Frek and the Elixir (40 page)

“What in the world are you nasty beasts?” said Yonny all of a sudden.

“We're from Earth,” said Frek. “I'm Frek, this is my father, Carb, my sidekick, Gibby, and my dog, Wow. I made a deal with the branecasters to let the Orpolese produce the Earth channel. You're supposed to help us get to the branelink so we can work some details. Like us getting paid.”

“I ain't no sidekick,” protested Gibby. “I'm the brains.”

“I despise branecasting,” interrupted Yonny in a lofty tone. “Tacky, tacky, tacky. Turning our stars into idiot-balls to show branecast advertisements and to display disgusting creatures like you? Spare us the details of your utter degradation. I most certainly won't help you. In fact—” The purple veins of his body drew together, reconstituting his fearsome claw.

Tusky began tweeting, explaining the situation to Yonny. An image of Earth, of a flickerball, of the branecasters, of Ulla/Bumby.

“Branecasting is contemptible,” intoned Yonny. “It's as simple as that. These soulless beasts are better off dead. I say put an end to their wretched—ow!”

Once again, Tusky had thrown a pinch into the flesh of herself and her current mate. The toothy bulge of Yonny's claw melted away.

“Very well then, I won't harm them,” said Yonny quickly. “You're a passionate one, my little Tusky.” He was really pouring the honey into his tone now. “It's lovely to be with someone so vivacious. But don't you think we could simply send these revolting vermin on their way?”

Tusky tweeted the image of captive Ulla/Bumby once again.

“But that's not our job, don't you know,” said Yonny in a nasal tone. “Let this—this what's-his-name—this Frek thing, let him clean up the mess he's made. We mustn't waste a single minute of our honeymoon in the monoculture wasteland of central Orpoly, dear Tusky. I'm keen on whisking you off to a special spot I know. A marvelous binary dwarf star near the outskirts. You'll find the most extraordinary loofy there, and the shapeliest gravity waves you've ever seen. It's quite unspoiled; the znag and znassen rabble haven't ruined it yet. Do let me take you there, my sweet. We've no need to watch these spit-talking fools rush into their dreary branelink. Surely it's enough to point them on their way.” His veiny purple body was kneading Tusky's golden flesh as he talked.

Tusky hesitated, then tweeted out a single, large, pointing hand. Just as Frek might have expected, the forefinger was directed toward the brightest region of the Orpolese environs. Toward the center of the galactic core.

“Fine, but what does the branelink look like?” demanded Frek.

For some reason the question provoked a mocking laugh from Yonny. But Tusky helpfully formed one last tweet for them, an mind-entangled form that would turn out to look different to each of them. For Frek, the tweet resembled the friendly creamy marble Buddha that sat on their kitchen shelf back home, rounded into a sphere, and with an emerald in his forehead.

“The branelink shapes itself to lure the rubes in,” said Yonny in a condescending tone. “We've done enough for them, now, Tusky. Forget these wretched beings and their trashy home world. Let our nuptial celebration begin.”

Tusky made a nodding gesture that must have meant yes. The Buddha tweet disappeared and the floating tweet hand waved goodbye. Tusky and Yonny flew off, swooping outward past the nearby star.

“Let's catch another flare,” said Dad. “Get a boost toward the core. There's a good set about to break over there.”

“Did you see the Buddha just now?” Frek asked his father. “The statue from our kitchen?”

“Well, um, to me it kind of looked like a statue of me,” said Carb, sounding embarrassed. “I wish I'd seen Buddha. Maybe next time.”

“I saw the nice round door of my burrow,” said Gibby. “With firelight glowing in the windowpanes.”

“Wow saw vig meat,” said the dog.

“That Yonny's right negatory on them branecasters,” mused Gibby. “Maybe he knows somethin', even if he is a toff. Maybe we shouldn't oughta go in that branelink at all.”

“Look, the only hope of stopping the branecasters is to talk with them and learn more. We gotta go all the way in to get out. Anyway, I didn't come this far to go home without the elixir.”

“Let's do it,” said Dad.

So they used their suits to jockey themselves into a line-up above a particularly active region of the star, and, yes, they caught the next good solar flare toward the mass of light at Orpoly's core. Frek's suit fed him a sound of breaking waves.

