Jack the Bodiless

by Julian May

  On 29 May, in Wallis Sands Park, about two kilometers north of Rye, an operant woman named Frances Schroeder disappeared while swimming in the sea. A day later, an operant young man named Scott Lynch vanished from the Hampton Beach Park, a few kloms south of Rye. Neither body was ever recovered.

  Madeleine Remillard, age twelve, who had been sailing along the shore in a small catamaran on both days, claimed to have seen a shark fin. The other four children in the boat, her cousins Celine, Quint, Gordo, and Parni, noticed nothing unusual. The Coast Guard issued a Shark Watch, which was to stay in effect throughout most of the summer.

  From July through August, Marie, Madeleine, and Luc stayed at the shore, either with Cheri or with Lucille and Denis at their summer cottage. Many of the other young Remillard and McAllister cousins were also there off and on. Two more apparent shark deaths took place—one victim an operant man whose overturned sailing dinghy was found drifting off the Isles of Shoals, the other an operant woman who disappeared while on a dawn swim off Salisbury beach, just south of the New Hampshire border in Massachusetts.

  The parents of the Remillard clan took a sensible view of the tragedies and did not prohibit their offspring from entering the water. Provided that the children always swam prudently in groups and kept their farsenses alert for marine predators, they would almost certainly be perfectly safe.

  30

  RYE, NEW HAMPSHIRE, EARTH 2 SEPTEMBER 2052

  THE BONFIRE HAD BURNED IN THE BEACH COOKING PIT ALL afternoon until the stone lining was red hot, and now Adrien Remillard carefully raked out the last glowing coals. The four youngsters who were designated cooks-of-the-day, togged out in gaudy aprons over their bathing suits, had baskets and boxes of food ready. Those of the other children who weren’t sailboarding or playing with Frisbees or swimming stood around making smart remarks.

  “Looking good,” Adrien sang out, tossing aside the last smoking brand. “Carry on, you cooks!”

  His eldest daughter Adrienne, wearing a tall white chef’s toque in addition to her apron, gave a telepathic command to Marc and Duggie McAllister, who began to fork up damp seaweed from a big pile on a plass tarp and heave it into the cooking pit. A great hiss and a tremendous cloud of iodine-smelling steam rose up, and the little kids screamed. When there was a good layer of weed in the pit bottom, Adrienne commanded: “In with the potatoes!”

  She and her cousin Caroline began tossing in foil-wrapped tubers, using their farsight and PK to do the job properly amid the smoke and steam. When the potatoes were all in, Marc and Duggie forked a thinner layer of seaweed on top of them. Then it was time to put in the lobsters and the crabs, a task that required the efforts of all four cooks. Tenderhearted Adrienne insisted that Marc mind-zap each living crustacean just before it was consigned to the pit, which drew hoots of laughter from Duggie and most of the audience. Another layer of weed covered the sacrificed creatures, and then Adrienne cried, “In with the corn!” She and Caroline flung in armloads of unshucked sweet corn, the boys heaped the rest of the weed over it, and then all four of the cooks raked a big pile of sand on top of everything to seal in the heat and steam. The spectators cheered and began to drift away.

  It would be several hours before the feast would be ready. Then the entire family would gather at the rustic picnic tables on the beach to stuff themselves with the bounty from the pit and with salad and peach shortcake that the cooks would have to prepare later and bring down from the house.

  Luc came up, big-eyed and solemn, as Marc was rinsing off the messy seaweed tarp in the booming waves. “I’m glad you killed the animals before they went into the pit,” he said softly to his brother. “Some of the other guys … were waiting to hear ’em mind-shriek. You know. As they roasted.”

  “Sadistic little shits,” Marc muttered. “Grab a corner of the tarp and help me slosh.”

  Luc obeyed. “Maddy killed a moth for Jack once. She said she wanted him to emp—empathize. She wanted to kill a sparrow for him, too, but he wouldn’t let her. He said he’d already grasped the concept. She was disappointed, just like she was today when you zapped the lobsters and crabs.”

