Frek and the Elixir (5 page)

It was cozy in the kitchen. Their little yellow-white marble statue of the Buddha looked friendly up the wall shelf. Seeing the Buddha always made Frek feel safe and good. Mom and Frek's sisters were eating grobread and anymeat with carrot sticks and sliced tomatoes from their garden. “Help yourself,” said Mom, nodding to the kitchen counter. “But don't let that dirty little watchbird kac on anything.”

The grobread and anymeat loaves were there with the knife. Frek had thought he was too worried to eat, but when he saw the food he changed his mind. He sliced off a piece of the puffy white grobread, enjoying, as always, the way the new-cut surface of the remaining loaf immediately started plumping itself up, growing the loaf back to its original size. The surface puffed up like foam. But somehow the new-cut slice in his hand knew not to grow. Frek had experimented with this a few times: slicing the grobread loaf first from one side and then from the other, making a whole lot of slices in a row, or cutting the whole loaf exactly in half. But it was always just one of the grobread pieces that would renew itself, and this always seemed to be a piece that you weren't biting into.

Slicing off a piece of anymeat wasn't so dramatic; the smooth pink loaf of anymeat renewed itself at a slower pace than the grobread. He took a tomato and some carrot sticks and sat down with the others. The watchbird sat on the back of his chair.

“What does it mean for you and Daddy to be unwebbed?” Ida was asking Mom just then. The girls had heard the conversation with the counselors, too.

Mom didn't answer right away, preferring to busy herself with pouring them mugs of tree-juice from a pitcher she'd filled.

“It means they're not married anymore,” put in Geneva. “And that Carb's never coming back.”

“That makes me feel sad,” said Ida in a low voice. “I hardly remember him at all anymore.”

“Maybe we'll see him again when we get big,” said Geneva.

“Don't count on it,” said Mom, setting down the pitcher with a clack.

“I could go visit him,” said Ida quietly. “Just to say hello.”

Lora Huggins started to say something more, then stopped herself. She reached over and patted Ida's head. “Of course you can, Ida. And maybe one of these days you will. It would be nice of you. I'm sure Daddy misses you.”

“If he misses us, how come he never gets in touch?” asked Frek. That was the thing that really rankled him. Carb's continued silence. If he'd been off on a secret mission of some kind, working to save the Earth, well, that would have been one thing. But it seemed like he'd just found an easy way to save his own neck. Probably he was flirting with other women, and maybe even starting a new family. Didn't he care about his kids at all?

“Dad would call us if he could,” said Geneva loyally. She was the one who remembered Carb the best. She'd been his favorite. “But Crufters don't have uvvies,” she added, as if Frek and Ida were complete gurps. “They don't use any newbio at all.”

“Except for the rockworms that hollow out their asteroids for them,” said Mom a little harshly. “And the oxymold that makes their air. And the space bugs they use to get around. It's all pretty bogus, if you want my opinion. The Crufters think they can pick and choose, but in the end their world's as compromised as ours. I'm afraid Frek's right, Geneva. If Carb tried hard enough, he could find a way to send a message. But probably his new girlfriend doesn't want him to.”

“How do you know he has a new girlfriend?” asked Geneva.

“He was talking to her on the web before he left,” said Mom. “I didn't want to tell you before. A woman called Yessica Sunshine. What a stupid name.”

“What is the Anvil anyway?” interrupted Ida, maybe to change the subject. “Is it going to hurt us?”

“I doubt if there's anything to it at all,” said Mom. “Gov is pretty paranoid. He put a watchbird on Linz Martinez last year just because Linz was hiking around counting trees for a teaching project.” Linz was a fellow facilitator who'd been spending a lot of time with Lora.

“Liiiinz,” sang Ida, sweetening her voice. She liked to tease Mom about having a boyfriend. “Linz and Mommy under the tree. K - I - S - S - I - N - G.” Geneva joined in and they sang it again.

Lora Huggins smiled and shook her finger at her daughters. Then she changed the subject. “Frek,” she said, “I noticed your bag of please plant seeds in the yard. Could you either feed them to the tree or fly them out to the woods? I told you I don't want them growing in our yard. Why not get away from all this foolishness about the Anvil and have some fun with your new wings.”

