Jack the Bodiless

by Julian May

  17

  FROM THE MEMOIRS OF ROGATIEN REMILLARD

  I SAID NOTHING TO TERESA ABOUT THE TELEPATHIC BOLT FROM the blue, that furious farspoken blast on my intimate mode that Denis had broadcast over the entire planet Earth and God knew how many parsecs of interstellar space, calling my name. The thing hit me with the impact of a punch in the stomach and I had responded with an involuntary mental grunt. But I clammed up immediately thereafter, and I was certain that Denis hadn’t been able to fix my position … yet. Many times during the following weeks at Ape Lake I lay half awake, momentarily expecting my mind’s ear to hear the precisely directed mindspeech of my foster son, telling me that his seekersense had found our hideout at last. But it didn’t come, and I finally convinced myself that Denis wouldn’t find us, and neither would anybody else—not until young Jack was born, and the Remillard Dynasty was safely inaugurated into the Concilium, and Teresa and I were safe from the clutches of the law, and we all lived happily ever after.

  It took two months for us to finish repairing our rustic home and get it ready for winter. The tree felling and carpentry were made almost pleasurable by that miracle machine the woodzapper, which I thanked God (and Matsushita Industries) for almost daily as I worked on the cabin and its furniture. When I was a youth, I had used a device called a chain saw, which was a wonderful improvement over chopping or sawing wood by hand. But even small chain saws were awkward and dangerous to use, were fueled by petrochemicals, and needed frequent sharpening. In contrast, the woodzapper was a lightweight wonder. In place of the chain saw’s oval guidebar, it had a business end that looked something like the capital D frame of a large hacksaw, but without the blade. When you switched the thing on, a thin bar of coherent golden light closed the gap. This photonic beam (so the instructions assured me) “would slice through the most dense varieties of wood like tofu.” And it did, too, exploding the cells of green wood with a great blast of steam and yielding a smooth raw surface that seemed almost to have been sanded. Dry wood had a residual thin layer of charring after being zapped, but I used hardly any of that in my construction.

  Notching logs was a breeze with that sweet little woodzapper, and one of the most tedious parts of log-cabin making—cutting boards—was almost like slicing bread. You could debark a log with the zapper as quick as peeling a carrot, and cut and split billets of firewood as fast as you could wave your arm. The only thing you had to remember was to wear the protective face shield and gloves, and keep your bare skin out of range of the cloud of hot sawdust. The device was powered by one of the ubiquitous small D-type fusion cells that had been part of the Milieu’s answer to Earth’s energy hunger, and it was guaranteed to operate for some two hundred hours before needing a fuel refill. I loved that woodzapper dearly, and it worked like a charm up until the fateful day of 19 October, when I forgot to press the STANDBY button after knocking off work. The overnight temperature outside on the porch where I had left the zapper fell well below freezing, turning the D-water inside the machine’s integral fusion unit to ice and ruining it. Fortunately, the construction work was nearly finished by then; but from that time on I had to split firewood with an axe.

  The flights of migratory birds began early in October, and often at night we would hear them calling as they winged southward, especially when the moon was bright. The geese and tundra swans hooted and blatted and honked as they flew; but the trumpeter swans made glorious music, like an airborne squadron of French-horn players, and sent Teresa into raptures. She managed to reproduce their calls with her electronic keyboard and composed a “Swan Sonata” that sounded rather good to me—although she deprecated it as too derivative of Sibelius and Rachmaninoff.

  On 21 October the first feathery flakes of snow fell, whitening the heights of Mount Mutt and Mount Jeff across the slowly freezing lake but accumulating less than a couple of centimeters around our cabin. The sun came out immediately afterward, creating a sparkling wonderland until most of the snow melted; but I was in no mood to join Teresa in her celebration of the beauty of it all. The first appearance of the white stuff only served to remind me that I had forgotten to bring snowshoes, and without them we would be unable to move away from the cabin when the really heavy snow arrived.

