Jack the Bodiless (Galactic Milieu Trilogy) (48 page)

He took the guidance helmet off and frowned at its complex interior. The needle electrodes gleamed faintly red with his blood before retracting into the cage, automatically heating up and sterilizing themselves with tiny puffs of smoke. Even as Marc summoned an ultrasensory view of the suspect microsystem, he knew that simply looking at the damn thing wouldn’t tell him diddly-squat. He would either have to take it apart and test it himself—and with all the makeup work from his two missed terms, it wouldn’t be easy to spare the time—or else give it to Alex and see if
he
had any bright ideas.

Marc took his IBM notebook and a large sack of buttermilk donuts from the turbocycle’s carrier and trudged up the slushy back walk. In the mudroom, he stripped off his environmental leathers and boots and put them in his locker to dry, then tramped into the back parlor stocking-footed. Alex was there, and so were Boom-Boom and Pete Dalembert and Shig Morita and a couple of sophomores he didn’t know, watching a Soviet football game on the Tri-D.

“Hey, Marc,” Alex said. The other three freshmen also murmured greetings.

“Small contribution to the general jollification,” said Marc, dumping the donut sack. Everybody but Shig, who was already munching dried seaweed from a plass packet, pounced. The sophomores took extras.

“Shitty weather,” Boom-Boom said, with his mouth full, “but very commendable quasi toruses.”

“Tori,” Alex corrected.

“But never torii,” Shig Morita said, his eyes never leaving the game, “because
that’s
not a bag of donuts at all but a Japanese gate!… Aaagh! Would you believe the way that Ostrovsky can boot the ball back over his head? The clot’s gotta be a closet PK meta!”

“No way,” said Pete Dalembert. “The refs would spot his noodling.”

“Not if the guy’s a gonzo screener,” said one of the sophs.

“A psychokinetic topspin on the ball is detectable if an operant referee is looking for it,” Alex said. “And if the player tried to screen it, the
screen
would be detectable. Right, Marc?”

“Most of the time it would,” Marc said gravely. “I could probably fudge it, but I doubt if many other heads could.”

“Oh, hey!
What
have we here?” The bulkiest of the sophomores, a patronizing grin on his face, tossed an inexpert mental probe at Marc. It did not even bounce; it was absorbed without a trace. “Ooo! Captain Marvel comes to Animal House! Lucky, lucky us. What did you say your name was, young donut peddler?”

“Lay off him, Eric,” said Boom-Boom in a warning tone. Although the sophomore was three years older, the hulking fourteen-year-old freshman outweighed him by ten kilos. “He’s one of our buddies from Brebeuf.”

“I’m Marc Remillard.” Marc spoke absently. He was having a swift telepathic conversation with Alex Manion about the malfunctioning helmet.

The second sophomore groaned. “Another Jebbie ass-wipe! The house is crawling with you precocious little pricks.”

“Remillard …?” The boy named Eric was frowning. “Don’t tell me you’re the one who—”

A donut levitated from Boom-Boom’s paw and neatly stoppered Eric’s open mouth.

“Marc’s okay,” said Pete Dalembert quietly. “Sometimes he comes on a little weird, but in time you get used to it. He’s not really shy, only arrogant.”

“Our glorious leader,” Shig said. “You sophs are going to love him even more than the rest of us.”

Eric slowly chewed his donut. His eyes had gone narrow and thoughtful.

Marc tossed the black helmet to Alex, who caught it one-handed. “There’s the wonky brain-bucket. I’m fresh out of easy fixes myself. Want to check it out?”

“Sure.” Alex Manion licked sugary leftovers off his unencumbered hand and got up slowly from his chair.

“That a CE hat you got there?” Eric brightened. “I’ve heard of them but never seen one. What model?”

“Homemade,” Marc said. “Built it myself. It drives my BMW bike.”

“Jeez Louise!” exclaimed the second sophomore. “You really made it, kid? Lemme check ’er out. I’m majoring in cerebroenergetics.”

“It’s broken,” Marc said shortly. “Maybe some other time.”

“Let’s take it up to my room and run a quickie test,” said Alex. “There’s time before dinner.”

The two of them climbed the back stairs of the frat house together, hearing Boom-Boom and Shig filling in the suddenly attentive sophomores on Marc’s family antecedents and metapsychic armamentarium. A rich scent of clam chowder wafted up from the kitchen. Somebody was playing “Lush Life” very badly on a saxophone. From the sun room and the front parlor came sounds of laughter and a mélange of declamatory mental speech, mostly jocose and semiobscene and concerned with coy women and hoped-for Friday-night dates. Alex addressed Marc on his intimate mode:

Sorry I missed you this morning. How they hanging?