“Yes,” said Frek, remembering his plan to plant the seeds up near the Giant's Marbles. “I'd like that.” But right then of course he had to knock over his half full mug of tree-juice.

“Every meal, Frek?” said Mom a little impatiently.

“I'm sorry,” said Frek, and got the cleaner tongue from its pouch in the wall. The tongue was glad to wipe the table off, for the tree-juice was sweet and sticky. When Frek had finished with the tabletop, he noticed that the juice had dripped down to the floor. He knelt down there with the cleaner tongue, and when he was finished his eyes felt hot and achey.

“Frek's crying,” said Geneva.

“Am not!” he shouted. “Nosy brat!” He stamped across his kitchen and shoved the cleaner tongue in its pouch.

“Poor Frek,” said Mom. She got up and put her arm around the shoulders. “I'm sorry I snapped at you. It's upsetting having the counselors snooping around, isn't it? And all this talk about Carb.”

“It's not just that,” said Frek, turning away from his sisters so they wouldn't see him dry his eyes. “Sao Steiner said I'm so clumsy that I should get special meds. She said you should take me to a tweaker.”

“That dumb grinskin!” exclaimed Mom. “Meds are all she thinks about. Meds and clothes. Maybe I'd be that way too if I had to live with Kolder. Have you ever seen that man smile, Frek? Even once?”

“No,” said Frek, feeling a little better. “You don't think there's anything wrong with me? You don't think I need a tweaker?”

“What?” said Mom. “Dumb you down with a med leech? Of course not. You're fine, Frek. You spill things and knock things over, and sometimes it's annoying. But so what? It'll be a cold day in hell when I let one of Gov's tweakers put a med leech on my smart son. Don't even think about it.” Mom held Frek out at arm's length and smiled at him. “Go sow your please plant seeds. Have some fun. Just remember not to fly near the Grulloo Woods.”

So Frek got his angelwings back out and flew to Lookout Mountain, with the watchbird whirring along in his wake. On the way, he uvvied Stoo to ask if he wanted to come, but Stoo said his mother wouldn't let him. They talked for a few minutes. Stoo was eager to hear what the counselors had said to Frek about the Anvil, not that, come to think of it, they'd really said much. Stoo was impressed that the counselors had grown their own field quarters, and that Gov had put his eagle toon on its wall skin. He started to ask Frek to stop over on his way back home, but Sao in the background shouted no. Evidently she'd starting thinking of Frek as a bad influence.

Grinskin, thought Frek.

It was a lovely day, the sky clear blue with creampuffs of cloud. The rocky little Lookout Mountain rose about three hundred meters above Middleville, with the Giant's Marbles halfway up. To make his flight more exciting, Frek spiraled straight up until he was even with the patch of boulders before heading across to it. It was incredible to be so high in the air, and just a little scary.

Frek glanced at the heads of his angelwings, sticking out from beneath his armpits. At first it seemed like you couldn't read much of an expression off an angelwing, as they had compound eyes: smoothly curved reddish-gray mosaics of lenses. But once you got to know an angelwing, you could read its mood from the motions of its mouth-parts in particular. Frek's angelwings had their jaws wide open to the air, and they were rocking their heads from side to side. They were loving it up here.

The beady-eyed little watchbird was laboring along just off Frek's starboard wingtip. It made Frek feel sort of important to have Gov watching him. But also a little worried. Probably he should have told the counselors about the thing under his bed. It might well be the Anvil. If it was really from another world, then maybe it had a way of making itself hard to see. The counselors would do something awful to him if they found out he'd lied. They'd call him a sociopath, or worse. But who wanted to be on the side of those bossy gurps? And maybe, just maybe, the Anvil held a message from his father.

The sunny air washed away Frek's worries for a time. He landed atop the biggest boulder in the Giant's Marbles, spotted a likely spot on the bank of the stream at the edge of the clearing, buzzed over there, and temporarily took off his angelwings. The wings crawled down to the edge of the stream to drink water, and Frek pulled up a few wild carrots for them to gnaw on. The watchbird perched on the branch of a low anyfruit tree, overseeing the goings-on.

The plants out here weren't any more diverse than the plants in town. Besides the generic grass and the ground-covering bindmoss, Frek could see roseplusplus bushes, scrubby anyfruit trees, please plant bushes, yams, tomato vines, carrots, bean bushes, stalks of rice, and clumps of chard. House trees tended not to grow outside of the towns; they needed special watering and fertilizer-pollen to get off to a good start.

