Jack the Bodiless (Galactic Milieu Trilogy) (3 page)

And suddenly the
real
nightmare takes charge.

No eyes. Only a void, a starless darkness that is somehow alive with fearsome knowledge. My dream races on, and Teresa and young Marc are gone. There is only a pathetic little child shackled to complex life-supportive equipment, and while I watch in horror, his human form begins to disintegrate.

I try to tear my gaze away from the awful sight, but I cannot. Faster and faster, the self-destructive process programmed by his own body proceeds.

The child’s despairing mother blames her own hubris for his suffering. His father, Paul, countering his own pain with clinical detachment, finds the disincarnation bleakly fascinating. Marc sees his first glimpse of Mental Man. Denis Remillard and Colette Roy and the other scientists of the Human Polity call the child a prochronistic mutant, an anomaly born out of proper time, too early in the scheme of biological evolution, a throw-forward in the pattern of orderly human development. Four of the exotic races of the Galactic Milieu, pitying, call the little boy pathetic and doomed. The enigmatic Lylmik refuse to discuss his case at all, except for flatly prohibiting his euthanasia.

In the dream, my mind is shrieking: No no Ti-Jean no God no how can you let his body die while his brain lives the brain the wonderful potent superbrain God why why—

Then I see the brain naked.

I plead: Let it die too let the poor thing die stop the machines the genetic engineering attempts the futile meddling let him go in peace let him go!

A monster that does not know its self sees the brain as the Great Enemy, and in a cataract of flame the machines are stopped.

I hear the laughter of the dead fiend again as Victor savors the hideous irony of the situation. For the brain that is Jack the Bodiless does
not
die, but lives. Impossibly, it lives, impervious, sustaining itself in some arcane psychoredactive fashion, nourished by the atmosphere and by photons, enduring and adapting and learning and growing in wisdom and grace and dieu de dieu I am so afraid of it paralyzed with dread even as it tries to reassure me and in my dream I call its name:

Ti-Jean! Jack!

This horrifying mutant, this
thing
, is still my dear little great-grandnephew Jon Remillard, a brilliant and vibrant little human person only three years old, trapped in 1.7 kilograms of unsupported humanoid encephalic protoplasm.

None of Jack’s eventual triumph penetrates my nightmare. I know only my own fear and revulsion and a demonic whisper:
Who will be the next to disincarnate? Perhaps you, Rogi?…

Then Marc is at my side again, much older. This time his dark armor is the glistening wet body-monitoring coverall of a cerebroenergetic enhancer, the perilous mind-boosting device outlawed by the Galactic Milieu. Marc studies the bodiless thing that is his mutant brother with open admiration. And a paradoxical envy.

I see a warning reflected from eyeless depths, and Marc sees it, too.

Jack’s mind tells us: No. Human is better. For you, Marc. For all of you.

Marc smiles and shakes his head, denying. Mental Man is the inevitable, the culmination of all rational being—and there is no need to wait upon evolution’s laggard pace for His coming. He can be summoned—

Suddenly I see three persons suspended in interstellar space: a faceless woman clad in a suit of diamonds, a blazing plasma that enfolds the first Mental Man, and a black armored shape leading an interstellar armada in opposition to the other two. The Metapsychic Rebellion of humanity against the Galactic Milieu has begun.

At my dream’s climax, a blue-and-white planet explodes,
haloed by a mass death-shout. And in that terrible moment the Galactic Milieu, the benevolent confederation that saved the human race from its own folly and gave us the stars as a playground, itself begins to die …

The dream always ends at this point, before the final resolution, and I return to consciousness freezing and paralyzed, with a half-strangled scream caught in my throat.

Peace! T’en fais pas, Rogi! Calm yourself and relax. It all happened long ago, and now at last in the writing of this personal chronicle you have a way of exorcising the nightmare once and for all.

Perhaps you already know me from the introductory volume of these Memoirs. If you do not, let me introduce myself briefly. My name is Rogatien Remillard, and I am sometimes called Roger but more often simply Uncle Rogi (pronounced, appropriately enough, as “rogue he”) by those who find my Christian name impossibly ethnic. It is of French origin, and the Remillards are a sizable family who originally were colonists in Quebec and later migrated to the northeastern United States, where there was a large but unobtrusive Franco-American population.

