Frek and the Elixir (20 page)

“Far,” said Woo. “Woo too far.”

“We're safe in this armor,” said Frek, sounding calmer than he felt. “I think we'll be okay.”

“Are we yunching yet?” wondered Gibby.

The armor rang like a bell.
Chime three.

The yunch trip began with a dropping sensation in the pit of Frek's stomach, a feeling like he was in a rocket rushing upward very fast. The Sun seemed to be getting closer. He was growing.

A side effect of their growth was that their bodies quickly began to overlap. They'd started out only a few meters apart from each other, and they weren't moving apart as they grew. This meant that they were soon layered upon each other; their particles were shuffled together like decks of cards. But their interpenetrating bodies could move independently from each other.

Their growth was a bit ragged and irregular, that is, the sizes of Frek's companions seemed to vary as their individual growth rates lagged behind or pulled ahead of each other. One instant Gibby was the size of a please plant seed soldier in Frek's pocket, a moment later Gibby engulfed Frek like an ogre in a toon. The Ulla/Bumby hoop shrank to a tight belt around Frek's waist, then wobbled out like a vast auditorium. One moment Wow and Woo were a matched pair of toy magnet dogs, the next moment Wow was an elephruk with Woo a watchbird hovering about their common center. Even the pieces of Frek's body were phasing in and out of scale with each other.

Frek's clothes and other possessions grew along with him, including his ring and his fungus-purse with the Aaron's Rod twig and the two remaining doses of chameleon mod.

As soon as the yunch began, the ring started tingling, buzzing at him for attention. He held it up to his eyes to study it. The red light in the cup was twinkling in a way he'd never seen before. A cloud of red flecks appeared in the air above it, and then yellow seeped into the red. The red-yellow haze spread out into a pattern of spikes and a pink form appeared in the middle—the face of a girl? But then the shape was gone. The others seemed not to notice.

Gibby's excited hooting brought Frek's attention back to his surroundings. “I ain't small no more!” crowed the Grulloo, surrounding Frek like a kind of fog.

Frek had been missing the forest for the trees. They'd reached an astronomical size. Their overlapping bodies stretched as far as the Earth. Frek was perhaps a billion times as big as he'd been when he started.

Gibby pointed excitedly to little Earth, twisting himself around to get a better look. And then, to Frek's horror, the amped-up Grulloo's tail dealt Gaia a whack. Even though Frek himself felt Gibby's motions through his body as but a faint breeze, he half expected to see his home world go sailing off like a badminton shuttlecock. But Gibby's tail passed through Earth with no visible effect. They'd yunched up to a size where their heavily-wound component strings had no discernible interactions with the loosely-wound strings of ordinary matter, and very little interaction with each other.

Curling himself into a ball, Frek brought his face right up to his home world. It was a sweet little marble, blue and patterned with white clouds. Frek had a brief, horrifying thought of some shecked-out yuncher plucking his planet like a berry, shaking off her ice caps, and sinking his teeth through her crust and into her hot, liquid core. How small and vulnerable she looked. It made Frek proud to think that he was setting off to find an elixir for her.

Briefly he wondered if the Earthlings could see him in their night sky. Probably not. Nobody had noticed when Bumby and Ulla unyunched into the outreaches of the solar system. Given that Frek himself was seeing Earth, that meant tight-wound matter could see loose-wound matter. But probably it didn't work the other way around. Frek could have tried asking Bumby, but he had the feeling that for the duration of the yunch trip, the Orpolese were not to be disturbed.

Frek's thoughts were interrupted by the sound of a gong that seemed to fill the expanses of planetary space.
Chime four.

Now things really took off, with the expansion proceeding at a superexponential rate. The Sun dwindled to a point as dozens, scores, hundreds of neighboring stars moved into view.

Frek, Ulla/Bumby, Gibby, and the dogs were expanding together as one, only occasionally getting out of synch enough for one of them to seem a bit too big or too small. The flesh of Ulla/Bumby was rolling over and over within itself, like the smoke in a smoke-ring. Frek felt the steady motion as a churning of his own flesh.

An avid whine filled Frek's body, as if his own particles were circling too, as if his body were the fuel for a starry dynamo of night.

