Frek and the Elixir (48 page)

“Nice sty,” said Gibby. “Cleaner than I'd expected.”

“I keep the wallow outside,” said Rundy. His grunts were high-pitched, excited. Although the bristles on his neck were snow white and he had deep wrinkles around his eyes, his face was eager inside his bright gold aura. “I don't use my wallow so much anymore,” continued Rundy. “Thanks to them putting that skewy branelink on Pig Hill. But I'm getting ahead of myself. First things first. Welcome, dear Earthlings! Sit down on any heap you like, they're all nice and fresh. I don't kac in the house, you know. I'm not a human!” He let out a laugh that twisted into a squeal, then trotted over to nose at Frek with the pink disk on the end of his snout. “My finest creation! A special welcome to Frek Huggins!”

“
Your
creation?” said Carb. “
I'm
his father, Rundy. Remember? You came and talked to me the night before he was born.”

“Funny thing is, that was yesterday afternoon for me,” said Rundy. “Yep, when I heard about you from Cecily, I quick decided to coach you. So I snuck into the Exaplex and rooted into your past. I got into your dream for a pep talk, Carb. And, better than that, I put some autopoiesis code into your and your son's DNA, and gave you two a pair of hyperdimensionally linked rings. And then Zed chased me out of the Exaplex, which was perfectly synchronistic of him, since that put me in the street at just the right moment to stop your tram. Things are so nicely entangled.”

“Wait a minute,” said Frek. “You're saying that when you heard I was here, you went back and changed the past to help me come here? That's a circle.”

“The world is full of circles,” said Rundy, twitching his floppy triangular ears. “I am because I am, and that's my wham. The Magic Pig and Pig Hill only make it through every renormalization storm because the other Hubs are so sure that we will. I'm a tradition. Yuga after yuga, there's always a Magic Pig.”

“Yesterday afternoon you changed Carb's and my DNA twelve years ago?” said Frek. He was having trouble wrapping his mind around this. “You changed us to do—what was it again?”

“Autopoiesis,” said Rundy, his voice a crisp oink. “Technically it's known as quantum error correction. Autopoiesis makes you quantum-mechanically coherent, which means being like yourself, only more so. Individualistic, you might say. Autopoiesis helped you keep the counselors from twenty-questioning you to death. And autopoiesis helps you block the espers. Autopoiesis keeps you in your own mental state, keeps you from letting the media do your thinking, keeps you from buying into every load of kac the monoculture tries to force feed down your throat. Makes you a troublemaker.” Rundy let out another of the stuttering squeals he used for a laugh.

“Combing my brain,” said Frek, suddenly making the connection. “That's what I call it. I have this mental routine I do. Sky-air-comb.”

“We remember ourselves,” put in Carb.

“Can you help us get past them demons and into that hollow tree?” interrupted Gibby.

“We'll give it a shot,” said Rundy. “They're waiting for you, but I'll cause a distraction. It'll be fun. They won't actually hurt me. And, boys, Guszti is counting on you to think about a Plan B for shutting down the branecasters. Even if you fail, it'll be entertaining to see you have a go at it. Win win, the way I see it.”

“What was Plan A?” asked Carb. “I missed hearing about that.”

“Plan A was that your blasters would do some damage to the Exaplex,” said Rundy. “Guszti and I wanted to see you try. When you guys were asleep in the projection room, I rooted my way into Frek's head through his mind worm and gave him my suggestions: Shoot the mind worms and blast a hole in the Exaplex to get out. Cecily had told me how tough you fellows are.”

“Cecily!” exclaimed Frek, suddenly recognizing the name. The female branecaster who looked like a pig. “She's the one who told you we'd arrived?”

“She's my daughter,” said Rundy. “I know her thoughts. Cecily and I are entangled—just like your two rings. But don't worry, I won't let her hear this conversation. Am I right in thinking you're for stopping the branecasters?”

“Of course,” said Frek. “I don't want them and their esper subscribers to be watching us and pushing us around like pieces in a game. I'd do anything to bring them down. And you, Rundy—Aunt Guszti says you don't like the branecasters because they built on your hill? But what about Cecily?”

