Frek and the Elixir

Carb's description of a portal between worlds in Chapter 10 was adapted from the “Apotheosis” section of Joseph Campbell's classic
The Hero with a Thousand Faces.
Campbell himself got the quote from J. Takakusu, translator,
The Amitayur-Dhyana Sutra,
Sacred Books of the East, Vol. 49 (Oxford University Press, 1894).

Writing notes and further background information about
Frek and the Elixir
can be found at
www.rudyrucker.com/frek
, the book's Web site.

Part 1 The Departure

One Middleville, 3003

Two The Thing Under Frek's Bed

Three In the Grulloo Woods

Four Stun City

Five Professor Bumby

Six Yunch!

Part 2 The Elixir

Seven Renata

Eight Unipusk

Nine The Spaceport Bar

Ten Orpoly

Eleven The Exaplex

Part 3 Earth's Fate

Twelve All Hell Breaks Loose

Thirteen The Revolution

Fourteen The Shuggoths

Fifteen The Toons

Glossary

“Your room is a mess,” said Lora Huggins, standing in her son's doorway. “A dog den. You're not going anywhere until it's straightened up. Poor Snaffle doesn't know where to begin.” Indeed, Snaffle had stopped short at her side.

Snaffle was a suckapillar, a bioengineered cleaner creature like an oversize green caterpillar, not that there were any normal-size caterpillars anymore. Snaffle had powerful lungs and a conical lemon-yellow mouth. The suckapillar's little stalk-eyes twitched as the dim-witted beast tried to form a plan for vacuuming Frek's room without swallowing anything valuable.

Frek Huggins sighed and finished pulling on his soft leather shoe. “My room's not a mess,” he said. “I know exactly where everything is. Snaffle's too stupid to understand. I have more important stuff to do, Mom.” Like dreaming about being a toonsmith.

Frek had a vivid imagination; his friends listened spellbound to the stories he liked to invent. Well, that wasn't quite true. It was more that he could get his acquaintances to listen to him for quite a while before they'd eventually cut him off with a remark like, “That's kac, Frek.” Maybe if he still had a father at home it would be easier to talk to people. Nothing had felt quite right since Dad left, just about a year ago now.

“Get to work,” said Frek's mother. “I mean it.” She started back down the corridor that curved toward big sister Geneva's room, over on the other side of their house tree. Geneva's room would be easy to clean. Her things were always lined up and orderly. “Come on, Snaffle,” called Mom. “You don't have to clean Frek's room yet.” The low-slung suckapillar let out a sigh, and undulated off, her legs rising and falling. Thanks to the gene-tweaks, each of her twenty-six stubby feet bore a different letter. Years ago, Snaffle had helped Frek learn the alphabet.

Frek stood up and looked out his roundish window at the sunny Saturday morning. It was a fine day in May. His room was halfway up their house tree. He had a good view of their yard, and of the neighbors' house trees and yards.

Right below Frek's window, his dog, Wow, was sleeping on the uniformly green grass in a patch of sun. Next to Wow were Mom's identically lush roseplusplus bushes, dense with blooms of every shape and color, and thornless of course. Beyond the roseplusplusses was the family vegetable garden with its super-high-yielding scions of the six canonical vegetables: yam, tomato, carrot, chard, rice, and red beans.

Between the Hugginses' garden and their garage was the elaborately filigreed mud mound where their turmite colony lived. The turmites ate organic trash and wove things. Cloth, paper, wallboard—whatever you needed, the turmites could make it from, say, a pile of dead leaves.

The garage was a dome of something like waxy brown cardboard. The turmites had put it up over the course of one frenzied afternoon. The Huggins family's angelwings lived in the garage. If Frek leaned far out of his window and listened, he could hear the angelwings softly buzzing. He'd gotten his own pair just last week—for his twelfth birthday. It made his heart beat faster to think about it. With his angelwings on his back, he could fly like a mosquito.

Frek was tempted to forget about cleaning his room, to hop out his window, clamber down the tree, and buzz on over to Stoo Steiner's house. Stoo would be playing with goggy killtoons, drinking soda, and eating greasy yam chips as usual. Stoo's mother, Sao Steiner, never made him do housework. But of course Sao didn't have a hard job like Lora Huggins did. Mom was a knowledge facilitator; that is, she gave music lessons. Some people still liked to play real instruments, others preferred pretend instruments like air guitar, gesture trumpet, invisible drums, and so on. Music urls could turn people's gestures into sounds, but they still had to know the right moves, and Lora was good at teaching them. She worked all week giving music lessons in person—and Saturdays the kids helped her clean house. No ifs, ands, or buts.

