Frek and the Elixir

Part 1

The Departure

1

Middleville, 3003

Your room is a mess, said Lora Huggins, standing in her son’s doorway. A dog den. You’re not going anywhere until it’s straightened up. Poor Snaffle doesn’t know where to begin. Indeed, Snaffle had stopped short at her side.

Snaffle was a suckapillar, a bioengineered cleaner creature like an oversize green caterpillar, not that there were any normal-size caterpillars anymore. Snaffle had powerful lungs and a conical lemon-yellow mouth. The suckapillar’s little stalk-eyes twitched as the dim-witted beast tried to form a plan for vacuuming Frek’s room without swallowing anything valuable.

Frek Huggins sighed and finished pulling on his soft leather shoe. My room’s not a mess, he said. I know exactly where everything is. Snaffle’s too stupid to understand. I have more important stuff to do, Mom. Like dreaming about being a toonsmith.

Frek had a vivid imagination; his friends listened spellbound to the stories he liked to invent. Well, that wasn’t quite true. It was more that he could get his acquaintances to listen to him for quite a while before they’d eventually cut him off with a remark like, That’s kac, Frek. Maybe if he still had a father at home it would be easier to talk to people. Nothing had felt quite right since Dad left, just about a year ago now.

Get to work, said Frek’s mother. I mean it. She started back down the corridor that curved toward big sister Geneva’s room, over on the other side of their house tree. Geneva’s room would be easy to clean. Her things were always lined up and orderly. Come on, Snaffle, called Mom. You don’t have to clean Frek’s room yet. The low-slung suckapillar let out a sigh, and undulated off, her legs rising and falling. Thanks to the gene-tweaks, each of her twenty-six stubby feet bore a different letter. Years ago, Snaffle had helped Frek learn the alphabet.

Frek stood up and looked out his roundish window at the sunny Saturday morning. It was a fine day in May. His room was halfway up their house tree. He had a good view of their yard, and of the neighbors’ house trees and yards.

Right below Frek’s window, his dog, Wow, was sleeping on the uniformly green grass in a patch of sun. Next to Wow were Mom’s identically lush roseplusplus bushes, dense with blooms of every shape and color, and thornless of course. Beyond the roseplusplusses was the family vegetable garden with its super-high-yielding scions of the six canonical vegetables: yam, tomato, carrot, chard, rice, and red beans.

Between the Hugginses’ garden and their garage was the elaborately filigreed mud mound where their turmite colony lived. The turmites ate organic trash and wove things. Cloth, paper, wallboard—whatever you needed, the turmites could make it from, say, a pile of dead leaves.

The garage was a dome of something like waxy brown cardboard. The turmites had put it up over the course of one frenzied afternoon. The Huggins family’s angelwings lived in the garage. If Frek leaned far out of his window and listened, he could hear the angelwings softly buzzing. He’d gotten his own pair just last week—for his twelfth birthday. It made his heart beat faster to think about it. With his angelwings on his back, he could fly like a mosquito.

Frek was tempted to forget about cleaning his room, to hop out his window, clamber down the tree, and buzz on over to Stoo Steiner’s house. Stoo would be playing with goggy killtoons, drinking soda, and eating greasy yam chips as usual. Stoo’s mother, Sao Steiner, never made him do housework. But of course Sao didn’t have a hard job like Lora Huggins did. Mom was a knowledge facilitator; that is, she gave music lessons. Some people still liked to play real instruments, others preferred pretend instruments like air guitar, gesture trumpet, invisible drums, and so on. Music urls could turn people’s gestures into sounds, but they still had to know the right moves, and Lora was good at teaching them. She worked all week giving music lessons in person—and Saturdays the kids helped her clean house. No ifs, ands, or buts.

Frek sighed and looked around his messy, curvy room. Where to begin? A bunch of his clothes lay near the foot of his bed. It was hard to think what he should do with the clothes. Rather than bothering to distinguish one piece of clothing from the next, Frek kicked at the garments until they were in a mound, and then he picked up the mound and stuffed it into his closet. The floor of his room was still covered.

Frek looked at all the scattered glypher slugs he’d brought home from school this week. School. Some kids stayed home and learned from knowledge facilitator toons instead of going to school. Mostly what you did at school was watch the same facilitator toons anyway. Frek felt like he would have liked home schooling. Frek had remarkably intense powers of concentration, and he could learn just about anything faster than the other kids. So why sit around waiting until even the gurps got the picture?

But Lora Huggins insisted that her children go to a real, everyone-in-the-same-room kind of school. Think school of fish, she’d tell Frek when he asked why he couldn’t stay home. School, Mom would repeat, waggling her two hands like a pair of trout swimming near each other. Don’t grow up antisocial like your father. Society is a herd, Frek, a flock.

Carb Huggins had tried fighting the way things were on Earth, and in return the government had done some nasty things to him, like using a peeker uvvy to search for rebel secrets in his brain. Gov might have eventually killed Carb, but he’d managed to ride a space bug out to a Crufter asteroid called Sick Hindu. He hadn’t asked his family if they wanted to come along—he’d just gone. They hadn’t heard anything at all from him since he left, which seemed pretty crummy. And there’d been some kind of mishap on Sick Hindu last week. Carb was a source of worry.

