Frek and the Elixir (56 page)

The hologram at the top of the Toonsmithy was a preview image of an upcoming game called Star Surfer, which was goggy to see, as Star Surfer was one of the games Deanna and Renata had been discussing with Frek over the winter. It was based on Frek's experiences riding the solar flares around the archipelago of Orpolese suns.

Frek landed beside a particularly sleek-looking aircoral, a domed shape with windows dramatically sliced out like segments removed from an orange. Renata had been living here with Deanna for eleven months. For Renata, Deanna was a combination employer, tutor, and big sister.

Frek settled his angelwings down in the yard, then knocked on the door. Deanna answered. The spiral pattern cut into her blond-dyed hair echoed the shape of the Toonsmithy. Like the other toonsmiths, Deanna was free of any Orpolese halo.

“Welcome, galactic groover,” said Deanna. “I've been wanting to show you Star Surfer. It's rather goggy. You gave us some great ideas. Remind me again, why are you still in school?”

“Because I'm thirteen,” said Frek. “And my mom's a facilitator.”

“Ah yes,” said Deanna. “A sound education is the basis for future success, hey? Me, I didn't go to school at all.”

“Yubba, Frek,” said Renata, running out, her pigtails bouncing. She'd tied them with the special green ribbons that Frek had made her on Unipusk last year. “I can't wait to go flying. Deanna's been working me too hard.”

“Renata's been drawing models of the creatures she saw in that spaceport bar,” said Deanna. “I used them in the Star Surfer opening scenes. My next hang-up is visualizing what it's like inside a sun. I need your help, Frek. Can you come to my studio for just a minute?”

“It's Sunday, Deanna,” protested Renata. “We have to go see Gibby's family!”

“We could spare a half hour,” said Frek. He never missed a chance to go inside the Toonsmithy.

So Frek left his angelwings grazing on the lawn and followed Deanna through a round door in the side of the Toonsmithy beanstalk. The building recognized Deanna and greeted her. Sloping up to the right was a long, curving hallway.

“Over here,” said Renata, leading Frek to stand with Deanna in the middle of the hall. “We can ride.” She squeezed his hand. A hump appeared in the floor and began sweeping upward, carrying them along like riders on a wave, the skin of the floor sliding beneath their feet.

The walls of the Toonsmithy were covered with stray toons: the Skull Farmers, the soap-opera Klaxon family, Dha Na Duc and his nephews, the Goob Dolls, and the Financiers of the Apocalypse. Frek thought he glimpsed the mortarboard-wearing cuttlefish toon that Bumby had made, but it didn't stick around to talk with them.

“None of us even designed that one,” remarked Deanna. “The toons have a whole ecology of their own. Competing for wall skins.” To illustrate her point, she dangled her hand and twitched her fingers as if they were independently walking around. And then she made a graceful pointing gesture. The bump in the floor settled down, bringing them to a halt at the door to her studio.

The walls, floor, and ceiling of Deanna's room were the dark of deep space, inset with the glowing disks of suns. A shutter covered the window. Now and then an undulating veil of colors shot out from one of the stars: a solar flare. In the middle distance, a boy and a girl were riding gold and chrome surfboards. The toons were modeled upon Frek and Renata. How glatt was that?

So convincing was the illusion of space that Frek had to fight a sense of vertigo. Deanna's wall skin was gundo good quality. The Frek toon character locked onto him and began matching his moves.

“Let's fly into that sun over there,” said Deanna, who was steering the Renata character. “Tell me how you like it.”

It was all wrong inside Deanna's toon sun. So for a half hour or so, Frek helped her tweak it. For one thing, Deanna had her soundtrack set to dull random roaring. Frek got her to make the air throb and chime instead, adding in gurgling sounds to suggest the feeling of bubbles running along your legs. And then he got her to put in a swarm of loofy. The eddies schooled like tropical fish, glittered like a bin of jewels. Being inside a sun was paradise, that's what Deanna hadn't understood.

“Enough now!” interrupted Renata. “We gotta go!”

Fifteen minutes later, Frek and Renata were flapping above the outskirts of Stun City, heading for the rolling, forested hills of the Grulloo Woods.

“What's wrong?” asked Renata, noticing something in Frek's face.

“It's—I'm feeling guilty,” said Frek. “This morning I saw an old friend of mine. Stoo? The Orpolese keep running him. It's terrible. I acted like I didn't have time to talk to him—but I had plenty of time to mess around with Deanna. I've got to find a way to finish off the branecast.”

