Frek and the Elixir (9 page)

His attention kept being drawn back to the rug. The pattern was slowly changing, smoothly cycling from one symmetry to the next. It was gog gripper. He leaned forward to examine the carpet. It wasn't turmite-fiber. It was a mat of soft bristles tinted in colors that slowly changed. In a way, the rug was like a house tree's wall skin, but it was a living colony on its own. Frek had never seen anything like it before. For some reason he thought of Sao Steiner. He wondered if she'd ever seen a Grulloo rug. And then his memories drifted off, and he was just staring at the rug's colors.

Jeroon reappeared with a cold plate of boiled carrots and roast yams, a thick slice of anymeat on grobread and a cup of tree-juice spiced with nutfungus. He held the plate and the mug balanced over his head with branches of his curled-up tail. Though the tail's surface resembled bark, the tail was like a set of four tentacles.

Frek ate and drank, thinking of nothing but the food. The nutfungus had a pleasant scent that tickled the back of his nose. Slowly the ache went out of his arms.

Jeroon watched him closely, bringing seconds, and then thirds. “I can't get over it,” he said when Frek was finally done. “I have a Nubby as a guest in my own home. Wait till I tell Ennie and her family.”

“Ennie?” said Frek. “Is someone else here?” He wondered if he'd forgotten meeting more Grulloos. Had they been in the room while he was watching the rug?

“Your memory!” exclaimed Jeroon. “We have to set it right. I'll mix you up a stim cell potion. It's not to be had amidst your Middleville Nubbies.” Jeroon reached over to the small bowl by the fireplace and picked out a couple of the drier gobbets of meat. “These are from the Kritterworks artigrows. They're like belly buttons, you might say, scraps of umbilical cord. NuBioCom harvests them special for us Grulloos, useful kritters that we are. And in return we give them our eggs, which just so happen to be ideal for making embryo blanks. A nice little circle there. We give 'em eggs to seed their kritters into, and they give us stim cell nuggets left over from where the kritters grow.” Jeroon brandished the two winkled nodules. “Loaded with bioactive repair cells,” he said. “Just the thing to fix your brain! Not that the counselors would have told you about them. Gov much prefers the Three R's for troublesome lads like you. The removal, recycling, and replacement of a bad boy's brain.” The Grulloo let out a snort of laughter.

Frek hadn't really been following Jeroon's meandering discourse. But at the last words, he instantly imagined the terrible squeak-clank sound again. He lurched up onto his knees. “The Three R's?” he choked, looking for a way out. It would be hard to make his escape with the ceiling so low.

“Don't startle up,” said Jeroon soothingly. “
No
Three R's. It's but a foamy health-drink I'm after making you, my boy. You'll drink, you'll sleep, and you'll be able to remember again. We Grulloos know firsthand about the beastly things your counselors do. Did you see the Raven when they peeked you?”

“Yes,” said Frek, slowly lowering back onto his cushion.

“Gov is kac,” said Jeroon shortly. “A bully and a coward. A parasitic worm. Don't budge!” He scuttled into the kitchen.

Gov is kac. Frek had never heard anyone say that before, not even Dad. It was music to his ears. The fact that Jeroon was free to say it made him feel safe. And then Jeroon was back with a mug of something lukewarm. It was cloudy, and smelled of rancid meat, and it made Frek's lips numb, but at Jeroon's urging he drank every bit of it down. All at once Frek could feel how tired he was from the long day. Jeroon pulled over another cushion. Frek lay down and slept right through the night.

He was roused by something lightly jumping on his stomach, then hopping off. He heard high little voices all around him, and the burbling of a stream. Light slanted in through a round window nearby, stained green by overhanging bushes of a type Frek had never seen. The voices belonged to five Grulloos, their bodies variations on Jeroon's, each of them with a head, a pair of legs ending in hands, and some kind of tail. They all wore colorful jackets around their middles. Two of them were quite small. Children.