  “Christ—the little creep! No wonder Jack told me he doesn’t like her. I’m going to have to have a long talk with Maddy one of these days.” He saw his younger sister down the shore a few hundred meters, shoving the Hobie Cat into the water together with Quint, Gordo, Parni, and Celine. He farspoke the lot of them: You guys watch out for sharks!

  They said: Yes SIR Officer Friendly SIR!

  Luc’s face was troubled. “Is it hard to kill things, Marco?”

  “Not critters like lobsters and crabs. Or worms or bugs or other small things.”

  “Have you ever killed anything big?”

  “No,” said Marc brusquely. “Quit being morbid.” He shook out the tarp and folded it. “You want to help? Take this up to the house and put it on the back porch.”

  “I could never kill anything. Not even mosquitoes. I just push ’em away.”

  “Great, if it makes you happy. Just don’t go pushing ’em at me.” Marc started back to the pit, and Luc trailed after. Adrienne was ordering Duggie and Caroline to help her gather up the shellfish baskets and pitchforks and things.

  “If a shark came after you, could you kill it, Marco?” Luc asked.

  “I don’t know. Sharks are weird. Joe Canaletto told me that if you cut the head off one, the head can still bite.”

  Luc shuddered. “There are sharks out there. Everybody says so. I’m never going swimming in the ocean ever again.”

  “You don’t have to be afraid. Just keep your farsight alert, and if you see a shark, you just tell it: ‘I’m not good to eat. Go away.’ ”

  “That didn’t help those four operants who disappeared,” Luc said dubiously.

  “They were swimming or sailing alone and probably not paying attention to what they were doing. Now get along up to the house with that tarp.”

  He watched the little boy, pathetically skinny in his bathing trunks, trudge away. Luc would never be physically strong until his body was finally completely restored in the regen-tank, after he reached puberty. And although his mindpowers assayed at the grandmaster level, he was still almost completely unable to utilize them. His early ordeals had turned him into a metapsychic invalid, and it was questionable whether he would ever be raised from latency. Marc wondered whether the same thing would happen to Jack if his genetic flaws resisted therapy.

  “Help me take away these gunnysacks the seaweed came in,” Adrienne called.

  “Yo,” said Marc. The other two cooks had already gone off with the pitchforks and the empty baskets. The mound above the fire pit now steamed gently, and a young gull poked through scattered bits of leftover seaweed. Adrienne was using a sack to brush sand and bird droppings off the picnic tables. “All we have to do now is take these sacks up and wash them at the pump, and then we’re off duty until the food is cooked.”

  “Cosmic,” said Marc. He collected his share of the slimy jute bags, and the two of them headed back through low sand dunes to the huge old gray-and-white shore house. Some of the adults were sitting on the long front veranda, and as Marc and Adrienne went around to the rear, where the old pump stood on a concrete slab, Teresa waved at them and baby Jack said: Hi!

  In the backyard, which was already deeply shaded from the westering sun, they heard laughter and caught a glimpse of Duggie and Caroline running off into the trees. Caroline was carrying a blanket.

  Marc scowled. “Well, now we know how they plan to spend the next few hours.” He took hold of the red-painted iron handle and began to pump.

  “They’re in love.” Adrienne pulled a sack inside out and held it under the gushing water. “They’ve had a thing going all summer. Most of the older kids know. I’m surprised you don’t.”

  “Poor shmucks.”

  “I think it’s beautiful! And they’re both sixteen, so they have a perfect right to love each other—”

  Marc cut her off
with a scornful laugh. “To use each other, you mean. Love! It’s just biology. One set of overactive adolescent gonads calling to another, causing all kinds of complicated emotional shit and grief en route to the propagation of the species.”

  “Human love,” Adrienne declared, wringing out a sack, “is noble and sacred. All the philosophers say so.”

  “About as sacred as taking a leak! If you want my opinion, Addie, the whole sex thing is a bloody bore and a time-waster. Just think of the famous people—smart people!—throughout history who acted like complete idiots because of sex: Saint Augustine, Mary Queen of Scots, Henry the Eighth, Oscar Wilde, John F. Kennedy, Dr. Louise Randazzo! To say nothing of the millions and millions of men and women who ruined themselves or accomplished nothing in their lives because they were too busy chasing members of the opposite sex, or taking care of one damn baby after another, or working like dogs to support all the children they fathered because they couldn’t keep their paws off their wives … The human race would be better off if we were all cooked up in jars, like the nonborns they’re growing to help populate the colonial planets.”

