Jack the Bodiless (Galactic Milieu Trilogy)

by Julian May

  SEVERIN: But Paul never went to the beach. He remained in Concord and came to Hanover late Friday morning—

  MAURICE: Yes. On the evening of the beach party he was to make a statement before the specially convened judicial panel that would determine whether he should be suspended from the Intendant Assembly during the inquiry into Teresa’s criminal pregnancy. When he was allowed to keep his seat, he decided against egging up to Hanover immediately. On Friday morning there was an important Assembly session debating the Denali colonization, and he had made his mind up that Teresa was only hiding and that she’d turn up …

  DENIS: Paul didn’t come to Hanover until long after Marc was found on the riverbank around 0630 Friday morning, when we had the first suspicion that Teresa and Rogi had been drowned. Paul says he was at his Concord apartment all night.

  SEVERIN: But he had all the time in the world to egg over to Rye.

  DENIS: Adrien and Anne and the wives didn’t know about Teresa and Rogi’s disappearance or any of the rest of it until I told them. That was after the police notified me of Brett’s murder on Friday morning. I farspoke Paul to inform him and found him still in Concord, so he must be considered a viable suspect.

  LUCILLE: Oh, my God …!

  DENIS: And so are Adrien and Anne. Both of them came in from Concord on Thursday afternoon, as Cat and Brett did, wanting to escape the magnate madness that had broken out in the capital. On Thursday night Adrien and Anne were at the Rye beach barbecue with me and all the grandchildren.

  LUCILLE: Adrien … Annie … Paul … It’s not possible that one of them is a psychic vampire!

  DENIS: Don’t forget Catherine herself. If the aberration is locked away in the unconscious, she could be guilty.

  LUCILLE: Denis—no!

  DENIS: [calmly] Yes. A part of her mind could have resented being tied to Brett and the Child Latency Project. Catherine seems to have the smallest coercive component of any of you, the least ambition. She married Brett—a brilliant man, but her metapsychic inferior—against the advice of the family because she was deeply in love with him. But if she was invaded by Victor long ago, who can say what motivates her inner persona? Perhaps a kind of—of psychic time bomb lay dormant in her mind until the appropriate stimulus activated it.

  SEVERIN: Marc is also a suspect. No one knows for certain where he was before he turned up on the riverbank at dawn.

  MAURICE: But how could Vic ever have got to him? Marc wasn’t there at the deathbed like the rest of us were. And he was only two years old! Papa, you postulated Vic acting out some kind of temptation scenario in extremis. But no one can tempt a two-year-old!

  DENIS: Not an ordinary two-year-old.

  PHILIP: Marc was there. Uncle Rogi brought him and Teresa to Berlin because Paul was flying Papa in from Johns Hopkins.

  DENIS: Yes. Paul had tried to convince me that I was too ill to attend the Good Friday meeting. But some premonition told me it would be our last chance.

  SEVERIN: Marc wasn’t in the same room as Victor at the end, but he was across the hall with the nurse. And Victor was strong enough at his death to take Louis and Leon and Yvonne with him …

  MAURICE: So he could have reached Marc.

  DENIS: [sighing] Yes.

  LUCILLE: [abruptly] But this entire notion is monstrous! That one of our family could be some sort of fiend in disguise!

  PHILIP: Brett is dead. The ash patterns match those on a known victim of Victor Remillard. There must be some correlation. The modus operandi is too bizarre …

  MAURICE: Papa, were the details of Shannon and Kieran O’Connor’s deaths publicized? I certainly don’t remember anything in the media at the time. Of course, the Great Intervention overshadowed everything …

