Frek and the Elixir by Rudy Rucker Page B

counselors’ service center, which was a large house tree in a deserted area outside of town. Nobody much was there; the service center was mainly for housing specialized, seldom-used kritters. Also it was a spot to interrogate someone out of the public view.
    A being was in Frek’s head asking him questions. Gov. Now Gov looked like a First Nations raven mask instead of like an eagle. He was red and black and white with a clacking beak a meter long. Gov didn’t actually say his questions out loud. Instead he bobbed his head forward and pecked the answers right out of Frek’s brain. Frek had a dim, sick feeling that the pecks were damaging him.
    He told Gov everything. About seeing the Anvil in the morning and about how it had hidden itself behind some kind of space lens in the afternoon. About the please plant seed that had looked a little like a squid, and where he’d planted it. About what the space cuttlefish had said. You’re the one. You’ll save the world.
    The raven kept pecking and a sad boy’s voice talked on and on.
    The pecking might have killed Frek then and there, but his mind possessed some hard kernel that the beak wasn’t able to break. It seemed Frek’s consciousness held a deep-buried core that could heal itself from the peeker’s wounds, an inner seed to regrow his personality. But by the end, the seed was very dented and small.
    Then Frek was up in the air with Zhak again. It was morning. Zhak had the window of the lifter pod open; the wind was blowing in at them. Gov wasn’t in Frek’s head anymore.
    â€œOkay now?” said Zhak.
    Frek didn’t answer. He felt the wind and listened to the buzz of the lifter beetle. He saw trees below. His house tree. The beetle landed. Frek’s legs weren’t working right. He fell down on the ground, onto his own yard’s grass. It was so wonderful to be back home that he was crying. PhiPhi and Zhak dragged him to his door, then flew off in the lifter beetle right away. They were done here.
    Â 
    Frek spent the next few days in bed, hobbling over to the toilet in the wall when he needed to. Mom, Geneva, and especially Ida came in to visit him, solemnly sitting on a chair by his bed. Sometimes Mom would bring up the yellowish little family statue of the Buddha and hold hands with Frek and pray.
    Mom kept telling Frek he’d get better soon. Even though he still hadn’t started talking. At first he didn’t remember how to talk, and then he didn’t want to, and then he was scared to try. If he tried to talk and he couldn’t, he’d get a med leech or even the Three R’s. Nobody was allowed to be handicapped anymore. They fixed you, no matter what. On the highest shelf of his room perched the watchbird, observing him.
    Another health issue was that Frek was having trouble remembering what he was doing, much more so than ever before. It was tricky, for instance, to fetch a mug of water from the tap in his wall. After he filled the mug, he’d maybe notice something else in his room, and when he got back to his bed, he wouldn’t be holding the mug anymore. And then he’d have to search all over the room to find it, repeatedly forgetting what he was looking for, but all the while anxiously aware that he was looking for something. Finally he’d spot the mug of water—on a shelf or a chair or sitting on the floor—the mug kind of sneering at him, it was a reddish-brown thing from a please plant, with a face on it like a monkey. Can’t catch me, the mug would seem to say. Imagining the voice of the mug would make Frek think of the pecking of the raven and the slow halting droning of that tormented boy’s voice. Things were bad.
    Late one afternoon, Ida got bored while she was visiting with him and put the Goob Dolls on his walls.
    â€œThere he is,” said Goob Doll Judy, staring down at Frek from the wall skin. As always, she had long, skinny arms and