Frek and the Elixir (11 page)

“He needed a disguise,” said Salla.

“And never mind that NuBioCom pays you every time you test out one of their new mods,” said Jeroon. “What did you put on the boy's arm?”

“It's called khora-khora,” said Gibby, who was smoothing back his hair. “It don't last but a little more than a day, feller said. Same as the beard and lip mods we put on him.” He rose up on his hands and walked over to Frek. “You a fighter, son. I'm proud to be your partner. No hard feelings?” He leaned to one side and stuck out a hand.

“Okay,” said Frek after a moment's thought. He needed all the allies he could get. “Maybe I shouldn't have gotten so upset. You're sure about my arm coming back?”

“If it don't come back, we'll make NuBioCom fix it,” said Gibby. “Before we steal the Anvil. You and me, Frek, we in this together.”

“That's more like it,” said Jeroon. “Gaia speed your way, Frek. I'll be getting back to—” His dark brown skin reddened. “You know.” And then he was down the bank and back in his burrow with Ennie.

After loading up a few more supplies for the trip, Frek and Gibby were ready to start on their way.

“Now Gibby, you take it easy with the cowloon moolk,” cautioned Salla as they left. “Remember what happened last time.”

“I remember,” said Gibby. “You done talked about it enough times. Don't worry a bit. Just one mug and I'm in beddy-bye.”

“Bye, Paw!” called Bili and LuHu.

And then they were off. The elephruk crossed the creek and found her way to a winding, sandy track that angled through the Grulloo Woods. Once they were on the road, Gibby produced a little fiddle from his travel sack and began to play it with some skill.

The sweet sound of live music held a nostalgic tinge for Frek, as Mom had a real guitar that she strummed sometimes. Carb was musical, too; he had a harmonica, and at the family's very happiest times, he and Mom would play together, joining their voices in song.

Where was Carb now? Had he really made it to the asteroids? Frek glanced down at his ring, wondering. Why didn't it talk to him? And what about Mom? Had the counselors done something to her? For now there were no answers, only the steady rhythm of the plodding elephruk and the plaintive notes of Gibby's music.

“Did you make the fiddle yourself?” Frek asked Gibby when the Grulloo paused to tune his instrument.

“We grow the pieces on please plants,” said Gibby, drawing his bow to make a long, sweet tone. “Fiddles are a Grulloo specialty.” He paused to adjust one of the instrument's tuning pegs, a little rod with a round disk on the end. And now Frek realized what those please plant seeds had been last night—he'd been hiding beneath a tuning peg bush!

They were coming into an unwholesome part of the woods. Many of the trees were blighted and bare, and the ground was thick with a rubbery yellow fungus. The air smelled of decay.

“Okky and her sisters live over there,” said Gibby, using his bow to point—though without interrupting his playing. Frek glimpsed the edge of a ragged shape peeking down from the blasted top of a dead tree. He and Gibby were quite exposed in the elephruk's bed. Gibby goaded Dibble to go faster and redoubled his sawing at the fiddle. “Listen up and sing along,” he urged Frek. “Music's the one thing Okky can't stand. We have one song in particular. We call it ‘Grulloo's Apology.'”

It was the same song Jeroon had bellowed at Okky last night. As Frek learned the words, his gaze darted between Gibby and the rotten tree. He saw one, two, three dark, toothy winged heads up there.

“Here she comes,” cried Gibby as they started the song over from the beginning. “Okky. You can tell her by the scar on the side of her head. Grab that long knife out of my sack and sing out, boy, sing out! It helps fend her off.”

Frek bawled the verses with the full force of his lungs as Okky swooped down to within five meters of them, close enough for Frek to pick up a smell of rotten flesh. Gibby played as if possessed, the two of them fairly screaming the choruses, with Frek holding up the knife, clutching it in his fiercest grip. And then Okky and her sisters flew away.

“Yee haw!” whooped Gibby. “Awright!”

What with his tweaked-away arm, Frek felt like a Grulloo himself. People were so quick to think the worst of these little people, just because they looked strange.

