Frek and the Elixir (17 page)

Frek barely had time to wonder how they were all supposed to fit in something so small when Bumby called out a new warning.

“Now's when the air show
really
begins,” he said. “The sky-jelly is about to shoot. Now you see me, now you won't.”

The space cuttlefish belched out a shape the size of his body; it was the classic mollusk stratagem of squirting out a decoy cloud of ink. Rather than being a simple mist, Bumby's “ink cloud” was a network of interlinked tendrils, with holographic colors shining out of the tendrils to produce an overall appearance identical to that of a large flying cuttlefish bearing a boy, two dogs, and a Grulloo upon his back.

At the same time, the true Bumby's skin took on the colors of the earth and sky, rendering him all but impossible for the Skywatch Mil satellites to see. He didn't need a chameleon mod to do this, for a cuttlefish was a chameleon all the time. Perhaps out of a concern that Frek and the others might stand out against his back, Bumby rolled his belly up so as to have a nice smooth expanse of skin facing the eyes of the distant sky-jelly.

And then he blatted out his helium, cut the jet-power of his siphon, and dropped tail-first like a stone, using his bunched-up arms like a rudder to steer them away from the vertical.

Nothing but Bumby's two long tentacles and some folded-over bits of his fin prevented Frek, Gibby, and the dogs from dropping a thousand meters to the ground. The landscape below was shifting about at crazy angles. Wow vomited onto Frek's neck. Frek pressed his face forward along the sky-blue-camouflaged cuttlefish skin and gasped for fresh air. Gibby's hands were clamped so hard onto Frek's ankles that his feet were going numb. And for some reason his arm stub was tingling like mad.

A cruel, twitching beam of pale red light appeared behind them. A Skywatch Mil laser ray from the nearest orbiting jelly. The beam passed through the decoy Bumby and down into, as it happened, the vicinity of the Brindle Cowloon on the edge of Stun City, possibly endangering Phamelu's establishment, though it was hard to be sure from up here. Though smoke was rising from the spot where the beam hit the ground, the decoy Bumby hung in place, imperturbable as a cloud.

Bumby's subterfuge was working perfectly. Everyone's attention was fixed upon the ink cloud and the hot, red beam of the laser. Meanwhile, Bumby and his passengers were gliding toward an overgrown stretch of the River Jaya, downstream from Stun City. Rolling his eyes back in his head and squinting against the whistling wind, Frek watched the ground rush up at him. They were going to crash quite soon.

At the last possible minute, Bumby swelled himself with helium and sent down a series of rapid blasts from his arm-tips and his siphon. Their fall slowed to a bearable rate, and their motion became more horizontal than vertical. Bumby rolled himself right side up, and they skipped a few hundred meters along the river's surface like a well-thrown stone. They drifted to a stop beneath some overhanging anyfruit trees at the river's low, marshy edge.

Bumby unwound his tentacles and rowed to the shore, where he set the Anvil down upon the low, soggy riverbank. Anyfruit trees hung low overhead. The cuttlefish reached up and took a peach, found it good, then took another.

Not minding about getting his clothes wet, Frek slid into the water to wash off the mess from Wow. For a moment he wondered if he could properly swim—but then his left arm pushed against the current, and he realized that it had grown back. He'd been too terrified during the long fall to notice consciously.

Treading water and running his hands over his face, Frek found that his beard was gone and his lips were back to normal as well. He switched his ring from his right hand back to his left, leaving the watertight fungus-purse with the Aaron's Rod twig and the chameleon mod pasted to his right palm.

“Come on, Wow!” called Frek. Still atop Bumby's bobbing body, the dog took a step forward, a step back, a step forward—and then finally jumped into the river as well. Woo followed suit.

Bumby gobbled one more peach, then uncoiled his tentacles out into the river water. Moments later he'd snagged an amplified trout, which he fed into the busy beak at the center of his arms.

Gibby was on shore investigating Bumby's slobber-tweet. The thing was dark, smooth, and bumpy—well-worn as an ancient meteorite, glossy as a new toy. In the light, Frek could see that its surface had a twisting grain to it, like dough or taffy—a spiral twist that led into the dimple on its flattened top.

“How the heck we goin' in thar?” asked Gibby. “Does it unfold or some such?”