  I made two stout wooden snow shovels at once, then consulted the reference flecks for a suitable snowshoe pattern. The ones I had used back home in New England had been of the classic Maine pattern, wide and quite large, with long tails, having ashwood frames and rawhide webbing. (Decamole would not be invented for another fifty years.) The Maine shoes were devils to use in brushy or steep terrain, which Ape Lake had plenty of, and I decided to make the more compact, rounded style called “bear paws” instead. The only flexible hardwood available for the frames was a kind of shrubby willow. I feared that the thicker sticks would break under my weight once the wood dried, and so I lashed together four much narrower withes with wire to give the outer framing and crosspieces the extra strength of lamination, then webbed them with stout cord. This webbing would be much less efficient than rawhide, which was nearly indestructible and did not stretch; but so far we had seen neither moose nor caribou in the region, and only the hides of these large animals would have been strong enough to make suitable babiche thongs.

  I expected to have to use the improvised shoes only in the immediate vicinity of the cabin, digging us out after storms and doing chores. It never occurred to me that those crudely made snowshoes would one day make the difference between our living or starving to death.

  In the early weeks, when it seemed that we had all the food in the world, the only animals Teresa considered fair game were the snowshoe hares. These creatures, which were brown-furred when we arrived at Ape Lake and became pure white except for black-tipped ears as the season advanced, were at first very numerous on the lightly wooded slopes above the cabin and easily taken in wire snares. Teresa not only caught and cooked the hares; she also skinned them to a special purpose.

  After I completed the new floor for our home, Teresa had made floor mats from part of the ten meters of wide wool duffel cloth we had bought. A couple more meters of the stuff were earmarked for childbirth supplies, and there was enough left to make a single narrow mattress pad for each bed. But she fretted that we might not be warm enough, even with our sleeping bags and the down comforter and the pads, when the temperature dropped far below zero. Then she happened to read in one of the woodcraft references how the Indians had made robes by weaving strips of rabbit-skin. She decided to make fur blankets in the same way, and set about immediately snaring the unfortunate snowshoe hares without mercy, extending her trapline in all directions. Her scheme eventually yielded two sizable blankets (fragile but luxuriant) and a small fur robe to wrap the baby in.

  From September until late October we dined on sautéed hare, roast hare, hare cutlets, civet of hare, hare pie, southern-fried hare, blanquette of hare, ragout of hare, hare ravioli, fricassée of hare, hasenpfeffer, pasta with hare sauce, and hare soup with bannock croutons. Finally a diminishing bunny population and the increasing awkwardness of her pregnancy brought her trapping career to an end. To this day, the mere mention of any dish containing rabbit turns my complexion green.

  In its finished state, our cabin on Ape Lake was about 4.5 meters square. Teresa had rechinked the old log walls tightly with moss and mud. The new roof was constructed on a framework of log beams which I had hoisted into place with the come-along, suspended from a three-legged tripod. I nailed close-set poles onto the beams, overlaid them with plass sheeting for waterproofing, then nailed down a second layer of stringers and poles chinked with moss. Teresa and I capped the whole lashup with the old shingles, plus some new ones I had made. I was bound and determined that this roof would not collapse, no matter how heavy the snow-pack. The roof overhung a small porch that ran along the eastward-facing side of the cabin. I cut more poles and enclosed most of the porch with a windbreak so that snow would not blow in each time we opened the door.

  Here
is a diagram of the interior of the birthplace of Saint Jack the Bodiless:

  Both bunks were wooden frames with rope-webbing “springs,” the longer one being mine. They stood high above the floor for the sake of warmth, and we stowed items underneath them and on shelves built above.

  Teresa had patiently scraped most of the rust off the cast-iron stove with grit, and we stood it upon a shallow bed of small stones covered with glacial-silt “cement.” Fortunately, the stovepipe sections were sound, as were the damper and roofplate. Being familiar with the dire effects of carbon monoxide in small shelters (a second cousin had perished that way in an ice-fishing shack on Lake Winnipesaukee), I sealed the pipe joints carefully with Pyron duct tape.