On the plus side, Dad was tough. He had a muscular body and a hard, angular face. He dressed like a gaussy old-time punk, complete with a Mohawk hairdo and moving tattoos on the sides of his head. Whenever anybody gave any trouble to Lora or the kids, Dad used to get right in their face about it—before Gov peeked him. After that he’d been a little vague sometimes. And then he’d deserted his family. No, Frek didn’t want to grow up like his father. It was better to grin and bear it, to be a good Nubbie and go to school.

The thing was, although school was about learning to get along with people face to face, Frek wasn’t very good at it. He was never on the same wavelength as the other kids, and the knowledge facilitators didn’t like him because he didn’t pay enough attention to their silly rules.

The glypher slugs were the perfect symbol of the goody-goody, make-work kac that facilitators liked for you to do. Every time Frek came home and unfastened his school satchel, more of the nagging glyphers slithered out, their skins aflicker with symbols. The glyphers contained permission forms and graded tests for Mom to view, requests for her to volunteer, and announcements of school events she should attend in person or at least watch on their house tree’s wall skins.

Frek got busy picking up the slugs. To make his work more bearable, Frek groaned as if he were a very old man with a bad back, letting out a sharp little yelp each time he bent over all the way.

When he had all the glyphers in one hand, he recklessly stuffed them into the soft toilet that bulged out of his wall. The facilitators might yell at him on Monday, but today was Saturday. Forget school! The toilet swallowed the slugs right down, just as if they were stinky kac. The toilet bowl was part of the tree. Not only did the house tree absorb waste, it provided sparkling pure water that it got from the rain, the ground, and its own photosynthetic reactions. A fine example of Nature’s alchemy as improved upon by a NuBioCom kritter.

Down the hall, Mom had herded the suckapillar out of Geneva’s room and into Ida’s. Geneva was Frek’s big sister and Ida was his little sister. Ida’s room was even messier than Frek’s. All of a sudden, Snaffle’s wheezy inhales changed to sharp coughs. The suckapillar had inhaled one of Ida’s umpty-zillion wooden building blocks. Ida! called Mom. Ida, come up here.

The only answer was the chatter of the toons on the walls of the family room. Geneva and Ida were playing with some toons that Frek didn’t like. Normally he’d look at any kind of toon at all, especially on Saturday morning, but he drew the line at the Goob Dolls. The Goob Dolls were most definitely evolved to please people like Frek’s sisters and not people like Frek.

Some Saturdays Frek would fight with Geneva and Ida to try and keep them from watching the Goob Dolls, who always debuted their latest skits and situations at the same time as that funny Vietnamese toon about Da Nha Duc and his nephews Huy, Lui, and Duy. Of course Frek could have watched any show he liked on the walls of his own room. But that would be giving in. Controlling which toons were shown in the big, comfy den downstairs was an important power game among the three Huggins kids.

Today, however, Frek wasn’t going to bother arguing with his sisters. As soon as he could get out of here, he was going over to Stoo Steiner’s to play with Stoo’s new Skull Farmers killtoons, the latest creation of the Stun City Toonsmithy. Frek was itching to mix it up with the Skull Farmers. Maybe Stoo would even lend Frek the Skull Farmers urlbud, not that Mom liked for him to play with killtoons.

He heard his mother come back along the curved passageway and stop at the head of the narrow steps down to the big round family room in the base of the house tree. Ida!

What! hollered little Ida, making her voice sound deep and rough. Whadda ya want! She and big sister Geneva let out shrieks of laughter.

Ida’s the Goob Doll’s Secret Agent! yelled Geneva. And I’m her contact in the Mean Queen Mansion! We’re lying low for the Final Fracas!

Goob Dolls rule! burst out Ida.

Goob Dolls! whooped Geneva, egging Ida on.

Thank you, girls! burbled one of the Goob Dolls. The Goob Dolls sounded full of joy. Hooray for Ida and Geneva!

Toons were smart. Thanks to the eyes in the walls, they always knew who was watching them. Every instance of their show was realtime tailored for the specific viewers.

Ida, you come up here and clean your room or I’m going to tell Snaffle to eat every single one of your blocks! called Frek’s mom.

I wanna finish my show, Mom, called Ida. "Pleeeease. The Goob Dolls need me for the Final Fracas!"

You children, said Mom and sighed. You tell those toons they’re just going to have to wait a few minutes for you to clean your room. Before she hopped downstairs to get Ida, Mom looked over and saw Frek watching her from his door. Is your room picked up yet, Frek?

Almost, said Frek. And then I’m going over to Stoo’s, okay?

I hope you don’t waste the whole day in a dark room pretending to shoot things, snapped Mom. Sometimes it seemed like she could see right into Frek’s head.