  DENIS: Uncle Rogi—who practically caught Vic in the act—knew about Shannon. He told me early the next day, and we led a handful of New Hampshire State Police officers to the closet in the hotel offices where Shannon’s body was hidden. The ambulance attendants who took her body away would have seen the ash patterns. And later, so would the county medical examiner who did the autopsy. Who else? The employees of the funeral home who put her body in a closed coffin. Nobody else … Except for Uncle Rogi and me, everyone who saw the ash marks was nonoperant. There was no publicity whatsoever on the cause of Kieran O’Connor’s death. As for the inquests—well, as Maury said, the Great Intervention was all that seemed to matter. Rogi and I agreed that nothing was to be gained by accusing Vic of killing Shannon. We had no proof, and he was in a profound coma. In the end there was an open verdict on her death. It wasn’t even called murder! She had no close living relatives. Her estranged husband, Gerry Tremblay, claimed the body, and it was cremated. I suppose Gerry might have seen the ash patterns. But he’s long gone, too … Victor remained comatose and was eventually remanded to the custody of the family because nobody could think of anything else to do with him except keep him in a private facility—and we were willing to take responsibility for him. He couldn’t be tried for the gun battle on Mount Washington. He wasn’t officially accused of anything, because his accomplices had mental blocks preventing their testifying against him. By the time the Proctorship looked into the case and officially pinned the attack on my brother, it was agreed that his medical prognosis was hopeless. We were free to pull the plug—if we wanted to.

  PHILIP: And none of us has ever understood why you didn’t, Papa. We thought we were joining with you in metaconcert to pray for Victor’s natural death every year on Good Friday because you—because you couldn’t—

  LUCILLE: You all saw that Victor’s body did not deteriorate. Even without muscle stimulation, and provided with only simple food and water, he retained the appearance of a healthy man. His nervous system functioned perfectly. His EEG traces showed normal sleeping and waking patterns and apparent cognition even though he was incapable of making any voluntary movement or communicating verbally or metapsychically. He lived, and apparently thought. What his thoughts were, whether he was sane or insane, no one could say. He was utterly isolated.

  SEVERIN: Then why didn’t you—

  DENIS: Because while he lived, I could still hope that one day he would be sorry. That he’d feel remorse for what he had done. And it seemed obvious to me that he was not ready to die. He could have stopped his life processes by willpower alone at any time.

  MAURICE: Good grief, Papa—!

  DENIS: None of you children knew the true extent of my brother’s sins. Very few people did. I’ll have to tell you now, I suppose … but not tonight.

  SEVERIN: [softly] He was a monster. But to condemn him to that …

  MAURICE: Every year, every Good Friday you made us all visit him. We never knew the real reason why you joined us in metaconcert, why you focused our massed mindpower with your own coercion, subjugating us.

  DENIS: [wearily] Would it have helped? To know that my poor brother had damned himself? We can only do it to ourselves, you know. And we make our own hell. But as long as he was capable of thought, not in physical pain—

  SEVERIN: Imprisoned in the ultimate solitary confinement. Is that what you sentenced Vic to, Papa?

  DENIS: I did what my conscience directed. What my religious beliefs required.

  PHILIP: Oh, Papa. If only you’d told us the truth. You were mistaken! No matter what kinds of crimes your brother had committed, you had no right to—

  LUCILLE: I concurred with your father’s decision. It was a matter of hope. We are required to take charge of our lives. To make responsible choices. But we also face perplexities—times when there is no ready answer. Victor himself seemed to want to live, and we hoped for his eventual reformation. Your father did for his brother what he had a right to do.

  SEVERIN: And now we all live with the result.

  DENIS: Yes. [A long silence.]

  MAURICE: If somehow we could acquire—or design—a coercive-redactive probe configuration that would give us the truth when it was used on a Remillard …

  PHILIP: The
five of us, working in metaconcert. Using purely human parameters—not the half-exotic techniques of the Krondaku and Simbiari! We could probe the suspect family members and establish guilt or innocence for Brett’s death. Use the Milieu’s own mental evidence-gathering technique to support or contradict the inconclusive Magistratum interrogation sessions. It would be legally admissible evidence.