The trip was like liveboard surfing, sailfish riding, angelwing gliding—and more. Whenever they'd slow down too much, they'd swing near a sun and get a slingshot boost off its gravity, sometimes catching a fresh flare wave as well. Carb was especially good at riding the interstellar energies. Cheerfully he showed Frek and the others how to improve their style. The old man was at his best out here. He made their urgent quest into play.

As the suns grew denser, Frek saw some Orpolese in the distance. He murmured a warning, and the four curled themselves into hoops and used the power of their suits to race away.

Frek had to grin at the way Wow looked, with his teeth clamped onto his two-hundred-kilometer tail, the tail continually about to slip away, his great snout twitching as he readjusted his bite, his eyes rolling back so that their whites showed, his legs twitching as if to run across the empty vacuum, his expression strained and grim.

Noticing Frek's smile, Carb began clowning: wagging his Mohawk, bucking his long body and acting like he was having trouble holding onto his toes. Finally Frek started laughing so hard he couldn't stay curled at all anymore. But it didn't matter, the Orpolese weren't following them.

Fewer suns lay ahead now, tens of thousands rather than hundreds of thousands. The missing suns had gone into a black patch that covered a third of the sky: a great wobbling dead zone, a giant black hole at the galaxy's exact center. Lively lines of light wound around the vast nucleus. The lights were a bit like chrome wires around a lump of coal, though more smeared out than that, more like chaotic strange attractors. A deep ghostly chant echoed from the dark central void, a sound like a chorus of the damned. Frek's suit was using all his senses to model this strange place.

A nearby star faltered after a near miss with another star and veered toward the dark zone. As the star fell, it screamed; and as it dropped, its voice grew deeper and slower. The titanic black hole kneaded the falling star, squirting out a hot jet that added to the bright traceries upon its dark surface. The doomed star's remaining shreds faded into a deep orange, then red, dimmer and dimmer, never quite going away. Its death cry merged with the never-ending plainsong of the millions of other stars who'd crashed here since the dawn of time.

The suns in this neighborhood had to step lively to survive, racing around the galactic doom-egg to postpone falling in. Frek and his party blended into the flow out on the lip of the whirlpool. Circling the core, jostled by suns, they encountered more and more Orpolese donuts.

The Earthlings did their best to look like hoops. Frek avoided looking at Dad lest he start laughing too hard to stay curled. Even in the face of a galactic black hole, Carb made things funny. The man was completely irresponsible.

And where was the branelink? No sign of it yet.

Just then Frek noticed a really odd-looking sun. This star had somehow been turned into a giant flickerball. It was displaying—you guessed it—the same old branecaster logo, the boring cube with blue pipes for its edges and an esper's face on each of the slowly tumbling cube's six sides. It gave Frek a sick feeling to see a star turned into an advertisement. The branecasters had brought this profound desecration of Nature to the very heart of his home galaxy.

Frek thought of a word he'd heard from both Bumby and Yonny. “Monoculture.” Bumby had used the word to describe the Unipuskers, and Yonny had applied it to the branecasters. Monoculture was exactly what was wrong with Earth. Monoculture was what NuBioCom had brought to the biome. And monoculture was what Gov and his cohorts were planning to spread across people's minds with their ooey internal uvvy—assuming people still had any minds after the branecasters and espers had taken hold.

A sudden shoal of Orpolese converged upon the star with the logo. The tamed sun switched to full flickerball mode, beaming out images of alien landscapes. No, wait, those were images of—Earth.

Frek stared, mesmerized. As an interface, the star was great enough to readily fold together millions, even billions, of images at once. Frek was looking at the head of each person on Earth, all of them, everybody overlaid on top of each other to make one supernal image of loving, suffering, weeping, laughing, feasting, starving humanity, men and women, boys and girls, morphs and bis, gumps and Grulloos, every size, every shade, every age.

Frek felt a rush of universal love for his fellows, and a shy joy that it was his lot to make their world better. He was glad to be seeing this, it was important. He'd never forget it.

One of the Orpolese changed the channel.

So much for Frek's vision of humanity. It hadn't really been a vision, it had been a product. Yes, it was universal love, but it was love in slop buckets. The branecasters had made the very soul of mankind into just another piece of slick entertainment. Frek's raw, whipsawed emotions settled upon a grim determination to end the branecast.

