big round building. I want to go there.”

Woo didn't understand, or wasn't interested. She could talk, but she was still a dog. She got up, walked a little farther back into the culvert and came back dragging a rather large bone. You rarely saw bones like this, since all the meat these days was from anymeat loaves. Frek guessed the bone was from the Kritterworks trash. Maybe from a recycled elephruk. Wow began chewing one end of the bone, and Woo the other.

“I'm going to the puffball,” repeated Frek after resting for a while. He would have liked to have Gibby along for this—but he had a feeling that the counselors might not release the Grulloo anytime soon. And if Gibby was in fact free, he'd probably think of going to the puffball too. One thing for sure, Frek wasn't going back to the Brindle Cowloon.

He took Jeroon's special mod-pod out of his pocket and looked at it. When Dha Na Duc had used it in the toon, each of his feathers had begun automatically tinting itself to be the color of the nearest background object. It hadn't always worked right, particularly when enemies were looking for Dha Na from two different sides. And a dose of chameleon mod only lasted half an hour. Well, he'd just have to see how it turned out. He was going to the puffball no matter what.

Meanwhile the dogs were still chewing. Frek went over to say good-bye. His foot bumped against the big bone, and Woo unthinkingly growled. Frek hunkered down next to his dog. “I'm going, Wow. You don't have to come if you don't want to.”

Wow paused in his chewing and looked up at him. “Wow have bone. Woo have heat.” He was in heaven just now, and clearly in no mood to go anywhere. Frek sighed. Well, it wasn't like he should expect Wow to follow him into the jaws of death or down the river or wherever the heck he was headed—though, really, that might have been kind of nice.

“You go home soon,” Frek told Wow. “Tell Lora Frek fine.” He gave Wow a few more lingering pats, and then he left the culvert. He was going to miss that dog. The sky was yellow in the east, and clear lavender-gray above, with a few high, pink cirrus clouds. It wasn't hard to locate the puffball. It was a few blocks up the hill that led away from the river. Its great bulge blotted out a good bite of the sky.

Despite the early hour, others were out and about on the tough bindmoss walkways of Stun City. Workers were coming and going from the Kritterworks. A turbaned man on a coffee-camel was selling mugs of java warmed by the flames of the beast's combustible breath.
Whooosh!
It was a gripper thing to see. The coffee came from a leaf-covered pouch slung across the camel's back; a kind of plant that produced coffee as its sap. The pouch was symbiotic with the camel; its roots grew right into the hot-breathed beast's hump. “Coffee here!” called the man in the turban, setting out a row of fresh-filled mugs. “Piping hot.”

A heavily modified couple came bouncing up for some coffee; maybe they'd been out all night. A young man and woman, they had long floppy ears and elastic balloons of skin growing from the soles of their bare feet.
Boing,
they went up into the air, bouncing on their foot-puffs, and came down,
boing, boing, boing,
in smaller and smaller increments, finally coming to a rest. The really weird thing was that their knees bent backward.
Whooosh
went the coffee camel, lighting its breath with a spark from its flinty back teeth. Sipping their drinks, the ball-foot couple stared absentmindedly at Frek—as if
he
were the odd one—all the while talking a funny city slang that he couldn't understand.

“Goggy Glen, it's goo to googoo you,” said the woman, laughing and leaning against her boyfriend. The letter ‘G' was very much the gripper thing to use these days. “Glim me a guzzle, gurgle my genes.” She licked the side of his cheek. Her tongue was green.

“It's godzoon gauss to glawk with you, Gillian,” said the man, spicing her coffee with a bit of mod gel he drew out of a pouchlike pocket in his skin. “Glug the grog, my guddly gollywog!”

“Gump dump grew you?” the woman asked Frek, swishing the modified coffee around her mouth. “Going Gov grotto for stim?”

“I'm going to the puffball,” said Frek.

“What I said,” answered the woman in clear. Her dangling ears were covered with animated tattoos. But despite her wild, uncanny looks, she meant to be helpful. “Up two blocks that way, one right, one left to the NuBioCom sample door.” Frek's twisted lips and shrunken arm must have given her the impression he was testing mods for NuBioCom. Like a Grulloo.

“Geevey khora-khora goo on you,” observed the man. His green-gummed smile and his backward-bending legs made Frek very ill at ease.

With the briefest of nods, Frek hurried up the hill toward the puffball in the direction the woman had pointed. He passed some men unloading an elephruk full of metallic dust and uncorking casks of aircoral polyps. They were adding a story to a shiny restaurant. A fish market stood next to the eatery; here in the big city people wanted something more than simple anymeat loaf every day. The fish were amplified trout from the River Jaya, identically plump and healthy. A little man with webbed fingers was busy laying them out.

At the end of two blocks, Frek was right up against the NuBioCom puffball, its shadow spreading across the green moss of the street. The building wasn't an aircoral, it was a single living thing, a giant fungus with brain nodules amid the computational richness of its mycelia and hyphae. Gov's home. The air in the shade of the puffball was cool and moldy-smelling, though now and then the breeze seemed to bring out a scent of corruption, as of rotten vegetables and decaying meat.

Remembering what the bouncy woman had told him, Frek turned right, then left, skirting around the edge of the puffball. The puffball presented a blank, greenish-gray surface to the outer world. Its walls had glassy black eyes set into in them; Frek wasn't sure if they noticed him or not. Thanks to Phamelu, Gov would know his disguise by now. Frek took out Jeroon's purse-fungus and stuck it to the palm of his hand. It clung tight there. Soon it would be time to put on the chameleon mod.

At the far side of the puffball, Frek found a square with a queue of gumpy mod-testers, waiting for admittance to the puffball's low, arched rear door. There was so much traffic here that, rather than being covered with bindmoss, the square was paved with live cobblestones, which were gray, rocky tubers grown right into place. The nearest gumps in line included a man with long antennae protruding from his head, a woman with an extra pair of arms, an old Grulloo woman with a squirrel tail, and a couple whose heads were partly melted into each other. A pair of beefy counselors were admitting the testers a few at a time. The puffball door opened onto a little chamber that flickered with colors; the walls inside the puffball were alive with images. Inside the door Frek could glimpse NuBioCom counselors taking blood samples from the mod-testers, and shadowy tunnels leading deeper into the puffball. That's where Frek wanted to go.

He squeezed up against the wall of the puffball and took the chameleon mod-pod out of his purse-fungus—and not a moment too soon, for now he heard the buzz of a lifter beetle drawing near. It pulled into view and angled down for a landing. PhiPhi. She hadn't noticed him yet. Frek squashed himself into the pinched crack where the puffball met the ground, taking off his shoes and slipping out of his blue turmite silk pants and his yellow T-shirt.