Jack the Bodiless (Galactic Milieu Trilogy) (33 page)

Zipped inside my shelter at last, I did what any sensible Canuck would have done: I crept into my sleeping bag, had a good nip of rum, and went to sleep.

For some reason, my slumber was as deep and restful as a child’s. I don’t remember my dreams, but they were innocuous. Every now and then I would half waken to the roaring of the gale in the trees and the sharp hiss of snow against the taut fabric of the tent, then drift back to sleep again. In time, the sound of the wind became muffled and the snow hiss stopped, and I knew that the tent was buried. But not to worry: the little screened window at the back was open a little at the top for ventilation, and loose snow has plenty of air in it. So I slept on and on …

 … Until utter silence woke me up.

It was pitch black inside my shelter and the storm was over. I had slept with most of my clothes on, and if anything, I was too warm. The felt liners of my Pak boots and my mitts were shoved down in the bottom of the sleeping bag along with my food sack and water canteen. I retrieved the lot, put on my damp parka, ate a soggy oatmeal cake blind (ugh!), and drank some water. Then I began to dig myself out, since nature called. The snow had drifted more than a meter and a half deep, but it was so soft it was easily pushed aside. A snowshoe, plied with care, made a good shovel. I stomped and scraped a ramp, peed into a snowy alcove, put the snowshoes on, then moved onto the fresh snow surface.

Up there it was bitterly cold. To my surprise, the night sky was bright. The aurora borealis glowed overhead like enormous curtains of green and scarlet light. As I watched, enthralled, they rippled and even seemed to rustle, and then a great expanding lance shape of white radiance thrust up from behind the ridge on the opposite side of the canyon, piercing the colored draperies. It was followed by another beam, and then a third and a fourth, like celestial searchlights. I gave an exclamation of awe. The trees now cast sharp shadows on the new-fallen snow, and the entire little basin was lit up as though a full moon were shining.

And not 15 meters away, on top of a great heap of nearly snow-free rocks, I saw something move. Something large.

I stood petrified. And then I caught a faint whiff of a pungent animal odor—and the thing on the rocks stood upright on two legs, the aurora silvering its shaggy pelt. It was huge, a good half-meter taller than I, and I knew in an instant what it was.

Careful to make no sound, I ducked back down into the tent, seized the rifle, and shook off my right mitt. Flipping off the safety, I crept back up the snow ramp, lifted the weapon to my shoulder, and lined up the sights. The creature was still there, facing away from me, looking as tall and as massive as a grizzly bear.

But it wasn’t a bear. It was a member of an endangered species: Gigantopithecus. The Bigfoot. The largest primate that had ever lived. A creature that was telepathic, as I was, but with a mind still innocent, as mine decidedly was not. As I drew a bead on the Megapod, I completely forgot all the
high-minded musings that had occupied me when I first came to Ape Lake. I thought only of how much meat that great frame carried—meat that would keep Teresa and Jack and me alive.

I would have killed it. At that range, even a duffer like me wouldn’t miss. And I had no qualms of conscience at all. It was an animal and I was a desperate human being, the most dangerous species in the universe. But just as my finger was tightening on the icy trigger, the aurora burst into a fantastic display of purple and green and white shapes, like multicolored ghosts gliding about the sky.

And the Bigfoot raised its arms, and my mind heard it utter a formless telepathic cry of wonderment and joy.

Slowly, I let the barrel of the Winchester sag. The sky phantoms danced above us and the stars sparkled and the great creature crooned its silent hymn from the rocky eminence. I tried to lift the rifle again, then gave it up and snapped the safety back on. The small sound echoed in the crisp cold air like a cracking twig, and the Bigfoot swung around abruptly and looked at me.

I waved.

It vanished.

Sighing, I returned to the tent, had another oatcake and a snort, and went back to sleep.

The next morning, it was snowing again, but lightly. I ’shoed over to the rocks where I had seen the giant ape and found nothing, not even tracks. Perhaps the thing had a den deep inside the pile.

“Snooze in peace,” I told it. “Reason tells me that you’re groceries, but my heart says, ‘Nay, nay.’ One simply cannot eat a fellow operant.”

