Frek and the Elixir (39 page)

“I don't want to be there,” said Dad shortly. “That's why I left.” He paused for a while, and then added, “You wouldn't want me if you knew everything I've done.” Another pause, longer than before. “Are we in the Planck brane right now?”

“We're in a sun, Dad.”

“You know how I get confused sometimes,” said Dad. “Ever since Gov peeked me.”

The space around them began flickering and shaking. Pinging sounds and the smell of ozone accompanied the turbulence. It felt like soft little objects were bumping into Frek.

“Loofy,” called Whaler, the twirling ring of him and Tusky heaving into visibility like a thick spot in a glowing fog of gems. The dark shapes of Gibby and Wow were nearby as well. “Good eats,” added Whaler. “Your suits can yum it, too.”

As if mocking her husband, Tusky glyphed a greedy silver ball with a stupid-looking open mouth.

The loofy consisted of darting eddies of solar plasma—twirling, quivering, and swarming around them. Though myriads of the loofy twists lay within easy reach, they were as nimble and hard to catch as minnows.

But Frek did manage to trap and squash a few in his hands; they melted into his armored suit, making a pleasant
zing
that left him feeling energized. Meanwhile Tusky/Whaler was swooping around like a whale eating krill, engulfing the loofy twists by the thousands.

“That's more like it,” said Whaler presently. “Let's rest, my motley crew.”

Tusky glyphed a grossly bulging tweet of selfish fatness, pale silver amidst the turmoil of the star.

“How did Bumby hook up with Ulla anyway?” asked Gibby. He looked/felt/sounded like a long forked cave in the mountain of light. “If them rassen hate znags so much.”

“They were both already married,” said Whaler. “An Orpolese can get by alone, but we don't like to. Ulla and Bumby were already partnered when they met in some tasty shoal of loofy. They'd gone cold on their workaday mates, and they liked the looks of each other's hot mirror-twists. So Bumby hopped off his old wife and onto Ulla.”

Tusky sent out an excited stream of glowing red hearts, soft dark thuddy holes in the roiling flame.

“What about the old wife and the old husband?” wondered Dad.

“They—killed them and ate them,” said Whaler. “It's the usual way. Honeymoon breakfast.”

“Ow,” said Carb, then laughed in a way that Frek didn't much like.

Tusky echoed Carb's laugh with a tweet flock of green monster-birds that hooted and cawed for far too long. This was the first time Frek had ever heard tweets making noise.

“It's not
that
funny, Tusky,” said Whaler in an uneasy tone.

“Fleas,” interrupted Wow, snapping at some large curls of loofy. “Catch fleas.”

“Were them rassen up there tryin' to eat us, or what?” asked Gibby, still trying to figure things out.

“Since you're not curled into hoops, you Earthlings look like giant loofy,” said Whaler. “Big dumb yum.” His voice dropped an octave. “But as for me and Tusky, I think—well, I think that reddish guy—Yonny—I think he'd like to croak me and blend with Tusky. But you wouldn't let him do that, would you, Tusky?”

A branching fern of purple tweet floated past, barely visible amid the crooning, caressing cells of light.

“Tusky says I'm stewing an empty pot,” interpreted Whaler in a suspicious tone. More tweets followed. “She says the purple-on-pink couple just wanted to be friends,” he continued. “Yonny and Marta. Tusky wants us to float up there and ask them for news of the family tree. But I don't trust them. That Yonny, he's got a thing for you, Tusky, I can tell. And it's two-way. I saw those pretty tweet blossoms you made for him.”

Tusky answered with a tweet of a swollen silver claw grasping a drooping gold ring.

“I am not a bully,” hollered Whaler. “But I don't trust Yonny and Marta. We lie low until I think they've gone away. And that's final. Relax, dammit!”

Tusky sent out a complicated, angry series of tweets. But again it seemed like Whaler had the power to control the pair's motion. Though the silver-on-gold donut twitched and trembled, she/he stayed right where they were.

For quite a long time not much happened. A whiff of peach blossoms came to Frek, along with a fizzy feeling all along his legs. The sun was gently chiming. How lovely it was here, really. He hung there basking, now and then catching an overbold twist of loofy that ventured too close.

 

Eventually Frek and the others must have slept, for at some point he had the feeling of waking up. Blissfully he hung there, enjoying the gentle shifting of the currents of the sun, faintly hearing the waking mutters of the others. Idly he wondered if there were anything odd about his sense of time. They'd been in here—how long? And they had to go—where? Oops.

