Frek and the Elixir (6 page)

An instant later, Zhak and PhiPhi came charging into Frek's room. The cuttlefish scooted awkwardly backward toward the Anvil, but Zhak caught hold of him. Zhak had a transparent glove on his hand, and as soon as he'd grabbed the space cuttlefish, the glove turned itself inside out and sealed the cosmic emissary in a clear bag. The alien was squealing and flailing about. He no longer sounded at all human. He bit his way out of the bag almost right away, using a large beak that had been hidden down in his tentacles. PhiPhi drew a light sword and carved the cuttlefish into five pieces. The pieces flopped around wildly and continued to scream, each piece screaming in a slightly different voice.

News reports of the ongoing struggle were on the house tree walls; it was an emergency wake-up bulletin about the invasion, narrated by Suzy Q. Frek could hardly believe Suzy Q was talking about his room and broadcasting a realtime picture of him in his pajamas.

PhiPhi and Zhak took the five bagged pieces of the cuttlefish outside, with Frek and his family tagging along. Down in the yard, two of the writhing chunks of mollusk flesh burst their bags and tried to crawl away. More counselors arrived and caught them.

A crowd of curious Middleville locals was gathering, Stoo Steiner and his parents among them. Alerted by their house trees and borne on angelwings, people were dropping from the sky like ripe fruit. They seemed anxious, even vengeful. With their biome so pruned-down, Nubbies had a deep-seated fear of new species. What if the alien cuttlefish were to breed explosively and run amok?

“Burn the invader!” shouted Kolder Steiner. “I brought alcohol,” he added, rushing up to PhiPhi. He was carrying two seedpods filled with liquid. “You have to burn that thing fast. Every bit of its tissues. I know all about biohazard. I'm a genomicist. There's no substitute for immediate incineration.”

“Burn the sport!” chimed in the other onlookers. “Burn it now!”

“Yes,” said PhiPhi, after listening down into her Gov-linked uvvy. She and Zhak quickly started a fire with a pile of alcohol-soaked mapine sticks and leaves. The mapine wood was rich with a sticky pitch that burned exceedingly well. The neighbors stoked the blaze, tearing off branches from all the nearby trees they could reach, and once the fire was roaring, the counselors hurled in the pieces of the space cuttlefish. The tentacled globs continued to writhe and scream even as the flames ate them away.

Sao was leaning tight against Kolder, with her head thrown back against his neck. “Burn,” she crooned, arching her body and glancing around to make sure people were looking at her. “Buuuuuuurn.” The firelight flickered across Kolder's hard face, all angles and crags. Seeing Frek, he glared.

Kolder wasn't the only one looking mean. Most of the neighbors were blaming Frek for the creature from the Anvil. Mom stuck close to Frek, ready to defend him. His sisters were right next to him, too.

Two of the counselors got the Anvil from under Frek's bed and lugged it outside. It looked almost like a meteorite: a shiny, bumpy purplish rock, a disk with dimples on the top and bottom. The triangular door was gone. The Anvil sat there by the fire, glinting in the light. The cuttlefish's screaming had stopped; the flames were guttering down.

“Did the octopus try to bite you?” asked Geneva.

“He was starting to talk to me,” said Frek. “He was friendly. He was a cuttlefish, not an octopus. I wish they hadn't killed him so fast.”

“Did he tell you his name?” asked Ida.

“He only said one thing,” said Frek. “He said I'm going to save our world.”

“You?” said Geneva.

“From what?” asked Ida.

Just then Zhak came over and took hold of Frek's arm. “We must take you to our service center,” he said. “It requires a full debriefing.”

“Frek hasn't done anything,” cried Mom. “It's your fault you didn't find that monster this afternoon. My poor son could have been killed.”

“This is not negotiable,” said Zhak. More counselors were at his side. “Come, Frek.”

Lora Huggins threw her arms around Frek; it took three big counselors to pry her away. Zhak dragged Frek to the pod of his lifter beetle. Geneva and Ida wailed for help, but none of the Nubbies raised a hand to save Frek.

As the counselors pushed Frek into the pod, he noticed that the yellow peeker uvvy was gone from Zhak's belt. And then he felt something settle onto his neck. The peeker had crawled up from behind his seat.

Frek tried to reach back and claw the thing off him, but Zhak held down his hands. As the lifter beetle carried them into the sky, the tendrils dug deep into Frek's brain.

