Frek and the Elixir (21 page)

“Damn, but he's layin' it on thick,” exclaimed Gibby. “Let me break out my cryin' towel.”

“Open your pinched heart, you pawky elephruker,” said Bumby without raising his voice. “Listen to me, Frek. The Unipuskers lured you here. Until someone bails out Ulla and me, we'll be suffering the torments of the damned. This wouldn't have happened if it weren't for you. You owe us. Don't let us suffer in vain. Don't let the Unipuskers win. Wait for an Orpolese rescue party. Eventually they'll come.”

A spiraling line of energy led to them from the nearby transport tube, branching in five to wreathe each of them with a faint glow of white light. The energy leakage was making it impossible for the Ulla/Bumby to halt their unyunching. By now they'd shrunk back to their starting size—Frek could tell because their bodies were no longer layered onto each other. They were separate. As the shrinking continued, they drew steadily farther apart. If you were the size of a dust mote, a meter's separation looked very big.

“Will our spacesuits keep protecting us?” called Frek. He felt selfish to be asking this just now, but he urgently wanted to know.

“These spacesuits can do anything you need,” said Bumby distractedly, his voice seeming to come from an ever greater distance. “You only have to ask.”

Frek was shrinking at a radically accelerating rate and dwindling, he imagined, to the size of a cell, a molecule, an atom, an electron, and beyond. The planets and suns of the Unipuskers' system had long since shot off into the distance. Frek's companions were out of sight as well. He could see nothing but a single writhing tendril of light from the impossibly distant transport tube.

And then Frek's world collapsed to a point.

At the ultimate moment, Bumby, Ulla, Gibby, and the dogs slapped back into him. All were merged into a single infinitesimal body the size of a dot.

Which exploded into the Planck brane.

It looked like a painting over there, with everything in bright, strange perspectives. Beneath a pearly gray sky were mountains, rolling hills, plowed fields, orchards, and on the horizon a city. Frek and the others had landed on the side of an improbably steep hill painted in rainy-day shades of green, a toony hill with star-shaped white splotches for flowers.

Frek no longer had the sensation of being watched by aliens across the galaxy. He was in the land of the branecasters themselves, off stage, behind the scenery.

The images here had a way of changing in size. That is, whenever Frek focused on something it got bigger. It was like in a dream, or perhaps more to the point, like a toon site with pzoom.

Bumby was a cuttlefish again, and Ulla a lumpy ball. They were screaming in horror, tormented by a swarm of small shapes with buzzing wings. Thanks to the rapidly reacting pzoom, Frek caught a close-up of one of attackers. It was an ugly little beast, something like an insect-winged fish with the gaping, fanged mouth of an angry cat. Its eyes were artful dots of glowing red.

The flying demons were snapping at the Orpolese, herding them down the hillside and across the plain. In an instant, the vicious creatures had chased the Orpolese all the way to the hazy blue spires of the town and into a jail cell in the basement of a turreted stone building that looked like City Hall.
Clank
went the metal door, damping the dreadful cries of the Orpolese. Frek's pzoom snapped back to normal; he was still on the hill.

Halfway up the hill was a red-and-white-checked square, a gingham tablecloth laid upon the ground with a stylized picnic basket. Six humanoid shapes had been sitting there when they appeared. Somehow Frek immediately knew them to be branecasters. They had gold auras around their heads like icons in old-time religious paintings.

And now the branecasters turned into big crude heads, still outlined by golden disks. The heads came tumbling toward Frek, Gibby, and the dogs. Frek braced himself for pain. The heads flattened themselves into squares, into six large squares like walls. One square scooted beneath Frek's feet, another came down overhead.

Frek and the others were penned in a cell with gold-edged faces painted onto the walls in shades of yellow purple green. Three cruel men, three mean women, dressed like old-time business people.

“Let's hear an explanation, or else.” The words sounded within Frek's Orpolese spacesuit. He sensed the words as coming from the branecaster on the ceiling, a man's face with heavy-lidded eyes and a sarcastic, bullying mouth. “I'm Sid,” added the man. “This is my wife, Cecily, and we've got two other couples here, too, Batty and Bitty and Chainey and Jayney.” His eyes twitched, pointing the others out.

