Jack the Bodiless

by Julian May

  “Nothing important,” Jack said. “Mostly I used air and accreted water vapor, and I have modified some things I took from wastebaskets. But my most versatile raw materials have been my own solid and gaseous body wastes. It’s possible to convert them into ever so many interesting organic compounds. I formed various things as I practiced—mostly spheroids and cubes and prisms and other symmetrical objects, once I had discovered how to manipulate the different compounds with fair precision. When I had finished experimenting, I reconverted my samples into an amorphous shitlike substance and replaced them in my diaper so that Mama or Nanny Herta wouldn’t find out … Do you know that it’s really possible to fart flames? I thought it was only a metaphor for anger, but I discovered that the phenomenon is genuine! It’s harmless to the body if you perform the experiment with extreme care. All you have to do is ignite the inflammable gases naturally produced by—”

  The three older boys collapsed into near-hysterical laughter and whoops. A couple of other fraternity brothers ventured downstairs and asked if they could get in on the fun.

  Marc scooped up his baby brother under his arm. “Just horsing around with the pygmy Einstein here.”

  “He’s more laughs than a barrel of monkeys,” Alex added hastily.

  Marc said: Upstairs. To my room. Pete hang on to that friggin’ ball.

  They galloped up two flights of stairs, and when they were safe in Marc’s cubicle sat Jack on the bed and began to throw questions at him:

  Did he realize what he was doing when he altered the Ping-Pong ball?… Yes. He was exerting the metafaculty of creativity.

  Did he have to exert creativity on each individual molecule to cause change?… Certainly not. The process, once initiated, “infected” adjacent molecules and spread under the mental direction of the creator’s coercion.

  Could he create matter out of nothing?… Of course not. On the other hand, there is indubitably a store of matter and energy trapped within certain of the dynamic-field lattices, and this, while not properly classed as “nothing,” has negligible impact upon the Present Reality and is available to an ingenious creator.

  Could he make matter out of energy?… Not yet. That would be a considerable challenge. It was rather easy to produce chemical energy from the disruption of molecules, however, and many interesting effects, such as the farting of flames, were—

  Could he transmute elements?… No. He felt that theoretically this was possible; but the consequences to the creator were likely to be drastic. One even had to exert caution with chemical-type reactions because of the potentially hazardous energies involved. For example, the bed linen should optimally be soaking wet before one attempts to—

  What was the most complicated thing he had ever made?… The wizzo Ping-Pong ball.

  How long had he been able to exert his creativity in this fashion?… Almost from the time he was taken from Ape Lake to Kauai, and there taught how.

  Who taught him?… An aged Hawaiian woman, Malama Johnson, who was the cook at the Kendall house on the island, had come creeping into his room when he was alone, soon after his arrival. She had greeted him with great dignity, treating him as an equal and not as a child, and told him that she was a kahuna, one of the magician-priests who had lived among the Polynesian people for thousands of years, long before they ever migrated to the Hawaiian Islands.

  Malama had touched Jack and sung very softly, and then she told him that he was overflowing with mana loa—the strongest kind of metapsychic energy.

  “She waved her hands, and there were hundreds of little sparks flying around, and then tiny little black things floated in the air,” Jack said to the older boys. “They settled on my crib and made an awful mess, but later, when Mama saw them, she thought they had blown in the window from a fire in a canefield nearby. The black bits were carbon smuts. Malama had formed them psychocreatively from atmospheric carbon dioxide and ignited some of them.”

  Jack went on to tell his awed listeners how the kahuna had taught him this simple trick and then, in the weeks that followed, many others. She warned him that he should not let anyone know what he could do—not even his Mama or his Uncle Rogi—until all of his inner “selves” were more fully under his control.

