Jack the Bodiless (Galactic Milieu Trilogy)

by Julian May

  Don’t take too long, Fury. I’ve grown already and I’ve GOT to continue to grow. In one way or another.

  29

  FROM THE MEMOIRS OF ROGATIEN REMILLARD

  WHEN I WAS STILL MODERATELY YOUNG, BACK IN THE LAST decade of the twentieth century, genetic engineering was in its infancy and all kinds of wild predictions were made about how, in the future, we would be able to have “designer” children, with bodies and minds tailor-made through manipulating the DNA codes that form the blueprint for the human species. It went without saying that all inherited abnormalities and diseases would be wiped out. No more sickle-cell anemia, no more hemophilia or cystic fibrosis, no more jerry-built eyeballs that made you myopic, no more saddle-bag flab or hay fever or dinky cocks or bald heads twinkling in the moonlight to put a damper on romance. Genetic engineering would fix it all.

  The more flamboyant scientific soothsayers went even further and said that we’d routinely be able to order up desirable traits for our unborn babies, like long eyelashes and clear skin and handsome features and white teeth and an IQ of 300—just by selecting from a shopping list of “superior” genes that the heredity manipulators would offer to prospective parents. And this was only for eugenic starters! When population-pressured Earthlings set out to colonize other worlds and we decided we needed colonists with gills for watery planets, or lizard-skinned folks for hot planets, or even turtle-bodied humans for heavy-gravity planets—why, hey! It’d be easy as pie to engender a whole new population of modified bods and superminds to order.

  Some of those science-fictional genetic predictions did come true. But not all of them—unfortunately for a whole lot of sick and unhappy human beings, including my little great-grandnephew Jon Remillard.

  In the months following Jack’s homecoming, I was to learn more about human genetics and genetic engineering’s limitations than I ever wanted to know. Most of my education came from good old Colette Roy, who took charge of the baby’s therapy from the hopeful beginnings in 2052 until the horrifying and transcendent culmination in 2054.

  When she agreed to supervise Jack’s treatment, Colette Roy was ninety-two years old. She was one of the original Dartmouth Coterie, that close-knit group of students with operant mindpowers who befriended young Denis when he first came to the college as a timid twelve-year-old prodigy in 1979. Like most members of the Coterie, Colette took a medical degree with graduate studies in psychiatry. She was an associate of Denis’s later in the new Department of Metapsychology, doing clinical work with operants and suboperants.

  In 1985 Colette married Glenn Dalembert, a colleague and another member of the original Coterie, who died in 2031. She and Glenn had one son, Martin Dalembert, who became a distinguished genetics researcher and the father of three children—Aurelie, Jeanne, and Peter Paul. Aurelie married Philip Remillard and Jeanne married his brother Maurice. Peter Paul and his wife Alice Waddell had a single child, Peter Paul Junior—called Pete—who became one of Marc’s closest friends and a fellow Metapsychic Rebel.

  After the Intervention, Colette herself turned to genetic research as a result of Martin’s influence and made a second academic career for herself in what she thought would be her twilight years, studying the genetic aspects of the higher mindpowers and teaching graduate courses in the subject that became world famous. She continued to be a close friend of Denis and Lucille’s and was Paul Remillard’s godmother. As she grew older, she continued to participate in research even in semiretirement, and was one of the first to submit to experimental regeneration tank therapy in 2035. Her rejuvenation was an unqualified success, and at the age of seventy-five, Colette found herself once again possessed of the body and brain cells she had enjoyed as a thirty-year-old.

  When she agreed to try to help baby Jack, Colette Roy knew that she faced the premier challenge of her long life. Even though the infant still looked perfectly normal at three months of age, the defective genetic blueprint within his body cells had already begun to program his inevitable death. Comprehensive tests showed that Jack had not three intractable lethal equivalent genes, as Severin’s hasty and incompetent assay had showed, but thirty-four—some of them never before encountered in the human gene map. Any one of those defective bits of DNA would have been sufficient to kill the little boy before he reached the age of five years. All of them had heretofore proved resistant to genetic therapy; but Colette was going to treat them anyway, hoping that Jack’s genetic makeup was as extraordinary as his mind.

