Frek and the Elixir (60 page)

With the mind worms gone, Frek's brain felt private, fully his own, not under attack. No espers pried at his head; he no longer needed to sky-air-comb the parasites away. Finally he could begin to relax.

Throughout the whole galaxy, the flickerballs and esper shows would now be on the blink as well. Untold numbers of talent races were awakening from slavery. All thanks to Frek and his gang. They'd killed off the Govs, they'd healed Earth with the elixir, and now they'd finally crashed the branecast. Unbelievable.

Frek had a sudden painful memory of the melting pictures tumbling from Dad's shroud. He wouldn't have made it if it hadn't been for his father. What had Dad said? “As long as you're around, I'm still alive.” It was all right.

“Can you feel the difference?” he asked the others.

“Yes,” said Renata, understanding exactly what he meant. “It's good. But we're not done. It'll come back unless we get rid of
them.
” She pointed to the floating lump of Exaplex flesh.

Perched on the singed meat were the six branecasters and—the Magic Pig. They looked annoyed, put out, angry, but not terrified. Their gold auras were strong.

“Nothin' we throw at them makes a difference,” said Soul Soldier. “They're tough as toons. Best we can do is keep them from flying away.”

“Right,” said Frek, with a quick glance up at the calm, starry heavens. “If only we could drain their wham before the storm hits.”

“Why does wham matter?” asked Ida.

“The Planck brane has these weird storms every fifty-two days,” said Frek. “The Hubs with the most wham survive a storm, the others don't. The Planck brane's like a shared dream the Hubs make up together. A storm is a fresh start. A Hub's in the new dream if enough Hubs remember him. Or her.”

“I've got it!” exclaimed Renata. “Disrespect the branecasters. Make them ridiculous. Show how plain and boring they are. And then stop thinking about them. I bet the Hubs will follow along.”

So as not to hide the branecasters beneath a struggling dog-pile, Renata sent only a few toons after them. It seemed likely that the far-flung Hubs would have some way of perceiving what happened here. Even without esping, distances didn't mean much in the Planck brane.

As the humans and toons laughed and cheered, the Space Monkeys tore off the struggling branecasters' spiffy clothes. Da Nha Duc pasted feathers to Chainey's bald head and bare butt. Mean Queen scrubbed off Jayney's pancake makeup and painted her nose red. Gypsy Joker darted in to bag the branecasters' gold jewelry and pry out their gold teeth. Goob Doll Judy used her lipstick to scrawl “KICK ME” onto Sid's hairy back. Fax Frog shoved a red apple into Cecily's mouth and trimmed her ears with parsley. Professor Bumby put dunce caps on Batty and Bitty and asked them Latin questions they couldn't understand.

But somehow nobody managed to lay a finger on the Magic Pig. He was always standing somewhere different than where his would-be tormentors reached.

Now Strummer played a song, with Soul Soldier singing along.

They sang the verse a few more times. Hubs all over the Planck brane joined in, the sky echoing with their massed voices. The branecasters tried to interrupt, but nobody listened to them. They made as if to fly away from the chunk of Exaplex meat, but the toons pushed them back. The longer the laughter and the singing continued, the fainter the branecasters' auras grew.

Though the Magic Pig was hemmed in with the others, his halo remained bright and strong. Nothing at all seemed to get to him. He always zigged whenever anyone else zagged.

Just then a kilometer-sized cube of starry sky tumbled down and fell into the ocean. What a splash! And here came a block with the moon, followed by another splash and another.

At this first touch of the renormalization, the branecasters faded away, leaving the Magic Pig on his own. The Pig seized the moment of confusion to fly off as fast as he could go. And Soul Soldier used a Nguyen War singularity gun to blast the last remaining bit of the Exaplex into glowing wisps of plasma.

Meanwhile more cubes were splashing into the sea.

“Lead us to the branelink, Guszti!” cried Frek. “Hurry!”

Guszti and Flinka sped across the ocean, closely followed by the four humans on their toons. The billion other three-dimensional toons stayed behind to take their chances. There wasn't room for them in the wall skins of Earth.

Frek and his party rocketed past the candle—its flame had been doused by waves from the falling blocks. They passed the hilltop mirror, avoiding its shattered shards of glass. It was turning to night. Not only was the moon gone, the dropping blocks were spilling blackness, as if covering the landscape with ink. Somewhere in the darkness Frek heard the slow snipping of giant scissors.

