Jack the Bodiless (Galactic Milieu Trilogy) (57 page)

Anna tilted her head and regarded Esi with a shrewd glint in her eye. “Do you think that discrediting the Remillard Dynasty deserves a place in our strategy?”

“I don’t know,” the African woman replied doggedly. “But it would get both Paul and Anne out of the Human Polity Directorate and give us a chance to introduce more prohuman legislation in the Concilium. Even here on Earth, in the Assembly, Paul hews to the Milieu party line and throws his weight around every chance he gets. He tried to stomp all over me with hobnailed boots when I demanded more colonial planets for humans of color, and to hell with this operant quota thing the exotics forced on us. Why should the Europeans and the Americans and the Anzacs have thirteen ethnic planets out of the twenty? All Paul could do was cite metapsychic demographics! More operants among those groups! And so we Africans end up with only two worlds to colonize, and the Asians have only five.”

“There are disproportionate numbers of Japanese and Chinese living happily on the cosmopolitan planets,” Hiroshi pointed out mildly.

But Esi was not to be mollified. “Look at that bastard ethnic world Paul lobbied the Assembly to approve just before the clampdown: Denali—an
Alaskan
planet, if you please! In my book, it’s just another colony of the U.S.A.”

Anna hastily offered her guests more tea and brandy, and
a few minutes later Esi was laughing at her own outburst and saying, “Well, hey. If we’re rebels, we ought to act rebellious! Everybody knows what a professional gadfly I am … but what are the rest of you doing to further the glorious revolution?”

Oljanna Gathen said, “I have something very interesting to report. It will be announced officially next week, but I’m happy to let you all know now that Owen Blanchard has been put in command of the first of the three new human space armadas, the Twelfth Fleet. And my brother Ragnar has been appointed the Chief Operations Officer. The fleet will be based on Okanagon.”

“Crikey!” exclaimed Will MacGregor. He turned an accusing glare on his colleague Alan Sakhvadze. “You must have known, and you didn’t tell me!”

Alan only grinned. “I didn’t spill the beans to Auntie Annushka, either. Oljanna would have had my guts for garters.”

“Bozhe moi!” Anna cried. “This means that someday, if all goes well, we may have control of a fleet of armed starships …”

Gerry Van Wyk was blinking like a frenzied electronic calculator, his wide mouth agape. “You don’t mean that we’d—No, of course not! We established at the very beginning of our—er—relationship that we’d seek to extricate humanity from the toils of the Milieu by peaceful means!”

“They won’t let us go peacefully,” Adrien said.

Gerry stopped blinking. “They won’t?”

“If we try to withdraw from the confederation, the Milieu is prepared to ostracize us. Put us into perpetual quarantine. They’ll toss us off the colonial worlds and sling our folks back into the solar system and take away our superluminal starships and slam the cell door on us. No more interstellar travel.”

“But”—Gerry flailed his small hands furiously—“we’d
suffocate
!”

“Yes,” Adrien said.

“All throughout the Simbiari Proctorship we were denied armed spacecraft,” Oljanna pointed out. “Even our commercial fleet was restricted in its operations. Now that the Proctorship is over, we’re permitted to travel anywhere we want in the Galaxy, and that means that we also must help
enforce the law. It’s just another privilege and duty of Milieu citizenship. Officially, the three human space fleets will be only an arm of the Magistratum. A glorified coast guard service and space patrol. But Owen and Ragnar know that the Twelfth Fleet could be much more.”

“Good God, yes!” Jordan Kramer said. “Those of us with the appropriate scientific expertise could do clandestine weapons research! I can already think of several projects—”

“What about the other two fleets?” Hiroshi inquired.

“When there are enough trained personnel, a Thirteenth Fleet will be headquartered on Elysium and a Fourteenth on Assawompsett,” Oljanna said. “But the Twelfth, being the mother fleet, as it were, will no doubt have a tactical advantage for a long time to come.”

“It will take years to prepare ourselves,” Anna warned. “We are still only a pitiful handful of people.”

“Quite a handful,” snapped Esi Damatura. In an instant, her expression changed and she smiled at Anna. “May I have just a bit more of that delicious tea? And then Hiroshi and I will have to think about egging back to Concord. The Directorate is considering setting up a blue-ribbon commission of philosophers and religious leaders to study the concept of Unity. Paul and Anne will push the resolution through, but I’m going to make damn sure that they don’t pack the commission with Jesuits!”