Frek sighed and looked around his messy, curvy room. Where to begin? A bunch of his clothes lay near the foot of his bed. It was hard to think what he should do with the clothes. Rather than bothering to distinguish one piece of clothing from the next, Frek kicked at the garments until they were in a mound, and then he picked up the mound and stuffed it into his closet. The floor of his room was still covered.

Frek looked at all the scattered glypher slugs he'd brought home from school this week. School. Some kids stayed home and learned from knowledge facilitator toons instead of going to school. Mostly what you did at school was watch the same facilitator toons anyway. Frek felt like he would have liked home schooling. Frek had remarkably intense powers of concentration, and he could learn just about anything faster than the other kids. So why sit around waiting until even the gurps got the picture?

But Lora Huggins insisted that her children go to a real, everyone-in-the-same-room kind of school. “Think school of fish,” she'd tell Frek when he asked why he couldn't stay home.
“School,”
Mom would repeat, waggling her two hands like a pair of trout swimming near each other. “Don't grow up antisocial like your father. Society is a herd, Frek, a flock.”

Carb Huggins had tried fighting the way things were on Earth, and in return the government had done some nasty things to him, like using a peeker uvvy to search for rebel secrets in his brain. Gov might have eventually killed Carb, but he'd managed to ride a space bug out to a Crufter asteroid called Sick Hindu. He hadn't asked his family if they wanted to come along—he'd just gone. They hadn't heard anything at all from him since he left, which seemed pretty crummy. And there'd been some kind of mishap on Sick Hindu last week. Carb was a source of worry.

On the plus side, Dad was tough. He had a muscular body and a hard, angular face. He dressed like a gaussy old-time punk, complete with a Mohawk hairdo and moving tattoos on the sides of his head. Whenever anybody gave any trouble to Lora or the kids, Dad used to get right in their face about it—before Gov peeked him. After that he'd been a little vague sometimes. And then he'd deserted his family. No, Frek didn't want to grow up like his father. It was better to grin and bear it, to be a good Nubbie and go to school.

The thing was, although school was about learning to get along with people face to face, Frek wasn't very good at it. He was never on the same wavelength as the other kids, and the knowledge facilitators didn't like him because he didn't pay enough attention to their silly rules.

The glypher slugs were the perfect symbol of the goody-goody, make-work kac that facilitators liked for you to do. Every time Frek came home and unfastened his school satchel, more of the nagging glyphers slithered out, their skins aflicker with symbols. The glyphers contained permission forms and graded tests for Mom to view, requests for her to volunteer, and announcements of school events she should attend in person or at least watch on their house tree's wall skins.

Frek got busy picking up the slugs. To make his work more bearable, Frek groaned as if he were a very old man with a bad back, letting out a sharp little yelp each time he bent over all the way.

When he had all the glyphers in one hand, he recklessly stuffed them into the soft toilet that bulged out of his wall. The facilitators might yell at him on Monday, but today was Saturday. Forget school! The toilet swallowed the slugs right down, just as if they were stinky kac. The toilet bowl was part of the tree. Not only did the house tree absorb waste, it provided sparkling pure water that it got from the rain, the ground, and its own photosynthetic reactions. A fine example of Nature's alchemy as improved upon by a NuBioCom kritter.

Down the hall, Mom had herded the suckapillar out of Geneva's room and into Ida's. Geneva was Frek's big sister and Ida was his little sister. Ida's room was even messier than Frek's. All of a sudden, Snaffle's wheezy inhales changed to sharp coughs. The suckapillar had inhaled one of Ida's umpty-zillion wooden building blocks. “Ida!” called Mom. “Ida, come up here.”

The only answer was the chatter of the toons on the walls of the family room. Geneva and Ida were playing with some toons that Frek didn't like. Normally he'd look at any kind of toon at all, especially on Saturday morning, but he drew the line at the Goob Dolls. The Goob Dolls were most definitely evolved to please people like Frek's sisters and not people like Frek.

Some Saturdays Frek would fight with Geneva and Ida to try and keep them from watching the Goob Dolls, who always debuted their latest skits and situations at the same time as that funny Vietnamese toon about Da Nha Duc and his nephews Huy, Lui, and Duy. Of course Frek could have watched any show he liked on the walls of his own room. But that would be giving in. Controlling which toons were shown in the big, comfy den downstairs was an important power game among the three Huggins kids.

Today, however, Frek wasn't going to bother arguing with his sisters. As soon as he could get out of here, he was going over to Stoo Steiner's to play with Stoo's new Skull Farmers killtoons, the latest creation of the Stun City Toonsmithy. Frek was itching to mix it up with the Skull Farmers. Maybe Stoo would even lend Frek the Skull Farmers urlbud, not that Mom liked for him to play with killtoons.