Bumby was still too busy eating and drinking to talk. Frek was hungry, too, but just now he was too shaken up to eat a peach. The dogs scrambled ashore and shook themselves dry. Wow sniffed at the slobber-tweet, which wasn't any bigger than him. He seemed on the point of lifting his leg against the purple pumpkin, but just then it made a sudden noise that sent him scampering a few meters off. A chirp, followed by a smooth hiss.

“But soft,” said Bumby, raising his head from the river. “What light through yonder window breaks? Ulla's wavy sunny soul. Meet and greet her, fleshapoids.” Still in the water, Frek could see a glow from the Anvil.

Frek paddled to the bank and climbed onto the shore. A bright triangle had opened up in the dimpled flat top of the slobber-tweet, a hole not all that much bigger than a rabbit-hole. Odd little colored shapes seemed to be crowding around the inside: green spheres, blue cones, and red cubes, briefly appearing and disappearing.

With the door open, the slobber-tweet looked just like it had looked under his bed, except then it had been propped up so that the door on the flat side pointed toward him. The Anvil was alive.

Woo, braver than Wow, walked over to nose at the door. As she extended her snout, something visually strange happened. Her head and forelegs shrank. It was as if her body had suddenly tapered to a point. Wow yelped in worry, but Woo seemed not to be feeling any discomfort. She hopped onto the top of the Anvil, with her rear legs shrinking to the size the front legs had been, and her front legs shrinking yet further. Now she looked like a small-headed rat. Finally noticing Wow's desperate barking, Woo turned around to look back at them, gave a yelp of surprise, hopped off the Anvil and came trotting right out of the slobber-tweet door's zone of influence, growing back to her normal dimensions as she came. Frek thought back on how the original Professor Bumby had seemed to grow as he came out of the starship.

“I see you big,” she told Wow, and sniffed him. “Wow same now,” she concluded.

“Ulla unwinds your strings,” said Professor Bumby. “So the space inside her seems big. Like an air bubble in a flat pancake, a tasty bonus beyond what old Euclid would allow. Not that Euclid knew about string theory, hey? He wasn't a Y3K professor.” Bumby took a bite out of a last twitching fish that he held with the suckers of the clublike tip of his left tentacle. Frek could see Bumby's bloodstained beak down in the midst of his sucker-arms. It wasn't exactly a sight that made Frek want to get into a sealed cabin with the space cuttlefish. But the trip had to be done; Frek had to get the elixir to restore Earth's flora and fauna.

And there was also the task of bringing down the Govs. It was crazy to think that people had let these monstrous things become their rulers. Yes, Frek and Bumby had killed the Gov worm. They'd won a battle, but the war wasn't done. There were govvy tyrants all over the planet, not to mention the orbiting jellies of Skywatch Mil.

Frek took a step toward the alluring orange-yellow light of the slobber-tweet's door and stretched out his arm. It seemed to shrink—not again! But as soon as Frek yanked back his arm, it was the same as ever. He stuck out his leg next, watched it get small, pulled it back. It was as if the slobber-tweet were a magic suitcase that made things shrink small enough to fit inside. Above and beyond any chances of saving Earth, an adventure in this craft would be gog gripper. Frek just had to see this journey through.

He looked at Bumby again, disregarding the beak and focusing on the big golden eyes with their dark, wavy pupils, the eyes set into bumps on the top of the cuttle's head. Taken all together, his head was shaped a little like a valentine heart: the two eyes on top, the pointy bunch of arms below. For the first time, Frek noticed that when Bumby put away his two long tentacles, he coiled them into springs and
boing
they snapped into pouches at the side of his face.

As if sensing Frek's doubts, Bumby scrunched his eyes in a friendly way, and demurely bunched his arms to cover his beak. “Take the magic trip,” he urged. “To my sweet home Orpoly, comfortably near the galactic core. I'll show you a tunnel to the Planck brane there. You'll meet the branecasters, they'll help you score your elixir, and then it's back in a flash with the stash and a crash. Inward and downward, Frek, upward and out! Let me hoist you and your pals into Ulla. You'll fit. She shrinks her passengers to ants on the front stoop.”

“Just a dang minute,” said Gibby from the riverbank. “You haven't told us what's in this for you, Bumby.”