The next few hours were odd, like watching a toon show. Frek kept hearing a boy's voice, slow and shy and hesitant. Sometimes he'd feel his throat vibrating in synch with the voice and he'd remember that it was him talking.

He and Zhak were in a room at the counselors' service center, which was a large house tree in a deserted area outside of town. Nobody much was there; the service center was mainly for housing specialized, seldom-used kritters. Also it was a spot to interrogate someone out of the public view.

A being was in Frek's head asking him questions. Gov. Now Gov looked like a First Nations raven mask instead of like an eagle. He was red and black and white with a clacking beak a meter long. Gov didn't actually say his questions out loud. Instead he bobbed his head forward and pecked the answers right out of Frek's brain. Frek had a dim, sick feeling that the pecks were damaging him.

He told Gov everything. About seeing the Anvil in the morning and about how it had hidden itself behind some kind of space lens in the afternoon. About the please plant seed that had looked a little like a squid, and where he'd planted it. About what the space cuttlefish had said. You're the one. You'll save the world.

The raven kept pecking and a sad boy's voice talked on and on.

The pecking might have killed Frek then and there, but his mind possessed some hard kernel that the beak wasn't able to break. It seemed Frek's consciousness held a deep-buried core that could heal itself from the peeker's wounds, an inner seed to regrow his personality. But by the end, the seed was very dented and small.

Then Frek was up in the air with Zhak again. It was morning. Zhak had the window of the lifter pod open; the wind was blowing in at them. Gov wasn't in Frek's head anymore.

“Okay now?” said Zhak.

Frek didn't answer. He felt the wind and listened to the buzz of the lifter beetle. He saw trees below. His house tree. The beetle landed. Frek's legs weren't working right. He fell down on the ground, onto his own yard's grass. It was so wonderful to be back home that he was crying. PhiPhi and Zhak dragged him to his door, then flew off in the lifter beetle right away. They were done here.

 

Frek spent the next few days in bed, hobbling over to the toilet in the wall when he needed to. Mom, Geneva, and especially Ida came in to visit him, solemnly sitting on a chair by his bed. Sometimes Mom would bring up the yellowish little family statue of the Buddha and hold hands with Frek and pray.

Mom kept telling Frek he'd get better soon. Even though he still hadn't started talking. At first he didn't remember how to talk, and then he didn't want to, and then he was scared to try. If he tried to talk and he couldn't, he'd get a med leech or even the Three R's. Nobody was allowed to be handicapped anymore. They fixed you, no matter what. On the highest shelf of his room perched the watchbird, observing him.

Another health issue was that Frek was having trouble remembering what he was doing, much more so than ever before. It was tricky, for instance, to fetch a mug of water from the tap in his wall. After he filled the mug, he'd maybe notice something else in his room, and when he got back to his bed, he wouldn't be holding the mug anymore. And then he'd have to search all over the room to find it, repeatedly forgetting what he was looking for, but all the while anxiously aware that he
was
looking for something. Finally he'd spot the mug of water—on a shelf or a chair or sitting on the floor—the mug kind of sneering at him, it was a reddish-brown thing from a please plant, with a face on it like a monkey. Can't catch me, the mug would seem to say. Imagining the voice of the mug would make Frek think of the pecking of the raven and the slow halting droning of that tormented boy's voice. Things were bad.

Late one afternoon, Ida got bored while she was visiting with him and put the Goob Dolls on his walls.

“There he is,” said Goob Doll Judy, staring down at Frek from the wall skin. As always, she had long, skinny arms and legs, lively ponytails, and hazel eyes like saucers. Two of Judy's Goob Doll friends were with her: Tawni and LingLing. When they moved, pixie dust showered off them, red yellow blue. They were in the Goob Doll House, a place of cheerful colored trapezoid walls and sketchy cartoon furniture.

“Frek Huggins,” echoed LingLing. She was the brainy one of the Goob Dolls; she wore those old seeing-things on her face. Glasses. “Are you being nice to him, Ida?”

“Yes,” said Ida. “We think maybe the peeker uvvy broke him.”

“What's broken gets fixed,” said Tawni, nodding her head. She wore her hair in a high, round bun that bounced as she moved.

Frek shook his head no.

“He doesn't want to be fixed,” said Ida. “He wants to be well. How can he get better?”

