Jack the Bodiless (Galactic Milieu Trilogy)

by Julian May

  Then the bulk of the old hospital loomed up, its outline blurred by the snow, and the children fell silent. The happy holiday vibes that had engulfed the hayriders vanished as they all, except for the single uncomprehending five-year-old, withdrew behind their mental screens.

  Jack.

  Poor little ravaged Jack.

  They were finally going to see him.

  Rogi had carefully consulted with each family before having Marc ask Jack if he felt up to having a horde of visitors. The parents had tried to prepare their offspring by presenting a realistic mental image of Jack as he now was. His aspect was saddening but not ghastly, for the child’s head was still normal in appearance, and his baldness would be hidden under a Santa cap, and the support unit that held him could be sheeted over to hide what was inside.

  The parents told their youngest children not to look under the sheet, knowing that the admonition was futile even as they said it. They also reminded the children that Jack’s mind was strong and well and there was still hope that his body could be restored.

  The night supervisor of nursing met them at the front door and led them to where Jack waited. There was no need to tell the operant youngsters to keep quiet. When they reached Jack’s room they filed in, one by one, to greet him and say a few words if they wished. Jack was tilted upright in the frame of his life-support apparatus. On one side of him was a bank of monitors and the controls of the machinery that kept him alive. On the other side was a top-of-the-line minimain computer with a brainboard box, no keypads or microphone, and a jumbo display monitor on a flexarm: a toy for the invalid child. Jack smiled a lot and spoke to his guests telepathically. There was no overt evidence that he was in pain.

  Then came five-year-old Cousin Norman, one of Philip’s large brood, who was the youngest caroler of the group. He asked Jack: “Why do you have to mindspeak us? Can’t you talk?”

  No, Jack said. I still have my voice box, but it’s no good without lungs.

  There were scattered sharp intakes of breath and gasps of dismay, but Norman plunged on. “Then you can’t sing along with us. But that’s okay. Your ears work, don’t they?”

  Yes. And my eyes are still fine, too.

  “How about your heart?”

  It’s still there, but it doesn’t beat. It’s shut down.

  “Oh,” said Norman. He was squinting, and everyone knew he was using his deepsight to look under the sheet. His older sisters braced themselves to grab him and hustle him out of the room if he became frightened and made a scene, but all Norman said was: “You’re really a mess in there, aren’t you?”

  Yes, said Jack. He was still smiling.

  “Now it’s time for the Christmas carols,” the head nurse said briskly to the visitors, “and then Jack must rest.”

  Marc had already primed them on his little brother’s favorites. They sang “Good King Wenceslaus,” and “Angels We Have Heard on High,” and “Jolly Old Saint Nicholas,” and finally “Lo, How a Rose E’er Blooming.”

  When the last sweet harmony faded, Jack said: Thank you for a wonderful Christmas present. And now I have a little present for each of you!… Marc, open the top drawer of that computer stand for me. Sometimes it sticks.

  Mystified, Marc complied. And discovered that the drawer was filled with miniature white roses.

  Murmurs of interest came from the carolers, and these turned to exclamations and even squeals when the little flowers began flying out and affixing themselves to the children’s coats like boutonnieres.

  Jack said: Lo, how a rose e’er blooming! Merry Christmas!

  “Merry Christmas, Jack!” they replied, the oldest of them with suspicious moisture in their eyes. And then they shuffled out.

  The head nurse was looking into the now empty drawer and shaking her head, her lips pursed with disapproval. She glowered at Marc, who had lingered after the others left. “I suppose you were responsible for that, young man. Don’t you know that live plants can carry viruses that might interfere with your little brother’s genetic therapy?”

  “I didn’t bring the roses,” Marc said. “If you want to know where those flowers came from, you’d better ask him. He did it with his creativity. It’s one of the things he’s good at, transforming one thing into another.” He fingered the rose in the lapel of his mackinaw, inspecting it with a critical eye. “You goofed, Jacko. Forgot the sepals. Smells nice, though. Good job on the essential oils.”