“I was wrong not to trust you,” he told Gibby. “Wrong to judge you by the way you look.”

“You like a younger brother to me now, boy,” answered Gibby, his hard face splitting in a grin.

The path rose to the crest of a ridge looking down on the River Jaya. Slowly the gray sky cleared. They rode along the wiggly ridge for a couple of hours, and then the path began working its way down to meet the river, golden in the late afternoon sun.

A watchbird buzzed them near the river bank; as a matter of course Gibby rocked over onto one arm and threw a stone. The watchbird easily dodged the missile and buzzed closer, getting a good look at them. For the next half hour Frek was worried about counselors, but his disguise must have been working. No lifter beetles appeared.

Gibby pointed out a prickly spot on the horizon: Stun City. They began passing isolated country homes; they were red, yellow, and purple with irregular towers and arches. Frek wanted to run over and get a good look at one, but Gibby warned him not to.

“It's rich people living out at this end of Stun City,” he told Frek. “Rich people always think they's about to get robbed. You hop off a Grulloo elephruk lookin' the way you do right now and go running up to them aircoral mansions, why, they'll shoot you with a webgun and feed you to the turmites. No gumps allowed!”

“The houses are aircoral?” said Frek. “I've never seen aircoral except on the toons.”

“You gonna see a whole bunch of it pretty soon,” said Gibby.

More and more houses appeared as they approached Stun City, mostly made of variously colored and textured aircoral—which was hard, lifeless stuff like stone. Where did it come from? Frek got his answer when they passed a house under construction. Around the growing walls were heaps of sand. The air was alive with a fog of glinting, darting animalcules. Some of these gnat-sized kritters drifted across the road as they passed; Frek caught one of them. It was like a flying worm; Gibby called it an airpolyp. The polyps carried specks of sand in their tiny tentacles; they were assembling the building like a reef.

Across the rolling river landscape, Stun City kept popping in and out of view. Just as the sun went down, they topped one last rise and the town finally lay spread out before them, a lush parkland of house trees and aircorals, with its famous central cluster of enormous, odd-shaped buildings.

The huge NuBioCom puffball had just turned on its lights, sending bright beams out across Stun City, as if reaching for its citizens. Frek studied the portholelike windows for a minute, imagining the inner structures and the hidden Anvil. The windows were aligned one above the other, forming ribbons that ran from top to bottom like the stripes on a gourd.

Gov lived in there. Who or what was Gov? He showed himself as First Nations–type bird designs like the Eagle and the Raven, but those were just toons. Behind the toons was—depending who you asked—a man, a worm, or nothing but a computation distributed across the tissues of his home puffball.

Frek tried to visualize himself running naked up and down the halls of the puffball, his skin indistinguishable from the walls and floor, looking for the Anvil. He no longer doubted that the chameleon mod would work—but what would he find inside the Anvil?

A bit closer than the puffball glowed the Kritterworks cube, set close to the banks of the River Jaya. As Frek knew from watching documentaries and news shows, four sides of the cube were solid, and the two end-walls were cored out with great and small tunnels. Frek could see a big central gallery and at least eight smaller galleries running the length of the cube. The side-walls of the Kritterworks were alive with billboard toons. Frek recognized ads for the latest kritter models: massage starfish, passenger crickets, mattresses made of big flat downy ducks, uvvy-controlled personal pickerhands, and the 3004 model dog. The 3004 dog wasn't going to be nearly as cute as Wow, who'd been artigrown in 2999. Frek wondered again what had become of Wow after he'd jumped into the river. Had he gone back home? Had he gotten a chance to tell Mom about seeing Frek? And was Mom okay?

The Stun City structure that interested Frek the most of all was the legendary Toonsmithy—this was where the very best toons were crafted. The Toonsmithy was a giant beanstalk, trained into the shape of a corkscrew that spiraled up into the sky. Jittering like visible music, colored pulses of light wound along the helical tube, up and up to where its gyres tightened to a point. At the apex hung a firefly hologram, a dancing fog of scenes from the Toonsmithy's latest shows and games. Frek saw the Skull Farmers: Gypsy Joker, Strummer, and Soul Soldier. He wished he had gotten to spend more time gaming with them. But then again, he was living a real-life adventure wilder than he ever could have imagined. Fingering his twisted lips and his gray beard—his beard!—he glanced down at his flipper arm, imagining what Ida and Geneva would say if they could see him now.