  This strange statement had a certain rightness about it that made a deep impression on Jack. Even when he was still in the womb he had felt that he had a Low Self and a High Self who contended within him, and he had asked my help keeping them in line as he was being born. Malama told him that the names of those two selves were unihipili and uhane. Haole wise men (who had only belatedly discovered what the kahuna had known from time immemorial and who still were very backward in their understanding of huna) sometimes called the two selves the unconscious and the conscious minds. But the uhane that Jack had mistaken for his High Self, she said, was actually his Middle Self. The true High Self, or amakua, was the superconscious, an integrating or unifying entity that was capable of binding together in perfect harmony the selves and the body they inhabited. The amakua had, she said, a special life of its own and was the font of mana loa. It was available to all thinking persons, but many did not make use of it. In time, she said, Jack would attain perfect access to the amakua, and then he would be able to accomplish a great work …

  “Of course,” Jack said to the college boys, “I have since recognized that what Malama called mana loa was what we would call the creative metafaculty, the higher mindpower that infuses and energizes all the others and the lower mindpowers as well. My very high metapsychic assay in creativity merely confirms what Malama observed when she first met me.”

  Marc asked: “And do you feel that your three selves are under control now?”

  The small face clouded with perplexity. “I’m having problems. I thought that the Low Self and Middle Self were under my control, and I’m learning to communicate with the High Self. I barred both Hydra and Fury, who would have separated the three and then reintegrated them into a new person—”

  Marc uttered an expletive, then said to Jack on the intimate mode: Say no more about THIS to Alex&Pete we’ll talk later!

  Jack said to Marc: Yes we must do that. You have been having troubling dreams, haven’t you? About Fury.

  How did you know that?!

  For a time he troubled me. But I forced him to go away. You have listened to him even though what he says is—

  Not now! Aloud, Marc said, “Tell me about the problems you’ve had trying to integrate your three selves.”

  “I’ve discovered that my body increasingly balks at accepting creative direction,” Jack said. “Up until now, I’ve been able to make it operate in a normal human fashion, within the accepted parameters of good health. But lately there have been difficulties.” He began to fumble ineffectively with the fastenings on one of his tiny athletic shoes. “Marco, help me.”

  “Imperfect motor coordination,” Marc opined. “To be expected until your peripheral nervous system matures a bit more.”

  “No, that’s not what I mean. Take off my sock and look at the toes.”

  Marc did so. The other two boys leaned closer.

  “What’s that on his little toe?” Pete pointed out. “Right at the base of the nail? Check it with your deepsight, guys.”

  “Looks like a sore,” said Alex without certainty. “Maybe a little bitty blister rubbed raw. But my deepsight isn’t worth shit.”

  Marc’s, however, was extraordinary. He could magnify the tiny spot and see into it, and call up from his memories information stored from his biology studies.

  “It’s not … just a sore,” Marc said. His two friends regarded him with astonishment. His usual shell of mental impermeability was faltering, as if attacked from the inside by some overwhelming emotion.

  “I know it’s not ordinary,” Jack said calmly. “I could use self-redaction on a blister or scrape and make it disappear at once. But this small lesion is caused by a cellular anomaly, and it responds neither to autoredaction from my unconscious nor to the psych
ocreative and coercive impetus of voluntary self-redaction. It’s very puzzling. I’m not yet very well educated in molecular biology, but it almost seems as though the lesion is a product of my body’s own genetic apparatus.”

  Marc stared at his little brother for a long moment without speaking. His mind-screen was once again fully deployed. He smiled as he took both of Jack’s little hands in his own and spoke quietly, coercively.

  “The thing on your toe could be nothing at all. It also could be a sign that something isn’t going quite right with your therapy. All those transplanted good genes have been racing around in your body trying to plug in, and your mind has evidently tried to help them. But now it may be that something’s screwed up a little bit. So I’m going to bundle you up right now and take you down the street to Hitchcock Hospital, and we’ll let Nana Colette take a look at this. Okay?”

  “Okay,” the infant agreed. Marc began to put on Jack’s sock and shoe. “What do you call the thing on my toe, Marco?”

  “It’s a cancer,” Marc said. “Upsy daisy, kiddo. Now we have to put on your snowsuit. Do you need to have your diaper changed first? No? Okay.” Marc turned to his two stricken friends, who were hiding behind their own thought-screens. “Will one of you guys do me a favor and run down for the astrophysics plaque I left in the game room? I’ll take it with me—in case I find myself with time on my hands while old Jacko here gets checked out.”

