Jack the Bodiless (Galactic Milieu Trilogy)

by Julian May

  “You bet.” Trembling, the great accoucheur tied one string tightly around the cord about two centimeters away from the baby’s belly. Then tied another string a ways away. Then (cringe!) cut the cord.

  “Wrap him up in some clean flannelette and give him to me.

  I did as she said, and she took the wailing little thing and held him to her breast, crooning softly. His head was already starting to look more normal. I stood there at a loss, a “What next, Coach?” expression on my face.

  Thank you. That’s much better. Mama. Uncle Rogi.

  Both Teresa and I burst into tears.

  * * *

  She rocked him in her arms, singing telepathically at the same time that she wept for happiness. The baby’s mind had become completely inaccessible, shut away from all human intercourse except at the animal level, the superintellect having throttled back into oblivious infancy after savoring its triumph. Jack was breathing strongly, his heartbeat was even, and his head with its wisps of dark hair rested against his mother’s breast. The yucky white stuff on his skin, Teresa informed me, was a normal coating called vernix which would easily wash off later. In minutes Jack had fallen peacefully asleep, his tiny mouth still fastened to the nipple.

  I told Teresa about my excursion into the infant’s mind, and about the “monster” I had apparently perceived hiding there.

  “You must have imagined it, Rogi. Or else it was a construct of his own unconscious. His Low Self threatening the High Self in some strange manner.”

  I shrugged. “Well, maybe.”

  “Perhaps it was symbolic of all the difficult tasks that lie ahead of him. When he wakes there’ll be all those new stimuli to process. The next few days will be very difficult for him. Poor Jack! His mind may be highly advanced and self-aware, but it’s trapped inside a helpless infant body. It didn’t bother him while he was safe in a symbiotic relationship with his mother, but now that he’s out on his own, he’ll have a lot of adjusting to do.” She winced. “Oh-oh. Here we go again. It’s the afterbirth. Now this is what you do …”

  I attended Teresa as she passed the placenta. This was an unattractive fleshy mass like a thick, veined pancake with the umbilical cord attached to its middle. Along with it came miscellaneous bits and pieces that Teresa said were the membranes that had enclosed the fetus, and a fair amount of blood. The fluids were mostly soaked up by the sawdust. Teresa directed me to burn the afterbirth, the soggy sawdust, the bed pads, and the most badly soiled cloths. She herself swabbed Jack off, dressed him in a bellyband, a diaper, plass overpants, and a little terry-cloth suit, then stowed him in his swansdown bunting and cradle furs while she washed herself and put on a fresh nightgown. She lay down to rest on my bed, with him tucked into the sleeping bag beside her and both comforter and fur blanket piled on top. The cabin was cooling off rapidly; during the past hectic hour, I had forgotten to stoke the fire. I told her she must sleep in my bed, closest to the stove. We would switch bunks. “And why don’t I make us some strong tea?”

  “There’s better than that for us. Look in the corner of the bath alcove.”

  Mystified, I went to check. And there was the split of Dom Pérignon that had been part of her original bag of “necessities,” resting in a bucket of half-melted snow. I let out a cackle of appreciation, popped the cork, and poured the champagne into teacups. Laughing like loons, we toasted Jack’s arrival and wished an early end to our other travails.

  “I’m afraid my bedspring ropes are rather messed up,” Teresa said, grinning over the rim of her cup.

  “Big deal. I’ll put a plass sheet over them tonight and weave a new spring tomorrow if I can’t wash them clean.”

  She nodded. Her face was radiant. She looked like anything but your stereotypical exhausted new mother.

  I said, “I didn’t expect you to be … in such good shape. Afterward.”

  “Some women feel pretty decent, others are knocked out. I feel like I climbed a mountain and fell down the other side. But tomorrow I’ll be fine. Cook your breakfast.”

  “Good God. And that’s all there is to it?”

  She laughed. “I’ll bleed for a while, but I have pads ready. If I don’t get an infection or hemorrhage too badly, I should be in fine shape inside of a week. But I intend to be a right layabout for the next six or seven days, eating and sleeping like crazy and nursing Jack. You’ll have your work cut out for you, bonhomme, waiting on me hand and foot. I’ll cook the breakfast tomorrow because right now you look worse than I do.”

