Frek and the Elixir (43 page)

The tram was full of Hubs, most of them seated, but a few holding onto the chrome poles that rose up from the backs of the seats. Alternating rows of seats faced forward or backward. Frek and Dad found an empty backward-facing seat for two. Frek took the window side and Gibby hopped on their laps. Wow squeezed under the seat and promptly fell asleep.

A pair of Hubs sat facing them, seemingly a mother and daughter. They wore black raincoats and gray head-scarves. The lady was green-skinned and bony, with angular cheekbones, a large nose, purple lips, and a prominent chin with a wart on it.

The Hub girl surreptitiously took a nugget of gold from her pocket and popped it into her mouth. As she savored the morsel, she peered up at Frek and gave him a little smile. Her eyes sparkled with humor and life; her aura pulsed with energy. The lady's eyes flickered from Frek to the girl, and back to Frek again, protectively noticing him noticing her daughter.

“I hope we don't miss our stop,” Frek murmured to Dad.

“Travel dreams are the worst,” answered Dad with a grim chuckle. “Nothing ever works.”

“This ain't a dream,” protested Gibby. “We're all seein' the same thing.” Cloddishly he stretched out his arm, or leg, to point at the woman facing them. “Her wart's got two jiggly hairs stickin' out from it, right?”

“Shut up,” hissed Frek, embarrassedly staring out his window.

A moment later the Hub lady tapped Frek's knee to get his attention. She was leaning forward to talk.

“Is not wart,” she said in a hoarse tone. “Is my husband.” She smelled of pungent, unknown spices.

And, yes, Frek could now see that the irregular bump on her chin was in fact a man's tiny head and shoulders—and what had seemed to be hairs were two wee arms. The arms were waving about as if to the sound of slow, flowing music. And the little man had his own tiny aura.

“I got gold,” piped the little girl, wanting to get in on the conversation. “I got a whole pocketful!”

“Vhere you fellows headed?” the Hub lady asked Frek, settling back into her seat.

“To the Exaplex,” said Frek. “A branecaster—Chainey?—he said we could get some stuff there from our planet's past.”

“Should blow up Exaplex,” said the woman. “Stupid greedy branecasters trying to get more wham than anyone. One fine day we'll manage to forget about them.”

“I like the branecasters,” piped the Hub girl, sneaking another nugget from her pocket to her mouth. “They bring in gold, and that's good for my wham. What's that, Father?” She stretched her neck out and put her ear to her mother's chin. “He says it's almost his turn, Mamma. He says he's gonna eat some of my gold!” Giggling, she rapidly shuttled five more fragments of gold from her pocket to her mouth. Her cheeks got big, and she took on an expression of bliss. “Mmmm!”

Just then the tram screeched to a halt. Frek peered anxiously out the windows, looking for the big, glowing sign of the Exaplex. But there was nothing to see but dirty gray apartment buildings. The Hub mother stumped down the aisle to the tram's rear and descended from the left side, her daughter following behind. As the tram pulled away, Frek stared back at them through his window.

Something very strange was happening to the woman's head. The husband-wart was growing, pulling her forward to the ground, and then, in a quick round of bloat and shrivel, the husband had drawn almost all of the wife's mass into his own body.

Thanks to his pzoom, Frek could make out a little wart upon the man's chin. This was the head and shoulders of the bony Hub woman, waving her arms as if she were dancing. The man took his daughter's hand and they headed off down the sidewalk. The smiling little girl handed her father a nugget of her gold. And then the tram went into a short tunnel.

Frek had been so busy staring at the dance of the wart-people that he'd missed the newcomer sitting down across from him. It was a man with short black bristles covering his scalp and the lower part of his face. He had a huge round stomach. He wore a stained white T-shirt and droopy gray pants with beige suspenders. He kept sighing and twisting his neck.

“Hi there,” said the irrepressible Gibby.

The man let out another sigh, slowly bending his neck from side to side. “You visitors from de plain brane?” he said finally. His breath smelled heavily of rotting meat. His aura was little more than a few faint scraps in the air near his ears.

“Might could say we're here on a galactic quest,” answered Gibby from Frek's lap. “Lookin' to patch our planet's biome. We're headed for the Exaplex.” The tram whooshed out of the tunnel and rattled around a curve.

