Frek and the Elixir by Rudy Rucker Page B

him, Bili!” She and the tiger-tailed Grulloo boy scampered across the pulsing rug and leaped onto his lap.
    â€œNot just yet,” said Frek, smiling and pushing them off. “I’m still thinking. I haven’t been able to think for a week, you know. Jeroon only just now fixed my brain.”
    Fixed it with stim cells. Tiny one-celled kritters that had made their way from his stomach into his bloodstream and up to his brain. Might the stim cells take over his personality? His heart began pounding. Was that the stim cells in action?
    â€œJeroon,” he croaked, clutching his throat. “Are the stim cells—”
    â€œDon’t kac your britches,” said Jeroon, proudly perched on his lofty chair. He’d just started eating his own plate of pancakes. “They’ll leave your system soon enough. It’d be better for us Grulloos if stim cells lasted longer. Then we wouldn’t need to dose ourselves so often.” His head was at the back of the cushion with the plate in front of him and his arms around it. He bit off a piece of pancake, chewed it, and then paused as if waiting for the mouthful to go down. Frek noticed that Jeroon had a stim cell nodule on his plate beside the pancakes.
    â€œYou eat stim cells all the time?” asked Frek.
    â€œLook us over,” said Jeroon, gesturing at himself and the other Grulloos. “You think we could live without some help? That big body you’re the master of, it’s full of life-support. Stomach, lungs, heart, liver, kidneys—you’ve got the whole shebang.” He tapped the thick base of his tail. “I’ve got a few rudiments in here, such as lungs, yes, but nothing like what’s needed for a proper long life. It’s the stim cells that keep me going, you know. I don’t have a stomach or a liver, no digestive tract. Take a gander!” He chewed up another big bite of pancake and opened his mouth. Him doing this reminded Frek of Geneva, who sometimes showed him a mouthful of food when Mom wasn’t looking, just to be gross.
    Jeroon’s mouth simply ended at the back. A little hole on the roof of his mouth connected with his nose and lungs, but he lacked any gullet-type throat-hole. The back of the mouth was a dead-end sack with the wad of chewed pancake just sitting there. But the flesh at the base of Jeroon’s tongue was busy; a thousand pink projections were tugging at the dough, picking it to pieces, pulling the pasty mush into the tongue’s fissures.
    â€œQuit it, Jeroon,” said Salla, shaking her petals. She had a mother’s firm voice. “You’ll teach bad manners to Bili and LuHu.”
    â€œMy breakfast,” said Jeroon, partly closing his mouth. “Once the food particles are in my tongue, the stim cells turn them into nourishment.”
    Little Bili was imitating him now, skipping about the room with his mouth wide open. The backs of Bili’s and Jeroon’s tongues were both engorged with pancake. So googly, so shecked-out.
    Frek asked another question so Jeroon would close his mouth. “You said the stim cells are from the Kritterworks?”
    â€œTo be sure,” said Jeroon. “From the artigrows. The NuBioCommers found a use for the stim cells when they made Grulloos. Around three hundred years back. A little after the Great Collapse.”
    Hearing about the collapse always made Frek feel wistful. First Earth’s genetic heritage had been driven extinct by the NuBioCom knockout virus, which broke the reproductive cycle of non-NuBioCom organisms. And then, on June 6, 2666, the NuBioCom labs had purged all the archived DNA information. Erased Eden’s blueprints. “I wish we had butterflies,” said Frek softly. “And octopi—I’d love to see an octopus or a squid. The alien I saw looked like a cuttlefish, you know. He was green.”
    â€œWhat alien?” asked Jeroon, surprised.
    â€œI didn’t tell