Jack the Bodiless (Galactic Milieu Trilogy) (16 page)

I was whistling as I made my way back to the cabin site in the fast-fading twilight, heading for the shore trail to call Teresa. I could see her down below. And I thought: Tonnerre de dieu! The dear girl has actually thought to do something useful! She had gone a few meters to the outflow of Megapod Creek, where there was a clear dark pool uncontaminated by the floury glacial silt, and was kneeling there filling one of our collapsible 19-liter water containers.

Teresa stood up and turned again toward Mount Remillard, now a black silhouette against the purplish western sky. A light breeze had begun to blow, and there was a scent of evergreen resin and distant snow. The evening-star planet shone with uncanny brilliance in the pure cold air.

And Teresa sang to it.

I stood rooted to the spot, unbelieving. The voice that had supposedly been lost forever soared once again with the old
magical richness that had enchanted audiences across the inhabited Galaxy. She sang to the star and to her child, and a flash of premonition chilled me at the same time that the beauty of the music wrung my heart.

Oh, Teresa. Let me be able to save you. Save both of you …

The cold wind strengthened and the song soon came to an end. She began to look about anxiously, and so I hurried down to her, sending on my farspoken reassurance that everything was ready for the night.

T
HE CONSPIRACY THAT EVENTUALLY LED TO HUMANITY’S
Metapsychic Rebellion was a long time germinating.

For more than thirty Earth years there were only two rebels: the Soviet-born Anna Gawrys-Sakhvadze, a professor of physics at the Institute for Dynamic-Field Studies at Cambridge, and her sometime lover and colleague, Owen Blanchard, an American who eventually emigrated to the planet Assawompsett and became the first President of its renowned Academy of Commercial Astrogation.

In the twenty years that Anna and Owen were together at Cambridge, the inevitable subject of their pillow talk concerned the cowardly way in which their fellow Earthlings had surrendered their birthright of freedom to the benevolent despotism of the Galactic Milieu. Throughout many a long English night, after they had satisfied the demands of their bodies, the couple debated, analyzed, and ultimately
condemned the Great Intervention of the Galactic Milieu as an immoral piece of meddling in the evolution of a sovereign race. By invading our planet in 2013 and thrusting Earth compulsively into their advanced civilization, the Milieu had violated some of the most fundamental tenets of human freedom. The Simbiari Proctors, who acted as agents of the other four nonhuman races during the long “educational” years that preceded our attainment of full Milieu citizenship, had severely restricted humanity’s intellectual freedom, religious freedom, reproductive freedom, media freedom, educational freedom, and freedom of choice in matters of lifestyle and domicile. They had made a mockery of habeas corpus and the right to mental privacy. They had seduced human youth with visions of high technology and new worlds to win. They had virtually enslaved human metapsychic operants (Anna and Owen both had exceptionally high mindpowers) by limiting their career choices and by attempting to manipulate their motivation and loyalty. And always, lurking in the future when the number of living human minds attained a certain mystical “coadunate number,” was the inevitable time when all human operants would be inducted into a mysterious mental state called the Unity, which a good many psychologists and theologians feared would submerge human individuality in a Cosmic Overmind.

I myself still shrink away from Unity four decades after the fact; but I am the perennial outsider, the last of the Metapsychic Rebels, too feeble a mentality to threaten the Milieu. And so I have been left in peace, granted immunity by the capricious Lylmik I call le Fantôme Familier, as a reward for serving as a cat’s-paw …

From the earliest years of her academic career, Anna Gawrys-Sakhvadze had been happy enough studying the permutations of sigma-fields at Cambridge, which probably boasted more operants on its faculty than any other human university. But Owen Blanchard had been a promising concert violinist at the time of the Intervention, and the Simbiari testing program that had uncovered his coercive and creative metafunctions also decreed that he renounce music in favor of dynamic-field physics, a science vital to the entry of the Human Polity into full citizenship in the Milieu. In those early Proctorship days, Earth needed all the high-wattage brainpower that it could get. So Owen bowed to the
inevitable and even came to enjoy designing hyperspatial drive mechanisms and then supervising the Department of Upsilon Studies. But when he played his violin for Anna, his resentment of the Milieu, and especially of the nonhuman Simbiari Proctors who had denied him the life he had chosen, gave his performance a fire that was almost diabolical.

