Jack the Bodiless

by Julian May

  She smiled a greeting both with her lips and with her mind. “Well, hello, Marc! So you’re back home in time to enjoy the last days of this beautiful New Hampshire summer, are you? I thought you were going to be off-world until the start of the Dartmouth fall term.”

  “The undergraduate seminar on psychocreative ambivalence at the Okanagon Institute ended earlier than I expected. The Simbiari prof came down with some kind of exotic allergy and couldn’t stop dripping green.”

  “Good heavens!”

  “And then there was the big news about the selection of the first human Magnates of the Concilium. Anybody named Remillard was fair game for the local media. So I caught the next ship for Earth.”

  “But it was your first star trip all alone. Didn’t you want to stay on and explore for a bit? Okanagon is such a gorgeous world. All those flowering trees and the singing fire-moths in the jungle gardens … Lindsay and I seriously considered settling there in 2020, when the first colonial planets were opened.”

  Marc’s response was edgy and formal. “The planet is certainly very attractive physically, but I found it mentally unsettling. It has such a large cosmopolitan population of nonoperants. Their excessively mercantile mind-set has generated a very anharmonic planetary aura.”

  “Oh.”

  “I suppose I’m oversensitive. But … there’s no place like home.”

  “Well, of course.” Perdita Manion offered him maternal sympathy well flavored with humor. Masterclass adolescents had such a difficult time coping, poor things! The brighter they were, the harder it was for them to adapt when they were first cut loose from the hothouse of operant training they had known since early childhood and were forced to swim in the perverse mainstream of “normal” humanity. Her own brilliant son, Alexis, who like Marc had recently graduated from Brebeuf Academy, was a sore trial himself these days—an idealistic champion of the Altruism Ethic one moment and a power-tripping little fascist the next, in spite of the best efforts of the school’s operant Jesuit preceptors. It was high time that both boys were off to college, where their psychosocial adjustment to nonoperant people and to members of the five exotic races would be even more closely monitored than their academic progress.

  Perdita said, “Alexis will be very glad to see you, Marc. He and Boom-Boom Laroche and Pete Dalembert are planning a fishing trip to Maine next week. I know they’ll want you to go along. That might help calm your nerves.”

  “I’ll catch Alex later, Miz Manion—but I’m afraid I may be too tied up with other business to go on the trip.”

  Marc spoke casually; but for the briefest instant, Perdita caught a hint of anxiety, flashing involuntarily from the expertly shielded young mind. “There’s nothing wrong, is there?” she asked.

  “Nothing you want to worry about. Just … personal stuff.”

  “And here I am keeping you, when you want to talk things over with your Uncle Rogi. Well, go right on back to his lair. You’ll probably find him up to his neck in buyer want-lists. He’ll be happy to have a visitor.”

  She returned to her own work, her subliminal thoughts radiating unqualified love for her own recalcitrant offspring and tolerant goodwill toward Alexis’s outré best friend. Perdita Manion did not know that most of her mind was as transparent as glass to Marc’s scrutiny. She thought: Thank God Alexis is only an ordinary genius. Since Lindsay’s death he’s been a handful … but what if I’d had to raise a child like Marc? The poor boy!

  Marc mind-smiled a salute to her kind heart, ignoring the implication of her other thoughts. Like so many other low-level operants, Perdita had no notion at all of the way higher minds like his functioned; she persisted in judging the personality integration of masterclass persons according to her own, nearly “normal,” standards. No wonder she failed to understand Alex—much less him.

  Marc made his way through the close-standing shelves of old-fashioned paged books—fantasy titles, science fiction, and horror novels—that were the stock-in-trade of his great-granduncle. The business catered exclusively to collectors, selling mostly by mail order. The only modern liquid-crystal plaque-books in The Eloquent Page were reference volumes or scholarly studies of the good old stuff.

