Frek and the Elixir by Rudy Rucker Read Free Book Online Page B

reddish-gray mosaics of lenses. But once you got to know an angelwing, you could read its mood from the motions of its mouth-parts in particular. Frek’s angelwings had their jaws wide open to the air, and they were rocking their heads from side to side. They were loving it up here.
    The beady-eyed little watchbird was laboring along just off Frek’s starboard wingtip. It made Frek feel sort of important to have Gov watching him. But also a little worried. Probably he should have told the counselors about the thing under his bed. It might well be the Anvil. If it was really from another world, then maybe it had a way of making itself hard to see. The counselors would do something awful to him if they found out he’d lied. They’d call him a sociopath, or worse. But who wanted to be on the side of those bossy gurps? And maybe, just maybe, the Anvil held a message from his father.
    The sunny air washed away Frek’s worries for a time. He landed atop the biggest boulder in the Giant’s Marbles, spotted a likely spot on the bank of the stream at the edge of the clearing, buzzed over there, and temporarily took off his angelwings. The wings crawled down to the edge of the stream to drink water, and Frek pulled up a few wild carrots for them to gnaw on. The watchbird perched on the branch of a low anyfruit tree, overseeing the goings-on.
    The plants out here weren’t any more diverse than the plants in town. Besides the generic grass and the ground-covering bindmoss, Frek could see roseplusplus bushes, scrubby anyfruit trees, please plant bushes, yams, tomato vines, carrots, bean bushes, stalks of rice, and clumps of chard. House trees tended not to grow outside of the towns; they needed special watering and fertilizer-pollen to get off to a good start.
    Frek used an anyfruit stick to poke a bunch of holes into the mossy mud along the edge of the stream, and one by one he planted all the seeds in his bag. It took awhile. Again he noticed that one funny-looking seed he’d found near the bed, the one with all the legs. Might it have something to do with the Anvil? Not wanting to excite the watchbird by staring at the special seed for too long, he planted it in the ground like the others.
    The seed came to life; it wriggled out of sight. A munching sound filtered up through the shaking earth. A little circle of soil collapsed. The watchbird chirped; it was taking all of this in. The ground vibrated beneath Frek’s feet. Accompanied by a high-pitched burrowing sound, a line of disturbance etched its way across the hill. Bushes trembled, boulders gently shifted, the ground was dented with the ghost of a trench. What had Frek unleashed?
    It was getting on toward evening when he got home. After supper, Frek’s family watched some toons. Suzy Q the statewide newstoon presented a brief item about the counselors standing guard over the Huggins house in case the mysterious “Anvil” from space were to turn up. It was quite unusual for Suzy Q to mention Middleville at all. Some friends uvvied Mom right away to talk about it. At least the news didn’t say anything about Frek’s weird seed. He listened to Mom talking for a while, and then he went up to his room and played with his Merry Mollusk toons.
    His customized cuttlefish was like a squid, but with a fatter body. Just like a squid, a cuttlefish had a bullet-shaped “mantle” covering the rear of its body, with its head and arms and tentacles sticking out of the mantle’s open end. And, like a squid, a cuttlefish had eight short arms and two long tentacles, all of them with suckers. When they were just floating around, the Merry Mollusk cuttlefish had a demure way of bunching their arms together to make a pointed cone beneath their large, yellowish eyes. Frek found the cuttlefish cute, even though their pupils were shaped like the letter W. He was teaching his cuttlefish toon to stretch out one arm to shake hands.
    But it