Frek and the Elixir (54 page)

“Stop grandstandin' and swing the bat,” said Gibby. “Let me tell you about the Kritterworks, Frek. Sometimes I deliver Grulloo eggs down here instead of up to the puffball. The Kritterworkers chop up our eggs to make embryo blanks, what it is. They got mommy long-legs spiders that run around settin' the embryo blanks into the artigrows. And the Kritterworkers use what you call gene wasps to seed the blanks with kritter wetware.”

“Sounds pretty funky,” said Renata with a little laugh. “I'll help you, Frek. It'll be like the creation myth in that old religious book—the Bible? We can be Eve and Adam.”

“What's that make me?” put in Gibby.

“My best friend,” said Frek, patting the side of his thick lizard tail. “I wouldn't have made it this far without you.”

At first the Kritterworks door wouldn't open for them, but then one of the haloed Kritterworkers within persuaded the door to unlock. She was a lanky old woman with a shock of gray hair sticking out on both sides. She held tight to the door, and didn't let in anyone but Frek, Renata, and Gibby.

“I'm Hanna,” said the overalled woman. She had a thin face with glowing eyes. Her halo was bronze with woody-brown highlights. “And of course I know all about you. I think we've doped out a way to get your codes into our gene wasps.”

The Kritterworks space was dimly lit, the living walls ledged with seemingly endless rows of reddish-purple gutters. A steady flow of clear nutrient ichor flowed through the troughs, gently cascading from one to the next. Sitting in the gutters were the artigrows, scaly teardrop-shaped buds like old-time artichokes, resting on their fat ends with their pointed ends up. Picking their way along the gutters were hundreds of plump hairy spiders on long articulated legs, reaching into the artigrows one by one.

“The mommy longlegs are eating the embryos we'd started,” said Hanna. “They're putting in fresh embryo blanks. In other words, we're getting ready for you. Come on up to the prep room and we'll see about the wasps. Eadweard's very excited.”

“Walk slow,” said Renata, her fingernail dancing across the surface of her turkle. “I have to sketch some of this. Save, turkle. Fresh page.”

They walked alongside the dimly lit walls of gently trickling gutters until they came to a rubbery, irregular staircase, with short flights mixed in among the long. Walking beside an artist made Frek look at things more intently than usual. The stairs led to a clear-walled dome set into the long airy gallery that cored through the heart of the Kritterworks cube.

A bearded man in overalls was waiting in the prep room. “I amm Eadwearrd,” he said, stepping forward.

A very large, clean table was set against the far side of the room, as shiny as if freshly extruded from the floor. The walls were mostly covered with a papery insect nest, a gray, undulating congeries of hexagonal cells, alive with wasps the size of Frek's little finger—gene wasps. They had glittering red eyes, stubby gossamer wings with intricate lavender veins, elegantly curved bodies striped black and green, and prominent stingers at their rears. A number of them were feeding from a trough of mush, others were rubbing feelers with their fellows or sleepily crawling about upon the gray surface of the nest. And who knew how many more were inside the thousands of covered cells.

The bearded Eadweard held his slender hands drawn up against his chest, rubbing them together like a housefly cleaning his legs. His Orpolese halo was iridescent black with shiny green markings, just like the body of a gene wasp. “You havve the elixirr?” he asked. His voice hummed and hissed; he made clicking sounds between his words.

“Here it is,” said Frek, drawing the egg from his pocket. The two Kritterworkers sucked in their breath. Renata's fingernail was scratching frantically across her turkle, trying to keep up.

“Crack the egg, I think,” said Hanna, excitedly gesturing. “Tap it on the big table we made. The gene wasps will buzz down and read the codes. They'll copy a genome apiece, cook up DNA in their stinger glands, go seed some embryos, then fly back and do it again. It'll take a load of trips to instantiate all these new species.”

“
Olld
sspecies,” corrected Eadweard with a smile that revealed overlapping yellow teeth. “Whatt a cornucopiaa!”

Frek gazed at the intricately patterned surface of his elixir egg, at the myriad of little creature icons tiled together.

“Go ahead, Frek,” said Renata. “Do it.”