“Hey, Whaler,” called Frek. Buried in the beating light/sound/touch of the star, it would be so easy to forget the purpose of their quest. “You're supposed to take us to the branelink. So I can get the elixir and take my guys home.” Home to Mom, Geneva, Ida, and Renata. Home to trees, grass, water, and the open air. Home to their cozy kitchen with the little yellow-and-white-veined marble statue of the Buddha. Earth was even more beautiful than the inside of a sun. “Come on,” clamored Frek.

“Those rassen will be on us like a murder of crows,” whined Whaler. “Handsome purple Yonny and his snotty Marta pecking first. You'll be loofy sushi, Frek.”

“Stop stalling,” said Frek. “They didn't hurt us before.”

Tusky sent out tweets of smiley faces, rainbows, candy canes, and flowers. Meaning that she was on Frek's side. But Frek was starting to wonder about her motives. Maybe Whaler's fears were justified.

Be that as it may, they had to get out of here. What if the rassen really were waiting for them? Thanks to the element of surprise, Frek had been able to push them around before. But maybe if there were a serious battle it would be a different story.

An idea came to Frek. “What if we grab our feet with our hands? Gibby grabs his tail of course, and Wow can bite his tail. If we're curled around, we'll look a little like Orpolese. So they don't right away think we're giant loofy.” Another idea. “And why don't we ride out on one of those solar flares we saw? Didn't you say something about surfing a tidal wave, Whaler?”

“Of course we'd ride a flare,” said Whaler in a sullen tone. “If we were leaving at all. Ouch!” A big pinch appeared in the flesh of the silver-on-gold donut, a thin spot that wobbled around and around the ring. “Don't do that, Tusky. Hey!” Another dent appeared, and the donut seemed very nearly on the point of breaking into pieces. “All right, then,” snarled Whaler. “We'll go.”

The six of them plowed through the synaesthetic gumbo of light/sound/scent/touch, the angry Whaler not bothering to watch if the Earthlings could keep up. And then Frek lost his bearings. Suddenly he couldn't tell which way was up. If he drove himself forward, would he be burying himself yet deeper in the sun? But if he stopped moving he'd fall farther behind. You could lose your mind in here.

Your mind, my mind, in the sun's rind find a bind, you mind? Unkind. My mind, your mind…

Something prodded Frek in the belly. Wow?

“Hey Frek!” Dad was right there too, a cool dark spot of reason. “Good boy, Wow, you found him. Come on, Frek, you're drifting down. Whaler and Tusky are up that way, waiting with Gibby for a blast. I told those damned Orpolese they were going too fast, but stupid sulky Whaler wouldn't even answer. You okay?”

Frek gratefully let his father lead him to the others. The sun-stuff was madly surging, with tornados of loofy tearing past.

“Hang onto us, you selfish turkeys,” yelled Dad to Whaler and Tusky. “Net us in a force field so you don't lose us on the way out.”

“Ready!” called Whaler, sending out a fairly weak force field to help them. “Everyone blast up as hard as you can when I give the signal!”

A stench of burnt sulfur, an avalanche roar, a sleet of needles—a rush of sun stuff came at them.

“Go!” yelled Whaler.

Frek jetted his suit as hard as he could. He was catching up to the rolling space wave of the solar plume, he was getting up on top of it, Whaler was still in sight, but—

“Wipe out!” yodeled Dad, laughing a little.

“Circle back, Whaler,” yelled Gibby. “We missed the son of a gun. You gotta drag us stronger, you lazy cuss. Wow don't get the picture a-tall.”

Frek skittered off to one side and let himself drop back down to his companions. In a bit Whaler reappeared.

“Another one's coming right up,” said Whaler. “They pulse in threes.”

The second time around Dad and Wow caught the plume, but Gibby slipped and knocked Frek off the rushing shock-front.

“If we miss the third one, we'll be dog-paddling here for another hour,” scolded Whaler. “Not that I mind but—don't pinch again, Tusky, you shrew! Front and center, cannon-fodder. Catch this wave or I'll turn off your spacesuits.” Whaler made his voice into a hoarse, scary whisper. “I'm not kidding.”

