Jack the Bodiless (Galactic Milieu Trilogy) (25 page)

PAUL
: Will do.
[Denis helps Catherine wrap her orchid. She goes out with Adrien. Anne leaves. Lucille begins to collect cups and saucers. Paul helps her carry things to kitchen.]

DENIS
: [on intimate mode] Philip. Maury. Sevvy. Please stay on after Paul goes.

PHILIP +
MAURICE +
SEVERIN:
??? Certainly.

PAUL
: [reentering living room] Well, I’ll get along, too. Good night, Mama, Papa. Thanks for hosting the confab. [To his brothers] See you at Burlington, mes frangins. [Exit.]

DENIS
: [after an interval] I have something to tell you three. It concerns Brett’s murder. Perhaps we’d all better sit down again.
LUCILLE
: [looking in] Et moi aussi!

DENIS
: You may as well.

LUCILLE
: [sitting] I knew you were up to something when you coerced Paul into leaving.

SEVERIN
: [astounded] Papa! You mean, you can still—

PHILIP
: Be quiet, Sevvy. What is it, Papa?

DENIS
: I have one solid piece of information to put before you. The rest is only intuition … You all know what this is. [Image.] It’s a depiction of the peculiar patterns of ash that were left along Brett’s spine and on his head when his killer extracted his psychocreative lifeforce. Please compare that set of lotus patterns with this one … [Image.]

PHILIP
: They are virtually identical.

DENIS
: The second set was found on the body of Shannon O’Connor Tremblay. She was murdered in 2013—on the very day of the Great Intervention—by my younger brother Victor. Similar marks were found on the body of her father, Kieran O’Connor, who was also presumed to have been killed by Victor. I regret to say that an emotional block in my mind prevented me from making the correlation before this. [General consternation.]

PHILIP
: But Victor acted alone! He shared his powers with no one, not even Shannon’s devil of a father. There’s no person he could have transmitted his—his
technique
to. And Victor’s been dead for eleven years. We were all there at his bedside and saw him—felt him!—die.

DENIS
: He died. After nearly twenty-seven years in a coma, encapsulated inside his own brain, unable to communicate mentally or physically with another living thing. He died. Yes … That’s what we thought.

PHILIP
: God almighty, Papa, are you suggesting—

MAURICE
:—that Victor’s mind somehow regained its potency—

SEVERIN
:—that the contagion was passed on, that his diabolical ambition lives—

PHILIP +
MAURICE +
SEVERIN:
—
in the mind of one of us?

DENIS
: I’ve asked myself if it was possible, if God could have permitted Victor’s imprisoned psyche to reach out at the very end, after we’d prayed for him for so long … reach out either in love or in a last temptation—

MAURICE
: Papa, I don’t mean to be blasphemous, but God doesn’t have a damned thing to do with this! The question is: Did Victor have the strength, right then at the vital-field dissolution, to break through his latency and take over another human mind?

PHILIP
: Mama wasn’t there at the deathbed. But all the rest of us and our spouses were. I think we can eliminate Maeve and Cecilia from suspicion. Since the divorce, Maeve has avoided the family. At the time of the Rye Beach barbecue, she was in Ireland, asleep in bed with her latest boyfriend. And Cecilia was off-world at a medical convention. That leaves me and Maury and Sevvy, my wife Aurelie, Adrien and Cheri, Anne, Paul, and Cat herself. Nine family members as potential tools of Victor—if he
was
capable of mind-transfer.

LUCILLE
: No! No! You’re talking witchcraft, not valid metapsychology! Such things can’t happen! One mind can’t be enslaved by another. The human personality—

SEVERIN
: —can fragment. Multiply. You’re a trained psychologist, Mama. You know that scores of separate personas can reside within a single diseased mind. An ordinary mind! Who knows what monstrous deviations might afflict operants? We can utilize the mental lattices to influence the very fabric of time and space, matter and energy! Who’s to say what else we’re capable of? The abnormal psychology of Homo superior is still being written. I’m writing a bit of it myself!
If
such a transfer were possible, the victim might not even be aware of it consciously—just as a patient with multiple-personality disorder is unaware of the existence of the other identities.

LUCILLE
: Denis … do you think it could happen?

DENIS
: I don’t know. But you see why I’m afraid, don’t you?

PHILIP
: Good God, yes! Maury and I are probably the only
ones besides you and Mama and Uncle Rogi who can remember what Victor was really like in his prime. The man wasn’t a human being at all. He was … an evolutionary aberration.