“Don't be so hard on yourself,” said Renata. “Look down at how many different colors of green there are. All the new plants are taking root.”

“It's good,” said Frek. “But it's not enough.”

“What's that big gray thing down there?” asked Renata, pointing.

Deep in one of the ravines was a long, twitching shape moving rapidly toward the river. Renata and Frek circled around to get a better look at it, but by then it had slid beneath the water. Barely visible, it undulated upstream toward Middleville.

“I've never seen a kritter like that,” said Frek. “The Kritterworks isn't still making new models, is it?”

“Maybe it's a dinosaur?” wondered Renata. “That would be gollywog. There might have been some ancient genomes inside your elixir egg.”

“We better not chase it,” said Frek, with a glance at the sun. “Salla said to show up between one and two.”

They flew along the Grulloo road on the ridge above the river, giving a wide berth to the crumbling dead tree where Okky and her sisters lived. Soon they could pick out the bright green of the tobacco plants along the stream where Salla and Jeroon had their burrows. Bili was on the bank, waiting for them. Seeing Frek, he whooped and waved, lashing his furry striped tiger tail.

LuHu and then Salla emerged from their burrow's round stone-framed entrance hole. LuHu's ponytail body was alive with excitement. Salla was wearing her best white turmite silk jacket, with the flowery petals on her body arranged just so. She was thinner than last year, her face sadder.

“I been makin' a pyramid for Paw!” Bili told Frek. “Dibble's gonna help us lift up the last stone. Looky. It's white.” Resting at Bili's side was a gleaming round boulder that the young Grulloo had somehow transported here to smooth and polish. Dibble herself was off to one side, ripping the low-hanging branches off an anyfruit tree.

“Great,” said Frek, shrugging off his angelwings. “Gibby deserves it. I still can't believe he's gone.”

“Where's that stupid Jeroon?” fretted Salla. She always seemed a little edgy when Frek was around. “He and Ellie walked down to the river to go fishing this morning and they haven't come back. They took our other sister Pfaffa with them. I bet it's her fault. Pfaffa always has her head in the clouds.”

“Up an elephruk's butt, you mean,” said Bili.

“Don't talk like that, you whelp.”

“Bili's bad,” exulted LuHu.

“Maybe we should just go without Jeroon,” suggested Frek. He wanted to be sure to get out of the Grulloo woods well before dark.

“Okay,” said Ellie. “It's about a half hour's walk from here.”

“I'm the mahout,” said Bili, and hopped into the recessed truck-bed of Dibble's back. In an instant, LuHu was at his side. The ill-tempered elephruk made as if to snatch them away, but she couldn't reach them.

“I got some yams at Paw's grave for you,” Bili told the elephruk. “Kneel down and let me roll in the rock.” Dibble lowered her bed to the ground. Frek helped Bili wrestle in the spherical stone. And then they got underway.

The woodlands were teeming with new life. Flies and gnats spiraled in the air. Flowers Frek had never seen outside of an url were pushing up from the forest floor—irises, snowdrops, and sorrel. Mushrooms were everywhere, slick and brown, white and round, beige fingers, orange trumpets. Squirrels chattered in the trees, rabbits loped by, a fawn crashed through the underbrush. A woodpecker tap-tatted a dead trunk, nuthatches peeked around mossy branches, chickadees balanced on supple spring-green twigs, jays swept down to peck worms from the ground. Moths were everywhere, gray and tan. The air smelled richer and sweeter than ever before.

And the seeding wasn't done yet. As they passed through a clearing, a Kritterworks lifter beetle rode down on a shaft of sunlight and unloaded a score of star-nosed moles, who quickly burrowed into the soft forest floor. Dibble snorted in surprise. Not finished yet, the lifter beetle scuttled around the clearing, poking seeds into the ground with its horned snout. With a rasp and a clatter it rose back into the sky.

Gibby's grave was in a clearing a bit farther on. Bili had been painstakingly assembling a symmetrical pile of matching round boulders: a four-by-four layer topped by a three-by-three layer and a two-by-two layer, tidy as old-time courthouse cannonballs. Finding, shaping, and setting the stones had taken him all winter; moss already grew on their northern sides.