  The human species has more than 100,000 genes, the DNA “code words” that program every cell in our bodies to take this shape or that, and perform this function or that, in this organ or that. A detailed map of human genetic material has been made, but the map is not always a straightforward thing. One gene does not always control one trait. On the contrary, the usual thing is for one gene to affect several traits or body functions, something geneticists call pleiotropy. (The ramifications of pleiotropy were still being studied as the twenty-first century rolled to a close.) In a flip side to pleiotropy, a number of completely different genes are capable of producing the same effect or trait. And in a given environment—for example, adequate or inadequate nutrition in the womb or in early years, or in the presence of carcinogenic agents—genes can influence the bodies in widely varying ways. To complicate things even further, our human-species collection of DNA is fraught with mysterious “extras”—ornaments or doodles on the basic blueprint that seem to be totally unnecessary … perhaps.

  The entry of the human race into the Galactic Age gave us access to high technology, but it did not instantly improve the techniques of genetic engineering. We still had the same human genes to cope with, and they were, by and large, more complex in their interaction than were the genes of the other Milieu races. It became possible to identify pleiotropic human genes more precisely using Milieu science; but modifying these genes to avoid undesired side effects during therapy was accomplished only very slowly, over a long period of time.

  It was not until 2040 that the genetic engineering triumph known as the regeneration tank came into widespread use, enabling humans to regrow lost or defective organs and rejuvenate aging bodies to a reasonable equivalent of young adulthood. As a side benefit to truly necessary (and expensive) regeneration therapy in the tank, a person could also be reprogrammed genetically for modest types of enhancement genetic engineering, such as the modification of muscle mass and inherited fat deposition patterns, the resculpting of facial features, the elimination of male-pattern baldness, and the changing of various body pigments. During the Simbiari Proctorship and for some decades thereafter, until tank therapy became inexpensive, reliable, and routine, purely cosmetic or otherwise frivolous alteration of the genes was forbidden by law. Human nature being what it is, however, persons with enough money to spend were very often able to get what they wanted, law or no law.

  Even the most carefully executed genetic engineering procedures still carried some risks all throughout the twenty-first century, since inserting extra genes into a person’s blueprint might produce unexpectedly disastrous effects through some hitherto unknown action of pleiotropy. There was also the perplexing matter of self-redaction, in which a person’s mind was known to influence the way that genes “expressed” themselves for better or worse.

  Certain gene complexes causing serious defects proved to be completely intractable to engineering, and so did some “good” genes that might have been used eugenically. Traits such as intelligence and personality turned out to be controlled by a bewildering interaction among more than sixteen thousand different genes—effectively banishing any possibility of genetically engineering the brain. As the reader of these Memoirs has probably already suspected, the so-called immortality gene complex occurring in the Remillard family was never successfully transplanted either, except by the good old-fashioned technique called sexual intercourse.

  Nevertheless, by the time of Jon Remillard’s birth, the “bad” genes responsible for a host of con
genital human diseases had been pinpointed, and a goodly number of the worst of them had succumbed to the type of genetic engineering called somatic cell gene therapy. In this, DNA containing a “correction” of the flawed gene is inserted into the patient’s body, and if all goes well, the genetic blueprint will be successfully revised, and abnormality will give way to normality.

  The flawed codons still existed within the cured patient’s germ cells, however, and could be passed on to the offspring. In order to eradicate a genetic flaw permanently from an affected family, the much trickier expedient called germ line gene therapy is required. The delicate fertilized egg itself must have the genetic correction inserted into it, so that all cells of the developing embryo, including the embryo’s own germ cells, will carry the revised blueprint.

  Germ line gene therapy was very successful in plants and in some animals. But in the highly organized human body with its pleiotropy, the results were usually unsatisfactory, with the DNA often latching onto inappropriate parts of the embryo’s chromosomes. Even before the Intervention, ethical genetic scientists had decided that the risks in the procedure outweighed potential benefits.