The younger rebels exchanged blank looks.

“The most famous human apologist for Unity,” Esi said darkly, “was a Froggie Jesuit who died in 1955, a paleontologist. They say he was also in on the Piltdown Man scam.”

Anna handed Esi a refilled glass, then turned to a nearby bank of shelves and drew out a book-plaque. The title on the spine was
The Phenomenon of Man
, and the author was Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, S.J. Anna stepped to a duplicator and in a moment had a copy for each person in the room.

“Teilhard was not a perpetrator of paleontological hoaxes. That was proved long ago. What he was, was something much more dangerous. Take the plaques with you,” she invited her fellow rebels. “Read the book, and then you may begin to understand what we are up against.”

A
FTER THE EARLIER TRAGEDIES, THAT YEAR OF 2052 WAS
blessed with a golden autumn and a sparkling early winter—at least so far as our family was concerned. Paul and Teresa were together again, Marc and his father were reconciled, and baby Jack still appeared to be responding favorably to the genetic therapy. There were no more mysterious deaths in the family or among its associates, and no sign whatsoever that the malevolent entities called Hydra and Fury were anything other than nightmarish figments of a supersensitive infant imagination.

Jack had begged for mental stimulation and sensory input: Marc gave it to him, and then some. He was unfailingly generous in his fostering of his little brother, even to the point of designing and constructing a special small environmental pod that could be perched at the back of his turbocycle, in which Jack happily rode on excursions throughout upper New England. The baby accompanied Marc two or three times a week to his classes at college and to the frat house. After Jack beat Alex Manion at three-dimensional chess, the other Mu Psi Omega men decided that he wasn’t a human baby at all but a midget exotic savant in disguise. They made him their mascot and dressed him in tiny Dartmouth sweaters and warmups, and when Marc was otherwise occupied they toted him around the campus, letting him sop up the Ivy League ambiance and audit every kind of class from algorithm analysis to French Symbolist poetry. Jack went to football games with Boom-Boom
Laroche, to plays and lectures with Shig Morita, and to the Shattuck Observatory with Pete Dalembert—where he made a pest of himself at the downlink station of the Hawking Orbital Telescope. He attended the performances of touring symphonies and chamber music ensembles and jazz groups and musical soloists and dance companies at Dartmouth’s Hopkins Center. Together with other members of the Outing Club, Marc took Jack hiking along the Appalachian Trail in the White Mountains. Riding in a modified backpack, the baby visited the scene of the Great Intervention atop Mount Washington, where the restored chalet and cog railway attracted millions of visitors each year. When snow closed the mountains to hikers, Marc took his little brother trekking along Dartmouth’s Skiway and on snowmobile rides in the deep woods north of Berlin—and nearly frightened him to death with a wild run up the frozen Connecticut River on the BMW turbocycle, with the ice spikes deployed.

I returned to the peaceful business of bookselling and very often entertained Marc and his fraternity brothers and Jack in the shop. Jack even learned how to walk there among the shelves of The Eloquent Page, rather to the dismay of Teresa, who had become just the least bit jealous of the closeness between her eldest and youngest sons. But she had other matters to keep her busy now. Because of the excessively long advance commitments customary in the opera business, she could not simply plunge back into a full-time musical career. But all the impresarios were wild to have her sing, and so she did pick up a fair number of other substitute engagements, similar to the one at the Met, and La Scala scheduled four special performances of Prokofiev’s rarely heard psychoanalytical opera
The Fiery Angel
especially for her, just before the Christmas season. Its sexually obsessed heroine Renata was another role, like Turandot, where Teresa’s acting ability and vocal power enabled her to score a triumph. She was home for the holiday itself, a tumultuous family gathering at Denis and Lucille’s farm, and immediately afterward she and Paul went together to Kauai for ten days alone together, just prior to his leaving for Orb and the Concilium session.

