Jack the Bodiless (Galactic Milieu Trilogy) (13 page)

But somehow I had a feeling we wouldn’t be. The mysterious exotic presence that I called the Family Ghost had ordered me to undertake the trip, and it wouldn’t send me to my death. Not unless it no longer needed a human cat’s-paw to further its inscrutable designs, a contingency I very much doubted.

The last time the Ghost had actively meddled with my life was a rather innocuous incident in 2029, when I had been commanded to attend a fantasy convention in London. There the Ghost told me to summon Ilya and Katy Gawrys’s daughter Mary up from their home in Oxford. The girl was simply to be introduced to a science fiction writer acquaintance of mine named Kyle Macdonald. I would not comprehend the logic behind
that
little transaction for another forty-eight years …

I did my best to put aside all worry, settled back in my comfortable banquette, ate potato chips, and tried to relax as our red egg raced through the ionosphere. Following Marc’s orders, I compiled a list—or rather, three lists: clothing,
equipment, and provisions—of the things we were going to need for the four months or so of our stay in the Canadian wilderness. I hardly noticed when we touched down briefly at Montréal and Chicago. But when we reached Denver, Marc decided it would be safe enough to do some shopping. We traveled ex-vector to the big REI outdoor store at Alameda Square, and Teresa and I engaged in a tornadic shopping spree. We didn’t get everything on my lists, but we made a respectable dent in all except the food. An hour later, we were on our way again, with most of the backseat jammed with plunder. Teresa and I began organizing things and packing them into duffel sacks, while Marc engaged in some heavy farsensing, staying in a trance throughout most of the flight to Vancouver Metro. When he finally snapped out of it, he told us that Lucille had discovered Teresa’s disappearance and drawn the worst possible conclusions. She had informed Paul of her suspicions, and he was so shocked by the double whammy of learning that his wife was both illegally pregnant and possibly scarpered that he was still in his Concord office, vacillating about what to do.

“He’ll figure something out soon enough,” I opined grimly. “Call a family council of war, most like. I wonder how long it’ll take ’em to think of
me
?”

“Perdita Manion will tell them that you and I went off canoeing together,” Marc said, “and they know I could screen us from farsensing if I wanted to. They can’t automatically assume we’re with Mama—or even that Mama has run away. They certainly won’t do anything to precipitate an official hue and cry. And when I return tomorrow and tell them my story—”

“What story is that, dear?” Teresa asked. She was examining a compact Matsushita woodzapper and its instruction manual with fascination. The ionospheric stars shone above our egg’s dome, and the vicinity display showed no other aircraft closer than ten kloms.

“It was such a hot afternoon,” the boy said, a dreamy expression coming over his face. “Uncle Rogi and I decided to go canoeing on the Connecticut River below Wilder Dam, and we took you along, Mama. Somehow, we capsized in the Hartland rapids. I got a knock on the head. I clung to the overturned canoe, all woozy and witless, while
Uncle Rogi tried to save you. He was very brave. I think I remember both of you saying telepathic prayers at the end.”

“Oh, how sad!” Teresa exclaimed. “And how clever of you, darling.”

My jaw dropped. Good God, was this Marc’s foolproof scheme?

“Somebody’ll find me and the canoe washed up on the shore down around Ascutney early tomorrow morning,” Marc went on. “Too bad they won’t find you two—except for one of Uncle Rogi’s shoes and Mama’s green scarf …”

“Do you really think Paul and Denis are going to fall for this fish story?” I inquired, oozing skepticism. “You won’t be able to coerce
them
like you did that poor girl from Hertz!”

“No,” Marc conceded. “But neither Papa nor Grandpère will be able to prove I’m lying, and my tale will serve as a plausible diplomatic fiction for the family to use, one that will be impossible for any officials of the Magistratum to refute—
unless
they trace this flight. The fact of Mama’s illicit pregnancy will probably come out. If only Grandmère hadn’t told Papa about it! But she did, and he’ll have to satisfy his precious sense of duty … Still, I’m virtually certain that Mama’s supposed death will get Papa and the family off the hook until after the inauguration of the Magnate-Designates in January.”

“But everything really depends on you, doesn’t it,” I pointed out to Marc. “Whether or not you’ll be able to resist the mind-probing of the most powerful human and exotic redactors trying to get at the truth.”

He looked sidelong at me with that strange smile of his. “I’ll resist,” he said. “Count on it.”