“I'm sorry,” said Frek, peering up. “It was an accident. We didn't mean to pop through. I only wanted to help my father on Unipusk. Please put us back.” For the moment all thoughts of the elixir had flown right out of his head.

“In other words, you're a moron,” snapped Sid. “You unyunched almost inside Jumm. Right beside the transport tube to Unipusk. With that kind of energy-feed, you unwound your strings completely. Your space connection went away. That's why you shrank through from the plain brane to the Planck brane.”

“And ruined the branecasters' picnic!” shrieked the branecaster on the wall on Frek's right. This was Batty, twitchy and scrunched-up, asymmetric, with a lunatic's glittering eyes. But like the other two men, he wore a white shirt, a black suit, and a gray necktie. The gold aura surrounding him was fainter than that around the others.

“Let's decohere them same as the Orpolese,” said the branecaster face in the floor, a thin-lipped woman, strict and cold, her skin modeled as smoothly as plastic. Jayney. She wore a powder blue power suit. “Make them into puppets, guinea pigs, couch potatoes. Right, Bitty?”

“Never forget,” quavered the unseen Bitty's gollywog high-pitched voice from behind Frek, and the others took it up as well.

“Never forget, never forget, never forget, never forget, never forget!” The scary thing was, each time Frek heard the phrase, it actually made him forget a bit more about what he was supposed to be doing here.

Frek's memories were all he had, all that really made him Frek. He couldn't let the branecasters drive his personality away. He fought them. He thought back to how he'd recovered from being peeked by Gov. He recreated the feelings of his convalescence; he mentally mimicked the healing action of the stim cells.

The branecasters' voices faded away. Frek focused in on his memories, hugging them to himself. Lora, Geneva, and Ida. Their house tree. Dad. The girl he'd seen in the ring. Bumby's W-pupil eye. Bumby had promised the branecasters would give him the elixir. Yes. As soon as he got a chance, Frek would ask the branecasters for the elixir to restore planet Earth. He wouldn't let the branecasters send him away without it.

“Never forget they ruined our picnic!” repeated the deranged Batty on Frek's right. At Frek's side, Gibby and the dogs were looking this way and that, their eyes rolling.

“How 'bout this,” cried Gibby before Frek could say anything. The Grulloo's sun-browned face was blotched pale with fear. “We got a deal for you folks. Tell 'em about the Bumby production angle, Frek!”

Frek hesitated. Did he really want to commit humanity to being made into a show by horrible creatures like these? But Gibby had a point. Talking about a business deal could be a way to get this conversation onto a better footing. And then he could ask for the elixir.

“I might, um, want to register a branecast producer for the, um, human race,” said Frek, feeling hollow in his gut. “Bumby and Ulla producing us for the Orpolese. They told me I should talk to you.”

“You hear that, Sid?” sneered the branecaster on Frek's left. She had a coarse, piggish face, rich in pinks and purples. This was Sid's wife, Cecily, dressed in a frilly white blouse and a gray cashmere suit. “The little big shot's all set to pick his race's producer. Do you even know what branecasting means, junior?”

“No,” said Frek in a small voice. It was hard to keep up his spirits against the branecasters. “Not really. Can you tell me?”

The sound of a vast laugh track bloomed around them: cackles, haw-haws, giggles, guffaws, tee-hees, titters, chuckles, belly-laughs, ho-ho-hos, snickers, chortles, hoots, and snorts, the noise going on for much longer than was at all comfortable or reasonable.

Suddenly Frek remembered one of the last things Bumby had said to him. Keep your head. He didn't have to let the branecasters get the better of him. “Stop it!” he yelled. He felt as strong and focused as when he'd hit the watchbird with the badminton racquet. “Forget about the branecast and put us back in normal space, you unny gleeps! We don't need a producer! We don't want to be branecast at all!”

