Frek and the Elixir (3 page)

Frek and his angelwings flew toward the Steiners' house tree, which was near the highest point in Middleville, at the base of Lookout Mountain. Frek made a long and winding trip of it, with Wow running along below the trees like a bouncy brown and white toon animated onto the uniformly green lawns. The angelwings were young and playful; they enjoyed a barrel-roll or a loop-the-loop as much as Frek. Occasionally Frek would get so dizzy from his gyrations that he'd have to orient himself by peering down at Wow, always doggedly on course for the Steiners'. Wow knew where they were going and he wanted to get there. Stoo's mother usually fed him something.

When Frek touched down in the Steiners' yard, he found Stoo's father, Kolder Steiner, trying to get his shiny green lifter beetle to fly him to work. The beetle's passenger pod was of transparent chitin, with a seat made up of swirly spiral curls the same golden-green as the beetle's wing covers. At one point in the beetle's life-cycle, the pod had been his pupa-casing. The beetle himself was perched on the top of the pod with his legs hooked into it. The great insect seemed to be in a contrary mood; he was snapping his mandibles and making liquid high-pitched noises.

Even though Kolder was a high-ranking exec at NuBioCom, he wasn't good at handling his living helpers. Kolder pressed a spot between the beetle's antennae, and the kritter went
sgli-gli-hi-hi.

“Hi,” said Frek.

“Hello, Frek,” said Kolder Steiner, not really looking up. He was a hairy man with strong arms. He poked impatiently at the beetle and again the kritter made the noise.
Sgli-gli-gli-hi-hi.
So far he hadn't lifted his wing covers.

“It sounds like a giggle, doesn't it?” said Frek, trying to be friendly. Frek's father had been gone for so long that Frek wasn't sure anymore how to act with grown-up men. Kolder Steiner didn't answer him. Jerk.

Frek walked past Kolder's uncommunicative back and stashed his angelwings in the Steiners' garage. When Frek came out, Kolder was glaring at the lifter beetle and muttering under his breath. Now he gave the beetle's domed back a savage slap.
Gli-squeeeek-gli-hi-hi,
said the beetle.

Inside the house tree, Sao Steiner was sitting at a table dictating a shopping list to a glypher slug. Like everyone else, she had golden skin and dark, almond-shaped eyes. But Sao was thinner than most people, and she had extra teeth in her smile. Toothbuds. She was wearing a white turmite-lace tube-top and tight, shiny, shin-length gray pants. A pile of new clothes sat on the table next to her; apparently she was planning to exchange some of them.

Sao made shopping complicated. She liked to go to the local turmite tailors who'd trained certain turmite mounds to create uniquely styled fabrics. She made forays into Stun City as well, seeking out the cured wall skin garments popular there. Sao would bring her selections home and try them on for days and then take most of them back. She was always talking about it. Shopping was like her main job.

“Yubba, Frek,” said Sao, flashing her amplified teeth. “Are you ready to rock and roll?”

“How do you mean?” said Frek. Sao Steiner had a way of saying offbeat things. It was like she was always acting flirty—or maybe like she thought it didn't much matter what she said to him. Frek found it interesting to talk with her, even though he could tell she didn't really approve of him. He was different from the other kids; his father was a Crufter and his mother had a low-status job.

“That's what Stoo's new game says when it starts up,” said Sao Steiner. “
Are you ready to rock and roll?
I think it's hysterical. You'll find the crown prince in his room. Here.” She stood up and got some cookies out of a drawer to put on a plate. “You can take these up with you. Nothing like some fat and sugar. Oh, look who else is here. Wowie! Want a cookie, Wow-Wow?”

“Cookie,” said Wow, opening his jaws wide to squeeze out the sound. “Wow want cookie.” His lips were drawn back from his teeth with the strain of using his voice, which sounded like the squeak at the end of a yawn. It was rare for Wow to talk, but Sao could always get him to do it. Lora Huggins didn't encourage Wow's talking—she said she heard enough from her three kids.

Sao Steiner held a cookie up in the air and Wow jumped for it, making a wet inhaling noise. He'd gobbled down the cookie by the time he was back on all four feet. He quickly nosed a stray crumb off the floor, then looked up at Sao Steiner, licking his chops, his gold-flecked eyes watching her every move.

