Jack the Bodiless (Galactic Milieu Trilogy) (11 page)

Teresa’s personal and professional decline began when her next baby was stillborn, in 2043. A comprehensive genetic assay of the tangled Remillard-Kendall heritage was still many years in the future; but a number of lethal genes were identified in Teresa’s germ plasm, and both she and Paul were found to carry the so-called immortality gene of the Remillards, actually a unique polygenic inheritance that augmented the self-rejuvenation capacity present in every human being.

In spite of the genetic problems, both Teresa and Paul were determined to have many more children, just as brilliant as the first four. Their efforts resulted in two additional stillbirths, followed by two lethal-trait bearers confirmed by prenatal testing. The most advanced techniques of genetic engineering having failed to ameliorate the stigmata of the defective fetuses, they were aborted according to the guidelines established by the Reproductive Statutes of the Simbiari Proctorship. Teresa was tormented by depression during this period, suffered two brief mental breakdowns,
and little by little began to lose her glorious voice. The final blow came when, in spite of all Paul’s efforts, the couple had their reproductive license revoked.

Teresa was pinpointed as the founder of the mutagene complex and received a contraceptive implant. She retired to the house in Hanover, where she clung to sanity by doing vocal exercises in futile hopes of a comeback and dreamed of outwitting the exotic puppetmasters who had imposed their benevolent despotism on virtually all facets of human life—even motherhood.

Paul was bereaved by the tragedy but more philosophical. Of course, his own seed was untainted, and he might have divorced his wife and married again. However, he was still devoted to Teresa even though the intense passion of the early years had cooled, and he was immensely proud of the surviving children. Divorce was a distasteful option, given the climate of the times and the old-fashioned brand of Roman Catholicism espoused by most of the Remillards. Paul might have followed the example of his close friend and rival European Intendant Associate, Davy MacGregor, who like many persons of superior genetic heritage had contributed sperm to the gene pool that would help populate the colonial planets with nonborns conceived in vitro. But the strict anonymity of the banked-sperm setup clashed with Paul’s sense of procreative pride. He wanted to know his children … and where there was a will, there was also a way.

He had never lacked for feminine admirers; and now that Teresa, although still beautiful, had lost her unique libidinous appeal, Paul put aside his religious scruples and set about to maximize his own genetic potential with discreet and dedicated fervor—and a good deal of willing cooperation from ladies of preeminent chromosomal content. He and Teresa still shared a bed; but as metasensitive spouses do, she knew that her husband was unfaithful.

She never stopped loving him and never reproached him. Nevertheless, it was undoubtedly Paul’s continuing betrayal of their marriage that gave a dark impetus to Teresa’s determination to have one last, supremely endowed child.

T
ERESA HAD OBEYED HER ELDEST SON AND PACKED
.

When I came into her music room, she was showing the contents of her soft-sided carryall to Marc. It contained a portable Tri-D, a plaque-reader, an audio player, a rolled-up Yamaha Scrollo keyboard, two Bose Dinky-Boom amps, a fleck library boîte, a power supply for the above gadgetry, a little toilet kit, a dozen cotton baby nappies, plass overpants, two terry-cloth infant suits, a swansdown bunting that had been a shower gift for her firstborn before the twins were diagnosed, a rain poncho, a ball of twine, a permamatch, a split of Dom Pérignon, and a Swiss Army Champ knife with every kind of thingummy on it but micromanipulators.

Marc was looking over this collection with frozen incredulity. She, sweetly reasonable, was explaining to her son that the twine was for tying the baby’s umbilical cord and hanging up laundry, while the champagne would celebrate Jack’s birth.

“Jack?” Marc said faintly.

“His name will be Jon—J-O-N. That’s the spelling I prefer. I’ve explained to him already about nicknames.” She acknowledged my entrance with a blithe nod. “Your Uncle Rogi may call him Ti-Jean, of course, in the Franco-American tradition.”

“Mama—all this musical stuff!” Marc protested. “I told you to pack only the essentials for survival!”

“These
are
the essentials, darling. I couldn’t possibly endure four long months in some dreary rustic backwater without my music.”

“But you’ve no clothes!”

She waved this off with an airy gesture. “I can buy those at the local shopping mall when I get there. Wherever
there
is! Meanwhile, this ensemble should be smart as well as serviceable en route. Don’t you think so, Rogi?”