  The bookshop took up the corner premises in the venerable Gates House building on Main Street and had been a landmark in Hanover since before the Great Intervention. Its proprietor, who was called Uncle Rogi by most of the town as well as by the numerous members of the Remillard clan, lived in an apartment on the third floor. Suites of professional offices took up the second floor, and the building also housed a coffee shop, and an insurance office in the annex out back, where there was a garage that Rogi used for his personal groundcar. Marc and his two younger sisters Marie and Madeleine and kid brother Luc had practically grown up in the bookshop, as had their father Paul and their six paternal uncles and aunts before them. The shop was a refuge from the overstimulating ambiance of the Remillard family home just around the corner and down the block, where the elite of Earth’s metapsychic operant community, as well as members of the nonhuman races of the Galactic Milieu, were apt to drop in without ceremony and stay for days on end.

  A shaggy gray animal strolled out from among the bookshelves and eyed Marc with benignant tolerance.

  “Miaow.” Greeting FriendofMaster.

  Hey. Hello yourself cat!

  Food?

  Don’t you ever think of anything else fatso?

  The boy bent to scratch behind the ears of Rogi’s big Maine Coon cat, Marcel LaPlume. The animal stretched his ten-kilo body and yawned, then gathered his muscles to spring as Marc reached for the doorknob of the back room where Rogi usually worked. The door opened and Marcel streaked inside, muttering telepathic feline complaints against masters who shut out their beloved pets. The back room was sultry with summer heat in spite of the laboring of the antique air conditioner in the window. The unmistakable scent of fine bourbon whiskey mingled with the musty smell of preserved pulp paper. Uncle Rogi, dressed in his usual summertime costume of faded Levi’s and a Bean seersucker shirt, was asleep in his ratty old leather-covered recliner-rocker. A half-empty bottle of Wild Turkey and a ham-and-cheese sandwich with two bites out of it sat in front of him in the midst of a pile of videograms and tattered printouts.

  The cat Marcel seemed to levitate onto the desk, landing his great bulk without disturbing a single item. He grabbed the sandwich, and his gray-green eyes regarded Marc with sly mockery before he took to the air again. A three-meter leap gained him the sanctuary of a high storage shelf, where he settled down to enjoy his purloined lunch among the piles of century-old pulp magazines shrouded in transparent plass.

  Marc came in and shut the door behind him.

  “Uncle Rogi, wake up!”

  As the boy spoke, his powerful redactive faculty performed a drastic therapeutic maneuver, canceling the alcoholic torpor. The sleeping bookseller’s brainwaves jumped into abrupt and highly unwelcome wakefulness. Rogatien Remillard snorted and hauled himself up, muttering curses in the Canuckois French of upper New England that was his natal tongue. His eyes snapped fully open when Marc sent a terse telepathic message arrowing into his mind.

  “My help? Batège! What kind of trouble have you gotten yourself into this time? And what are you doing back home so early? Don’t tell me you’ve been thrown out of another school workshop for gross insubordination—”

  The old man broke off, coerced firmly into silence. Marc said on the intimate mode: It’s not that at all Uncle Rogi. This is serious business. A family emergency. You’ve got to come home with me right away and for God’s sake put a lid on it while we’re in range of Perdita Manion!… Do you still have your old canoe and camping gear stashed in your garage?

  Yes. But—

  Good. We’ll be needing them and your groundcar too. Do you have any cash available?

  You know damn well I do and I always will until the foutu credit cards conquer the universe. [Suspicion.] How much cash?

  Three or fo
ur kay.

  Grand dieu! What kind of trouble have you—

  Get it and let’s go.

  Without any further mental exchange, the bookseller rose and put the bottle of whiskey away in a file cabinet. He took a filthy old book-shipping Jiffy bag from the shelves of packing materials, extracted a wad of durofilm bills from it, and stuffed the money into his pants pocket. Then, with the boy following, he went into the front of the store.

  “Marc and I will be going out for a while, Perdita. If Professor Dalembert comes for his copy of Murray’s Mamelons and Ungava, be sure to point out the cracked hinges. But it’s still a steal at three hundred.”

  “You two run along, and I’ll hold the fort,” Perdita said comfortably. “Nothing’s happening at all on a lazy summer afternoon like this.”

  Marc’s laugh was strained. “That’s nice to know. Uncle Rogi and I just may take the rest of the day off and go canoeing. Good to see you again, Miz Manion.”