After breakfast, I packed up and continued my journey down Ape Canyon.

Below the little basin, the bed of the creek steepened once again. With the snow much deeper now, I had to proceed with greater care and much more slowly. So far, I had not encountered any formidable obstacles to travel—but I hadn’t seen any game trails, either, except for the tracks of something that might have been a mink or a marten in a place where the creek had a small area of open water.

It snowed dismally on and off all day long, accumulating
another ten cents or so. Ape Creek curved in a northerly direction now, skirting the little peak I had named Mount Jeff. I might have traveled four or five more kloms downstream by the end of the day. I found a place where there were wind-scoured rocks, pitched the tent, and built a fire. The oatcakes were not much more palatable warm than they had been cold, but a potful of hot chicken soup warmed my belly nicely. I lay in my sleeping bag at the open door of the tent, sipping the rum drop by numbing drop, watching the fire die and the snowflakes sift gently down. As boozy contentment took hold of me, I wondered if I was going to die. Freezing to death is supposed to be an easy way to go. Much easier than starvation. Lucky me. Poor Teresa …

But then I snapped out of my morbid reverie, remembering that I had not decided to accompany Teresa to this place of my own free will. I was ordered to do so by the Lylmik entity I called the Family Ghost, who had said that my participation in the adventure was necessary.

Necessary! To what? To the thing’s cosmic chicanes, of course. I was quite certain that Teresa’s unborn child was the key factor in my spectral hassler’s schemes; this meant that she would live to see Jack born. It was logical that I would probably live as well, so that she would not have to go through her ordeal alone in the dead of winter. Un point, c’est tout, Oncle Rogi! The luxury of freezing to death was not to be mine after all.

Still, I was getting mighty tired of clambering down this canyon. The farther away from Ape Lake I went, the more trouble I’d have returning. One more goddam blizzard, and I might not be able to get back at all …

“Mon fantôme!” I called out. “Are you there?”

The last flaming chunk of wood in my campfire subsided into the ashes. Only embers remained, making little sizzling sounds as the snowflakes pelted them.

“Ghost! I know you can hear me. It’s getting colder and colder, and this rock-scrambling on snowshoes is pooping me out. I’m only a poor old man—a hundred and six years old! If I go much farther, I’ll have big trouble hauling back any game I find. You shag me out some kind of edible critter tomorrow—you hear me? No more fooling around. You want me to do this job you handed me, then gimme a break! Big game! No shit! Tomorrow! Right here! Without fail!”

Feeling much better, I capped the rum canteen, zipped the tent flap, and slept.

In the morning, it was very cold and cloudy, but the snow had stopped. When I went down to the creek for water, I discovered that something had been there before me. Tracks led upstream on the opposite bank, and I could see a thin plume of smoke or steam arising from a stand of small fir trees about a hundred meters away.

I got the Winchester, crept up my side of the creek, and spotted him browsing among the firs. Aim for the front of the body, where the vital organs are, the
Wilderness Survival Handbook
had said. And the book even included a line drawing of an animal with a bull’s-eye on it for the sake of idiots like me. I slipped off the safety, took aim at the proper spot, and fired.

The young bull moose dropped dead into the snow.

It must have weighed upwards of 450 kilos. Even if I made a sled, it was going to take several grueling trips to get all the meat back home. But what the hell. I’d done it! Giddy with success, I got out the axe and the knives and the tarp and the plass bags, and tried to remember what the book had said about butchering. I was a little hazy on the details, but I figured I’d manage somehow.

Before I started, I chanced one triumphal telepathic shout, imperfectly directed along Teresa’s intimate mode:

Foodgloriousfood!

And another thought-beam pierced my brain like a tiny dart, smack between the eyes:

Gotcha Uncle Rogi!

Denis had finally found me.

O
N
4 D
ECEMBER BY
E
ARTH RECKONING
, A
NNE
R
EMILLARD
had requested—no, ordered!—that Marc do his family duty by tourist-guiding small groups of his newly arrived cousins about Concilium Orb, orienting them to the legislative center of the Galaxy. She had delivered this stunner with oh-by-the-way casualness as the two of them were leaving the Human Polity office block on Monday, heading for the tube station along with a great mob of operant human bureaucrats.

