Frek and the Elixir (41 page)

In a couple of hours they were done. They'd made a ten-trillion-ton asteroid of pure gold, a ball ten kilometers across. Gibby cradled it in his enormous hand, using his powered suit to nudge the massive lump around.

Wow began barking. A really big pink and yellow Orpolese donut was swooping in toward them, a male-female pair bent on making a post-flickerball snack of them. Without even saying anything, Dad kenny-crafted himself a hundred-kilometer long Nguyen War singularity gun and fired a stinging swarm of space-cusps that sent the couple howling for safety, their donut surface roiled into untidy peaks.

“Carb boom,” exclaimed Wow.

“Spaceman with a shotgun!” hooted Gibby.

“How did you make something so big?” cried Frek.

“It's hollow,” said Dad, happily brandishing the great, finned tube. “There's no more mass in it than in one of those tiny pinches of gold. I studied the designs for these suckers one time. I always wanted one.” He glanced over at Gibby. “Do we go off alien-hunting or do we finally go in?”

“We go in to get out,” said Gibby. “Like Frek said.” He clenched his fingers around the asteroid of gold and held his arm in front of his face. “Might as well do it now. I think we're drifting into a cloud of, like, cinders out here.”

“Ready, Wow?”

“Wow ready.”

Dad tossed away his singularity gun. The four of them arrowed toward the Bodhisattva's third eye.

Frek thought he heard branches breaking as they shot through the green veils of the idol's eye. It was as if they were crashing through the canopy of the world's largest tree. Not that he saw a tree. And then they were falling through a pearly gray sky.

They fell for a while, and as they fell, Frek started absentmindedly thinking about the Skull Farmers game and its old-time decor. But then finally he was able to see the Planck brane world below—far, crooked, and shining. It had the feel of an artificial construct, like a three-dimensional painting, with every detail put in by hand. Zigzag lavender mountain ranges ran all along the horizon. Damp green and pale yellow foothills rose in abrupt bulges, some of them wind-carved into beetling bluffs. Farm fields rolled out of the hills, patterned with loamy stripes of brown and dotted with orchards in pink bloom.

A city was set amidst the fields, a sprawling metropolis with mansions mixed in with city blocks of apartments and office buildings. On the industrial fringes, factory chimneys puffed rhythmic balls of smoke. Radiating out across the enormous city was a pie-slice of park with a freeform lake and tens of thousands of trees. The park's tip was at the city's center, its leafy avenues ran clear out to the countryside. At the center was a great concrete-paved square with ugly old-style glass-box buildings and a stone gingerbread City Hall—presumably Bumby and Ulla were jailed in its basement.

All this was visible to Frek even though they were incredibly far up in the endless, empty, glowing sky—at an altitude of perhaps a million kilometers. But as Frek had noticed last time in the Planck brane, he had only to stare at something for its image to get as big as he liked. It was the phenomenological autozoom feature, the pzoom.

Pzooming on the town, Frek saw humanoid figures pointing at them and running about. One oddity was that the figures had spherical auras surrounding their heads, big bright auras for some, small faint ones for others. Not that this was heaven. In fact the city was set up like early times on Earth, like the Y2K era, with a somber palette and finely modeled forms.

The marble statues in the park had been heavily graffiti-tagged, perhaps by the skateboarders practicing beside boom-boxes with fanciful little music notes pulsing out. Automobiles crowded the streets with honks and fumes. Women with auras pushed strollers past people getting paper money from cash machines. Men with auras sold waffles and pig meat sandwiches from holes in the walls, hawking their wares over the din of leaf-blowers cleaning the pavement. Farther from the city center, a tram rattled past a soft, deserted building with a three-story lit-up yellow sign saying
EXAPLEX
. Frek had a vague memory of Chainey mentioning something about finding the elixir at the Exaplex, so seeing the building made him feel good.

And then,
pop,
Frek pzoomed his view back to normal. Though it was hard to be sure, he had the feeling that the Planck brane city was scaled like a city on Earth, which meant that Frek and his thousand-kilometer-tall companions would be giants here. And they were falling right toward the middle of town, closing in faster than seemed possible.

“Use your suits to steer out to those hills!” Frek called to the others. “Hurry!”

Dad moved forward, but Wow didn't get it. And even though Gibby's suit was humming with the strain, the Grulloo seemed unable to make any progress.

“The gold!” called Gibby. “It's too heavy!”

Frek darted over to his side and gave him a shove. Gibby swung around, but the hand with the asteroid held him in place. The gold ball was linked to its trajectory like a bead sliding down a wire. There was no deflecting it from its predestined path to the heart of the branecaster's sprawling city park.