Teresa was not a tall woman, but she gave that impression—larger than life. She wore a stylish polished-cotton jogging suit of her favorite Kendall green and had tied back her shining black hair with a matching green silk scarf. Flung over her shoulders was a hooded sweater of fauve cashmere. She wore medium-weight Raichle hiking boots on her feet. It was a fine outfit for a jaunt up Mount Moosilauke with the Dartmouth Outing Club; but for wintering in the depths of the B.C. mountains …

My gaze slid away from hers, and I kept my thoughts hidden. “Uh—Teresa, didn’t Marc explain that this place you’re going to is a howling wilderness? No malls. No stores at all. Not even a trading post within a hundred kloms.”

She shrugged. “Then I shall simply have to throw myself upon the charity of the local inhabitants.” She flashed that brilliant smile of hers. “Perhaps I can give little concerts or music lessons in exchange for warm clothes and such.”

Marc almost shouted, “Mama, the only local inhabitants in the Megapod Reserve are
them.”

“Oh,” said Teresa. Her exquisite brow knit in a frown of resolute determination. “Well, I’ll get along somehow. I was a Girl Scout, you know.” She held up a boîte the size of a deck of playing cards. “My fleck library has some excellent references. Along with my opera videos and music recordings and vocal scores, I’ve duplicated all the books and movies in our family collection downstairs and called up some more from the public library that I thought might be useful.
Camping and Woodcraft
by Horace Kephart sounded wonderfully pioneering from the catalog synopsis. And I couldn’t resist some survival books by Bill Riviere and Bradford Angier that I remember reading when I was little and went to stay at Gran Elaine’s summer cottage in Maine. Such wonderful Franco-American names those authors have! And for literary atmosphere, I have
Walden
and
The Call of the Wild
and
The Complete Poems of Robert Service.”

“Mon cul,” I muttered.

Teresa didn’t even hear me. She sailed serenely on. “The matter of the birth should be easy enough to manage with my training in Lamaze and the obstetrics book I processed into the flecks. Jack says he’ll be born easily. He’s going to be a small baby. He doesn’t quite understand my explanation about the diaper thing yet, but I’m sure it’ll sort itself out once he’s actually free of the amniotic fluid and experiencing the
concept
of dryness. And he won’t really need many clothes inside the house if I keep the heater turned up high, will he?”

“What heater?” I barked. I had been listening to her idiotic prattle with openmouthed horror. “What house? The place is nothing but a broken-down log cabin with a rusty old iron stove, for God’s sake, and it’s been disused for nigh onto forty years! You’ll have to cut wood—”

Teresa flourished her Swiss Army knife. “Fortunately, it has a very sharp saw blade! Of course, I’ve never had to use it yet, but I expect I’ll learn how very quickly. And there would be lots of dry branches just lying about, wouldn’t there?”

“Plenty,” I said gently. “Only thing is, by the time winter comes, which will happen around the beginning of November at that latitude, the wood will be under three or four meters of snow.”

Marc was even more mentally opaque than usual. Maybe the enormity of what he contemplated had finally penetrated that supremely self-confident young ego. He turned to me, a sudden awful decision making his mind blaze.

“I thought you’d just help me take Mama there, Uncle Rogi. She assured me that she’d be able to cope if I fixed her up with plenty of supplies. But I realize now that we’ll have to work things out another way. You’re going to have to stay in the cabin with her. You know all about wilderness survival and that stuff.”

I simply stood there, stunned, with my mind bleeding dismay and pullulating blue funk, while the two of them exchanged nods of agreement.

Marc said to me, “We can pack a few more clothes for her, at least. As for you—I’d planned a provisioning and
equipment-buying stop. We’re using your camping gear as a basis, and you can make a list of the other stuff you’ll need.”

Teresa said, “If I’m allowed to take more of my own things, I want my nightgown and a robe and slippers. And if it’s really going to be cold, the big down comforter. You’ll love that, Rogi, for long nights sitting in front of the fire! We can squish it into a tiny bundle and it won’t take up any room at all in the luggage.”

I finally managed to overcome my vocal paralysis and blurted, “Now, just a damn minute! We’re talking
four months in the wilds?
What’s going to happen to my bookshop—”

“Miz Manion will take care of the shop,” Marc said, “just as she always does when you’re out of town.”