You children should be outside doing something healthy on a day like this, continued Mom. Climbing a tree or building a dam. Flying with your new angelwings. The angelwings need exercise, you know. The more you fly, the stronger they get. I didn’t buy them so they could rot away in the garage. Suddenly she got an odd look on her face and stopped herself. Listen to me, she said ruefully. Nag, nag, nag. I’m turning into Grandma Huggins. Enough. I’m glad that you’re cleaning your room, Frek. I appreciate that. She gave him a kind smile. She looked a little tired from the housecleaning.

The weary look on his mother’s face made Frek feel bad about stuffing his clothes in the closet instead of sorting them. Well, maybe he’d sort them later. Meanwhile he still needed to finish clearing his floor.

Frek had a set of fifty shiny monster-shaped seeds that he’d bought from a shape-farmer at the Middleville market last November. They came from a please plant that the cheerful farmer had tutored with clay figurines he himself had made. Please plants had eyes in their flowers and you could show them models of how you wanted their seeds to be.

Last week the please plant seeds had begun to sprout, which meant Frek would have to get rid of them soon. He’d positioned them in nooks and crannies for one last attack on the King’s Quarters—which is what he imagined the little monsters calling his big, comfortable bed. Frek liked to see them poised in readiness, their taut shiny buds like purple eyes. What made it really gollywog was that the spring-wakened seeds were slowly, slowly creeping toward the Quarters, which they perhaps perceived as a moist, loamy spot good for roots.

Frek found the turmite-cloth sack that the monster-seeds had come in, and walked around the room collecting them, still giving an agonized yelp each time he leaned over. To make it more interesting, he kept count of the seeds, and made the numbers part of his cries.

Is something wrong, Frek? called Mom from the bottom of the steps.

Thirty-seven, groaned Frek.

Is something ailing you? There was humor in his mother’s voice.

Thirty-eight. I’m picking up my monster-seeds.

Get rid of them! called Mom. I don’t want please plants growing in my house or yard. They’re unny.

It might be easiest to dump the seeds in the toilet. They hadn’t cost all that much in the first place. Frek picked up the rest of the seeds without any more yelping. When he was almost done, he noticed one last please plant seed on the floor right next to his bed. This one wasn’t shaped like the others. Rather than looking like a little humanoid monster, it looked like a—spider? A tapered blob with big round eyes and a bunch of legs. He’d never noticed that particular seed before, but it was a good one. He put it in the sack with the others.

And then Frek found himself tossing the sack out his window. It would be a shame to waste these glatt seeds. The thought popped into his head that he should plant them someplace private. Yes. He’d use the place called Giant’s Marbles on the slope of Lookout Mountain above Middleville. It was full of huge boulders, with no big trees, and you could see really far. Lots of please plant bushes grew along one edge of the clearing where a little stream came trickling down. Not many people went there, but it wasn’t dangerous like the Grulloo Woods east of town. Frek could fly his seeds to Giant’s Marbles later today. It would be fun with his new angelwings.

But first he had to finish his room, and second he had to go to Stoo’s.

The next thing to pick up were the fungoid urlbuds scattered across the floor. But right away Frek came across one of his favorites, the Merry Mollusks. He went ahead and pressed the rubbery little disk to the wall. The wallpaper pattern cleared to reveal a mosaic of octopi, squid, cuttlefish, nautili, and yet odder forms. They were toons of extinct animals, dancing around, clowning, singing songs. Frek had been tweaking one of them to resemble a believable character for a story. Practicing for the day he tried to get a job at the Toonsmithy.

The arms on his virtual cuttlefish looked a bit too short today, and Frek would have started working on him, but just then Goob Doll Judy came barging in, sliding across the wall leaving a wake of yellow sparkles.

You shouldn’t be on my wall when I didn’t ask to see you, said Frek.

You should know that Gov’s curious about you, said Judy, widening her pale brown eyes. Something happened last night in the sky. It’s the start of a new adventure!

Toons had all sorts of tricks for roping more and more people into watching them. Frek quickly made his pet cuttlefish get big enough to cover up Judy. When Judy’s ponytails came poking out among the tentacles, Frek pasted another urlbud to the wall, the Gaiatopia. This site was complex enough to cover both Goob Doll Judy and the Merry Mollusks.

Frek stared at the orchid-bedecked trees, at the dragonflies, the scuttling rodents, the languid snakes, the crazy monkeys, and the lurking big cats. The Gaiatopia was populated by toons of all the lost species of Earth—at least all the species that the designers could remember. NuBioCom had collapsed the Earth’s biome in 2666, and the species they’d winnowed out weren’t ever coming back. NuBioCom didn’t exactly advertise the fact, but if you poked around on the Net, you’d find that the old DNA codes were gone as well. Erased from all the memory archives. These days evolution was limited to NuBioCom’s designs for commercial kritters, and to the toons.

Not for the first time, Frek let himself dream of finding a way to bring back Earth’s real plants and animals—of going on a quest for a magic elixir to heal his home world. But he had no idea of where to begin. Visiting the Gaiatopia always made him a little sad.