This time they all caught the wave. It was incredible, a Nantucket sleigh ride through rough seas of sound, a romp up the blossom-scented stairway to heaven, a barefoot scamper across a million-note chrome xylophone.

Frek wished there were a way he could have recorded his sensations to play for Stoo Steiner and the other guys. That would geeve up their minds! And, as he thought this, he realized that the espers were in fact relishing his inputs. At some point during the jangling chaos of his trip into the sun, he'd let down his branecasting block. The golden glow was on him stronger than ever before. So once again, Frek pushed the glow out into the distance, made his thoughts as unresisting as air, and “combed his brain,” getting back his normal modes of thought. And then he entangled his thoughts with those of his companions and did sky-air-comb with them as well, to keep the espers from seeing through their eyes. Thinking about your adventures in your own way felt better without other minds leeching onto your feelings and your thoughts.

And now they were up in interstellar space, entering the open gulfs of Orpoly. The plume they'd ridden had spent its force; it was guttering back into the sun they'd just left. They were free, in the black, their suits a little pocked and iridescent, everyone intact, and no rassen in sight.

But Whaler and Tusky were still quarrelling.

All at once Tusky poofed out a spore-cloud of ten thousand tiny shiny red tweet hearts. Messengers. The hearts buzzed off in every direction, and it wasn't long till one of them must have found its target—for here came Yonny and Marta, a growing dot against the endless bright star, pink Marta bucking and struggling, Yonny throbbing on her surface like a web of varicose veins. They looked ready to rumble.

“Come on, pretty boy!” yelled Whaler aggressively. He peeled himself loose from Tusky to hang free. “You want a piece of me?” He floated up above his wife's gold donut, his body an angry tangle of silver strands and stalks. Yonny too tore free of his mate, ready for battle.

The two male Orpolese circled each other, tightening up their shapes. Whaler drew much of his mass into a flattened central wad, leaving about a dozen tentacles writhing from his forward end. In their midst was a large, sharp beak. Whaler resembled a cuttlefish, like Bumby, only a thousand kilometers long. For his part, Yonny looked more like a giant crab, with much of his purple mass formed into a menacing pair of claws.

Moving fast, Whaler darted forward, slung a two-hundred-kilometer-long tentacle around one of the immense claws, and tore it off. He whisked the purple mass into the furious tangle of his feelers and devoured it with his beak.

“Dig it, Tusky!” roared Whaler. “Who's your man, baby? Who's your man?”

Glancing over at Tusky, Frek noticed something new. Tusky had extended a kind of snout, a tube like an elephruk's trunk, and she'd managed to dig the proboscis into the flesh of Marta. Lumps were moving up the trunk. Tusky was eating Marta! But Marta was extruding her own tube-snout and—

A bellow from Whaler brought Frek's attention back to the two males. Yonny had snipped off half of Whaler's tentacles, and he'd grabbed the silver Orpolese's body with his remaining purple claw! A snaky knot of Whaler's tentacles surrounded the great pincer, struggling to pry it loose.

Looking back at the two female Orpolese, Frek was shocked to see Tusky suddenly shrunken to a tenth of Marta's size. The pink donut's trunk was deeply embedded in Tusky's flesh. Bolus by bolus, Tusky's body was traveling up Marta's steadily pulsing snoot. Though Tusky continued sucking at Marta's body with her own trunk, she was losing the race.

A scream from Whaler and an obscene alien twitter from Yonny signaled the denouement. The attacker had torn Whaler in two! Whaler was done for!

The huge one-clawed purple crab stuffed the silver fragments into the churning machineries of his mouth.

Meanwhile Tusky was nearing her own end; she was little more than ten kilometers across. But Yonny saw, and raised his claw, and struck his wife a fearsome blow.

The great dent in Marta's pink flesh threw off her sucking rhythm. Tiny Tusky seized the opportunity. Cubic hectokilometers of Marta-stuff surged up Tusky's greedy golden snout. Marta never did manage to get back into the groove. In minute it was all over. Marta was no more.

Yonny stretched himself into a comely purple tracery and settled onto the plump gold body of his new bride. The two forms quivered in sensual delight.

“Lordy lord,” marveled Gibby. “What's gonna happen now? They gonna eat us too?”

“Yonny pinch,” said Wow, impressed by how the Orpolese had used his giant claw.

“I wonder what'll happen when Yessica meets Lora down in Middleville,” mused Dad. “I'm glad I won't be there for that.”