Jack the Bodiless (Galactic Milieu Trilogy)

by Julian May

  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.

  Teresa’s apprehensions were far from calmed, even though Colette tried to put a good face on things by reminding her how Jack’s older brother Luc had been restored. Luc’s genetic anomalies had been completely different from Jack’s, Teresa pointed out, and he had never had cancer. That formerly deadly condition had become readily treatable among humans at the midpoint of the twenty-first century, but the ancient fear of it lingered on. What would happen to Jack if more of the rapidly metastasizing cancers appeared? Colette calmly replied that they would be treated in whatever way was appropriate. She said nothing to Teresa of what the treatment might entail.

  Just after Jack’s operation, which Colette pronounced to be completely successful, Teresa gave a disastrous concert in Moscow, during which her voice broke several times. She immediately canceled the rest of her singing engagements for the year and moved into a room next to Jack’s in the hospital, where he was still recovering and undergoing tests. She declared that she would not sing again until Jack was completely cured. Following this, Paul left the house on South Street and returned to his apartment down in Concord. There was no overt evidence of a fresh breach in the marriage, but neither Marc nor I needed a neon sign to indicate what was probably happening.

  In mid-June little Jack was pronounced fit again, and he and Teresa returned to the family home, where he was pampered and carefully monitored. Henceforth the baby would be taken to the hospital every other day for scanning, so that any incipient problems could be nipped in the bud.

  When the summer term at Dartmouth began and Marc started the last intensive push toward his goal of a bachelor’s degree, he made a decision not to take Jack on long outings anymore until Colette was satisfied that the baby’s health had stabilized. Feisty Ti-Jean deeply resented being confined to the house most of the time, and Marc did his best to be with him as often as possible and take him out for short trips. Jack’s other three siblings, free from school for the summer, also seemed anxious to help the baby in his continuing thirst for intellectual input. His second sister Maddy, who was now thirteen and ready to begin her final year at the Granite Hill School in Vermont, was especially solicitous. She and Jack spent many long hours together studying cerebroenergetics, of all things. They made Marc show them the schematics of his homemade CE helmet and pestered him until he took the thing apart for them and explained it to the last detail.

  Everything went well until early August, when the first act of the drama of Jack the Bodiless began to approach its climax. The scanner revealed several dozen ultramicroscopic cancerous lesions scattered in the child’s long bones, pelvis, ribs, and scapulae. These were diagnosed as Ewing’s sarcoma, a rare type of childhood-onset cancer with a propensity for rapid metastasis. Ordinarily, the Ewing oncogenes responded well to genetic engineering. In Jack’s case, the attempt to insert replacement DNA failed. His variety of Ewing’s was somehow different from the type already well known, having a different pleiotropic mechanism that undoubtedly accounted for its striking in so many places at once. Ferreting out that mechanism might take months. Given the multiple sites of the tiny cancers and their impending metastasis, amputation of the limbs and aggressive laser cautery and chemotherapy of the other diseased bones was the only course open to Colette and her colleagues.

  When Teresa learned what would have to be done to Jack to save his life, no bright talk of future restoration in a regen-tank was able to distract her from the present catastrophe. She reacted so wildly that she had to be put under sedation. To his credit, Paul returned to her and attempted to use his own powerful redactive faculty to help her regain her mental equilibrium. He also spent long hours with Jack during the five weeks following the operations, transmitting to the precocious child every redactive healing program known to the human race at that time—plus numbers of them derived from the near-humanoid Poltroyans. In addition, he obtained from Denis and various other sources the most advanced metacoercive and creative programs, and force-fed the child the design principles for more complex multifaculty programs. Jack assimilated these recondite data gratefully, telling his father that he would make what use of it he could.

  Now came those autumnal days, so crucial in the later lives of both Marc and Jack, when the older boy would come sneaking into the hospital, cloaked with invisibility, to steal his baby brother away. The original crude papoose-board backpack carrier that I had fashioned for Jack had gradually been transmogrified by Marc and his buddies into a high-tech wizard’s cradle. Following Jack’s quadruple amputations and entry into chemotherapy, the backpack became a virtual portable intensive-care unit, with only the baby’s pale, bald little head visible within the transparent hooded top. The nurses at Hitchcock who were supposed to guard Jack were coerced and then convinced by posthypnotic suggestion that he never left his room. Marc craftily timed his excursions so that Colette Roy and the other operant doctors would be unlikely to discover what he and Jack were up to.

  Most of the time, Marc carried his little brother away from the old hospital and walked north on Rope Ferry Road, along a path through the golf course and into a ravine carved ages ago by Girl Brook, where they entered a region of ancient pine trees and other evergreens called Pine Park. Until the Metapsychic Rebellion, the place was also one of my favorite walks, an undisturbed fragment of New England forest growing along the bank of the great Connecticut River. The place is full of ferns, and in its tiny glades there are wildflowers in season, and birdsong echoes beneath the 30-meter-tall pines as if in a hushed cathedral.