At the time when circumstances eventually parted the couple, they knew that their treasonous opinions were held by few other metapsychic operants of importance. Open opposition to the Galactic Milieu was futile; operants did not even have the dubious option of escaping the twenty-first century through the time-gate invented by the eccentric Frenchman Théo Guderian, as “normal” humans did. If operants bowed to the Milieu’s yoke, they might prosper and ascend to positions of honor and responsibility, while resistance to the dictates of the Simbiari Proctors brought professional disgrace, the ignominy of “open incarceration,” or even the death penalty for sedition.

“We are two lonely rebels,” Anna whispered when she kissed Owen goodbye at the Unst Spaceport. “But let us not give up hope completely. As the end of the Proctorship nears, humans may once again remember the nobility of self-determination. I shall keep a cautious eye out for other operants who share our beliefs, and you must do the same. Humanity can be free again, and it may be that you and I are destined to play a role in bringing about that freedom.”

Deep in his heart, Owen Blanchard thought her dream of rebellion was hopeless. Once he reached the exuberant new planet he had been assigned to and became absorbed in the affairs of the fast-growing academy, he had no time for idealistic brooding. He worked hard building his institution into the best school for superluminal starship personnel in the Human Polity, he married and fathered two sons, and he nearly forgot Professor Anna Gawrys-Sakhvadze of Cambridge University.

Until he met Ragnar Gathen in 2050.

Gathen was a senior captain in the Civil Interstellar Force, the closest thing to a military space fleet that the Human Polity boasted during the years of the Proctorship. Sheer serendipity seated the two men side by side at a performance of
William Tell
, that operatic tribute to Swiss liberty. Between the acts, over drinks, Blanchard and Ragnar Gathen discovered they were both in their secret hearts
rebels against the Galactic Milieu, both operants with growing political influence, and both likely to be nominated Magnates of the Concilium in two years, when the hated Simbiari Proctors finally stepped down and the Human Polity took control of its own destiny.

After assuring himself of Ragnar’s sincerity by means of a mind-probe, to which the other man willingly submitted, Owen introduced him to Anna, who also anticipated being nominated as a magnate. Anna saw interesting possibilities in the new recruit, and he visited her often when he was on Earth.

Ragnar introduced his sister Oljanna, a spaceliner captain who shared his rebellious sentiments, to Anna’s nephew Alan Sakhvadze, who was similarly inclined. The young people promptly fell in love and were eventually married.

Alan Sakhvadze, who also worked at the Institute for Dynamic-Field Studies, in a different department from Anna’s, was a close friend and colleague of his cousin Will MacGregor. Eventually he converted Will to the anti-Milieu point of view, bringing the number of rebels to six. Neither young man was magnate material. But Will’s father, Davy MacGregor, the son of the metapsychic pioneer Jamie MacGregor and an administrator of the European Intendancy, was. His metafaculties were so extraordinary that he was considered the only serious rival to Paul Remillard for the post of First Magnate.

Will was certain that his father entertained serious philosophical doubts about the mysterious concept of Unity, which the operants of the Human Polity would eventually be obliged to embrace. Whether Davy’s doubts might lead him to repudiate the Milieu was problematical. No member of the cabal possessed the mental firepower to undertake a coercive-redactive mental examination of the great Davy MacGregor. If he was to be brought into the group, it would have to be accomplished by more subtle means.

Anna nevertheless found the conjecture about Davy very interesting, as did Owen and Ragnar. Three—possibly four—Magnate-Designates were strongly opposed to the exotic domination of humanity! Might there be other potential rebels among the nominees?

She herself knew of two possibilities. Jordan Kramer was a stalwart twenty-four-year-old psychophysicist and Magnate-Designate who worked both at Cambridge and at a
research facility on Okanagon. Gerrit Van Wyk, a year older, was probably the most brilliant cerebroenergetic specialist in the Polity. Unfortunately, he was also a very low-powered operant and a notorious lush; in addition, he had a face like a frog and possessed a querulous and eccentric personality. The Milieu nominated him to the Concilium anyhow.