SEVERIN
: [quietly]
I
remember Victor quite well. The last time we saw him—before the Intervention, that is—was at the family Christmas party at Tante Margie’s in Berlin in 2012. You were fifteen, Phil, and Maury was thirteen, and I was nine years old. Anne and Cat and Adrien were just little kids, and of course Paul hadn’t even been born … Uncle Victor came in with his twin deadhead stooges, Uncle Lou and Uncle Leon, all loaded down with expensive presents just like always. And just like always, the operant relatives were polite and had their toughest mental defenses in place, and the normal ones were either fawning over the family black sheep with the Midas touch or else scared white. Only the littlest kids were glad to see Uncle Vic—the ones who were too young to realize that there was more to him than a big good-looking guy handing out incredible loot … That year, when I was nine, was the first time I
knew
. Vic didn’t try to make mental contact, didn’t really do a thing. But all the same, I knew. It was the mystery of evil coming home to me for the first time, and I was damn near petrified. Vic just laughed and gave me this fantastic rhythm programmer with one of the first of the brainboard interfaces. Right after Christmas I traded it …

MAURICE
: Good thing. Those early brainboards had nasty possibilities. [A meditative interval.]

DENIS
: [slowly] Boys, do you agree when I state that no known operant entity could have killed Brett in that manner from long distance?

PHILIP
: I think it’s a safe assumption. Even a grandmaster-class exotic operant—always excluding the Lylmik, whom we know so little about—would have had to be in Brett’s immediate vicinity to initiate a psychocreative drain of such extraordinary complexity.

DENIS
: The Magistratum probed all your minds and presumed you and your spouses innocent of Brett’s murder. Aurelie and Cheri were exonerated because their metapsychic powers are too meager to have accomplished the killing, and they are completely incapable of resisting exotic mind-probe techniques. We can safely eliminate
them from suspicion. But we know, and so does the Magistratum, that probing does not necessarily exonerate
us
 … There are only four members of the family who I can be certain were nowhere near Rye Harbor when Brett died on that boat. You three and your mother. Severin was here in Hanover all the previous Thursday and throughout the night and early morning on Friday, the day of the murder. Lucille had called him up from Concord when she thought she’d convinced Teresa to have the abortion. Early Thursday evening, when your mother discovered that Teresa had disappeared, she called you two others up from the capital to help in the rough farscan search. The three of you stayed with her until the next morning.

SEVERIN
: But Paul never went to the beach. He remained in Concord and came to Hanover late Friday morning—

MAURICE
: Yes. On the evening of the beach party he was to make a statement before the specially convened judicial panel that would determine whether he should be suspended from the Intendant Assembly during the inquiry into Teresa’s criminal pregnancy. When he was allowed to keep his seat, he decided against egging up to Hanover immediately. On Friday morning there was an important Assembly session debating the Denali colonization, and he had made his mind up that Teresa was only hiding and that she’d turn up …

DENIS
: Paul didn’t come to Hanover until long after Marc was found on the riverbank around 0630 Friday morning, when we had the first suspicion that Teresa and Rogi had been drowned. Paul says he was at his Concord apartment all night.

SEVERIN
: But he had all the time in the world to egg over to Rye.

DENIS
: Adrien and Anne and the wives didn’t know about Teresa and Rogi’s disappearance or any of the rest of it until I told them. That was after the police notified me of Brett’s murder on Friday morning. I farspoke Paul to inform him and found him still in Concord, so he must be considered a viable suspect.

LUCILLE
: Oh, my God …!

DENIS
: And so are Adrien and Anne. Both of them came in from Concord on Thursday afternoon, as Cat and Brett did, wanting to escape the magnate madness that had
broken out in the capital. On Thursday night Adrien and Anne were at the Rye beach barbecue with me and all the grandchildren.

LUCILLE
: Adrien … Annie … Paul … It’s not possible that one of them is a psychic vampire!

DENIS
: Don’t forget Catherine herself. If the aberration is locked away in the unconscious, she could be guilty.

LUCILLE
: Denis—no!

DENIS
: [calmly] Yes. A part of her mind could have resented being tied to Brett and the Child Latency Project. Catherine seems to have the smallest coercive component of any of you, the least ambition. She married Brett—a brilliant man, but her metapsychic inferior—against the advice of the family because she was deeply in love with him. But if she was invaded by Victor long ago, who can say what motivates her inner persona? Perhaps a kind of—of psychic time bomb lay dormant in her mind until the appropriate stimulus activated it.

SEVERIN
: Marc is also a suspect. No one knows for certain where he was before he turned up on the riverbank at dawn.

MAURICE
: But how could Vic ever have got to
him?
Marc wasn’t there at the deathbed like the rest of us were. And he was only two years old! Papa, you postulated Vic acting out some kind of temptation scenario in extremis. But no one can tempt a two-year-old!

DENIS
: Not an ordinary two-year-old.

PHILIP
: Marc was there. Uncle Rogi brought him and Teresa to Berlin because Paul was flying Papa in from Johns Hopkins.

DENIS
: Yes. Paul had tried to convince me that I was too ill to attend the Good Friday meeting. But some premonition told me it would be our last chance.

SEVERIN
: Marc wasn’t in the same room as Victor at the end, but he was across the hall with the nurse. And Victor was strong enough at his death to take Louis and Leon and Yvonne with him …

MAURICE
: So he could have reached Marc.

DENIS
: [sighing] Yes.

LUCILLE
: [abruptly] But this entire notion is monstrous! That one of our family could be some sort of fiend in disguise!