  The Simbiari Proctorship confirmed this judgment and set up the infamous Reproductive Statutes in order to prevent the propagation of the genetic flaws deemed most injurious to human society as a whole. All humans were obliged to submit to genetic assay before they were issued a reproduction license. Those with the cleanest gene map—especially the operants—were encouraged to have the most children, while somewhat less fortunate types were apt to be restricted to a single offspring. Persons having genetic flaws were counseled as to the risks they faced and the possibility of successful genetic therapy. Those who carried the worst category of deleterious genes were prohibited by law from having any children at all, with the penalty varying with the seriousness of the genetic defect and the metapsychic status of the individuals involved. All fetuses had to be tested for flaws within two months of conception, and those with intractable genetic disease were aborted. If nonoperant parents evaded the restrictions and persisted in having a seriously flawed baby, they were subject to fines, their health insurance was canceled, and they were obliged to assume all expenses involved in treating and rearing the diseased child. Operant parents, being in the eyes of the Simbiari Proctorship the standard-bearers for humanity’s future, were subject to the death penalty for committing the same reproductive crime. And so was the flawed fetus, if it still resided within the womb of the criminal mother.

  As a result of Teresa Kendall’s case, the deliberate contravention of the Reproductive Statutes by an operant was eventually reduced from a Class One to a Class Two felony, no longer carrying the death penalty, and the child involved in such a crime was deemed totally innocent and given the right to the best medical treatment that society could provide. The operant parent or parents found guilty under the new law were deprived of custody of the illicit child, heavily fined, and obliged to perform ten years of public service.

  Paul and his powerful siblings did not oppose the proposed new law as it was debated in the Intendant Assembly but rather gave it their enthusiastic support. The measure was passed by a simple majority, ratified by the Human Magnates of the Concilium, and became law with the affirming signature of the Dirigent for Earth, David Somerled MacGregor, on 10 May 2052.

  A rider that would have pardoned Teresa Kendall and Rogatien Remillard was stricken from the measure during the final floor debates. The members of the Dynasty, with a single exception, had voted to keep the rider.

  But Paul had voted against it.

  I was fit to be tied when the news reached me that day in the bookshop, and it was Anne, not Paul, who transmitted the details to me from Concord in brisk, emotionless farspeech. I immediately went galloping out of the shop and around the corner and down to Teresa’s house. It was a nice sunny day, and the new roses in the bed that she had planted on the side of the house facing the library were blooming their heads off. Marc’s turbocycle stood in the driveway, signaling that he’d got the news from the capital even faster than I had.

  I went slam-banging into the house and found Teresa and all five of her children in the cool, dim living room. Jack was suspended in his papoose-frame, which stood at his mother’s side. Marie, cuddling Luc, and Madeleine sat at Teresa’s feet. Marc was standing at one of the windows, staring morosely outside.

  “You don’t have to worry!” I blustered. “They won’t take Jack away from you. There still has to be a trial—due process!”

  She looked at me with that calm, madonna expression. “I’ve been telling the children what their Aunt Anne explained to me about that. You and I are not scheduled to go to trial until November, but there are two other legal avenues open for pardoning us before that. The first—and the one Anne thinks most likely, because she’s a member—is through the ten-person Directorate of the Human Polity of the Concilium. Anne thinks Paul felt obliged to make a public gesture deploring my deliberate defiance of the law, and that’s why he voted to defeat the pardon rider. It didn’t have enough support to pass the Assembly anyhow. But when the application for pardon comes before him and Anne and the other eight Concilium Directors, they’ll prevail on the others to let us go free.”

  “H’mph!” snorted I. “They damn well better! If we go to trial, we’ll be convicted. You can afford to pay almost any fine, and your ten years of public service would probably consist of giving music lessons on that damned Siberian planet. But my poor old bookstore has always tippy-toed along the brink of insolvency, and any sort of fine would bankrupt me. I’ll be damned if I want to spend my next immortal decade planting baby evergreens in a Maine tree farm while mosquitoes drill my ass!”

  Maddy giggled.