  What did they talk about during those stolen hours? That they discussed the meaning of life goes without saying, for it seemed increasingly certain to Marc that little Jack was going to die. They discussed the science of death and the philosophy of it and the personal beliefs each one had on the subject, and how these contrasted with the tenets of the religion of their ancestors. Jack was often in considerable pain, although he never let it daunt him, and he steadfastly maintained that pain, like the paradoxical proto-oncogenes, would not have evolved in us and remained a part of the higher animal condition for so long unless it had more than a fleeting, avoidance-factor/signal-factor value. Jack recapitulated Teresa’s naïve wisdom relating to the subject, which Marc tended to pooh-pooh. Jack also queried Marc’s views on the notion, held by a fair number of thinkers, that pain was an educative tool and the ordeal a potential pathway to higher levels of consciousness. At first, Marc thought this was more sentimental poppycock, but later he came to share his brother’s opinion.

  Besides philosophizing, they argued. Among other things, about sex. At this point in his adolescence, the sexually repressed Marc was fighting what seemed to be a never-ending battle with his body’s carnal urges. The usual avenues of relief open to a boy of his age seemed to him to be a craven cop-out, a surrender of the mind to the most primitive instincts of the body. He would learn to control himself in a dignified manner—in
an operant manner!—or know the reason why.

  Human sex, Marc argued, was a detriment to metapsychic advancement. The exotic races of the Milieu were a case in point: The most advanced were the ineffable Lylmik, who had no sex at all. Then came the Krondaku, with whom sex was so stately and well deliberated that it might be a formal dance ending in an exchange of gifts. The Simbiari, in spite of their racial immaturity and all the jokes cracked over their unesthetic physiology, ranked next on the ladder of metapsychic advancement. Their sex involved no intercourse or frenzied courtship ritual, the eggs being fertilized in their watery nest by sperm packets neatly supplied through a special orifice beneath the male’s vestigial tail. The jolly but none-too-competent Poltroyans, as lusty a lot as ever copulated for the mere fun of it, were always letting sex make sentimental fools of them. And the Gi …! They seemed to live for little else and were so scientifically backward that it was a wonder they had ever been accepted into the Milieu at all.

  Humanity, in Marc’s opinion, fell somewhere between the Poltroyans and the Gi.

  They argued about many other things as well: About the validity of the Judeo-Christian tradition and the existence of God, and especially about the notion that a thinking, responsible person with well-defined goals was still somehow obligated to “trust” God. About whether continuing membership in the Galactic Milieu was apt to be a good or a bad thing for humanity in the long view. About eugenics, the deliberate attempts to “improve” the human organism, which had been forbidden under the Proctorship but was now coming to the fore again. About the desirability of mass-producing humans artificially to facilitate populating new planets with nonborns. About the underdog position of humans in the Galactic Concilium. And about the potential danger that Unity might pose to human individualism.

  They also argued about Fury and Hydra, even though neither entity had manifested itself for over a year. Marc had had many troubling dreams of Fury, but his conscious mind by now had almost managed to convince itself that Jack had imagined the fearsome events attending Addie’s death. Jack stubbornly maintained that there was a real Fury and a real Hydra, and that Marc should make a stronger effort to bar Fury from his dreams, or one of these days, when everyone least expected it, the monsters would be back.

  The brother minds were very different. They were natural antagonists by nature, and one can see that the rivalry that eventually led to the Metapsychic Rebellion had its inception during these intimate, clandestine walks in the pine forest, when the warmth of Indian summer filled the air with the scent of resin and the two of them, weary at last of their colloquy, would simply stand watching the great river flow by, Jack fashioning tiny boats out of forest debris with his creativity and Marc influencing the wind and river currents with his to make the little things dance on the water.

  In November, just as the last leaves had fallen and the frost began to settle in to stay, the scanner detected in Jack incipient adenocarcinoma of the pancreas, formerly one of the fastest-acting and most intractable cancers. Gene therapy was tried, and once again it failed. The child’s pancreas had already been removed before the genetic procedures were attempted, and Colette hoped that no metastasis had taken place.

  Unfortunately, it had. New deadly cancer seeds were detected soon afterward in vital organs adjacent to the pancreas—in the liver, the spleen, the stomach, the large and small intestines, the kidneys—and in the great blood vessels of the heart. Pinpoint chemotherapy and laser microsurgery were brought to bear, but no sooner had one crop of seeds been destroyed than another wave appeared to take its place. The baby was put on full cerebro-isolate life support while Colette, her colleagues, and consultants brought in from all over the world tried to find a way to get Jack into a regen-tank, wipe his genetic slate clean, and put him back together again.

  None of the cancers or the therapies affected Jack’s brain or his central nervous system. He remained alert, fully operant in all his metafaculties (except, apparently, self-redaction), and in considerable pain. He refused to accept any anodyne, chemical or electronic, saying that it would dull his mind and inhibit the “work” he was engaged in. What this work was he could not explain, and the mental images he projected were incomprehensible to Paul, Marc, and the professional attendants. Because of Jack’s extraordinary precocity, both his father and the doctors acceded to his request, hoping that the “work” was some grand, all-encompassing mental program that would eventually initiate a spontaneous cure.