  36

  FROM THE MEMOIRS OF ROGATIEN REMILLARD

  NOW I COME TO A PART OF MY MEMOIRS THAT I WOULD rather skip over, for it covers the time during which Jack’s body changed. It was a time when those of us who loved the child saw hope give way to horror and horror pass into numb despair and a desperate desire that the suffering baby would die and find peace, giving us peace as well. We could not know that Jack’s body was as anomalous as his brilliant mind, that he was destined from his conception to be as he became. He was at once more than we humans are, and less. Prochronistic is the term the scientists eventually applied to him: a being born far ahead of its time, with a body that was not that of Homo sapiens at all. The beautiful, normal-appearing baby that Teresa had given birth to was only the larva, as it were, of the wondrous and terrible mature entity that Jack would become.

  His transformation began in the spring of the year 2053.

  I have to apologize again if the entity reading these Memoirs finds my explanation of the background of Jack’s disincarnation to be overly facile and full of scientific half-truths and omissions. Human genetic science is a complex discipline, and Colette Roy’s explanations to me were couched in the most elementary lay terminology, which I must inevitably fall back on in my writing. If I inadvertently slip from the path of scientific orthodoxy, remember that what was going on in Jack’s body was subordinate to what was going on in his mind and the minds of those around him …

  * * *

  Beginning in the late twentieth century, genetic engineers had developed a number of different and reliable methods for inserting new genes into the human body. The most widely used, and the one that formed one of the principal mechanisms of the regeneration tank as well as the more specialized therapy used in the attempts to cure Jack, was the viral vector or transduction technique. In this, special viruses carrying the gene transplant were allowed to “infect” appropriate target cells in the patient. Over the years, hundreds of thousands of different viral vectors had been developed to carry and deliver genetic material safely and efficiently. The selection of the vector was done after a meticulous assay of the individual patient’s gene map, in order to avoid a dangerous situation that cropped up all too often during the pioneer days of gene therapy—the activation of proto-oncogenes.

  All of us have a mixed bag of proto-oncogenes in our heredity. They are two-faced bits of DNA that can lie doggo all throughout a person’s life, acting just as though they were perfectly normal blueprints for body proteins or the switches turning processes on and off, doing the useful work they are supposed to do … unless some extraneous factor sets off a fatal trigger and transforms them into genuine oncogenes, the inducers of cancer. The trigger can be a virus, or radiation, or a carcinogenic chemical, or a mutant gene that is inherited, or even a failure of the body’s autoredactive mechanism.

  One of the commonest kinds of proto-oncogene used to cause lung cancer in people who smoked tobacco. Folks who had the P-O and smoked got the disease; folks who didn’t have the P-O might smoke like chimneys for years and eventually die of something else. There were other ways of getting lung cancer—other chemical or psychological triggers, even different kinds of tobacco-cancer P-Os; but you get the idea.

  Now, a cancer is not a simple thing, any more than a living human body is simple. A cancer is not an alien invader, as a germ is, but rather an uncontrolled growth that begins in a single cell that once was normal. We are marvelously made. So marvelous that, if you study molecular biology and get an inkling of just how many millions of little chemical and electrical and psychocreative reactions have to take place and coordinate perfectly from moment to moment in order for the body to function, you might wonder how we manage to live at all! But we do, because the genes present in our body cells give out instructional messages to keep things ticking. Most of the time, we tick properly. But when an oncogene is activated, the wrong messages are sent to the affected cell and it becomes transformed into a cancer cell.

  Cancer cells multiply like mad and don’t know when to stop. They have extraordinary vitality, a characteristic that has led some researchers to call them “immortal.” They invade adjacent tissues, destroying normal cells as they go. They hog the blood supply. They seed themselves and spread throughout the body via the bloodstream or the lymphatic ducts, a process called metastasis. Cancers come in many different varieties, some slow-acting and some fast. The worst of them wreak havoc on normal tissues, interfere with vital body functions, and kill the victim unless they are stopped.