Frek used an anyfruit stick to poke a bunch of holes into the mossy mud along the edge of the stream, and one by one he planted all the seeds in his bag. It took awhile. Again he noticed that one funny-looking seed he'd found near the bed, the one with all the legs. Might it have something to do with the Anvil? Not wanting to excite the watchbird by staring at the special seed for too long, he planted it in the ground like the others.

The seed came to life; it wriggled out of sight. A munching sound filtered up through the shaking earth. A little circle of soil collapsed. The watchbird chirped; it was taking all of this in. The ground vibrated beneath Frek's feet. Accompanied by a high-pitched burrowing sound, a line of disturbance etched its way across the hill. Bushes trembled, boulders gently shifted, the ground was dented with the ghost of a trench. What had Frek unleashed?

It was getting on toward evening when he got home. After supper, Frek's family watched some toons. Suzy Q the statewide newstoon presented a brief item about the counselors standing guard over the Huggins house in case the mysterious “Anvil” from space were to turn up. It was quite unusual for Suzy Q to mention Middleville at all. Some friends uvvied Mom right away to talk about it. At least the news didn't say anything about Frek's weird seed. He listened to Mom talking for a while, and then he went up to his room and played with his Merry Mollusk toons.

His customized cuttlefish was like a squid, but with a fatter body. Just like a squid, a cuttlefish had a bullet-shaped “mantle” covering the rear of its body, with its head and arms and tentacles sticking out of the mantle's open end. And, like a squid, a cuttlefish had eight short arms and two long tentacles, all of them with suckers. When they were just floating around, the Merry Mollusk cuttlefish had a demure way of bunching their arms together to make a pointed cone beneath their large, yellowish eyes. Frek found the cuttlefish cute, even though their pupils were shaped like the letter W. He was teaching his cuttlefish toon to stretch out one arm to shake hands.

But it was a little hard to focus on his Merry Mollusk tonight. All he could really think about was the Anvil. And the faintly etched line across the hillside at Giant's Marbles. Of course with the house tree and the watchbird spying on him, he couldn't go poking around under his bed again. He did allow himself one quick glance, and spotted the same warped-looking blank region near the wall. When he went to bed, he lay about half an hour in the dark waiting for something to happen. And then he fell asleep.

Frek's dreams were so strange that when the noise woke him he wasn't sure he was really awake. He'd been dreaming about his father, Dad talking to him and intensely nodding his Mohawk-crested head, and then he'd dreamed about a spiky glowing shape floating in the air with a smiling girl his age inside it, and then about his Merry Mollusk cuttlefish jabbering really fast, and then about a yellow peeker uvvy worming its feelers into his head.

Here came the noise again, a twitter as of some animal. Frek listened with all his might. The house was dead silent. Another chirp came, followed by a hiss. Yellow light spread across Frek's floor. Light from underneath his bed. Frek leaned over and, yes, the purple thing he'd seen that morning was visible again. He knew now that it was the Anvil.

The Anvil was disk-shaped, like a big red blood cell, except it was purple. It was tipped up so that the flattish top faced Frek's way. A bright triangle of yellow-orange light glowed in the top's dimpled center. The triangle was a door with a thing coming out: a tiny form dark against the light, growing bigger, moving forward, its shape coming clear as it approached. It was a flattish lump with a cluster of arms or legs sticking out the front end. It had two shining eyes. Frek wasn't scared. Surely the Anvil's passenger was his friend. It had come all this way just to see him.

The watchbird started squawking. The house tree turned the room lights on. Already the counselors in the yard were hollering. There wasn't much time.

The shape beneath Frek's bed had grown into the form of—a cuttlefish, just as if it had read Frek's mind. The cuttlefish gazed up at Frek with large, kind, wise eyes. The eyes were a pleasant shade of gold, with dark, wiggly pupils. The cuttlefish's flesh was shaded in tints of green. “You're the one,” said the cuttlefish in a low voice. “You'll save the world.” The voice sounded human, manly, comforting. The cuttlefish stretched out one of his short sucker-arms and twined it around Frek's hand, just like Frek had been teaching his toon to do. The creature's touch was smooth and warm and—tingly.