Gibby hopped up onto the tabletop to watch. The table was easily three meters across. Frek gave his egg a sharp downward rap against the broad, smooth surface. The egg shattered into millions of pieces. Some residual Planck brane force drew the tiny plantlets and animalcules into a tidy array, aligning them like iron filings in a magnetic field, marshaling them into a grid with thousands of rows and columns, a square of life two meters in size.

“Come, my pretty buzzers!” sang Hanna in a musical tone. “We have an army of new codes!”

At first only a few gene wasps responded. As they delicately hovered above the grid of tiny gene models, Eadweard spoke to them in buzzes and pops. Apparently he could speak the language of insects.

Eadweard must have told the wasps to start at the upper left corner of the grid and to work their way across and down, for that's what they did. As it happened, the tiny figure at the starting location happened to be the first gene icon that Frek had saved. The red-breasted robin. A gene wasp hovered over the robin, studying it with compound eyes and touching the icon all over with long, stiff feelers. And then the wasp buzzed out through a hole in the clear ceiling that Frek hadn't noticed before.

“His little stinger will seed a few score artigrows at the farthest corner of the cube,” said Hanna. “Males and females he'll create. And then, zoom, he'll be back to learn another one.” She lifted her voice in melody. “Come come, you sweet striped buzzers!”

Quite a swarm of the gene wasps lifted out of the wall-sized nest. Unsettled by the cloud of insects, Gibby hopped off the counter and hand-walked back to the head of the stairs. Frek and Renata joined him, brushing the gene wasps away from their faces. Eadweard crouched by the table, hissing and clicking, ensuring that the gene wasps copied each code once and once only.

“All is well,” called Hanna. “We'll release your new creatures as they mature. We have lifter beetles to carry them to promising habitats. And once we've copied everything, we'll start over.”

“We'll keep att itt,” twittered Eadweard. “Yess. A nnew Edenn. Only onne taskk remainns.”

“We must bring down all the Govs,” intoned Hanna. “Make them stop puffing out their filthy knockout virus mist. Let our reborn plants and animals freely breed. Go, Frek, and bring down the Stun City puffball.”

“Gubernator delenda est,”
said Frek, remembering Bumby's phrase. Gov must be destroyed.

“Yes,” said Hanna. “The door will let you out.”

“Look, there goes a wasp,” said Renata, as she, Frek, and Gibby headed down the gutter-lined hall toward the exit. A gene wasp flew past them to hover over the artigrows closest to the door, its red eyes glinting. Wings abuzz, it lowered itself onto one of the plump green buds and forced its abdomen into the artigrow's heart, feeling for the embryo blank. Having read one of the codes stored in Frek's icons, the gene wasp had synthesized the DNA for the corresponding creature. “I wonder what it's making,” continued Renata, sketching the wasp's bent body as she talked. “A coconut palm? A snowshoe rabbit? A luna moth? I'm so proud of you, Frek.”

Gibby was at the door, uneasily peering out at the waiting crowd. “I been seein' the fight pictures up on the walls,” he said, nodding toward a billboard facing the Kritterworks. “Lot of people gettin' killed. How about them Orpolese helpin' us here, Frek? Vlan could blast Gov the way Bumby did.”

“I think they want to stay out of sight,” said Frek. “If the espers have us do it ourselves it makes a better show.”

“Man,” said Gibby, mournfully rocking from leg to leg. “We might end up dead—and it's all a game for them donut things.” He thought a little more. “You sure you can't kenny craft us a blaster or two? Try it again before we go out there in all that mob.”

So once again Frek vaared some dark matter into visible kenner; once again he overlaid it with the blueprint of a blaster; once again the object fought him and turned into—something like a crab this time. The kenner-crab would have pinched Gibby's leg-arm if the Grulloo hadn't impaled it with his knife. And then it deliquesced into invisible dark matter.

“I don't think crafting's gonna work here,” said Frek. “The dark matter around Earth might be different from the stuff in the Planck brane and the galactic core.”

“You don't need blasters anyway,” exclaimed Renata. “Look how many people are waiting to help us. They'll tear down the puffball with their bare hands if you tell them to.”

“It's too big,” protested Gibby. “Gov's throwing flamin' jellies. No sense half the folks in town gettin' killed. Come on, Frek, think of somethin' smart.”

