Jack the Bodiless (Galactic Milieu Trilogy) (52 page)

They said:
Yes SIR Officer Friendly SIR!

Luc’s face was troubled. “Is it hard to kill things, Marco?”

“Not critters like lobsters and crabs. Or worms or bugs or other small things.”

“Have you ever killed anything
big?”

“No,” said Marc brusquely. “Quit being morbid.” He shook out the tarp and folded it. “You want to help? Take this up to the house and put it on the back porch.”

“I could never kill anything. Not even mosquitoes. I just push ’em away.”

“Great, if it makes you happy. Just don’t go pushing ’em at
me.”
Marc started back to the pit, and Luc trailed after. Adrienne was ordering Duggie and Caroline to help her gather up the shellfish baskets and pitchforks and things.

“If a shark came after you, could you kill it, Marco?” Luc asked.

“I don’t know. Sharks are weird. Joe Canaletto told me that if you cut the head off one, the head can still bite.”

Luc shuddered. “There are sharks out there. Everybody says so. I’m never going swimming in the ocean ever again.”

“You don’t have to be afraid. Just keep your farsight alert, and if you see a shark, you just tell it: ‘I’m not good to eat. Go away.’ ”

“That didn’t help those four operants who disappeared,” Luc said dubiously.

“They were swimming or sailing alone and probably not paying attention to what they were doing. Now get along up to the house with that tarp.”

He watched the little boy, pathetically skinny in his bathing trunks, trudge away. Luc would never be physically strong until his body was finally completely restored in the regen-tank, after he reached puberty. And although his mindpowers assayed at the grandmaster level, he was still almost completely unable to utilize them. His early ordeals had turned him into a metapsychic invalid, and it was questionable whether he would ever be raised from latency. Marc wondered whether the same thing would happen to Jack if his genetic flaws resisted therapy.

“Help me take away these gunnysacks the seaweed came in,” Adrienne called.

“Yo,” said Marc. The other two cooks had already gone off with the pitchforks and the empty baskets. The mound above the fire pit now steamed gently, and a young gull poked through scattered bits of leftover seaweed. Adrienne was using a sack to brush sand and bird droppings off the picnic tables. “All we have to do now is take these sacks up and wash them at the pump, and then we’re off duty until the food is cooked.”

“Cosmic,” said Marc. He collected his share of the slimy jute bags, and the two of them headed back through low sand dunes to the huge old gray-and-white shore house. Some of the adults were sitting on the long front veranda,
and as Marc and Adrienne went around to the rear, where the old pump stood on a concrete slab, Teresa waved at them and baby Jack said:
Hi!

In the backyard, which was already deeply shaded from the westering sun, they heard laughter and caught a glimpse of Duggie and Caroline running off into the trees. Caroline was carrying a blanket.

Marc scowled. “Well, now we know how
they
plan to spend the next few hours.” He took hold of the red-painted iron handle and began to pump.

“They’re in love.” Adrienne pulled a sack inside out and held it under the gushing water. “They’ve had a thing going all summer. Most of the older kids know. I’m surprised you don’t.”

“Poor shmucks.”

“I think it’s beautiful! And they’re both sixteen, so they have a perfect right to love each other—”

Marc cut her off with a scornful laugh. “To use each other, you mean. Love! It’s just biology. One set of overactive adolescent gonads calling to another, causing all kinds of complicated emotional shit and grief en route to the propagation of the species.”

“Human love,” Adrienne declared, wringing out a sack, “is noble and sacred. All the philosophers say so.”

“About as sacred as taking a leak! If you want my opinion, Addie, the whole sex thing is a bloody bore and a time-waster. Just think of the famous people—smart people!—throughout history who acted like complete idiots because of sex: Saint Augustine, Mary Queen of Scots, Henry the Eighth, Oscar Wilde, John F. Kennedy, Dr. Louise Randazzo! To say nothing of the millions and millions of men and women who ruined themselves or accomplished nothing in their lives because they were too busy chasing members of the opposite sex, or taking care of one damn baby after another, or working like dogs to support all the children they fathered because they couldn’t keep their paws off their wives … The human race would be better off if we were all cooked up in jars, like the nonborns they’re growing to help populate the colonial planets.”

