Jack the Bodiless (Galactic Milieu Trilogy) (50 page)

Rogi said, “Well, I’ll be damned. So they decided to work you over, too, eh?”

Marc ignored the comment. “I’m going to be spending a lot of time with Jack and Mama. She thinks the baby needs
me, and she’s probably right. I’ll keep up a cheerful front, and Papa will never know what I really think of him. Satisfied?”

The two of them glowered at each other. Then, abruptly, the tall old man’s eyes filled, and he caught up his great-grandnephew in a bear hug.

“Oh, God, Uncle Rogi,” Marc whispered, his face against the worn corduroy.

“Bon courage, mon petit gars.”

“It’s not only Mama … Jack pried inside my mind. I was off guard, and I had no idea he’d be able to do such a thing. He made me promise to explain the lethal genes.”

“Merde alors.” Rogi took a resolute breath. “Then you’ll just have to do it.”

Marc pulled free. “Mama said that Colette Roy came to the island along with Papa and the lawyers.”

“Yes. She took tissue samples from the baby for a comprehensive assay at the Gilman Human Genetics Center. You remember that the original tests were done on the sly by your Uncle Severin, who’s hardly an expert. Paul expects the results in about three days. If therapy is called for, it’ll be done here, at Dartmouth, under Colette’s supervision.”

“Mama is convinced that Jack is perfectly normal.”

“I know. He looks and acts normal, and has since he was born. I know that doesn’t necessarily mean that he
is
normal. But your Mama seems to have put any idea of congenital disease in the baby clear out of her mind.”

“As you said, Uncle Sevvy’s no expert. Even though he was a pretty decent neurosurgeon, he wasn’t trained in genetics. Still, it doesn’t seem likely he could have mistakenly diagnosed three lethals …” Marc put on his helmet and gloves. As if reassuring himself, he said, “But the docs managed to fix Luc, and look what a mess he was.”

“That’s right. When you talk to Jack, tell him about the wonders of modern genetic therapy. Lethal genes aren’t the death sentence they were in the old days. No way!” Rogi gave the boy an encouraging clap on the shoulder.

Then Marc was gone. For a few minutes, Rogi used his farsight to watch the turbocycle roar away into the storm. Then he shook his head and went off to burgle Denis’s supply of fine cognac.

*    *    *

I don’t agree. I was actually able to deflect Marc’s will. Stop him from doing something he wanted to do. My hunch paid off: the cerebroenergetic technology provides a genuine entry port into his mind—a bypass of all his mental screens. So what if nothing much came of it this first time? I’ll think of other angles.
You
never managed to get that far!

Well give me
some
credit!

I’m going to keep trying. I’m studying very hard.

No! Oh shit. I got absolutely nowhere in my first contact with the baby.
He’s
an instinctive mind-guarder too. With Marc hanging around now things will be impossible! If you
really
want Jack you’re going to have to let me kill Marc.

I could get him through the helmet brainboard. I know it. Let me try. I could make him crash the cycle—

[Jealousy. Impatience.]

I will follow! I do still love you! But—

That’s not as good as it used to be. I need operant lifeforce! I need it to grow. I NEED IT TO METAMORPHOSE.

You want me to be strong! Strong enough to take on the
best of the Grand Masters. Strong enough to kill your Great Enemy!

Don’t take too long, Fury. I’ve grown already and I’ve GOT to continue to grow. In one way or another.

W
HEN
I
WAS STILL MODERATELY YOUNG, BACK IN THE LAST
decade of the twentieth century, genetic engineering was in its infancy and all kinds of wild predictions were made about how, in the future, we would be able to have “designer” children, with bodies and minds tailor-made through manipulating the DNA codes that form the blueprint for the human species. It went without saying that all inherited abnormalities and diseases would be wiped out. No more sickle-cell anemia, no more hemophilia or cystic fibrosis, no more jerry-built eyeballs that made you myopic, no more saddle-bag flab or hay fever or dinky cocks or bald heads twinkling in the moonlight to put a damper on romance. Genetic engineering would fix it all.

The more flamboyant scientific soothsayers went even further and said that we’d routinely be able to order up desirable traits for our unborn babies, like long eyelashes and clear skin and handsome features and white teeth and an IQ of 300—just by selecting from a shopping list of “superior” genes that the heredity manipulators would offer to prospective parents. And this was only for eugenic starters!
When population-pressured Earthlings set out to colonize other worlds and we decided we needed colonists with gills for watery planets, or lizard-skinned folks for hot planets, or even turtle-bodied humans for heavy-gravity planets—why, hey! It’d be easy as pie to engender a whole new population of modified bods and superminds to order.

Some of those science-fictional genetic predictions did come true. But not all of them—unfortunately for a whole lot of sick and unhappy human beings, including my little great-grandnephew Jon Remillard.

In the months following Jack’s homecoming, I was to learn more about human genetics and genetic engineering’s limitations than I ever wanted to know. Most of my education came from good old Colette Roy, who took charge of the baby’s therapy from the hopeful beginnings in 2052 until the horrifying and transcendent culmination in 2054.

When she agreed to supervise Jack’s treatment, Colette Roy was ninety-two years old. She was one of the original Dartmouth Coterie, that close-knit group of students with operant mindpowers who befriended young Denis when he first came to the college as a timid twelve-year-old prodigy in 1979. Like most members of the Coterie, Colette took a medical degree with graduate studies in psychiatry. She was an associate of Denis’s later in the new Department of Metapsychology, doing clinical work with operants and suboperants.

