Frek and the Elixir (38 page)

He hoped Renata would really be waiting at his house when he got back to Middleville. Of course he still had a few little bridges to cross.

While Frek was thinking all this, they'd continued shrinking. Ahead of them lay cluster upon cluster of suns, like the lights of a densely populated city.

Chime ten.
Their collapse slowed. Frek turned his head this way and that, trying to spot the planet they'd be landing on. But there were no solid worlds in sight, just suns—hundreds, no, thousands of them, stars everywhere you looked—dull red giants, gemlike blue dwarfs, stormy white stars with coronas flickering from them, binary stars pulling each other's substance into tendrils, and lenslike warped spots betokening black holes.

Surely anything so puny as a planet had long since been swallowed up by these monsters and their churning gravitational tides. So where were they going to land?

“Welcome to Orpoly,” said Whaler, halting their downward yunch at no place in particular amidst the crowded stars.

“We ain't done shrinking yet,” objected Gibby.

Though it was hard to judge, Frek had the impression that he—and the others—were a thousand kilometers or so tall. And they were still overlapping.

“When Ma and Pa visited Earth, they knotholed down to your runtsome size,” said Whaler. “But we're in our home zone here, and you stay big like us. Yunched extra-large. Whoopsy-doozy while I deshuffle you.” The great braided wreath of gold and silver got out of their way. And then—

Sproing!

In the blink of an eye, Frek and the three other Earthlings had rebounded from each other like a fistful of rubber balls. Frek's fellow travelers weren't overlapping him anymore. They loomed before each other like giants, like titans, like foggy gods.

“Now to apply lotion with sun protection factor ten-to-the-thirtieth power,” resumed the peppy voice of the enormous, wavering ring that was Tusky/Whaler. “Oinkment to shield your pigment. Stiffen up those suits.” Moving with the steady, rolling languor of a squid's tentacles, the braided wreath wound itself around Frek. A half dozen shimmering planes of additional tweet lifted free of Tusky's flesh and wrapped around Frek's arms, body, head, and legs. His spacesuit hardened and gleamed.

Frek's body was a living gas within his titanic suit's transparent tubes. He was a neon sign a thousand kilometers high. Quietly a sun blazed nearby.

“And you live—?” began Frek, already guessing the answer, but fearing to say it out loud.

“The Orpolese live in these suns,” said Whaler simply. “And in the spaces around them. We're Polynesians of the galactic core, you wave, hopping from isle to fiery isle. This whole zone is Orpoly. Our archipelago.”

“But—what are you made of? Nothing can live in a sun!”

“Ever heard of sunspots?” said Whaler. “Stars are full of donut-shaped plasma rings, and a sunspot is where one of those rings crosses the surface. We supertwisters evolved from crude sunspots. Just like how you meat-brains evolved from protozoa. The Orpolese are personified plasma vortex rings, yes, thinking toroids of magnetofluid, spheromaks with soul. The dopey rings in your home Sun are like algae we might eat.”

A flock of giant polyhedral tweet shapes burst out of Tusky's flesh, swooped through Frek and returned.

“She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed is deciding our plans,” said Whaler. “Bossy as her mother Ulla, the yore princess of the royal rassen family, you understand. Ulla's folks think they're nobler stock than a znag like Papa Bumby. Bumby dragged Ulla down into a znassen pair.”

“What's he saying, Frek?” interrupted Dad. He seemed a little spaced-out. “We're so big. Did something go wrong with the yunch? I'm scared. I can't catch up with what's happening.” Slowly, immensely, Dad reached out to take Frek's hand. With Dad's suit still unburnished, his hand felt soft to Frek. Poor Dad. Frek was careful not to squeeze him too hard.

“Whaler's strengthening our suits,” Frek told him. “So that sun can't hurt us.”

“He's not takin' us in thar, is he?” shouted Gibby, the sound of his voice reverberating endlessly within Frek's enormous glassy shell.

“It could be goggy,” said Frek, who was still letting the concept sink in. The intense sunshine felt good on his long legs. It would be incredible to jump into the huge sphere of fire and not worry about being burned.

“Into a star,” mused Dad. “I want it. That's what you're planning, Whaler?”

