Jack the Bodiless (Galactic Milieu Trilogy) (59 page)

Cancer cells multiply like mad and don’t know when to stop. They have extraordinary vitality, a characteristic that has led some researchers to call them “immortal.” They invade adjacent tissues, destroying normal cells as they go. They hog the blood supply. They seed themselves and spread throughout the body via the bloodstream or the lymphatic ducts, a process called metastasis. Cancers come in many different varieties, some slow-acting and some fast. The worst of them wreak havoc on normal tissues, interfere with vital body functions, and kill the victim unless they are stopped.

Another name for cancer is neoplasm, which means “new tissue.” It’s an appropriate name, because the DNA in cancer cells is different from the stuff in normal body cells, in that the harmless proto-oncogenes have been transformed into new, malignant oncogenes.

Now, none of baby Jack’s original collection of lethal equivalent genes had been oncogenes, but some of his chromosomes did have the “fragility” factor that characterizes proto-oncogenes. When Colette Roy and her colleagues prepared his genetic map, they discovered not only the thirty-four potentially lethal DNA combinations but also a number of peculiar DNA novelties that occupied the “redundant” chromosomal regions, those that have no known effect upon normal bodily function. Colette went ahead with therapy to repair Jack’s documented genetic defects, the ones that were guaranteed to be harmful, knowing that there was an off chance that the proto-oncogenes might be triggered. When the child passed his first birthday still showing no sign of genetic disease, she and her colleagues thought they had lucked out.

Until the first cancer appeared.

The thing on Ti-Jean’s toe was a relatively sluggish little epidermoid carcinoma of the type that ordinarily is easily cured. After the scientists analyzed the cancer’s DNA, they whipped up a correction and inserted it into the baby.
Within a few weeks, all of the neoplasmic cells vanished, and Teresa and Paul and Marc and the rest of us breathed a sigh of relief.

Colette was not nearly so sanguine, although she did not then share her fears with the family. She thought at first that one or more of the viral vectors used to infect Jack with good genes might have set the P-Os off. But there was another, more ominous possibility: that the cancer had been triggered by messages sent from the mysterious redundant genes. If this was true, then Jack carried the blueprints for his own destruction in every single cell nucleus of his body.

Less than a month later, in early May, another, completely different variety of cancer was detected during one of the weekly comprehensive body scans that Jack endured at Hitchcock Hospital. It was a much more malignant and fast-growing melanoma, and there were two of them, sited in Jack’s testicles.

When I got the news I felt my own balls flinch in sympathy. I am sterile as the result of a painful complication of the mumps that I suffered in early adolescence, but aside from having no viable sperm, I function very well, thank you. Even though it eventually became possible to restore my ruined semeniferous tubules in the regen-tank, I have declined to be treated, for various reasons of my own.

Jack’s case was far worse than mine, of course. His cancer would not only destroy his testicles; it would kill him very quickly unless drastic treatment put a stop to it. Once again, corrective genes were transplanted—but this time the cancer proved to be highly resistant. Even though the two lesions were still microscopic in size, they showed alarming signs of getting ready to metastasize—to seed replicas of themselves throughout the body. According to the medical state of the art in 2053, in the rare case when an adult or an older child suffered from metastatic cancer, the treatment of choice involved putting the patient into a regen-tank, where the “seeds” could be obliterated by rigorous treatment. But Jack was too young for the tank, which was contraindicated in individuals below the age of puberty. In order to prevent metastasis in Jack, they had to act very quickly and remove his testicles surgically.

The family was devastated, even though they knew that it would be possible to restore him when he was older. Jack suffered considerable pain following the operation, for he
declined to take any analgesics, and Teresa fell into a mood of profound depression. She cornered Colette Roy and demanded to know what was setting off the oncogenes. Colette had to say that they didn’t know for certain. Some unknown factor was “insulting” the baby’s DNA, causing the proto-oncogenes to mutate. If the viral vectors used in the original gene transplants were responsible, then the doctors would continue making “repairs” until the situation stabilized. It was also possible, she admitted, that Jack’s anomalous genome itself contained the cancer triggers … triggers with a built-in time-lapse function. A third and less likely possibility was that his autoredactive metafunction had gone awry, perhaps as a result of its working so hard in suppressing the expression of the lethals while the genetic transplant therapy was “taking.” If this latter was the case, then voluntary redaction on Jack’s part might restore his health—provided he was able to learn the appropriate metapsychic programs.