  DENIS: I don’t know. I just don’t know. We’re only beginning to understand the programming principles for precision human metaconcert. When I worked with you on Victor, I coordinated almost instinctively! I could try to design an infallible probe program, but I don’t think I have sufficient skill. I doubt that any human does yet—not even Davy MacGregor or Ilya Gawrys. It would be best to wait until our Polity takes its Concilium seats, then request informal help from the Krondak Ministry of Evaluation. They wrote the damned book on mind-reaming.

  PHILIP: Yes … that seems the best course.

  MAURICE: And the safest. As long as there’s a chance that a member of our family is a deliberate or unconscious murderer, the five of us will have to guard our minds and act with the utmost caution. If our Monster of Iniquity feels threatened, it might kill again. We still don’t have the remotest inkling of its motive.

  SEVERIN: Once we’re all in Concilium Orb, we’ll surely be safe. No operant murderer would dare to try anything in a cerametal beehive crawling with exotic Grand Masters and Lylmik Supervisors. We might even be able to resolve this thing before we return to Earth—if Papa will agree to work out a probe program with the Krondak Ministry of Evaluation while we’re all there.

  DENIS: Your mother and I aren’t Magnate-Designates, and we certainly can’t tag along with you ahead of time, pretending to be part of your staff. I’ll come to Concilium Orb when the rest of the family guests do, and meanwhile I’ll do my best to work up the skeletal probe configuration. I promise I won’t try to play Sherlock Holmes or flush out bogeypersons ahead of time if you won’t.

  PHILIP + MAURICE + SEVERIN: We agree.

  DENIS: Then I think we’d better say good night. [Parents and children embrace. Philip, Maurice, and Severin leave. Lucille and Denis stand at the front window, watching the rhocraft loft into the sky. Small clouds speed before the moon. The rain is over.]

  LUCILLE: It’s none of them. I know it.

  DENIS: We can hope.

  16

  SECTOR 15; STAR 15-000-001 [TELONIS] PLANET 1 [CONCILIUM ORB]

  GALACTIC YEAR: LA PRIME 1-378-497 [28 SEPTEMBER 2051]

  ON THE MORNING AFTER THEIR ARRIVAL AT THE WORLD called Concilium Orb, Anne Remillard and her nephew Marc went out for breakfast to La Closerie des Lilas, an “open-air” restaurant across the square from the little Hôtel Montparnasse, where they were staying until more permanent accommodations for the family could be arranged.

  The orbicular wedge within the great hollow planetoid built by the Lylmik already had over thirty different enclaves set apart for humanity, each one simulating a distinctive district on Earth. They featured appropriate landscaping, typical ethnic commercial, cultural, and artistic amenities, and characteristic residential areas. Some enclaves bustled, and some were quiet; some were tasteful, and some were gaudy; some were urban, while others imitated the inhabited countryside and housed people in tiny villages. The enclaves were of differing sizes, separated from one another by carefully tended parklands and forests that underwent “seasonal” variation, by rockeries that looked much like mountains, by desert gardens, jungles, simulated tropical lagoons, waterways, and lakes. Over all stretched an illusory sky, which brightened and darkened in the 25-hour cycle of the Galactic day, showing the star patterns and the single moon of Earth at night, and changing varieties of clouds during daytime. Rain fell when and where it was appropriate; and in the Boreal Forest separating Scandia and Baltica enclaves, and in the Alpenland, Yakutskaya, and Himalaya enclaves, there was occasional snow. Most of the plantlife was living and authentic. Most of the fauna, except for some domesticated species, was bionic. Everything was kept clean and tidy by automated mechanisms.

  The new human Magnates of the Concilium, their immediate families, and their operant assistants might live in whatever enclave they wished during the periods that the Concilium was in session, and they could return to their home world or continue to reside in Orb while the Galactic governing body was in recess. Although there were only one hundred human Magnate-Designates now, it was expected that many more would be raised to the Concilium in years to come, until humanity was represented proportionally, as the exotic races were. The human enclaves would expand and multiply as the need arose.

