Jack the Bodiless (Galactic Milieu Trilogy) (10 page)

T
HE METAPSYCHIC PIONEERS
D
ENIS
R
EMILLARD AND
L
UCILLE
Cartier had lived in the old house on South Street for more than thirty years while raising their seven amazing children. Paul, the youngest and most mentally formidable of the brood, was born in 2014, the year after the Intervention. He was the only one of his siblings to be educated in utero by means of the new Milieu preceptorial techniques; and by the time he grew to adolescence he was acknowledged as the first human Grand Master metapsychic, with powers that were so overwhelming that he was virtually guaranteed a Concilium seat at such time as humanity’s long probationary period ended.

In 2036, when Paul was twenty-two and already media-conspicuous for political maneuvering (read: circumventing the Simbiari Proctorship’s more inconvenient restrictive ordinances), as well as being the most brilliant scion of Earth’s “First Family of Metapsychology,” he met Teresa Kaulana Kendall, a young woman of Hawaiian extraction, who was a celebrity in her own right. She was a musical prodigy who had made her debut at the Metropolitan Opera in New York the previous season singing the fiendishly difficult roles of the Queen of the Night and Lucia di Lammermoor. She was barely nineteen, and the storm of critical and popular acclaim greeting her had been colossal.
The New York Times
had called her “the Voice of the Century … a rare, exquisitely high sopra acutissima that is perfectly controlled and full of ravishing color.” Teresa Kendall was also beautiful,
and a natural actress, and her stage presence even at that early age had the magical quality that differentiates a talent from a superstar.

The rather inhibited young Paul Remillard found her singing to be an unfailing aphrodisiac.

Even people who ordinarily did not care for operatic music idolized the glamorous young performer. She was also metapsychically operant, although her higher mental faculties were by no means as spectacular as her vocal abilities. The modern-day disparagers of her legend like to hint that the voice’s effect was a mere psychocreative illusion, a mesmerizing of the audience by the mindpower of the singer—but this is patently ridiculous. While it is true that Teresa’s popularity owed something to her coercivity and charm (as is true even of nonoperant divas), the voice stood on its own merits, unique and phenomenal, as her recordings prove.

Less than five months after Teresa and Paul’s first meeting, they were married on the Met stage at the close of the 2036-37 season. The set was from the last act of a Russian fantasy opera that had been revived especially for her, which she had sung to tumultuous acclaim. The bride was attended by the production’s principals, all still in gorgeous Slavic costume. (The groom wore conventional black tie.) The Archbishop of Manchester-in-New-Hampshire, a noted opera buff and a close friend of the groom’s distinguished parents, performed the ceremony. It was witnessed by a mob of singers, stagehands, supers, technicians, musicians, and most of the rest of the opera company; and as the bride and groom kissed, the Met Chorus made the chandeliers shiver with a recessional version of the hymn to love from
Turandot
. Sundry Remillards were in attendance—including a certain elderly bookseller. So were Teresa’s mother, the noted actress Annarita Latimer; her father, the distinguished astrophysicist Bernard Kane Kendall; and her lovely and spectacularly rejuvenated grandmother, Elaine Donovan.

(The collateral consanguinity of the couple, even had it been acknowledged, would have been no real obstacle to this marriage under Milieu law. It would be another matter altogether when Marc and Cyndia Muldowney determined to marry many years later and their true relationship came to light.)

The production that Teresa had starred in on her wedding night was, portentously enough,
The Snow Maiden
by Rimsky-Korsakov, a dark fairy tale with a disturbing ending; but no one thought about omens at the time. Teresa was captivated by the dashing Paul, eager to have his children—who would certainly be metapsychic giants—and confident that she could continue her singing career with a few minor adjustments to her schedule.

Lucille and Denis turned their big old home on South Street over to the newlyweds and moved to an elegantly refurbished farmhouse on Trescott Road east of Hanover. By then Denis was Emeritus Professor of Metapsychology at Dartmouth College’s Metapsychic Institute, and the rejuvenated Lucille was the doyenne of faculty society.