Teresa’s apprehensions were far from calmed, even though Colette tried to put a good face on things by reminding her how Jack’s older brother Luc had been restored. Luc’s genetic anomalies had been completely different from Jack’s, Teresa pointed out, and he had never had cancer. That formerly deadly condition had become readily treatable among humans at the midpoint of the twenty-first century, but the ancient fear of it lingered on. What would happen to Jack if more of the rapidly metastasizing cancers appeared? Colette calmly replied that they would be treated in whatever way was appropriate. She said nothing to Teresa of what the treatment might entail.

Just after Jack’s operation, which Colette pronounced to be completely successful, Teresa gave a disastrous concert in Moscow, during which her voice broke several times. She immediately canceled the rest of her singing engagements for the year and moved into a room next to Jack’s in the hospital, where he was still recovering and undergoing tests. She declared that she would not sing again until Jack was completely cured. Following this, Paul left the house on South Street and returned to his apartment down in Concord. There was no overt evidence of a fresh breach in the marriage, but neither Marc nor I needed a neon sign to indicate what was probably happening.

In mid-June little Jack was pronounced fit again, and he
and Teresa returned to the family home, where he was pampered and carefully monitored. Henceforth the baby would be taken to the hospital every other day for scanning, so that any incipient problems could be nipped in the bud.

When the summer term at Dartmouth began and Marc started the last intensive push toward his goal of a bachelor’s degree, he made a decision not to take Jack on long outings anymore until Colette was satisfied that the baby’s health had stabilized. Feisty Ti-Jean deeply resented being confined to the house most of the time, and Marc did his best to be with him as often as possible and take him out for short trips. Jack’s other three siblings, free from school for the summer, also seemed anxious to help the baby in his continuing thirst for intellectual input. His second sister Maddy, who was now thirteen and ready to begin her final year at the Granite Hill School in Vermont, was especially solicitous. She and Jack spent many long hours together studying cerebroenergetics, of all things. They made Marc show them the schematics of his homemade CE helmet and pestered him until he took the thing apart for them and explained it to the last detail.

Everything went well until early August, when the first act of the drama of Jack the Bodiless began to approach its climax. The scanner revealed several dozen ultramicroscopic cancerous lesions scattered in the child’s long bones, pelvis, ribs, and scapulae. These were diagnosed as Ewing’s sarcoma, a rare type of childhood-onset cancer with a propensity for rapid metastasis. Ordinarily, the Ewing oncogenes responded well to genetic engineering. In Jack’s case, the attempt to insert replacement DNA failed. His variety of Ewing’s was somehow different from the type already well known, having a different pleiotropic mechanism that undoubtedly accounted for its striking in so many places at once. Ferreting out that mechanism might take months. Given the multiple sites of the tiny cancers and their impending metastasis, amputation of the limbs and aggressive laser cautery and chemotherapy of the other diseased bones was the only course open to Colette and her colleagues.

When Teresa learned what would have to be done to Jack to save his life, no bright talk of future restoration in a regen-tank was able to distract her from the present catastrophe. She reacted so wildly that she had to be put under
sedation. To his credit, Paul returned to her and attempted to use his own powerful redactive faculty to help her regain her mental equilibrium. He also spent long hours with Jack during the five weeks following the operations, transmitting to the precocious child every redactive healing program known to the human race at that time—plus numbers of them derived from the near-humanoid Poltroyans. In addition, he obtained from Denis and various other sources the most advanced metacoercive and creative programs, and force-fed the child the design principles for more complex multifaculty programs. Jack assimilated these recondite data gratefully, telling his father that he would make what use of it he could.