When Frek peeled the two urlbuds off the wall, it reverted to looking like silvery paisley. Goob Doll Judy was gone, too. Once all the urlbuds were stored away, Frek set to work on the mess of wooden blocks left in his room by Ida, who’d been building a maze for Wow the other day. Despite Ida’s injunctions, Wow had of course just stepped over the blocks to get to the scrap of anymeat that Ida had placed at the maze’s end. The kids could never quite decide how smart or dumb their dog was.

Frek decided to stash Ida’s blocks under his bed, which was a bouncy platform grown right out of the house tree wall, with a pair of legs at the outer corners to hold it up. A bunch of stuff was already under there, but the blocks fit easily enough, as did the curved ebony shapes of Frek’s Space Monkeys puzzle, his real metal spring, and the wooden top that he could never get to work. And then Frek crammed his throwing disk under the bed, also his ball-paddles, his model rocket made of a tweaked snail’s shell, and the box holding a tank-grown microscope eye you could uvvy-link to.

With all of this gear out of the way, the only thing left to get rid of was Frek’s battered old Solar Trader game. He’d been playing a big tournament with Stoo over several days this week. The colorful money leaves and deed petals and hotel seeds were all over the place. The edges of the game’s turmite-paper box were broken, which meant that after Frek got all of the Solar Trader stuff sandwiched in between the flattened top and the bottom he couldn’t carry it very far, or everything would slide out.

He tried to push the box under his bed, but it wouldn’t fit. A giant shove might have done it, but Frek was worried all the game pieces might spew out. He leaned over and peered under his bed at the clothes, blocks, and toys. In toward the middle was a pillow, a fancy pillow of Geneva’s that Frek had forgotten about. He’d hidden it there last month when he and his sisters were in the middle of a great pillow fight.

The pillow had a picture of a rabbit embroidered on it. Grandma Huggins had made it by hand when Geneva was born. Frek had hidden the rabbit pillow so that Geneva couldn’t hit him with it, and so that he himself would have extra artillery for the next pillow war. Geneva had asked him about her rabbit pillow a few times since then, but so far she hadn’t gotten around to pitching a big enough fit to make Frek find it and give it back. Geneva had other things on her mind these days.

Frek lay down flat on his stomach and worked the pillow out from under the middle of the bed, trying not pull along the junk squeezed in around it. Just as the pillow came loose he glimpsed something odd in the farthest, darkest corner of the space under his bed. Something rounded and shiny. A dark, glossy purple, almost black. The size of a squashed bowling ball, with a dimple on the side facing him. He couldn’t think what it might be. A toy he’d forgotten about?

Downstairs Mom had just told the house tree to take the toons off the walls. Ida was yelling about it, but there was no stopping Lora Huggins. Good-bye, Ida, good-bye Geneva, sang the sweet, chuckling voices of the Goob Dolls. I wish Frek would listen to me, called Goob Doll Judy just before Mom closed her down. I have more to tell him. Right.

Ida’s footsteps came pounding up the steps. Instead of starting to clean her room, Ida dashed into Frek’s room. She was a cheerful little girl with golden skin and sparkling black eyes. She was wearing yellow turmite-silk pajamas that had black fuzzy stripes to make her look like a bumblebee.

You found Geneva’s rabbit pillow, said Ida in her deep little voice.

I had it under my bed, said Frek. My stockpile for the next pillow fight.

Pillow fight! exclaimed Ida. She snatched Frek’s pillow from his unmade bed and smacked him with it.

Ida! called Mom from the foot of the stairs. If you don’t clean your room, you’re not getting any allowance!

"All right," shouted Ida. She always got rebellious when she had to clean her room. Ida was rebellious a lot. Being the youngest of three kids, she had to be. She gave Frek another good whack with his pillow and took off down the hall.

Frek decided to leave the mysterious shiny purplish thing under his bed for later. It was time to get going. Stoo would already be deep into the land of Skull Farmers. Frek pushed everything a little farther under the bed, finally making enough room for the Solar Trader set. To finish things off, he made his bed.

On his way down the hall, he tossed the rabbit pillow onto the floor of Geneva’s room, making an exploding sound with his mouth as he did it. Geneva was in there, sitting on her bed, her eyes blank as she focused on the signal from the pulsing uvvy kritter on the back of her neck.

Brat, said Geneva to Frek, snatching up the pillow and setting it beside her on the bed. She made her mouth a thin straight line and shook her fist. And then she went back to talking to her friend. Even though you didn’t really have to, most people talked out loud when they were on the uvvy, and usually they even gestured with their hands. As if the other person were right there in front of them. Oh that was just my brother, said Geneva. Yon upstart barbarian. So what should we wear to the store, Amparo?

Outside, Wow greeted Frek with enthusiasm, bowing and wagging his tail and squeaking, Frek, from the back of his throat. In principle Wow wasn’t allowed in the house as he still chewed things and he went to the bathroom on the floor sometimes. But Ida loved to smuggle Wow in. He was only outside today because he truly couldn’t stand to be around when Snaffle was active. Snaffle and Wow were archenemies: Ms. Tidy and Mr. Mess.

