Jack the Bodiless (Galactic Milieu Trilogy) (51 page)

The Simbiari Proctorship confirmed this judgment and set up the infamous Reproductive Statutes in order to prevent the propagation of the genetic flaws deemed most injurious to human society as a whole. All humans were obliged to submit to genetic assay before they were issued a reproduction license. Those with the cleanest gene map—especially the operants—were encouraged to have the most children, while somewhat less fortunate types were apt to be restricted to a single offspring. Persons having genetic flaws were counseled as to the risks they faced and the possibility of successful genetic therapy. Those who carried the worst category of deleterious genes were prohibited by law from having any children at all, with the penalty varying with the seriousness of the genetic defect and the metapsychic status
of the individuals involved. All fetuses had to be tested for flaws within two months of conception, and those with intractable genetic disease were aborted. If nonoperant parents evaded the restrictions and persisted in having a seriously flawed baby, they were subject to fines, their health insurance was canceled, and they were obliged to assume all expenses involved in treating and rearing the diseased child. Operant parents, being in the eyes of the Simbiari Proctorship the standard-bearers for humanity’s future, were subject to the death penalty for committing the same reproductive crime. And so was the flawed fetus, if it still resided within the womb of the criminal mother.

As a result of Teresa Kendall’s case, the deliberate contravention of the Reproductive Statutes by an operant was eventually reduced from a Class One to a Class Two felony, no longer carrying the death penalty, and the child involved in such a crime was deemed totally innocent and given the right to the best medical treatment that society could provide. The operant parent or parents found guilty under the new law were deprived of custody of the illicit child, heavily fined, and obliged to perform ten years of public service.

Paul and his powerful siblings did not oppose the proposed new law as it was debated in the Intendant Assembly but rather gave it their enthusiastic support. The measure was passed by a simple majority, ratified by the Human Magnates of the Concilium, and became law with the affirming signature of the Dirigent for Earth, David Somerled MacGregor, on 10 May 2052.

A rider that would have pardoned Teresa Kendall and Rogatien Remillard was stricken from the measure during the final floor debates. The members of the Dynasty, with a single exception, had voted to keep the rider.

But Paul had voted against it.

I was fit to be tied when the news reached me that day in the bookshop, and it was Anne, not Paul, who transmitted the details to me from Concord in brisk, emotionless farspeech. I immediately went galloping out of the shop and around the corner and down to Teresa’s house. It was a nice sunny day, and the new roses in the bed that she had planted on the side of the house facing the library were blooming their heads off. Marc’s turbocycle stood in the driveway, signaling that he’d got the news from the capital even faster than I had.

I went slam-banging into the house and found Teresa and all five of her children in the cool, dim living room. Jack was suspended in his papoose-frame, which stood at his mother’s side. Marie, cuddling Luc, and Madeleine sat at Teresa’s feet. Marc was standing at one of the windows, staring morosely outside.

“You don’t have to worry!” I blustered. “They won’t take Jack away from you. There still has to be a trial—due process!”

She looked at me with that calm, madonna expression. “I’ve been telling the children what their Aunt Anne explained to me about that. You and I are not scheduled to go to trial until November, but there are two other legal avenues open for pardoning us before that. The first—and the one Anne thinks most likely, because she’s a member—is through the ten-person Directorate of the Human Polity of the Concilium. Anne thinks Paul felt obliged to make a public gesture deploring my deliberate defiance of the law, and that’s why he voted to defeat the pardon rider. It didn’t have enough support to pass the Assembly anyhow. But when the application for pardon comes before him and Anne and the other eight Concilium Directors, they’ll prevail on the others to let us go free.”

“H’mph!” snorted I. “They damn well better! If we go to trial, we’ll be convicted.
You
can afford to pay almost any fine, and your ten years of public service would probably consist of giving music lessons on that damned Siberian planet. But my poor old bookstore has always tippy-toed along the brink of insolvency, and any sort of fine would bankrupt me. I’ll be damned if I want to spend my next immortal decade planting baby evergreens in a Maine tree farm while mosquitoes drill my ass!”

Maddy giggled.

Luc wailed, “I don’t want Mama to go to jail! Not when we just got her back.”

Baby Jack asked: What is jail?

