Frek and the Elixir (22 page)

“Just kill him!” hissed mean-faced Jayney from the floor. She was every bit as heartless as Chainey.

“I'm talking here, Jayney,” said Chainey's little letter-slot mouth. “Are you going to pick a producer now, Frek?”

“I—I guess so,” said Frek. Since they were already planning to branecast the human race, it couldn't do any harm for Frek to pick their producer, right? Especially since Chainey said that otherwise some other producers might kill Frek to get their own negotiator in. If you could believe what Chainey said. It wasn't like Frek knew a lot of producers to pick among, though. Bumby and Ulla, or those Unipuskers, what were their names—Hawb and Cawmb. Maybe he could ask Chainey for a list of other producers. But the branecasters' patience seemed to be wearing pretty thin. The real goal, of course, was to get the branecast turned off entirely. But it seemed like that would have to wait. For now Bumby might as well be the producer. He was in some kind of jail anyway, which meant nothing much would happen soon.

Frek took a deep breath and said, “Bumby and Ulla can produce us for the Orpolese.”

“Done,” said Chainey, his mouth bending into a pleased U. “Deal one, step one.”

“And now can I have the elixir?” asked Frek.

“Why would I give you anything?” said Chainey impatiently. “Haven't you been listening? We never make direct transfers to the talent. That's what the producers are for. They get paid by their subscribers and their advertisers, then they pay you. And they pay us. That's the important thing:
They pay us.
And there's a penalty for you and your people having screwed up the start of the deal so badly. The Orpolese pay us the bail for Ulla and Bumby before anything else happens at all. Ten trillion tons of gold. Until then, we'll leave the humanity channel on open access. Other producers may be contacting you, of course. A completely different deal could develop.”

“But the other producers might try to kill me!” protested Frek, not wanting to believe what he'd just heard. Something else occurred to him. “And Bumby and Ulla can't protect me now—they're in jail! I don't understand what you mean about bailing them out. Why would you want all that gold?”

“Food!” screeched crazy Batty on Frek's right, the white slashes of his teeth seeming to take up half of his face. “I want to eat a dog!” The wall with the frenzied face bulged up, forming a pseudopod that reached out as if to touch Wow. Wow backed away, snarling.

“Leave him alone!” shouted Frek.

“Matter's what we like, kid,” came the voice of the pig-faced Cecily woman on Frek's left. “If you were smart, you'd give us a sample now. For good will, you know what I mean? You don't want us thinkin' you're, um,
uncompanionable.
” She grinned over at the branecaster bulging from the other side. “Right, Batty?”

Frek felt his body through the flexible field of the spacesuit. All he had was his yellow T-shirt, his blue turmite silk pants and the little fungus purse with the chameleon mod and the twig of Aaron's Rod.

“Do you want my shirt?” offered Frek.

“Offer rejected,” said Cheney, making a fishlike face. “Don't try evading, Frek. It's going to take ten trillion tons of gold to bail out your Orpolese friends. I'm talking about a solid gold asteroid ten kilometers across. That'll earn us some wham, right, guys? And, yes, like Batty and Cecily said, you have to give us something with some heft to it right now, just so we see you're ready to be a real business partner. Why
not
feed us a dog? You don't need two of them.”

“Take my knife,” said Gibby, suddenly rocking over to one side and feeling against his body. The bubble of his smart kenner spacesuit allowed him to get into his coat, to produce his knife, and to push it out through the spacesuit. “Here you go,” said Gibby, and nimbly lunged forward to plunge the blade right into the center of Chainey's smug face.

The branecaster's image puckered up and flowed onto the knife's handle. A burst of mint green bloomed across his distorted features. The knife melted away like a piece of ice in the sun. Shades of green and blue washed across the walls, down to the floor, and onto the ceiling.

“Tasty!”
whooped Batty. His face was bile green; his aura had brightened and grown.

“Real glatt stuff,” agreed Sid on the ceiling, his sarcastic eyes glinting a brilliant aquamarine, the air around him gleaming with gold. “Good wham.”

“Thanks for that,” said Chainey, his skin turning as blue as Krishna's. His aura was twice as bright as before. “Iron is good. I'll put you back where you came from, with no elapsed time. And Frek, don't forget to tell your Orpolese friends to bring us that gold asteroid to bail out Bumby. Bring it through a proper branelink, of course. Tell them to hurry. You're a marked man; the other producers are going to be after you. You need Bumby and Ulla out of decoherence so they can set up your security. Oh, and once they're bailed out, they ought to be able to help you get your elixir.” Chainey favored Frek with a mirthless, unkind smile. “See you again—maybe. Cheers.”