At first, Paul and Teresa seemed to share a union written in the stars. Three mental prodigies were born to them in quick succession—Marc, Marie, and Madeleine. The family was saddened when Marc’s twin, Matthieu (actually the firstborn), died at birth; but the small tragedy was quickly forgotten and its import quite unappreciated at the time. Like most opera singers, Teresa had the physique of an athlete, and she had her first three babies easily, retiring from the stage only during the final month of each pregnancy. The precocious infants were nursed backstage, in rehearsal halls, in dressing rooms, and even in the cabin of the luxurious Remco rhocraft that the family corporation provided to shuttle the Prima Donna between her home base in New Hampshire and opera houses in New York, London, Milan, Tokyo, Moscow, and a dozen other Earth metro regions. She also sang on the populous colonial worlds of Assawompsett, Atarashii-Sekai, Cernozem, Londinium, Etruscia, and Elysium, on the exotic planet SponsuBrevon, the Poltroyan artistic center, and on Zugmipl, where adoring Gi packed the house to the rafters for her week-long engagement in
La Traviata
. In an ultimate tribute, sixteen particularly keen Gi opera aficionados expired in aesthetic ecstasy at the climax of her final performance.

Paul was tolerant of his wife’s professional absences. At that time he was deeply involved in the burgeoning new bureaucracy of the Human Polity of the Galactic Milieu. This organization had operated in the beginning as an “apprentice metapsychic government” under the stern guidance of the Simbiari Proctorship and independent of nonmeta
Earth governing bodies; but by the time Paul came onto the political scene, twenty years after the Intervention, the pupils were clamoring ever more vociferously to take over the whole school.

Pre-Intervention modes of Earth government had by that time been almost completely metamorphosed into the peculiar republican setup that the Lylmik overlords had deemed most suitable for the Human Polity. This combined the intimate citizen involvement of New Hampshire town meetings on the lowest civic levels with a kind of operant oligarchy in the highest judicial and executive branches. The whole was a tidy representational tree structure, providing a voice in government for each citizen via precinct or township, for each corporation or cooperative enterprise involving more than a thousand persons, for each metro region or city, for each zone—a region often encompassing a former small nation or state—and for each quasi-continental area, called an Intendancy. The highest level of public office, that of Intendant Associate, included both operant and “normal” humans. Nonmetas tended to greatly outnumber persons with higher mindpowers in the lower levels of government, but in the judicial system the opposite situation prevailed.

By and large, the Human Polity shaped up pretty well. Most vestiges of old-fashioned human bloody-mindedness, stubborn nationalism, and fanatical religious opposition to Milieu precepts had melted away on Earth by the fourth decade of the twenty-first century. (The infamous Sons of Earth, in their antiexotic transmogrification, were one of the few dangerous exceptions to this general rule.) Mind-reading exotic overseers and ombudsmen made most forms of political dishonesty obsolete. There was still a certain amount of traditional crime and chicanery and prejudice and injustice, but it was no longer flagrant. Law enforcement was administered by both operant and “normal” human officers, supervised by the Magistratum of the Simbiari Proctorship. The meting out of condign punishment for legal transgressions was swift, and recidivist criminals were dealt with very severely. Members of the metapsychic elite who were convicted of high felonies usually faced the death penalty.

The great majority of “normal” humanity was afire with enthusiasm for the brave new world under the aegis of the
Galactic Milieu. It was, of course, somewhat humiliating for the prouder Earthlings to be governed by the humorless Simbiari race, who had been assigned to accelerate our psychosocial maturation. The exotic Proctors, after all, were green; their physiology made them the inevitable butt of cruel human humor, and their severity and jaundiced view of human weakness sometimes provoked hatred and even outright rebellion. On the other hand, poverty and other kinds of deprivation were now obsolete on Earth, the educational system ensured that most people fulfilled their potential, virtue and hard work were rewarded, there was ample leisure, and if one felt hemmed in, there were challenging new worlds to conquer on the colonial planets set aside by the Milieu for humanity’s surplus population.

