Jack the Bodiless (Galactic Milieu Trilogy) (15 page)

The exotics in Concilium Orb were apparently willing to sacrifice the McAllister-Remillard research partnership for some nebulous greater good, but Cat was not. Late yesterday afternoon, she had notified both the Intendant Assembly in Concord and the Concilium that she was turning down the magnateship. Her decision had caused a sensation.

There was going to be a high old family row, of course. To postpone it and to shore up resolution (and ostensibly to celebrate her birthday), Cat and Brett had fled their research establishment in the capital of Earth and egged to the beachfront mansion in Rye that was the summer home of Cat’s younger brother Adrien and his wife, the sculptor Cheri Losier-Drake.

This grandiose old place, which was only half a klom down the beach from the more modest summer home of
Denis Remillard and Lucille Cartier, had been in the Drake family for generations, its twenty rooms rendering it a conspicuous white elephant. But all that had changed when Cheri married one of the distinguished offspring of Denis and Lucille. She and Adrien had six children, and Cheri would eventually acquire a horde of operant nieces and nephews that numbered more than thirty. Fortunately, she was a warmhearted child-nurturer and an enthusiastic hostess who championed tribal conviviality, with the result that from late May until September, the enormous carpenter-Gothic house on the beach was almost always full of youthful guests, and Cheri got very little sculpting done. Professional parents would show up when their work permitted, and other relatives were encouraged to join the mob scene for parties, particularly the annual Fourth of July beach picnic and the Labor Day crab-and-lobster feast that traditionally closed the summer season.

Cat and Brett, whose four children were close in age to those of Adrien and Cheri, kept a modified Dutch trawler named Doolittle at the Rye Harbor Yacht Club, less than a kilometer south of the big beach house. Other family boaters—especially Paul, with his splendid Nicholson ketch, and Anne, who had spent the day racing in her Swan—sneered at the modest McAllister stinkpot. But Brett and Cat had no love for the hard physical labor of sailboating. Putting about in Doolittle was soothing. The fact that the trawler had lately become too small to accommodate their four growing children also suited Brett and Cat just fine …

When they were gravity-bound on the deck again, he gently untangled himself from her hair. “There’s sure to be a certain amount of family hell to pay over your decision, Cat. But eventually they’ll come around. Even Paul. Every operant educator in the Polity appreciates the importance of our work. And no one but you is even remotely competent to evaluate the configurations of our pilot secondary-level project.”

She nuzzled his ear. “There’s no one else who can make sense of your redactive programming gestalts, you mean. My genius lies in converting
yours
to practical application.”

“We’re still more than a year away from getting the ultimate refinements really nailed down. But when it’s finally ready, millions of kids with latent metapsychic talents will
be unblocked and freed to use their higher mindpowers. Kids who would otherwise have been condemned to a lifetime of normalcy—”

Abruptly, she sat up. “Brett, you know we mustn’t speak of it like that.” Mustn’t even
think
about it that way even though we Truepeople know we are the chosen the elite the future the heirs and successors to poor normal humanity God maybe that’s why I feel our project is so urgent even more urgent than finally admitting humanity to the Galactic Concilium the division the gulf between Operant and Non
must
be bridged and as soon as possible for our sakes as well as theirs—

“It will be,” he soothed her, speaking aloud.

I didn’t tell you because there were so many other things on my mind but that wretched Gordo
still
has the metabigot complex encysted I didn’t excise it after all the miserable boy simply pulled the wool over the mind of his own shrink-mother!

Brett laughed. He got up and began pulling on his dungarees. A chill breeze had sprung up, and he handed Cat a velour robe. “Gordo’s eleven. Perhaps it’s time for old Dad to take over his civilizing. With sterner therapy measures.”

“Well, we might do well to consider it. Lately, I just can’t seem to get through to the child.”

Brett said: Don’t fret. Not about the world’s kids. Not about ours. For now just think of the loving.

She began braiding the extraordinary hair into a single thick plait. Her voice was low, her thought flavor bittersweet. “I do think of it. Of you and me together. Always.” And I want it to go on forever and to hell with our responsibilities to operant humanity to hell with the aspiring normals and the arrogant exotics and everything and everyone except you and me and the sea. And stars that are nothing but little lights in the sky—

“Shush. You know you don’t mean that.”

