Jack the Bodiless (Galactic Milieu Trilogy) (28 page)

He got up from the bench and bought himself a large Pepsi-Cola at a refreshment bar. Then, sipping it through a straw, he strolled casually to the feeder tunnel that would take him to Bay 638. The small-craft facilities were much less crowded than the main terminal area and the noncrew people hurrying along the tunnel tended to be earnest-looking business types in sober suits, carrying briefcases, or rumpled scientists meandering along, thinking great thoughts on declamatory mode. There were no young people about, and several passersby eyed him curiously as he stopped at the observation window overlooking Bay 638 and stood there drinking his Pepsi.

The display beside the access door told him that the ship was CSS Roderick Dhu, a twelve-passenger De Havilland S-211 out of Grampian Town, Caledonia, owned by Guinness PLC. Its EDT was about one hour from now.

Perfect! And the spacecraft was even a lineal descendant of the antique Beaver floatplane that had carried him, his mother, and Uncle Rogi into the Megapod Reserve!

“Seems almost like fate, doesn’t it?” an adult voice remarked.

Marc whirled about, his heart pounding. He had been aware of no one approaching him, sensed no aura. But he had company. Standing close behind him was a very tall elderly man with a neatly trimmed white beard and a patriarchal halo of snowy hair. He wore floor-length blue garments in a style that Marc could not immediately identify as
typical of any ethnic group. His eyes had a preternatural brightness, set deep within dark sockets.

Marc suspected immediately that he was not human. The mental signature was totally absent, even to a third-level probe delivered at point-blank range. But what kind of exotic was he? The Krondaku were known to assume illusory bodies sometimes, especially when they undertook sociological research or other work among humanity that depended upon an unobtrusive or nonthreatening presence. A Krondak Grand Master would be able to suppress his aura beyond the reach of any human-generated redactive probe … and the Magistratum had a disproportionate number of the frightful, supremely intelligent beings on its roster.

The cup of Pepsi trembled in Marc’s hand as he turned, his mental screen strengthened to the maximum. “Excuse me. What did you say?”

“I said nothing special. I implied a great deal.”

Marc grinned and shrugged. “Sorry. I don’t understand. I was just looking this ship over.”

“Wondering whether the crew would use this access door or the one down in the bay to board her. The answer to that is: neither. They’ve just been notified that they can’t return to Caledonia today after all. A small problem with the environmental system. But you needn’t start looking for another ship.”

“Oh,” said Marc. Oh, Jesus—the exotics were on to him. He had been so sure that his secret thoughts were beyond their reach, so sure that he’d pulled the wool over their eyes during the interrogation. But they’d only bided their time! Some giant brain had been reading his mind, probably from the moment he arrived in Orb, and knew all about—

“Your scheme to pinch the ship. Oh, yes. It would probably have worked, too, if you were able to control the coercive-redactive ream precisely enough to avoid permanent mental damage to the crew. I’m not sure you’re up to that yet. But the point is moot. There’s no need for you to go back to Earth. The two of them will survive without your help.”

“Who will?” he whispered. But he knew.

“Off we go,” said the disguised exotic briskly. “Don’t waste time.”

A heroic form of metacoercivity took hold of Marc. He had never experienced anything like it. He wasn’t a child hurried along by a stronger adult; he was a mosquito borne along by a gale. As he walked helplessly alongside his captor, heading back toward the main terminal, Marc managed to look more carefully at the face of the person beside him. “Do—do I know you?”

The tall man laughed but did not answer the question.

“What do you want?” Marc asked.

“I want you to take a hike, kiddo. Get the hell out of this terminal and don’t come back until you’re ready to go home.”

“Am I under arrest?”

“No. Providing you haul your young ass out of here and don’t try pulling a stunt like this again. You do, and I’ll see that you come down with the galloping shits and spend the time from now until Inauguration Day in the hospital. The
pediatric
hospital. You’ll like it. The bed gowns have Walt Disney characters printed on them.”