Wow was the one and only kind of dog left after the Great Collapse. NuBioCom changed the design very little from year to year. Wow was a little like a collie and a little like a beagle, medium-sized with white hair, a dark tail, and an orange saddle-shaped patch on his back. Every dog in town looked pretty much like Wow—every dog on Earth for that matter—but even so, the Huggins kids felt like their dog was the best. Wow’s eyes were perhaps a lighter shade of brown than those of some other dogs, flecked with gold in certain lights, and surely Wow was unusually intelligent-looking.

The garage’s thin turmite-paper door opened at a touch of Frek’s finger. Wow tried to push into the garage with Frek, but Frek didn’t let him. The angelwings were scared of dogs.

The angelwings were godzoon goggy kritters, one of the newbio miracles that made the collapse of the biome seem almost okay. Each was about one and a half meters long and resembled a scaled-up mosquito wing, a transparent wing veined with branching struts. They had a rainbow sheen to them. Despite their name, they didn’t look much like the wings on angels in old-time pictures; if anything, they looked devilish. An angelwing’s body was a flexible stick along the base end of the single wing. There were left and right angelwings; they came in pairs like shoes. The sticklike body had an insect head at one end, a few padded legs in the middle, and a bunch of soft, sticky tendrils mixed in with the legs.

The six angelwing kritters dragged themselves slowly across the floor toward Frek. Kvaar, buzzed six sets of mandibles. Kvirr, kvurr, kvak. The long gossamer-thin wings were layered on top of each other like a pile of stained glass.

Frek got a bag of water-soaked beans and rice down from the shelf, sprinkled it with mapine sugar, and spilled the mush into the angelwings’ trough. While they were eating—never a pleasant sight to watch—Frek used a broom-branch to sweep away the sticky pellets of waste they left on the hard dirt floor, lifting up the wings to reach under them.

You wouldn’t have thought the frail angelwings could possibly have enough power to raise a person off the ground. But NuBioCom had found a way around that; their organisms incorporated a secret process that metabolized energy from the invisible dark matter known to pervade all of space. Normally you didn’t notice dark matter because it was somehow perpendicular to ordinary matter. The patented NuBioCom process depended upon a certain oddly knotted molecule’s ability to rotate particles of dark matter into normal space. Or something like that.

When the angelwings had finished eating, Frek brought them a bucket of water from the side of the house tree. They uncurled their long hollow tongues to slurp up the water. Meanwhile Frek took the waste pellets out to the turmite mound.

A few turmites came poking up out of their lacy mud galleries. They resembled pale, oversize ants, each with six legs and a complicated mouth. They gave Frek the creeps. Last year he’d gooshed a couple of them sort of by accident, but not really, and a swarm of turmites had instantly crawled out of the mound to begin biting him. You had to mind your manners with these little kac-eaters.

Wow kept poking his nose through the open garage door. He was always curious about the angelwings. Frek shooed him away and herded his two angelwings out onto the flat lawn. It didn’t take much urging. The angelwings loved the chance to fly.

Frek lay down on his back and the angelwings scooted over next to him, clamping their padded legs around his upper arms and fastening their tendrils all along his ribs. The tips of the tendrils were fine enough to reach right through the cloth of Frek’s shirt. He rocked up one shoulder, then the other, letting the wings reach behind him.

By the time he got to his feet, the angelwings had comfortably bonded to his back, chest, and arms. Frek held out his arms and flapped. The wiry muscles of the angelwings amplified Frek’s shoulder motions strongly enough to lift him a few centimeters off the ground. Wow began barking.

The wingtips quickly sped up into their own rhythm, beating in figure-eights at many times the frequency of Frek’s motions. From now on, the main thing he had to do was steer. With a twitch of his shoulders, Frek buzzed high into the air. He began looping around the trees, hoping someone would look out of his house and see him.

The Hugginses’ yard had one each of the three standard NuBioCom trees: a house tree, an anyfruit tree, and an all-season mapine—which was about it for trees anymore. The house tree resembled a thick, sturdy oak with oval window holes and an arched door. House trees were perhaps the finest miracle of genomics. They grew their own plumbing, saved up solar energy, showed video on their inner walls, and networked via the antenna veins in their branches. Frek glimpsed Mom through her bedroom window, folding clothes on her bed. She looked up and spotted him, then smiled and waved. He waved back.

On the other side of the house tree was their anyfruit tree. Depending on the season, it might have cherries, plums, pears, or apples. Right now it was making blackberries. Rolling his shoulders in a hover-pattern he’d just learned, Frek got the angelwings to suspend him over the highest branch of the anyfruit. He ate a handful of ripe berries.

Right about then a special feeling came over Frek, a feeling that he’d been having off and on all week. The feeling had to do with the world taking on a larger-than-life quality, and with Frek’s own sensations seeming exceptionally fresh and interesting. A golden glow would spread across things, and Frek would imagine that someone was watching him and asking him to explain everything that he thought. It felt like he was a star being interviewed. He didn’t know why he felt this way, but it was kind of fun.

