Frek and the Elixir (15 page)

“Intruder alert,” said Gov's voice from the wall. “He's right there next to the door. Grab him.”

But by then Frek was off and running down the corridor again. Alerted by Gov, the counselors were coming back down the hallway toward him. Frek did a U-turn and ran the other way, back past the conference room. For the moment nobody was ahead of him, but that wasn't going to last long. He needed a plan, or he was headed for the Three R's—if not outright execution.

Rounding the next corner, Frek noticed a shape sliding along on the wall next to him. It was a dark green toon of a cuttlefish with light spots, a tentacled creature wearing one of those funny old skullcaps with a square on the top of his head. A mortarboard. Facilitator toons sometimes wore them. Except for the mortarboard, the toon looked exactly like the Merry Mollusk Frek had been working on. Or, more to the point, it looked like the alien Frek had seen under his bed.

The toon began talking to him, vibrating its voice from a moving patch of wall.

“Follow me,” it said in that same familiar male voice the alien had used. Like a mixture of the voices of Frek's friends, of Dad's voice, of toon voices, and even the voice of Frek himself. A voice that evoked instant liking and trust. “I know what to do,” said the cuttlefish on the wall.

By this point, Frek was ready to try anything. For the moment his pursuers were out of sight. The tentacled toon darted around the lip of a doorway that led to a little side corridor. Frek followed the cuttlefish, hoping he wasn't being led into a trap.

The short corridor quickly hit a dead end—but the final chamber had a sizable hole in the floor and a similar hole in the ceiling. The room seemed to function as a kind of air vent. Glancing up, Frek could see a series of holes in the chambers above him leading all the way up to a faintly glimpsed patch of sky. Though he would have preferred to head upward, the green cuttlefish toon thought different.

“Crawl down through here,” the toon's voice told him. The images of his tentacles writhed and beckoned at the edge of the hole in the floor. For a minute Frek just looked at him. Unlike a real mollusk, the toon creature had had a slight corkscrew twist to his tentacles, like the tendrils of vines. It gave him a lively, springy look.

Just about then the counselors went thudding down the main corridor, right past Frek's cul-de-sac. They hadn't noticed yet that Frek had branched off. Even the eyes in Gov's main hallway seemed to have missed his move, and by some stroke of good luck, Gov didn't seem to have any eyes or ears in this side corridor's walls to notice Frek talking to—who?

“What's your name?” Frek asked the toon on the floor.

“Call me Bumby,” said the toon, and then made a sound like a laugh. “Professor Bumby. ‘Professor' being the old-time Earth word for a super-duper facilitator, you understand. I boned up on your planet's mighty culture whilst I've been waiting for your next move. When I call myself ‘professor,' I mean that I have an advanced level of practical knowledge about the manipulation of physical reality. Get down, Frek, down through the hole. I'll waltz us out of this corner fine and dandy.”

So Frek squeezed through the rubbery hole. It was a little awkward with his half-missing arm. The next chamber down had a hole in its floor too, and Frek followed the toon through that hole, and down through a hole in the floor of the room below that, which brought him back to the bottom floor of the puffball.

“We've lost those creeps for now,” said the Professor Bumby toon in that cozy voice he used.

“You
are
the same one who was under my bed, right?” asked Frek, just to be sure.

“That was a wetware me indeed,” said Professor Bumby. “I'm a software instance. We'll unearth the new scion before you know it.”

“And you told me I can be a hero and save the world?” persisted Frek.

“I did, and you will, my boy. You're off to a bang-up start. You sowed the backup scion into the soil of Giant's Marbles, the new Bumby inflated, and he headed here. Flying underground—for us Orpolese your earth is soft as fog, you understand. Soon, very soon, you'll meet the kick-ass Bumby scion, the amazing cuttle who'll fly you to the elixir. And in return you'll say a few words to the branecasters.”

“You're saying we'll find the Anvil?” asked Frek, a little bewildered.

“My ship,” said the toon. “The solid Bumby's ship, that is. Don't call her ‘Anvil.' An anvil is heavy and it falls. I've been overhearing the brutish Gov-worm saying ‘Anvil' all week. I've been out and about your infospace, Frek, all eyes and ears, demurely waiting for my hero. You. I was just listening in on the same conversation as you, in fact. About Gov's plans to put a controller uvvy in each Earthling's brain. And about the branecasters opening up a channel to your minds.”