The Brindle Cowloon Inn was beside the river on the near edge of Stun City, a two-story aircoral building with a grassy pasture. No two of the windows were the same shape. Fantastically formed turrets and antlers stuck up higgledy-piggledy from the cornices and roof. The inn's smooth, undulating walls were creamy white with a few large patches of orange—like a giant cow.

“Advertising,” said Gibby, nodding at the walls. “The cowloon itself is out back. It's the only one in town; draws a good crowd this time of day. I'm sure enough ready for my moolk. But first we gotta stash our cargo and pasture Dibble.”

Dibble came to a halt before the asymmetrically arched entrance. While Gibby went inside to arrange for a room, Frek helped drag the four moss-packed hampers of eggs off the elephruk. With his arm missing, it was hard work. Suddenly he heard a woman's clear voice.

“Who's the gump?”

“Just a drifter helping me out,” said Gibby. “Don't need to ask no more, Phamelu, we call him—Huckle.”

“Hi, Huckle,” said Phamelu. She was a middle-aged woman with a pleasant, open face. She reminded Frek a little of his mother; she wore that same air of humor and intelligent self-possession. But her black hair was tweaked to a honey-colored shade of blond. “Welcome to my inn,” said Phamelu. She gave Frek a friendly smile that crinkled the corners of her eyes. “That's a nice ring you have. I've never seen anything like it.”

“Leave him alone, I say,” rasped Gibby, and then he and Frek were wrestling the egg baskets up the stairs, with Gibby putting his powerful tail to good use.

“Phamelu seems nice,” said Frek when they were ensconced in their small slant-ceilinged room. Phamelu. He liked the sound of the kind innkeeper's name.

The Grulloo gave a short laugh. “Didn't you tell me you was through judging people by their looks, boy? Me lookin' like a lizard don't make me bad, and Phamelu's apple-pie smile don't make her good. There's razors in that pie. The woman's robbed me more than once. That's why I brought a guard-toad for the eggs. Anyone comes in our room without my say-so, they gonna get bit.”

Gibby dug down into the egg basket nearest the door and came up with an ordinary-looking toad. The toad had been sleeping, but now he perked up and yawned. Frek glimpsed stubby fangs, sticky with green venom.

“Good toady,” said Gibby. He fished a pod of grub-worms out of his travel sack and fed the toad three of them. It gave a low croak of thanks. And now Gibby emptied out his pockets and put everything of value in his travel bag, which he set, in turn, behind the baskets of eggs. Just to be safe, Frek tucked his purse-fungus back there too, with the chameleon mod and Aaron's Rod inside it. They left the room with the watch-toad perched on the egg-basket closest to the door.

They found Dibble impatiently waving her trunk, sniffing the breeze from the river. They led her down through the inn's riverside pasture, lush with shoulder-high grass. Some other elephruks stood at the edge of the stream. After an introductory round of snuffling and trumpeting, Dibble sprayed some gallons of river water into her mouth. And then she lumbered over and set to work tearing up huge sheaves of grass. The grass's biorhythm must have been tweaked to an insane speed, for it grew back nearly as fast as Dibble could eat it.

“Don't bust your gut, Dibble,” chuckled Gibby. He grinned up at Frek. “Now let's get ole Gibby his moolk.”

The lighter-than-air cowloon bobbled above the center of the courtyard, surrounded by a Friday evening crowd of drinkers. Two bright-looking young women were talking and gesturing, one of them was showing the other one designs on the back of a turkle. Their jokey, stylized clothes looked almost like something the Goob Dolls would wear. It struck Frek that these two were probably toonsmiths. Maybe they worked for the Goob Dolls show! Maybe they'd even helped design the Skull Farmers! It would be gog gripper to talk to them.