Frek and the Elixir (45 page)

The screen was showing both the inside and the outside of the house tree. In the kitchen, Yessica was acting surprisingly calm, wiping off the pureed carrot with a cleaner tongue, saying that Lora didn't have to be such a mother lion, and asking, by the way, if Lora minded if Yessica left Renata here while she had a look around the area. Lora said no, and then she carefully added that if Yessica wanted some excitement, then Stun City was the place to go, and that if Yessica needed money, then maybe Lora could lend her a little, and that Yessica shouldn't feel she needed to hurry back.

 

All of this was as interesting as anything Frek had ever seen.

“Yo!” shouted Zed from somewhere back behind them. “C'mon up!”

“He's in the projection room,” said Dad, pointing toward the rear wall of the theater. Visible through a square hole was a glaring light. “This is how old-time movie theaters worked,” said Dad. “They had a little cubby in back with a projector that uses a film ribbon or maybe a digital file. I know because we had a theater on Sick Hindu. That projector light is what's putting out the different pictures we're seeing. And the projection room is where we'll find Earth's past. If Zed Alef helps us.”

Gibby and Wow went to investigate.

Suddenly Frek remembered Zed's threat. “Zed says they want to keep you here,” he whispered to Dad. “Be careful!”

“Why would Zed want me?” exclaimed Dad, sounding almost flattered.

“Sssh! He said he and the branecasters could, like, feed on us. We can't let him trap you.” And then Frek came out and said something he hadn't quite realized he'd been thinking. “I want to bring you back to Middleville, Dad.” Somewhere deep down Frek was hoping to get Carb and Lora back together and patch up the Huggins family.

“Kill me now,” said Dad in that odd way he had of mixing a joke with something serious.

“I found the stairs,” called Gibby from the rear of the room. Wow came running back for Carb and Frek.

In and of themselves, the stairs were no big deal, just a single steep, dark flight of steps. But Frek felt strange. The display at the front of the room was indistinguishable from reality—which meant the projection room held the underlying pattern of the world. Going up the stairs was like pushing behind the curtain of a puppet show. What hidden forces might Frek find in the projection room, what puppeteers?

The room was a largish cube, some four meters on a side, with a thick spongy floor that shook underfoot. The very first thing Frek noticed was a knot of meaty vines upon the room's high ceiling, slowly writhing shapes, evil eels. With immediate conviction, he knew that the eels were the conduit to humanity's watchers. And with the same certainty, he knew that the eels were the mind worms Chainey had warned him to stay away from. If humanity were ever to fight free of the branecasters, the unny grayish tubes on the ceiling were the shackles they'd have to cut. But not yet. Finding the elixir would come first.

An oily, iridescent pool was set into the floor beneath the projection window, and standing in the pool was a kritter or Exaplex organ of some kind. He resembled a chess piece with spindly arms ending in white-gloved hands. The number of arms was impossible to determine: they moved very rapidly and they left trails in the air. The creature's head was a lightbulb or, more accurately described, a glass pod with a tiny sun at its center. The lightbulb head was opaque and shiny on the side toward Frek, while the clear front side of the bulb was beaming three-dimensional images into the theater.

Zed Alef leaned against the wall by the shiny pool, fingering one of his little pigtails, watching them with that same half-smile on his face. His feet were wholly merged into the soft floor.

“Hi boys,” he said. “This here's Li'l Bulb and your time pool.”

Wow trotted up to the pool and tried to drink from it, but the sparkling time stuff was more like tar than like water. When the dog pulled up his head, a taffylike strand of time stretched briefly from the pool's surface to his nose—and snapped back, sending out some sluggish ripples. Wow gave a little yip and went to sit by the projection room's door.

Meanwhile Li'l Bulb was steadily hauling a thick column of time from the pool with his right hands, shaping the translucent mass into a squarish animated block that he held in front of his blazing “eye” to project the scenes of Earth. The used-up time passed through Li'l Bulb's left hands and back into the pool. The time strand was continually feeding the magic theater before Li'l Bulb's glowing eye.