  The old man and the boy exited into brazen sunshine. High in the buttermilk sky a single egg-shaped rhocraft soared westward over the Connecticut River Valley, seeming to waft as slowly as a toy balloon even though it must have been traveling at several hundred kilometers per hour. There was no other aerial traffic. A sporty black groundcar drove slowly past the post office, where on twin poles the flags of the United States of America and the Human Polity of the Galactic Milieu hung limp. Across Main Street, at the BP energy station, Wally Van Zandt was squirting the petunias in the bed next to the egg-charging pad with D-water, following the common folkloric belief that it would make the flowers more spectacular. Marc noticed that the cost of j-fuel had risen five pence since he’d gone off-world. The damned energy companies seemed to do that every summer. It was high time the manufacturers converted turbocycles and private groundcars to fusion, just like commercial vehicles and eggs. More expensive in the short run for the power plant, but cheaper in the long for the fuel.

  Rogi and Marc went around the corner onto East South Street, to Rogi’s garage. It was nearly three months since the bookseller had last seen his great-grandnephew, and even in that short period of time Marc seemed to have grown. The top of his black curls was above Rogi’s shoulder level now. The young jaw with its deeply cleft chin was more angular, and the profile was fast losing its childish contour and taking on the distinctive Remillard aquilinity that made Marc’s father’s face so striking. But the boy’s eyes weren’t blue like Paul’s; they were gray, with a startling luminosity, set deeply in shadowed sockets and topped by oddly shaped brows that were thickest at the temple ends, giving them a resemblance to dark wings. On the rare occasions when Marc neglected to maintain his “social” mental screening, those eyes could flash with a power that was almost heart-stopping.

  Rogi, whose own operant mindpowers were unexceptional, was the oldest surviving member of the family. He had experienced the metapsychic usage and abusage of every one of the Remillard stalwarts, and he had no doubt that Marc was the most highly endowed of the lot. He also suspected that the boy might be the most marginally human. For that very reason, Rogi had taken special pains to reach out to him—not always with success. From infancy, Marc had contrived to hide behind a barrier of nearly perfect control and self-containment. More unfortunately, there was something about the boy’s mind-set that reminded the old man of his late nemesis, Victor Remillard, the brother of Marc’s grandfather Denis. Like Victor, Marc was emotionally cold and prideful, determined to do things his own way while letting the rest of the world go hang. On the other hand, the boy’s arrogance seemed not to be malicious, as Victor’s had been, but rather the almost inevitable consequent of having a skull crammed with more metafaculties than the human soul could safely support.

  Marc had badly needed an adult friend. His father Paul, a fiery politician busy about many things, was undeniably proud of his son’s brilliance and his preeminent metapsychic powers; but Paul Remillard seemed to have given up years before trying to establish an intimate rapport with his remote eldest child. Marc’s mother Teresa, distracted in his early childhood by her operatic career and her artistic temperament and later traumatized by personal tragedy, loved Marc with the same vague affection she bestowed upon her other three children. But she, like her husband, had failed in her halfhearted attempts to penetrate the boy’s personal shell. Rogi had never quite managed to break through that wall of mental armor plate, either; but he wasn’t about to stop trying …

  They went into the garage, and Marc put Rogi to work gathering equipment while the boy himself installed the ancient canoe rack atop the old Volvo groundcar. There was no verbal conversation, and Rogi was patient as he tossed tent, cooking gear, tarpaulins, and nearly all the rest of the camping equipment he owned into the car’s trunk and backseat. Marc finished with the rack and revealed how agitated he really was by using his PK to loft the canoe into place, psychokinesis being considered a déclassé metafunction among most operants of stature.

  Finally, while the two of them clamped the canoe down, Marc came out with an edited version of the emergency in formally cadenced mental speech:

  My seminar on Okanagon ended early. I thought I’d surprise Mama and didn’t teleview or farspeak her—just grabbed the first flight to Earth and shuttled from Ka Lei to Anticosti, then drove my bike home. When I got into Hanover I didn’t see a soul I knew. I think the whole town is on vacation break. I figured nobody would be at our place except Mama, since Papa’s not due back from Concord until the weekend, and the three pipsqueaks are still at the beach at Grandpère’s place. I sent my mind on ahead to the house and up to Mama’s music studio. I discovered that Grandmère Lucille was there. I listened to what they said—

  !! You’re too damned good at eavesdropping my lad it’ll get you in a peck of trouble one day.