Marc was dumfounded. This was a
Krondaku?
He sure as hell didn’t talk like one! But whoever this guy was, he was no Enforcer of the Magistratum. He was somebody else—playing games! Somebody who obviously knew all about Mama and Uncle Rogi …

Marc felt the anger that had blazed within him drain away. A sudden, awful suspicion gripped his heart. “Are you
him?
Vic …?”

“I have nothing to do with Victor Remillard or his creatures,” the being said. “But you’re quite right to keep the possibility in mind. They pose a rather serious threat to the good order of the Galactic Milieu. They’re damn near as dangerous as
you.”

The two of them had entered the busy terminal. Marc’s mind spun as he was compelled to walk directly to the tube entrance. His mind began to shout:
Who are you who are you who are you?
He was aware that the telepathic scream went no further than the boundary of his own skull.

Side by side, the disoriented boy and the tall man stood waiting for a transport capsule. In one last futile attempt to break the coercion, Marc had managed to drop his nearly empty cup of cola, scattering bits of crushed ice all over the capsule platform.

“You’ll find out who I am eventually,” his captor said. “Just remember what I told you. I wasn’t joking about incapacitating you if you make trouble … Here’s your capsule. It’s been very interesting talking to you face-to-face, but now—get lost.”

A big hand took hold of Marc’s shoulder with a painfully strong grip and thrust him unceremoniously into the open hatch. “I’m sending you to Carioca Enclave. Colorful as all get-out, but don’t lose track of time and turn up late for dinner, or your Aunt Anne will be more than a little pissed. Au revoir, kiddo.”

The hatch slammed, and the capsule shot into the glowing purple rho-field of the tubeway, whisking Marc away at 6000 kph. Unifex’s smile faded, and he shook his head. Then with a gesture he cleaned up the ice and the rest of the mess and went back into the terminal. He had decided to have a Pepsi himself before he dematerialized.

I
SAID NOTHING TO
T
ERESA ABOUT THE TELEPATHIC BOLT FROM
the blue, that furious farspoken blast on my intimate mode that Denis had broadcast over the entire planet Earth and God knew how many parsecs of interstellar space, calling my name. The thing hit me with the impact of a punch in the stomach and I had responded with an involuntary mental grunt. But I clammed up immediately thereafter, and I was certain that Denis hadn’t been able to fix my position … yet. Many times during the following weeks at Ape Lake I lay half awake, momentarily expecting my mind’s ear to hear the
precisely directed mindspeech of my foster son, telling me that his seekersense had found our hideout at last. But it didn’t come, and I finally convinced myself that Denis wouldn’t find us, and neither would anybody else—not until young Jack was born, and the Remillard Dynasty was safely inaugurated into the Concilium, and Teresa and I were safe from the clutches of the law, and we all lived happily ever after.

It took two months for us to finish repairing our rustic home and get it ready for winter. The tree felling and carpentry were made almost pleasurable by that miracle machine the woodzapper, which I thanked God (and Matsushita Industries) for almost daily as I worked on the cabin and its furniture. When I was a youth, I had used a device called a chain saw, which was a wonderful improvement over chopping or sawing wood by hand. But even small chain saws were awkward and dangerous to use, were fueled by petrochemicals, and needed frequent sharpening. In contrast, the woodzapper was a lightweight wonder. In place of the chain saw’s oval guidebar, it had a business end that looked something like the capital D frame of a large hacksaw, but without the blade. When you switched the thing on, a thin bar of coherent golden light closed the gap. This photonic beam (so the instructions assured me) “would slice through the most dense varieties of wood like tofu.” And it did, too, exploding the cells of green wood with a great blast of steam and yielding a smooth raw surface that seemed almost to have been sanded. Dry wood had a residual thin layer of charring after being zapped, but I used hardly any of that in my construction.