He swept her into his arms and kissed her one last time, and then they went into the pilothouse and started the engine of the white trawler and headed back to the harbor.

The Hydra skulked among the mooring slips of the yacht club, hiding behind a big garbage dumpster until Doolittle was finally docked among the gaggle of Remillard sailboats,
a sturdy snow goose awkward in the company of sleek terns and frigate birds.

Waiting.

Waiting.

Then it was time! Nobody awake on any of the other boats, and the watchman safe in his cubicle watching a porno video and beating off.

Yes Fury. [Stumble.]
Shit!
[Terrorexasperation—]

Nopleaseno look nobody noticed it’s allright—

Begin at the top of the head …>

Catherine Remillard awoke at dawn, cold and aching and faintly nauseated, hearing the gentle slap of wavelets against the trawler’s hull and the voices of three fishermen up on the dock quarreling about the quality of the day’s bait. She was lying uncovered on one of the bunks. Her skull was splitting. How very odd!

In the way of metapsychic spouses, she cast about for her husband’s aura, but he was apparently nowhere nearby. She swore mildly, got up, and secured warmer clothing from a locker. After she had dressed, she went forward to the pilothouse.

And found Brett lying there. And screamed.

He was facedown, and his dungarees and jersey had been burned from his body. Most of the skin was charred and cracked, revealing a terrible red moistness beneath. Along the spine and the back of his neck and head the burning had been deeper, blacker. But along his body’s dorsal midline there were seven curious white areas, patches of ash about the size of a palmprint, each one having the distinct outline of a different intricately drawn multipetaled flower.

Catherine Remillard’s mind was lost to rational thought, and she did not really notice the patterns. She only screamed
again and again and again, and the three fishermen came running, and the watchman, and eventually the Rye Township Police.

The Hydra was back in bed long before then, sleeping and sated and out of Fury’s reach.

T
ERESA AND
I
STOOD ON THE TINY ROCKY BEACH OF
A
PE
Lake, surrounded by our collection of duffel bags and boxes, which now seemed very meager indeed. We watched the De Havilland Beaver disappear behind a wooded slope above Ape Creek, which drained the lake at its eastern end. When the buzz of the aeroplane engine finally cut off, I had to bolster my emotional screen to prevent Teresa from detecting the sudden panic that washed over me. I was no longer concerned about Paul or the Magistratum tracking us down; what frightened me was the isolation of this place, and the responsibility I had assumed by agreeing to hide here in the wilderness with an inexperienced, mentally unstable woman, who harbored in her womb a child marked for some awful Galactic destiny.

Forcing myself to concentrate on practicalities, I began to move our supplies off the exposed beach and into a patch of shrubbery, where they would be hidden from aerial observation.

The sky was indigo, except for a residual carmine radiance at the opposite end of the four-kilometer lake, where the sun had gone down behind the heavily glaciated crags of
what would one day be called Mount Remillard. A single bright planet hung above the mountain’s shoulder. The lake waters were pale opal blue, ruffled by the floatplane’s dissipating wake. Across the water was a steep 1800-meter ridge that connected two anonymous peaks that I later christened Mount Mutt and Mount Jeff. This precipitous opposite shore was thickly forested with spruce and whitebark pine in its lower reaches and had sparse patches of dwarfed and battered krummholz trees and tundra vegetation at the higher elevations. Tree level at this latitude was about 1500 meters, but much of the lakeshore at the western end was barren moraine or ice-scoured rock. An arm of the huge Fyles Glacier formed a natural dam at that end of the basin, and small icebergs that had calved off its face were white specks on the distant waters.

Behind us little Megapod Creek chuckled as it flowed down from another ominous hanging glacier that nearly hid Mount Jacobsen; only the hulking summit of this peak, more than 3000 meters high, was visible. To the south, a delicate pink afterglow tinged snowfields covering Talchako Mountain, which was even higher than Jacobsen. We seemed completely hemmed by ramparts of rock and ice, alone in a secret oasis of alpine forest and high meadows, where the last flowers of summer still bloomed and milky water lapped the lichen-crusted boulders at our feet.

