Frek and the Elixir (18 page)

“What are they?” Frek asked Bumby.

“They're what we call tweets,” said Bumby, making half of the noise that he used for Ulla. “They're made of kenner, the stuff that your race calls dark matter. An Orpolese can do all sorts of things with kenner. And one thing is making tweets.”

“What about the slobber?” asked Gibby, not missing a beat.

“You're not hearing me right,” said Bumby in a curt tone. “I'm saying ‘Ulla,' not
‘slobber.'
If her name were Susanna, I'd call her—” Bumby made a noise that sounded very much like the same old
slobber-tweet.

Frek let it pass. Right now he was more interested in staring at the oddly patterned pale purple saddle-shape hovering near him. The design on it was like a sea of suns. Right about then the saddle flapped its lobes and flew right though Frek's head.

Though it didn't hurt, Frek shouted, and when he saw that his noise was driving the shapes away from him, he shouted some more. It wasn't nice, having all those googly tweets come at him, right after the thousand-meter daredevil-dive from the sky to the riverbank. Gibby began yelling along with Frek, and then they went ahead and sang a little bit of another Grulloo song that Gibby had taught him on the ride to Stun City.

Frek had only learned these two verses, so they sang those through three or four times. When they were out of breath and couldn't bawl out the words anymore, Frek glanced down at Wow and Woo for comfort. The colors were reflecting off the dogs' eyes, but they didn't seem disturbed by the phantasmal shapes. The tweets had no smells attached, and the dogs didn't take them seriously. Wow and Woo looked up at him, each with a half-open mouth and a lolling tongue, quite at ease—even though a glowing orange shape like a skinny pointy pyramid stuck straight through Wow's head, and a pale blue cube protruded from the back of Woo's skull.

“Fella could just about lose his marbles in here, I reckon,” said Gibby. His lizard tail was trembling. He was even more frightened than Frek. “I wish I hadn't of drunk so much moolk last night. Tell me you're seein' all this too, Frek. That orange arrowhead pokin' through your dog's head, I ain't dreamin' it, am I?”

“I see it,” said Frek. “And that spring coming toward us, too.” A shape like the wound-up tip of a vine tendril was bouncing across Bumby's back, with its free tip disappearing and reappearing as it moved. Taking a final off-kilter
boing,
it passed right through Gibby, then flew up toward one of the little tornadoes feeding into the walls.

“I feel like I'm goin' gollywog kac crazy,” said Gibby staring after the green helix. “Didn't your overgrown squid friend say this trip wasn't gonna take no time a-tall?” He raised his voice querulously. “You hear me, Bumby?”

“If you lose your marbles, Ulla can round them up,” said Bumby, not sounding very concerned. He made a little gesture with a twisting tentacle. “She's got photorealistic mental images of you four by now. Commemorative coins in the old memory bank. These tweets are how Ulla talks and finds things out, you understand. She puts out kenner that's lean and hungry for info exchange. Her tweets are words that listen.”

“I'd say she talks too geevin' much,” said Gibby. “Tell her to pipe down, would ya? She's makin' me sick.”

“Ulla is divine,” said Bumby. “She knows—ah, compared to Earthlings, you can flat-out say she knows everything. She's my wife, did I mention that before? Ulla and me.” He'd stopped undulating his fin; they'd reached the center of his ship's interior.

“How can Ulla be your wife?” blurted Frek. “You two don't match at all.”

This remark seemed to annoy Bumby very much. “You pipsqueaks got no inkling of my own true face,” said the green cuttlefish in a snappish tone. “Nor any clue of Ulla's secret form, nor of how deep-twined a pair of soul-mates we are. You're a clod from a boondocks dirt world. You came aboard of your own free will, and we're going to wheel and deal you fair and square, but don't ever dream you're on some high horse to sling stones at the marriage of Ulla and Professor Bumby. And don't you be hinting that a pure rassen like her is all muddy and low for linking with a znag like me; I bet that's exactly what's in your monkey mind.”