  The nurse was incredulous. “Do you mean to tell me he made those roses? Out of nothing?”

  Jack grinned.

  Marc headed out the door. “No, he used an organic raw material. But if I were you, Nurse, I wouldn’t ask what.”

  Even before the long midnight mass was completely over, Rogi slipped outside and trudged toward his apartment above the bookshop. He was dead beat after shepherding the kids, and the sip of consecrated wine he’d taken at communion had reminded him sacrilegiously that his flask had been emptied long before. When he passed the house he saw that the light in Teresa’s bedroom was still on, as were many of the downstairs lights. Impulsively, he rang the doorbell. When Jacqui answered, he asked if Teresa was still up. Jacqui said that she had looked in about twenty minutes previously and found Teresa reading. The nurse was at midnight mass.

  “I’ll just go up and find out how Teresa liked the caroling,” Rogi said, shedding his down jacket and stamping most of the snow off his boots. “Don’t bother coming along to play chaperone. Teresa and I know all there is to know about each other.”

  Jacqui laughed dutifully at his old-fashioned notions of prudery and went off. Rogi climbed to the second floor and knocked on the door of the big master bedroom. There was no reply, and he hesitated. It never occurred to him to use his metafaculties.

  Well, he thought, if she’s gone off to sleep, I’ll just tuck her in and turn out the lights.

  He opened the door and nearly jumped out of his skin. For the merest instant, he imagined that he saw a tall man in evening clothes bending over Teresa as she lay sleeping, giving her a tender kiss on the forehead.

  “Paul …?”

  But there was nobody there after all. Trembling, Rogi came into the room, thinking that the night’s excitement really had been too much for him, and he’d have to think seriously about going on the wagon during the new year. Damned imagination! Next thing, he’d be seeing snakes or pink elephants instead of Paul.

  … But it hadn’t been Paul. The phantom had been beardless and of a more muscular build than Teresa’s husband. But for all that, there had been a distinctly familiar air about him.

  Espèce d’idiot, Rogi called himself.

  He drew up the coverlet a bit, turned off the bedside lamp, and gave Teresa a gentle farewell pat on one hand.

  The hand was cold.

  Rogi stood stock-still. But Teresa was even more motionless, and when the truth finally penetrated and he frantically switched the lamp back on and snatched up the bedside phone, he saw the empty pill bottle.

  38

  FROM THE MEMOIRS OF ROGATTEN REMILLARD

  NOT EVEN JACK KNEW WHAT TERESA HAD PLANNED TO DO, so skilled was she in guarding her most secret thoughts. When she took the pills, her youngest son was asleep, exhausted from his visitors and from the psychocreative gifts he had fashioned for them. As his mother began to slip into death, Jack woke, for in her deranged state she sought to force him to accompany her, and the final transmutation of her vital energies lent her a terrible gentle strength that the child could barely countermand. When Teresa passed on at last, Jack was comatose for ten hours, and his medical attendants and his distraught father were certain that he would surely die, too. He did not, but his condition worsened, and a new crop of rapidly infiltrating malignancies appeared.

  Teresa’s suicide provoked a wave of prurient public interest in the Remillard family, its tragedies, and its personal affairs that reminded me uncomfortably of the media madness attending the family of the assassinated U.S. President John F. Kennedy. The
actual condition of young Jack had been carefully hidden from reporters, who knew only that the First Magnate’s youngest son was being treated for cancer; but with the vultures circling around more and more closely, it seemed only a matter of time before the child’s bizarre condition would become known—and then there would be a fresh spate of adverse publicity.

  In January 2054, Paul took a month-long leave of absence from his official duties and went into seclusion on the planet Denali, with Laura Tremblay accompanying him. The inhabitants of the frigid little world were so grateful for Paul’s help in getting their colony established that they kept his place of refuge secret, frustrating any journalists who might have pursued him.

