Frek and the Elixir (14 page)

Just then Dibble came marching into the square. The Grulloo egg-baskets were back in her bed, plus an unhappy Gibby, propped up against a basket with his hands bound together by a wad of gunk from the webgun. Dibble's driver was none other than blond, kind-faced Phamelu. Frek guessed she'd come to sell Gibby's eggs for herself—and probably to sell Gibby, too. Gov wasn't likely to show the cantankerous Grulloo much mercy. Frek realized that it was up to him to save his friend.

Phamelu's bright gaze fell upon Frek; instantly, she pointed at him and raised her voice.

“There he is! The boy who ran away!”

Already naked, Frek dabbed a third of the chameleon goo onto his bare stomach, and willed his body to start looking like the gray-green puffball and the reddish dirt beneath his feet.

It happened fast as thought. The effect began with a stippled pattern of dull red and green dots that spread from his stomach to his chest and arms and legs, the dots racing across his skin. They covered every bit of him, even sliding out along his hairs. The color spots split into smaller and smaller dots with ever finer shadings. Frek's body looked like a house tree's wall skin bringing a scene into focus. And then his feet were indistinguishable from the dirt, and his upper body was a perfect match for the slanting puffball's skin.

But of course the counselors were still running straight toward the spot where Frek stood. There was PhiPhi, and one of the guards from the puffball entrance, and two more counselors who'd appeared from inside. Phamelu remained perched upon Dibble, guarding her plunder.

Frek darted in a direction his pursuers might not expect: toward Phamelu. As he moved, his body matched itself to the appearance of the square's cobblestone tubers and the appearance of the buildings and streets beyond. It was like having a perspective-warped toon show playing on his skin. Magical. The chameleon mod worked without his having to control the details consciously.

But when he was out in the open like this, the illusion couldn't fit together for every direction at once. Though Phamelu was still pointing at the spot by the wall where he'd started, the guard from the door was easily following Frek across the square. Reaching Dibble, Frek pressed himself against the elephruk's gray flank, figuring the chameleon effect would work better against something flat.

Meanwhile—accidentally on purpose—the gump with antennae had gotten in the guard's way, and the Grulloo woman with the squirrel tail had tripped up PhiPhi.

Frek's skin was an elephruk shade of gray now, complete with darker lines to mimic the beast's wrinkles. By the time the guard had reached the front of the elephruk, Frek had scooted along its body to the rear. For the moment, nobody knew exactly where Frek was.

Except for Gibby. The Grulloo was less than a meter away and he could hear Frek breathing.

“Didn't I say git?” hissed Gibby.

“I'm going to save you,” murmured Frek, though he didn't know how. With the four counselors after him, and only his naked body, there was no hope of cutting Gibby's bonds. And he wouldn't get very far if he tried to carry him.

Phamelu must have heard them talking, for now she was turning around. “Thar he is!” shouted Gibby to distract her. “Headin' off downhill! Look! Look! Look!” It was the oldest trick in the book, but Gibby was yelling so loud that Frek's pursuers couldn't help but look down the street toward the river. The gump mod-testers took up Gibby's cries and kept getting in the way of the counselors. The counselors now wasted a few precious moments in clearing the riffraff from the square.

Meanwhile Frek dropped to the ground, crawled under Dibble, finding his way among her legs, and came out on the elephruk's other side. He realized that his ring was still visible. He used his thumb and fingers to work it loose, and tucked it into the purse-fungus pasted to the palm of his hand. And then he flattened himself on his stomach against the cobblestones and began worming his way across the square, moving quite fast. His stub-arm was fine for this kind of crawling.

With Frek flat on the ground, the chameleon effect was perfect. Looking down as he slid his hand across the ground, he could see every detail of the street's surface echoed upon his skin. If he moved his arm across a pebble, the image of a pebble moved across his skin; if a leaf was beneath his fingers, the image of a leaf was displayed upon his knuckles. Frek recalled hearing that the chameleon mod made your skin photosensitive, effectively giving it the ability to see. One side of his arm could tell the other side what color to use. The effect was as if Frek were made of glass, except that the purse-fungus glued to his palm didn't show through.

