Frek and the Elixir Read Free Page B

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