Jack the Bodiless (Galactic Milieu Trilogy) (58 page)

“Messed up its polymers,” said the baby, grinning. A drop of drool hung from his pink lower lip. He had on his little green Dartmouth sweats and miniature Nikes.

“Just like that?” Pete cried. He shook the ball. “There’s some kind of damned fluid in there!”

“It improves the coefficient of elasticity,” Jack lisped. His mind broadcast the formulas of both the ball shell and its contents. “I’ve been practicing my creative metafaculty in secret for some time now. It was very difficult to learn how to revise small molecules. Very large ones are easier.”

“Oh, God,” said Marc. “What
else
have you been messing with?”

“Nothing important,” Jack said. “Mostly I used air and accreted water vapor, and I have modified some things I took from wastebaskets. But my most versatile raw materials have been my own solid and gaseous body wastes. It’s possible to convert them into ever so many interesting organic compounds. I formed various things as I practiced—mostly spheroids and cubes and prisms and other symmetrical objects, once I had discovered how to manipulate the different compounds with fair precision. When I had finished experimenting, I reconverted my samples into an amorphous shitlike substance and replaced them in my diaper so that Mama or Nanny Herta wouldn’t find out … Do you know that it’s
really
possible to fart flames? I thought it was only a metaphor for anger, but I discovered that the phenomenon is genuine! It’s harmless to the body if you perform the experiment with extreme care. All you have to do is ignite the inflammable gases naturally produced by—”

The three older boys collapsed into near-hysterical laughter and whoops. A couple of other fraternity brothers ventured downstairs and asked if they could get in on the fun.

Marc scooped up his baby brother under his arm. “Just horsing around with the pygmy Einstein here.”

“He’s more laughs than a barrel of monkeys,” Alex added hastily.

Marc said:
Upstairs. To my room. Pete hang on to that friggin’ ball
.

They galloped up two flights of stairs, and when they were
safe in Marc’s cubicle sat Jack on the bed and began to throw questions at him:

Did he realize what he was doing when he altered the Ping-Pong ball?… Yes. He was exerting the metafaculty of creativity.

Did he have to exert creativity on each individual molecule to cause change?… Certainly not. The process, once initiated, “infected” adjacent molecules and spread under the mental direction of the creator’s coercion.

Could he create matter out of nothing?… Of course not. On the other hand, there is indubitably a store of matter and energy trapped within certain of the dynamic-field lattices, and this, while not properly classed as “nothing,” has negligible impact upon the Present Reality and is available to an ingenious creator.

Could he make matter out of energy?… Not yet. That would be a considerable challenge. It was rather easy to produce chemical energy from the disruption of molecules, however, and many interesting effects, such as the farting of flames, were—

Could he transmute elements?… No. He felt that theoretically this was possible; but the consequences to the creator were likely to be drastic. One even had to exert caution with chemical-type reactions because of the potentially hazardous energies involved. For example, the bed linen should optimally be soaking wet before one attempts to—

What was the most complicated thing he had ever made?… The wizzo Ping-Pong ball.

How long had he been able to exert his creativity in this fashion?… Almost from the time he was taken from Ape Lake to Kauai, and there taught how.

Who taught him?… An aged Hawaiian woman, Malama Johnson, who was the cook at the Kendall house on the island, had come creeping into his room when he was alone, soon after his arrival. She had greeted him with great dignity, treating him as an equal and not as a child, and told him that she was a kahuna, one of the magician-priests who had lived among the Polynesian people for thousands of years, long before they ever migrated to the Hawaiian Islands.

Malama had touched Jack and sung very softly, and then
she told him that he was overflowing with mana loa—the strongest kind of metapsychic energy.

“She waved her hands, and there were hundreds of little sparks flying around, and then tiny little black things floated in the air,” Jack said to the older boys. “They settled on my crib and made an awful mess, but later, when Mama saw them, she thought they had blown in the window from a fire in a canefield nearby. The black bits were carbon smuts. Malama had formed them psychocreatively from atmospheric carbon dioxide and ignited some of them.”