  All of the Magnate-Designates in the Remillard family except Paul and Anne had requested beach houses in Paliuli, a Hawaiian-style paradise that was fast becoming one of the largest and most popular enclaves in Orb. Paul had asked for a place in Golden Gate, the Lylmik evocation of sophisticated San Francisco, situated near Orb’s Central Concourse and meeting chambers. Anne thought she might like a Parisian-style apartment in Rive Gauche, which was why she had chosen to stay in a hotel in that enclave.

  Marc thought Rive Gauche was too suffocatingly quaint and whimsical for words, and he found it inexplicable that the normally sensible Anne would even consider living in such a kitschy place.

  Although his aunt ordered only café au lait and a couple of croissants for breakfast, Marc insisted that he was starving after more than three weeks of mediocre shipboard meals on the CSS Hassan Bashaw. With adolescent perversity, he turned up his nose at all of the elegant French items on the Closerie’s menu and scandalized the waitron by demanding corned-beef hash—fried extra crisp—with poached eggs, a slice of fresh papaya with lime, banana-walnut bread, and a pitcher of Mexican chocolate.

  “Those are hardly the specialties of the house,” the prim, middle-aged waitron began. She was dressed like a nineteenth-century serveuse, in keeping with the décor of the establishment.

  “But you can get them, can’t you?” Marc’s face wore the mocking one-sided smile that had driven Anne to distraction during their long voyage from Earth. “All the food in Orb comes from a central provisioning depot, and you can have any Earth edible imaginable sent to your kitchen within five minutes. If I wanted to, I could order witchetty grubs or sheep’s eyeballs or bison hump-ribs or poi.”

  “Marc …” Anne said wearily.

  “Well, couldn’t I?” the boy demanded.

  “Yes, m’sieu.” The waitron, like all human service personnel in the huge artificial planet, was a nonoperant; but she knew a rebellious brat when she saw one, and her attitude changed instantly, becoming sweetly patronizing. “Of course we will be delighted to prepare what you have ordered. It is unsettling to be so far away from Earth, isn’t it? Poor little fellow! We must do our best to ease your homesickness. Would you like your witchetty grubs on toast?”

  “No,” he growled. “Just the other stuff.”

  “Very well.” And she patted Marc on his head, winked at Anne, and swept away.

  Face flaming, the boy stared at the tablecloth. In the everblooming mutant lilac bush behind him, a robotic bird began to warble. Other human patrons of the outdoor restaurant filled the air with the hum of their verbal conversation. The aether, as everywhere within Orb, was pervaded with the most serene and benevolent vibes.

  Marc felt like puking.

  “Don’t you think it’s about time you and I declared a truce?” Anne asked him.

  He raised his eyes. “A truce?”

  “You know very well why we wanted you off-Earth.”

  “Yes,” he snapped.

  At the embarkation, when Paul had abruptly handed Marc his carry-on bag and credentials, and the entire family had focused their coercion on him, the boy had offered no resistance at all. Helpless in the multiple grip of the Grand Master adults, he had simply looked his father in the eye and said, “You may regret this.” Then he had turned away and followed Anne onto the starship without another word.

  Now she said, “Yo
u’re going to stay here in Orb at least until January, until after the inauguration. You can continue to brood and sulk like a silly child if you wish, but I had hoped you would accept the family’s decision and be of some help to me while you’re here. There’s a great deal to be done in our offices before the others arrive in December.”

  He stared at her and she stared back at him, yielding not a mental micron, until he finally lowered his eyes. Like her younger sister Catherine, Anne was tall and blonde; but where Cat was as impetuous and passionate as Lucille, Anne embodied the icy intellectualism of Denis and had always been her father’s favorite. There had been sibling jokes about her springing fully armed from Denis’s brow rather than being born normally like her five brothers and her sister. Anne had taken the jests to heart while still a young girl, obtaining a small statue of Pallas Athene, which she made her mascot and still kept on her desk in Concord. Marc had asked her once what the goddess symbolized, and she had replied, “The victorious mind.”