Jack the Bodiless (Galactic Milieu Trilogy) (41 page)

[!!!Panic!!!]

<[Exasperation.] A hint only nothing concrete you fool be calm be calm wouldn’t I have warned you if there was any real danger?>

You’re going away again?
Woe …

Yes. Isupposesoyes …

You too Fury. I’ll hang up my stocking and leave milk and cookies.

Five.

Davy MacGregor stood among the crowd on the side of the crèche opposite the Remillard tribe and studied the lot of them with a dark and baleful eye. With him were his son Will and his platonic friend Cordelia Warszawska.

Five, Margaret had said, as she died. Five.

“Hiroshi has been working on M-Ds who are members of the Asian Intendancy,” Cordelia was saying, “and he is very confident that you will gain a majority of their votes. So many of them have an inherent prejudice against nepotism, and if Paul is elected he will undoubtedly install members of his family in the steering committees—if not in the Directorate itself. The European Intendants among the M-Ds are also solidly for you, and if only Earth’s Zone Intendants voted, you would probably win. But the swing votes will undoubtedly come from those Magnate-Designates who are not home-world elected—those nominated from the colonies, and the at-large M-Ds from the ranks of science, the arts, and the smaller categories.”

“If only the Magistratum had been able to find something implicating a Remillard,” Will mourned. “Anything! But they haven’t a clue—not in the two killings and not in the Dartmouth College attack on Margaret. And to think we once believed that the exotics were damn near omniscient!”

“They’re no such thing,” Cordelia said. “Especially not nowadays, when human operants are finally learning how to use their powers to the fullest. The exotics have been reluctant to admit publicly that some of us can screen them out and resist their probing, but it’s true all the same.”

“Especially of those damned Remillards,” Will said. “But just wait till the Human Polity gets its franchise! Our own Magistratum will have the—”

Don’t even think it, you fool!
Cordelia admonished.

Will retreated precipitately behind a mental barricade, flushing to the roots of his auburn hair.

Davy, who knew very well what his son was thinking, said quietly, “Unless we want to be even more totalitarian than the Simbiari Proctorship, we’ll have to put strict legal limitations on mental probing.
Any
kind of probing. Certainly the process will never be used casually—for investigative fishing expeditions. And there is no solid evidence whatsoever linking any Remillard to the crimes in question.”

“Then we may never find out who killed Margaret!” Will said.

His father looked away. He, like his son, had inherited the rangy Highland physique and beaklike nose of Jamie MacGregor. But where Will also had his grandsire’s flaming hair and impetuous temperament, Davy was swarthy, and his demeanor more dour and studied.

“There is one clue,” he now admitted to Will and Cordelia. “I said nothing of it to the Krondak Evaluator because I’d blanked it out in my grief, along with Margaret’s dying cry. She said a single word, you see. It seemed to make no sense then. But I’ve been worrying it in my mind for a while now, batting it about and tearing at it and trying to sift out the nuances of her meaning as I replayed it in memorecall. And I think I may have finally got it …”

“For God’s sake, Dad!” Will cried. “You have a clue and you’ve said nothing …?” Cordelia touched the younger man’s arm, silencing him with her coercion.

Davy was looking away, over the crèche with its naïvely
charming santons, to the dense group of people on the other side. Clustered proudly together now amid their children and spouses, exuding their inimitable aura of power and consequence, were the seven members of the Remillard Dynasty: Philip, Maurice, Severin, Anne, Catherine, Adrien, and Paul.

“As Margaret died,” Davy said, “she cried out the word ‘five.’ I’ve pondered her meaning and come at last to the conclusion that she was describing her murderer. But he wasn’t a single person at all. He was a meld of five minds—a metaconcert.”

“Of course,” breathed Cordelia Warszawska, her eyes widening in sudden comprehension. “And if the same metaconcert killed Brett, it would help explain the extraordinary amount of psychocreative force that had to have been exerted to drain the lifeforce in that unique way.”