  Paul still had a small hope that Jack would survive. Teresa was another matter. When the new and devastating pancreatic cancer was diagnosed, she insisted at first on visiting him daily, even though the sight of the awesome paraphernalia now enveloping him frightened her almost to the point of hysteria. When Jack truthfully admitted to her that the pain was intense, she begged him, day after day, to let the doctors install a blocking device. His continuing calm refusal and rapid physical deterioration as organ after organ shut down culminated in her having a nervous breakdown in Colette’s hospital office, blaming herself for the baby’s ordeal in an orgy of self-recrimination, saying Jack should never have been born, and demanding that he be removed from the machines and allowed to “die in peace.”

  Stress and guilt brought about Teresa’s total collapse. Once it was determined that there was nothing wrong with her physically, she was given medication and put to bed in the house on South Street, with a full-time private duty nurse to keep an eye on her. Marie and Maddy were away in boarding school until the Christmas holidays, and Luc, who was tutored by the nanny, was shipped off with her to stay with Cheri and Adrien in their winter home in Loudon, just outside Concord. After several futile attempts to aid Teresa through his redaction (she shut him out, accusing him of damning their baby to a travesty of life), Paul left her once again.

  For some weeks Teresa languished, eating very little and sunk in profound depression. She no longer had any desire to see Jack, and when I visited her from time to time, bringing from the bookshop rare musical tomes that I thought might interest her, she was sweetly apathetic. And then, just before Christmas, she suddenly began to speak of her youngest child in the past tense, and her condition greatly improved.

  Imagining Jack dead, Marc told me without emotion, was apparently the only way his mother could retain her sanity. In Marc’s opinion, she had made an eminently sensible adaptation, for unless the family was willing to keep the baby on total brain-isolate life support for over a decade, he was certainly doomed to die.

  The bone cancers had returned, and they were attacking Jack’s spine and skull in spite of everything the doctors could do.

  37

  HANOVER, NEW HAMPSHIRE, EARTH 24–25 DECEMBER 2053

  UNCLE ROGI WAS THE ONE WHO ORGANIZED THE MOB OF cousins into carolers. With both Teresa and Jack unable to attend the family Christmas party at Denis and Lucille’s, the old bookseller thought of this way to cheer the invalids a little, and the children of the Dynasty, both young adults and kids, agreed enthusiastically to participate. Two hours before they were all scheduled to attend midnight mass at the quaint fieldstone Catholic church on Sanborn Road, Rogi had all of the Remillard offspring assemble in his bookshop. He gave them songbook-plaques and then led them down South Street en masse to sing Christmas carols under Teresa’s bedroom window.

  It was snowing gently, with a crisp shallow layer already on the ground and sticking to the bare bushes and trees. Hanover looked impossibly lovely in the gleam of streetlights and house windows that framed illuminated Christmas trees. There were thirty-four children in the choir. The only ones missing were two toddlers belonging to Philip and Aurelie, who were too young to participate, Cheri and Adrien’s little Cory, who had a cold … and Jack.

  They sang “Adeste,” and “Il est né, le divin enfant,” and “The Holly and the Ivy,” and “Gesù Bambino,” and “Silent Night,” and “Bring a Torch, Jeanette, Isabella” in both French and English. They sang the haunting “Coventry Carol” in its entirety, and some o
f the young voices broke when they reached the more unfamiliar verses on the book-plaques and realized that the carol was about the slaughter of the innocents by Herod, sung by the mothers of the dead babies:

  Herod the King in his raging, chargèd he hath this day

  His men of might, in his own sight, all young childrèn to slay.

  Then woe is me, poor child, for thee! And ev’ry morn and day

  For thy parting nay say nor sing: By, by, lully, lullay.

  The somber mood was lifted when they swung into “Joy to the World” and then finished with the Remillard family’s favorite carol, “Cantique de Noël.”

  The nurse, forewarned by Rogi, had helped Teresa to a chair by her window. She waved to the crowd when the concert ended, and immediately the front door opened and Jacqui Delarue, the matronly housekeeper, came out with paper cups of steaming cocoa. Rogi surreptitiously added to his a slug of rum from his pocket flask.

  Then—voilà! The carolers heard a sound of bells jingling and horses puffing and clomping, and two large wagons filled with hay driven by Severin and Adrien came out of the little lane beyond the library and up to the front of the house. With happy shrieks, the younger children greeted Dobbin and Napoleon, who normally lived in Denis’s neighbor’s pasture as pensioners and were called upon only during Christmas and the Dartmouth Winter Carnival.

  “Everybody into the wagons!” Rogi roared. “We’ll roll over to the hospital now to carol for Jack. And as we go, everybody sing!”

  So they wended their way through town to the strains of “Frosty the Snowman,” and “Rudolph” in English and in bastard French, and “Chestnuts Roasting,” and “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town,” and “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas,” and “Jingle Bell Rock.” As the wagons rolled past the snow-covered expanse of the college green, Marc and several of the other older Remillards who were students sang Dartmouth’s “Winter Song.”