Grinning like a newscaster, Frek threw his shoulders far back. The angelwings scooped mightily at the air, giving him the altitude to sail over their all-season mapine. The mapine bore red-yellow autumn foliage, tender new green shoots and dusty summer leaves. Some of its branches were wintry and bare, while others were dripping the sticky sap of spring. From above the mapine, Frek could see across his whole neighborhood. The three kinds of trees were scattered in an organic, natural way across the hills and dales. You could hardly tell you were looking at a Nubbie village. No roads or wires or pipes—just the house trees and anyfruits and mapines and some winding grassy footpaths, with bindmoss covering the spots where the grass had worn away. Every part of the Nubbies’ lives depended on the NuBioCom kritters.

Frek and his angelwings flew toward the Steiners’ house tree, which was near the highest point in Middleville, at the base of Lookout Mountain. Frek made a long and winding trip of it, with Wow running along below the trees like a bouncy brown and white toon animated onto the uniformly green lawns. The angelwings were young and playful; they enjoyed a barrel-roll or a loop-the-loop as much as Frek. Occasionally Frek would get so dizzy from his gyrations that he’d have to orient himself by peering down at Wow, always doggedly on course for the Steiners’. Wow knew where they were going and he wanted to get there. Stoo’s mother usually fed him something.

When Frek touched down in the Steiners’ yard, he found Stoo’s father, Kolder Steiner, trying to get his shiny green lifter beetle to fly him to work. The beetle’s passenger pod was of transparent chitin, with a seat made up of swirly spiral curls the same golden-green as the beetle’s wing covers. At one point in the beetle’s life-cycle, the pod had been his pupa-casing. The beetle himself was perched on the top of the pod with his legs hooked into it. The great insect seemed to be in a contrary mood; he was snapping his mandibles and making liquid high-pitched noises.

Even though Kolder was a high-ranking exec at NuBioCom, he wasn’t good at handling his living helpers. Kolder pressed a spot between the beetle’s antennae, and the kritter went sgli-gli-hi-hi.

Hi, said Frek.

Hello, Frek, said Kolder Steiner, not really looking up. He was a hairy man with strong arms. He poked impatiently at the beetle and again the kritter made the noise. Sgli-gli-gli-hi-hi. So far he hadn’t lifted his wing covers.

It sounds like a giggle, doesn’t it? said Frek, trying to be friendly. Frek’s father had been gone for so long that Frek wasn’t sure anymore how to act with grown-up men. Kolder Steiner didn’t answer him. Jerk.

Frek walked past Kolder’s uncommunicative back and stashed his angelwings in the Steiners’ garage. When Frek came out, Kolder was glaring at the lifter beetle and muttering under his breath. Now he gave the beetle’s domed back a savage slap. Gli-squeeeek-gli-hi-hi, said the beetle.

Inside the house tree, Sao Steiner was sitting at a table dictating a shopping list to a glypher slug. Like everyone else, she had golden skin and dark, almond-shaped eyes. But Sao was thinner than most people, and she had extra teeth in her smile. Toothbuds. She was wearing a white turmite-lace tube-top and tight, shiny, shin-length gray pants. A pile of new clothes sat on the table next to her; apparently she was planning to exchange some of them.

Sao made shopping complicated. She liked to go to the local turmite tailors who’d trained certain turmite mounds to create uniquely styled fabrics. She made forays into Stun City as well, seeking out the cured wall skin garments popular there. Sao would bring her selections home and try them on for days and then take most of them back. She was always talking about it. Shopping was like her main job.

Yubba, Frek, said Sao, flashing her amplified teeth. Are you ready to rock and roll?

How do you mean? said Frek. Sao Steiner had a way of saying offbeat things. It was like she was always acting flirty—or maybe like she thought it didn’t much matter what she said to him. Frek found it interesting to talk with her, even though he could tell she didn’t really approve of him. He was different from the other kids; his father was a Crufter and his mother had a low-status job.

That’s what Stoo’s new game says when it starts up, said Sao Steiner. "Are you ready to rock and roll? I think it’s hysterical. You’ll find the crown prince in his room. Here. She stood up and got some cookies out of a drawer to put on a plate. You can take these up with you. Nothing like some fat and sugar. Oh, look who else is here. Wowie! Want a cookie, Wow-Wow?"

Cookie, said Wow, opening his jaws wide to squeeze out the sound. Wow want cookie. His lips were drawn back from his teeth with the strain of using his voice, which sounded like the squeak at the end of a yawn. It was rare for Wow to talk, but Sao could always get him to do it. Lora Huggins didn’t encourage Wow’s talking—she said she heard enough from her three kids.

Sao Steiner held a cookie up in the air and Wow jumped for it, making a wet inhaling noise. He’d gobbled down the cookie by the time he was back on all four feet. He quickly nosed a stray crumb off the floor, then looked up at Sao Steiner, licking his chops, his gold-flecked eyes watching her every move.