With my initial shock slowly receding, I realized that the bookstore should be the least of my worries. I whimpered, “We’ll be tracked down and arrested before we ever get out of New England—”

“Not if I toss a few blivets into the system,” Marc said. “Uncle Rogi, don’t worry. I’ll see that you get to the Reserve safe and undetected. I’ve got everything worked out.”

“Well, that’s just friggin’ dandy!” I said. “And I suppose when Teresa and me are all settled in and comfy in the cabin, with the critters gathering outside licking their chops,
you’ll
just fly back home and pretend nothing’s happened—and no one will suspect a thing. Not your father. Not Denis or Lucille or your gung ho Intendant uncles or aunts. Not Enforcer Chief Malatarsiss and her squad of Magistratum mindfuckers—when the family’s forced to drag you down to Concord and get your young brain peeled like a hard-boiled egg!”

“Nobody,” said Marc calmly, “messes with my mind. And I told you I have a plan all worked out.”

Teresa smiled, stood on tiptoe, and kissed my cheek. “I’m so glad you’re going to stand by me, Rogi. You know, I
was
just the least bit apprehensive about having to cut the wood.” Her charm melted me like a Popsicle on a griddle. She whirled away into her adjacent bedroom to secure the additional items, and I flung up my arms in surrender.

“Oh, hell. The three of you have got me backed into a corner, and you know it.”

Marc had the grace to grin. “Ace coercers—me and Mama and Jack.”

The young devil was so confident he had me buffaloed that he didn’t even probe my mind. And a damn good thing, too, because I wasn’t thinking of the baby at all as Coercer Number Three …

I turned away from Marc and stared out the streetside window of the studio, letting my wits freewheel in total discombobulation. Suddenly I spotted a small white ovoid and a larger scarlet one drifting past the tower of the Catholic church.

“Here comes the Hertz service egg towing that rent-a-rho you ordered,” I observed. “I suppose I’d better go down and sign it out.”

“I’ll come with you,” Marc said, “to help with the details.”

I might have known he had some fairly unusual details in mind.

The Hertz agent waiting for us outside was a pretty young thing in her twenties, normal-minded as they come, and the name tag on her uniform blazer said Siri Olafsdottir. Marc’s coercion turned Siri’s smile to stone and her lushly fringed eyes into green glass. She stood in the driveway between the two parked eggs and my old Volvo with the canoe on the roof, a credit-card machine in one outstretched hand and a dangling set of plass rhocraft keys in the other, as motionless as a stop-frame hologram image in a Tri-D commercial. Marc had not only paralyzed her but also erased her memory of coming to Hanover, and he later extended the amnesia to include subsequent events involving lawbreaking Remillards. Little pearls of sweat formed on Siri’s downy upper lip while she waited in the summer heat, oblivious to any skulduggery.

My terrible young relative sat himself down in the driver’s seat of the woman’s service egg, getting ready to bamboozle the Hertz firm’s computer.

“We tell it she never came here. We tell it that the red 2051 Nissan Peregrine GXX with New Hampshire tag BWS 229 is in the shop for regular maintenance and will stay there for twenty-four hours.” He began to mutter into the command mike.

Resigned to my fate, I detached the keys gently from poor
Siri’s fingers and opened the red egg. It was a luxury model with an oversized boot. We were going to travel in style. I wondered how Marc planned to fudge North American Air Traffic Control and the ever-vigilant skytroopers, to say nothing of the rho-field neutralizers, the warm-body detectors, and the other alarm systems that guarded the perimeter of the Reserve itself.

“Patience,” the juvenile delinquent said. “First we send this good woman on her way.” He climbed out of the service craft and said to the Hertz agent:
Into your egg
.

She obeyed like a lovely robot.

Now start up and fly back to Burlington International. You have been out for coffee. You never came here. You never saw us
.

The vehicle’s door rolled shut. We stepped back as Siri lit the thing up. The faintly glowing purplish net of the safety-jacketed rho-field clothed the egg’s outer surface. The machine retracted its pads and hovered half a meter above the ground for a moment. The woman inside now acted perfectly normal—and paid no attention whatsoever to us. She jockeyed neatly out of the driveway, floated to the middle of the street, signaled properly, and swooshed straight up out of sight. A few dry yellow elm leaves swirled in the vortex, then settled back onto the pavement.