Adrienne straightened up and glared at him. She was wearing the ridiculous chef’s hat, and her dark hair was sweaty and straggling, and she was sunburned and peeling
slightly on the bridge of her nose. “Is
that
what they taught you at Dartmouth?”

“No,” Marc said archly. “I figured it out for myself, through keen observation and deduction. And what are they teaching you math majors down there at MIT this summer? How to be noble, sacred sexpots?”

“Surely you jest.” Adrienne struck a pose and sang:

Marc howled with laughter, and then he gave the pump handle a mighty thrust, and stuck his hand into the spigot so that she was sprayed with water, and she shrieked and walloped him with a sopping-wet gunnysack, and then they stood there grinning at each other.

“God,” she drawled, “what a pair of superior metapsychic lifeforms we truly are.” She dropped the wet sack and stepped close to him. Her chef’s hat had fallen off. “I’m homely and brilliant, and you’re gorgeous and brilliant, and we’re sweet fourteen and never been kissed … Marco, let’s do it.”

“Good God, no!”

She was laughing, but there was something else lurking behind her eyes. “Think of it,” she said lightly, “as an exercise in empiricism. Or are you afraid to verify your antisexual hypothesis experimentally?”

He stopped smiling. His emotions were barricaded, and his gray eyes were like polished granite. He suddenly took hold of her head in both wet hands and bent over her upturned face. Their lips met and hers were chilled from fear and audacity and his were warm and slightly parted. Both of them still had their eyes wide open, and she felt herself melt as his tongue stole gently through her teeth and then thrust strongly. It seemed that she tasted perfumed honey, and then smoldering musk, and finally the acidic tingle of a Winesap apple, strong enough to make her dizzy, to dissolve all the carefully woven mental screens she had always locked tightly into place whenever she came near him. Her own
eyes closed as the sweet aching wonder began to flood through her; but she still saw Marc and knew that he saw her—body and brain and everything. And knew.

Then they stood awkward and apart, still in their silly aprons, barefooted, their legs and arms all sticky with sand and seaweed slime and bits of cornsilk. He had that maddening little lopsided smile on his face, and his inner self was as impenetrable as ever.

“Addie, you silly broad. You can’t possibly love me. It’s only sex.”

“I never wanted you to know,” she whispered, contrite now for having tricked him. She hesitated. “Didn’t you feel
anything?”

He was silent.

She flung her hands wide in helpless, comical exasperation. “There’s nothing at all I can do about it, Marco. It’s there. Those damned adolescent gonads! But you needn’t worry that I’ll make a dreary mooning pest of myself. No brokenhearted complicated emotional shit. We’ll go on as before. Platonic cousin-pals. Okay?”

“Okay,” he said, grinning at last.

“What about a swim?” she suggested briskly. “We’re both filthy, and at least
one
of us needs cooling off.”

Marc made an almost imperceptible gesture toward the blazing sky. Adrienne looked up and saw a silver rhocraft wafting toward them from the west. “It’s my father,” he said. “I have to see him. I’ll wash off here at the pump.”

“Right. But remember—I want you in the kitchen no later than nineteen hundred hours to help with the salad and peaches. God only knows if those idiots Caroline and Duggie will show up.”

She went running away to the beach then, her unrequited love for Marc once again locked safely away. Flinging the apron onto one of the tables, she sprinted across the hot sand, dived into the breakers, and swam strongly toward deep water.

Much farther out, the catamaran danced on the sparkling waves.

Fury watched from above, watched the swimmer suddenly change direction and head directly for the Hobie Cat in response to the irresistible coercion. The little boat was far
enough offshore that none of the beach loungers was paying any particular attention to it.

Fury told Hydra,

YesyesyesyesYES! I’m so glad the last one will be her. I
hate
her!