  There had been a star-studded public memorial service for Teresa in Concord between Christmas and New Year’s, overflowing the Catholic cathedral in the capital of Earth and covered by all the news services. Her interment was to be private, and since she had been cremated, the media and the general public assumed that her ashes would be scattered. However, in a handwritten codicil to her last will and testament, Teresa had requested that I return her ashes to Kauai, the island of her birth. Marc wanted to accompany me, but I held off until he assured me that he had successfully completed the work for his Bachelor of Science degree and was well along on his Master’s thesis. Then, on 5 February, the day after Marc’s sixteenth birthday, when he was finally able to pilot a rhocraft legally, he borrowed Paul’s silver Maserati and flew us to Poipu. The two of us carried Teresa’s remains in an elegantly carved little pine box.

  We picked up Teresa’s father at the beach house and flew almost immediately to a historic little old church out in the wild canefields, Saint Raphael’s. The ninety-three-year-old astrophysicist Bernard Kané Kendall looked sallow and middle-aged when he greeted us, although he had undergone rejuvenation less than a decade earlier. His mind was in a perennial state of abstraction, rapt in cosmological mysteries; and although he mourned the loss of Teresa, Marc and I could see that he was anxious to get back to the great complex of observatories on the Big Island, where he lived and worked during most of the year.

  Teresa’s mother was not in attendance. Annarita Donovan Latimer, the only child of my onetime fiancée, Elaine Donovan, was seventy-eight years old at the time of her daughter’s death and living as a recluse in New York City after a long and successful career as an actress. She had been separated from Kendall for over twenty years and was adamantly opposed to rejuvenation. (Annarita would succumb quietly to heart failure in 2056, the year that the new Teresa Kendall Opera House had its inaugural season on the cosmopolitan planet Avalon, thanks to the beneficence of the Remillard Foundation.)

  Saint Raphael’s Church was packed with islanders who had known and loved Teresa in her youth, many of them native Hawaiians. When the service was concluded, the people filed up to the altar, where the little box of ashes rested on a kind of wide wooden stand with handles at the corners, and draped it with gorgeous leis of island flowers. Four Hawaiian men wearing brightly patterned traditional shirts and horseshoe leis woven of ferns then took up the litter, and I thought there would be a procession to the local cemetery. To my surprise, the pallbearers and the file of mourners moved directly to our silver Maserati, where the priest said a last blessing and sprinkled the box of ashes with holy water. Then the people began to sing “Aloha Oe,” and a plump brown hand fell upon my shoulder. I looked around, to discover Malama Johnson, the woman who had taken care of Teresa and Jack and me when we spent the last months of our exile at the Kendall beach house down in Poipu.

  “Now you and I and Marc will take dear Kaulana’s dust to Keaku,” she whispered. “We will fly in your egg.”

  The box and most of the flowers fit in the backseat, and the three of us climbed into the front. Keaku, it seemed, was in the direction of cloud-cloaked Mount Waialeale, in the center of the island north of us. Our inertialess aircraft lofted us 1700 meters into the air in a few seconds under Marc’s pilotage, and we flew noiselessly through thick clouds almost as featureless as the gray limbo of hyperspace.

  The heights of Kauai are the wettest place on Earth, with an annual rainfall of over twelve meters. I knew only a little about the country up there. It is called the Alakai Swamp and is a windswept ancient volcanic plateau of almost perpetual rain and mist, where the bogs shelter rare plants and hundreds of waterfalls plunge over precipitate fern-clad cliffs into the fertile lowlands. Of all the Hawaiian Islands, Kauai is the greenest and, to me, the most inviting. It was also the island that had been the last refuge of the legendary Menehune—the dwarfish “magical” people whom the conquering Polynesians found and enslaved when they first migrated north from Tahiti.

  The place Malama had indicated on the rhocraft’s large-scale local navigation display was a lava cave on the southern edge of the swamp, near the head of Olokele Canyon. Marc had the egg on autopilot, and the terrain indicator warned us that we were about to touch down while the ship was still totally enveloped in cloud.

  I stepped out into a cool drizzle that immediately soaked the white tropical suit I had chosen for the obsequies. All I could discern with my regular sight was swirling mist, gnarled little trees, and a lush growth of ferns and other rain-forest vegetation. There was a delicate fragrance like anise in the air.