I have for most of my life been a bookseller in the college town of Hanover, New Hampshire. I have a small antiquarian bookshop, The Eloquent Page, where rare old twentieth-century fantasy and science fiction books printed on carefully conserved paper are offered to connoisseurs at atrocious prices. Although I belong to a family of acknowledged mental giants, my own intellectual and metapsychic functions are meager. This has not prevented me from being caught up in the chequered careers of my more illustrious relatives. On the contrary, I have played at times a rather significant role in the family’s machinations—something that Milieu historians have seen fit to ignore—and I have witnessed from my worm’s-eye view the rise and fall of many a Galactic worthy and villain, including two saints and one notorious individual whose misdeeds were so appalling that he was known as the Angel of the Abyss.

I have never married, but I have loved unwisely several times. I have faced imminent death on quite a few occasions and survived through improbable happenstance. I have killed three persons in cold blood, even though I am the
most easygoing and peaceable of men, and one of them was a person I loved deeply.

My fraternal twin brother, Donatien, and I were born in the year 1945, in the New England mill town of Berlin, New Hampshire. Our young father had already been killed during World War II, and our mother died giving birth to us, so we orphans were raised by our kindly aunt and uncle, who had six children of their own.

But no members of the Remillard clan except my brother and I had the “immortality” genes, whose existence was not confirmed until after the Intervention, nor did they possess the genes for higher mindpowers. (It was many years before my twin brother and I discovered that we were not unique in our metapsychic operancy.) How we two responded to our more frightening metafunctions is a story that I have already related at some length. In brief, I learned to live with such powers as telepathy, psychokinesis, and metacoercion, while Don was ultimately destroyed by them, tragically killed when he was only forty-four.

I was rendered sterile by a childhood illness. Don had ten offspring, and all of them inherited the genes for high metafunction and self-rejuvenation; but only the two oldest children were able to utilize their extraordinary mindpowers. Circumstances made Don’s oldest child, Denis, become a foster son to me; and it was he who founded with his operant wife Lucille Cartier the so-called Remillard Dynasty, which eventually included many of the most powerful minds the human race has ever known. Don’s second son, Victor, was not as intellectually brilliant as his older brother; but his metapsychic mindpowers were probably even more formidable, and he used them ruthlessly for his own self-aggrandizement until he was finally struck down, immediately prior to the Great Intervention, either by me or by the mysterious being I had learned to call the Family Ghost.

From time to time, especially when I am drunk and morose and seized with that melancholy feeling of inescapable doom that francophones call malheur, I have been tempted to believe that the Family Ghost is nothing more than a construct of my own imagination. But if that is true, then by default
I
am responsible not only for the Great Intervention but for the Metapsychic Rebellion as well, and ultimately for the even more momentous events that came afterward, bringing the long story full cycle.

But that would be too farfetched a practical joke, even for le bon dieu, who is so full of them.

So let me begin this Galactic Milieu Trilogy without further maunderings, first with a retrospective.

R
OGI DROVE INTO THE TOWN OF HIS BIRTH LATE ON A DREARY
spring afternoon, bringing Teresa and little Marc with him from Hanover, as he had been instructed to. Wrathful and profane protests to the contrary had got Rogi nowhere: Paul had been adamant. This time Rogi, too, would come to Berlin and participate in the annual ritual because Denis had insisted upon it. And that was that.

It always seemed to rain on Good Friday, but at least this year the rain was warm, and it was making short work of the remnant patches of street ice and the old gray mounds of snow that still lay about in the sun-starved nooks of town. By Easter, Rogi told himself subvocally, Berlin would be nearly washed clean. The pussy willows in the gardens along the Androscoggin River, where the smoke-belching paper mills once stood, would have snowdrops and blue Siberian squill and pink hellebore blooming beneath them, and the first robins would sing in the budding sugar maples, and the townsfolk in their Easter finery would stroll the riverside paths.

And with luck, before
next
Easter, Vic would be dead.

“Why will that be good?” Marc piped up. “Who is Vic, Uncle Rogi? And why will it be a good thing for him to die?”

“Oh, merde et puis merde,” Rogi muttered.

Teresa said: Rogi for heaven’s sake!

