Frek and the Elixir by Rudy Rucker Page A

them.
    A crowd of curious Middleville locals was gathering, Stoo Steiner and his parents among them. Alerted by their house trees and borne on angelwings, people were dropping from the sky like ripe fruit. They seemed anxious, even vengeful. With their biome so pruned-down, Nubbies had a deep-seated fear of new species. What if the alien cuttlefish were to breed explosively and run amok?
    â€œBurn the invader!” shouted Kolder Steiner. “I brought alcohol,” he added, rushing up to PhiPhi. He was carrying two seedpods filled with liquid. “You have to burn that thing fast. Every bit of its tissues. I know all about biohazard. I’m a genomicist. There’s no substitute for immediate incineration.”
    â€œBurn the sport!” chimed in the other onlookers. “Burn it now!”
    â€œYes,” said PhiPhi, after listening down into her Gov-linked uvvy. She and Zhak quickly started a fire with a pile of alcohol-soaked mapine sticks and leaves. The mapine wood was rich with a sticky pitch that burned exceedingly well. The neighbors stoked the blaze, tearing off branches from all the nearby trees they could reach, and once the fire was roaring, the counselors hurled in the pieces of the space cuttlefish. The tentacled globs continued to writhe and scream even as the flames ate them away.
    Sao was leaning tight against Kolder, with her head thrown back against his neck. “Burn,” she crooned, arching her body and glancing around to make sure people were looking at her. “Buuuuuuurn.” The firelight flickered across Kolder’s hard face, all angles and crags. Seeing Frek, he glared.
    Kolder wasn’t the only one looking mean. Most of the neighbors were blaming Frek for the creature from the Anvil. Mom stuck close to Frek, ready to defend him. His sisters were right next to him, too.
    Two of the counselors got the Anvil from under Frek’s bed and lugged it outside. It looked almost like a meteorite: a shiny, bumpy purplish rock, a disk with dimples on the top and bottom. The triangular door was gone. The Anvil sat there by the fire, glinting in the light. The cuttlefish’s screaming had stopped; the flames were guttering down.
    â€œDid the octopus try to bite you?” asked Geneva.
    â€œHe was starting to talk to me,” said Frek. “He was friendly. He was a cuttlefish, not an octopus. I wish they hadn’t killed him so fast.”
    â€œDid he tell you his name?” asked Ida.
    â€œHe only said one thing,” said Frek. “He said I’m going to save our world.”
    â€œYou?” said Geneva.
    â€œFrom what?” asked Ida.
    Just then Zhak came over and took hold of Frek’s arm. “We must take you to our service center,” he said. “It requires a full debriefing.”
    â€œFrek hasn’t done anything,” cried Mom. “It’s your fault you didn’t find that monster this afternoon. My poor son could have been killed.”
    â€œThis is not negotiable,” said Zhak. More counselors were at his side. “Come, Frek.”
    Lora Huggins threw her arms around Frek; it took three big counselors to pry her away. Zhak dragged Frek to the pod of his lifter beetle. Geneva and Ida wailed for help, but none of the Nubbies raised a hand to save Frek.
    As the counselors pushed Frek into the pod, he noticed that the yellow peeker uvvy was gone from Zhak’s belt. And then he felt something settle onto his neck. The peeker had crawled up from behind his seat.
    Frek tried to reach back and claw the thing off him, but Zhak held down his hands. As the lifter beetle carried them into the sky, the tendrils dug deep into Frek’s brain.
    The next few hours were odd, like watching a toon show. Frek kept hearing a boy’s voice, slow and shy and hesitant. Sometimes he’d feel his throat vibrating in synch with the voice and he’d remember that it was him talking.
    He and Zhak were in a room at the