I’m thinking we should get a dog, too, said Sao. But Kolder wants to wait for next year’s model. Wow’s cute, but there’s already so many of him in town. Kolder says the 3004 model dogs won’t mind fleas. That’s why it’s good that dogs don’t have puppies. The new models replace the old ones.

At the sound of the word flea, Wow abruptly lay down and started chewing at the hair on the base of his tail. Any talk about fertility was over his head. He remained prone to wandering off in search of female dogs in heat, even though nothing could ever come of it.

When NuBioCom collapsed the biome, why didn’t they get rid of fleas? Frek asked Sao Steiner. Since Kolder was such a big deal at NuBioCom, Frek figured Sao might have some inside information. All the ants and beetles are gone, and the grasshoppers and butterflies and lightning bugs—why keep fleas?

They kept mosquitoes, too, said Sao, shaking her head. Counting everything, we’re down to only two hundred and fifty-six kinds of legacy species—including mosquitoes and fleas. I’ve asked Kolder about it, and he says NuBioCom has a use for blood-suckers. They’re vectors for spreading the knockout virus to spots where the puffball spores might not reach. We need the knockouts to keep dogs from conceiving puppies, for instance. And to keep people from having un-licensed children. Don’t frown like that, Frek! You don’t want to end up like your father, off in some crazy Crufter asteroid and maybe even disappeared from there. Life’s gog gripper just the way she is. It grated to hear someone’s mother try to use kids’ slang.

Don’t talk about my father that way, snapped Frek, a little surprised at his temerity. Even though he wasn’t happy about Carb running off, he didn’t like other people to criticize him. He’s not crazy.

I’m sorry, Frek, said Sao, backing off. That was insensitive of me. You must be worried sick about him. The love of gossip glinted in her eyes. Have you gotten any news about what happened up on Sick Hindu? I heard this googly rumor that three Crufters were abducted by aliens.

We haven’t heard a geevin’ thing, said Frek with a sudden rush of fear. Carb hasn’t managed to call us since he left. Mind your own business.

Sao pursed her lips and wrinkled her nose. How about giving me some fashion advice, then. She pulled a blouse from the bags of clothes on the table. With your fresh eyes. She slipped the blouse on over her tight lace top and cocked her head. How does it look, kid?

It looked like a blouse. And Sao looked like Sao. Lively, thin, smug, theatrical, slightly unfriendly. What else was there to say?

Just then Sao’s uvvy made a wet razzing noise. It was under her pile of clothes, and it took her a few seconds to unearth it. I’ll be glad when NuBioCom finally figures out how to put these things inside our heads, she remarked to Frek as she pressed the uvvy’s patch of tendrils to her neck. And then she was into her call. Wordlessly she handed Frek the cookies, and gestured toward the stairs.

Frek thought he had a good hold on the cookie plate, but he didn’t. The next second, the plate and the cookies were on the floor and Wow was snarfing them down as fast as he could. Furious at Wow, and at himself, Frek poked Wow hard with his foot. It wasn’t exactly a kick.

Wow yelped a really nasty curse word and swung his body away, keeping his head down on the floor, eating.

Frek crouched to scoop the rest of the cookies onto the plate. He managed to save about half of them. Sao had set aside her uvvy call. She was looking at Frek with a mixture of pity and contempt.

You drop things a lot, don’t you? she said. You need meds. Clumsiness is a type of attention deficit disorder, you know. Lora should take you to a tweaker. She flashed her too-wide grin. Nothing personal, of course.

Don’t need tweaking, muttered Frek. His face felt hot. I’m good the way I am. Turning away, he hurried up the steps to Stoo’s room before Sao could pick on him any more.

Stoo had his window curtains closed and his lights turned off. He was perched on a big round cushion in the middle of the floor. He was a dark-haired, bright-eyed boy a bit taller and older than Frek, and with a crooked angularity to his jaw. He was handsome and very much his own person, a kid that the others looked up to. Frek wasn’t quite sure why someone as gaud as Stoo even hung out with him.

Right now Stoo was holding an imitation gun grown by a please plant. A prop gun. It didn’t need an uvvy-link. Because of all the eyes in a house tree’s wall, the toons could track Stoo’s hand motions closely enough to tell when and in which direction he meant to shoot.

Yubba, Frek, said Stoo. It was the standard greeting for kids their age, though it had sounded odd coming from Sao in the kitchen.

Yubba you, said Frek. Here’s some cookies from your mother. He dragged over a cushion and sat down next to Stoo. Wow lunged for the cookies again but Frek sharply blocked him. No, Wow! You want to stay at home next time? He felt around on Stoo’s floor and found a prop gun of his own.

The Skull Farmers were on all the curving walls of Stoo’s room. Their world was designed around an old-time Y2K theme. Frek could see at first glance that it was another Toonsmithy masterpiece. An oil refinery was burning in the distance, killer giraffes and elephants were silhouetted nearby, and six business-suited figures were flying across the sky on winged motorcycles. Loosely ranged across the foreground were three lively, individualistic skeletons in Y2K garb. Skull Farmers.