  Adrienne straightened up and glared at him. She was wearing the ridiculous chef’s hat, and her dark hair was sweaty and straggling, and she was sunburned and peeling slightly on the bridge of her nose. “Is that what they taught you at Dartmouth?”

  “No,” Marc said archly. “I figured it out for myself, through keen observation and deduction. And what are they teaching you math majors down there at MIT this summer? How to be noble, sacred sexpots?”

  “Surely you jest.” Adrienne struck a pose and sang:

  “Root-ti-toot! Root-ti-toot!

  We are the girls from the Institute.

  We don’t neck.

  We don’t screw.

  We don’t go with boys who do.”

  Marc howled with laughter, and then he gave the pump handle a mighty thrust, and stuck his hand into the spigot so that she was sprayed with water, and she shrieked and walloped him with a sopping-wet gunnysack, and then they stood there grinning at each other.

  “God,” she drawled, “what a pair of superior metapsychic lifeforms we truly are.” She dropped the wet sack and stepped close to him. Her chef’s hat had fallen off. “I’m homely and brilliant, and you’re gorgeous and brilliant, and we’re sweet fourteen and never been kissed … Marco, let’s do it.”

  “Good God, no!”

  She was laughing, but there was something else lurking behind her eyes. “Think of it,” she said lightly, “as an exercise in empiricism. Or are you afraid to verify your antisexual hypothesis experimentally?”

  He stopped smiling. His emotions were barricaded, and his gray eyes were like polished granite. He suddenly took hold of her head in both wet hands and bent over her upturned face. Their lips met and hers were chilled from fear and audacity and his were warm and slightly parted. Both of them still had their eyes wide open, and she felt herself melt as his tongue stole gently through her teeth and then thrust strongly. It seemed that she tasted perfumed honey, and then smoldering musk, and finally the acidic tingle of a Winesap apple, strong enough to make her dizzy, to dissolve all the carefully woven mental screens she had always locked tightly into place whenever she came near him. Her own eyes closed as the sweet aching wonder began to flood through her; but she still saw Marc and knew that he saw her—body and brain and everything. And knew.

  Then they stood awkward and apart, still in their silly aprons, barefooted, their legs and arms all sticky with sand and seaweed slime and bits of cornsilk. He had that maddening little lopsided smile on his face, and his inner self was as impenetrable as ever.

  “Addie, you silly broad. You can’t possibly love me. It’s only sex.”

  “I never wanted you to know,” she whispered, contrite now for having tricked him. She hesitated. “Didn’t you feel anything?”

  He was silent.

  She flung her hands wide in helpless, comical exasperation. “There’s nothing at all I can do about it, Marco. It’s there. Those damned adolescent gonads! But you needn’t worry that I’ll make a dreary mooning pest of myself. No brokenhearted complicated emotional shit. We’ll go on as before. Platonic cousin-pals. Okay?”

  “Okay,” he said, grinning at last.

  “What about a swim?” she suggested briskly. “We’re both filthy, and at least one of us needs cooling off.”

  Marc made an almost imperceptible gesture toward the blazing sky. Adrienne looked up and saw a silver rhocraft wafting toward them from the west. “It’s my father,” he said. “I have to see him. I’ll wash off here at the pump.”

  “Right. But remember—I want you in the kitchen no later than nineteen hundred hours to help with the salad and peaches. God only knows if those idiots Caroline and Duggie will show up.”

  She went running away to the beach then, her unrequited love for Marc once again locked safely away. Flinging the apron onto one of the tables, she sprinted across the hot sand, dived into the breakers, and swam strongly toward deep water.

  Much farther out, the catamaran danced on the sparkling waves.

  Fury watched from above, watched the swimmer suddenly change direction and head directly for the Hobie Cat in response to the irresistible coercion. The little boat was far enough offshore that none of the beach loungers was paying any particular attention to it.