He heard his mother come back along the curved passageway and stop at the head of the narrow steps down to the big round family room in the base of the house tree. “Ida!”

“What!” hollered little Ida, making her voice sound deep and rough. “Whadda ya want!” She and big sister Geneva let out shrieks of laughter.

“Ida's the Goob Doll's Secret Agent!” yelled Geneva. “And I'm her contact in the Mean Queen Mansion! We're lying low for the Final Fracas!”

“Goob Dolls rule!” burst out Ida.

“Goob Dolls!” whooped Geneva, egging Ida on.

“Thank you, girls!” burbled one of the Goob Dolls. The Goob Dolls sounded full of joy. “Hooray for Ida and Geneva!”

Toons were smart. Thanks to the eyes in the walls, they always knew who was watching them. Every instance of their show was realtime tailored for the specific viewers.

“Ida, you come up here and clean your room or I'm going to tell Snaffle to eat every single one of your blocks!” called Frek's mom.

“I wanna finish my show, Mom,” called Ida. “
Pleeeease.
The Goob Dolls need me for the Final Fracas!”

“You children,” said Mom and sighed. “You tell those toons they're just going to have to wait a few minutes for you to clean your room.” Before she hopped downstairs to get Ida, Mom looked over and saw Frek watching her from his door. “Is your room picked up yet, Frek?”

“Almost,” said Frek. “And then I'm going over to Stoo's, okay?”

“I hope you don't waste the whole day in a dark room pretending to shoot things,” snapped Mom. Sometimes it seemed like she could see right into Frek's head.

“You children should be outside doing something healthy on a day like this,” continued Mom. “Climbing a tree or building a dam. Flying with your new angelwings. The angelwings need exercise, you know. The more you fly, the stronger they get. I didn't buy them so they could rot away in the garage.” Suddenly she got an odd look on her face and stopped herself. “Listen to me,” she said ruefully. “Nag, nag, nag. I'm turning into Grandma Huggins. Enough. I'm glad that you're cleaning your room, Frek. I appreciate that.” She gave him a kind smile. She looked a little tired from the housecleaning.

The weary look on his mother's face made Frek feel bad about stuffing his clothes in the closet instead of sorting them. Well, maybe he'd sort them later. Meanwhile he still needed to finish clearing his floor.

Frek had a set of fifty shiny monster-shaped seeds that he'd bought from a shape-farmer at the Middleville market last November. They came from a please plant that the cheerful farmer had tutored with clay figurines he himself had made. Please plants had eyes in their flowers and you could show them models of how you wanted their seeds to be.

Last week the please plant seeds had begun to sprout, which meant Frek would have to get rid of them soon. He'd positioned them in nooks and crannies for one last attack on the King's Quarters—which is what he imagined the little monsters calling his big, comfortable bed. Frek liked to see them poised in readiness, their taut shiny buds like purple eyes. What made it really gollywog was that the spring-wakened seeds were slowly, slowly creeping toward the Quarters, which they perhaps perceived as a moist, loamy spot good for roots.

Frek found the turmite-cloth sack that the monster-seeds had come in, and walked around the room collecting them, still giving an agonized yelp each time he leaned over. To make it more interesting, he kept count of the seeds, and made the numbers part of his cries.

“Is something wrong, Frek?” called Mom from the bottom of the steps.

“Thirty-seven,” groaned Frek.

“Is something ailing you?” There was humor in his mother's voice.

“Thirty-eight. I'm picking up my monster-seeds.”

“Get rid of them!” called Mom. “I don't want please plants growing in my house or yard. They're unny.”

It might be easiest to dump the seeds in the toilet. They hadn't cost all that much in the first place. Frek picked up the rest of the seeds without any more yelping. When he was almost done, he noticed one last please plant seed on the floor right next to his bed. This one wasn't shaped like the others. Rather than looking like a little humanoid monster, it looked like a—spider? A tapered blob with big round eyes and a bunch of legs. He'd never noticed that particular seed before, but it was a good one. He put it in the sack with the others.

And then Frek found himself tossing the sack out his window. It would be a shame to waste these glatt seeds. The thought popped into his head that he should plant them someplace private. Yes. He'd use the place called Giant's Marbles on the slope of Lookout Mountain above Middleville. It was full of huge boulders, with no big trees, and you could see really far. Lots of please plant bushes grew along one edge of the clearing where a little stream came trickling down. Not many people went there, but it wasn't dangerous like the Grulloo Woods east of town. Frek could fly his seeds to Giant's Marbles later today. It would be fun with his new angelwings.