“It's a sad tale,” said Rundy with a theatrical sigh. “After they put up the branelink, our little Garth wandered into it, and my wife, Cynthia, went in there to look for him, and I never saw either of them again. It was just Cecily and me for a quite a few years, and then that sleazy Sid started courting her, and next thing I knew she went over to the 'casters. I'm all alone, just me and my garden and my memories of my family.”

Rundy gave another sigh and shook his head so hard that the ears flapped. Frek had a feeling the Pig might be doctoring the truth.

Meanwhile Wow had been nosing curiously at the cupboard shelves of muddy purple beets and pointed orange yams. Before Frek could come out with another question, Rundy turned his attention to the dog. “Would Wow like a yam?”

“No,” said Wow. “Want meat.”

“No meat here,” said Rundy. “You're really a kind of wolf, aren't you? You can darn well eat porridge. It's made with the oats, beets, and yams that I grow myself. Good for you.”

The Magic Pig rose up on his hind trotters and fetched a ladle and some bowls, then dished out five helpings of thick porridge, gray with orange and purple lumps. What with that long ride through snow and rain on the back of a flying fish, Frek found the gruel very welcome. At first he worried his body might not take to the mutable Planck brane matter—but it felt nice and warm in his stomach.

Rundy's aura bobbed and twinkled as he ate. “That ‘wham' you keep talking about,” said Frek presently. “It shows up as the size and brightness of your auras, right? And wham has something to do with surviving a storm?”

“Exactly,” said Rundy, lifting his grizzled snout from his bowl. “The better your wham, the more persistent you are as a pattern in the Planck brane. There's two ways to get wham. The old way, the traditional way, is to have a lot of links to other Hubs, to make an impression on people, to make yourself useful, to have a family, to be part of society. Everyone remembers you, and you persist. But the new way to get wham, the modern branecaster way, is to huff down some plain brane matter and use that as an anchor to keep you in place during the renormalization storms. Plain brane matter isn't affected by renormalization, you see.”

“The branecasters had us bring in ten trillion tons of gold,” bragged Carb. “My son and I made it. It looked to me like the branecasters gave most of it away.”

“The branecasters get wham both ways,” grunted Rundy. “Their plain brane clients pay them in matter and they eat maybe a tenth of it. But they give out the other ninety percent of the matter to average Hubs, who get so grateful that they end up thinking about the branecasters all the time. Pretty glatt, huh?”

Frek shrugged. “I heard the branecasters are accumulating so much wham that fewer and fewer regular Hubs are surviving the storms.”

“Tough on them,” said Rundy, his voice a callous grunt. “The branecasters do what they like—for now. Eventually they'll push it too far, and this old Pig will move on.”

“This is all real interesting and everything,” said Gibby, setting down his bowl with a clack. “And thanks for the grub, not that my tongue's doing much good at soakin' it up. But can we get to the dang point? How the Sam Hill do we get our butts outa here without bein' kilt?”

“I have a secret tunnel,” answered Rundy. “It spirals up through the hill to the top, and it comes out under a bush right beside the branelink tree.”

“But your daughter Cecily must know about it,” exclaimed Carb. “She'll be expecting us.”

“You'll have to take that chance,” said Rundy. “Anyway, the bush isn't far from the tree. And, like I said, I'll make a distraction.” Hearing this doomed, half-baked plan, Frek remembered Flinka's claim that the Pig was working with the branecasters. But there was nobody else to turn to. He got up and walked across the Magic Pig's living room to the closed door in the other wall.

“Not there,” said Rundy. “That's my private study. The passageway is over here. Behind the cupboard. Help me move it.”

With Carb and Frek's help, Rundy pushed aside his cupboard to reveal a little round passageway angling upward. Wow ran right in, followed by Rundy, Gibby, Carb, and Frek, the last two crawling on their hands and knees.

After a few turns of the spiral tunnel, the air grew very close and dusty, so much so that Frek began worrying about suffocating. What would happen if he died in the Planck brane? Would it really count? He wasn't eager to find out. He comforted himself by patting the egg in his pants pocket. If he could get the elixir back home he'd surely manage to repopulate Gaia with her missing species. Moths, lobsters, rabbits, daisies—it would be heaven on earth.