Bili fed Dibble some yams, and then the elephruk helped them hoist the final stone into place. It was of a remarkable brightness, like an eye on the peak of the pyramid.

“Roar!” exclaimed the young Grulloo, perching atop the monument. “Don't nobody forget my paw!”

Bili and LuHu had brought along Gibby's souvenirs: Bili had the little Unipusker statue, the fish scale from flying Aunt Guszti, the star-cinder from Orpoly. LuHu had the branecasters' key and the blue stone from Unipusk. At their request, Frek once again told the Grulloo children the stories behind their souvenirs. And then Renata retold the tale of how Gibby had saved their lives during the final attack on Gov's puffball. Salla frowned a bit to hear it.

It was late afternoon by the time they got back to Salla's burrow. As they arrived, Jeroon appeared, running up the creek bed with the mermaid-tailed Ellie puffing at his side, both of them disheveled and wild-eyed, their clothes and leg-arms completely covered with mud.

“It ate Pfaffa!” shrieked Ellie. “It almost got us!”

“No!” screamed Salla, her petals standing straight out from her body. “What do you mean!”

“A great pasted-together thing,” said Jeroon. “A shuggoth. I've heard of them—NuBioCom used shuggoths against the Crufters to crush the Revolution of 2710. But this one had an Orpolese halo. Its body was masses of animals and plants melted together. Eyes along its sides, bunches of hands and tentacles sprouting out here and there, mouths where you least expect them, a few branches and leaves. It swallowed Pfaffa whole—absorbed her. I could still see her face under its skin, screaming like.”

“How did this happen?” asked Frek.

“We heard a voice calling for help around a bend in the river,” said Jeroon. “Sounded for all the world like a woman drowning. So we ran over there and—it was a shuggoth fooling us. It came out of the water faster than you can say
knife,
running on flipper legs that grew feet. Ellie and I climbed up on a cliff, but poor Pfaffa was too slow. We were trapped on those rocks for two hours, on the highest, thinnest ledge. Eventually the shuggoth gave up on us and started grazing, and then it split in two. And it kept up like that, eating and splitting. Finally a herd of deer came by. Half the shuggoths took off after them; the others jumped in the river.”

“I can't believe how fast they were making babies,” said Ellie, her mouth trembling. “In two hours, that one shuggoth became—a thousand? An army. And a new Orpolese halo popped up on every one of them.”

“This could mean the end of the world,” said Jeroon. “They're swallowing down every last thing they crawl upon. Every plant, every mushroom, every bug. We could hardly make our way through the mud. The haloes mean it's all part of the filthy game your alien friends are running on us, Frek.”

“Where were they headed?” asked Frek, feeling sick.

“I think Middleville,” said Jeroon.

“Let's go,” said Renata.

“Yes,” said Frek. “We'll do something.”

“It's your fault Pfaffa's dead!” burst out Salla, overwrought at the bad news. Her tears coursed down the wrinkles in her face. “You killed Gibby! You're ruining our lives, you gleep!”

“I'll stop the shuggoths,” said Frek, glimpsing the rudiments of a desperate plan. “I think there's a way.” As for the rest of what Salla had said, Frek could see the crushed expression on Bili's face. The boy's big day was ending badly. “You made a great pyramid for your father,” he told Bili, giving the little Grulloo a pat. “I'll never forget him. And I'll be back.”

“Geever,” said Bili, and turned away.

Flying toward the river, Frek and Renata crossed several trails like dirt roads. Shuggoth tracks. It was appalling how often the trails branched. Down near the river they spotted a pair of straggler shuggoths hungrily plowing up the landscape—gray-green shapes sprinkled with eyes, feelers, and tentacles. Now and then, when one of them got stuck, it would sprout out a deer-leg to push against the mud. Noticing Frek and Renata overhead, a shuggoth called out in a woman's imploring voice.

“I need your help,” sang the shuggoth, the incongruously sweet tones emanating from its vibrating skin. The monster wore a wobbly brown Orpolese halo. “I've lost my friends.”

The shambling beast reared up toward them, stretching out a protrusion like an elephruk's trunk. They hovered a bit higher. The disappointed shuggoth popped out a dozen centipede legs and scrabbled onto a ten-meter mapine. The branches sagged and melted; the trunk softened and merged into the shuggoth's flesh. The bloated, foul thing sank down. With a popping sound, it split along its length, sending up a meaty stench of excrement and decay.