“Gov wants to make us into—components,” said Frek. That much he understood. The rest of it was still vague, the part about aliens watching their minds. “I have to do something.”

“You have to be the hero,” said the Bumby toon quietly. “I'm here to potentiate, to open the gate, to aid your quest, to be your race's producer. Just in the nick of time. We're ready to fly, to grow beyond all measure like a soul striving toward the All. My Orpolese ship is no anvil; she's my
slobber-tweet.
I call her Ulla.”

Not that “slobber-tweet” was exactly what the toon said, but the sound was something like that, with the
tweet
coming right on top of the
slobber.
The toon's odd, rapid talk was a little hard to follow, and the fact that he was using such a familiar-sounding voice made it extra goggy.

“Yes, Frek,” continued the Bumby toon, “My superfine
slobber-tweet
Ulla will carry you to the galactic core, you'll meet the scary branecasters and contract the Orpolese as your producers. You'll win the elixir, hooray! But before all this sundry adventure, we'll dig the new me in Gov's graveyard.”

“Look out,” interrupted Frek, pointing upward.

Somebody was poking around in the fourth-floor corridor they'd started from, peering down through the air hole. Professor Bumby slid along the wall, leading Frek into an empty hallway with softly throbbing yellow walls. With a little squirt of visual ink, the toon sped off toward the center of the puffball. A bad smell was coming from there, the stink of death. Frek hesitated and stood in the middle of the corridor for a minute, thinking.

Go to a graveyard? Cross the galaxy? Branecasters? Fine concepts for a fantasy game or a killtoon, but this was Frek's real life. He was a little frightened of following Professor Bumby toward that unsettling smell. The toon barely made sense. What if Frek just got the heck out of here before his chameleon mod wore off? He wished he could be a regular kid again and go back home to Mom. But that was over now. He had to get even with Gov. The cuttlefish toon would help him.

Right about then the wall flickered from yellow to green, but Frek's skin didn't. He'd reverted to his usual golden tan. The chameleon mod had expired. He fumbled at his fungus-purse, hurrying to smear on more.

“Come on!” urged Professor Bumby, his image darting back down the corridor to Frek's side. “Hurry up. We have to meet me in Gov's graveyard. Be a hero, Frek, not a cluck. The graveyard's just a decomposing compost heap.” The cuttlefish toon jiggled back and forth, the image excitedly curling and uncurling his helical tentacles and sucker-arms.

“Stop rushing me,” said Frek. “I need to put on more goo. So they can't see me.”

“Save it for a rainier day,” said the toon, undulating the skirtlike fin that ran along his body. “You won't need camouflage once we reach the compost heap. The solid Bumby's coming back. They'll all be screaming and running away.”

So Frek took the toon's advice and refrained from rubbing on the chameleon mod. By now the Gov eyes in the corridor's walls had seen him, anyway, and even if he put the mod on, the eyes would track him like before. He took off running after the toon.

The puffball was a bedlam. Counselors were shouting as they came down through the air vent, counselors were yelling to each other in nearby halls, somewhere Gibby was hollering, and dogs were barking, too. Wow and Woo?

Professor Bumby twisted and turned through the maze of passages, managing to keep Frek always out of sight of the counselors. And soon they'd reached Gov's graveyard. What a stench. The puffball was like a hollow ring, with a big hole in its middle, and a patch of ground like a courtyard garden. But instead of grass and trees, the ground was mounded up with piles of rotting vegetables, with chunks of unused factory meat, and with the foully decaying corpses of people, of animals, of Grulloos. The shapes were slumped and soft. Frek gagged. Hair-fine white fungus tendrils shrouded the stinking refuse. The ground underfoot was puddled with vile, dark juice. Food for the puffball.

Breathing shallowly through his mouth, Frek looked around for the cuttlefish toon. He saw no sign of it. The puffball walls surrounding the courtyard of death were a leathery monochrome.

The walls had windows, though, and at every level of the puffball, NuBioCom workers were leaning out into the courtyard, pointing and yelling at Frek—Frek standing there in plain sight, completely naked save for the fungus-purse holding his mod, the Aaron's Rod, and his new ring. And here came blank-faced PhiPhi yet again, buzzing down into the puffball's hole upon her teal blue lifter beetle.

