Frek and the Elixir (46 page)

As Frek drew close to the wall, it melted away.

 

Three men and two women were sitting at an old-style round computing table. One of the men wore a turban. The table was made of computational plastic; its top was a beige disk with a dark hole in its center. A slight waviness in the air above the hole indicated that it was a memory shredder.

Upon the tabletop rested the translucent 3D icons of a planet's worth of animal and plant species and subspecies. Elephants, squid, giraffes, monkeys, banana trees, whales, prickly pear cactuses, house-flies, morel mushrooms, rattlesnakes, swallowtail butterflies, crows, angel fish, sea snails—the whole Noah's ark of Gaia's diversity was ranged in concentric ranks around the table's faintly humming central hole. The NuBioCom workers were herding the icons inward to destruction. As Frek watched, a narrow-beaked platypus icon hit the hole; it shriveled away with a pathetic
queep.

“I feel gleepy doing this,” burst out one of the women at the table. She had an angular face with dark, vivid lips. “We've already deployed the knockout virions. Nothing but NuBioCom-authorized species can reproduce. Why can't we at least hang onto the DNA of the species we're making extinct? Just in case?”

“We've been over this and over this, Karla,” said a man sitting across from her. He had a wide mouth and a shaved head. “As long as any obsolete genomes survive, even in software, there's always the risk of some anti-progress zealot bringing them back. Let's get on with it. We're going to erase them all, we're going to do it now, and we're going to share the responsibility. We five, the heads of the five NuBioCom divisions. If you're going to go environmentalist on us, the company will find someone reliable to head up your unit.”

“No need to get huffy,” said Karla quickly. “I was only asking.” She nudged a little model orchid into the hole and it withered away with a barely audible rustle. Gone for good.

Though the turbaned man beside Karla pretended to be working right along with the others, Frek could see that, whenever possible, he was sneaking an icon into his lap. It was Sri-Sri Krisna, founder of the Crufters!

 

Though it was exciting to see Krisna, Frek well knew that the Crufters would only manage to save a few dozen species. Frek turned his attention from Krisna to a little red-breasted robin icon near the center of table. The robin would be one of the next to go. How to save it? It wasn't as if he could sweep the icons off the tabletop and pocket them. The substance of the past was inalterable.

But it would be enough to
remember
the icons. The icons themselves were the data they represented. It was a standard interface trick. The genome data sets were arranged so as to resemble the plants, animals, and microorganisms they stood for. The robin icon's appearance held all the information needed to generate its DNA.

In other words Frek could save the robin if he could remember exactly how the robin icon looked. First the robin, and then the tapir next to it, and then the raspberry bush and then—how many icons in all? At first Frek had thought there were a few thousand—but in fact the icons grew quite a bit smaller near the outer edges of the table, with more and more of them crowded in. There were millions of them. Impossible.

Someone nudged Frek's elbow just then. Carb, looking like a whipped dog. “Hi,” was all he said. “I see it, too.”

“Don't bother me,” mumbled Frek. He didn't want to think about his geevey no-good father. But now of course he couldn't stop. Carb had told Gov about the Anvil. He'd leaked the Crufter hideout info. He'd tricked Frek into crashing the yunch trip. He'd given his ring to Yessica to help the Unipuskers. He'd—

“I'm sorry!” cried Carb.

“No good,” snapped Frek. “Words don't change what you did.”

“By Buddha, I'll make it all up to you, one way or another,” blustered his father. “Now come on, what can I do to help here?”

“You can't do anything, you loser,” said Frek. “You only make things worse.”

“Talk to me, Frek. Please tell me what's happening.”

The old man was absurd. But he wasn't going away. In exasperation, Frek went ahead and started explaining the problem. Maybe talking would help. “Every one of these icons codes up a genome,” he said. “The most I'd be able to remember would be ten of them or a hundred. But—” He waved his hand across the crowded table. It seemed like the harder he looked, the more tiny figures there were to notice by the rim. Meanwhile, at the table's center, a tiny striped pig bit the dust.
Wheenk!