“Don't know if dis tram stops dere,” said the man. “Nobody wants to go to de Exaplex. Why for? Dat's just a switchboard.”

“The stop's not automatic?” said Frek, instantly worried. “How would I ask for a special stop? How soon is the Exaplex?”

“Press dat when it's close,” said the man, pointing up at blue button set into the chrome seat pole. “But she might not halt. I dunno. Exaplex is after I get out. I only ride one stop.”

He sighed again, and slumped back in his seat, letting his face fall into a blank, mindless expression. He had nothing else to say. A few minutes later the tram began slowing.

“Can we just get out at your stop and walk to the Exaplex from there?” asked Dad.

“Too far,” said the man wearily. “You never get dere before de storm. Anyway de doors, dey don't open at dis stop. Dis only a facultative stop. I don't got enough wham for a regular stop. I don't got enough wham at all. Nobody gonna see me no more after dis storm.” With another meat-reeking sigh, he got to his feet.

And then the Hub did a curious thing. Rather than walking to the closed doors at the rear of the tram, he gave his head an especially sharp twist. His body broke into pieces—his head, his shoulders, his arms, his hands, his stomach, his butt, his thighs, his calves, and his feet—they scattered from one side of the tram to the other, vibrating together and apart.

Frek noticed something moving outside the tram window. A piece of the man had somehow tunneled out. It was a stubbled roll of fat from the base of his neck. The roll of fat jiggled as if to invite the other pieces, and, one by one, the other pieces quantum-tunneled through the tram's wall. Outside on the pavement, the man reassembled his wavy particles and went lumbering off, his hand reaching up as if to feel his tattered aura.

Just as the tram began moving, a cloud of colored blobs converged on the tram's rear and cohered into a shape in the aisle. It was a woman Hub, quite remarkable in appearance. While most of the things in Node G were fairly realistic, this woman was close to being abstract art.

She had a spherical head, a leaflike hank of blond hair, and a body like a pear, with arms and legs just as long as they needed to be at any given time. A vivid green profile line divided her round face. The left side was a delicate white with hints of purple, the right was yellow as a smiling sun. Her body was striped mauve on the shadowed parts, and highlighted with pale green circles on the spots where it was lit. Her aura, too, was boldly designed, with zigzag rays of bright gold against a background of light gold polygons. She sashayed up the aisle and dropped into what had been the fat man's seat.

“Good day, I'm Dora,” she said, noticing Frek, Dad, and Gibby staring at her. Her sketchy fingers kneaded her hair. “And youm would be whom?”

“We're visitors from the plain brane,” sad Dad, always glad to talk to a woman. “Milky Way galaxy, Sol system, planet Earth. We came here for a deal with the branecasters.”

“The branecasters are a social disease,” said the colorful woman. She pushed her face forward for emphasis, batting a flirtatious eye at Carb. “I don't need them. Everyone knows me. See how much wham I have?” She gestured toward her striking aura, and then her eye pulsed out a blaze of blue lines that actually bounced off of Dad, Gibby, and Frek before dissipating. They felt tingly when they hit Frek's skin. One of the lines must have zinged Wow, for he squeaked and sat up, sniffing at the woman's leg. She gave him a gentle pat on the head.

“You look pretty,” observed Gibby.

“Refresh my memory, if you would,” said the woman. “Over in the plain brane, you ‘see' with ‘light'? And you project reality down into just four dimensions? Or is it two? I always forget.” She tossed her head, and her profile line flipped to pointing the other way. Now the left side of her face was like a blurred brown moon, and her right side was a dusky mix of orange and lavender with a deep dark eye socket. She continued fiddling with her banana of hair, now gone narrow and green.

“We're three dimensional,” said Dad. “We're trying to get to the Exaplex.”

“This tram will never stop there,” said the woman. “You should have switched to the seventeen-A at my stop.”

Frek felt sweat running down his ribs. He peered out his window, trying to see what was coming up. The tram was going faster than ever, screeching around bends, clattering over low bridges, and darting through impossibly narrow alleyways between crumbling buildings. The walls had taken on pastel shades of orange and purple, with something odd about the upper floors' perspectives. The sky overhead was growing dimmer.