Secure in his little car seat in the back of the big Lincoln
groundcar, the child turned from his interested scrutiny of the town to attack his great-granduncle with a precocious mental probe that made Rogi yelp with sudden pain. Marc’s chubby face reflected in the rearview mirror revealed nothing but solemn curiosity, and his own mind was guarded with its usual indomitable screen. He was two years old.

Marc stop that!
Teresa said.

“Yes, Mama,” said the boy. The probe withdrew almost as quickly as it had penetrated, leaving only a lingering ache behind Rogi’s eyes. But the cute little tyke had nearly mind-sucked him like a plass pouch of orange juice.

“Shame on you for invading Uncle Rogi. I want you to apologize!” Teresa’s uneasiness, which she had carefully concealed during the hour-long drive from Hanover, now tinged the exasperation that she projected to the old man on his intimate mode:

For the love of God Rogi can’t you control yourself for my sake and Marc’s if not for common decency?

The two-year-old said, “I’m sorry, Uncle Rogi.”

“You’re forgiven,” the old man said. And then to Teresa: Once we get to Vic’s house the kid will read the whole family like billboards no matter how they try to screen Denis is an integral
idiot
asking you to bring Marc along to this damned charade does he actually intend to use this
baby
in a metaconcert forchrissake and whatthehell good is a lowwatt mind like mine the whole goddamn thing is a farce a sop to Denis’s guilt the lot of you should have put an end to it years ago and Paul should have more sense than to upset you in your condition—

Marc asked, “Does Uncle Rogi think making this Vic dead will hurt you and Maddy, Mama?”

“No, dear. Not at all. I’m fine, and so is Maddy, safe inside me.” Rogi TRY to stay more securely on the intimate mode! Better yet think of something else like watching where you’re going if you insist on driving manually. Look isn’t this High Street where we turn? “Marc, dear, you’ve misunderstood Uncle Rogi’s thought. The Vic he was thinking about is Victor Remillard, who is Grandpère’s brother. We’re going to see him and pray for him. Victor is very, very sick. He’s been sick for nearly twenty-seven years, ever since the Great Intervention.”

The small boy was prodding and thrusting now at his mother’s mental shield, as a frustrated kitten scratches at a
closed door. But there was no easy way through the maternal barricade; nature, compassionate of metaphysically operant parents, had rendered most of them proof against the onslaughts of their loving offspring.

“But why should Vic be made dead? Open to me, Mama, so I can understand better! I
want
to understand. Being dead is bad, isn’t it? How can it be good for Vic?”

“Dear, stop poking at me. How many times must I tell you to respect the integrity of other minds? And you must call him Granduncle Victor, not Vic. Politesse, dear, always!… When a person is very sick and unable to get well, it’s usually better for him to die and go to heaven rather than live on and suffer.”

Rogi uttered a short, explosive laugh. “Heaven! That’s rich.”

Teresa said calmly to the child, “Uncle Rogi is being ironic, Marc. Do you remember what irony is?”

“Yes, Mama. But I’d rather discuss death with you now, please.”

“There isn’t much time, but I’ll do my best, dear.”

Rogi had slowed the car as they drove through the central district of Berlin. The town had undergone great change since the last time he had been here, and now seemed gussied up and gentrified almost beyond recognition. The older buildings that were worth rehabilitating had been expertly restored and framed in plantings, and the new structures looked as though they had stood there from time immemorial, mellowing gracefully. There were small parks at every other block, quaint wrought-iron streetlamps already glowing against the early dusk, even though it was still two hours until sunset, and not a trace of shabbiness was anywhere to be seen. Even in the pouring rain the old cottages and frame apartments of the core residential area seemed to glow in their coats of fresh paint, many done in classic New England white with dark shutters, while others sported the cheerful ice cream colors traditional to southern Quebec.

Teresa continued in her attempt to explain mortality to the child. The tiny head with its thick mass of black ringlets had lowered as she spoke, apparently in obedient concentration. But all at once Rogi felt Marc renewing his quest for more interesting data, drilling into his own all-too-vulnerable cortex. Rogi exerted all of his adult coercion to fend off the infantile probing, addressing the boy with considerable
precision on the intimate mode so that Teresa would have no hint of what he said: