Live Without a Net

by Lou Anders

  Here came another river bend. The carved-out left bank was bluff-high with a fringe of roseplusplus and please plant fronds against the cloudy sky. Frek went partway round the bend, then quickly angled up to the top of the bank, his arm muscles a mass of pain. Above the bank he found an overgrown slope with no sign of human habitation. He realized he’d ended up in the Grulloo Woods. He’d never been here before. Well, it was better than letting the counselors get him. There was a deep gully in the slope. Frek dived for the spot where the vegetation looked the thickest.

  As soon as he hit the ground, his angelwings peeled themselves off him. They were trembling with fatigue. They wanted to start foraging, but Frek stopped them. He gathered them in his arms, collapsing them like umbrellas. And then Frek scooted under the thickest, lowest-hanging bush, a please plant bush with a bundle of thin branches shooting up from a central clump. The branches drooped back down to the ground, leaving plenty of room underneath. The branches were set with little oval leaves of a lovely spring-fresh green.

  Frek lay there crooning softly to his angelwings, rubbing their domed eyes and their complicated mouths against his cheeks. Up through the bush he could see the clouds turning pink with the setting sun. As he shifted around, trying to be invisible, he felt some hard lumps under his hips. Parts of last year’s please plant seeds.

  The seed bits were shaped like smooth little rods with round disks on the top—like spoons, but not cupped like spoons. Each of the rods had a tiny hole in it. Something about these shapes seemed familiar, but in his present condition, Frek had no hope of remembering what they were. He held some of them up to the mouths of the angelwings. The famished kritters gnawed avidly.

  For the next hour or so, Frek lay beneath the bushes, feeding please plant seeds to his angelwings and looking at his new ring. Dad’s ring. Frek had always dreamed that he might get it someday, but he’d never thought it would be so soon. Dad must have left it for him, and Mom had been saving it for when he got older.

  It was nicely made, with the bulging round boss part blending smoothly with the band. The hemispherical crest looked just like half of Planet Earth, the half with the Pacific Ocean. Carb had loved the Pacific. The jewelers had somehow worked color into the plant-metal gold, and you could see an amazing amount of detail.

  Mom had wrapped enough tape onto the band to make it a tight fit. With a little effort, he slid the ring off and had a look at the underside. He’d never actually seen Dad take his ring off, so he wasn’t sure if the bulging round part would be hollowed out or not. There was in fact smooth gold metal all across the back of the hemisphere—lightly flecked with copper crystals, the crystals making a delicate pattern that teasingly seemed to change when you stared at it. For a second Frek thought he saw little lights moving about in the patterns of the underside. Could Dad be using his ring right at this moment to try to talk to him? But the ring did no more than twinkle at him. After a bit, Frek decided the lights might just be reflections from the afternoon sun coming down through the please plant leaves. He slid the ring back on, pleased at its weight upon his finger. Having the ring made him feel better about Dad than he’d felt for a long time.

  All the while Frek was thinking about the ring, the rest of his memory kept blanking out on him, but not so much that he ever forgot that he was hiding from the counselors. At first he kept hearing their lifter beetles flying along the river, but after a while the buzzing went away. The clouds grew orange, then shaded down to purple and gray. Maybe he could fly farther down the river tonight. He wished he could remember where Mom had told him to go. He’d forgotten about the paper in his pocket, and he’d forgotten he was in the Grulloo Woods.

  In the distance, farther up the slope, there was an occasional thudding sound, as of someone chopping wood. Just before it got completely dark, the chopping stopped. A moment later a lifter beetle set down on the ground some thirty meters off. It was PhiPhi and Zhak with some kind of animal—oh, God, it was Woo.

  “You smell him near here, Wooie?” said PhiPhi in a sweet voice. Frek could hear her perfectly. With the coming of dusk, the air had grown very calm. “Good, smart dog. Poor Frek needs help. Find him! Find Frek!”

  “This the fourth place that dog think he smell Frek,” said Zhak impatiently. “We should get real counselor watchdog, a dog with an uvvy so you know what it thinking. Get real counselor dog come back tomorrow morning. If Gov gave Middleville better funding, we have dog like that in the first place.”

  “Tomorrow morning the boy could be in Stun City,” said PhiPhi. “Where Gov lives. Gov doesn’t want that.”