We made very good time flying in Canada, with nary a sighting of the Air Patrol. Additional farsensing by Marc of the Remillards back home revealed a good deal of backing and filling going on among Paul and his powerful siblings and the latters’ spouses. There was no firm consensus on whether Teresa had decamped or simply gone off innocently for the day. None of the items Teresa had taken with her were likely to be counted missing by Lucille, so the formidable family matriarch really had only her suspicions to guide
her. Denis, with characteristic intelligence, had undertaken a methodical seekersense dowsing of Hanover and vicinity, searching for the missing woman. I thought this was rather bad news with respect to the canoe-disaster scenario Marc planned to use, since his grandfather was probably the premier aura-scanner of the Human Polity; but the boy only shrugged off my apprehensions.

“If I’m presumably lying unconscious on the banks of the Connecticut while Mama and you have drowned,” he said, “my aura would be diminished to the point of undetectability, and yours would be extinct. It doesn’t matter if Grandpère fails to scan any of us.”

The Vancouver-Williams Lake Vee-route took us almost due north along the valley of the great Fraser River, through a landscape that was, during those years, still fairly well settled by farmers and ranchers. The profligate lumbering operations that had stripped away so much of the Canadian forest earlier in the century were now at an end, and nature was fast reclaiming the remoter parts of the Cariboo and Chilcotin country. As in other marginal parts of the world, many of the people who had struggled here for generations to earn a hardscrabble living had gone away, electing to migrate to the new colonial planets of the Galactic Milieu.

Williams Lake, the terminus of our vectored flight, was then a bush metropolis of ten thousand souls. Here we went first to a hardware store and, using my diminished pocketful of cash, bought items such as wire, nails, spikes, heavy plass sheeting, a couple of lamps that would run off Teresa’s little sealed fusion power supply, lots of heavy-duty rope and cord, duct tape, a portable block-and-tackle thingy called a come-along (the cabin was going to need repairs, your average log weighs upward of 150 kilos, and my PK is weak in the extreme), a Swedish saw as backup to the woodzapper and my two axes (I had neglected to sharpen my own camping saw, as usual, so we had left it behind), three metal buckets, a basin, a chisel, and some wedges. Then we went to a drugstore and got vitamins and Chap Stick and lotion and first-aid supplies and pads for Teresa’s postpartum needs. At the Bay (Hudson’s Bay Company, that is), which Marc was surprised to find looked just like a regular department store, we got ten meters of thick wool duffel cloth, a
bolt of white cotton flannelette for baby things and miscellany, some needles and thread, a big pot, a Dutch oven, and a teakettle. At the liquor store we got six bottles of Lamb’s Navy Rum, 151 proof, for the comfort of the poor bastard (c’est moi!) who would have to do the hewing of wood and drawing of water. That pretty well wound up the equipment list.

We had obtained some freeze-squeeze camping rations at the Denver REI, most notably hamburger, tomato flakes, carrots, green beans, and ten kilos of dried eggs; but the rest of our food was to be purchased at the Williams Lake hypermarket. Our red rhocraft was now pretty well jammed with stuff, and my money was running low, so we were obliged to halve the quantities of staples on my list. I managed to talk Teresa out of “necessities” such as extra-virgin olive oil, canned liver pâté, smoked char, red wine, and chocolate-covered liqueur cranberries. We did get flour, margarine, lard, dried milk, dried peas and beans, white and brown sugar, pasta, oatmeal, dried fruits and mushrooms, instant potatoes, coffee, tea, instant orange juice, and soup mix. We got salt and baking powder and yeast and dried garlic and onions, as well as peppercorns, bay leaves, chili powder, oregano, and a few other herbs and spices. To Teresa’s horror, for she fancied herself a gourmet cook, we got ten kilos of nonperishable Velveeta cheese ragougnasse and a half-case of Spam. We got five kilos of bacon. We got canned Norwegian sardines. We got twelve big Hershey chocolate bars. We got Adolph’s meat tenderizer (for which I would later thank the saints). We got broiler foil and giant degradable plass garbags and soap and toilet paper and four liters of chlorine bleach.

Marc said he would bring more food and supplies to us once the excitement died down—positively before the middle of November, when winter would really begin to set in at our refuge. I told him he damn well better not forget, since the food we had would only feed Teresa and me for about three months.

I had insisted upon one last piece of equipment, and left Marc and Teresa to wait for me in the egg while I went into a sporting goods store to get me a gun. Mind you, I wasn’t really afraid of the mild-mannered denizens of the Reserve; but I was damn near petrified of grizzly bears, the only kind
of wildlife in North America that seems constitutionally unwilling to share the landscape with humanity. I’d read plenty of horror stories about these gigantic brutes, who were mercifully not very common in the lower United States, and I knew that the Canadian Coast Range was crawling with them.