After the most delicate kind of backing and filling, the suspect pair were maneuvered into situations where Owen, the most powerful coercer in the group, could forcibly probe their minds. When the indignation of the probees subsided, they allowed themselves to be recruited, and subsequently indicated to the group that they were at work upon a revolutionary kind of psychoassay device that might ultimately be very valuable—or very dangerous—to the cause of human freedom.

The mind-reaming of the unlovable Van Wyk brought unexpected bonuses. He knew of two other highly placed operants with seditious propensities and suspected that a third might also be a closet rebel. The first was none other than the famous Hiroshi Kodama, Intendant Associate for Asia. The second was also an Associate, in the European Intendancy. Her name was Cordelia Warszawska, and she was a prominent xenologist at the University of Cracow as well as a skillful politician … and a platonic friend of Davy MacGregor’s.

The third suspect dredged from Van Wyk’s quivering psyche was so unexpected and outrageous that no member of the little group would have dreamed of attempting to sound him out. His recruitment would have to be postponed until after the Magistratum withdrew its surveillance from him, since he was not only a Magnate-Designate but also a suspect in a murder investigation.

His name was Adrien Remillard.

T
HE
I
NTENDANT
A
SSOCIATE FOR
A
SIA LOOKED OUT OVER THE
breathtaking view from the balcony of the summerhouse. The tray in his hands with its pitcher of beer and earthenware mugs was forgotten.

“Taihen utsukushii desu!” he exclaimed, and Inga Johansen came hurrying out from the kitchen to see what might be wrong.

“What is it, Mister—I mean,
Citizen
Kodama?” Like most Norwegians of the older generation, she had spoken English as a second language from childhood, so the Standard English prescribed by the Simbiari as the official Earth tongue had been no hardship for her.

Japanese was the second language of thirty-seven-year-old Hiroshi Kodama.

“Nothing at all. I beg your pardon for startling you, Fru Johansen.” Hiroshi set down the tray on the heavily laden dinner table with an apologetic little laugh. “It was only this gorgeous vista of the fjord and the harbor below that suddenly struck me. When I arrived yesterday in the rain I never dreamed that you lived amid such splendor! The awesome gray cliffs so lightly touched with green, the water, such an incredibly luminous shade of aquamarine blue, the small white boats dotted about it like gulls. And the exquisite houses, so vivid a scarlet, with their somber black roofs.”

“They are the rorbuer, the old fishermen’s shanties that are rented out to vacationers. The cheerful color is traditional.
Our islands are not always as sunny as you see them today.”

She carried a bottle of aquavit that had been frozen into a block of ice and set it down beside a salver of tiny glasses. There would be toasts on this very special occasion. When her grandson had called her at her apartment in Trondheim, asking if he might borrow the ancestral home on remote Flakstad Island above the Arctic Circle for a get-together of his friends, the old lady had said, “Only if you let me cook you good Norwegian food!” Ragnar Gathen had laughed and agreed. She was a nonoperant, and all of their discussions would be in mental speech, so why not? He himself had not been to the house in Nusfjord since he was a boy; but when Owen asked him if he knew of an out-of-the-way place for the first “official” meeting of the rebel group, Bestemor Inga’s summer place had come immediately to mind. The abrupt pull of nostalgia for the beautiful old fishing village, which he had not seen in eighteen years, also helped cement Ragnar’s decision. He was American-born, and the planet Assawompsett, where he had lived most of his life, was a thriving and attractive world; but something deep in his bones insisted that Norway was his true home.

Fru Johansen now surveyed the table, hands on hips. She was a round-cheeked woman with white hair, and to honor her grandson and his important guests she wore the traditional costume of her birthplace in Trøndelag: a long dark skirt with a brocaded apron of green and gold, a red brocade bodice with a peplum, held together at the waist with silver clasps, and a white embroidered blouse adorned with two large silver rosesøljer, brooches with many glittering little concave bangles.