“Why not make copies of them,” suggested Carb. “Like how we made the gold. We'll kenny craft copies and take them home.”

“Not a bad idea,” admitted Frek after a long pause. “Do you think there's dark matter in the Planck brane?”

“Only one way to find out,” said Carb, holding out his cupped hands.

Sure enough, the Planck brane was loaded with kenner. In a moment, Frek and Carb were each holding a colorless ball of the stuff.

“Let's start copying the icons,” said Frek.

He and Carb hovered right over the table, with their legs harmlessly projecting through the insubstantial heads of the NuBioCom workers. Frek stared down at the little robin on the edge of extinction. Moving his head from side to side, he absorbed every detail of the image and zapped it onto a pinch of his kenner.

“Lemme see,” said Carb, setting down the model he'd just made and looking at Frek's. “You nailed it, kiddo! Every detail in place. Mine didn't come out so good.” Carb's copy of the tapir icon was missing a leg.

“I think the copy has to be exact,” said Frek. “Each little bit of the image probably codes a piece of the genome.”

“Tell you what,” said Carb. “You make the copies. I'll keep the kenner coming and accumulate our stash.”

Frek hovered above the table gathering his strength, studying the table. The tabletop reminded him of one of those round stained glass windows in the old-time cathedrals. A rose window. Each species was a gemlike fragment, each was a spot of color in Gaia's holy wheel of life.

Frek began crafting kennies, eidetically copying the little plant and animal icons one after the other, his mind unbelievably clear and sharp. Some of the icons were bacilli capsules and viral squiggles. Frek considered leaving these out but, after all, the former ecosystem had been a whole, a web delicately tuned by millions of years of evolution. And if he tried starting to make case-by-case decisions he'd never finish. The only option was to preserve it all. He started with the inner, more endangered, species and worked his way out, going faster and faster. All the while Carb was murmuring encouragement, continually feeding him fresh bits of kenner and taking the copies Frek made. From the corner of his eye, Frek could see Carb's long tweaker fingers fitting the pieces together like bits of a three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle.

Time passed, perhaps a lot of it—though who can say how long ten hours or a hundred years might be, played out so far beneath the surface of time's pool? Now and then Frek would pause to craft some food and drink to keep him and Carb going; he lost track of how often. They were getting tired, but they didn't sleep. Frek was afraid that if he slept inside the time pool, he might never wake up. Finally the point came when Frek encoded the last icon—a scorpion—and each and every species on the NuBioCom table had been faithfully preserved.

Frek's father held up the result for Frek to admire. He'd nestled the myriad copies together into a smooth, intricately patterned egg.

The elixir.

“Finally,” exclaimed Gibby when Frek and Carb emerged from the time pool. “You were in there must have been half an hour. Wow and me were startin' to get worried.”

“Where's Zed?” asked Frek, wearily looking around the projection room. For the moment, he and Carb lay sprawled on the floor at the side of the pool, too tired to stand.

The overlaid copies of Li'l Bulb were taffy-pulling time strands through their light beams, and the sinister hyperdimensional mind worms were slowly twitching, the same as before. The rear door of the projection booth was open, and Zed Alef was gone. Wow trotted over to sniff at the elixir egg. Even though it contained millions or billions of the little genome models, the talisman fit in Carb's palm.

“Look at that!” exclaimed Gibby, ignoring Frek's question in his eagerness to examine the egg. “All them little shapes fitted together.” He peered closer. “I've heard of some o' these. A toucan, a daffodil, a guinea hen, a dung beetle—you boys done good! You gonna just plant this in the ground and everything'll come back?”

“Where's Zed?” repeated Frek, unwilling to start thinking about all the steps that lay ahead. Buddha was he beat.

“Oh, he slipped off to take care of something else,” said Gibby. “Says he's the only one watchin' over this whole dang theater. Even asked me if I'd like to be his assistant. No thanks!”