“He's awake!” shouted the littlest Grulloo, the one who'd just woken him by bouncing on his stomach. “The Nubby's awake!” She had a sweet round face and two pink leg-arms sticking out of the side of her head. Her jacket was little more than a pink sash. The bulge at the back of her head tapered out into a little ponytail that waved about on its own. “Hi, Nubby,” she cried, hopping onto Frek's chest again. “I'm LuHu!” Her ponytail rose into the air like an exclamation point.

“Roar!” said the other young Grulloo. “Are you scared?” He had short orange hair and sharp yellow teeth. His tail resembled a tiger's, and his jacket was striped to match. He'd been feeling Frek's belly with one of his black-nailed hands, but when Frek moved, the little Grulloo twitched away.

Next to him was a mermaidlike Grulloo with a scaly, silver tail and a fair, thoughtful face supported by two well-formed arms. Her jacket was of flowing, sea-green cloth. Beside her was an orchid Grulloo, a heavy-set woman with white petals upon her legs and tail. Her jacket was of white turmite-silk. She was pressed tight against the male Grulloo at her side, a tough-looking fellow with a green lizard's tail and a dirty red suede jacket with four pockets. The Grulloos were shifting back and forth on their legs, torn between curiosity and fear, the little ones alternately darting away beneath the adults and creeping forward for a better view. Though the Grulloos' tails were like parts of plants or animals, they all had human faces.

“Hello,” said Frek a little warily. “I'm Jeroon's friend.” Sounds of cooking came from the kitchen.

“Good morning,” said the Grulloos.

Remarkable as the Grulloos were, Frek's attention turned inward. His memories were back, including everything he'd heard and seen the day before.

The first bit to grab him was something Zhak had said: “He supposed to head upstream to that old Crufter hideout. Like Lora Huggins tell him to.” How had Zhak known what Mom told Frek? Had the house tree overheard them? No, Mom had been too careful for that. One of those supposedly helpful Crufters must have spilled the beans. Given what a thoughtless opportunist Carb was, it figured the Crufters would foul things up. Frek felt a burst of anger at his father—and that reminded him of his new ring. There it was, still on his finger. The Grulloos were interested in it, the little ones had already come over to touch it, fingering the depression on its top.

The next thing Frek remembered was faithful Wow. Wow had jumped into the river. Had he found his way back home?

And then came the memory of Mom putting a paper in his pocket. Hard to believe he'd totally forgotten to look at it yesterday. He'd been gog fubbed. It was wonderful to have his mind back. He felt like his old self for the first time since he'd been peeked.

Frek rocked to one side, toppling the Grulloo with the long lizard's tail and the powerful, green legs. He apologized, then pulled the folded paper from his pants.

“Don't smother him,” said Jeroon, hand-walking out from the kitchen with a big plate of pancakes balanced on his tail. “He needs his breakfast. What do you have there, Frek?”

“It's a note my mother put in my pocket,” he said. “My memory's all better again, Jeroon. Thanks.”

“My pleasure,” said Jeroon, setting the plate of pancakes beside him. “You saved my life.” He smiled tenderly at the mermaid Grulloo. “Keep your niece and nephew off him, Ennie, while I make enough pancakes for everyone.” The Grulloos cheered and continued chattering. Soon Frek had sorted them out. The green one in the grubby red suede jacket was Gibby, his plump petal-covered wife was Salla, their children were LuHu and Bili, and Ennie was Salla's younger sister.

Frek wasn't good at reading, so it took him a while to get through his mother's note. He ate most of his pancakes while he was at it. They were made of grobread dough, fried and drenched in blackberry syrup. One by one the Grulloos got pancakes too, Ennie first.

The note went as follows.

Well, Frek could forget about (2) through (7). He'd flown the wrong way down the river, he'd gone into the Grulloo Woods, the Crufters had turned out to be double-crossers, and he didn't want to live with selfish Carb one bit. What a mess.