I didn’t want any modern photon weapon, either. No, sir! The best of zappers available to the Earthling general public at that time were apt to be unreliable in foul weather, going plasmatic even in drizzle or ground mist. So I picked out a Winchester Model 70 .30-06 bolt-action rifle with a hooded front bead and adjustable rear sights, and a couple of boxes of ammo, paying for them with almost the last of my Human Polity dollars. In a place like Williams Lake, in those days, nobody thought it was unusual for a person to use cash instead of a credit card for such a purchase, nor was there any kind of a rigamarole about registration or a waiting period. A rifle was just another workaday tool in the Canadian boondocks.

The only firearm I had ever used was Cousin Gerard’s old .22 Mossberg, which my brother Donnie and I had plinked beer cans with when we were eleven. Don had gone on to become an enthusiastic hunter, but I had never killed an animal in my life. (We will draw a veil over my three homicides.) All the same, just hefting that good old classic piece and sighting down the Winchester’s dark steel barrel made me feel all macho and self-confident about surviving winter with a pregnant woman in the midst of a subarctic mountain wilderness.

What a flaming idiot I was.

When we left the town for Nimpo Lake, a tiny resort settlement located just outside the Reserve, it was around 1800 PDT, more than an hour and a half before sunset. The area we flew over now was a high plateau sliced by canyons and dry seasonal watercourses. As we flew west, the rangeland turned into scrubby evergreen forest, and this thickened to clothe low mountains dotted with countless lakes and bogs. On our left hand, rising ever higher toward the south, was the rugged spine of the Coast Range, where many of the peaks topped 3000 meters, and one, Mount Waddington, exceeded 4000.

Some of the wildest and most spectacular scenery in North
America was to be found in the part of British Columbia we were heading into. The Megapod Reserve itself had an area of nearly 2,000,000 hectares and extended from the rain-forested Pacific fjords to the eastern slopes of the Coast Range. There were no towns within its boundaries, no tourist facilities or campsites, no roads or trails. Rhocraft were prohibited from overflying it below an altitude of 20,000 meters. The entire Reserve was ringed with rho-field neutralizing generators that would first give warning, then cause trespassing eggs to be shunted into the arms of the law at Bella Coola. Assorted alarm systems around the Megapod Reserve perimeter were designed to betray unauthorized persons afoot or using ground transport who might disturb the rare creatures for whom the Reserve had been dedicated.

Gigantopithecus megapodes.

Called Toki-Mussi, Soquiam, Sosskwatl, and Sasquatch by Native Americans; known to the Tibetans as Mi-Gö and to other peoples of the Himalaya as Yeti; named Jen-Hsüen in China, Almas in Mongolia, Ban Manas in northern India, Abanauayu in the Abkhazian Caucasus, and Gul’-biyavan in the Pamir Range, the animals had long been considered to be legendary. The scientists of the Soviet Union, who captured the first living specimen in the high Tien Shan, called it Snezhniy Chelovik, the Snowman. The Canadian biologists who discovered a relict North American breeding band of the huge pongids in a remote valley west of Mount Jacobsen in British Columbia referred to them by the traditional name of Bigfoot and established the first refuge.

After the Intervention, the entire surviving world population of Gigantopithecus, thirty-eight males and twenty-six females, was tracked down by metapsychic means and resettled in the expanded B.C. Megapod Reserve. By 2043, the year of my own clandestine visit, the number of Bigfeet had increased to nearly two hundred, and they were designated as a Galactic Treasure. The giant apes throve in the remote wilderness of the Reserve with the barest minimum of human contact. According to law, only scientists and the trained foresters who tended to the propagation of the native flora and the regulation of other animals indigenous to the Reserve were permitted access. Casual entry by the vulgar citizenry was strictly prohibited.

But there were ways.

I had become interested in the Bigfoot a decade or so before, as a result of acquiring an estate collection of books on the subject. In the course of my advertising the collection for sale, I corresponded with a man named Bill Parmentier, a devoted Bigfoot buff who operated a little fishing and hunting resort on Nimpo Lake. The countryside thereabouts had been reputed to be the stamping grounds of the fabulous Sasquatch since before the arrival of the white man. Bill Parmentier’s forebears had claimed many times to have sighted the elusive giant apes—only to be derided as superstitious stump-jumpers by more sophisticated British Columbians. But eventually vindication came. In his videograms to me, Bill displayed interesting family relics: underexposed old photos of strange footprints; people posed beside trees, indicating just how tall a Bigfoot they were sure they’d seen; and even a picture of a tuft of reddish hair, allegedly from a Sasquatch, that had been handed down from a relative who had had the shit scared out of him one day in 1936 while logging in the Bella Coola River Valley.