  We discarded the earlier, crudely made furniture, and I managed to make some rather nifty new pieces with the woodzapper before its untimely demise. It could be manipulated with considerable delicacy once you had a bit of practice. A large table and the smaller kitchen worktable were fastened to the walls and had shelves above them. Most of Teresa’s musical things were stored beneath the large table, as was the sophisticated little hydrogen-fueled fusion power-supply (incompatible with the woodzapper, alas!) that operated her equipment, the stereo unit, the Tri-D, our two lamps, and the microwave.

  I crafted two “uneasy” chairs, which Teresa fitted with moss-packed pads on the seat, arms, and back. A stool near the beds also served as a nightstand. I built a slew of wanigan storage boxes (we had brought in all our food from the cache), more shelves, a washstand, a woodbox, and a cradle—which was nothing but another box on tall legs. Our bathroom was the small area adjacent to the front door, where I hung the old Porta-Shower pouch from my camping equipment. Teresa curtained it with cotton flannelette from the bolt we had brought. The single window, facing the lake, had a movable shutter hinged at the top that we sometimes lowered over the glass at night and when the wind blew strongly from the north. I was very proud of the shutter hinges, which I had to whittle with a jackknife. We had found serviceable iron hinges and a latch for the front door buried beneath the derelict cabin floor.

  Our cabin acquired a family of wood mice as soon as we brought food inside. The wretched little creatures lived under the new floorboards and became terrible pests, attacking our food supplies and even shredding one of my wool socks to make a nest … until a beautiful little ermine—snow white with a black tailtip and black eyes—showed up and made short work of them. The ermine was ridiculously tame and eventually came to treat our cabin as his private stamping grounds. I was surprised at his friendliness, for I thought all creatures of the weasel family were vicious. Teresa called him Herman and gave him bits of Spam as a reward for exterminating the mice; and when she played her keyboard and sang softly to unborn Jack late in the evening, the little beast would lurk behind the woodbox, listening, with its beady eyes aglitter.

  The cabin was complete by 23 October. I had mounted the snowshoes, the axes, the saw, and the rifle on the wall outside—which gave the place a fine coureur de bois air—and above the door, on a peg, I stuck up a bear skull I had found, for a totem. We looked forward to showing the cabin off to Marc when he arrived with the additional supplies of food. Ape Lake was beginning to freeze over already, but I assured Teresa that the antique Beaver aeroplane would be able to land and take off just as easily on skis as it had on floats.

  That final week in October was our first opportunity to really relax. Now that there were no more construction noises, the place reassumed its mantle of profound peacefulness during the day as well as at night. We had a brief Indian summer when it was warm enough for us to potter about in our shirtsleeves—blissfully free of the insects, who had died with the first hard frost, along with the woodzapper.

  On the twenty-ninth we undertook one of Teresa’s favorite hikes, moving westward along the southern lakeshore as far as the lateral moraine of Ape Glacier, where a brawling torrent dropped steeply down Mount Jacobsen. The moraine stream had shrunk since the last time we had seen it, two weeks earlier. The glacier that fed it was congealing with winter cold, and soon our own little Megapod Creek and all the other cascades rushing into the basin would dwindle away, and we would have to take our water from the lake.

  On our Indian summer walk we saw only the friendly whisky-jack birds, some spruce grouse, and the trail of a small wolf in some unmelted snow beneath the gnarled trees. We always kept a sharp eye out for the elusive Bigfeet, but we had found no footprints other than the single one I had seen. The only other trace of the primates had been a faint, rank stench occasionally borne toward us from the foot of the lake on the rare easterly breezes. I remembered Arôme de Sasquatch from my previous encounter with the creatures and had alerted Teresa to its significance, but no Big-feet had ever appeared.

  When I awoke on the morning of 30 October, our cabin was very cold. The bucket of water on the unlit stove was skimmed with ice, and I cursed under my breath as I made up the morning fire with stiffened fingers. Outside, clouds of deep gray hung low, and snow was sifting down thickly through the dead-calm air. These flakes were unlike the tentative, feathery ones that had fallen earlier; they were small, and one had the impression that they intended to keep on falling for a good long time. There was already about 15 centimeters’ worth on the ground outside, and I could see that the lake was frozen at last from shore to shore, a level expanse of purest white.