It was good that Flinka and Guszti glowed. Frek and his companions safely followed them to the hill with the giant leaf. The luminous fish hovered by the branelink tree's stem, shedding enough light to see.

To Frek's horror, the Magic Pig was busy there, furiously digging with his trotters. He'd covered up the entrance hole with a big pile of mud!

Ida ran over and kicked the Magic Pig in the butt so hard that he rolled down Pig Hill, squealing all the way. Meanwhile Renata used her blaster to burn the dirt away from the branelink entrance.

Hearing a rush of air, Frek looked up to see a cube of sky falling straight down upon them. The hill and the giant leaf rocked and shuddered under the impact, but Frek felt only a puff of wind. And then he realized their protective spacesuits had dissolved.

“I can't see!” cried Ida. “Where's the door?” The darkness was absolute.

“It's here,” called Renata's voice. “The door looks like a woman.”

Yes, the branelink door was a cut-out patch of twilight against the renormalization's velvet gloom—it was shaped like the outline of a plump, motherly figure in a wide-brimmed straw hat. Visible through the woman-door were the Huggins kitchen and garden. A cozy little group sat on a cloth in the yard with a crescent moon behind them. From where Frek stood, the crescent was positioned exactly at the center of woman-door's head.

They found their way through, Frek last.

As he stepped into his home world, Frek looked back for a last glimpse of the Planck brane. He saw a blackboard with symbols marked in chalk. The symbols were moving. The branelink vanished.

Out in the backyard, Linz Martinez, Mom, Geneva, and the Unipuskers were watching Da Nha Duc toons on a show-pillow. The Unipuskers were enjoying it mightily.

“Haw haw haw,” creaked Hawb, leaning back his head and letting his shell mouth crack wide open. His eye stalks were bent to focus on Da Nha's furious struggle to build a larger house than his neighbor Jones.

There was a faint mist beneath the leafy trees, and a line of pink along the horizon where the sun had gone down. The crescent moon hung just above the trees, delicate and bright.

Linz Martinez was sitting beside Mom, and Geneva was petting one of Wow and Woo's puppies. She looked very relieved to see Frek return. For the first time in a long while, he realized that his big sister cared about him. He didn't look forward to telling her about Dad.

“Command Frek to close our deal now,” said Hawb, turning all businesslike. He was trying to stand up, but couldn't quite get his footing. There was an empty tree-juice mug and quite a pile of peach pits by his side. He'd been eating and drinking as fast as he could.

“No more deal,” said Frek, temporarily forgetting about his father. Such a wide smile crawled onto his face that he felt as if his chin could fall off. “No more esping. The mind worms and the branecasters are gone.”

“Explain!” cried Cawmb, taking on his usual peremptory tone.

“Oh, Frek!” said Lora, ignoring Cawmb. “That's wonderful.”

“You should have seen your son,” put in Renata. “He rocked. And Ida—Ida kicked the Magic Pig's butt.”

“Just like she said she would,” said Frek, grinning even wider, if this were possible.

“Way to go, Frek, Ida, and Renata,” said Geneva, giving them a warm smile. “You're heroes!”

“Justify the projected delays in the Unipusker production of the humanity channel,” persisted Cawmb.

“No channel,” said Frek, making it insultingly simple. “No producer. No flickerball. No got. Go home.”

“Might as well relax for a while and watch more toons,” Geneva told the Unipuskers in a soothing tone. “I'll tell you what, Hawb and Cawmb, I could get you some urlbuds to take home. If they don't work on your walls, I bet you could rig something up. You're so high-tech. Buy some urlbuds and you won't be going home empty-handed. Start a new business.”

“Request one thousand toon urlbuds,” said Hawb almost right away. Cawmb burst out with something in Unipusker, and the two quarreled for a minute. But then the Da Nha Duc on Geneva's pillow did something else that set them both to laughing. “Make that two thousand urlbuds,” said Cawmb.

“And you pay us—what?” said Geneva. She had more of a head for business than Frek.

“Propose to pay equal weight of gold?” said Hawb. “We have a supply that was intended for the branecasters.”

Geneva glanced over at Mom. “Gold will do,” said Lora. “We could use some gold around here. But make it ten times the weight. And throw in some diamonds. We'll get the urlbuds tomorrow morning. Now sit down, everyone. I'll bring out more tree-juice. The fizzy kind for the old folks. And Frek, I'll make you and the girls some sandwiches. You look kind of—did you find out something about Carb?”

