Frek and the Elixir by Rudy Rucker

the slope above the bluff. Frek dove 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 he saw—a please plant bush with a bundle of thin branches that rose up from a central clump to droop back 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 for a while crooning softly to his angelwings and 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. Last year’s please plant seeds.
    The seeds 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 bush feeding please plant seeds to his angelwings and looking at his new ring. Frek had always hoped he might get a special ring like Dad’s some day, but he’d never thought it would be so soon. Dad had left it for him, and Mom had been saving it for when he got older. Dad cared.
    The ring was nicely made, with its cup fashioned into a perfectly parabolic dish. The mysterious red light at the base of the cup glowed equably. Frek prodded at the light with a bit of twig; the stick moved right through the red dot.
    Mom had wrapped enough bark 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, and he wondered if you could see the red dot from underneath. But he found smooth gold metal all across the back of the hemisphere—lightly flecked with subtle crystalline structures, the crystals making a delicate pattern that teasingly seemed to change when you stared at it. Frek turned the ring right side up and stared into its glowing red dot. For a second the light seemed to be painting a pattern in the air, like a laser limning a hologram. A face? Could Dad be using his matching ring right at this moment to try to talk to him? But then the thing was once again just a ring. Frek slid it 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.
    Too bad Dad wasn’t here, though. He’d know what to tell the counselors, all right. Dad was the one to have on your side when there was trouble.
    While Frek was thinking about Dad and 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, an occasional thud sounded, as if someone were chopping wood. Just before it got completely dark, the chopping stopped. A moment later a glistening teal lifter beetle set down on the ground some thirty meters off. It was PhiPhi and Zhak with some kind of animal—oh Buddha, it was Wow.
    â€œYou smell him near here, Wowie?” said PhiPhi in a sweet voice. Frek could hear her perfectly. With