  I let Teresa sleep on. When the fire was going well, I bundled up and slipped outside. The snow shovels were ready on the porch, and it was an easy matter to clear paths to Le Pavillon and the latrine. I brought quantities of split dry and green wood to the porch (one required the first for proper cooking and the second for maintaining heat), then took the smaller axe and an empty bucket with a rope on it from the porch and went down the path to the shore. The ice round about the little rock jetty I had built was only a couple of centimeters thick. I broke it easily and scooped up a pailful of milky water. Now that the silt-laden streams had ceased to flow, the lake water would begin to clear. I stood looking out over the lake for some time.

  There was no sound except the gentle hiss of falling snow. I could smell woodsmoke and frosty air. I was well dressed for winter in a down parka, heavy polypro pants, and felt-lined Pak boots. Up the slope behind me, the comfortably furnished little cabin was slowly warming, and in a few minutes I could go up and make a breakfast of scrambled powdered eggs and fried bacon and coffee, and share it with Teresa. Her fey mannerisms and innocent carelessness no longer troubled me. Keeping her out of trouble and advising her in the ways of the wilderness made me think of the time more than eighty years before when I had been the best friend and metapsychic mentor of baby Denis. He had depended upon me in order to survive, and so did Teresa now. Having been a loner for so long, I had forgotten what a great satisfaction it was to be needed by another human being.

  Two, actually.

  After breakfast Teresa would do the dishes and get the sourdough bread ready to rise. She might put beans on the back of the stove in the Dutch oven, where they would cook all day. If I felt like it, I could watch an old movie on the Tri-D or read a plaque-book or wash my socks. Teresa might practice silently on her keyboard, using the earphones, or sew baby clothes. Then we might play poker, using dry beans for chips, and the greasy old deck of miniature cards that I always kept stowed in my Kelty pack’s lower right pocket. Or she might work on one of her musical compositions while I brought my plaque-journal up to date; I’d neglected it, working twelve or fourteen hours a day getting the cabin finished.

  Time had raced by. Next week would mark the halfway point in our sojourn at Ape Lake. Teresa was healthy and happy, full of a naïve certainty that Jack’s birth would rekindle Paul’s love. The prodigious fetus was seven months alive, apparently thriving and learning about the world through ultrasenses and through his mother’s borrowed faculties in the mysterious way unborn operant babies do.

  And I was surprised to realize that I was enjoying life immensely. I was fit and
strong again, feeling like a forty-year-old, and of the six bottles of 151-proof rum I had bought in Williams Lake, five and a half remained.

  When he showed up in the Beaver with the rest of our food, Marc was going to be mighty proud of his old Uncle Rogi.

  18

  HANOVER, NEW HAMPSHIRE, EARTH 31 OCTOBER 2051

  THE GREAT ENEMY HAD UNEXPECTEDLY ACCEPTED AN INVItation to speak at a symposium on Milieu politics at Dartmouth College, and there was to be an informal dinner party for him and two other distinguished symposium speakers at the President’s House on that same evening—on Halloween.

  It was too good an opportunity for Fury to miss.

  Who would pay any attention if the Hydra prowled the landscaped grounds around the college president’s mansion on this festive New England night of nights? All of Greek Row was throwing impromptu bashes. Half the undergraduates were roaming around the campus in costume, as were the town youngsters—most especially the operants—playing trick-or-treat and having no scruples at all about ringing the president’s doorbell and the bells of the frat-sor houses. There was a certain risk, bringing Hydra into the open; but it just might be possible to put Davy MacGregor out of the game now, right here on Earth, rather than waiting until the Magnate-Designates were assembled on Concilium Orb.

  Fury had decided to risk it.

  The night was crisply chilly and clear, and it was nearly 2130 hours before the Hydra arrived. It flitted across the moonlit lawn toward the President’s House with Fury watching from above. The windows of the stately Georgian-style dwelling were all ablaze, and the front door was flanked with sheaves of cornstalks and a collection of glowing jack-o’-lanterns. There were three groundcars parked along the drive, together with a small rhocraft having both Polity Capital and Lothian registration. MacGregor lived in Edinburgh when he wasn’t on deck down in Concord at Europa Tower.