Frek worked his way over to the far side of the square, and then crawled around the square's edge to get back to the puffball's wall. Meanwhile, the counselors were ineffectually milling around. Gov was trying to think for all of them at once, and not doing too well at it. Only if one of them happened to blindly step on Frek would they find him. And that wasn't likely, now that Frek was back under the bulge of the puffball. A bad smell, as of a dead animal, drifted past again. Frek crept along the wall toward the waiting door.

Getting through the door was going to be tricky, as counselors kept rushing in and out, for all the world like turmites in a hill. The only thing to do would be to wait for a lull and make a dash for it. Somebody might glimpse him going in, but once he was inside the puffball there'd be hundreds of meters of smoothly curved walls against which he could hide himself. Even if the walls were covered with toons, Frek felt sure his chameleon skin could keep pace with them. His mod still had maybe twenty minutes to go. He crouched beside the door, waiting for the counselors to clear out of his way. He felt just a bit hypnotized by the slowly changing colors he could see inside the entrance.

Sitting still like this, Frek entered a strange, yet familiar, state of mind. The world took on a kind of golden glow, as if Earth were an exotic place and he were seeing it for the very first time, being sure to clearly characterize everything that he saw. It wasn't just the puffball that looked goggy—it was everything around him that looked new: the forms and faces of the people, the colors of the plants, the clouds in the sky, the live cobblestones. The gentle whisper of his breath was deeply significant; the counselors' footsteps were like an orchestra. Most of all, the play of Frek's consciousness felt like a performance, unique and miraculous, like some exquisite piece of craftsmanship with all of its components on display. This was the same golden glow sensation he'd been having off and on for the last couple of weeks. Ever since, come to think of it, the mysterious trouble on Sick Hindu. What did it mean?

“If you can't find him, better take my goods and close the door,” called Phamelu right about then, breaking the spell. “Frek and this little Grulloo were planning to get inside the puffball and find the Anvil. The Grulloo was bragging about it last night when he was drunk. Might as well give him what he asked for!”

“You poisoned me!” shouted Gibby. “I'm bein' kidnapped and robbed! The boy ain't here, he's run off, I tell you, he's goin' down the river!”

Ignoring his cries, five puffball counselors converged on the elephruk, one for each basket of eggs, and one for Gibby. Meanwhile the color-lit puffball door was drawing itself together like an anxious mouth. It was time to act. While the door was still waiting for the counselors to carry in Gibby and the baskets of eggs, Frek ran for it as fast as he could.

“There he goes,” cried the alert Phamelu, who'd been watching for him. The guard by the door glimpsed him too, and almost caught him, but Frek managed to dodge past his grasp. And then he was inside the puffball.

The room had four, no five, tunnels leading off it. The walls were flowing with pastel hues like watercolors melding on wet paper. Frek's skin took on the same shades. The center of the room was full of equipment growing out of the floor: chairs, desks, lamps, hoses. Gov's disembodied voice called out a warning. Three counselors jumped up.

The wall skins went creamy white, as if to make Frek easier to see. But of course he turned the same shade of white all over. Nevertheless, at least one of the counselors had gotten a good visual fix on him when he came in, and they were closing in.

Small and quick as he was, Frek was able to dodge past them. He took off into the handiest of the tunnel mouths. It proved to be a spiral ramp winding up to the next level, and then to levels above that. Frek kept going up, hoping the counselors would tire before he did. But they remained close behind. As if to make it harder for Frek to stay in synch with his background, the walls now began to flicker rapidly through an irregular sequence of solid colors. It was dizzying.

By the fourth level, Frek didn't have the breath to climb anymore. He branched off into a level hallway, and ran fifty yards along that. The hall seemed to circle along the outer edge of the puffball. Every few yards an oval door gave upon a chamber with a window. People were in many of these little rooms, NuBioCom techs and genomicists. All the while, Gov was broadcasting warnings from the puffball wall skins, and some of the workers joined in trying to capture Frek.

By dint of some tricky turns and reversals, Frek managed to lose his pursuers for a bit; they thundered off down the hall ahead of him, leaving him camouflaged against a wall. He dropped to the floor and crept into a room off the hall. It was a kind of meeting room, with two men and two women standing by a table. NuBioCom execs. Frek didn't take time to really look at them. A window faced out on Stun City; it occurred to Frek that if all else failed, he might use a chair to smash open the window and then slide down the curving puffball wall.