“We know where Gov likes to live,” said Frek slowly. “We saw his chamber when Bumby shot him before. Phamelu's lifter beetle can fly us up there. I bet the new Gov's in the same place. We'll take a whole bunch of counselors to help. We'll chop our way in with axes, maybe stun Gov with electric eels and chop him up with knives.”

“Now you talkin', boy,” said the Grulloo, grinning and whetting his blade against the stony Kritterworks floor. “Now you cookin' with gas.”

The crowd roared with excitement when the three companions reappeared. It was late afternoon by now, approaching dusk. Frek found it unsettling to have so many people staring at him and yelling. It was so easy to imagine their emotions flipping the other way. But for now, yes, they were ready to follow him. Nearly all the other Govs on Earth were already gone. It was up to them to finish winning the war, right here and now.

Rather than riding with Phamelu—whom he still didn't trust—Frek called a counselor out of the crowd, a dark-haired, wide-mouthed woman with a double chin. Her name was Xondra. She said her heavy-duty lifter beetle would be powerful enough to carry herself, Frek, and both Frek's companions.

They rose up and criss-crossed above the crowd, enlisting a few dozen more haloed counselors to join them. Their lifter beetles formed a swarm, a little air force. Frek sent four of them winging down to the nearby counselor service center to fetch all the weapons in stock—please-plant-grown knives and hatchets plus, of course, electric eels.

While waiting for the arms, Frek addressed the people who'd followed him to the Kritterworks.

“Are you ready to bring down Gov?” he called, feeling his voice as very thin above the rumble of the crowd and the buzzing of the lifter beetles.

But everyone heard. “Yes,” they roared back. “Kill Gov!”

“Is that you guys talking, or just your Orpolese players?” shouted Frek—not that people would be able to give an honest answer. But he wanted to believe they were acting with their hearts. “What do you
really
think about NuBioCom?”

Honest or not, the response was reassuring. “We hate Gov!” cried some, while others shouted, “We want the old-time plants and animals back!” A chorus of “Good old days!” arose, and soon everyone was chanting it. “Good old days! Good old days! Good old days!”

Frek held out his hands for silence, hardly believing his gesture would work but, lo and behold, it did. The Nubbies below and the counselors in their lifter beetles watched him expectantly. General Frek Huggins.

“We're going up to the puffball now,” said Frek. “You guys on the ground form a ring around the puffball and watch for any of Gov's clones trying to escape. The counselors and I will go for him through the roof. If we can, we'll set the building on fire. And be careful. You've seen the pictures. Gov will use everything he's got.”

“You'll lose,” boomed a voice from behind Frek. A fifty-meter-high First Nations raven mask was glaring down from the billboard on the Kritterworks outer wall, pushing away the news feeds of the burning Gov puffballs in the other towns. Gov's image, red and black and white. “I'll kill you. And none of your new creatures will breed. I'm the ruler, for ever and ever and ever.” The clacking beak was besmirched with blood.

Goaded on by their Orpolese puppetmasters, the assembled citizens shrieked their defiance. Just then the counselors returned with the weaponry—electric eels, knives, machetes, and axes. There were more than enough arms for Frek's “air force,” and the extras were passed out to the foot soldiers below, though many of them had already found their own knives and clubs. With a roar they surged up the street toward the puffball, the lifter beetles buzzing in formation with Xondra, Frek, Renata, and Gibby at the head.

As they entered the square surrounding the puffball, Gov began lobbing firebombs again. Zhak, riding in Phamelu's lifter beetle, swooped in past the fireballs and sliced off one, two, three of Gov's tendrils with powerful swings of his machete. Two more counselors joined him. Moments later all the tendrils were gone.

Images of the angry raven flitted across the puffball's skin. The building door irised open and a horde of small kritters came storming out. They were biters, low-slung balls with big jaws and side-mounted running legs. The biters did substantial damage to the leading rank of Nubbies. But the second rank surged forward, wielding their blades and cudgels until all the biters were laid low. The Nubbies reached the wall of the puffball and began cutting their way in.

Meanwhile, Frek's beetle was angling down toward a landing atop the puffball. The building was a fat ring around a central courtyard. Frek was guessing Gov was hidden beneath the rounded top surface at the same compass point as before, slightly to the west of the door facing the square.