Teresa said, “How lovely.” Her mind was smiling.

“It is that.” I was casting about with my inefficient seekersense. “Uh—do you detect any critters?”

She sat down on one of the supply boxes, eyes shut, and concentrated. “Birds,” she whispered. “Something small up the slope, among the trees. It may be a hare or a marmot.”

“No Bigfeet? No bears?”

“No … Rogi, may I just sit here for a moment? I want to describe the place to Jack. He’s very interested.”

And something seemed to say:
Yes
.

I felt the hairs creep at the back of my neck and ventured a telepathic query: Baby? Jack? Is that you?

There was no response. Teresa had become pensive and inaccessible, and the baby’s thoughts—if I hadn’t imagined them—were doubtless linked to hers.

I picked up the duffel that held our sleeping bags, my little old dome tent, and the necessities I had set aside for our first night in the wilds. It was going to be dark soon, and the
beach was too narrow and rocky to camp on. I decided to take a look at the cabin site, which was up the slope. From the air, the log structure had seemed much more dilapidated than I had remembered from my visit of eight years earlier. I thought I might as well find out the bad news right away.

I climbed up a dim trail that angled off to the right of the creek through a tangle of stunted mountain hemlock and Englemann spruce. The way was steep but short, and I came almost at once to a reasonably level little bowl-shaped clearing, where the log cabin stood.

The structure had originally been erected on a 4.5-meter-square foundation of cemented fieldstones, with a small set of concrete steps leading to the east-facing front door. The four walls remained more or less intact, although in places the cement chinking between the logs had fallen out. The north-side window from which I had watched the Sasquatch family still had glass. The pole roof had collapsed from the weight of too many winters’ snows, scattering nearly indestructible silvery cedar shakes all over the rotted wood-plank floor.

The cabin interior was a jumble of moss-clad poles and broken rusty stovepipe sections. The crumbling bunks and the other rustic furnishings I remembered had mostly biodegraded into nature’s green maw, but I did spot one corner of the iron stove peeping coyly from beneath a growth of scrubby willow that had made itself at home among the moldering floorboards.

I took a deep breath and told myself there was no reason to panic. I was simply going to have to repair the cabin before the snow flew, using our small stock of tools and whatever information on the subject might be found in our fleck library. I had never constructed anything more elaborate than a predrilled bookcase in my life, but in my veins flowed the blood of voyageurs, coureurs de bois, and ten generations of bushwhacking Franco-Canadians. There was also, in a pinch, the Family Ghost. I would manage.

I found a suitable spot for the tent and wasted no time setting it up and camouflaging it lightly with evergreen branches. Mosquitoes and other biting insects were beginning to home in on me in spite of my metacoercion, and pretty soon it would be impossible even for an operant to move around outdoors without a head net or plenty of insect repellent. There was just room inside the tent for two
people to sit and heat tea water in my little portable microwave, and then doss down in sleeping bags atop inflated Mylar mats.

We would have to leave the rest of the equipment down on the beach for the night, since there was no time to build a cache. But none of the food was open and attractively odoriferous, and the local wildlife would probably take a day or two to move in and check us out. I figured the stuff would probably be safe. I would drape the more brightly colored bundles with my old camouflage tarps, on the off chance that personnel of the Megapod Reserve would fly over.

Only one other necessity required investigation. When I had arranged everything neatly inside the tent, I emerged and prowled slowly along the edge of the clearing farthest from Megapod Creek, looking for another trail that I remembered was somewhere in the vicinity. Sure enough, I found it partially obscured by a fallen snag, which I moved aside. The path wound through the thick growth of krummholz and shrubbery to another tiny clearing—and there fortune (or a certain Lylmik) smiled, and I discovered a roofless but otherwise intact little portable fiberglass latrine hut, of the type used in campgrounds all over North America during the late twentieth century. All I would have to do to put it into operation was dig a fresh pit nearer the cabin, drag it over, and stretch some plass on top to keep out the elements and the bugs.