  “I feel like I gave birth to the kid. My hands are still shaking!” I extended a batch of quivering digits. We were sitting side by side, she in my bed and me in one of the chairs I had dragged over. “Do I get to be godfather?”

  “You get to baptize him.”

  “What …?”

  “Tomorrow. The circumstances are unusual, so it’s quite justified. And it’s the way I want ft.”

  I took refuge in the cup of champagne. “Whatever you say.”

  We sat in peaceful silence for some time. The cooling stovepipe clicked and the Great White Cold crept in through the planks of the cabin floor and nipped my feet in their wool socks. Then there was a distant explosion.

  “The trees are starting to pop off again,” I observed. “Going to be another really cold night. Think I’ll visit the outhouse and get us some more firewood before I turn in.” I checked my wrist chronometer, which I had stashed out of the way when scrubbing up. “Almost midnight.”

  “We did a good job.” She finished her champagne.

  “Damn right.”

  I took her cup, and she settled back to sleep. The baby beside her had not made a peep, either vocally or mentally, since she finished bathing him. But now that all the excitement was over, I became aware of unfamiliar vibes pervading the atmosphere of our little cabin—weird and wonderful and quite different from any human aura I’d ever experienced before. I figured they had to be coming out of Jack.

  I looked down at the tiny face, which was now pink and attractive. Perhaps he would grow up to be the greatest human mind ever! I said to him: Que le bon Dieu t’bénisse, Ti-Jean.

  Then, aching in every muscle, I put on my Paks and layer after layer of outer clothes and wrapped my lower face in a muffler before pulling the parka hood tight. When it was really cold, exposed facial skin would freeze in less than a minute.

  “Back in a jif,” I told Teresa, and went outside.

  The aurora was crazily blazing, and every bare twig and branch was encrusted with glittering rime. The crystalline world was flooded with pale rainbow light. My heart caught in my throat at the beauty of it.

  Thank you, I said. Thank you so much. Now let them live. Let it all work out for the best.

  Then I crunched off into the cold-flaming night.

  Both the woodshed and the latrine were on the west side of the cabin. I didn’t bother looking into the shadowy gnarled trees farther over to the east, beyond the door. If I had, I might have seen the creatures that made the big footprints I found in the snow the next morning, right by the window.

  One of them, I have since been told by a reliable source, had gray eyes.

  27

  APE LAKE, BRITISH COLUMBIA, EARTH 22 JANUARY 2052

  DENIS HAD FARSPOKEN ROGI ON THE DAY AFTER JACK’S birth, telling him that he was on his way back to Earth and would be coming to take the two of them and the baby away from Ape Lake. He would hide them, he said, in a more salubrious place until the Dynasty was able to repeal or modify the Reproductive Statutes and procure retroactive pardons for Teresa and Rogi.

  The two of them spent the next two weeks very quietly. A new series of storms swept over the Coast Range, dumping deep snow upon the cabin so that it was almost buried to the eaves. Rogi always managed to shovel the roof clear, and he traveled easily to the cache of moose meat and to the lake on snowshoes. But the routes to the latrine and the wood supply in Le Pavillon were now snow tunnels, and he worried about how the chimney would draw if th
e cabin was buried much deeper.

  Jack almost always behaved like a normal infant, nursing and sleeping and watching the two of them with solemn eyes during his periods of wakefulness. He spoke mentally mostly with his mother. Rogi gathered that he was hard at work processing a monumental batch of new sensory data input and had little time for social conversation. Jack intensified the bonding to his mother once he had “formally” identified her as a being separate from himself. And when Rogi baptized him, the infant bonded to the old man as well, somehow seizing upon the memory of Denis’s long-ago christening and judging that Rogi, too, was an appropriate person to love without qualification.