It was hard to grasp exactly what had set off Bumby like this. Evidently he wasn't going to act so nice anymore, now that he'd gotten them inside of Ulla. What kind of idea was it to let this eccentric cuttlefish's race have branecast access to the minds of humanity? A terrible idea, that's what.

Frek spoke up. “If you want to just put us back down on Earth and tell the branecasters to leave humanity alone, that would be—”

The alien gave his back an impatient twitch that sent them tumbling into the space near his body. But they didn't drift away. Some kind of gentle force field kept them near the center of Ulla. The bizarre shapes began congregating around them again, arcing inward along writhing paths. Gibby let out a despairing moan.

“Oh, maybe you better lay off trying to confab with them, Ulla,” said Bumby, relenting a bit. “We don't want the passengers flipping their wigs. Better just mime the view. That's something their little minds can digest.”

And instantly the walls of the slobber-tweet began to show the outer world. It wasn't like the walls had turned transparent, nor were the images like a wall skin's video. The pictures were coarse; they were made of tweets irregularly tiled upon the domed inner surfaces of the star craft. The tiles weren't in any kind of orderly grid; they arranged themselves so as best to fit the various parts of the image.

The sunlit overhanging branch of the anyfruit tree was represented, for instance, by a mounded ridge of granular tweets; the leaves of the tree were mimed by green tweets that twisted and turned in their own private dances, yet managed, as if by a serious of miraculous coincidences, to continually outline exactly the shapes of foliage upon a tree. For Ulla, imitating Earth's shapes was a trivial task, as easy as holding your hand in front of a light to make a duck-shaped shadow, and she was amusing herself by doing it in complicated ways.

The branches of the tree waved languidly in the breeze, seamlessly imaged by Ulla's hyperintelligent color shards.

Seeing the lush fruit on the trees, Frek wished he'd eaten some when he had the chance. He was very hungry. A little bird came flying right up to the outer surface of the walls, the bird's image as vast as a toon upon the electronic billboards of old Tokyo.

It was a watchbird.

“Look out, Bumby!” shouted Frek.

The anyfruit tree burst into flame. A blinding red beam swept toward the slobber-tweet. The sky-jelly had found them.

Ulla made her outer surface like a mirror. She continued putting images of the world on her walls, but the colors grew fainter than before. Frek could make out the silhouette of the blasted anyfruit tree and the red glow of the laser beam rebounding into the sky. The Skywatch Mil sky-jelly could do the cunning Ulla no harm.

“Fall up now, Ulla,” said Bumby in an unhurried tone. “Fall sky high into the Govs' jellyfish, yes. Follow that aggro red line.”

Ulla answered with a flock of tweets; Bumby concluded the conversation with a gargle in his native tongue.

Then came a brief shuddery feeling, as if from an earthquake, with a blank instant at the center of the shake. The starship fell upward.

They were accelerating into the sky, repelled by the entire mass of planet Earth. Ulla had reversed the effects of gravity upon them.

Looking downward, Frek watched his homeland drop away. Stun City shrank to a spot beside the River Jaya. A few bends upstream lay Middleville. Frek strained to make out his home tree. As if reading his mind, Ulla briefly made that particular spot of green bigger, tweeting extra kenner to bulge Frek's part of Middleville into bold relief.

“Bye, Mom,” said Frek softly. “I hope you're okay. Bye, Ida and Geneva. I'll be back soon.” Wow nudged him with his nose, recognizing the familiar names. Frek ran his hands over the dog's smooth head, hoping everything would be okay. He wondered if, somewhere out in space, he might find his father.

“Wait for me, Salla,” added Gibby, staring down at his patch of the Grulloo Woods. Ulla didn't bother to magnify the spot that Gibby was looking at. Frek was starting to notice that nobody ever liked Grulloos. That was all the more reason for him to be loyal to Gibby. He gave his little friend a pat on the shoulder, that is, he laid his hand upon the thick spot where the Grulloo's arm or leg came out of the side of his head.