“I'll look it up for you, Ida,” said Goob Doll Judy. She gestured at a stylized shelf of books behind her and one of the books hopped to the floor and became a cheerful little facilitator toon with a white mustache and a bald head.

“Peeker exposure of more zan five minutes iss known to cause trauma to the hippocampus, parietal lobe, and structures of the corpus callosum,” said the facilitator toon in a thick European accent, pacing back and forth as he talked. “Treatment? Vhy not ze Three R's! Ja, ja!” He did a quick, elbow-waggling dance-step with Tawni, then raised his finger for attention.

“Three R's iss the physical rrremoval, rrrecycling, and rrreplacement of damaged cortical structures,” continued the toon. “Vatch!” He drew an imaginary line around the hairless cap of his head. The top of his skull swung open like it was on a hinge. His brain popped out, dropped into a jar of liquid, dissolved, regrew itself, and hopped back into his head. The toon's skull flipped closed with a little clanking sound. The facilitator rolled his eyes and wriggled with delight.

And then he shoved his face forward, filling up half the wall. “Time iss of the essence!” he warned. “Ja, some healing of peeker damage may occur spontaneously after the cerebral insult. But, should lesions remain at six days, the Three R's is strongly, strongly rrrecommended, lest morbidity set in. Never fear, Three R's is a vell-tested procedure vith an exceedingly high zuccess rate!” He flipped his skull top open and closed one more time. The hinge on the lid squeaked, and when it flopped shut it made that little clank. The toon did a final pirouette and turned back into a book. The tome thudded to the Goob Doll House floor, sent out a puff of dust, rebounded into the air, and slid back into the flat wall-pattern that represented a bookshelf.

Frek gathered his courage and finally tried to speak. For a full minute he couldn't get his tongue to respond. But then finally it did. “How many days?” he asked Ida. His voice slid up on the last word.

“You can talk!” exclaimed Ida.

“How many days since I got sick?”

“I don't know,” said Ida. “Are you well now?”

“I have to be,” said Frek. “I have to.” He got out of bed and walked to his closet to get some clothes, but when he got to the closet he'd forgotten what he was looking for. “Kac,” he muttered. He knew he had to be well or they'd kill his brain—he wasn't going to forget that—but what did he need from his closet? He looked up and down until he saw rumpled pants and shirts on the floor and remembered.

“What's wrong?” asked Ida.

Frek started to tell her about his short-term memory problem, then stopped himself. The house tree and the watchbird would overhear and tell the counselors, and they'd use it as an excuse for the Three R's. Gov was probably looking for a reason to do something else to him. Frek had the feeling that Gov and the counselors hated him. And he hated them back. It felt bad. He'd never hated anyone before. He'd been mad at Carb for leaving, but he'd never hated him. And the way things were going, Frek was beginning to see why Dad had gone. Gov had peeked Dad too, and Dad had never let on how really horrible it had been. No wonder he'd been a little out of it after that. Maybe he'd been right to leave Earth. But surely, if Carb had tried harder, he could have brought Mom and the kids along. At the tail end of this long train of thought was Ida, standing there looking at him, waiting for the answer to her question.

“Nothing's wrong,” said Frek, forcing a smile. “I'm fine. I'm all better, Ida. Thanks for coming to sit with me so much.” Grimly he clutched some sturdy blue turmite-silk pants in one hand, a yellow T-shirt in the other. Get these on and then some leather shoes. Shoes, shoes, shoes. But first the—pants. “Stop watching me, Ida. You're making me nervous. Get out of here and let me dress.”

“Mom,” yelled Ida, running downstairs. “Frek can talk!”

A bit later Frek and his mother were sitting alone in the kitchen, the Buddha looking warm and friendly on his shelf on the wall. They'd had an early supper—though now Frek wasn't sure what they'd eaten—and then Mom had sent Wow and the girls over to Amparo's to play. “Call the counselors and tell them not to come,” said Frek. “I'm all better now. I don't need help. I don't want the Three R's.” He kept thinking about the squeak and clank of the lid on the top of that little facilitator toon's head.

“The counselors,” said Mom with a heavy sigh. “They'll want to test you anyway. They've been coming around every day. They carried that Anvil thing off. They can't get it open. They don't trust you at all. Oh, Frek, if only you'd told them about the Anvil as soon as you saw it.”