“He's dead,” said Frek. “The branecasters killed him.”

“They made him into a pile of leaves that blew away,” added Ida.

“Oh no,” said Geneva.

It took a while to settle down from that, but even so, the warm evening went on. Even though he'd turned his back on the family, Dad would have wanted them to be happy, wanted them out in the yard, enjoying the spring night, talking, eating, and drinking. Woo, Wow, and the puppies kept sniffing everyone and begging snacks.

The Unipuskers were in a good mood. They said that of all the races they'd met in the galaxy, only the Earthlings had thought of making toons. Made expansive by the tree-juice, Cawmb said the toons meant that Earth, just as she was, had an export valuable enough to prevent other races from wanting to crush and colonize her. Humanity could join the galaxy's other races on equal terms.

Such good news called for cheers, toasts, and songs. A few neighbors came over, among them Stoo Steiner, looking a little shy.

“Stoo!” exclaimed Frek. “It's all fixed. No more espers.”

“My father's sorry about the shuggoths,” said Stoo.

“Sorry?” exclaimed Frek. “That's all?”

“
You
should talk,” said Stoo. “It's been a bad year for some of us.”

“Oh, Stoo,” said Frek, softening. “Can we be friends again?”

“That's why I'm here.” Stoo's smile was wonderful to see. “I've always gotten a kick out of you and your family. You're all so—I don't know. Different.”

“Thanks,” said Frek. “I'm starting to think maybe different is good. The toonsmiths—they like some of my ideas. And Renata's already working with them.”

“Can you take me to meet them, too?” said Stoo. “By now, I must know more than anyone about watching toons.”

“Sure,” said Frek.

Lora brought out some more instruments and they played music till midnight, Lora on guitar, Frek on harmonica, and Linz Martinez coaxing sweet melodies from his violin.

And then Frek and Renata were alone. When Frek glanced up at the sky, he almost felt like he could see his old man up there smiling—the crazy goof. He smiled back. The lawn smelled like flowers. A mockingbird sang in the trees; the branches blinked with lightning bugs.

“It's all together,” said Frek, thinking back over the long quest. “We're done.”

“No, we're not,” said Renata, squeezing Frek's hand. “We're just beginning.”

aircoral, airpolyp.
Airpolyps are gnat-sized flying kritters that build up curvy houses called aircorals. Like sea-going polyps, they create these reeflike structures by depositing tiny bits of silicon and calcium.

 

angelwing.
An angelwing is a kritter resembling a one-meter-long dragonfly body with a single two-meter wing. People use pairs of angelwings to fly.

 

anyfruit.
A tweaked fruit tree that yields all the traditional fruits.

 

anymeat.
A meat product grown in loaves for food.

 

artigrow.
A kritter resembling a large artichoke. Serves as an incubator to grow kritter embryos to term.

 

autopoiesis.
The process by which a living (or social) system creates, organizes, and maintains itself. (A standard word, popularized by the Chilean biologists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela in the 1980s.)

 

bindmoss.
A durable ground-cover resembling wiry moss.

 

bobblie.
An enormous sentient weather pattern in the atmosphere of the gas-giant planet Jumm.

 

brain nodule.
A dense nexus of fungal tissue found in the Govs' puffballs. Functions like an organic computer.

 

brane, branelink.
A brane is a universe, and a branelink is a hyperdimensional tunnel connecting two parallel branes. (Brane is a standard word, derived from “membrane,” and is used by cosmologists and string-theorists.)

 

branecast, branecaster.
The branecast is a process by which the branecasters extract the thoughts of “talent creatures” in our universe and display them to “clients.” An entire race's activities become something like a reality TV show. The branecasters are a tightly knit group of six.

 

counselor.
A police agent employed by the Govs.

 

cowloon.
A balloonlike cow-derived kritter that yields an intoxicating fluid called moolk.

 

Crufters.
Rebels dedicated to turning back biotechnology and restoring Earth's original ecology.

 

cryptoon.
A toon creature that acts as an autonomous secret agent.

 

decoherence.
A standard quantum-mechanical notion akin to the notion of a system being in a simple, collapsed state after a measurement is performed. The terminology is a bit counterintuitive, in that a “coherent” state is a mixed state of being simultaneously in many modes, and a “decoherent” state resembles a definite, classical single-mode state.

 

elephruk.
An elephantlike kritter with a lowered back. Used as a truck.

 

esp, esper.
To esp someone is to see into their mind.