In 1985 Colette married Glenn Dalembert, a colleague and another member of the original Coterie, who died in 2031. She and Glenn had one son, Martin Dalembert, who became a distinguished genetics researcher and the father of three children—Aurelie, Jeanne, and Peter Paul. Aurelie married Philip Remillard and Jeanne married his brother Maurice. Peter Paul and his wife Alice Waddell had a single child, Peter Paul Junior—called Pete—who became one of Marc’s closest friends and a fellow Metapsychic Rebel.

After the Intervention, Colette herself turned to genetic research as a result of Martin’s influence and made a second academic career for herself in what she thought would be her twilight years, studying the genetic aspects of the higher mindpowers and teaching graduate courses in the subject that became world famous. She continued to be a close friend of Denis and Lucille’s and was Paul Remillard’s godmother.
As she grew older, she continued to participate in research even in semiretirement, and was one of the first to submit to experimental regeneration tank therapy in 2035. Her rejuvenation was an unqualified success, and at the age of seventy-five, Colette found herself once again possessed of the body and brain cells she had enjoyed as a thirty-year-old.

When she agreed to try to help baby Jack, Colette Roy knew that she faced the premier challenge of her long life. Even though the infant still looked perfectly normal at three months of age, the defective genetic blueprint within his body cells had already begun to program his inevitable death. Comprehensive tests showed that Jack had not three intractable lethal equivalent genes, as Severin’s hasty and incompetent assay had showed, but
thirty-four
—some of them never before encountered in the human gene map. Any one of those defective bits of DNA would have been sufficient to kill the little boy before he reached the age of five years. All of them had heretofore proved resistant to genetic therapy; but Colette was going to treat them anyway, hoping that Jack’s genetic makeup was as extraordinary as his mind.

The human species has more than 100,000 genes, the DNA “code words” that program every cell in our bodies to take this shape or that, and perform this function or that, in this organ or that. A detailed map of human genetic material has been made, but the map is not always a straightforward thing. One gene does not always control one trait. On the contrary, the
usual
thing is for one gene to affect several traits or body functions, something geneticists call pleiotropy. (The ramifications of pleiotropy were still being studied as the twenty-first century rolled to a close.) In a flip side to pleiotropy, a number of completely different genes are capable of producing the same effect or trait. And in a given environment—for example, adequate or inadequate nutrition in the womb or in early years, or in the presence of carcinogenic agents—genes can influence the bodies in widely varying ways. To complicate things even further, our human-species collection of DNA is fraught with mysterious “extras”—ornaments or doodles on the basic blueprint that seem to be totally unnecessary … perhaps.

The entry of the human race into the Galactic Age gave us access to high technology, but it did not instantly improve the techniques of genetic engineering. We still had the same human genes to cope with, and they were, by and large, more complex in their interaction than were the genes of the other Milieu races. It became possible to identify pleiotropic human genes more precisely using Milieu science; but modifying these genes to avoid undesired side effects during therapy was accomplished only very slowly, over a long period of time.

It was not until 2040 that the genetic engineering triumph known as the regeneration tank came into widespread use, enabling humans to regrow lost or defective organs and rejuvenate aging bodies to a reasonable equivalent of young adulthood. As a side benefit to truly necessary (and expensive) regeneration therapy in the tank, a person could also be reprogrammed genetically for modest types of enhancement genetic engineering, such as the modification of muscle mass and inherited fat deposition patterns, the resculpting of facial features, the elimination of male-pattern baldness, and the changing of various body pigments. During the Simbiari Proctorship and for some decades thereafter, until tank therapy became inexpensive, reliable, and routine, purely cosmetic or otherwise frivolous alteration of the genes was forbidden by law. Human nature being what it is, however, persons with enough money to spend were very often able to get what they wanted, law or no law.

Even the most carefully executed genetic engineering procedures still carried some risks all throughout the twenty-first century, since inserting extra genes into a person’s blueprint might produce unexpectedly disastrous effects through some hitherto unknown action of pleiotropy. There was also the perplexing matter of self-redaction, in which a person’s mind was known to influence the way that genes “expressed” themselves for better or worse.

Certain gene complexes causing serious defects proved to be completely intractable to engineering, and so did some “good” genes that might have been used eugenically. Traits such as intelligence and personality turned out to be controlled by a bewildering interaction among more than sixteen thousand different genes—effectively banishing any possibility of genetically engineering the brain. As the
reader of these Memoirs has probably already suspected, the so-called immortality gene complex occurring in the Remillard family was never successfully transplanted either, except by the good old-fashioned technique called sexual intercourse.

Nevertheless, by the time of Jon Remillard’s birth, the “bad” genes responsible for a host of congenital human diseases had been pinpointed, and a goodly number of the worst of them had succumbed to the type of genetic engineering called somatic cell gene therapy. In this, DNA containing a “correction” of the flawed gene is inserted into the patient’s body, and if all goes well, the genetic blueprint will be successfully revised, and abnormality will give way to normality.

The flawed codons still existed within the cured patient’s germ cells, however, and could be passed on to the offspring. In order to eradicate a genetic flaw permanently from an affected family, the much trickier expedient called germ line gene therapy is required. The delicate fertilized egg itself must have the genetic correction inserted into it, so that all cells of the developing embryo, including the embryo’s own germ cells, will carry the revised blueprint.

Germ line gene therapy was very successful in plants and in some animals. But in the highly organized human body with its pleiotropy, the results were usually unsatisfactory, with the DNA often latching onto inappropriate parts of the embryo’s chromosomes. Even before the Intervention, ethical genetic scientists had decided that the risks in the procedure outweighed potential benefits.