Their upward motion continued apace. The countryside around Middleville and Stun City unfurled like a map, revealing the hamlets beyond the Grulloo Woods, the town behind Lookout Mountain, and the winding course of the River Jaya toward the sea.

Soon they'd risen high enough to see the wrinkled sea itself and, in the other direction, the inland mountains. They fell higher, faster. The sky above turned dark purple, then black. Finally Frek could see the actual curve of Mother Earth. Seeing it in person was different from hearing about it, different from seeing a picture on a wall skin.

An uneasy thought struck Frek. He wasn't truly seeing Earth from space, he was looking at shifting patterns of Ulla's tweets. Suppose Ulla was tricking him, kidding him along so he wouldn't realize, say, that this cavity was her stomach and that she was about to digest him!

Frek pushed the fear away. Far better to believe that he was the size of beetle, at the center of an antigravity pumpkin falling into the sky. Godzoon googly indeed.

“There's the killer jellyfish,” said Bumby. “Twelve o'clock high. Try to splatter it, Ulla.” A fresh shoal of tweets came spiraling down from Ulla's fountains, the bright shapes passing through Bumby and back out to the wall.

Peering up at Ulla's shiny dome, Frek could make out the sketchy form of a sky-jelly overhead. The creature had long since abandoned its fruitless attempts to blast Ulla with its laser ray; its energies were now focused upon lumbering out of the way. The jelly was pulsing and twitching, sending waves racing across its great unclean body. With so little air up here for its bell to beat against, the monster was making scant progress.

But just before Ulla would have smashed into it, the jelly spat a house-tree–sized gout of wobbly goo to its right, propelling its main body to safety on the left. They fell up past it, missing the unsavory behemoth.

Bumby wetly warbled a command to Ulla, then turned to Frek and Gibby. “She'll open the door so I can shoot the jelly, and while I'm on the job, I'll scour away the rest of your world's so-called defense systems. The jellies defend the Govs only against their enslaved citizenry, against you and your people.”

“Fry the jellies!” exclaimed Gibby. “Yee haw!”

An equilateral triangle opened in Ulla's lower side, a twin to the old door on top. Ulla's subtle force fields were able to keep their air from rushing out, but the resulting turbulence buffeted Frek, Gibby, and the dogs from side to side. Woo began barking. Meanwhile Bumby had propelled himself to the doorway.

The sky-jelly was very clearly visible below them. Blandly, unthinkingly aggressive, the floundering jelly was turning over so as to shoot its laser at Ulla's underside. If Frek still had any doubts about the reality of this trip, they were gone now. Earth hung below them, crystal clear, unimaginably huge, a vision of beauty blemished only by the ragged, evil disk of the Skywatch Mil jelly.

The jelly's flesh glowed white at the center, as the monster prepared to lance a fresh laser beam their way. With the door wide open, Ulla wouldn't be able to protect them. Holding onto the doorsill with two of his arms, Bumby stretched out his two long tentacles and his other arms. Was his strength equal to this task?

Ulla sent an excited avalanche of tweets down upon Bumby. Wifely advice. Bumby's arms and tentacles began to shine and grow. The tentacles became ropes of fire, ten kilometers long. And at their touch the sky-jelly became a cloud of steam and ash.

Bumby wasn't finished. Though Ulla was racing into the heavens at an even greater rate than before, his tentacles were lengthening faster still, growing to magic beanstalk lengths and branching all the while. The filigreed tentacles grew to hundreds of kilometers long, then to thousands and tens of thousands of kilometers in reach. It was hard to fully process the sight. Earth's entire upper atmosphere was covered with the glowing mesh of Bumby's branching tentacles. The space cuttlefish held the entire planet in his grasp.

“He zapped another,” exclaimed Gibby, peering out into the distance with squinted eyes. “And another. Poof! Another and another!”