The cube of faces around them became a swirl, Frek heard a
deedle-deedle-deedle
as of a sound being played backward very, very fast, and then, lo and behold, Frek, Gibby, and the dogs were floating in space again.

The vast marbled surface of the pink and yellow gas giant planet Jumm loomed before them. Behind them was the blue and white disk of the gas giant's moon, Unipusk. The cylindrical tube from Unipusk to Jumm was still quite near them, but it wasn't flaring at them anymore.

Frek's first feeling was one of joy at being back in what the branecasters called the plain brane, back in normal space and safe in his Orpolese spacesuit. Compared to the Planck brane, even the gas giant looked almost friendly. They were falling toward it, yes, and away from the Unipusk moon, but maybe that was all right. The distances out here were vast. They still had some time to work with. And Bumby had said the Orpolese armor could do anything they needed.

About then Frek noticed that the world had that golden glow again, and again he had that feeling of being watched from a viewpoint only very slightly outside himself, with an accompanying sensation of having his thoughts simplified and flattened out. An alien was esping him on the branecast, and it wasn't Ulla or Bumby. Bumby and Ulla were decoherent zombies, waiting for a ten-trillion-ton ransom. Until they got free, it was open season on Frek.

“Chainey didn't give you that elixir, did he?” asked Gibby. “To bring back the animals and the plants? I was so fired up from usin' my knife that I didn't exactly catch what happened at the end.”

“Chainey didn't give me jack,” said Frek dejectedly. And then all his self-doubts came tumbling out. “I'm not the right one for this quest, Gibby. I'm a gump. I'll never save the Earth. I've done everything wrong and I'll be dead before long. If it weren't for me, we wouldn't have crashed here; we would have gone on to Orpoly and done it right. I got us in deeper with the branecasters and I didn't get the elixir at all. And the other producers are going to try to kill me pretty soon.”

“You did better than I could have,” said Gibby. “Me, I about kacced the floor in there.” He reached out and caught hold of Frek's hand. “You had a reason for landin' us here, Frek, a good one. You wanted to save your dad. We'll get him, and then we'll get that elixir, and then we'll turn the branecast off. You the one, Frek. We countin' on you.”

“Thanks, Gibby.” It was good to have a friend. “Thanks for giving up your knife. I know that knife meant a lot to you.”

“Hey, at least I got to stick it into Chainey's face,” said Gibby. “Man, that felt good. Not that he minded. Chomped it down like a carrot, he did. I would have hated to see him eatin' one of the dogs.”

“We should grab hold of the dogs,” said Frek. “Before they float away.”

The dogs were about five meters off and, adrift in space as they were, there seemed to be no way to reach them. But then Frek thought of asking his Orpolese spacesuit to move him. Frek pointed toward Wow and, considering his words very carefully, said, “Move me slowly toward the dog and stop me when I touch him.”

Frek felt a slight vibration in his heels, yes, a flicker of energy coming from his feet. He glided toward Wow, towing Gibby behind him, and when he got there, another drizzle of energy from his spacesuit brought him to a stop.

“Frek good,” said Wow, nuzzling Frek through his kenner armor.

Woo began barking in excitement, then composed herself and called, “Touch me too.” Frek powered himself, Gibby, and Wow over to her.

“Want eat,” said Wow, when he and Woo had finished pawing each other in greeting.

“Frek feed?” asked Woo.

Even though they'd had lunch less than an hour ago, right before the yunch trip, Frek too was hungry. He recalled Bumby saying that a yunch trip took a lot out of you. He was exhausted and starving. Maybe that was why he'd felt so low a minute ago, telling Gibby he couldn't do the quest. At home, when Frek was sad or cranky, Lora usually asked him if he'd eaten.

So, all right, thought Frek, why not ask the spacesuits for food? “Feed me a mouthful now,” said Frek, testing the concept out. And, yes, a nugget of grobread and anymeat popped out of the spacesuit faceplate just in front of his mouth. He chewed it down, and when he said, “Give me a little ball of water,” a one-gulp blob of water appeared as well. “Feed the others the same way,” he said. “And give Gibby some stim cells, too.” Their suits heard him, and it was so.