  “Little zook,” said Zhak angrily. “He supposed to head upstream to that old Crufter hideout. Like Lora Huggins tell him to. I waiting there all afternoon, and he never come. His brain’s fubbed, yes? Let’s just k-i-l-l him, hey, PhiPhi?” He spelled the word to keep Woo from understanding.

  “Gov doesn’t want that,” said PhiPhi again. “Gov wants the boy for bait to reopen the Anvil. We bring him in alive. We do like Gov says, Zhak.”

  “Yaya,” said Zhak wearily. “Go on, you stupid dog! Find Frek!”

  Woo gave a low growl. But PhiPhi started up the sweet talk, and soon Woo was nosing around in the brush. It took all of three minutes till his head appeared under Frek’s bush, his soft golden eyes glowing with pleasure at having found his friend.

  “No, Wooie,” whispered Frek before Woo could bark. “Go away. PhiPhi bad. Zhak bad. Frek hide. Go away.”

  The angelwings twisted in Frek’s grasp, trying to get away from the smell of dog. If they started chirping, he was doomed.

  “Go away, Woo,” hissed Frek.

  Woo bared his teeth in his version of a smile and went crackling off through the bushes, moving on past Frek, pretending still to be searching, and having himself a good look around. He kept it up for quite a long time.

  When it was fully dark, Zhak and PhiPhi started hollering for Woo. And then, finally, Woo went to them.

  “Frek not here,” squeaked Woo from deep in his throat. The sound carried clearly in the calm evening air.

  “Goddammit,” said Zhak. “We go now, PhiPhi. These woods not safe at night. The Grulloos thinking about suppertime. Grulloos eat people. If Frek is here, he won’t get to Stun City. We posted watchbirds all along River Jaya, anyhow. Enough now, PhiPhi. We go.”

  “I wish we have one more watchbird,” said PhiPhi. “I got a feeling Frek’s under one of these bushes. Listening to us. I bet Woo lied to us. I wonder if Frek come out if we start t-o-r-t-u-r-e his dog?”

  “Yaya,” said Zhak with a snicker. “I like your think. Hang on. I’ll—” He broke off in a yelp. “He bit me! There he goes! Don’t let him get—”

  There was frantic crashing in the bushes and then a distant splash in the river.

  “I’m bleeding, PhiPhi,” said Zhak mournfully. “I need med-leech. We go. Forget goddammit dog. Maybe he drowns or a Grulloo eats him or we catch him tomorrow—who cares. We go.”

  The lifter beetle buzzed away, invisible against the black sky. It was a cloudy, moonless night.

  Frek was trying to process all the different things he’d heard. It was like juggling—and he couldn’t juggle. One by one the memories dropped from his grasp and rolled off. Eventually he gave up and began putting on his angelwings. He knew for sure that he should keep running from the counselors—he just didn’t know which way.

  There was a noise coming from uphill. A quiet sobbing. It had started soon after the counselors left, but only now had he identified it. Someone up there was hurt and crying. Frek headed up the dark slope, using his angelwings to move in long, low leaps. When he got closer to the sound, it turned into words.

  “I’ve pinched my tail,” said a man’s rough, high-pitched voice. “Please help me, Frek.”

  Startled, Frek flew straight up into the air and found a perch on the high bare limb of a rotted-out mapine tree, pale in the darkness. He’d just remembered he was in the Grulloo Woods. The clearing beyond the dead tr
ee was a pool of night.

  “How do you know my name?” called Frek into the gloom.

  “Your dog told me,” said the little voice, growing conversational. “He said you might come. Please help me. I’m trapped.”

  “How do you mean?” asked Frek.

  “My long, clever tail,” came the raspy tenor from the blackness. “It’s pinched. I was splitting logs this afternoon to get at the veins of nutfungus. It’s got a spicy taste my folk are fond of. I was holding the wedge with my tail, and when those counselors came buzzing in, I was so frightened that I let the wedge pop out. The log snapped shut on me.” The unseen little man dropped his tone nearly to a whisper. “If Okky finds me like this, I’ll meet a sorry end. Hop down here and free me, Frek. Drive in the wedge, and pry the log open.”

  Frek was on the point of flapping down when something stopped him. “You have a tail?”

  “A fine woodsy one,” confided the voice, growing stronger again. “It looks like a stick, but it’s terribly strong and leathery. I can lie in a bush and stick my tail up into the air, and when a little bird lands on it—zickzack, Jeroon’s got his lunch! Come on, boy, don’t keep me waiting.”