Maddy said, “It’s really awful!” And she simultaneously transmitted a horrific mental image of a dungeon cum torture chamber, whereupon the infant began to cry.

“Mama won’t go to jail, silly,” Marie declared. She gave Madeleine a PK poke. “And neither will Uncle Rogi. Nobody goes to jail except
really
wicked people.”

Still mewling and hiccuping, Jack said: Was bringing about my birth only moderately wicked?

Teresa burst out laughing, lifted the baby from his swing, and kissed him. “Certainly not! It wasn’t wicked at all, only illegal. There’s a big difference, and Marie is going to take you upstairs and explain it to you, and then it’s time for your nap. Nana Colette is coming later with more good genes for you, and you must be well rested and full of the best possible redactive thoughts in order for them to work.”

The baby said: Very well Mama.

Teresa gave the baby to Marie and told Maddy and Luc to go out and play. When the youngsters were gone, Marc turned away from the window.

“What happens if Papa and Aunt Anne
don’t
convince the Directorate to pardon you and Uncle Rogi?”

“Then we can appeal to Davy MacGregor,” she replied calmly. “The Planetary Dirigent can issue an order of executive clemency all by himself, and not even the Lylmik can countermand it.”

“If MacGregor is charitably inclined,” I muttered.

“You probably have a better chance with him than with Papa,” Marc said.

“I won’t have you talking that way,” Teresa reproved him.

“How much vindication for Jack’s birth does Papa need?” Marc demanded hotly. “Even the preliminary assessment of the baby’s armamentarium shows that he has the most powerful mind the human race has ever produced! You were right to save him from being aborted! Someday he could be a super-Einstein! But all Papa can think of are his precious principles and what the goddam Simbiari and Krondaku think. He won’t even come and see Jack!”

Teresa’s resolution wavered. Her eyes began to fill, and she shrank back into the corner of the couch. She appealed to me mutely on my intimate mode.

“Okay,” I said to Marc shortly. “You’ve expressed your righteous indignation. Now scram.”

The boy finally had sense enough to be ashamed of himself. He made a gruff apology to his mother, promised to visit Jack tomorrow, and slouched away. I waited until the roar of his turbocycle had dwindled into the distance before speaking to Teresa again.

“He’s only fourteen. The intellect of a grown man, the tact and forbearance of a teenage twit.”

“I know … and he’s been marvelous with Jack, coming almost every day in spite of his heavy course load at college.”

“Is it true—what he said about Jack’s mind? I’ve always felt in my guts that the kid was hot stuff, but have the psychologists actually proved it?”

She shrugged. “Apparently yes. Colette told me last week. I’m sorry that I forgot to tell you, Rogi. You see, I never doubted that Jack was extraordinary, and the mental-test results only seemed to confirm what I knew all along was true. My little son is going to do wonderful things for humanity. It … hurts that Paul still seems to think of him as an embarrassment rather than a source of pride. I can only keep praying that he’ll change his mind after we’re finally pardoned.” Her eyes met mine. “And we will be. I know it. Please don’t worry about it, dear.”

I mumbled something reassuring, then said I’d better be getting back to the shop. Teresa walked me to the front door. Colette Roy’s groundcar was just pulling up in front of the house.

“How’s the therapy going?” I asked Teresa.

She smiled again. “Colette says everything is going very well. As you saw, Jack is perfectly healthy. It’s entirely possible that his mind is fending off the harmful effects of the damaged genes.”

“Good for him,” I said heartily, and fled, giving Colette only a hasty wave.

Two weeks later, Colette Roy was able to tell the family that replacement genes to counteract all of Jack’s defects had been successfully implanted within his body. Now we could only wait and see whether the therapy succeeded. From time to time the baby would be given full-body scans at the old Hitchcock Hospital, which was part of the Genetics Center; and he would also wear a tiny vital-signs monitor that would alert Colette to any problems.

Meanwhile, Jack was able to live the life of a normal infant, so Teresa and all the children joined the rest of the family at Adrien and Cheri’s place in Rye, on the New Hampshire shore, for the Memorial Day holiday weekend, the traditional opening of the summer boating season.
Teresa and Jack returned to Hanover on the following Tuesday, May 28, so that the baby could undergo some special tests of his self-redactive faculty at the Ferrand Mental Science Center, and Marc came with them to take his spring finals. The other three children and Herta, their nanny, stayed at Cheri’s with a horde of younger cousins throughout the rest of the week.