Frek couldn't make out the explosions, but he took Gibby's word for it. And then Professor Bumby was done. His ramified arms and tentacles shrank back to normal, and Ulla's door slid shut.

The alien cuttlefish had killed off every one of the Gov's sky-jellies. The people of Earth were free of the constant threat of being laser-blasted from the sky. That was the good news. The bad news was that Earth now lay quite open to invaders from space. But when, in the entire history of humanity, had the sky-jellies actually stopped a single invader? They'd killed, rumor had it, any number of insurgent citizens; they were good at that. Yet when it had come time for the jellies to truly defend Earth against aliens, the “Anvil” had come and gone without a scratch.

“That felt good,” said Bumby.

“I can't believe you made yourself so big,” said Frek.

“Comes natural to me,” said Bumby. “Back home, Ulla and I are a thousand kilometers long. When we yunched down to Earth, we overdid it enough to scrunch down to your size. Like you turning into a paramecium, you might say.”

“What kind of world do you come from?” asked Frek, trying to imagine a sea large enough for thousand-kilometer cuttlefish.

“You'll see soon enough,” said Bumby.

The view on Ulla's inner surfaces was bright and crisp again. Earth shrank to a very clearly defined ball: alive, vibrant, divine. The pocked Moon went flying past them; they sailed into the gulf between Earth and Mars.

Frek was bursting with more questions for Bumby, but he was a little leery of again being called an “ignorant boy from a boondocks dirt world.”

Fortunately Gibby was there to speak up.

“You got some kinda hyperdrive on tap or what?” asked the Grulloo. “Sure we're truckin' along right smart, but this ain't gonna get us to no galactic center.”

“Festina lente,”
said Bumby in a calm tone. “Means hurry slowly. Ulla will yunch us soon.”

“Yunch?” asked Gibby.

“She winds up our component strings to make us the size of the galaxy,” said Bumby, curling his tentacles and puffing up his body. “Then we take a seven-league step to the center, Ulla unyunches us and forsooth! Behold! We're in Orpoly, back to our own right size. Yunch, unyunch, plop.”

“Oh, of course,” said Gibby sarcastically. “Anybody would o' thought of that.”

“We have to get to a nice clear spot before we yunch,” added Bumby. “If you yunch or unyunch near too much mass-energy, then you might pooperoo into the Planck brane. Entering the Planck brane through a branelink is one thing, the branecasters don't mind that, it's a business call, welcome and how do you do. But if you drop in on account of you goofballed a yunch trip, especially while they're having lunch, well, they're roaring demons then, they're cruel and vengeful, they deal you a living death, and I don't meant that as a metaphor, boys, it's precisely and literally like being dead without being destroyed. Decoherence is what it's called. Strains the brain, eh, Gibby?
Festina lente.
Do you know Latin?”

“What's Latin?” muttered Gibby in a confused, resentful tone.

“Maybe it's what they talk on Orpoly,” suggested Frek, trying to get in on the conversation. Wow glanced up at him, happy to hear his voice.

“Wrong and wrong,” said Bumby. “I'm starting to have the odd wee doubt about you, Frek. If the choice of an Earth's hero had been up to yours truly, I don't know as I would have picked a twelve-year-old small-town boy. But we had a strategic reason to pop your name from the hat. I'm talking about your father.”

Frek felt his stomach drop. “What do you know about him?”

“He was living with some others in a hollowed-out asteroid, yes? They call themselves Crufters, and they brag on avoiding biotech. Ulla and I caught their act on our way in. We'd unyunched ourselves into the far-flung vacuum outside your planetary system. Why so? I could talk all day! Snap my suspenders around the cherry-red stove. Wal, the point is, the more highly evolved solar systems have webs of force-field tubes connecting their worlds, which means that their interplanetary spreads aren't really empty. If you unyunch near one of those tubes you can't stop when you should. You keep on shrinking, help, help, help, and then our plain brane pinches you off and drops you down into the Planck brane, and you're in Dutch or lowlander than that with the branecasters. We played it all cautious and egg-walking because we didn't realize how bush-league your civilization is.”