  “You’re a Grulloo,” exclaimed Frek. “You eat people.”

  “Your Gov promotes that toony tale to make you hate us. Grulloos all cannibals? Poppycock! I live on fruit, vegetables, and the odd fowl. I’m a simple woodsman; I gather what I can—rugmoss, nutfungus, please plant seeds—and I barter my takings for what I can get from my fellow Grulloos. Groceries, in the main, with the rest going toward furnishing and decorating my burrow. I’ve a handmade chair, a bed, and a fine Grulloo carpet of cultured rugmoss. Once my home’s to the liking of my Ennie, the two of us can hatch out an egg, God willing. Yes, yes, Grulloos are family people, as peaceable as you Nubbies. Precious few of us are man-eaters.” The Grulloo lowered his voice again. “But if I’m trapped here much longer, it’s the dreadful Okky who’ll make a meal of me. She eats her victim’s heads, you know, starting with the nose and ending with the brain. I’ve chanced upon her grisly leavings more than once. It’s said that Okky sells our refined cerebral essences to NuBioCom, as she’s got no eggs to offer them. Free me, Frek, free me before Okky finds us. She’ll eat you, too!”

  “You won’t hurt me?” asked Frek.

  “Aid me this once, and I’m your friend forever. Such larks we’ll have, Frek. I’ve always wanted to know a Nubby. Jeroon’s my name. I’m the fellow to have at your side.”

  “I do need help,” said Frek. “The counselors broke my memory.”

  “Peeked you, they did, eh? I’ve got some stim cells in my burrow that’ll heal that. Come on down here, boy. My axe is next to me, but the wedge flew off to the other side of the clearing.”

  Still Frek hesitated. “Can I look at you first? Can you make a light?”

  The Grulloo grumbled a bit and began rustling in the dark. There was a spark as he fired up a matchbud and lit his—pipe? Except in toons, Frek had never seen anyone smoke before. In the darkness of the woods, the glow of the pipe was enough to light the clearing. The Grulloo was little more than a man’s head with a pair of arms—or were they legs? Little legs with hands that he walked upon. He had a big nose and browned, leathery skin. His eyes were hidden by the brim of a dark blue felt cap worn tight and low on his head. There was a knife tucked beneath a strap of the cap, the blade lying along one side of the crown. A tight little red jacket rose up to his chin, with a pouch of nutfungus at the waist. He flexed his cheeks, pulling smoke out of the pipe. Rather than breathing the smoke in, he let it trickle up around his weathered face.

  The Grulloo—he’d said his name was Jeroon—had a bit of a body that tapered out from the back of his head like a fish’s, thinning down to a branching, sticklike tail. Much of his tail was buried deep in the heart of a thick old log with a red strip of nutfungus along one side. He cocked back his head and peered up imploringly with his pipe clenched between his square yellow teeth. His face was tight with pain.

  “Poor Jeroon,” said Frek, his heart opening. He fluttered to the ground. It was a matter of minutes to fetch Jeroon’s wedge and to pound it into the log with the little axe. Jeroon’s wedge, axe, and knife were elegantly formed; they were the products of please plants cunningly tweaked to draw metal from the soil.

  “Oh, that’s good,” said Jeroon when his tail came free. Although his tail was camouflaged to resemble a branching stick, it was completely flexible. He set his pipe down on the ground and brought the tail around to his face, sniffing and licking at the injured spots. And then the pipe was back in his mouth and he was scrambling about on the split log, prying at the thick veins of shiny red nutfungus and stashing the pieces in his pouch.

  Frek caught a whiff of the pipe smoke. He’d always wondered what tobacco smelled like. Sort of good. You couldn’t get it in Middleville.

  “Hist,” said Jeroon, suddenly looking upward. He ballooned his cheeks to draw the smoke from the pipe, letting the smoke leak out of his mouth and up around his nose, turning his head from side to side. He slowly stalked all around the clearing, listening. He moved with a bowlegged rocking motion, tossing his tail from side to side to keep his balance. He was like an armless toon tyrannosaur—but less than half a meter tall.

  Now Frek, too, could hear what Jeroon was listening to. The whir of wings. A lifter beetle? No, this sounded different. More of a flapping sound.

  “It’s Okky,” whispered Jeroon. “We’re for it, lad. Let’s bolt!”