 

Exaplex.
A huge organic entity in the Planck brane that acts as the machinery of the branecast. Seemingly created by the Magic Pig. The Exaplex has hyperdimensional mind worms that extend out to the brains of talent race members, as well as Li'l Bulbs that send the information to clients' flickerballs. The controlling intelligence of the Exaplex is a being called Zed.

 

facilitator.
A teacher.

 

flickerball.
A device resembling a crystal ball, used by espers to experience the branecasts of other beings' minds.

 

foamskin.
The foamy, leathery skin of a tweaked thistle. Used to make casts for sprains and broken bones.

 

gaussy.
Far out, extremely fashionable, uncompromisingly chic.

 

geeve, geever, geevey, geevin.
Geeve is an obscenity with the force of the f-word, and is used in a similar range of combining forms.

 

giga.
A lot.

 

glatt.
Smooth, excellent, very nice.

 

glawk.
To hang out.

 

gleep, gleepy.
Creep, creepy.

 

glozy.
Cozy and nice.

 

glypher.
A sluglike critter that posts images onto house tree wall skins. Used by schools to send messages home to parents.

 

godzoon.
Very, extremely.

 

gog, goggy, gripper.
Excellent, wacky, mind-boggling.

 

gollywog.
Weird and crazy.

 

googly.
Funny, entertaining, cheerful.

 

Gov.
A highly intelligent kritter evolved from a certain kind of worm. Govs live in fungal structures called puffballs and act as the rulers of Y3K Earth.

 

Great Collapse.
The catastrophic occasion in 2666 when the NuBioCom directorate chose, firstly, to deploy a knockout virus to block reproduction, and secondly, to destroy the genetic codes of all but 256 of Earth's species.

 

grinskin.
A person who takes psychotropic and weight-reducing medications that render the individual's personality artificially bright and flat.

 

grobread.
An organic, living bread culture that continually renews itself.

 

groover.
A dumbbell, a pawn, an individual whose thoughts are completely controlled by the media.

 

Grulloo.
A humanoid mutant with only one pair of limbs which perforce function as both arms and legs. (Derived from the medieval term “gryllos,” used for fantastic creatures of this type depicted in the margins of illuminated scriptures. The painters Hieronymus Bosch and Peter Bruegel often painted gryllos creatures into their scenes of hell.)

 

gump, gumpy.
Impolite word for a handicapped person.

 

gundo.
A large quantity, very much.

 

gurp, gurpy.
Very unintelligent person. A dope.

 

Hub.
An inhabitant of the parallel universe called the Planck brane. Their appearance is quite mutable, and their continued existence depends upon their level of renown (see “wham”).

 

ickspot.
A deadly disease peculiar to Unipuskers. Symptoms include gray, flaky spots.

 

jocktoons.
Toon shows about sports.

 

Jumm.
The large gas-giant planet orbited by the moon of Unipusk.

 

kac.
Obscenity for excrement, with the same force as the s-word.

 

kenner, kenny, kenny-crafter.
Kenner is invisible dark matter, found throughout our universe. Kenny-crafters have the ability to transmute kenner into visible matter, and to “vaar” it into whatever shape they want. Objects created in this fashion are kennies.

 

killtoon.
A violent toon show.

 

knockout virus.
An agent used to block the reproductive processes of every species on Earth. The exact formula is continually changed. NuBioCom licenses temporary antidotes so that people can from time to time have children.

 

kritter.
A genomically tweaked plant or animal. Generally kritters are designed by the NuBioCom corporation.

 

loofy.
Collective word for the smallish vortex rings found in the atmosphere of a star. Larger vortex rings (such as the Orpolese) feed upon loofy.

 

Magic Pig.
A powerful being capable of seeing—and touching—Frek's past and his possible futures. The Pig's main motive is to make a profit and survive. Due to his association with the branecasters, he has a vested interest in making Frek's life more complicated and thus more entertaining. (One of my nicknames in college was the Magic Pig.)

 

mapine.
A tweaked plant that is a cross between a maple and a pine tree, but which resembles a maple that simultaneously bears colored autumn leaves and fresh green spring foliage.

 

matchbud.
A tweaked plant that produces stalks with phosphorus heads used as matches.

 

mind worm.
A hyperdimensional tendril connecting an individual's brain to the Exaplex in the Planck brane. The mind worms make branecasting possible.

 

mod.
A jellylike substance that people smear onto themselves to change their appearance. The effects, which can be dramatic, appear rapidly, but normally dissipate within a few days.