“Leave it!” yelled Frek, getting hold of Wow. Gibby abandoned the asteroid and followed. They sped a few hundred kilometers, just in time to land in the cartoon foothills. It was an easy, springy landing; the hills felt like rubber.

Using his pzoom, Frek watched the gold asteroid smash into the branecaster's park, throwing up an iconic cloud of spirals, five-pointed stars, exclamation points, and X-eyed fish from the lake. And then the asteroid was at rest, ringed by the tidy ridge of an impact crater. Above the golden orb floated dollar signs and wavy lines of gleam. A swarm of tiny figures were already crawling upon the great nugget, their bright auras bobbing like fireflies.

Wondering what might happen next, Frek, Dad, and Gibby shifted about uneasily, their enormous feet scarring the bumpy carpet of hills. For his part, Wow lay down and began scratching himself through his spacesuit. The thumping of his leg sent tremors rippling across the fields.

Fifteen minutes later, the gold asteroid was completely gone, like a cow-pie dismantled by dung beetles. Immediately thereafter, a jet came whining toward Frek and the others from the city, a plump gold-plated cigar-shaped jet with stubby wings. It did a quick exploratory loop around them. An arched door appeared in its side, and with a quick series of pops, six tiny branecasters appeared with parachutes. The plane sped off; the branecasters floated to the ground and discarded their chutes.

Peering down, Frek could see them milling like excited ants. Unless he was mistaken, these were the same six as before. Sid, Cecily, Batty, Bitty, Chainey, and Jayney, humanoid figures with intense gold auras. Sid ran toward Frek's foot and gave it a series of kicks.

Bam!
The sound traveled though Frek's vast, airy body, echoing off the inner curves of his glassy suit.
Bam, bam, bam!
The final kick triggered a prolonged whistle that slid up the scale into inaudibility.
Fweet!

With the whistle, Frek shrank, his body finally finishing the unyunching process that the Orpolese had halted in mid-stream before. When he reached his old hundred-sixty-centimeter size, his body locked in on it with a
bing.
Fine, but the
bing
was followed by
crash
and
tinkle
—the sounds of Frek's spacesuit popping off him and shattering like a shell of ice, the suit's pieces spinning through the air and melting away.

The air was nice; it smelled of rich soil and grassy meadows. It felt great to be out of the suit. Frek heard three more sets of
bam-fweet-bing-crash-tinkle
sound effects. And then the others were back to normal, too. The four Earthlings faced the same six frowning, selfish branecasters as before.

This time, instead of coarsely painted wall-sized faces, the branecasters were three-dimensional figures, none of them taller than Frek. They were somewhat realistic now, but not entirely so—like caricatures brought to life.

“You ruined the branecasters' picnic!” Batty shrieked. Oh Buddha, thought Frek, that routine again? Batty was dressed like a mental patient, with a white gown that had long, dangling sleeves. His legs and feet were bare. He'd pushed the sleeves back so that his knobby, purplish hands could show. His fingernails were gilded, and he held a gold-handled carving knife.

“You wrecked our park,” hollered Sid, starting right in at a fever-pitch of fury. He was bald, with orange highlights along his thick, twisting lips. Drops of spit flew from his mouth. “You'll have to pay damages! Make us another asteroid!” He wore an old-fashioned black suit with a white shirt and a gray tie. He was sporting a massive gold watch.

“He's actually serious,” said chunky pink-jowled Cecily in her gravelly voice. She was wearing a gray suit as before, livened up by a heavy gold necklace.

“I think it ought to be two more asteroids,” put in thin-lipped plastic Jayney. Her face was as peach-colored and glossy as before. Beneath her pastel blue suit was a creamy blouse with a strict, tight collar. She had thick gold hoops in her ears.

“Get them, Batty,” chirped Bitty, a wild-eyed thin woman dressed in a rumpled red suit. She had a hot red spot on each cheek. Her mouth sparkled, for she had a gold tooth and a massive gold stud in her tongue.

“I'm afraid we may not be able to honor your attempted ransom of Ulla and Bumby,” said gray Chainey, patting his necktie. He pushed back his gold-rimmed glasses with his finger and cleared his throat. Like the others, he had a fine big aura like a bubble of light. It was obvious they'd made good use of their share of the asteroid. “It seems there was an irregularity in—”

Good old Dad broke the set. “You forgot to say thank you,” he snarled, stepping forward and punching Batty so hard in the stomach that the branecaster dropped his knife.

At the same time Wow bit Sid in the leg. Gibby yanked Chainey's legs out from under him and held Batty's knife to the bespectacled branecaster's throat.

“Free our friends,” said Gibby.

“You fool,” said Chainey. “I could decohere you right now.” But in point of fact he looked worried.

“Call off this damned dog before someone gets hurt,” yelled Sid. Wow was up on his hind legs, snarling and snapping near Sid's face. Meanwhile, Bitty had jumped on Dad's back and he'd hurled her into Jayney, sending the two branecaster women to the ground.

Frek strode toward the swinelike Cecily. Was she modeled on a person or a pig? It was hard to be sure. Her ears were triangular flaps, clearly outlined against her gold aura. She took a step back. She actually seemed a little scared of Frek.

“I admit we're acting greedy,” said Cecily, making a placating gesture with stubby arms that ended in pig trotters. She glanced over at Sid. “Don't you think we better play fair, honey? I don't see why we can't spring Ulla/Bumby if that's what it takes to get these thugs out of here. Right, Chainey?”

“And don't forget our elixir,” yelled Gibby, digging the point of the knife right into the skin of Chainey's neck.

“Let him go!” shrieked Jayney, getting back to her feet. “You can have what you want.”

“Now you're talking,” said Gibby, releasing his grip on Chainey.

“Here Wow,” added Frek. “Leave Sid alone.”

“Take them downtown, Chainey,” said Sid, brushing the dog hair off his suit.

“New frame,” said Chainey.

And with no transition at all, Frek, Dad, Gibby, and Wow were standing with Chainey on the steps of the City Hall. The other five branecasters hadn't bothered to come.

The rendering of the town was darker and more realistic than the hills. The steps were coated with grit. Across the street, where the gold had been, the cratered park had repaired itself: lawns, trees, and lake were back in place.

Gibby was feeling through his jacket pockets, going over the contents. “Look at this,” he said, holding out a foamy little rock with an iridescent sheen. “This is one of them pebbles we bumped into before we fell through the branelink. Another souvenir for the kids.” He began looking around the sidewalk for something else small enough to pick up.

Meanwhile figures were coming out of the park and hurrying off down the gray sidewalks. Many of them sported jewelry, and all of them had bright-burnished auras. But nobody was looking over at them; nobody gave a smile or a wave of thanks. A tram clanked past, pushing its way through the stinking, photorealistic cars.

“This will free your Ulla and Bumby,” said bland-faced Chainey, handing Frek a shiny piece of metal with one round end and a sticking-out piece with grooves in it and teeth along one edge. An old-fashioned key. “The cell door's around back.”

“What's the name of this place?” said Frek, taking the key. “And who are all these—people?”

“This is Node G,” said Chainey. “And our people call themselves Hubs. Has to do with the fact that we depend upon each other's attention. A word of advice: don't stay here too long. We're near the end of a cycle—what we call a yuga. We're due for renormalization.” Chainey glanced at his wrist. Like Sid, he had a shiny new gold watch. “I've really got to leave you. Another deal to work out.”

“Hold on,” said Frek. “What about the elixir?”

“As I've told you before, your payment is something you need to take up with your producers,” said Chainey. “Not me. But, I suppose it doesn't hurt to tell you that, in principle, you might be able to find what you want in one of the Exaplex projection rooms.” That would be the movie theater that Frek had seen from the sky while they were falling down.

“How do I get to the Exaplex from here?” demanded Frek. He wasn't exactly sure what Chainey meant by a projection room either, but he'd put that off for now.

Chainey pointed vaguely toward a passing tram. “Theoretically, one of those vehicles could perhaps take you there. Ask Bumby.” This guy was Mr. Helpfulness; he was really putting himself out. “So now I'll be—”

“Wait!” hollered Frek, seizing hold of Chainey's necktie. “There's something else I want to tell you. We don't want to be branecast at all.”

Chainey gave his head an impatient little shake, twitching his necktie free. “Not negotiable. Can't fight progress. Go run after your elixir and don't make any more pathetic impossible demands. Oh, and that reminds me, if you do make it into Earth's projection room, stay clear of the mind worms, or we really
will
decohere you.”

“What?”

“Cheers.”

And then Chainey rotated around some impossible axis and disappeared.

“Let me see that,” said Dad, taking the key from Frek and examining it. “This scene is so, so Y2K. Like Earth a thousand years ago.”

“Yeah,” said Frek. “Kind of like the Skull Farmers game. I was thinking about that game on the way down, you know? I wonder if the Hubs looked into my mind for tips on how to set this world up. Maybe they wanted to make us feel welcome. You
are
seeing what I'm seeing, aren't you, Dad? We both see the key and, like, the knobby spires on this City Hall with statues on the tops?”

Dad nodded. “And you see that tram with the blond Hub woman driving it?”