“Where do them Unipuskers live?” Gibby asked when they'd finished eating. “Down to that monster planet? We gonna fall right into it?”

“That's Jumm,” said Frek, who still felt quite fatigued. “We don't want to go there. Unipusk is the moon up there. We missed it.”

They rolled back and gazed at the blue disk of Unipusk. It had clouds, seas, and continents. A lot more inviting than the turbid, curlicued surface of Jumm. But how to fly up there?

Frek and Gibby got their spacesuits to start pushing them away from the gas giant world, towing the dogs along, but the progress, if any, was slow. At these distances it was hard to be sure. What if they simply fell into Jumm's maelstroms of pink and yellow storms, forever to be lost? Jumm was so big; they were so small. Even if the miraculous Orpolese spacesuits could keep them alive, they'd grow old and die alone in those chaotic clouds. Frek didn't say these thoughts out loud, but a glance at Gibby's wrinkled forehead made it clear his friend was worried, too.

“Let's try something else,” suggested Frek. “Let's head for the transport tube.”

The Jumm-to-Unipusk tube was less than a kilometer off. Abandoning any attempt to fly upward, they simply angled over toward it. By now the dogs had grasped the notion of using their spacesuits to fly, or maybe it was that the spacesuits had come to understand that when the dogs made running motions they wanted to move. In any case, Wow and Woo flew along with Gibby and Frek.

“Is it gonna spark at us again?” worried Gibby as they approached the tube. “Or send us back to them branecasters?”

“I think it'll be all right since we're not yunching or unyunching anymore,” said Frek. And he was right. No energy flares flickered out at them, no tendrils of light.

They peered into the transparent tube. It was filled with a cloudy fluid, something like methane or liquid helium, moving somewhat sluggishly in the direction of Unipusk. If they could have gotten inside the tube, they could perhaps have ridden the current up to Unipusk.

In any case, try as they might, they couldn't get inside the tube. The surface was completely impermeable. Rather than being either ordinary matter or dark matter, it seemed to be a force field. It didn't want to let them in, and there wasn't much they could do about it.

A discouraging aspect of being next to the tube was that by watching it they could better estimate how rapidly they were falling toward Jumm. Even when Frek commanded his Orpolese spacesuit to rocket up upward as forcefully as possible, the suit's power wasn't sufficient to do more than slightly slow them down. Things were looking grim. But in his weariness, it was all Frek could do to keep from dropping off to sleep.

And then Frek remembered his ring.

He slowly brought his hand up to his face and stared at the ring, at the red dot nestled in the golden cup. Though he was exhausted, the yunch trip seemed to have sharpened his mental abilities. He was able to visualize a flow of energy passing down his arm through his finger and into his ring.

“I want to call Dad,” he said. “I want to talk to my father.”

His finger tingled; the dot began to twinkle. A haze of light formed, grew red and yellow spikes. And there in the middle of the ball was Dad's face.

For a moment Carb seemed to be unaware that his ring was in contact with Frek again. His head was bent to one side, the fan of his Mohawk spreading out like Saturn's rings. The tattoos on his temples had sketched out clams with eye stalks—Dad's tattoos tended to show things he'd recently seen. Right now Carb was rubbing his face with a wet rag, blearily wiping black makeup from his cheek and red makeup from his lip. His injuries had been faked.

And then he glimpsed Frek watching him.

“There you are!” said Carb. Now that Frek wasn't yunching, the ring-aura voices were much easier to hear. “We lost sight of you for a second. Good thing there wasn't any trouble when you unyunched so close to that tube.” Apparently Carb didn't realize that Frek had already been to the Planck brane and back. He called a name over his shoulder. “Hawb.” An alien appeared next to him.

It was one of the Unipusker producers, probably the same one as before. The flat disk of his head bulged up in the middle. Two eye stalks stuck out of the head's top surface, just like in Carb's tattoos, with each stalk tipped by a piercingly bright blue eye. The top of the disk was separate from the bottom, like the two halves of a clamshell. The halves were tightly joined except in front, where they split apart to make a lipless mouth.

“Greet Frek,” said the mouth in a high, sweet tone. It was dark yellow on the inside.

“Hawb will come get you,” said Carb. “Now that we've got a fix on you. He'll be there before you fall too far. Hurry, Hawb!”