After a bit, Frek saw a yellow glow. Yes—he reached up and pressed the blue button on the pole—they were approaching their goal. He could already read the letters on the lit-up vertical sign.
E - X - A- P - L - E - X.

Far from slowing, the tram accelerated. “Hey!” shouted Dad. He'd noticed the sign too. “This is our stop!”

“This car doesn't stop till Hilbert Space Axis seven seventy-eight-ZW,” said Dora, tossing her head. Again her colors changed kaleidoscopically. “You'll have to try to work your way back, I suppose. Maybe you can catch the one thirty-three. Not that you'll have gobs of time to do it before the renormalization storm sets in. I wonder if you'll even survive. You don't seem to have any visible wham. But I reckon being made of matter is enough. Certainly the branecasters believe in using matter to get wham. How crude they are, how inferior to artists.”

Gibby ran up the aisle, as if to force the driver to stop. But the Hub had sealed off her window, and when Gibby beat his tail against her cabin's transparent walls, she only hunched farther forward over her controls. The situation seemed hopeless.

Just then the tram's bell clanged a warning at something ahead on the tracks. With a rusty screech, the metal wheels locked. The tram skidded to stop, throwing up fountains of sparks, the bell sounding all the while.

With a final delicate nudge, the tram came to rest against the pink creature blocking its progress. Standing foursquare in the tracks was a smallish pig with a glowing aura. He let out an abrupt grunt that was somehow a recognizable greeting.

“The Magic Pig!” exclaimed Dad. “He's real!”

“You know the Magic Pig?” said the paintinglike woman, darting her head toward them. “Don't talk about him in the Exaplex! Supposedly he's a big enemy of the branecasters—though some of us think that's an act. In any case, this is your chance if you really want to debark. Best of luck and so on.”

“Come on, Gibby!” yelled Frek. They ran to the tram's rear door. Of course it wouldn't open. And there was no obvious way for them to duplicate the fat man's quantum-tunneling feat. So tough old Carb just kicked the door so hard that half of it flew off its hinges.

They hopped down onto the dirty concrete sidewalks of Node G. The towering yellow Exaplex sign bathed the scene in warm light. The sign wasn't neon; it was, rather, a glowing pattern within the flesh of the building. They were near the end of their quest.

The tram was already pulling forward again, clattering off down the tracks toward Hilbert Space Axis 778-ZW, wherever that might be. Meanwhile the Magic Pig was nowhere to be seen. Wow must have been able to smell him, though, for he was circling around excitedly sniffing the air.

The others studied the Exaplex. What made the buildings in the neighborhood look so funny was that the windows along the soft, receding walls of the buildings had a space-warped quality, with each further window looking half as wide as the window before. The Exaplex was going to be mighty big on the inside. At least it didn't look to have more than maybe five floors.

“All right now,” said Gibby. “We'll go in that movie house and get the elixir. What's elixir look like, anyhow?”

“I'm not sure,” said Frek. “I figure the elixir will have the genetic codes for all the missing species. But how all that gets packaged is—”

“I can't believe we really saw the Magic Pig,” interrupted Dad. “So he lives in the Planck brane! Must be some kind of Hub. Funny he'd have taken an interest in your destiny, Frek. Maybe we should split up in teams to search for the Magic Pig.”

“It's the elixir we're looking for, not any pig,” corrected Frek. “I don't think he ran into the Exaplex. See how Wow's sniffing for him across the tracks?”

“Come here, Wow!” yelled Gibby, and the dog came trotting over. “I'll stick with Frek,” Gibby told Dad. “You take Wow if we're gonna split up.”

“I want to be with Frek, too,” said Carb.

“So let's all stick together,” said Frek, feeling a little gratified. “Come on!”

The Exaplex doors were wide open; they walked right in. Though the lobby was lit up, it was completely deserted. And there were no ticket-sellers in sight.

Frek, Carb, Gibby, and Wow walked tentatively forward to the dimly lit door at the rear of the lobby. It led to a little curved antechamber which had five doors leading off it. The floors, ceilings, and walls were rubbery with red fuzz, and the doors were edged in shiny stuff that resembled the chitin from a silver beetle's wing covers. Unlike the tram, the Exaplex seemed to be a single huge organism—like Gov's puffball.