“I'm thinking we should get a dog, too,” said Sao. “But Kolder wants to wait for next year's model. Wow's cute, but there's already so many of him in town. Kolder says the 3004 model dogs won't mind fleas. That's why it's good that dogs don't have puppies. The new models replace the old ones.”

At the sound of the word “flea,” Wow abruptly lay down and started chewing at the hair on the base of his tail. Any talk about fertility was over his head. He remained prone to wandering off in search of female dogs in heat, even though nothing could ever come of it.

“When NuBioCom collapsed the biome, why didn't they get rid of fleas?” Frek asked Sao Steiner. Since Kolder was such a big deal at NuBioCom, Frek figured Sao might have some inside information. “All the ants and beetles are gone, and the grasshoppers and butterflies and lightning bugs—why keep fleas?”

“They kept mosquitoes, too,” said Sao, shaking her head. “Counting everything, we're down to only two hundred and fifty-six kinds of legacy species—including mosquitoes and fleas. I've asked Kolder about it, and he says NuBioCom has a use for blood-suckers. They're vectors for spreading the knockout virus to spots where the puffball spores might not reach. We need the knockouts to keep dogs from conceiving puppies, for instance. And to keep people from having un-licensed children. Don't frown like that, Frek! You don't want to end up like your father, off in some crazy Crufter asteroid and maybe even disappeared from there. Life's gog gripper just the way she is.” It grated to hear someone's mother try to use kids' slang.

“Don't talk about my father that way,” snapped Frek, a little surprised at his temerity. Even though he wasn't happy about Carb running off, he didn't like other people to criticize him. “He's not crazy.”

“I'm sorry, Frek,” said Sao, backing off. “That was insensitive of me. You must be worried sick about him.” The love of gossip glinted in her eyes. “Have you gotten any news about what happened up on Sick Hindu? I heard this googly rumor that three Crufters were abducted by aliens.”

“We haven't heard a geevin' thing,” said Frek with a sudden rush of fear. “Carb hasn't managed to call us since he left. Mind your own business.”

Sao pursed her lips and wrinkled her nose. “How about giving me some fashion advice, then.” She pulled a blouse from the bags of clothes on the table. “With your fresh eyes.” She slipped the blouse on over her tight lace top and cocked her head. “How does it look, kid?”

It looked like a blouse. And Sao looked like Sao. Lively, thin, smug, theatrical, slightly unfriendly. What else was there to say?

Just then Sao's uvvy made a wet razzing noise. It was under her pile of clothes, and it took her a few seconds to unearth it. “I'll be glad when NuBioCom finally figures out how to put these things inside our heads,” she remarked to Frek as she pressed the uvvy's patch of tendrils to her neck. And then she was into her call. Wordlessly she handed Frek the cookies, and gestured toward the stairs.

Frek thought he had a good hold on the cookie plate, but he didn't. The next second, the plate and the cookies were on the floor and Wow was snarfing them down as fast as he could. Furious at Wow, and at himself, Frek poked Wow hard with his foot. It wasn't exactly a kick.

Wow yelped a really nasty curse word and swung his body away, keeping his head down on the floor, eating.

Frek crouched to scoop the rest of the cookies onto the plate. He managed to save about half of them. Sao had set aside her uvvy call. She was looking at Frek with a mixture of pity and contempt.

“You drop things a lot, don't you?” she said. “You need meds. Clumsiness is a type of attention deficit disorder, you know. Lora should take you to a tweaker.” She flashed her too-wide grin. “Nothing personal, of course.”

“Don't need tweaking,” muttered Frek. His face felt hot. “I'm good the way I am.” Turning away, he hurried up the steps to Stoo's room before Sao could pick on him any more.

Stoo had his window curtains closed and his lights turned off. He was perched on a big round cushion in the middle of the floor. He was a dark-haired, bright-eyed boy a bit taller and older than Frek, and with a crooked angularity to his jaw. He was handsome and very much his own person, a kid that the others looked up to. Frek wasn't quite sure why someone as gaud as Stoo even hung out with him.

Right now Stoo was holding an imitation gun grown by a please plant. A prop gun. It didn't need an uvvy-link. Because of all the eyes in a house tree's wall, the toons could track Stoo's hand motions closely enough to tell when and in which direction he meant to shoot.

“Yubba, Frek,” said Stoo. It was the standard greeting for kids their age, though it had sounded odd coming from Sao in the kitchen.