“Simple as jumping in a pond,” said Whaler. “We'll finish sun-screening your suits, dive into this fattie here to graze some gnarly vortices, meet and greet the local mokes, surf solar tsunamis to the branelink at the center of Orpoly—and then it's into the hole with you and your son and his pal and his dog. Along with that gold asteroid to bail out my parents. You're going to have to make the gold yourself, Frek. You're the one who busted their yunch. You and your dad.”

“But—” started Frek, then let it go. He'd find a way. In any case, Whaler and Tusky weren't listening anymore, they were busy writhing around the thousand-kilometer bodies of his companions, layering and polishing them like shiny-backed lifter beetles.

Wow got upset when the great wreath closed in on him, and even tried to bite it. “Bad snake,” yelped Wow. But they hardened his suit, too.

The Earthlings and Orpolese were falling toward the nearby star at an ever-accelerating rate, but this wasn't fast enough for Whaler and Tusky, who used some googly force field to speed things up. Their efforts made them pitch and rock. The sun rushed toward them like a jerky, speeded-up toon. It occurred to Frek that his body was big enough to hold everyone on Earth. This was beyond gaussy, beyond gollywog, beyond his googliest dreams.

Solar prominences licked out like giant flames. The star's vast, glowing surface was patterned into slowly shifting polygons—yellow patches rimmed by edges of fierce clean white. Frek was so close now that some of the flares reached out past him.

Frek had a vague memory of a facilitator saying that the temperatures in a solar flare were in the millions of degrees, hotter even than within the star itself. But thanks to the souped-up Orpolese spacesuit, he felt fine, neither hot nor cold, just comfortable, with a slight sense of enjoying the pleasant glow of sunlight upon his skin.

Frek heard Whaler talking in the sibilant gurgle of the Orpolese tongue and then, from the corner of his eye, he noticed a great flutter of tweet leaving Tusky. Whaler made more gargling sounds, louder than before. Tusky responded with an agitated cloud of dark blue polyhedra. Could the two be quarreling?

It seemed absurd to mix something so humdrum as a married couple's bickering with something so extraordinary as diving into a sun. Shouldn't they stop arguing and pay attention to where they were bound? Their party was rushing toward the bloated, twitching sun at what felt like a million kilometers per hour.

For his part, the old husband Gibby was amused to notice Whaler and Tusky's exchange. “What's the spat about?” he asked in a cozy tone. “One of you got a rival down in that star—might could say an old flame?”

“I just picked up on the fact that it's mostly rassens shoaling in this sun,” said Whaler in a tense tone. “Not my scene. But the little lady insists we go on in. As if we'll have a hearty holiday reunion with her cousins and her grandparents' friends. But I know they'll gnash and scowl at us for being znassen.”

“What's all this rassen and znassen?” asked Gibby.

“There's two castes of Orpolese,” said Whaler. “The fancy, rich, important rassens and the plain, poor, ordinary znags. One guess which of us two is which. A mixed marriage like ours is called a znassen. Ulla/Bumby were znassen, and we inherited it. The difference has to do with what you'd call handedness or chirality. In your language, Tusky's counterclockwise, I'm clockwise. Bulge your eyes, she'll give you visual aids.”

Silent as usual, Tusky created two hundred-kilometer-long tweets, a pair of gold rods that were perhaps ten kilometers across. The rods twitched and coiled themselves into gentle helical springs, like spiral staircases. They looked dark against the reticulated plain of the onrushing sun's surface. If you walked up one of those staircases, you'd move in a counterclockwise circle as you rose.

“That's a rassen twist,” said Whaler. “Twisted like your human DNA, as it happens. Sex them, Tusky.”

One of the helices bent around to join itself and make a twisted donut. The other helix branched at the tip, splitting into a broom of baby helices, all twisted the same way. Frek remembered Bumby's tentacles.

“A rassen female and a rassen male,” said Whaler. “Now show them two znags, Ulla.”

“Stop jawin' and pay attention to whar we're goin', Whaler!” yelled Gibby. “I don't give a squat about your screwy tribes. Forget I asked!”

“Into the sun,” intoned Dad, who wasn't listening to Whaler at all. “We're falling into the sun. The white light.”

Wow howled. He didn't like any of this.

The sun had grown so large that you couldn't see anything else. Immense sheets and towers of glowing gas rippled up from the surface, streaming past. Here and there the rolling donut plasmas of other Orpolese could be glimpsed in the flames, capering like the demons of hell.