“Tough luck,” said the sixth branecaster, who was a man's face on the wall in front of Frek. He was even more unfriendly-looking than the others, bald and pudgy, with old-fashioned spectacles, a tight necktie, and a tiny straight mouth like a slot, his golden aura tight and perfectly round. It struck Frek that he resembled one of the Six Financiers of the Apocalypse in the Skull Farmer game—a cunning, humorless businessman with a bag of bills in place of a heart. His skin was all in shades of gray; he spoke in curt, clipped tones. “Except for those rare moments when you're in the Planck brane with us, every member of your race is available for live branecast, around the clock, forever. That's that. As soon as the Unipuskers happened to find your system, we opened up the human branecast channel. And we never, but never, close down a channel, son. It's a revenue stream. You start out on unrestricted read-only access, and when you're ready you pick a producer. I'll be the one to set up your deal. My name's Chainey, in case you've lost track.”

“It's really up to me to select the producer?” asked Frek. “Why me, anyway?”

“You're the first member of your race to make it from the plain brane to the Planck brane,” said Chainey. “Since we like to be paid in good solid matter from the plain brane, we're not interested in anyone who can't actually get here. To keep things simple, we appoint the first individual we meet to be a given talent race's sole negotiator, for however long he or she lives. You might say that you've won yourself an honor. A big day for a small boy.”

“I already told you what kind of production I'd like,” reiterated Frek. “No branecasting at all.”

“Just kill him and wait for the Unipuskers to send over his father,” snapped plastic-faced Jayney from under Frek's feet. Chainey's wife in her powder blue suit. “He's too dumb to close a deal.” Her aura contained a spiral design that was continually turning inward. Like a whirlpool.

“Don't try and stampede me,” said Frek, glaring down at her. “I want to know what I'm getting us into.” He glanced up at the icy Chainey. “What if we don't have a producer at all?”

“Jayney's serious, you know,” said Chainey, with a nod toward the floor. “If we find a talent race's current negotiator to be uncompanionable, we liquidate him or her and wait for the next one. We never have to wait long. Now that the humanity channel is open, producers will be all over the opportunity. Eventually they'll bring over one of you who's able to make the deal. It might as well be you, Frek.”

“I'm listening,” said Frek, a little surprised at how calm he sounded. “Tell me more.”

“All right,” said Chainey. “The standard procedure is that the talent race's negotiator makes an exclusive distribution agreement with a producer. Branecast access to the talent race becomes available solely to the producer's customers, who are normally limited to one particular esper race. In other words, only one kind of alien is esping you—or watching you—via the branecast access that we're able to provide. I
will
tell you that if you don't have a producer, we don't pay you anything. I'll also tell you that as long as you don't have a producer, you're going to be under extreme pressure. Producers will be importuning you to get them a deal. They might even seek to terminate you so as to bring their own hand-picked negotiators into place.” As Chainey talked, the legalistic words seemed to crawl out of his mouth and into his gray skin. He looked like the fine-printed page of a law book.

“Won't the competing producers be after me even if I do pick a producer?”

“Your producer will provide you with protection. It's in their interest to preserve the status quo. Other producers may in fact come to you with attractive offers. Do note that, as sole negotiator, you're always free to return to the Planck brane and recast our agreement. We believe very strongly in the free market.”

“I see,” said Frek carefully. “Before I commit to a producer, let me ask you about our payment. We'd want a genomic elixir to restore the lost species of planet Earth.”

“Restore your biome, eh?” said Chainey. He sounded like it was a request he'd heard before. For how many eons had he been doing this? With how many races? “I don't suppose your people happened to save the missing genetic codes?” asked Chainey.

“I think they're all gone,” said Frek, remembering what he'd heard of the Great Collapse. In their zeal to make their changes permanent, NuBioCom had rooted out all the old genomics books and papers, all the digital files, all the databases. In order to make the world completely safe for their patented proprietary life forms, they'd destroyed every trace of Gaia's heritage. “But Bumby said you could fix it anyway.”

“Bumby's not feeling so good right now,” said the branecaster with a slight upward curve in his tiny little gray mouth. “He's waiting for somebody to bail him out.”

“Will you give us the elixir or not, Chainey?” snapped Frek.

“It would mean letting you go rooting around in your past,” said Chainey. “Dipping into the time pool of the appropriate Exaplex projection room. Not something we especially like to see clients do. You'd have to ask Zed, in any case.”