The motions of Li'l Bulb and the time strand left afterimages, like you'd see if you waved a burning stick in the dark. It almost looked like there were multiple copies of Li'l Bulb.

“Your elixir's waiting in there,” said Zed, pointing at the pool. “Get down on it.”

Frek cast a wary glance at the snaky gray things on the ceiling. One of them seemed to be watching him. It had a disk face of concentric rings of teeth around a raspy central tongue. Like a lamprey eel's. The lamprey had the same higher dimensional quality as Li'l Bulb, that is, the lamprey's sluggish motions sketched ghostly spacetime veils, and sections of it were continually disappearing and reappearing, folding in and out of higher spaces unknown to man.

Frek went and knelt by the pool of time. Dad quickly joined him. Wow remained by the exit door, while Gibby squatted against a side wall, his knife in one hand, staring watchfully at the shapes on the ceiling.

Frek tapped the pool's shimmering surface and pulled out a strand. Little figures moved within it. The whole pool was full of reality animations.

“That's our past and our future?” Dad asked Zed. “How do we find what we want?”

“Gotta stick your head in there,” answered Zed.

“There's something bothering me,” said Frek. “The branecasters only started watching the human race a couple of weeks ago, right? The Unipuskers made first contact when they abducted Yessica, Renata, and Carb, right? In other words, your Exaplex has only been projecting Earth's reality since the first Monday in May, 3003. So why would your time pool have the Great Collapse of June 6, 2666?”

“It's like pulling up a yam,” said Zed. “You yank on the leaves—and the roots, shoots, and patoots come along with it. Once we get one day, we got 'em all. It's hyperdimensional, son.”

Brave Dad took a deep breath and dipped his whole head into the time pool. For a long minute his head was invisible, two minutes, maybe three. Frek couldn't stand it; he grabbed Dad's shoulders and pulled him out.

Dad's face was dripping with glittering time, droopy shapes running off him. Frek could make out the forms of a chair, sagging windows, a bed, a woman with a great stomach, a bony Mohawked man—the melting shapes of the man's youthful dreams.

“Frek!” exclaimed Dad. He didn't seem at all out of breath. “I saw myself on that night I told you about! It felt like I was there for an hour. Lora was lying on her back with her stomach domed up like a beach ball, feeling some pains, wondering whether to wake up her husband yet, and there he was, young Carb Huggins, lying next to her having his vision. What a night that was. The night my son was born. I could see right inside my dream, Frek. The Magic Pig's a Planck brane revolutionary. In the dream back then he knew you'd be here now. That's why he came! The Magic Pig says—”

“Enough about him!” interrupted Zed. Up above, the hyperdimensional lampreys were lashing about faster than before. Large new sections of them were in motion, leaving trails like blurry gray fans.

“Stop pussy-footin' around, boys,” added Zed, gesturing at the pool. “It's time. Do your thing.”

Dad didn't hesitate to stick his head back into the time pool. Frek followed suit. A recent scene from the past sprang into life before Frek's eyes: Mom telling him to pick up his room.

 

“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.”

The boy on the floor 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.”

 

Frek could hear the chatter of the Goob Dolls on the walls of the family room, with Geneva and Ida shouting things back at them. It seemed like so long since Frek had heard his family—Lora's slow warm voice, Geneva's clipped, cheerful tones, and Ida's bursting quack.

Right about then somebody, probably Zed Alef, shoved Frek's butt really hard, and he fell all the way into the time pool. For the moment he still saw his Middleville bedroom, but then Dad appeared, hanging in midair, overlapping the image of Lora. Zed must have shoved Dad in, too.

It occurred to Frek that they were breathing. As far as his lungs were concerned, the time stuff was like colored air. They could stay in here for quite a while.

Dad wasn't seeing what Frek was seeing, he was seeing something different. Something he didn't want Frek to see. For when Frek reached out to touch Dad, Dad twitched and tried to push Frek away. But Frek had caught hold of Dad's arm, and now Dad's motions spun Frek sideways into the scene his father was watching.