 

moolk.
An intoxicating form of milk obtained from cowloons. (Suggested by the moloko of Anthony Burgess's
A Clockwork Orange.
)

 

newbio.
The radically different ecology produced by genomics and biotechnology in the Y3K era.

 

newstoon.
A toon creature that acts as a newscaster.

 

NuBioCom.
The ruthless company that takes control of Earth's genomes during the third millennium. NuBioCom is effectively the Earth's government, with its puffball regional centers housing the rulers called Govs.

 

Nubbie.
A citizen of Earth who takes advantage of the NuBioCom biotechnology. A well-off citizen, comparable to a Y2K yuppie.

 

nutfungus.
A spicy nutmeg-scented fungus that grows in the cracks of dying trees.

 

oldbio.
Earth's original untweaked ecology.

 

Orpoly.
An archipelago of suns near the galactic core, inhabited by intelligent plasma vortex rings.

 

oxymold.
A tweaked mold that produces oxygen even in the absence of light.

 

peeker.
A creature related to the “uvvy.” Unlike the uvvy, the peeker is very invasive, and uses its electrical fields to pry deep into a subject's brain, causing considerable damage.

 

phenomenological autozoom, pzoom.
The technique by which a toon show adjusts its view to the wishes of one privileged viewer. That is, whatever the viewer focuses on tends to get larger. The particular instance of the show “watches” the viewer for cues using eyes in its wall skin display. (Phenomenology is the branch of philosophy that seeks to analyze the actual perceptions that people have.)

 

pickerhand.
A kritter like a disembodied hand, used to harvest rice and other crops.

 

Planck brane.
A parallel universe inhabited by creatures called Hubs.

 

please plant.
A kritter plant with eyes in its flowers. It grows seeds to match whatever shapes are shown to it.

 

puffball.
A large, torus-shaped fungus inhabited by a Gov worm. Also contains offices used by NuBioCom functionaries. Is responsible for spreading the latest knockout viruses to block reproduction.

 

qubit.
A quantum bit. Unlike a classical bit, which must be 0 or 1, a qubit can be in a mixed, “coherent” state that is a weighted combination of two possibilities, such as twenty-five percent 0 and seventy-five percent 1.

 

rassen, znag, znassen.
The Orpolese have bodies that are something like tornadoes of plasma bent around into rings. These vortex rings have an inherent twist, which is either clockwise or counterclockwise. The rassen twist in one direction, and the znags twist in the other. Generally the rassen are of higher status. To complicate things, it turns out that the Orpolese actually travel in pairs, with two vortex rings overlaid upon each other. In a “mixed marriage,” the two rings have opposite inherent twists. The znassen pairs are a combination of a znag and a rassen. (While working on
Frek and the Elixir
in Brussels, in 2002, I often ate at an inexpensive Moroccan restaurant called Beni Znassen.)

 

renormalization.
A standard physics word for redefining a system's numerical attributes in some new, improved way. I use it to suggest the notion of recasting the quantum reality of the Planck brane in terms of some new set of axes (eigenvectors). During a renormalization storm, the entire Planck brane gets reformulated, and the local Hubs with a low amount of wham are likely to disappear.

 

rockworms.
Kritters that hollow out the insides of asteroids.

 

roseplusplus.
The ultimate futuristic gene-tweaked rose plant. (The name is a play on the “doubleplusplus” of Aldous Huxley's
Brave New World.
)

 

rugmoss.
An attractive tweaked moss that changes its colors in rhythmic patterns, with each region influenced by the colors of the neighbors. (This is a biological form of the two-dimensional cellular automaton rule called “Rug,” see, for instance,
www.cs.sjsu.edu/faculty/rucker/cellab.htm.
)

 

sextoons.
Pornographic toon shows.

 

shecked out.
Freaked-out or jaded or world-weary. (Cf. SF writer Robert Sheckley.)

 

shuggoth.
A sluglike creature that's a glued-together hodgepodge of many other kinds of creatures. (H. P. Lovecraft sometimes wrote about shuggoths, although not in precisely the same sense. My sense of shuggoth was first described in my
Saucer Wisdom.
)

 

Sick Hindu.
The hollowed-out asteroid inhabited by the rebel Crufters. (Name taken from a graffiti tag near Mountain View, California.)

 

sky-air-comb.
The autopoietic meditation technique that Frek uses to restore the integrity of his mind, also to block out the espers.