The three Skull Farmers noticed right away that someone new had come into Stoo’s room. Frek happened to focus on one of them, and that one got big; his bony face filled the whole wall.

Toons had a way of enlarging whatever aspect of their world you focused on. The toonsmiths called the technique phenomenological autozoom, but gamers just called it pzoom. The toons were letting Frek, and not Stoo, control the pzoom. They wanted to draw him into the game.

The face Frek had focused on was a goggy shecked-out skull with glowing red eyes, a gold front tooth, and a crumpled black top hat upon the deathly white pate. A rusty nail had been hammered into one side of the skull, with a pair of dice dangling from it like an earring.

Welcome, Frek, said the skull-faced toon. His voice was shrill and grainy, as if he’d been yelling all day long. They call me Gypsy Joker. We need yore smarts and firepower. Seems we’ve got our butts into a bit of a situation hyar. He hooked one thumb toward the sky, and Frek pzoomed out to view the background. The six Financiers of the Apocalypse is a-comin’, just for openers. I cain’t promise you an easy run, but it could be hella fun. You wanna sign on with the Skull Farmers?

Meanwhile Stoo fired off a couple of shots at the business-suited Financiers of the Apocalypse, who took the damage hits in a shower of green dollar signs and circled back into the distance.

Right on, Stoo, said the second Skull Farmer, and Frek brought him into view. He was wearing a red velvet cape and held an archaic electric guitar. He pushed himself into prominence and struck a chord of rich metallic-sounding music, sending images of roses spiraling out. I’m Strummer, he told Frek. Some of his teeth were black and he had an old-time British accent. He struck a pose and raised his voice to a warbling shriek. Are you ready to rock and roll?

Hold it, said the third Skull Farmer in a sharp tone. Frek was back to a medium view, now, showing all three of the Skull Farmers. The third one had a heavy ballistic-style machine-gun hanging from one bone shoulder, and his skull was burned black, as from a fire, with tendrils of singed hair and crusts of burnt skin. Soul Soldier here. I’m just pickin’ up a message for new recruit Frek Huggins. Goob Doll Judy passed it to me. Groove on it, Skulls. Soul Soldier flicked the joints of his spectral skeleton hand and blood-red urlbuds flew across the walls to the two other Skull Farmers.

Whoo-eee! said Gypsy Joker, catching a bud. Frek Huggins got company comin’. Anvil fallin’ down at him.

Tell me more, said Frek, pleased to have the toons drawing him into their game.

Anvil’s what they call it, said Soul Soldier in his dark, gravelly voice. "The Govs have had Skywatch Mil trackin’ it for a couple days. Came down through the asteroids. ANonymous Vector, IntersteLlar. Last night they found out it’s headed for Frek Huggins."

An anvil from the forge of God, said Strummer in a cracked whisper. He plucked the strings of his guitar and crooned the phrase again, rounding it into a verse of song.

An anvil from the forge of God

Is falling toward a young man’s bod,

It’s coming closer night and day

He doesn’t think to run away.

Strummer’s papery voice gave Frek a chill. What are you talking about? he asked uneasily. Toons always mind-gamed you to get you into the play, but this routine seemed unusually gollywog.

Lot of alien activity last night, said Soul Soldier. Your world’s gettin’ real funky. After the Anvil hit the atmosphere, the sucker darted around so swoopy that the Skywatch jelly-eyes lost it in the foo-fightin’ fog. And then a big fat flying saucer cruises over Stun City, with some kind of human voice on its radio sayin’ as how the Anvil’s addressed to Mr. Frek Huggins. What it is, Frek. Had any company this morning?

Kac, Huggins, interjected Stoo. The Skulls never ran a level like this for me yet. What makes you so gaud?

I don’t know, said Frek, forcing a laugh. He had a sudden memory flash of that dark shiny shape he’d glimpsed in the farthest recess of the space under his bed. But it couldn’t be. The toons were just playing with him was all. I’ll handle that Anvil, he said, making his voice firm. He aimed his prop gun and squeezed his trigger finger, expecting to see simulated bullets shoot across into the toons’ sky, expecting to see some Y2K saucer UFO icons darting away in response. But the toons were ignoring his prop gun.

This is realtime, said Gypsy Joker, watching Frek with his hot red eyes. We ain’t jivin’ you. There’s something come down to Earth lookin’ for you, Frek, and don’t nobody know what it is or where it’s hiding.

Suddenly Sao Steiner walked into the room. Her voice was cold and all business. Frek, I just got a message from Lora. There’s two counselors over at your house to see you. Go talk to them before they have to come over here to get you. Kolder’s furious. What on Earth have you been up to, you odd little boy? Stoo—he didn’t ask you to do anything geevey, did he?

2

The Thing Under Frek’s Bed

A watchbird appeared as soon as Frek got back in the air, and it followed him all the way home. It was a gray, beady-eyed little thing, a tweaked hummingbird kritter with the slick bump of a tiny uvvy on the back of its neck. The watchbird’s one color accent was its narrow, scarlet