  Luc wailed, “I don’t want Mama to go to jail! Not when we just got her back.”

  Baby Jack asked: What is jail?

  Maddy said, “It’s really awful!” And she simultaneously transmitted a horrific mental image of a dungeon cum torture chamber, whereupon the infant began to cry.

  “Mama won’t go to jail, silly,” Marie declared. She gave Madeleine a PK poke. “And neither will Uncle Rogi. Nobody goes to jail except really wicked people.”

  Still mewling and hiccuping, Jack said: Was bringing about my birth only moderately wicked?

  Teresa burst out laughing, lifted the baby from his swing, and kissed him. “Certainly not! It wasn’t wicked at all, only illegal. There’s a big difference, and Marie is going to take you upstairs and explain it to you, and then it’s time for your nap. Nana Colette is coming later with more good genes for you, and you must be well rested and full of the best possible redactive thoughts in order for them to work.”

  The baby said: Very well Mama.

  Teresa gave the baby to Marie and told Maddy and Luc to go out and play. When the youngsters were gone, Marc turned away from the window.

  “What happens if Papa and Aunt Anne don’t convince the Directorate to pardon you and Uncle Rogi?”

  “Then we can appeal to Davy MacGregor,” she replied calmly. “The Planetary Dirigent can issue an order of executive clemency all by himself, and not even the Lylmik can countermand it.”

  “If MacGregor is charitably inclined,” I muttered.

  “You probably have a better chance with him than with Papa,” Marc said.

  “I won’t have you talking that way,” Teresa reproved him.

  “How much vindication for Jack’s birth does Papa need?” Marc demanded hotly. “Even the preliminary assessment of the baby’s armamentarium shows that he has the most powerful mind the human race has ever produced! You were right to save him from being aborted! Someday he could be a super-Einstein! But all Papa can think of are his precious principles and what the goddam Simbiari and Krondaku think. He won’t even come and see Jack!”

  Teresa’s resolution wavered. Her eyes began to fill, and she shrank back into the corner of the couch. She appealed to me mutely on my intimate mode.

 
“Okay,” I said to Marc shortly. “You’ve expressed your righteous indignation. Now scram.”

  The boy finally had sense enough to be ashamed of himself. He made a gruff apology to his mother, promised to visit Jack tomorrow, and slouched away. I waited until the roar of his turbocycle had dwindled into the distance before speaking to Teresa again.

  “He’s only fourteen. The intellect of a grown man, the tact and forbearance of a teenage twit.”

  “I know … and he’s been marvelous with Jack, coming almost every day in spite of his heavy course load at college.”

  “Is it true—what he said about Jack’s mind? I’ve always felt in my guts that the kid was hot stuff, but have the psychologists actually proved it?”

  She shrugged. “Apparently yes. Colette told me last week. I’m sorry that I forgot to tell you, Rogi. You see, I never doubted that Jack was extraordinary, and the mental-test results only seemed to confirm what I knew all along was true. My little son is going to do wonderful things for humanity. It … hurts that Paul still seems to think of him as an embarrassment rather than a source of pride. I can only keep praying that he’ll change his mind after we’re finally pardoned.” Her eyes met mine. “And we will be. I know it. Please don’t worry about it, dear.”

  I mumbled something reassuring, then said I’d better be getting back to the shop. Teresa walked me to the front door. Colette Roy’s groundcar was just pulling up in front of the house.

  “How’s the therapy going?” I asked Teresa.

  She smiled again. “Colette says everything is going very well. As you saw, Jack is perfectly healthy. It’s entirely possible that his mind is fending off the harmful effects of the damaged genes.”

  “Good for him,” I said heartily, and fled, giving Colette only a hasty wave.

  Two weeks later, Colette Roy was able to tell the family that replacement genes to counteract all of Jack’s defects had been successfully implanted within his body. Now we could only wait and see whether the therapy succeeded. From time to time the baby would be given full-body scans at the old Hitchcock Hospital, which was part of the Genetics Center; and he would also wear a tiny vital-signs monitor that would alert Colette to any problems.