“I'm a branecast producer,” said Bumby. “Throughout our universe certain,
harrumph,
highly evolved species enjoy themselves by snooping on others. Universal peeping tomfoolery—we call it esping. Ulla and I scour the galaxy for talent races suitable for esping by our fellow Orpolese. And, finding same, we produce exclusive Orpolese branecast arrangements. Now, thanks to the Unipuskers visiting Sick Hindu, the branecasters have already opened a channel on your race. You're in play. Viewable by free read-only public access—until a producer is registered for you. So I want you to register Ulla and me as your producers.”

“We Grulloos don't cotton to bein' snooped on,” said Gibby. “I can tell you that.”

“I really doubt if the average Jezebel or Jamul will notice the branecast action at all,” said Bumby, giving Frek an odd look. “At most you'd feel a pleasant buzz.”

Frek remembered the golden glow he'd been getting lately, that feeling of experiencing his perceptions and thoughts as something completely fresh. The alien watchers that Kolder had been talking about.

“I'm already being esped by branecast viewers!” exclaimed Frek. “I keep noticing.”

“You're waving with it,” said Bumby admiringly. “Yes. Think of it like your old-time religion of God in His heaven watching the world,” he continued soothingly. “God as an invisible eye, so laid-back that people argue about whether He even exists. Though the more sensitive talent race members can wig to it. People like you, Frek. Once the branecasters locate a talent race, there's no stopping them. Until you register for a producer, you'll stay on open access like you are now. Aliens all over the galaxy peeking in on you for free, looking at your rock-star underwear. So you might as well hook up with a decent producer and get paid! I'm asking that you come along and take one tiny meeting with the branecasters. I'm sure they'll give you your elixir. It'll be no trouble for them at all. A sweetheart deal all around. Not only do you have the elixir, when the Orpolese esp you, you get those feelings of exaltation and importance. Yes, there may be the occasional Good Word or two of ‘guidance' passed into the hearts of the talent race from the producer's race. But it's all happy pie in the sky. I'll tell you more later, lad, but let's depart this vale before that filthy sky-jelly finds us again. Get on me, and I'll fly you through Ulla's door.”

With a side-to-side wallowing motion, Bumby freed himself from the river water and floated into the air. Gently beating his fin, he drifted over to the bank and lowered his rear end like a boarding ramp. Fecklessly as children following the Pied Piper, the four travelers clambered aboard.

Bumby positioned himself above the slobber-tweet and descended. It took him nearly a minute to traverse what had seemed to be the last half meter. All the while they shrank. The anyfruit trees towered overhead like the now-extinct redwoods might once have done. Relative to the dwindling size of Bumby and his riders, the slobber-tweet became vast as Gov's puffball, its triangular door a mighty arch.

As soon as they pulled inside, the door hissed and closed up behind them. Frek repressed a brief twinge of fear, a sense of being trapped. The inside of the ship was, after all, quite lovely.

The air was filled with flying colored shapes like living, toony toys. A flock of yellow pyramids darted toward Bumby and his passengers, then veered aside to orbit them. Acid green hearts flew among the pyramids. The swoop of shapes felt like a greeting, and perhaps it was, for Bumby made the by-now-familiar
slobber-tweet
noise and then added in English, “Hello, Ulla! Meet my friends.”

New clouds of bright forms came to swirl about them—cones and helices and saddle surfaces and cubes—four separate flocks, one to investigate each of Ulla's passengers. A few of the lavender saddle-shapes brushed against Frek, but their touch was insubstantial, little more than a feeling of changed temperature in the air.

Bumby steadily rippled his fin, propelling them toward the center. Although from the outside, the starship appeared no larger than a dog, its inside was like the nave of one of those great stone churches Frek had visited on the history urls. A cathedral, with free-moving shards of stained-glass light.

Glancing past the lively forms to the curved walls, Frek observed a number of knobby little masts or antennae pointing inward. These spikes acted as fountains: They were bubbling over with bright blocks of color that flew into the air to join the others. Set in among the fountains were drains—whirlpools where the three-dimensional confetti spiraled back into the substance of the Ulla's walls.

The shapes began as simple compounds of angled faces, little more than square balloons. As they aged and moved about, they gained smoothness and complexity. Some of them looked biological, like pieces of plants and animals; others were harder-edged and with a curious dimensionality that made them seem constantly to be turning inside out.