Jack went on to tell his awed listeners how the kahuna had taught him this simple trick and then, in the weeks that followed, many others. She warned him that he should not let anyone know what he could do—not even his Mama or his Uncle Rogi—until all of his inner “selves” were more fully under his control.

This strange statement had a certain rightness about it that made a deep impression on Jack. Even when he was still in the womb he had felt that he had a Low Self and a High Self who contended within him, and he had asked my help keeping them in line as he was being born. Malama told him that the names of those two selves were unihipili and uhane. Haole wise men (who had only belatedly discovered what the kahuna had known from time immemorial and who still were very backward in their understanding of huna) sometimes called the two selves the unconscious and the conscious minds. But the uhane that Jack had mistaken for his High Self, she said, was actually his Middle Self. The true High Self, or amakua, was the superconscious, an integrating or unifying entity that was capable of binding together in perfect harmony the selves and the body they inhabited. The amakua had, she said, a special life of its own and was the font of mana loa. It was available to all thinking persons, but many did not make use of it. In time, she said, Jack would attain perfect access to the amakua, and then he would be able to accomplish a great work …

“Of course,” Jack said to the college boys, “I have since recognized that what Malama called mana loa was what we would call the creative metafaculty, the higher mindpower that infuses and energizes all the others and the lower mindpowers as well. My very high metapsychic assay in creativity merely confirms what Malama observed when she first met me.”

Marc asked: “And do you feel that your three selves
are
under control now?”

The small face clouded with perplexity. “I’m having problems. I
thought
that the Low Self and Middle Self were under my control, and I’m learning to communicate with the High Self. I barred both Hydra and Fury, who would have separated the three and then reintegrated them into a new person—”

Marc uttered an expletive, then said to Jack on the intimate mode:
Say no more about THIS to Alex&Pete we’ll talk later!

Jack said to Marc: Yes we must do that. You have been having troubling dreams, haven’t you? About Fury.

How did you know that?!

For a time he troubled me. But I forced him to go away. You have listened to him even though what he says is—

Not now!
Aloud, Marc said, “Tell me about the problems you’ve had trying to integrate your three selves.”

“I’ve discovered that my body increasingly balks at accepting creative direction,” Jack said. “Up until now, I’ve been able to make it operate in a normal human fashion, within the accepted parameters of good health. But lately there have been difficulties.” He began to fumble ineffectively with the fastenings on one of his tiny athletic shoes. “Marco,
help
me.”

“Imperfect motor coordination,” Marc opined. “To be expected until your peripheral nervous system matures a bit more.”

“No, that’s not what I mean. Take off my sock and look at the toes.”

Marc did so. The other two boys leaned closer.

“What’s that on his little toe?” Pete pointed out. “Right at the base of the nail? Check it with your deepsight, guys.”

“Looks like a sore,” said Alex without certainty. “Maybe a little bitty blister rubbed raw. But my deepsight isn’t worth shit.”

Marc’s, however, was extraordinary. He could magnify the tiny spot and see into it, and call up from his memories information stored from his biology studies.

“It’s not … just a sore,” Marc said. His two friends regarded him with astonishment. His usual shell of mental impermeability was faltering, as if attacked from the inside by some overwhelming emotion.

“I know it’s not ordinary,” Jack said calmly. “I could use self-redaction on a blister or scrape and make it disappear at once. But this small lesion is caused by a cellular anomaly, and it responds neither to autoredaction from my unconscious nor to the psychocreative and coercive impetus of voluntary self-redaction. It’s very puzzling. I’m not yet very well educated in molecular biology, but it almost seems as though the lesion is a product of my body’s own genetic apparatus.”

Marc stared at his little brother for a long moment without speaking. His mind-screen was once again fully deployed. He smiled as he took both of Jack’s little hands in his own and spoke quietly, coercively.

“The thing on your toe could be nothing at all. It also could be a sign that something isn’t going quite right with your therapy. All those transplanted good genes have been racing around in your body trying to plug in, and your mind has evidently tried to help them. But now it may be that something’s screwed up a little bit. So I’m going to bundle you up right now and take you down the street to Hitchcock Hospital, and we’ll let Nana Colette take a look at this. Okay?”