  Another name for cancer is neoplasm, which means “new tissue.” It’s an appropriate name, because the DNA in cancer cells is different from the stuff in normal body cells, in that the harmless proto-oncogenes have been transformed into new, malignant oncogenes.

  Now, none of baby Jack’s original collection of lethal equivalent genes had been oncogenes, but some of his chromosomes did have the “fragility” factor that characterizes proto-oncogenes. When Colette Roy and her colleagues prepared his genetic map, they discovered not only the thirty-four potentially lethal DNA combinations but also a number of peculiar DNA novelties that occupied the “redundant” chromosomal regions, those that have no known effect upon normal bodily function. Colette went ahead with therapy to repair Jack’s documented genetic defects, the ones that were guaranteed to be harmful, knowing that there was an off chance that the proto-oncogenes might be triggered. When the child passed his first birthday still showing no sign of genetic disease, she and her colleagues thought they had lucked out.

  Until the first cancer appeared.

  The thing on Ti-Jean’s toe was a relatively sluggish little epidermoid carcinoma of the type that ordinarily is easily cured. After the scientists analyzed the cancer’s DNA, they whipped up a correction and inserted it into the baby. Within a few weeks, all of the neoplasmic cells vanished, and Teresa and Paul and Marc and the rest of us breathed a sigh of relief.

  Colette was not nearly so sanguine, although she did not then share her fears with the family. She thought at first that one or more of the viral vectors used to infect Jack with good genes might have set the P-Os off. But there was another, more ominous possibility: that the cancer had been triggered by messages sent from the mysterious redundant genes. If this was true, then Jack carried the blueprints for his own destruction in every single cell nucleus of his body.

  Less than a month later, in early May, another, completely different variety of cancer was detected during one of the weekly comprehensive body scans that Jack endured at Hitchcock Hospital. It was a much more malignan
t and fast-growing melanoma, and there were two of them, sited in Jack’s testicles.

  When I got the news I felt my own balls flinch in sympathy. I am sterile as the result of a painful complication of the mumps that I suffered in early adolescence, but aside from having no viable sperm, I function very well, thank you. Even though it eventually became possible to restore my ruined semeniferous tubules in the regen-tank, I have declined to be treated, for various reasons of my own.

  Jack’s case was far worse than mine, of course. His cancer would not only destroy his testicles; it would kill him very quickly unless drastic treatment put a stop to it. Once again, corrective genes were transplanted—but this time the cancer proved to be highly resistant. Even though the two lesions were still microscopic in size, they showed alarming signs of getting ready to metastasize—to seed replicas of themselves throughout the body. According to the medical state of the art in 2053, in the rare case when an adult or an older child suffered from metastatic cancer, the treatment of choice involved putting the patient into a regen-tank, where the “seeds” could be obliterated by rigorous treatment. But Jack was too young for the tank, which was contraindicated in individuals below the age of puberty. In order to prevent metastasis in Jack, they had to act very quickly and remove his testicles surgically.

  The family was devastated, even though they knew that it would be possible to restore him when he was older. Jack suffered considerable pain following the operation, for he declined to take any analgesics, and Teresa fell into a mood of profound depression. She cornered Colette Roy and demanded to know what was setting off the oncogenes. Colette had to say that they didn’t know for certain. Some unknown factor was “insulting” the baby’s DNA, causing the proto-oncogenes to mutate. If the viral vectors used in the original gene transplants were responsible, then the doctors would continue making “repairs” until the situation stabilized. It was also possible, she admitted, that Jack’s anomalous genome itself contained the cancer triggers … triggers with a built-in time-lapse function. A third and less likely possibility was that his autoredactive metafunction had gone awry, perhaps as a result of its working so hard in suppressing the expression of the lethals while the genetic transplant therapy was “taking.” If this latter was the case, then voluntary redaction on Jack’s part might restore his health—provided he was able to learn the appropriate metapsychic programs.