“Hear,” said Hawb, bending his eye stalks forward toward Frek. “Inform Frek he and companions have eight more hours until they reach the atmosphere of Jumm. Mention that our saucer will take seven point nine nine hours to arrive. Alert Frek of airborne enemies in the Jumm atmosphere. Thousand kilometer bobblies. Hurry, Hawb.” The Unipusker turned to one side and stumped off, his stubby tail swaying from side to side. His body was all brown, except for the tail, which was wrapped in shiny gold material. After two or three steps he was beyond the ring-aura's field of view.

It seemed like a good sign that the Unipusker producer had bothered to give Frek a safety warning. Hopefully this meant he wasn't going to kill him right away. Maybe he'd try and sweet-talk Frek instead. If Chainey was to be believed, this was all about the production deal. Carb seemed to care more about the deal than about his son.

“Why did you help them trick me?” Frek asked his father. “You're not hurt at all.”

“I hurt inside,” said Carb with a wry smile that sent wrinkles all across his face. He laid his hand upon his heart. “Does Lora miss me?” Just like Carb to focus on himself.

“Tell 'em we need help,” said Gibby at Frek's side. Though he was unable to see or hear the images from Frek's ring, he gathered Frek was talking to Unipusk. “That geevin' gas giant's too close!”

Frek glanced down, or was it up? Out in space like this, his body's sense of direction had a way of unexpectedly switching around. Jumm was huge and eerie. The folded, wavy convolutions of its colored clouds were no place for human life. The closest point was a large whirlpool of pink and yellow, a maelstrom of whorls and eddies ten thousand kilometers across. They were rushing toward it. But everything was so big that, according to the Unipusker, they'd take another eight hours to get there.

It did make things worse to learn of predators in the garish skies of Jumm. Frek and the others should really be in a state of maximum alert, prepared to use their spacesuits' feeble rocket powers as best they could. But that was later. What had Hawb called the monsters? Bobblies, a thousand kilometers in size. Were they giant flying jellyfish? Frek was too tired to worry about it.

Though Carb was still waiting for a response, Frek sullenly denied him an answer. He wasn't going to tell Carb anything about Lora. If he was so curious about Mom, he could have stayed home with her or, having left, he could have called her once or twice in the last year. There wasn't much use talking to him at all if he was going to lie.

“I'm sorry we tricked you,” said Carb, reading Frek's expression. “I wore the makeup to make sure you'd come. It was Yessica's idea. We had to be sure and get you away from those Orpolese. Humanity's looking at a very big opportunity, and the Orpolese could fub it up. Whatever you do, don't listen to them. That's great that you were able to crash their yunch trip. I hope they can't hear me talking. Well, our friends the Unipuskers ought to be able to take care of them.” Carb sighed and rubbed his face. He looked tired. “It's the wee hours on Unipusk,” he explained. “The Unipuskers have picked me to do some very important negotiations, you know.” Carb livened up a bit as he said this. He'd always been looking for a way to make himself important. “Did the Orpolese tell you about it yet?”

“No,” said Frek shortly. He was mad at his father for tricking him. And there was no point going over the details for him. The Unipuskers would esp Frek and figure out everything anyhow. In fact, given the intensity of the golden glow around Frek, they were probably doing it right now. Carb was the only one out of the loop. “We can talk it over later, Carb.”

“Right you are,” said Carb, always quick to read Frek's moods. He shifted to one side, revealing the cute, friendly-looking girl Frek had seen before. Neither of them was wearing a spacesuit. They seemed to be in a green room with dark windows.

“This is Renata,” Carb offered. “She's eager to meet you. Her mother and I are friends.”

“Hi, Frek,” said Renata, bobbing her head. Her dark brown pigtails swung with the motion. Frek wondered if by now his father liked her more than him. But she looked like she could be a good friend. Frek didn't know many girls besides the ones who hung around with his sisters.

“It's great that you came,” continued Renata. “We've been waiting up. It's like three in the morning.” She looked sleepy, too. “Mom says you can help us get home. I hope you aren't mad that we called you.” She smiled. “It's goggy here. I've been having fun drawing the Unipuskers and the vigs. The rickrack cities with Jumm in the sky. Are you close to Jumm right now?”

“Yeah,” said Frek, feeling almost at a loss for words. He wanted Renata to like him, but he didn't know what to say. She looked smart, and maybe a year or two older than him. He was too tired to think. “I draw a little, too.” Meanwhile Gibby was tugging at him, wanting to know what the ring-aura had told him. “I think I better say bye for now, Renata,” said Frek with a yawn.