The dogged Tusky continued her demo. A second pair of tweet lines appeared; these were thin and silver, all but black against the star. They coiled themselves into two more helical springs, coiled in the opposite sense from the gold ones. These were znags. Enough already.

A slow eruption on the sun sent a ragged cloud of fire up toward them. The fire held four Orpolese donuts, each of them with a rassen twist to their flesh.

“Put a znag on a rassen and you get a znassen like Tusky and me,” continued Whaler obliviously. Her silver znag squid model meshed into the flesh of the gold rassen donut she'd made.

But who cared anymore, for the Orpolese rassen were upon them, and none too friendly. Gusty force fields tossed Frek's party from side to side. Wow was barking wildly. Tweets swirled, and Frek heard garbled Orpolese speech. One of the rassen pairs stood out, a pink donut with purple veins. The pair sniffed appreciatively at Tusky and murmured to her in a low tone. Tusky replied with a delicate tweet greeting, a shape like a creamy orchid. The fresh donut's female part replied with a polite round tweet of her own.

“Head for the deeps!” cried Whaler, obviously wanting to break off the conversation. Tusky formed a second friendly orchid. The mauve male part of the donut spoke again in Orpolese, his voice deep and melodious.

“I said let's
go,
damn you, Tusky,” bellowed Whaler.

For a moment Tusky/Whaler hung there, torn by two wills. As if by main force, Whaler spurred the reluctant Tusky down toward the sun. Tusky left behind a single rueful tweet in the shape of a teardrop. The purple-on-pink donut swallowed the teardrop and followed along. Gibby, Wow, and Dad went, too.

But Frek couldn't join the others. A rassen pair was blocking his way. The ring pushed him upward and tugged at his limbs as if to tear him in half. Maybe the donut thought he was food.

Frek surprised himself by moving with sudden, violent grace, his suit acting in perfect synch with his thoughts. He dove through the hole of the menacing donut, and as he passed through, he landed a solid kick that sent the shape spinning away. His actions seemed to have caught the donut off guard. Perhaps these Orpolese hadn't realized Frek was alive, conscious, and intelligent. As smoothly as if he'd been doing this his whole life, Frek bent at his waist and dove for the sun.

The others were far ahead—with the exception of Wow, who was kicking and snarling, caught in the grip of the two other Orpolese donuts. One was pulling Wow's hundreds-of-kilometers-long tail, the other was fastened to the dog's monumental snout. Frek knifed into first rassen, pulling the monster nearly in two. She/he fluttered raggedly away. Frek shoved one arm through the hole of the second rassen, hefted the great donut, and flung her/him like an old-time Frisbee. Wow yelped his gratitude. The purple-on-pink donut that had been following Tusky swooped up from below to join the skirmish.

The boy and his dog evaded the new donut and sped down before any of the Orpolese could retaliate. As they neared the sun's stormy surface, the excess of light spilled over into Frek's ears, nose, and sense of touch. Though his eyes were functioning, they were overloaded to the point of showing ragged checkerboards of feedback. His suit was using his other sense organs to process the overflow. It was almost like being a blind person, modeling reality from sound, smell, and touch.

And then he was inside the sun.

The sound of the sun was as the warm hubbub of human voices in a crowded room, with the buzz and throb of great machineries in chambers far below. The touch of the sun was like the bubbles and currents in the foamy white spot at the base of the waterfall in the River Jaya where Frek and his sisters went to swim. Tickling taps danced along the shell of Frek's suit; little swirls plucked at his limbs. The smell of the sun was like a garden on a hot summer day, with vagrant breezes bringing a pleasant palette of scents. Frek could pick out roses, bean-blossoms, an anyfruit tree, and the vinegary smell of a turmite mound.

His four companions were nearby. He could hear the touch of their voices in the perfumed tessellations of light.

Something big and hollow brushed against him. A dark, quiet cavity. Dad.

“There's nothing left after this,” said Dad. It was hard to be sure from his tone if he was happy or sad.

“There's always more, a little farther,” insisted Frek, not liking his father's eerie calm. “It never ends.”

“I used to think that way,” said Dad. “Before I went to the Crufter asteroid.”

“We're together now,” said Frek. “I can bring you home.”