  The sun rose tardily during winter in the northland, and Rogi and Teresa usually did, too, conserving their body energies against the ever-deepening cold. She kept the cradle close beside her bunk, and when Jack indicated telepathically that he needed nursing during the night she would simply take him into bed with her and put him to the breast without really waking up. Rogi, in a similar state of somnambulism, would rise at night several times to restoke the fire. Even so, in the morning the door would be frosted from top to bottom and the water in the bucket frozen nearly solid. The adults found that they could sleep ten or eleven hours at a stretch; the baby slept twenty hours out of every day. They all seemed to be in a state of semihibernation, recuperating from the tension of the time before Jack’s birth and marshaling their strength for whatever was to come.

  On the evening of 21 January, Teresa and Rogi finally broke the news to the baby that Denis was on his way and they would probably be leaving the cabin the next day. Teresa spent a long time reassuring Jack that the change was necessary and good, but he was frightened at the prospect of meeting other persons and living in a new place. She tried to make a game of it by having him designate which things he would like to take away with him. He chose the swansdown bunting, the swing-papoose carrier that Rogi had made, and Herman the Ermine, who had fascinated Jack with his antics.

  “No, dear,” Teresa said. “Herman can’t come. This is his home, and he would be unhappy going with us.”

  This is my home too! Jack said, his tiny face crumpling with woe. And he began to cry dismally.

  “Not really.” Teresa cuddled him against her shoulder. She and Rogi together projected images of the big house in Hanover in an attempt to show Jack what his real home was like. They showed him images of his father and his brothers and sisters and grandparents, new minds he would be able to bond with; but the only other person who seemed at all acceptable as a love object was Marc, whom Jack remembered very clearly. Paul and the others were equated with danger.

  Jack finally fell asleep, and Teresa put him into his cradle with a sigh. “This is going to be very hard on him, Rogi. We probably won’t even be able to go to the New Hampshire house.”

  The old man shrugged. “Denis only told me he’d find us a safe place.” He was packing Teresa’s musical equipment and the few other things they were going to take. “Jack will just have to learn to adapt. Other babies do. You can’t raise the little nipper in an isolation chamber. He’s supersensitive, and change will seem awful to him at first, but he’ll get over it. I get vibes from him that tell me he’s a lot tougher than we think.”

  Teresa began to rummage through her clothing. She held up her improvised Snegurochka headpiece. “Do you think we could find room for this and for the rest of the costume in our baggage?”

  Rogi grinned. “Hell, yes. Someday you and Jack ought to do a repeat performance of the opera for the whole family. It could become a Christmas tradition!”

  Later that evening, when the bundles were packed, they retired to their bunks, feet to feet, with the wind hooting down the stovepipe.

  Teresa said, “I don’t want to leave here, either.”

  “I know. I know exactly how you feel. And him, too. This place has been good to us, keeping us all safe. But Denis is right about taking us out of here. You need to get back to civilization, where you can wear clean clothes and take regular baths and eat fresh fruits and veggies and get some decent exercise. God knows how much deeper the snow will get here before the spring thaw. And what would happen to you if I got sick or broke a bone?”

  “You’re right. I was only thinking of myself. I’m sorry, Rogi. I keep forgetting what a terrible responsibility the two of us have been for you.”

  He made a growling sound deep in his sleeping bag. “Fool girl. I haven’t enjoyed myself so much in years. And that includes hunting the moose! I’ll be bored out of my mind back in the bookstore.”

  They laughed together and then went to sleep, lulled by the wind.

  Mama! the baby’s mind screamed. Both Teresa and Rogi woke with a start.

  A thing [image]—a terrible big thing!

  Rogi struggled to sit up in his bunk. It was pitch black except for the dull glow around the edge of the stove door. He squinted at his wrist and blearily made out that it was 0523 hours.

  A THING!

  “Rogi, what is it?” Teresa was petrified. She snatched Jack from his cradle and clutched him tightly. The cabin was like a deep freeze.

  Rogi pulled his wits together. He could see well enough in the dark once he exerted his ultrasenses, but Teresa was very poor at that particular mental trick, and her agitation made things worse. Neither could she identify the farseen image that the terrified infant was projecting—something huge, silvery, and elongate that apparently hovered silently only a few meters above the smoking chimney pipe of the cabin.

  But Rogi knew what it was.