Notching logs was a breeze with that sweet little woodzapper, and one of the most tedious parts of log-cabin making—cutting boards—was almost like slicing bread. You could debark a log with the zapper as quick as peeling a carrot, and cut and split billets of firewood as fast as you could wave your arm. The only thing you had to remember was to wear the protective face shield and gloves, and keep your bare skin out of range of the cloud of hot sawdust. The device was powered by one of the ubiquitous small D-type fusion cells that had been part of the Milieu’s answer to Earth’s energy hunger, and it was guaranteed to operate for some two hundred hours before needing a fuel refill. I loved
that woodzapper dearly, and it worked like a charm up until the fateful day of 19 October, when I forgot to press the
STANDBY
button after knocking off work. The overnight temperature outside on the porch where I had left the zapper fell well below freezing, turning the D-water inside the machine’s integral fusion unit to ice and ruining it. Fortunately, the construction work was nearly finished by then; but from that time on I had to split firewood with an axe.

The flights of migratory birds began early in October, and often at night we would hear them calling as they winged southward, especially when the moon was bright. The geese and tundra swans hooted and blatted and honked as they flew; but the trumpeter swans made glorious music, like an airborne squadron of French-horn players, and sent Teresa into raptures. She managed to reproduce their calls with her electronic keyboard and composed a “Swan Sonata” that sounded rather good to me—although she deprecated it as too derivative of Sibelius and Rachmaninoff.

On 21 October the first feathery flakes of snow fell, whitening the heights of Mount Mutt and Mount Jeff across the slowly freezing lake but accumulating less than a couple of centimeters around our cabin. The sun came out immediately afterward, creating a sparkling wonderland until most of the snow melted; but I was in no mood to join Teresa in her celebration of the beauty of it all. The first appearance of the white stuff only served to remind me that I had forgotten to bring snowshoes, and without them we would be unable to move away from the cabin when the really heavy snow arrived.

I made two stout wooden snow shovels at once, then consulted the reference flecks for a suitable snowshoe pattern. The ones I had used back home in New England had been of the classic Maine pattern, wide and quite large, with long tails, having ashwood frames and rawhide webbing. (Decamole would not be invented for another fifty years.) The Maine shoes were devils to use in brushy or steep terrain, which Ape Lake had plenty of, and I decided to make the more compact, rounded style called “bear paws” instead. The only flexible hardwood available for the frames was a kind of shrubby willow. I feared that the thicker sticks would break under my weight once the wood dried, and so I lashed together four much narrower withes with wire to give the outer framing and crosspieces the extra strength of lamination,
then webbed them with stout cord. This webbing would be much less efficient than rawhide, which was nearly indestructible and did not stretch; but so far we had seen neither moose nor caribou in the region, and only the hides of these large animals would have been strong enough to make suitable babiche thongs.

I expected to have to use the improvised shoes only in the immediate vicinity of the cabin, digging us out after storms and doing chores. It never occurred to me that those crudely made snowshoes would one day make the difference between our living or starving to death.

In the early weeks, when it seemed that we had all the food in the world, the only animals Teresa considered fair game were the snowshoe hares. These creatures, which were brown-furred when we arrived at Ape Lake and became pure white except for black-tipped ears as the season advanced, were at first very numerous on the lightly wooded slopes above the cabin and easily taken in wire snares. Teresa not only caught and cooked the hares; she also skinned them to a special purpose.

After I completed the new floor for our home, Teresa had made floor mats from part of the ten meters of wide wool duffel cloth we had bought. A couple more meters of the stuff were earmarked for childbirth supplies, and there was enough left to make a single narrow mattress pad for each bed. But she fretted that we might not be warm enough, even with our sleeping bags and the down comforter and the pads, when the temperature dropped far below zero. Then she happened to read in one of the woodcraft references how the Indians had made robes by weaving strips of rabbit-skin. She decided to make fur blankets in the same way, and set about immediately snaring the unfortunate snowshoe hares without mercy, extending her trapline in all directions. Her scheme eventually yielded two sizable blankets (fragile but luxuriant) and a small fur robe to wrap the baby in.

From September until late October we dined on sautéed hare, roast hare, hare cutlets, civet of hare, hare pie, southern-fried hare, blanquette of hare, ragout of hare, hare ravioli, fricassée of hare, hasenpfeffer, pasta with hare sauce, and hare soup with bannock croutons. Finally a diminishing bunny population and the increasing awkwardness of her pregnancy brought her trapping career to an end. To this
day, the mere mention of any dish containing rabbit turns my complexion green.