“Yubba you,” said Frek. “Here's some cookies from your mother.” He dragged over a cushion and sat down next to Stoo. Wow lunged for the cookies again but Frek sharply blocked him. “No, Wow! You want to stay at home next time?” He felt around on Stoo's floor and found a prop gun of his own.

The Skull Farmers were on all the curving walls of Stoo's room. Their world was designed around an old-time Y2K theme. Frek could see at first glance that it was another Toonsmithy masterpiece. An oil refinery was burning in the distance, killer giraffes and elephants were silhouetted nearby, and six business-suited figures were flying across the sky on winged motorcycles. Loosely ranged across the foreground were three lively, individualistic skeletons in Y2K garb. Skull Farmers.

The three Skull Farmers noticed right away that someone new had come into Stoo's room. Frek happened to focus on one of them, and that one got big; his bony face filled the whole wall.

Toons had a way of enlarging whatever aspect of their world you focused on. The toonsmiths called the technique “phenomenological autozoom,” but gamers just called it “pzoom.” The toons were letting Frek, and not Stoo, control the pzoom. They wanted to draw him into the game.

The face Frek had focused on was a goggy shecked-out skull with glowing red eyes, a gold front tooth, and a crumpled black top hat upon the deathly white pate. A rusty nail had been hammered into one side of the skull, with a pair of dice dangling from it like an earring.

“Welcome, Frek,” said the skull-faced toon. His voice was shrill and grainy, as if he'd been yelling all day long. “They call me Gypsy Joker. We need yore smarts and firepower. Seems we've got our butts into a bit of a situation hyar.” He hooked one thumb toward the sky, and Frek pzoomed out to view the background. “The six Financiers of the Apocalypse is a-comin', just for openers. I cain't promise you an easy run, but it could be hella fun. You wanna sign on with the Skull Farmers?”

Meanwhile Stoo fired off a couple of shots at the business-suited Financiers of the Apocalypse, who took the damage hits in a shower of green dollar signs and circled back into the distance.

“Right on, Stoo,” said the second Skull Farmer, and Frek brought him into view. He was wearing a red velvet cape and held an archaic electric guitar. He pushed himself into prominence and struck a chord of rich metallic-sounding music, sending images of roses spiraling out. “I'm Strummer,” he told Frek. Some of his teeth were black and he had an old-time British accent. He struck a pose and raised his voice to a warbling shriek.
“Are you ready to rock and roll?”

“Hold it,” said the third Skull Farmer in a sharp tone. Frek was back to a medium view, now, showing all three of the Skull Farmers. The third one had a heavy ballistic-style machine-gun hanging from one bone shoulder, and his skull was burned black, as from a fire, with tendrils of singed hair and crusts of burnt skin. “Soul Soldier here. I'm just pickin' up a message for new recruit Frek Huggins. Goob Doll Judy passed it to me. Groove on it, Skulls.” Soul Soldier flicked the joints of his spectral skeleton hand and blood-red urlbuds flew across the walls to the two other Skull Farmers.

“Whoo-eee!” said Gypsy Joker, catching a bud. “Frek Huggins got company comin'. Anvil fallin' down at him.”

“Tell me more,” said Frek, pleased to have the toons drawing him into their game.

“Anvil's what they call it,” said Soul Soldier in his dark, gravelly voice. “The Govs have had Skywatch Mil trackin' it for a couple days. Came down through the asteroids.
AN
onymous
V
ector,
I
nterste
L
lar. Last night they found out it's headed for Frek Huggins.”

“An anvil from the forge of God,” said Strummer in a cracked whisper. He plucked the strings of his guitar and crooned the phrase again, rounding it into a verse of song.

Strummer's papery voice gave Frek a chill. “What are you talking about?” he asked uneasily. Toons always mind-gamed you to get you into the play, but this routine seemed unusually gollywog.

“Lot of alien activity last night,” said Soul Soldier. “Your world's gettin' real funky. After the Anvil hit the atmosphere, the sucker darted around so swoopy that the Skywatch jelly-eyes lost it in the foo-fightin' fog. And then a big fat flying saucer cruises over Stun City, with some kind of human voice on its radio sayin' as how the Anvil's addressed to Mr. Frek Huggins. What it is, Frek. Had any company this morning?”