The “normal” overt conscientious objectors to Milieu policies, although never coerced or directly punished for resisting the Galactic social revolution, were denied positions of power, deprived of media publicity, and eventually consigned to the ZPG reproductive class. After 2040, they were also forbidden access to the coveted rejuvenation technology and sequestered from participation in the Milieu’s garden of advanced socioeconomic and technical delights. Some of these recalcitrants managed to escape the Milieu via Madame Guderian’s notorious time-gate to the Pliocene Epoch. But for the most part, nonoperant misfits such as the religious fundamentalists and other square-peg individuals lived and died embittered and ostracized. Almost inevitably their children became estranged, even those who were educated outside the Milieu-controlled public school system; and when the children reached their majority they almost always rejected the reactionary values of their elders and opted instead for the mental testing and intensive higher education that would prepare them for life in the Human Polity.

The
operant
conscientious objectors to Milieu policy were altogether another kettle of fish, whose adventures will take up a large part of these Memoirs of mine …

Three of Paul’s older operant siblings—Anne, Catherine, and Adrien—had chosen careers in Human Polity administration, training under the exotic Proctors for the day when Earth’s growing operant population would form the highest level of Human Polity government in the Galactic Concilium under an elected First Magnate. After Paul joined his
sisters and brother as a member of the North American Intendancy, he rose quickly by dint of statecraft and grandmasterly mental gamesmanship to the highest rank permitted members of a client race—Intendant Associate. From his eminence, Paul coached his lower-echelon sibs, and within two years they were also Grand Master Metapsychics and Intendant Associates. Thus the first hint of the Remillard Dynasty raised its nose above the horizon of the unsuspecting Milieu.

With a minimal bit of coercion, Paul prevailed upon his remaining three brothers to jump on the metapolitical bandwagon as well. Severin abandoned neurosurgery, Maurice gave up sociological research, and Philip, the oldest of Denis and Lucille’s children, reluctantly quit as CEO of Remco Industries, the continuing fountainhead of the family fortune. Nepotism being perfectly acceptable to the ethical statutes of the Milieu (although some spoilsport humans cried foul), the seven Remillard siblings linked minds, destinies, and mental constituencies … and soared.

Denis and Lucille preferred the academic world, resisting Paul’s attempts to draw them into politics. The parents regarded their ambitious offspring with wary bemusement, but the family nonetheless remained very close. In time, all seven siblings achieved grandmasterly status and were elected Intendant Associates.

While Teresa’s musical career continued to flourish, Paul devoted himself to the lobbying effort that would culminate in the selection of Concord, New Hampshire, as the capital of Earth and the Human Polity in 2040. This feat earned him the media sobriquet of The Man Who Sold New Hampshire. Paul acquired a smartly trimmed beard to enhance his image as a senior legislator, published several books extolling his vision of Galactic Humanity, and became a fixture on the Tri-D talking heads circuit. His wit, physical attractiveness, and reassuring (to normal humanity) image as a spokesman for the “conservative” metapsychic viewpoint made him appealing to a wide spectrum of human factions—as well as to the urbane Poltroyan auxiliaries within the Proctorship, who dearly loved watching an Earthling outwit the earnest, efficient, scientifically advanced, but undeniably cloddish and dour Simbiari overlords.

Paul and Teresa’s fourth child, Luc, was born epileptic, blind, and with severe bodily deformities. The baby’s
metapsychic armamentarium was enormous but nearly latent. By 2041, the year of his birth, genetic engineering techniques were able to restore Luc’s twisted little innards and useless eyes to the human norm. Complete restoration of his body would have to await the advent of puberty, when it would be possible to use regeneration-tank therapy. Redactors had less success alleviating Luc’s epilepsy, which was of a puzzling etiology; however, a device implanted in the child’s brain eventually prevented the worst of his seizures.

Luc’s travails were a source of anxiety and severe nervous strain for Teresa. It became more and more necessary for her to pamper her voice, and she cut back drastically on the number of her operatic and concert engagements. Nevertheless, her repertoire of personal triumphs expanded to include roles such as Manon, the long-neglected Lakmé, Juliette, and the Queen of Shemakha in Rimsky-Korsakov’s
Le Coq d’Or
—which had not been mounted by a major opera company since the heyday of Beverly Sills. Teresa’s signature role, however, remained the title character of Snegurochka in
The Snow Maiden
, another of Rimsky’s gorgeous but psychologically murky fantasies that was scarcely ever performed outside the Soviet Union until Teresa’s electrifying portrayal popularized it overnight.