The church carillons started chiming, and a chorale of exquisite Gi voices began to sing the “Cantique de Noël.” Almost at once, the exotics were joined by those humans in the crowd who knew the French lyrics—including every one of the Family Remillard.

“What we must determine now, somehow,” Davy MacGregor concluded, “is:
which five?”

“Peuple à genoux,” caroled the exotic choristers, “attends ta délivrance. Noël! Noël! Voici le Rédempteur!”

“No one could sing that song like Teresa Kendall,” Davy MacGregor said. He seemed to be staring blindly at the great star that now shone above the crèche. “But she’s gone, too, poor lass. What a hell of a Christmas.”

Cordelia was Jewish and Will was an agnostic, but that didn’t stop the two of them from each taking one of Davy’s arms and drawing him along with them into the throng streaming toward the Protestant Rite church.

“Noël! Noël!” the humans and exotics sang. And the bells rang out.

J
ON
P
AUL
K
ENDALL
R
EMILLARD HAD PHILOSOPHICAL DIFFICULTIES
with the concept of Christmas. That the scraggly little evergreen tree his mother was trimming was a midwinter hope symbol was easy enough to understand from the explanations and mental images Teresa offered. But the notion of God creating a body for himself to wear—and even Creation itself—bothered Jack.

He said: It seems a very strange and unnecessary thing for God to do. To become human so that we’d love him rather than fear him. If he’s truly a Supreme Being then it follows that he has no need of any other entity to ensure his own happiness. Especially entities that are so imperfect by their very nature that they will inevitably befoul an otherwise orderly creation. I can understand God creating the physical universe for fun. But why create other minds when you
know
they’re going to mess things up?

“I believe famous human thinkers have debated those points.”

Teresa was fastening diminutive candles made of moose tallow to the Christmas tree, which was hardly 60 centimeters tall. Each candle had a kind of saucer clip of aluminum foil to fasten it to the branch, but if one wasn’t careful either the foil or the soft candle would crush. She had already spoiled three candles by working too fast, trying to have the tree finished before Rogi got back inside after his wood-splitting. The festive dinner was almost ready to put on the table.

“I seem to remember that the theologians [image] of early times were quite positive that God had no absolute need to create other thinking persons,” Teresa said. “This is perfectly ridiculous, of course, since the theologians were willing to concede that he
had
done it and must have had a good reason. Now, unless we’re ready to admit that a Supreme Being can be capricious or wishy-washy [grotesque images], it follows that he needed to do it. He did need us.”

But what prompted God’s need of us?

“Love,” said Teresa.

The fetus said: That’s irrational.

“Exactly. I don’t believe anyone has ever
reasoned
out a satisfactory answer to God’s need of us. Those religions outside the Judeo-Christian [image] tradition rarely hit upon the notion of a loving God at all. As for natural philosophy, loving-kindness would not be an attribute that one would logically deduce that a Big-Bang-Creator-God [image] would have.”

Hardly.

“But love is the only motive that seems to make any sense. Without it, you have the Creator-God as a game player trying to assuage his cosmic boredom, caring about us only as game pieces [image]. That is to say, not caring very much! Now, if God wanted us to know that he created us out of love, he’d have to
tell
us, since we couldn’t figure it out for ourselves. He’d have to get directly involved with us, rather than let us tick along obliviously the way the evolving non-sapient universe does [image].”

I suppose so …

“There are any number of ways he might have done this [images]. But put yourself in God’s position and try to decide the most
elegant
way to get involved with your thinking creatures. The way that is at once most difficult and unlikely but has the potentiality to succeed in the most magnificent manner imaginable.”

Not the easiest way?

“Heavens, no! What would be the satisfaction in
that!
I can sing ‘Happy Birthday to You’ [quotation], but I get more satisfaction doing the mad scene from
Lucia
[quotation], even if it tires me out terribly.”

I understand.