“But what about my
real
work?” Marc had protested. “I’m not finished with the research correlating GPPs of the cosmop worlds with their crime rates.”

“Junko can finish it.”

“But I’m supposed to be acting as a legislative page, doing important work for you and the other family magnates—not wet-nursing gangs of gawking juvenile relatives!”

Anne was adamant. “Young man, until your father or someone else requests your inestimable services, you are still
my
page, and you will do as I say. After two days of rest, your cousins are all recovered from limbo lag and spoiling for something to do, especially the young ones. There’s no reason why they should waste time sailboarding and lying
on the beach in Paliuli when they could be furthering their education.”

“Why
me?
There are regular tours for the families and friends of the new human magnates—”

“I know you’ve been spending every spare minute prowling this exotic beehive. Make some good use of what you’ve learned. Your uncles and aunts and your father and I are going to be much too busy with the inauguration preliminaries and other Concilium affairs to spend much time with the children, and your cousins will learn much more from you than they would from a canned tour.”

Most of the Remillards had arrived on the CSS Kungsholm, which had docked two days earlier, and all of the families except Paul’s had settled in at tropical Paliuli. Only Denis and Adrien remained behind on Earth to take care of last-minute business. They would be joining the others just before Christmas. Lucille had insisted upon taking charge of Marc’s motherless younger siblings during the space voyage and was still supervising them in Paul’s big apartment in Golden Gate, bossing the nanny and the housekeeper about. She had also appointed herself Paul’s official hostess, to his well-concealed chagrin, and had arranged for herself and Denis to take an apartment right next to Paul’s.

“Show your cousins around in small groups,” Anne said, as she and Marc descended the escalator into the tube station. “Not more than six or seven kids at a crack. Five days with each bunch ought to give them a useful overview of the human and exotic enclaves, especially the latter. Do an especially good job showing them how our nonhuman compères behave in simulated natural settings. And don’t forget to take the youngsters to the visitors’ gallery in the Concilium chambers so that they can experience legislative procedures.”

Marc groaned. “I’ll be running fifty-pence tours from now until New Year’s!”

“The Galactic year is a thousand days long. And we are now”—Anne allowed herself a small smile as she paused to consult her wrist-com—“only on Day 566. You’ll be back home on Earth long before then.”

Marc looked at her with a startled expression, his annoyance wiped away by a sudden new thought. “Back home … Aunt Anne, do you know what Papa and the others are planning to do?”

“About what?” Anne inquired blandly. She had turned aside into a refreshment bar once they reached the lower level. “Buy you a ginger ale?” She fed her credit card into the small machine on the bar and punched up an Anchor Steam beer for herself.

Marc nodded to the drink invitation but otherwise kept his mind well guarded. He did not reply out loud but projected to her on her intimate mode twin portraits of his mother and Uncle Rogi.

“We’ve not yet held a family memorial service or a requiem,” Anne said, pressing her right thumb on one corner of the tab display and then scanning it swiftly with her wallet for a receipt. “You can have masses said for them yourself if you want to do something special.”

“You know very well that’s not what I mean.” The two cold beverages popped out of a hatch in front of them. Marc picked his up and began to drink in apparent unconcern. The bar was crowded with humans and exotics, and Marc and Anne were squeezed in between a tall Gi daintily sipping a cocktail of frangipani nectar and a stout little Poltroyan chugalugging a stein of crème de menthe.

Anne said to Marc on intimate: If you have questions about Teresa and Rogi ask your father if you dare but do it very ADROITLY because this entire Orb is supposedly bugged by Lylmik surveillance machinery.

I can’t ask Papa. I haven’t been able to get him alone since he arrived. All he’s interested in is scrounging for votes and fooling around with Laura Tremblay the damned HYPOCRITE he’s supposed to be such a high-and-mighty great leader and statesman and
he’s going to be First Magnate for Christ’s sake
and he doesn’t even care about his wife and unborn child—