On 29 May, in Wallis Sands Park, about two kilometers north of Rye, an operant woman named Frances Schroeder disappeared while swimming in the sea. A day later, an operant young man named Scott Lynch vanished from the Hampton Beach Park, a few kloms south of Rye. Neither body was ever recovered.

Madeleine Remillard, age twelve, who had been sailing along the shore in a small catamaran on both days, claimed to have seen a shark fin. The other four children in the boat, her cousins Celine, Quint, Gordo, and Parni, noticed nothing unusual. The Coast Guard issued a Shark Watch, which was to stay in effect throughout most of the summer.

From July through August, Marie, Madeleine, and Luc stayed at the shore, either with Cheri or with Lucille and Denis at their summer cottage. Many of the other young Remillard and McAllister cousins were also there off and on. Two more apparent shark deaths took place—one victim an operant man whose overturned sailing dinghy was found drifting off the Isles of Shoals, the other an operant woman who disappeared while on a dawn swim off Salisbury beach, just south of the New Hampshire border in Massachusetts.

The parents of the Remillard clan took a sensible view of the tragedies and did not prohibit their offspring from entering the water. Provided that the children always swam prudently in groups and kept their farsenses alert for marine predators, they would almost certainly be perfectly safe.

T
HE BONFIRE HAD BURNED IN THE BEACH COOKING PIT ALL
afternoon until the stone lining was red hot, and now Adrien Remillard carefully raked out the last glowing coals. The four youngsters who were designated cooks-of-the-day, togged out in gaudy aprons over their bathing suits, had baskets and boxes of food ready. Those of the other children who weren’t sailboarding or playing with Frisbees or swimming stood around making smart remarks.

“Looking good,” Adrien sang out, tossing aside the last smoking brand. “Carry on, you cooks!”

His eldest daughter Adrienne, wearing a tall white chef’s toque in addition to her apron, gave a telepathic command to Marc and Duggie McAllister, who began to fork up damp seaweed from a big pile on a plass tarp and heave it into the cooking pit. A great hiss and a tremendous cloud of iodine-smelling steam rose up, and the little kids screamed. When there was a good layer of weed in the pit bottom, Adrienne commanded: “In with the potatoes!”

She and her cousin Caroline began tossing in foil-wrapped tubers, using their farsight and PK to do the job properly amid the smoke and steam. When the potatoes were all in, Marc and Duggie forked a thinner layer of seaweed on top of them. Then it was time to put in the lobsters and the crabs, a task that required the efforts of all four cooks. Tenderhearted Adrienne insisted that Marc mind-zap each living crustacean just before it was consigned to the pit, which drew hoots of laughter from Duggie and
most of the audience. Another layer of weed covered the sacrificed creatures, and then Adrienne cried, “In with the corn!” She and Caroline flung in armloads of unshucked sweet corn, the boys heaped the rest of the weed over it, and then all four of the cooks raked a big pile of sand on top of everything to seal in the heat and steam. The spectators cheered and began to drift away.

It would be several hours before the feast would be ready. Then the entire family would gather at the rustic picnic tables on the beach to stuff themselves with the bounty from the pit and with salad and peach shortcake that the cooks would have to prepare later and bring down from the house.

Luc came up, big-eyed and solemn, as Marc was rinsing off the messy seaweed tarp in the booming waves. “I’m glad you killed the animals before they went into the pit,” he said softly to his brother. “Some of the other guys … were waiting to hear ’em mind-shriek. You know. As they roasted.”

“Sadistic little shits,” Marc muttered. “Grab a corner of the tarp and help me slosh.”

Luc obeyed. “Maddy killed a moth for Jack once. She said she wanted him to emp—empathize. She wanted to kill a sparrow for him, too, but he wouldn’t let her. He said he’d already grasped the concept. She was disappointed, just like she was today when you zapped the lobsters and crabs.”

“Christ—the little creep! No wonder Jack told me he doesn’t like her. I’m going to have to have a long talk with Maddy one of these days.” He saw his younger sister down the shore a few hundred meters, shoving the Hobie Cat into the water together with Quint, Gordo, Parni, and Celine. He farspoke the lot of them:
You guys watch out for sharks!