 

A recent version of Dad was sitting in the cockpit of a Unipusker flying saucer, gliding over the green wooded valleys of planet Earth. A river glinted in the setting sun—the River Jaya. Up ahead was Stun City, with the corkscrew Toonsmithy, the Kritterworks cube, and Gov's NuBioCom puffball.

Standing beside the Dad were Hawb and Cawmb. Pilot Evawrt was flying the ship. The Dad was fiddling with his uvvy, tuning someone in.

“I have some information for Gov,” said the Dad. “The Anvil that's coming down tonight is an alien ship intending to abduct Frek Huggins. H-U-G-G-I-N-S. He lives in Middleville with his mother, Lora. Be sure and stop them.”

 

“Don't look!” shouted the real Dad at Frek's side. With a convulsive effort, he managed to tear them away from this scene. And now they were drifting like dead leaves through the air above Stun City. Frek could hardly believe that his father had betrayed him.

Even though he was boiling with emotions, Frek didn't let himself forget that he was here to find the elixir. If Carb's betrayal distracted him from the quest then, in the end, the forces of monoculture would have won. So before Frek started in on Carb, he focused his mind upon the puffball and its NuBioCom labs—the place where the last samples of Earth's diverse genomes would have been. Somehow Carb stayed right in synch with him.

Almost immediately they came to rest amid the square before the NuBioCom puffball in Stun City. People were walking backward across the square, this way and that, their clothes progressively more old-fashioned. Frek and Carb were fixed in this one space location, sinking steadily deeper into the time pool. Now there was a little time to talk.

“So you were the one who warned the Gov the Anvil was coming for me?” demanded Frek. “Thanks to you I got peeked! How could you, Carb?”

“I didn't know it would come to that,” cried Carb. “I never wanted you to find out! Oh, why did I have to go straight to that memory?” A crowd of laughing 2900s women went skipping by, their reversed motions looking unnaturally lively. Carb kept talking. “I did it because it was my big chance to be important, don't you see? I've never amounted to much, Buddha knows. I was supposed to negotiate with the branecasters for the whole human race. But the geevin' branelink was down when we got to Unipusk.” A group of NuBioCom lab workers dressed 2800 style hurried backward out of the puffball.

“You weren't on any Unipusk,” snapped Frek. “You were in that saucer telling Gov about me and the Anvil. Stop lying!”

“We'd been on Unipusk and come back by then. The open access branecast had already started, right, so on Unipusk we could see the people on Sick Hindu and Earth. We watched those nosy Orpolese finding out about me and the Unipuskers from Yessica's sister Meshell in the Crufter colony. It was Meshell who told them that Carb Huggins had a son. Right away I guessed the Orpolese would try to get you. So Hawb, Cawmb, Evawrt, and me yunched back to Earth to give Gov a warning. We didn't want to lose control of the humanity branecast channel. I had no idea it would end with—”

“You told them about the Crufter hideout, too, didn't you?” said Frek, giving Carb a shake. Just now Carb seemed as weak as a puppy. “About the hideout where Lora tried to send me when I was running away from the Three R's!”

“That was Hawb's idea,” said Carb in a barely audible tone. “He saw the hideout location in my mind.”

In the scene around them a street-cleaner tongue was working over the square's cobblestones. One of the earliest completely unnatural kritters, the oversize street tongues had been terminated back in 2700 after a series of unpleasant incidents in which they'd consumed un-watched babies and napping bums.

The puffball had changed into a faceted crystal dome, the original housing for the NuBioCom labs. Frek and Carb were closing in on 2666, the year of the Great Collapse.

“You know I'd never let Gov give you the Three R's,” said Carb in a pleading, insistent tone. “You've got to believe me!”

“I hate you,” said Frek, the words bursting out by themselves.

Carb didn't say anything back.

Right about then the sun stopped rolling across the sky and hung still. People began walking forward instead of backward. This was it. They'd reached the day of the Great Collapse. June 6, 2666.

Frek turned away from Carb, struggling to focus on finding the elixir. It took only a slight push of will to launch himself into dreamlike flight, straight toward the center of the great glassy dome of the NuBioCom headquarters.