“Okay,” the infant agreed. Marc began to put on Jack’s sock and shoe. “What do you call the thing on my toe, Marco?”

“It’s a cancer,” Marc said. “Upsy daisy, kiddo. Now we have to put on your snowsuit. Do you need to have your diaper changed first? No? Okay.” Marc turned to his two stricken friends, who were hiding behind their own thought-screens. “Will one of you guys do me a favor and run down for the astrophysics plaque I left in the game room? I’ll take it with me—in case I find myself with time on my hands while old Jacko here gets checked out.”

N
OW
I
COME TO A PART OF MY
M
EMOIRS THAT
I
WOULD
rather skip over, for it covers the time during which Jack’s body changed. It was a time when those of us who loved the child saw hope give way to horror and horror pass into numb despair and a desperate desire that the suffering baby would die and find peace, giving us peace as well. We could not know that Jack’s body was as anomalous as his brilliant mind, that he was destined from his conception to be as he became. He was at once more than we humans are, and less. Prochronistic is the term the scientists eventually applied to him: a being born far ahead of its time, with a body that was not that of Homo sapiens at all. The beautiful, normal-appearing baby that Teresa had given birth to was only the larva, as it were, of the wondrous and terrible mature entity that Jack would become.

His transformation began in the spring of the year 2053.

I have to apologize again if the entity reading these Memoirs finds my explanation of the background of Jack’s disincarnation to be overly facile and full of scientific half-truths and omissions. Human genetic science is a complex discipline, and Colette Roy’s explanations to me were couched in the most elementary lay terminology, which I must inevitably fall back on in my writing. If I inadvertently slip from the path of scientific orthodoxy, remember that what was going on in Jack’s body was subordinate to what was going on in his mind and the minds of those around him …

*    *    *

Beginning in the late twentieth century, genetic engineers had developed a number of different and reliable methods for inserting new genes into the human body. The most widely used, and the one that formed one of the principal mechanisms of the regeneration tank as well as the more specialized therapy used in the attempts to cure Jack, was the viral vector or transduction technique. In this, special viruses carrying the gene transplant were allowed to “infect” appropriate target cells in the patient. Over the years, hundreds of thousands of different viral vectors had been developed to carry and deliver genetic material safely and efficiently. The selection of the vector was done after a meticulous assay of the individual patient’s gene map, in order to avoid a dangerous situation that cropped up all too often during the pioneer days of gene therapy—the activation of proto-oncogenes.

All of us have a mixed bag of proto-oncogenes in our heredity. They are two-faced bits of DNA that can lie doggo all throughout a person’s life, acting just as though they were perfectly normal blueprints for body proteins or the switches turning processes on and off, doing the useful work they are supposed to do … unless some extraneous factor sets off a fatal trigger and transforms them into genuine oncogenes, the inducers of cancer. The trigger can be a virus, or radiation, or a carcinogenic chemical, or a mutant gene that is inherited, or even a failure of the body’s autoredactive mechanism.

One of the commonest kinds of proto-oncogene used to cause lung cancer in people who smoked tobacco. Folks who had the P-O and smoked got the disease; folks who didn’t have the P-O might smoke like chimneys for years and eventually die of something else. There were other ways of getting lung cancer—other chemical or psychological triggers, even different kinds of tobacco-cancer P-Os; but you get the idea.

Now, a cancer is not a simple thing, any more than a living human body is simple. A cancer is not an alien invader, as a germ is, but rather an uncontrolled growth that begins in a single cell that once was normal. We are marvelously made. So marvelous that, if you study molecular biology and get an inkling of just how many millions of little chemical and electrical and psychocreative reactions have to take place and coordinate perfectly from moment to moment
in order for the body to function, you might wonder how we manage to live at all! But we do, because the genes present in our body cells give out instructional messages to keep things ticking. Most of the time, we tick properly. But when an oncogene is activated, the wrong messages are sent to the affected cell and it becomes transformed into a cancer cell.