  [Impatience!] Never mind that!… How much do you know about the genetic heritage of the Remillard family?

  [Confusion.] You mean the immortality thing?

  Not the multifactorial self-rejuvenation trait. The lethal equivalents!

  … Aside from knowing the hell our weird family genes have put Teresa and Paul through I have only an incompetent layman’s knowledge of the matter.

  All four of us children inherit from the Remillard side of the family a dominant polygenic mutant complex: we’re smart, we have extremely high metafunctions, and our bodies age up to a certain point and then persistently rejuvenate. The traits have a reduced penetrance and exhibit variable expressivity. You know what that means?

  Quelle chierie don’t be so damned patronizing. It means some Remillards get a little some get a lot and I’m on the short end of the stick while you’re up to your young stuckup pif in the good stuff just like your siblings&cousins&father&uncles&aunts&GrandpereDenis—

  Exactly. Now, because of Mama’s consanguineous relationship through Annarita Latimer, her offspring have an enhanced chance of manifesting one or another of the good traits. Unfortunately, Mama has also contributed a deleterious gene complex to some of us kids. She herself doesn’t display any harmful traits, and neither do Marie and I, so it’s been assumed that Mama was subjected to a mutagenic factor at some point in her life after Marie’s birth in 2039. The deleterious mutagenes appear to be sex linked, and they have lethal expression in male offspring most of the time. Because Maddy’s female, she escaped. But she’s a carrier. Luc inherited the harmful mutation, but at least he could be pasted back together into a semblance of normality. Mama’s stillborn babies and the aborted ones inherited intractable lethal traits that defied all attempts at genetic engineering—

  Hence the revocation of your parents’ repro license.

  But should it have been revoked?

  Marc what the hell are you driving at? It’s the law.

  But is the law just?

  The Galactic Milieu thinks so. The Reproductive Statutes are intended to purge the human gene pool of—

  The Milieu is a nonhuman organization. How can it know what’s best for our race
—what genes are good and bad in the long run? Study after study has shown that the human brain is not susceptible to genetic tinkering. The hereditary factors are too complex and interlinked for any eugenic manipulation. What gives those exotics the right to tamper with physical aspects of our human genetic heritage that may harm our mental evolution as an unintended side effect?

  That’s a question without an answer Marc. And it’s been knocking around ever since the Intervention and there’s no use at all you stewing over it. The Milieu took over the right to control reproduction as a condition of admitting humanity to the Galactic civilization and we accepted it and that’s that … How come you’ve all of a sudden got your ass in an uproar about this? Damn you boy let me see what’s really on your mind instead of beating around the bush like this!

  The Remillard family includes the most powerful metapsychic practitioners on Earth. Who’s to say in a crazy mixed-up genetic complex like ours what is an unacceptable heritage and what isn’t? The genetic assay of Mama’s five dead babies showed nothing about their mental potential.

  So what? Physically the poor little things were losers. The genetic engineering attempts on them failed. The stillborn ones never saw the light of day and the aborted ones would have been horribly deformed and dysfunctional and destined to die before reproducing.

  But the minds of the aborted babies might have contributed something invaluable to the Earth Mind before their disabilities killed them.

  Marc I don’t understand what you’re driving at. Do you mean to say that the brain genes of the babies should have been evaluated along with those for the rest of their bodies? Even I know that it can’t be done! Human genetic science has come a long way under Milieu guidance but it can’t assay the mind from examining brain tissues any more than it can engineer the mind by tinkering with the brain’s DNA. Ordinary evolution is doing just fine transforming our race into metapsychic operants and the Earth Mind is coming along well enough toward coadunation under the Milieu’s Reproductive Statutes and I can’t see that it matters a hoot whether or not a few poor little crippled babies get to make their contribution—