  Fury told Hydra,

  YesyesyesyesYES! I’m so glad the last one will be her. I hate her!

 

  It’s allright I can wait I’ll be good I’m getting stronger&-stronger ah Fury it’s so good I love you so much and I WILL mature and then it will be Marc’s turn won’t it please won’t it and then I’ll be strong enough strong enough for Jack and all the others …

 

  The traditional American Labor Day holiday was not celebrated in the Galactic Milieu, and the Directorate of the Human Polity of the Concilium had put in a full Monday’s work in Concord. Most of the time had been spent on the final arguments and the voting on the pardon applications of Teresa Kendall and Rogatien Remillard.

  Paul was exhausted and dispirited, and if there had been any honorable way that he could have avoided going to the last beach party of the season, he would have stayed in his apartment in the capital. But the final ruling of the Directorate would be reported on the evening news, and he would have to face Teresa and the family eventually anyhow, and so he bit the bullet.

  As he guided the silver egg in for a landing behind the big house he perceived Marc waiting for him. That provoked a suppressed subliminal obscenity from the First Magnate, followed by a sense of relief. At least the damned kid was off the hook. The Human Magistratum had accepted without demur Uncle Rogi’s simple statement that he was solely responsible for Teresa’s flight and concealment. It had helped that the media made a hero out of the old man—to say nothing of idolizing Teresa herself. The pair of them were universally regarded as martyrs to human freedom, and there had been clamorous dismay among the citizenry, both operant and non, when the first attempt at pardoning them fell through.

  The PR repercussions of today’s Directorate ruling would cause an even bigger hullabaloo.

  Marc, wearing only swim trunks, greeted his father without emotion as he stepped out of the egg. It did Paul no good to erect a thought-screen when that young devil was around—not that the lowliest normal could have failed to read on Paul’s face what the decision had been.

  “I’m sorry, son. The Directors voted against pardoning, five to four. I abstained. It would have accomplished nothing to tie the vote and throw the decision onto a vote of the full Concilium.”

  “I suppose not.” They walked
side by side up the garden path toward the house. Cheri had planted haphazard masses of colorful annuals—zinnias and marigolds and petunias and cosmos—and the flowers were alive with butterflies. “Who were the nay-sayers?” Marc asked.

  “Vijaya Mukherjee, the Director for Arts—and I admit that was a nasty surprise. Kwok Zhen-yu, the economics boffin. Rikky Cisneros, who’s a Director at Large. The Colonial Affairs Director, Larry Atlin … and your Aunt Anne.”

  “Anne!” Marc stopped in his tracks. “In the Intendant Assembly, she voted to include the pardon rider—and she said she’d vote in favor when the petition came before the Directorate.”

  “She reviewed her decision when it became very obvious that most of the Directors favoring the pardons were the ones who are—shall we say—the least committed to Human Milieu solidarity.”

  Marc pricked up his ears. “Oh? That Russian woman who’s the Science Director? The one who made the speech demanding that more colonial planets be opened for nonoperants?”

  Paul nodded. “Anna Gawrys-Sakhvadze. And two other at-large members who are cronies of hers—Hiroshi Kodama and Esi Damatura. Esi always was an anti-Milieu troublemaker in the African Intendancy, and the Asians have a lingering resentment of the fact that such a large percentage of Human Magnates come from the Caucasian and Amerind racial groups. The fourth yes vote came from Nyssa Holualoa, understandable given her Polynesian descent. In her heart, Nyssa thinks of Teresa as a Hawaiian, not a citizen of the Milieu.”

  They went up the side stairs and walked around to the front veranda, where Cheri, Teresa and the baby, Denis, Lucille, and Aurelie Dalembert were sitting.

  Jack bounced in his papoose swing. He gurgled and exclaimed: Marc! Take me for a walk along the beach!

  “Is it okay?” Marc asked his mother.

  “Yes, dear. Just keep his head covered from the sun.”

  “Okay, brat! Let’s hike.” The boy detached his swaddled infant brother from Uncle Rogi’s invention, adjusted the shoulder straps of the carrier, and hiked off through the beach plums with Jack on his back, squeaking happily.