“He's done reading,” shouted LuHu, who was grasping a last sticky bit of her pancake with her prehensile ponytail. “Let's get him, Bili!” She and the tiger-tailed Grulloo boy scampered across the pulsing rug and leaped onto his lap.

“Not just yet,” said Frek, smiling and pushing them off. “I'm still thinking. I haven't been able to think for a week, you know. Jeroon only just now fixed my brain.”

Fixed it with stim cells. Tiny one-celled kritters that had made their way from his stomach into his bloodstream and up to his brain. Might the stim cells take over his personality? His heart began pounding. Was that the stim cells in action?

“Jeroon,” he croaked, clutching his throat. “Are the stim cells—”

“Don't kac your britches,” said Jeroon, proudly perched on his lofty chair. He'd just started eating his own plate of pancakes. “They'll leave your system soon enough. It'd be better for us Grulloos if stim cells lasted longer. Then we wouldn't need to dose ourselves so often.” His head was at the back of the cushion with the plate in front of him and his arms around it. He bit off a piece of pancake, chewed it, and then paused as if waiting for the mouthful to go down. Frek noticed that Jeroon had a stim cell nodule on his plate beside the pancakes.

“You eat stim cells all the time?” asked Frek.

“Look us over,” said Jeroon, gesturing at himself and the other Grulloos. “You think we could live without some help? That big body you're the master of, it's full of life-support. Stomach, lungs, heart, liver, kidneys—you've got the whole shebang.” He tapped the thick base of his tail. “I've got a few rudiments in here, such as lungs, yes, but nothing like what's needed for a proper long life. It's the stim cells that keep me going, you know. I don't have a stomach or a liver, no digestive tract. Take a gander!” He chewed up another big bite of pancake and opened his mouth. Him doing this reminded Frek of Geneva, who sometimes showed him a mouthful of food when Mom wasn't looking, just to be gross.

Jeroon's mouth simply ended at the back. A little hole on the roof of his mouth connected with his nose and lungs, but he lacked any gullet-type throat-hole. The back of the mouth was a dead-end sack with the wad of chewed pancake just sitting there. But the flesh at the base of Jeroon's tongue was busy; a thousand pink projections were tugging at the dough, picking it to pieces, pulling the pasty mush into the tongue's fissures.

“Quit it, Jeroon,” said Salla, shaking her petals. She had a mother's firm voice. “You'll teach bad manners to Bili and LuHu.”

“My breakfast,” said Jeroon, partly closing his mouth. “Once the food particles are in my tongue, the stim cells turn them into nourishment.”

Little Bili was imitating him now, skipping about the room with his mouth wide open. The backs of Bili's and Jeroon's tongues were both engorged with pancake. So googly, so shecked-out.

Frek asked another question so Jeroon would close his mouth. “You said the stim cells are from the Kritterworks?”

“To be sure,” said Jeroon. “From the artigrows. The NuBioCommers found a use for the stim cells when they made Grulloos. Around three hundred years back. A little after the Great Collapse.”

Hearing about the collapse always made Frek feel wistful. First Earth's genetic heritage had been driven extinct by the NuBioCom knockout virus, which broke the reproductive cycle of non-NuBioCom organisms. And then, on June 6, 2666, the NuBioCom labs had purged all the archived DNA information. Erased Eden's blueprints. “I wish we had butterflies,” said Frek softly. “And octopi—I'd love to see an octopus or a squid. The alien I saw looked like a cuttlefish, you know. He was green.”

“What alien?” asked Jeroon, surprised.

“I didn't tell you?” said Frek. “You didn't hear? Don't you watch the news on your wall skins?” But then, looking around the burrow, he remembered that Jeroon's walls were packed dirt, very far from the live inner surfaces of a house tree.

So now Frek told his new Grulloo friends about the Anvil and the cuttlefish, about the peeker and his brain damage, about the smashed watchbird and the escape.