Above them was an intricate noise that grew louder as they climbed. By the time Frek reached the end of the tunnel, the sound had bloomed into deafening cacophony. It was the massed chants and cries of the demons around the bonfire, the squalling of the giant bagpipe, and the pounding of the stomach-drummers.

Frek found his companions already crouched beneath a large bush. The bush reminded him of the please plant that had hidden him in that gully above the River Jaya. Could that only be a week ago? He prayed to Buddha that he was finally on his way home.

Peering through the chinks between the leaves, Frek saw the frog-mouthed demons milling around the fire. Swords and pikes rose above them like feelers. The bagpipe had puffed itself up to a height of fifteen meters; its sticks and horn were waving about in complex, hypnotic paths; its unrelenting voice was an amalgam of every negative emotion. Fanciful demons hovered in the air, buzzing upon insect wings. The six branecasters were, however, nowhere to be seen. Not necessarily a good sign.

The branelink itself was indeed nearby. Little more than five meters of bare ground separated the great hollow tree from the bush where the Earthlings lurked. Looking up, Frek wondered at the tree's vast fire-lit branches fading into the night. At ground level was a ragged gateway in the side of the tree, a doorway of strobing light. How hard could it be to run the five meters and jump inside?

Well, for one thing, the gateway was guarded by an armored demon. He had a long shiny beak with a disk at the end—a spoonbill. He wore an inverted funnel atop his head. The effect might have been comic, but the guardian had evil-looking red eyes, and he bore a weapon resembling a bow and arrow mounted upon a rifle stock. Frek recognized it as a crossbow.

“I'll lure him off,” said Rundy in his penetrating grunt. He'd crept over to crouch at Frek's side. “Don't forget that Guszti wants you to think of a Plan B.” On Rundy's other side, Frek could see Carb, tensed for the dash, with one hand holding Wow in check. And beyond Carb was wide-eyed Gibby, his leg-arms bent in half, poised to catapult himself toward the branelink.

Rather than trying to shout an answer to Rundy over the demons' yells, Frek simply ran his hand over the ancient pig's bristly, curved back, drawing a bit of reassurance from the touch. Perhaps this only looked like a trap. Maybe Rundy was thinking ahead for a way to save them. The Magic Pig nuzzled Frek's hand with his nose-disk, gave a last sharp grunt, then shot into the open.

The spoonbill demon's arms rose and his crossbow twanged. Though the bolt sank deep into the Magic Pig's pink hide, the damage fazed him not one whit. He ran right up to the spoonbill demon and bit him on the foot, then raced toward the fire with his enemy in hot pursuit.

Gibby, Wow, and Carb were already halfway to the tree. You could count on Carb to look after himself. Frek took off after them. A huge wobble of light flared up to Frek's right; from the corner of his eye he saw Rundy scampering through the bonfire, scattering firebrands in every direction. Just a few meters ahead of Frek, the branelink entrance flashed green as Gibby reached it. And then Wow and Carb were safe inside, too.

Frek only had one more step to go when the dragon caught him.

The six heads came down at him from the dark branches of the branelink tree, seizing him by the arms, the legs, the waist, and the throat. The head holding his throat was recognizably Cecily's. Her snout was long and green and with big nose-holes like a dragon's, but even so she still looked like a businesswoman—and like the daughter of a pig.

“How could you ever think we'd let you get away,” growled Cecily. “Especially after what you told Rundy. You're too big a threat to us. We hadn't quite realized before.”

“Let's finish him off in the nest,” mumbled the Chainey head, keeping his narrow mouth clamped onto Frek's right hand. “Jayney will decohere him.” He was still wearing his little gold-rimmed glasses.

Frek was swept up into the air; his body turned at dizzying angles. From what he could make out by the chaotic firelight, the six branecasters had merged themselves into a single great dragon: six heads, six necks, and one long, slender body coiled around the branches of the branelink tree. Far below, Frek saw the Magic Pig come charging back toward the tree. Too late.

Writhing and slithering, the dragon pulled itself up and up to arrive at a large, flat nest of sticks from the tree, smoother than wood, and hollow like bones. The nest had clamps to hold Frek in place, flat on his back, staring up toward the orange-lit clouds.

Jayney leaned over Frek, her plastic dragon face bent into a parody of a motherly smile. She had fangs. She bit his neck and drew something out of him, leaving numbness in its place.