Jack spent his first birthday quietly at home. Paul and Teresa gave him a beautiful Celestron telescope, Marc gave him an air guitar (which he had especially wanted), Marie
gave him a teddy bear, Madeleine gave him a weighty treatise on theoretical cerebroenergetics, and Luc gave him a small tank with saltwater tropical fish. I gave him a new papoose carrier, since he had outgrown the old one.

For some time before and after Teresa and I were pardoned, my bookshop was overrun with curiosity-seekers and opera buffs wanting to felicitate and shake the hand of the hero who had rescued Teresa Kendall and stood by her during her ordeal in the Great White North. One idiot Tri-D producer even wanted to do a movie-of-the-week about our adventure and was dissuaded from pestering me only when I threatened to sic the Remco lawyers on him.

My notoriety (a gushing female commentator compared my daring rescue of Teresa to an escapade of the fictional Scarlet Pimpernel—leading Marc and his pals to dub me the Scarlet Pumpernickel) somehow also managed to get my hormones all a-burbling. I noticed belatedly that I was Man and Perdita Manion, my widowed assistant, was Woman, and a discreet literary affaire ensued. We were not really in love with each other. But she was a congenial person, and when one feels on top of the world, sex often demands to share the limelight. (It also tends to intrude when the world is falling to pieces around one’s ears, but that’s another story.)

Perdita and I fooled around a fair bit when business was slow in the dead of winter, 2053, and we made dinner for each other now and then in my flat or in her neat brick house over on Brockway Street. We went to Dartmouth’s Winter Carnival together and canoodled afterward in the icy moonlight under a bearskin rug in Denis’s antique sleigh over by Occam Pond, nearly freezing our silly pétards off. Family members began to grin at us with a knowing air, while Marc and Perdita’s son Alex were first incredulous and then appalled at the evidence of superannuated lust. Perdita was then 51 years old, and I was a full-blooded 108. I don’t know what might have happened had things continued to go smoothly.

But they didn’t. Not long after the Winter Carnival, near the end of February, the first evidence appeared that Jack’s body was rejecting the gene-transplantation therapy.

He was then thirteen months old. He had black hair and bright blue eyes and was a little below normal for his age in
height and weight. He could creep faster than a fence lizard and toddle along fairly well on his chubby legs. He spoke in erudite sentences using an excruciatingly cute infantile accent. His metafaculties were coming along like gangbusters. By that time, Marc’s accelerated honors course had brought him well into junior-class work, and he was charging ahead toward the attainment of his Bachelor of Science degree, with dual majors in metapsychology and theoretical physics.

Marc told me all the details of that snowy afternoon when Jack’s life changed forever, replaying his searing memories so that now it seems that I was there myself. He and his pals Pete and Alex had the baby with them in the basement game room of the frat house. Marc was studying for an astrophysics credit and Jack was watching the other two boys play Ping-Pong, idly exercising his PK on a spare plass ball by making it creep up and down his arms and around his neck and head. When he tired of this game, he cupped the ball in both of his tiny hands for some time, sitting motionless with his eyes closed, and then called out:

“Pete, Alex—use my ball to play with for a while!” And he held out the white sphere.

Alex took it with a good-natured insult, tossed it up, and hit it with his paddle.

The ball was a blur as it flew to Pete’s side of the table, eluded his paddle in a lightning bounce, and went sailing ten meters farther on. It impacted the wall at the far end of the room, then continued to bounce crazily among the furniture and video games as if it had a life of its own.

“Okay, shrimpo,” Alex cried in disgust. “What’s the big idea? You know you’re not supposed to interrupt our game with juvenile PK shit!”

Jack grinned. “I didn’t. I fixed the ball instead.” And he burst into squeals of laughter.

Marc looked up from his book-plaque, and his shocked gaze met that of the other two boys. Without a word, he reached out with his own psychokinesis and snared the still wildly bouncing ball. He hefted it, smelled it, stared fixedly at it, and then carefully handed it to Alex. “It’s not plass.” His face had turned expressionless. Jack was still gurgling with self-congratulation.

Alex did his own quick examination, then dropped the ball onto the table from a height of about ten centimeters.

It bounced nearly to the ceiling.

Alex snatched it out of the air and handed it to the open-mouthed Pete. He said to Jack: “All right. It was a regular Ping-Pong ball when I gave it to you. It’s still even got the trademark on it. What’d you do to it?”