  “Which way?” asked Frek, crouching down to face the Grulloo.

  “Can you carry me?” asked Jeroon, hand-walking forward. He’d pocketed his wedge and his axe hung from a loop in the side of the coat.

  “All right.”

  “Friends for life,” said Jeroon, leaning far to one side and extending the hand at the end of his right leg. “I’ll give you something wonderful when we get to my house. A boon.”

  “Friends,” answered Frek, shaking Jeroon’s hand. The Grulloo’s grip was firm and strong, his skin hard and callused.

  Jeroon got his arms, or legs, around Frek’s midsection, and they lifted up into the air. The overburdened angelwings weren’t liking this; they were chittering in dismay.

  “That way,” said Jeroon, speaking around the pipe stem still clenched in his teeth. He was pointing with his tail, curved around to gesture in the direction they flew. The pipe smoke trickled from Jeroon’s mouth and floated up into Frek’s face, making him cough. Breathing tobacco was a different story from smelling it.

  “Put out the pipe, Jeroon.”

  “Not yet,” said the Grulloo, puffing out his cheeks so hard that the pipe bowl glowed bright orange. “We may need it against Okky.” The color made Frek think of the triangular door to the Anvil—but all that seemed like a lifetime ago. He worked his wings, staying ahead of Jeroon’s smoke.

  They were above the tangled dark shapes of the Grulloo Woods, heading away from the river. This was wild, unknown country. Nobody ever came here. It was all Frek could do to avoid hitting the trees, but Jeroon seemed to know exactly where they were going. His arms aching with a wholly new level of fatigue, Frek followed the pointing of Jeroon’s limber tail, dimly visible in the light from his pipe.

  “Look out,” said the Grulloo suddenly. “Here she comes.” Nimble as a nightmare demon, Jeroon scrabbled up Frek’s chest and hauled himself onto Frek’s shoulders, his coarse hands digging into the nape of Frek’s neck. The pouchy base of Jeroon’s tail swept past Frek’s face and wedged itself against the side of his head. From the corner of his eye, Frek could see that Jeroon had stuck one hand up high into the air, the hand clutching both his knife and his glowing pipe. Hard as it was to believe, Jeroon was also singing at the top of his lungs—bitter, joking verses about Grulloos, each chorus ending with the line, “So don’t you call us freaks!”

  There was a hooting sound and a whoosh laden with the smell of corruption. Jeroon’s singing rose to a fierce shriek. So
mething thumped against Frek’s back, crumpling one of his angelwings. The poor wing gave a dying insect chirp of agony, then peeled off and fell away. Frantically Frek feathered the air with his remaining wing, sweeping it from side to side to break their fall as best he could. Jeroon seemed to be everywhere at once, on his shoulders, at his waist, on the side of his leg, all the time singing his defiance of Okky, who swooped about them, pressing her attack.

  They crashed into the top of an anyfruit tree, and as luck would have it, the impact snapped Frek’s other wing, sending the ichor of its torn, dying body oozing down his side. Frek initially took it for his own blood. But then he realized that by some miracle he himself was unscathed.

  Jeroon leapt off him and clambered onto a thick branch just overhead. His pipe and its coal were long gone. Jeroon was still roaring out his song and stabbing his knife at the dark form that hooted and beat the air with stinking black wings. For a terrible, confused, instant Frek thought the shape was Gov in his raven form, somehow risen out of the toon world to physically hunt him down. But it was Okky, and then the deathly beast had flown away.

  “Your poor wings,” rasped Jeroon, nimbly dropping to a branch by his side. “Gaia bless ’em—they saved our lives. We’d never have gotten this far on foot. You’re a good friend, Frek. I hope you’re hale enough to push on? We’re not safe yet. My burrow’s just a bit farther.”

  They climbed down the tree. Frek followed the sound of Jeroon’s steps through some brush into the bed of a gurgling stream. They walked up the stream for a while, the banks getting higher on either side. Frek’s feet grew wet and muddy. He felt thoroughly miserable, and he couldn’t even remember what he was doing here. There was nothing for it but to press on.

  Finally Jeroon came to a stop and began fumbling at a spot on the bank. Frek heard the creak of a little door.

  “Welcome to my home,” said Jeroon.

  Frek reached out to feel the shape of the entrance. It was a round hole, nicely framed in stone, less than a meter across. “I don’t want to go in there,” he said. “I’ll suffocate.”