Goodenough. These first days back are bound to be glarfy the worst will be wangling the lost labtime but fear not I’ll catchup I did a lot of the swotwork while I was in Orb.

Hey burdens of being wellconnected! Tough you missed WinterCarnival icecycle racing this year was
noteworthy
but it musta been somekinda zorch seeing ConciliumOrb and mingling with the MagnatizedMob + **LYLMIK OVERLORDS IN HUMAN FORM**!!

“Ha,” Marc said without humor. “You don’t know the halvesies.”

They went into Alex’s room, a tiny cubicle where the floor, desk, and two chairs were nearly buried in a junkshop tangle of microelectronic gear, homemade boxes of mysterious function, and miscellaneous equipment ranging from miglom analyzers to miniature dy-field generators. The place stank of fried insulation and Forte cement. On the wall was a holo poster advertising the New D’Oyly Carte Opera Company production of
The Mikado
.

“Didn’t take you long to make yourself at home,” Marc observed, taking in the chaos of the room. He sat down on the bed, the only reasonably clear surface available. “Your
mom must be singing hallelujah, getting all this crapdoodle out of your house at long last. Her fire insurance probably dropped a few kilobux, too.”

Alex was Marc’s best friend and his former prep school roommate, a sturdy, bulldog-jawed youth whose eyes were dark and wide-set, with heavy lids that gave him a sleepy expression. He was the only person who had ever beat Marc at three-dimensional chess, and the only other undergraduate at Dartmouth with an intelligence quotient classed “unmeasurable.” He was an amateur computer engineer of considerable talent and intended to specialize in theoretical physics. His creativity was grandmasterclass and his other powers mediocre.

Alex pulled a clamp vise from behind an overflowing trash basket, fastened it to the worktable after making room, and immobilized the CE helmet. Deftly as a surgical nurse prepping a patient, he removed the visor, the ear padding and phones, the needle-electrode cage, and the environmental unit. “Mom’s got her hands full with your Uncle Rogi’s bookshop, and no time left to fret about anything so piddling as my little hobbies.” He positioned a microscanner and a slave manipulator, then laid out the slave’s tool kit, the virtual glove, and the goggles. Poking around among the junk on a nearby shelf, he found what looked like a jeweler’s ring box, made of crystal and silvery metal. He plugged a little cable into it and mated it to the scanner. “Will your family close the bookshop, now that the old man’s passed away?”

“No,” said Marc tersely.

Alex fiddled with his IBM Main Shoebox, coupling the powerful little computer to the scanner as well. The Tri-D monitor lit up. Alex began configuring for the job, whispering parameters into the hand mike. His mind said: I’m really sorry Marc. About Uncle Rogi and your mother.

Don’t be.

…?

It’ll be made public eventually but keep it under your hair until the poop hits: Uncle Rogi and Mama aren’t dead.

Alex’s jaw dropped open. He stared at his friend in shock.

Marc said: It was all a hoax. I engineered most of it with Uncle Rogi’s help. Mama was preggers in violation of the Repro Statutes and determined to have the baby. His fetal genetic assay said he was chock-full of lethals but Mama
proved to me that his mind was superior to anybody’s in our family. Including mine. I decided the kid deserved to live and so I hid Mama in the Canadian bush with Uncle Rogi to take care of her. My father and the rest of the family found out but they didn’t know where I’d stashed them and knew they couldn’t pry it out of me and they were wild to suppress the scandal so they let it be. They sent me to Orb to keep me out of shitway and kept me there after most of the human magnates had already gone home. My grandfather finally found out where I’d hidden Mama and Rogi and took them out of the hiding place up in Canada and put them somewhere else. Our lawyers have been working to find a way to deal with Mama’s legal problems. Rogi’s too of course. And the baby’s. His name is Jack. I haven’t seen him or Mama or Rogi or even farspoken them since last August.

God … Can your mother really beat the rap? An operant’s violation of the Repro Statutes carries the death penalty!

Under the Simbiari Proctorship it did. Papa&Dynasty have been humping away down in Concord trying to change the law get Mama a pardon or retroactive exoneration or some damned thing. That may take months. But the resolution to modify the Repro Statutes finally passed in the Intendant Assembly three weeks ago and went to committee. That’s when I was finally allowed to leave Orb.