Pinching and twisting, Teresa affixed one little candle after another, pausing now and then to straighten those that
leaned out of true. “God’s most elegant way of involving himself with us would have to be a scandal to the stodgy-minded and a delight to minds that have a sense of humor and of adventure. As his mind does.”

God can laugh?

“Of course, dear, and feel sorrowful, too. A Supreme Being without those attributes wouldn’t be supreme. Grim and joyless people try to pretend otherwise, but their arguments are unpersuasive.”

Explain to me how God became directly involved with us.

“It has happened differently on different worlds in the Galaxy. On ours,
I
believe that the primary involvement happened through the Jewish people and the Christians. It’s a long story, and you’ll really have to read it in the Bible [image]. That book is a fascinating account of human moral evolution, with historical and deeply mythic truth all mingled in a wonderful mishmash. It’s a literary treasure as well as the word of God, and some parts of it are profound, and some are fascinating and some are poetic, and some are even a bore, and parts of Saint Paul make me want to scream. I’m sorry that I haven’t read the whole thing myself, but you can pull bits and pieces out of my memories. Different religions interpret the Bible in different ways, but we Catholics believe that when the mentalities of one single key tribe of extremely intelligent people [image] were finally mature enough to grasp the concept of a loving God, God simply spoke to them.” She laughed. “Well—perhaps not
simply
[image].”

And the tribe accepted his messages and passed them on?

“Some members did. Others kept slipping and sliding back into primitive notions of angry gods that constantly needed to be appeased with blood sacrifices and other rubbish [image]. God had to keep coaxing them and smacking them down the way a loving mother has to do when her children are naughty [image], and—well, you must read the Bible and discuss it with people who know more about it than I do. Your Mama is a very poorly educated person, especially in religious studies. I’m probably explaining this all wrong. When I was in school and college, all I really was interested in was music … Now, where did I put that foil? I forgot to make a star. You can’t have a Christmas tree without a star [image].”

Is love the motivation for all creation, then?

“I imagine so. Mental lattices within our normal Reality can’t exist without the other five kinds, and vice versa. If God wanted to make minds to love, he had to make the whole cosmos. And it is quite lovely, most of it [images].”

But to create for the love of it seems so odd!

“Of course it does. It really makes no sense—in a rational view of the universe. And yet every artist knows the truth of it. And every healthy adult human knows that people who are in love want the whole world to be as happy as they are. If you are God, loving yourself or even
being
Love in some mysterious fashion, and there aren’t any other minds to share happiness with—then you make some.”

So one may conclude that God does need us?

“Most of our coreligionists today believe it’s true … Damn! These two candles are bound to set the tree on fire if they sag just the least bit. I’ll have to move them again!”

The fetus persisted: And the problem of the created minds being imperfect? And sometimes evil?

“I think that has something to do with advanced chaos theory, which I’ve never been able to make head or tail of. You must ask your big brother Marc to explain it after you’re born. There’s also some principle to the effect that it is much more glorious to make something wonderful out of imperfect parts. The very imperfection of the individual elements—even when there’s actual evil involved, as there often is in human affairs—challenges God to greater creative heights.”

What a strange idea.

“There’s an old proverb that says: ‘God writes straight with crooked lines.’ Human history is just full of crooks and twists and twines [images]. One would think anarchy or barbarism or the lowest common denominator would have triumphed ages ago. But it hasn’t. All the messes and atrocities and disasters have somehow been woven into a construct that looks better and better every year—at the same time that some things look even worse! The world you’re going to be born into is a wonderland compared to the world that existed only forty years or so in the past [images]. That’s because most people have easier lives in the Galactic Milieu than they did before the Great Intervention. But even so, there are still persons who are discontented or who are villains, and situations that are evil or tragic. Nevertheless we children of God continue to evolve and improve on
every level, almost in spite of ourselves. That also has something to do with nonlinearity and chaos. And God’s love, too.”