Following Dad's lead, the four Earthlings caught a flare off the flickerball star and proceeded on their way among the great procession of stars circling the central black hole.

They passed perhaps a dozen more flickerball stars. Each was attended by a rapt coterie of Orpolese users, none of them aware enough to notice the four real Earthlings in their midst. Meanwhile, in the background, the insane grandeur of the galactic black hole's light show played on—with only the Earthlings watching.

By now Frek was wondering if they'd ever find the branelink. Would he recognize it? But then he saw something that took his doubts away.

Though he wasn't sure at first how it looked to the others, to him it was a star resembling that same old yellow-and-white marble Buddha, the comfortable beloved figure from their kitchen shelf. Just as Tusky had predicted. The subtle color shadings of the star's convection cells mapped out the giant, blissful face, set with a great green emerald in his forehead, and surrounded by a gently tinted halo.

“The Bodhisattva,” said Dad, who must have been seeing about the same thing as Frek this time, instead of some personal ego-boosting statue. All at once he recited a half-remembered bit of scripture.

“He wears a crown of eight thousand rays, in which are seen fully reflected a state of perfect beauty,” murmured Carb. “The color of his body is ivory and gold. His palms have the mixed color of five hundred lotuses, while each fingertip has eighty-four thousand gem facets and each facet has eighty-four thousand colors and each color has eighty-four thousand rays which are soft and mild and shine over all things that exist. With these hands he draws and embraces all beings. In his towering forehead gleams the eye of wisdom, eight thousand kilometers tall.”

“The branelink,” murmured Frek. The Bodhisattva's green third eye rippled like a jungle in a windstorm. Now and then you could glimpse the warped Planck brane landscape behind the green scrim. They were supposed to fly in there.

“I don't see nothing like that at all,” said Gibby. “I'm just seein' my front door, though it's hella big. Got a little green light up in the window.” He paused, then continued. “If we really gotta fly in there, Frek, what about the bribe? No point goin' off half-cocked. You gotta make that gold asteroid for 'em like you said.”

Frek was a little glad for the delay. They and the Bodhisattva-star were orbiting the black hole fast enough not to fall in. There was no rush. He'd take his time and vaar the gold, yes. Making a ten-kilometer gold asteroid shouldn't actually be that hard. After all, Frek was still a thousand kilometers long. The ball of gold only had to be as big as the tip of his finger.

So, just as Gawrnier had taught him to do, Frek held out his hands and let his mind merge into the space between. Empty space, with nothing to say about it. Frek breathed evenly and gazed at the Bodhisattva, then pushed that perception away.

The space was part of Frek's breath. Emptiness. The space was breathing. Nothing.

“Something's there!” shouted Dad.

Frek snapped out of his trance and looked down. There was kenner between his hands, but it wasn't solid. It was a wispy cloud.

He imagined solid gold, he gilded the image onto the perimeter of his thoughts, let the center of his mind merge with the cloud of kenner, and turned his perceptions inside out.

A ball of gold hung in space. But the ball was tiny, nowhere near as big as Frek's fingertip. It was a mere speck, maybe a kilometer across, a tenth as wide as what he needed. Remembering the old volume-varies-as-the-cube thing from school, he figured he'd need about ten-cubed of these balls. And, oh man, that was a thousand. Wishing that much nothingness into gold was going to take a long time.

“Can I help?” asked Dad, leaning his tattooed head forward to study the tiny dot of gold. Just now his tattoos were depicting suns with solar flares. “Show me how you do it,” added Dad.

“I already tried to teach it to Gibby and Renata,” said Frek wearily. “It's no use.”

“Try me,” urged Dad. “Maybe I've got some powers, too. Don't forget, I'm the one who saw the Magic Pig!”

And, yes, Carb was able to craft kenner, too. Even though Frek couldn't explain it very well, Dad got the knack right away. In fact his first ball of gold was twice the size of Frek's. Dad managed to make his two-kilometer glob look a little bit like a pig with a Mohawk. Gibby, who had the keenest eyes of any of them, used his powerful fingers to tweeze the two lumps into one.