What was that Bumby had said? “Yunching likes
you.
”

Slowly the great wheel of the galaxy came into view around them. They were as a group of swimmers, raising their heads from the surface of a glowing pond.

“We're clouds of dust,” Gibby fretted. “How we gonna make it back?”

Frek looked at his hands. Sparks of starlight were visible between his spaced-out particles. He felt overextended, fragile. Still his body grew. Bumby had said they'd expand till they were a third the size of the galaxy. They were out near the edge of the star-puddle. Orpoly was in the galactic disk's central bulge.

Frek's ring buzzed, again sending out a ball of red and yellow spikes with something in the middle. This time he could see the image quite clearly. A girl with two braided pigtails was tentatively smiling at him, leaning toward him as if she were hovering over a lens. The light around her was greenish. She was wearing a pale blue jersey. She looked sweet and friendly. She was saying something, the sound lost in the whining of the yunch. But Frek could read her lips.

“Help,” she was saying. “Please help me.”

The others seemed not to notice her. She was only visible to the wearer of the ring. The girl was gesturing for Frek to look at something; she was pointing off into the Milky Way pinwheel of stars. With her head turned slightly away from him, Frek could see the lovely gentle curve of her features: a high round forehead, a smooth firm cheek, a perfect arc of chin. She was the prettiest girl he'd ever seen.

She turned back to gaze at him again, her eyes wide and pleading.

“Help,” she said once again, and now he could faintly hear her. “Please help me.”

Could this be the Renata who'd been abducted by the Unipuskers along with Carb and that Yessica Sunshine? But why was the ring showing the girl instead of showing Frek's father?

Frek's armor sent an echoing sound into his ears.
Chime five.

The whining in Frek's body was damping down; they were rising above the galaxy at a decelerating rate. And then the upward yunch had ended. A moment of cosmic silence spread across the galactic pool of stars. All was still, so very still.

The band of Ulla/Bumby caught hold of their particles with a gentle force field, and began slowly, slowly moving them across the galaxy as one being. In toward the galactic core.

All the while, the ring was sending pricks of pain into his finger. Certain positions of Frek's arms and body made the ring hurt less, others made it hurt more. Much as Frek was attracted to the girl, he slapped at the ring, wishing she'd go away. This was no time to make complications!

Frek was half tempted to remove the ring and hurl it into the intergalactic void. But his ring was the mate to Dad's ring. He had to hang on to it.

He found that if he kept his hand pointed toward a particular location halfway in toward the galactic core, the ring would let him alone. And then he was able to tear his attention away from the sweet, pleading girl and look at the wonders spread before him.

Gazing across the surface of the galaxy, Frek noticed a kind of shimmer along the far edge. With a bit of effort he brought it into focus. It was a huge, translucent thing with claws, creeping along the rim. Another yuncher. And there, off to its right, three purple worms came yunching up, layered onto each other like a multiheaded hydra. They seemed to be in a hurry. In a matter of seconds, they'd wriggled across the galactic disk and unyunched back down.

Now that he had the knack, Frek began to see yuncher after yuncher boiling up, crawling about, simmering back down. A few of them expanded on past him, growing toward the distant dots of lights that were the other galaxies. It was fascinating to be up at this level. Frek noticed that when yunchers got appreciably bigger than him, he couldn't see them anymore.

The troublesome ring sent a fresh pain up Frek's arm, demanding his full attention. Frek frowned at his hand. His finger was pointing toward his stomach. The girl in the spiky aura was wearing an expectant expression. Frek guessed that Ulla/Bumby's slow progress had brought them to a point where they were roughly centered upon the world the ring was making him point at. Probably the world the girl was on. He overhead the faint sound of a man talking. The girl looked away from Frek, and then the perspective in the spiky ball shifted to show—Frek's father.

Carb had his same old Mohawk hairdo, with the slowly shifting tattoo molds embedded in the bare regions of his scalp. His face was hard and craggy as ever. A rope was tied around Carb's neck. He had a bruise on one cheek and a bloody split lip. He could see Frek, Frek was sure of it, for when their eyes met, Carb formed his lips into a small, pained smile and silently shrugged his shoulders, as if to apologize for being such a screwup. An alien figure stood behind Carb, a creature with muddy-looking body, approximately humanoid, but with a stubby tail and a head like a clamshell resting flat on his shoulders. This must be one of the Unipusker producers that Bumby had talked about.