  Malama carried the box of ashes in her arms and started off among the bog pools. Marc and I followed, loaded with flower garlands, casting about with farsight and deepsight lest we sink into the muck. Almost immediately we came upon the cave, which was of a fair size, girt about with rampant, dripping greenery.

  “You stay here,” Malama told me sternly, “and keep your farsight under control.” And then to Marc: “Boy, bring one lei strung with green berries and leaves—the mokihana and maile that belong to our island. And bring one other that you think your mother would have liked.”

  His face frozen, Marc took the modest green garland and another of white dendrobium orchids. The other flowers were left at the cave mouth. He followed the Hawaiian woman into the darkness, and dutifully, I did not spy. This remote spot wrapped in chill, sweet-smelling mist was not one I would have chosen as a last resting place, and somehow I found myself doubting that Teresa would approve of it, either. But neither Marc nor I had thought for a moment of going against the kahuna’s command.

  After less than ten minutes, the pair of them reappeared. We returned to the egg in silence and were back in sunny Poipu in short order. Dr. Kendall was already gone from the beach house, leaving only a curt note, and Malama disappeared almost as soon as we landed. Her husband Ola, an uncommunicative stocky fellow with grizzled, curly hair, showed us where we could dry out our clothes and then gave us a hearty lunch (which was actually supper for us New Englanders) of roast chicken, taro biscuits, a salad of corn, tomatoes, and watercress in spicy mayonnaise, and pineapple with sweet coconut sauce for dessert.

  Marc said nothing during the meal. As we started back for the egg, he looked up with a grimace at the sky to the south, which was rapidly filling with black storm clouds.

  “It’s going to be pouring cats and dogs pretty soon,” I said.

  “Yeah.” He talked to Air Traffic Control and got us a superexpress Vee all the way to Boston.

  “You want to tell me what happened in the cave?” I asked.

  But Marc had a question of his own. “Did Mama’s will specify that Jack was to be cremated and interred with her?”

  I had said nothing about that part of the will to Marc, and he’d shown no curiosity about the document up until now. But Teresa had left that instruction, as though she believed that the baby would soon join her in death, and I admitted it to Marc.

  It was getting very dark outside, and a sudden blast of wind made the egg totter on its splayed landing pads. The environmental unit of the rhocraft was still working to counter the island heat and humidity that had filled its interior. Marc’s face wore a sheen of perspiration and was illuminated eerily by the glow of the control-panel displays.

>   “Malama … In the cave, she said Mama tried to take Jack with her. As she died. She said Mama had used the anana, the kahuna death prayer.”

  “Mes couilles!” I scoffed. “That’s complete bullshit.”

  “Malama said she was very disappointed in Teresa for doing that. She called Mama selfish and said she had committed a sin against huna that her Middle Self was now sorry for. She said—” He paused, gritting his teeth, then continued relentlessly. “She said Mama’s soul was in purgatory, atoning for the sin, and her Low Self was still charged with mana and dangerous, and that’s why her ashes would have to stay in Keaku Cave for the time being. So Jack wouldn’t die now when he was especially vulnerable. Malama said Jack wasn’t going to die. Do you think she could possibly be right, Uncle Rogi?”

  I felt ice-cold ants creeping up my spine. We were getting into areas of metapsychology that science knew nothing about: the possible survival after death of malignant aspects of the personality, the “evil spirits” of legend … and maybe even things like Fury and Hydra. The egg rocked with another gust. Palm trees were flailing, and out to sea I could see a pitch-black wall getting closer and closer. I said, “What with your studies and the family hassles, you’ve been so busy during the past month that you haven’t seen much of Ti-Jean. But I have, and I can tell you that Colette has just about lost hope for conquering his cancer through genetic engineering. On the other hand, the kid acts like he wants to live! He’s always talking about integrating his three selves. And he still refuses painkillers, because he says they would interfere with some special ‘work’ he’s doing. Would any of that matter worth a damn if he knew he was going to die in a few weeks? Don’t you think a mentality like Jack’s would know if he was failing?”