It’s allright I can wait I’ll be good I’m getting stronger&-stronger ah Fury it’s
so
good I love you so much and I WILL mature and then it will be Marc’s turn won’t it please won’t it and then I’ll be strong enough strong enough for Jack and all the others …

The traditional American Labor Day holiday was not celebrated in the Galactic Milieu, and the Directorate of the Human Polity of the Concilium had put in a full Monday’s work in Concord. Most of the time had been spent on the final arguments and the voting on the pardon applications of Teresa Kendall and Rogatien Remillard.

Paul was exhausted and dispirited, and if there had been any honorable way that he could have avoided going to the last beach party of the season, he would have stayed in his apartment in the capital. But the final ruling of the Directorate would be reported on the evening news, and he would have to face Teresa and the family eventually anyhow, and so he bit the bullet.

As he guided the silver egg in for a landing behind the big house he perceived Marc waiting for him. That provoked a suppressed subliminal obscenity from the First Magnate, followed by a sense of relief. At least the damned kid was off the hook. The Human Magistratum had accepted without demur Uncle Rogi’s simple statement that he was solely responsible for Teresa’s flight and concealment. It had helped that the media made a hero out of the old man—to say nothing of idolizing Teresa herself. The pair of them were universally regarded as martyrs to human freedom,
and there had been clamorous dismay among the citizenry, both operant and non, when the first attempt at pardoning them fell through.

The PR repercussions of today’s Directorate ruling would cause an even bigger hullabaloo.

Marc, wearing only swim trunks, greeted his father without emotion as he stepped out of the egg. It did Paul no good to erect a thought-screen when that young devil was around—not that the lowliest normal could have failed to read on Paul’s face what the decision had been.

“I’m sorry, son. The Directors voted against pardoning, five to four. I abstained. It would have accomplished nothing to tie the vote and throw the decision onto a vote of the full Concilium.”

“I suppose not.” They walked side by side up the garden path toward the house. Cheri had planted haphazard masses of colorful annuals—zinnias and marigolds and petunias and cosmos—and the flowers were alive with butterflies. “Who were the nay-sayers?” Marc asked.

“Vijaya Mukherjee, the Director for Arts—and I admit that was a nasty surprise. Kwok Zhen-yu, the economics boffin. Rikky Cisneros, who’s a Director at Large. The Colonial Affairs Director, Larry Atlin … and your Aunt Anne.”

“Anne!” Marc stopped in his tracks. “In the Intendant Assembly, she voted to include the pardon rider—and she
said
she’d vote in favor when the petition came before the Directorate.”

“She reviewed her decision when it became very obvious that most of the Directors favoring the pardons were the ones who are—shall we say—the least committed to Human Milieu solidarity.”

Marc pricked up his ears. “Oh? That Russian woman who’s the Science Director? The one who made the speech demanding that more colonial planets be opened for nonoperants?”

Paul nodded. “Anna Gawrys-Sakhvadze. And two other at-large members who are cronies of hers—Hiroshi Kodama and Esi Damatura. Esi always was an anti-Milieu troublemaker in the African Intendancy, and the Asians have a lingering resentment of the fact that such a large percentage of Human Magnates come from the Caucasian and Amerind racial groups. The fourth yes vote came from
Nyssa Holualoa, understandable given her Polynesian descent. In her heart, Nyssa thinks of Teresa as a Hawaiian, not a citizen of the Milieu.”

They went up the side stairs and walked around to the front veranda, where Cheri, Teresa and the baby, Denis, Lucille, and Aurelie Dalembert were sitting.

Jack bounced in his papoose swing. He gurgled and exclaimed: Marc! Take me for a walk along the beach!

“Is it okay?” Marc asked his mother.

“Yes, dear. Just keep his head covered from the sun.”

“Okay, brat! Let’s hike.” The boy detached his swaddled infant brother from Uncle Rogi’s invention, adjusted the shoulder straps of the carrier, and hiked off through the beach plums with Jack on his back, squeaking happily.

Paul sighed and helped himself to iced lemonade. He had conveyed the Directorate ruling to the others almost instantaneously in baldly stated telepathy, in the manner that operants often used to deliver the worst of news.

Lucille said, “What a shame.” Paul sat down beside her, at some distance from Teresa.

“Have you told Uncle Rogi?” Aurelie asked.