“He told me he was going to try to keep Carb,” said Frek. “I'd like to be out of here before he comes back.” But why was he still worrying about Carb after all his betrayals?

“How would we leave?” said Carb, lying propped up on one elbow at Frek's side. “Zed led us into the Earth theater through a special door that's closed back up. How would we find our way out of here without him?”

“So forget it,” said Frek, flopping down flat on his back.

“You boys need to sleep,” said Gibby. “Wow and me too. I'm right peaked, tell you the truth. Anyhow if Zed or Li'l Bulb or them worms on the ceiling was gonna kill us, seems like they woulda gotten around to it by now. I'd say there ain't no kac-a-brick rush to get outa here. And—before we snooze, Frek, could you kenny craft me some food and some stim cell truffles?”

“Eat food,” echoed Wow.

So Frek thought about nothingness and made a nice lump of kenner, and then he turned the kenner into water and anymeat and stim cells. And then he was really and truly too tired to think of leaving.

The very last thing Frek did was put the elixir egg in his pants pocket.

They slept.

Much later a noise woke Frek, a thump and clatter as of something sliding across the building's roof. The moaning sound of high wind filtered in.

All was still calm in the little room. The overlaid versions of Li'l Bulb were projecting, Frek's companions were asleep, and Zed wasn't around. Frek could feel the reassuring lump of the egg in his pants pocket. Lying quite still, he stared up at the mind worms.

For some reason he was seeing them and Li'l Bulb in a new way. The mind worms' motion trails seemed to persist for longer than before, and he could make out some previously invisible loops of their bodies. It was as if, during his rest, Frek himself had become a little hyperdimensional.

Jiggling his eyes brought more and more of the gray lampreys into focus—revealing something dreadful. Slowly writhing tubes led to Wow, to Gibby, to Carb—and, yes, to Frek. Even though Frek had often felt like he was blocking out the watchers, the branecasters had a mind worm permanently attached to his head.

He slapped his hand against the spot where it seemed the gray tube must plug in. But his fingers felt nothing. The parasitic thought-suckers were hyperspatial; they came in from a direction he couldn't touch or normally see—they were four- or even five-dimensional. The lampreys were like fingers poking down into the centers of gingerbread men.

And now Frek remembered something about a dream he'd just had. The Magic Pig had been grunting to him, talking, telling him that he was going to have a five-dimensional vision for a few minutes when he woke up, the Pig saying Frek would see how the mind worms enslaved humanity. And then the dream Pig had more or less branded two follow-up commands onto Frek's brain: Kill the mind worms, and shoot your way out of the Exaplex. Now?

Looking up at the mind worms, Frek's vision grew yet more inclusive. There weren't just a dozen or a hundred of the sluggishly coiling things. They numbered—Buddha help him—in the billions, each of the lampreys looping off through the fourth and fifth dimensions to plug into one particular person back in the plain brane. Each and every person on Earth had an individual mind worm siphoning off their thoughts. That's what it meant to be a talent race. The Magic Pig was right; Frek should kill the worms.

Kill. The word echoed in Frek's mind, colored by the memory of the Pig's grainy oinks. Kill. Suddenly there was no room for anything but that one thought in Frek's head. Kill. Without even the slightest pause to consider the consequences, Frek went ahead and kenny crafted one, two, three blasters.

The gale outdoors was monstrously shrieking. Things thudded into the Exaplex roof and went scraping and rolling across it.

“Wake up,” said Frek, poking Carb and handing him a blaster. “Kill.” He leaned across to give the third blaster to the Grulloo. “Wake up, Gibby. Kill.”

“Huh?”

One of the gray mind worms turned its dreadful eyeless face toward Frek, exposing concentric circles of teeth and a raspy, flickering tongue.

“Kill!” screamed Frek and fired his blaster. Although they couldn't see the evil worms quite so clearly as Frek, Carb and Gibby had no choice but to fire as well.

The blaster rays were gorgeous—hot white in the center, with auras of red, green, and purple, a different color aura around each beam.

The mind worms charred and blistered, their disk-mouths choiring a shrill screech. But the beams were making no lasting headway; indeed, fresh heads were growing from the mind worms' fast-healing wounds. Frek whirled his blaster around over his head, steadily holding down the firing stud, hoping to sever the snake that led into his brain.

As Frek continued blazing away, his higher-dimensional vision picked up something else. There was a kind of tube running from Carb's ring to Frek's ring. A higher-dimensional tunnel. He should really get rid of the stupid ring. But he might still need it, so he avoided shooting the tube connecting the rings.

After a while, he actually managed to burn his mind worm in two. But a fresh one immediately took its place. Somewhere inside himself Frek heard the Magic Pig's laughter. Without constant sky-air-comb vigilance, Frek continued to be subject to the cursed golden glow.

Wow was barking furiously. Frek was still firing. Clouds of greasy smoke billowed through the room and chunks of burnt, foamy material dropped from the ceiling—which was made of something very much like meat.

“Stop it!” yelled Carb, grabbing Frek's arm. Traitor. He'd quit shooting and so had the Grulloo. “Help me, Gibby,” said Carb.

Carb bear-hugged Frek and Gibby got hold of his legs. But Frek kept his finger pressed down on his blaster, unwilling to stop trying to kill the worms, and especially not wanting to obey his no-good father.

The sweeping blaster beams had blown away large sections of the projection room's walls. And now a crucial supporting section of wall tore in half. The floor lurched and tilted; the time pool sloshed from its basin and streamed onto the theater seats below. Frek hoped the dispersal of the mind worms' pooled history of Earth wouldn't have any odd back-reaction upon humanity's actual reality. But still he continued firing.

His red-tinged blaster beam lit upon Li'l Bulb, or rather, upon the fan of Li'l Bulbs. Li'l Bulb no longer looked like a single creature at all. There were thousands, perhaps even billions of Li'l Bulbs, as many as the mind worms. They responded to the blaster's heat with the same kind of high-pitched shriek. Indeed, with the pond gone, Frek could see that the Li'l Bulbs were a bundle of snakes that ran through the floor, up the rear wall and into the knot of mind worms on the ceiling. The Li'l Bulbs were nothing but a kind of mind worm output unit. Both were components of the great branecaster router-server complex that was the Exaplex.

Lights still blazing, the Li'l Bulbs stretched out their bodies, reaching through the blown-out projection room walls and into the cavernous Earth theater, modulating their screams into an endlessly chorused pair of names.

“Zed Alef! Zed Alef! Zed Alef…”

A deep chuckle rose from below.

With a startled clatter, Wow lost his footing and slid across the slanting projection room floor to bump into Frek's legs. At the same time Carb finally ripped the blaster from Frek's hand. Frek tried to get it back, but it was hard with Gibby wrapped around his legs. The struggling Earthlings staggered across the floor, fetching up against a broken fragment of wall.

Close up, the wall resembled singed flesh with bones sticking out. Yes, the entire Exaplex was a single Planck brane organism. Overhead the mind worms were writhing about the same as before, all signs of damage gone.

The Li'l Bulbs had fallen silent, but their lights shone on, casting multiple shadows across the theater. The floor was bulging up in the middle, and the seats looked pointier than before, like little haystacks. Puddles of time were gathered at the bases of some of them. The domed floor chuckled again. It sounded like Zed Alef.

“You're gollywog, boy,” murmured Gibby into a brief moment of silence. He gave Frek's leg a vengeful squeeze. “Look what you done stirred up.”

Somewhere overhead the largest object yet went crashing across the Exaplex roof. The roaring of the wind grew deeper, more powerful. It would take but one more jolt to snap their tilted platform loose—an unpleasant prospect, as the now-hemispherical theater floor was acting so very weird.

“Let's play it nice and glozy,” Carb whispered to Frek. “You've still got the egg, right? Getting you out of here safe with your elixir is all I care about.” He almost sounded like he meant it. But how many times had he lied before?

Behind the noise of the storm, Frek heard something else. Memories of the Magic Pig's insinuating grunts were playing in his head, telling him to fire his blaster at the theater ceiling.

Carb had the blaster out at arm's length where Frek couldn't reach it. Frek wanted to start wrestling him with all his might, but he was afraid that too rough a motion might send them all tumbling down.

“Give it to me,” said Frek.

“Don't let him, Carb,” hissed Gibby. “No indeedy!”

“I won't,” said Carb.

So Frek lunged for the blaster, and sure enough the floor gave way entirely, sending the four of them tumbling down. It was a soft landing. The theater seats were springy—like big tufts of hair.

“Cooties on me!” said Zed Alef's enormous voice. The theater seats were Zed's pigtails and the floor was the top of his head. The theater walls drew back on every side. The room became a giant stall with Zed standing inside it.

Over to the left, Frek could see one of Zed's enormous arms stretched out, with his hand grown right into the wall's foamy flesh. Frek recalled how Zed's feet always touched the floor. Zed was part of the Exaplex. The mind worms were inputs, the Li'l Bulbs were outputs, and Zed Alef was—the controller. What had he called himself? “The soul of the Exaplex.” Zed's other arm came snaking upward, undulant and boneless, his fingers feeling for the Earthlings.

“Me and the branecasters are changing the game,” boomed Zed. “Being as how you messed up on the rules. You plain braners are here for good. We'll decohere you and siphon off your qubits. Good for our wham.”

The giant hand grabbed for them. Its fingers had branched into smaller fingers that branched two more times again; it seemed like they were everywhere.

Atop Zed's head, Frek and the others were like kids playing hide and seek in a cornfield. They splashed through the puddles of time, each splash sending a thousand images flying. It could have been fun—but it wasn't. Frek was as frightened as he'd ever been.

And he still hadn't gotten his blaster back from Carb! Twice he tried to stop and kenny craft himself a new one, but he couldn't focus, what with Zed's creepy crawly fingers continually after him.

And then all at once Frek was nabbed. A wad of baby-sized sub-subfingers was clamped around his neck, and another bunch of the fingers took hold of his waistband. But Zed hadn't reckoned with faithful Wow, who snarled and bit, over and over, till Zed had released the boy.

“Here,” said Carb, appearing around a hair stack to finally return Frek's gun.

“Shoot the ceiling!” roared Frek, firing straight up just like the Magic Pig had told him. Carb and Gibby let fly, their beams hot white, with green and purple auras, focused upward on the same spot as Frek's.

The result was smoke, fire, a hail of singed scraps of meat, a whistle—and a sharp, cold current of air. And then, with a sound like the end of the world, the gale caught hold of the punctured roof and pulled the whole thing to pieces. Gibby linked arms with Frek and Carb, who used their free hands to grab hold of Wow. The storm whirled in, furiously snatching them up into the sky.

Sharp spatters of rain stung Frek's cheeks. The air was acrid. Parts of Node G were in flames, tinging the smoke with an orange glow. On Earth it might have been morning by now, but here it was still night. Frek had the feeling that it might stay dark here for many days to come.

Below them was the congeries they'd called the Exaplex, lit by its own dancing bulbs of light and by some burning rubble nearby. It was nothing like a movie theater anymore. The illusions had fallen away, and he could see it as it really was: a vile mound of interlinked mind worms and Li'l Bulbs arcing off in bundles toward eldritch vanishing points. The worms led to talent race brains, the Li'l Bulbs to subscribers' flickerballs. Time pool data bases glinted amidst the evil, writhing mass. And there, humped up like a tumor, was the wobbly dark controller organ who'd worn the face of Zed Alef. The Exaplex was a huge organism controlled by Zed Alef. Zed and the Exaplex were the brain and body of branecasting.