Just then the ground under Frek's feet bucked up. Something was digging out. A rubbery shape, a fluked arrowhead of flesh worming its way out of the ground, dark green spotted with light green dots. Yes. A pair of extremely large and intelligent eyes appeared at the wide lower end of the body. The eyes were golden, and the dark pupils were shaped like the letter W. The space mollusk finished digging its way out of the sodden, reeking soil. It shook out its eight boneless arms and two long tentacles, each of them dotted with suckers, each of them with a slight clockwise twist. Squeezed in with the arms was a protruding flexible tube—which Frek recognized as the “siphon” used for rapid cephalopod propulsion.

“Eadem mutata resurgo,”
said the alien cuttlefish, flinging a comradely tentacle across Frek's shoulders. “That's Latin. The same yet changed I rise again. I'm a Professor Bumby, too.” He raised an arm and delicately aimed one of its tips at PhiPhi's noisy beetle. The tip glowed and lengthened itself into a curving ray of energy that lashed out to touch the tweaked insect. The lifter beetle plummeted from the air, landing on a soft mound of rotten fruit. PhiPhi spilled into the stinky mush, and when she tried to stand up and fire her webgun, a second burst from Bumby knocked her onto her back, kicking and yelling.

Professor Bumby's other arms were spread out and squirming, each of them with tips that dissolved into living lines of—light? No, it wasn't light, but rather some cosmic form of energy new to Earth. The beams were moving in arcs and loops, they were branching like vines. The ropes of energy writhed across the faces of the counselors and NuBioCom workers.

“I can't see!” shouted a counselor, and the cry was taken up by the others. Bumby had temporarily blinded them, one and all.

“Let's go liberate Ulla,” said the green cuttlefish, gazing at Frek with his W-pupil eyes. The eyes were in humps that stuck up above his bunch of arms. “My
slobber-tweet.
Gov has her stashed in one of the puffball's tiptop rooms. Wrapped inside a space bug.” The cuttlefish inflated his body like a balloon. He was hovering half a meter above the ground, and he'd grown to the size of a couch or a bed.

“We have to save Gibby before we do anything else,” said Frek. “And Wow. I heard him barking. Are you going to help me fight Gov?”

“Yes, in spades,” said Professor Bumby. His voice came from inside the cluster of arms and tentacles he had in place of a face. Frek recalled that a cuttlefish had a razor-sharp beak, with the top half fitting into the bottom. Maybe it was just as well not to see Bumby's mouth.
“Gubernator delenda est,”
continued Bumby. “Gov must be destroyed. I came in peace. Gov's counselors lynched me. It's payback time.”

“Why didn't you protect yourself, anyway?”

“I was weak from my long journey, enfeebled, on the ropes. A yunch trip takes the juice out of a traveler. And, you know, I hadn't been expecting Gov to know I was coming in. Someone tipped him off, I think it might have been a Unipusker saucer, it flew over Stun City right after we landed. Anyway, I'd formed my yunched little body into a nice-looking cuttlefish shape to meet you, and right away those Gov-zombies hacked me up and burned the pieces to ashes. But, thanks be to the Many, you planted my scion, and I quickly instantiated a new Earth-type body in the rich soil of Gaia. I'm most peppy indeed, most thoroughly revivified, with all relevant memories downloaded from my Bumby cryptoon.
Gubernator delenda est!
” His talk was a mixture of facilitatorlike formality and freewheeling poetic elaboration.

By way of punctuation, Professor Bumby extended his siphon and shot a gundo goggy blast of energy, charring a hole the size of an elephruk in the nearest puffball wall. An angry scream split the air, coming from the whole fungus at once.

“Gov doesn't like it now,” said Professor Bumby. “We'll deconstruct him, eh, Frek?”

“Get away from me,” boomed Gov's voice, coming from every side of the courtyard. “Tell this monster to leave, Frek, or I tear your friend and your dog in two.”

“A challenge for the hero and his noble steed,” Bumby said to Frek in a calm tone. “
Whinny.
Where do you think Gov has laired your companions?”

“I heard them near the entrance,” said Frek, pointing. He was a little in awe of the strength of his new ally. The siphon blast had surprised him even more than those goggy curving energy rays that the cuttlefish controlled like extensions of his arms. And on top of it all, Bumby could fly! The space cuttle was remarkable, to say the least.