Can they nail
you
for anything?

Probably not. Uncle Rogi will most likely claim that the whole thing was his doing. There’s no percentage in my contradicting him.

Holy shit … and you say this little brother of yours is a real longbrain?

“He’d better be,” said Marc out loud.

Alex blinked, then ventured to ask, “What about the snuff genes?”

“I don’t know,” Marc said in a low voice. “I just don’t know.”

Alex didn’t say anything else. He turned on the microscanner, aimed it at the relevant circuitry of the helmet, then slipped on the virtual glove and goggles. The slave manipulator delicately picked up an instrument in obedience to the analogous movements of the gloved hand. Alex
seemed to be prying up an invisible thing as the glove moved in empty air. On the microscan monitor, Marc could see an enlargement of the actual tiny tool removing an infinitesimal electronic chip from its seating in the brainboard.

“You say you replaced this chip when the hat first began to act up,” Alex said. In the virtual world depicted in his goggles, he saw the chip as a thing larger than a book-plaque. The microscopic tool seemed the size of a small crowbar, gripped firmly in his gloved hand.

“Right. I was getting oddball feedback from the executive miglom. Mental imagery that wasn’t mine and didn’t make any sense. Weird pictures. I thought I had traced it to that chip of the brainboard and put in a new one. Then today the exec mode balked out completely and the bike fought back every time I thought it an order.”

Alex mimed moving something. The slave swooped away from the helmet and extended an arm toward the ring box. An opening appeared in the box’s top, and the slave, directed by Alex’s glove, inserted the microscopic electronic device into the function-tester. “This little hummer is certainly the obvious point of origin for spurious commands. Putting it through its paces in the glom analyzer ought to flush out any exec glitch.”

“It tested okay on miglom. I didn’t try ceep.”

“Let’s do that.” Alex took the glove off and picked up the mike again. In a few minutes the computer’s monitor began to display the chip’s secrets. The two boys studied the flickering complexities, now and then making remarks. After about ten minutes, Alex said, “The chip is functioning perfectly in cpglom
and
miglom.”

“Shit,” said Marc.

Alex shrugged. “You want me to trace the board’s executive circuitry? It’ll take a while.”

“It’s impervious, and I never touched it. Only the one chip. There must be some other explanation.”

“Wear and tear,” Alex suggested. “Sweat in the board. Electric dandruff.”

“Come on! You saw how well sealed the brainboard is, and the helmet was working perfectly before I got shipped off to Orb. Now it starts gibbering and flashing goofy images and countermanding my orders! A tired chip in the BI exec was the obvious fix. Eliminate that, and what’s left?”

Alex considered for a minute. “Is there any way that somebody could have tampered with the helmet while you were away?”

“It was locked in the boot of the bike, in our garage at home. Who the hell would bother?”

“Beats the hell out of me,” said Alex. He hesitated. “You know, my man, the most obvious explanation for malfunction is that the glitch is in your own neuronic software. You’ve had a hard time of it during the past months. The spurious commands could result from some mental conflict that has nothing at all to do with turbocycle steering.”

“Horse puckey,” Marc scoffed.

“You know CE devices have always had a bad rep for screwing up the operator’s mind … You want my advice?”

“Not if it’s what I think it is.”

His friend persisted. “Give this brain bucket a rest. Drive your bike like a normal. At least until your family problems are resolved and you’re positive you’re thinking straight—”

“I always think straight, dammit! There has to be some other explanation.”

“Is it possible that another mind could inadvertently interfere with this CE system of yours? Say, through some gross slopover of the creative metafunction into the brain interface?”

“I don’t think so. But cerebroenergetics is one of those damned sciences where things are being discovered so fast that the new data are obsolete before they’re published. I suppose it’s theoretically possible to diddle the BI voluntary nodes, given a humongously talented grandmasterly creativity maven.”

“Now if you only had a twin,” Alex postulated idly, “and he was shadowing you on a second turbocycle wearing an identical guidance helmet …”

Marc did a double take. “I
did
have a twin brother … but he died when we were born. His name was Matthieu.”

“I’ll be a horse’s patoot!”

“Uncle Rogi told the story to me in the bookshop one day when I caught him maudlin drunk and he didn’t know what he was doing. He said that the two of us babies were mental antagonists almost from the first time we attained consciousness. Matt was born first, dead, and when I was born they found my umbilical cord wrapped around my neck and
my little hands locked in a vise grip on Matt’s cord. Evidently I cut off my twin’s blood supply before he could finish throttling me.”