The execs had jumped up in response to Gov's alarm, but now that the chase had moved off to another part of the puffball, they were settling back down.

“Terrible business, that runaway boy getting inside our headquarters,” said one of the women. Her face was so flat that the bridge of her nose was level with her eyes. It almost looked as if her eyes could see each other.

“I know him,” grunted one of the men. “He's a misfit, practically a mutant. Four sigmas off the genomic norm. Frek Huggins. His father went over to the Crufters last year. Young Frek was always wanting to come over to play with our son, Stoo. I did what I could to make him feel unwelcome.”

Wedged down against the curved corner where the wall met the floor, Frek recognized the voice. It was Kolder Steiner talking. Frek had never realized the Steiners thought quite so poorly of him. It made him ashamed to think back on all the times he'd tried to be nice to them, and them just thinking he was a gleep.

“Well, let's get back to the business at hand,” the second woman exec said. She was dark-skinned, with slowly writhing copper hair. “The internal uvvy, to be known as the
ooey.
We need to get the ooey genome finalized so we can give the product a full-court press. We're targeting a ten percent early-adopter rate in the first quarter and a front-porch bulge of sixty percent by the end of the second year. After that, Gov makes them mandatory.”

“Mandatory?” said the second man at the table, who sounded a little surprised. He was younger and more thoughtful looking than the other three. A genomicist.

“Makes things easier to just have one kind of uvvy,” said Kolder dismissively.

“But—what if somebody doesn't want a voice in their head?” asked the young genomicist. “That's what's bothering some of us. We want the internal uvvy to have an ‘off' mode. A user-activated pause control.”

“Excellent that you mention this,” said the copper-haired woman. “It's exactly the main topic we planned for this meeting. The point is that an off mode would defeat our goal. Gov wants everyone online, all the time, everywhere. A hundred percent connectivity. This is absolute and nonnegotiable. The internal uvvies are to be universally adopted and always active. Why? Think of the marketing possibilities. The educational benefits. Gov feels this will be the most important thing he's ever done.”

“I think it's fabulous,” enthused the flat-faced woman, who seemed to be a corporate cheerleader type. “An age-old dream come true.”

Whose dream?
thought Frek with silent sarcasm. Hucksters and salesmen, tyrants and dictators, bullies and snoops—that's who wanted an always-on communication channel to the inside of every citizen's head. He had to find a way to stop Gov. NuBioCom had already collapsed the biome and now, with that ooey internal uvvy, they were planning to make people's minds all the same.

But then Kolder said something that totally caught Frek by surprise.

“We already have other beings in our heads,” said Kolder. “Ever since the Sick Hindu incident. Gov told me I could share this with you. But perhaps you've noticed?”

The young genomicist glanced around at the others, a little embarrassed, maybe even wondering if Kolder had gone gollywog.

“A special feeling,” said Kolder in a coaxing tone. “Things take on a warm, rich appearance. Your sensations and thoughts seem unusually interesting. You view yourself from a certain remove.”

The young genomicist's face remained politely blank. He hadn't risen this far in the ranks without knowing when to hold his tongue.

Kolder gave a sudden short bark of laugh. “You thought it was just you, didn't you? Well, guess what, boy, these days lots of people are feeling like they're the stars of their own shows. It's a pattern Gov's picked up from people's conversations. Analyzed it. He thinks it's because of those aliens who abducted the three people from Sick Hindu. We believe they've instigated a mind surveillance operation whose scope is the entire human race. So the sooner Gov gets out ahead of them, the better.”

“That's—incredible,” said the genomicist quietly. He didn't seem to believe Kolder at all. But Frek did. Kolder was talking about the golden glow sensation that Frek had noticed outside the puffball.

“Let me make it simple for you,” Kolder told the doubtful genomicist scornfully. “Implement the always-on ooey genome. Do it now.”

“Thanks for clearing this up,” said the genomicist in a neutral tone. “I'll get my team right on it.”

Just then the wall-colors flipped from beige to dark gray. It took a split second before Frek's skin could catch up. Maybe nobody in the room would have spotted him, but the rooms had eyes all along the tops of their walls, and one of the eyes saw him.