They were sailing smoothly through space. Every one of Bumby's arms was moving about, each one illustrating some arcane subtlety of his discourse, perhaps for the benefit of Ulla's attentive tweets. Frek held his breath, waiting for the news about his father. “And the motion on the galactic table is that we've found solid branecast talent in your very home-sweet-home solar system,” continued Bumby unconcernedly. “Suffering struggling humanity, yes indeed, information-processing self-reproducing symbol-using communicating beings, very tasty. But, tsk, your levels are crude. No yunching, no force fields, no kenny crafting. Aside from a few barely eking space colonies, there's nothing happening on your outer planets, nary a peep on your moons, and only the dullest of spheromak loops inside your sun. And to top it off you've collapsed your biome! Blind, lost, benighted, tragically fumbling screwballs. I see great doomed, primitive nobility here. The branecast ratings could blast the roof. And your appearance and customs are wigsville, man, absolute maximum in alien oddness. So I'm here to pound the drum and shout that we Orpolese are the best independent branecast production group that—”

The maddening thing about listening to all this rigmarole was that Frek could feel the golden glow again. Some alien was tuning in on him sitting here listening to Bumby's mumbo-jumbo, possibly relishing his anxiety about his father. Maybe the watcher was Bumby himself. “Tell me about Dad!” cried Frek, actually reaching out and giving one of Bumby's writhing arms a yank. Though the tapering, leathery shape slipped quickly from Frek's grasp, the gesture got the cuttlefish's attention. At the same time, Frek clenched his mind in an effort to force the invisible watchers out.

“Well, the Crufters weren't all open arms,” said Bumby. “They'd already slogged through some caustic psychodrama with the Unipuskers. Did I mention that a couple of Unipusker producers got here before us? Old rivals of ours. Hawb and Cawmb. We tracked their progress, sly sniffers that we are. The Unipuskers came in skittish same as us, a couple of weeks previous. They unyunched outside of your system and visited the same First Chance Asteroid as us. Being Hawb and Cawmb, they used up the good will, acted like ugly spooky saucerians, left a miasma of hard feelings. Unipuskers are scaly two-leggers with big clamshells for their heads. Monoculture missionaries. Yeah, when we showed up after Hawb and Cawmb, the Crufters actually shot off some kind of catapult at us.”

“What happened to Dad?” demanded Frek, his voice rising. “What did the Unipuskers do to my father?”

Bumby paused. Frek, Gibby, and the dogs were floating in front of Bumby's twisty mass of arms. The dogs weren't paying attention to the conversation, they were sniffing and licking each other, now and then batting each other about with their paws. Gibby was temporarily absorbed in loading and lighting his pipe, unconcerned about polluting their ship with smoke. Meanwhile Ulla was winging a steady stream of multicolored disks their way to keep abreast of the conversation, with some of the disks passing through their heads. Ulla's walls continued to faithfully represent the space outside, black and empty, with the Moon and Earth shrunken to little disks, and the Sun still too bright to look at. Waiting for Bumby's answer it occurred again to Frek that he was very hungry.

“Those two Unipusker producers snatched your father in their UFO,” said Bumby finally. “Hawb and Cawmb. Well, either they snatched him or they got him to volunteer. Space cadet number one. They no doubt promised some kind of reward to him or to his woman friend. Yessica Sunshine. But of course it wouldn't have been a restorative Gaia-healing genomic elixir like we promised you. Hawb and Cawmb's empty bivalve heads don't know from diversity. Those Unipuskers, get this, they've whittled their biome down to three, I said three, species: a plant called rickrack, an animal called a vig, and the pullulating 'Puskers themselves. All the same. Not like Orpolese at all. Yes, they took your father.” Bumby gazed mildly at Frek, blinking his big, W-pupil eyes.