  “Easy! Easy, you two. It’s only Denis, come to get us. And damn my eyes if he hasn’t come in a Poltroyan orbiter!”

  The old man flung himself out of bed, lit a lamp, and hastened to pull his clothes on over grubby long johns. Jack was wailing softly. Teresa put him back in his cradle and began to dress. No sooner were the two of them decent than something shocking happened.

  There was a knock at the door.

  Rogi stamped his feet into his Paks, ran his fingers through his greasy silver curls, and straightened up. He strode to the door and yanked it open. There stood a human in a full environmental suit with the helmet closed, and a lilac-faced Poltroyan male in a heavily bejeweled fish-fur parka and mukluks. They entered in a swirl of frigid air and ice crystals and slammed the door behind them. Jack abruptly stopped crying.

  Denis lifted his visor. “Hello, Uncle Rogi, Teresa. Meet my good friend Fred.”

  “Enchanté,” said the Poltroyan, stripping off his elaborate mittens. He shook Teresa’s and Rogi’s hands, beaming genially, and waved to Jack.

  “We’ve come to take you away,” Denis said. “Let’s not waste any time. Fred’s vessel is field-screened, but I’d like to land you two on Kauai while it’s still night in the islands.”

  “Kauai!” Teresa exclaimed joyfully. “We’re going to my folks’ old place?”

  Denis nodded. “It’s all arranged. You and Rogi and the child will stay there until the mess is resolved. There’s no longer any danger of a search by the Magistratum. The Human Polity is finishing up its preliminary work on Orb, and in a week or so everyone will head for home. There’ll be debate on the Reproductive Statutes, and a lot of tap-dancing by the family lawyers once the Intendant Assembly reconvenes with the new magnates seated, but Paul plans to introduce a resolution granting you a retroactive pardon as soon as possible.”

  “And when can we go home?” Teresa demanded. “Really go home?”

  “I can’t be certain. Perhaps as early as March if the Dynasty can get you bail or push through a general amnesty for Repro Statute violators.” Denis’s gaze moved for the first time to the cradle with its furs and silent tiny occupant. “He’s still well?”

  “Perfectly,” said Teresa.

  “I see he’s already learned to erect a mental barrier.”

  “He could do it in the womb,” she said.

  “Remarkable … It seems your illicit pregnancy is completely vindicated after all.”
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  She met his eyes without flinching. “I always knew it would be. Little Jack’s body is flawless. There is no congenital deformity and no physical dysfunction as far as I can tell. His mind is … superior. I should warn you that he doesn’t think like an infant. You might think of him as a precocious nine-year-old.”

  “A very innocent precocious nine-year-old,” Rogi added. He began to stoke up the fire for the last time.

  Denis took off his gloves. The wan lamplight gleamed on his silvery suit as he approached the cradle and looked down at the tiny baby.

  Hello Grandpère, Jack said.

  “Good morning, Jack. Are you ready to travel?”

  I will be. Soon. I must be fed and changed. Will you and Fred mind waiting for a few minutes?

  “Not at all,” Denis replied.

  The baby said: I am going to try very hard not to be afraid. I hope you won’t be angry if I cry a little when something new startles me. It’s a reflex action I have very little control over as yet.

  “I understand.” Denis reached out one bare hand toward the baby’s pink cheek. “May I touch you?”

  With your hand? Yes. But not with your mind.

  “Oh, Jack,” Teresa sighed. She made an apologetic gesture to Denis, who smiled with apparent understanding and withdrew his hand after a brief pat.

  The baby said to Denis: I don’t think I will be able to love you.

  “You don’t know me,” Denis said equably. “Later, you may change your mind. You have a great deal to learn, you know. Especially about other human beings like yourself.”

  Are there others like me?

  “Of course!” said Teresa, with mock indignation. She began to bustle about, getting a washcloth and clean diaper and gown for him, warming them first on the stove since the temperature in the cabin was still well below zero Celsius. She told Denis and Fred that the baby wouldn’t mind the brief exposure to the cold as she changed him. Even ordinary babies were able to adjust their body thermostats to frigid air for very short periods, and Jack was particularly adept at the trick.