The creature tightened the rope around Dad's neck, and he winced. Frek had to do something.

He stared down into the sea of stars within his body, straining to pick out the exact dot he was pointing to. He felt certain that their current position matched that of the world that held his father captive. They had to unyunch to save Dad and the sweet-faced girl. Right now.

But how could Frek initiate the downward yunch? Even as he thought the question to himself, something within him answered that he knew. It had to do with the spinning feeling that he'd felt within the particles of his flesh on the way up. Frek could initiate the opposite motion. He could wish for them to shrink.

He put his whole soul into the wish. For a moment he could sense Bumby and Ulla's minds fighting his; he could feel the galactic wisdom of the Orpolese aliens pitted against his own small experience. Frek redoubled his effort, visualizing the familiar, unhappy face of his father.

“We're coming, Dad,” he whispered. “We're coming to save you.”

Frek felt within himself for the spot that held his father. He found it, locked their overlapping bodies onto it, and willed them to unyunch toward it. The faintest of whining, spinning sounds began. Bumby and Ulla sent out another push of their own willpower, trying to block the premature downward yunch. But Frek was stronger. The song of the downward yunch rose.

One more time Bumby fought him, once again Frek won. They shrank. Ulla/Bumby, Frek, Gibby, and the dogs—they were deflating. Frek had a clear sense of his particles spinning and singing. Spinning differently from before.

Bumby began calling out a phrase in the Orpolese tongue. Though filled with urgency, his voice remained level and clear. Over and over he said it.

“Alilallah tekelili eheu uborka Orpoly.”

Perhaps it was an SOS signal, a call for help.

Meanwhile the dogs were howling in fear. The spiky aura with its images of Dad and the girl had disappeared.

“What in tarnation did you do, Frek?” yelled Gibby. “We're gonna come down wrong and rile the branecasters!”

“I saw a girl,” said Frek. “And my father. We have to help them.”

The stars were rushing past them like the falling blossom petals of an anyfruit tree. Great, warped clouds of bright gas flew by on either side.

The purple and green hoop of Ulla/Bumby jostled from side to side, trying to control the collapse. They were congealing right into the plane of a planetary system that had two stars at its center, a dozen gas giant planets, and a remarkable network of bright lines connecting the planets and their moons.

The nearest moon was bluish white, and with a bright tube connecting it to the most overwhelming part of the view, an enormous pink and yellow gas giant planet. They were close enough to the giant that it seemed more like a plane than like a sphere. It ran from horizon to horizon. And they were falling toward it.

“Frek,” came Bumby's quiet voice. “The big planet is Jumm. And Unipusk is the Earthlike moon up above. The one with the transport tube. There's too much mass-energy here, Frek. We've landed very badly. We're going to break through to the Planck brane. The branecasters will decohere us.” He'd all but dropped the poetic elaborations from his speech.

“Living death,” cried Gibby. “You said it's a living death.”

“Yes,” said Bumby, and paused for a long time. They were shrinking at a steady rate. The binary suns of the system were two bright disks far off to one side, and in the other direction hung the intimidating Jumm. A side-effect of their shrinking was that both the suns and the planet seemed to be moving away from them. But the transport tube from Jumm to Unipusk lay quite nearby, and, if anything, it seemed to be getting closer. Suddenly a messy flare sputtered toward them from the tube.

“They'll turn Ulla and me into things,” said Bumby finally. “Zombies. But they'll probably let you four go. Especially if you give them a little chunk of matter to chew on. You're not Orpolese, not a professor of any kind, and they won't view you as the responsible yunchers. They'll yell at you and try to trick you. Keep your head.” Bumby sighed and spoke again, his voice very low. “Frek, I want you to do one thing for me. Tell the branecasters your race wants Ulla and me to produce your branecast channel. Pick us even though they've decohered us. Frek, if you do that, then Ulla and I—we'll have a chance. Once the other Orpolese learn that we're humanity's producers, they'll come and bail us out.”