Now came those autumnal days, so crucial in the later lives of both Marc and Jack, when the older boy would come sneaking into the hospital, cloaked with invisibility, to steal his baby brother away. The original crude papoose-board backpack carrier that I had fashioned for Jack had gradually been transmogrified by Marc and his buddies into a high-tech wizard’s cradle. Following Jack’s quadruple amputations and entry into chemotherapy, the backpack became a virtual portable intensive-care unit, with only the baby’s pale, bald little head visible within the transparent hooded top. The nurses at Hitchcock who were supposed to guard Jack were coerced and then convinced by posthypnotic suggestion that he never left his room. Marc craftily timed his excursions so that Colette Roy and the other operant doctors would be unlikely to discover what he and Jack were up to.

Most of the time, Marc carried his little brother away from the old hospital and walked north on Rope Ferry Road, along a path through the golf course and into a ravine carved ages ago by Girl Brook, where they entered a region of ancient pine trees and other evergreens called Pine Park. Until the Metapsychic Rebellion, the place was also one of my favorite walks, an undisturbed fragment of New England forest growing along the bank of the great Connecticut River. The place is full of ferns, and in its tiny glades there are wildflowers in season, and birdsong echoes beneath the 30-meter-tall pines as if in a hushed cathedral.

What did they talk about during those stolen hours? That they discussed the meaning of life goes without saying, for it seemed increasingly certain to Marc that little Jack was
going to die. They discussed the science of death and the philosophy of it and the personal beliefs each one had on the subject, and how these contrasted with the tenets of the religion of their ancestors. Jack was often in considerable pain, although he never let it daunt him, and he steadfastly maintained that pain, like the paradoxical proto-oncogenes, would not have evolved in us and remained a part of the higher animal condition for so long unless it had more than a fleeting, avoidance-factor/signal-factor value. Jack recapitulated Teresa’s naïve wisdom relating to the subject, which Marc tended to pooh-pooh. Jack also queried Marc’s views on the notion, held by a fair number of thinkers, that pain was an educative tool and the ordeal a potential pathway to higher levels of consciousness. At first, Marc thought this was more sentimental poppycock, but later he came to share his brother’s opinion.

Besides philosophizing, they argued. Among other things, about sex. At this point in his adolescence, the sexually repressed Marc was fighting what seemed to be a never-ending battle with his body’s carnal urges. The usual avenues of relief open to a boy of his age seemed to him to be a craven cop-out, a surrender of the mind to the most primitive instincts of the body. He would learn to control himself in a dignified manner—in an operant manner!—or know the reason why.

Human sex, Marc argued, was a detriment to metapsychic advancement. The exotic races of the Milieu were a case in point: The most advanced were the ineffable Lylmik, who had no sex at all. Then came the Krondaku, with whom sex was so stately and well deliberated that it might be a formal dance ending in an exchange of gifts. The Simbiari, in spite of their racial immaturity and all the jokes cracked over their unesthetic physiology, ranked next on the ladder of metapsychic advancement. Their sex involved no intercourse or frenzied courtship ritual, the eggs being fertilized in their watery nest by sperm packets neatly supplied through a special orifice beneath the male’s vestigial tail. The jolly but none-too-competent Poltroyans, as lusty a lot as ever copulated for the mere fun of it, were always letting sex make sentimental fools of them. And the Gi …! They seemed to live for little else and were so scientifically backward that it was a wonder they had ever been accepted into the Milieu at all.

Humanity, in Marc’s opinion, fell somewhere between the Poltroyans and the Gi.

They argued about many other things as well: About the validity of the Judeo-Christian tradition and the existence of God, and especially about the notion that a thinking, responsible person with well-defined goals was still somehow obligated to “trust” God. About whether continuing membership in the Galactic Milieu was apt to be a good or a bad thing for humanity in the long view. About eugenics, the deliberate attempts to “improve” the human organism, which had been forbidden under the Proctorship but was now coming to the fore again. About the desirability of mass-producing humans artificially to facilitate populating new planets with nonborns. About the underdog position of humans in the Galactic Concilium. And about the potential danger that Unity might pose to human individualism.