Jack the Bodiless (Galactic Milieu Trilogy) (6 page)

Where did you come from? Rogi asked.

I am newborn. Inevitably
.

What—what do you want?

And it said:
All of you
.

Rogi’s mind screamed its fear and loathing. He seemed to
hear laughter—and this time, the voice was recognizably Victor’s. Rogi cried out again, pleading, begging for Denis—for anyone!—to come to his rescue. But Denis seemed to be gone, and the minds he had woven so skillfully about him were gone as well.

I require assistance
, Fury said, reaching out.
And I’ll take you to start with. Silly, flawed old Rogi! But you’ll be useful
.

You can’t! You can’t!… See? I told you so!

Now Rogi was laughing hysterically, and the horror that was Fury roared, and the negation of the mental chasm was lit by a crimson radiance that grew brighter and brighter, becoming a red sphere suspended in utter darkness.

He is mine
, another voice said. A familiar voice.
You may not have Rogi. Do what you must do, but not with him
.

The red sphere hovered, seeming to become more solid, a glowing thing that Rogi thought he recognized. He took hold of it somehow, and it pulled him away, away, out of the depths, away from the mind-monster named Fury, and back into ordinary reality—

—the bedroom. Severin and Cecilia Ashe bending over the supine figure, she seeking a wrist pulse, he lifting an eyelid to reveal a dilated, fathomless pupil. Denis on his knees, head bowed, hands touching the covered feet of the body, weeping. Paul and Adrien at the machine, where the once-green telltales now blinked red. Anne standing apart, her face frozen. Catherine, Teresa, and the other women together in an agitated group, murmuring. Philip, Maurice, and Brett staring at each other helplessly.

Suddenly, through the closed door, Rogi heard a baby scream.

His paralysis evaporated and he raced to the door, yanked it open. Then he halted, stunned, at the scene in the hall.

Three bodies lay on their backs on the Oriental runner rug. Yvonne, Louis, and Leon, their faces contorted and their eyes wide open, were stone dead.

From the doorway of the bedroom across the hall, Mrs. Gilbert, the nurse, stared down at the bodies in astonishment, while the two-year-old boy in her arms shrieked and struggled like a wild thing.

Rogi’s hand went involuntarily to his pants pocket, to the key ring that he always carried with him, the one with a fob
like a red glass marble. His strong fingers tightened about the little caged sphere.

It’s all right, Rogi said to Marc on the intimate mode. He’s gone.

Abruptly, the boy’s cries ceased. Flushed and tousled, breathing in noisy gulps, Marc held out his arms to the old man. Rogi took him from the nurse, cradled the small head against his chest, and hurried off downstairs.

H
E HAD BEEN SUMMONED
.

Coerced. He—the uncoercible!

It was nothing so concrete as a call on the telepathic intimate mode. It was a compulsion, an aching cryptesthetic urge having nothing at all to do with the usual workings of his powerful and orderly young mind. It was a
feeling
(and that, of course, made it totally suspect) that his mother, more than 540 light-years away on Earth, was in danger from some purposeful agency that would cause her irreparable harm. And only he, Marc Remillard, could save her.

But that was counter to all logic; and he had arranged his life so as to subdue in himself the messier, nonintellectual aspects of the human psyche. When irruptions of the feeling function occasionally got the better of him, he counted it a personal defeat, and analyzed the phenomenon rigorously, and strove to bring it under control so as to lessen his susceptibility on the next go-around. But somehow, where his mother was concerned, emotional skewing tended to persist. It was odd that he should continue to love her with such unreasoning ardor in spite of her benign indifference; no amount of metacreative sorting and rechanneling on his
part had been successful in transmuting the filial bond with Teresa Kendall into something safer …

He had dealt with his father more satisfactorily. Paul could no longer hurt him or even shake his composure. Why, then, he asked himself, should a son’s relationship with the maternal parent be so much less amenable to rationalization? It was annoying—and in the present situation, intuition hinted that it might even be dangerous.

But intuition was often illogical, too.

When Marc attempted to farspeak his mother, he discovered that she had her impregnable mental barrier up. And so he was forced to place a call to her from Okanagon via subspace communicator, just as though he were a nonoperant or a metapsychic infant.

When he reached her, Teresa cheerfully denied that anything at all was wrong. She said she missed him, as she said she missed the other three children, off on their various summer jaunts. But they would all be together soon enough, and she was feeling quite well these days, and it was
so
unlike him to be hyperimaginative—and was he quite sure that he wasn’t coming down with some exotic bug?

He told her that he would get a scan, and apologized stiffly for his irrational behavior and for disturbing her.

She laughed kindly and said it was probably only puberty, which was bound to be unsettling even to a grandmaster-class young operant like himself. She told him that she loved him, and reassured him once again that everything at home on Earth was fine, and then terminated the communication.

Marc had no way of telling whether or not his mother was lying to him again. The notion that puberty was the cause of his malaise he rejected out of hand; his hormonal secretions were normal for a boy of thirteen, and he was confident that they, like the rest of his bodily functions, were at the moment subordinate to his self-redactive metafaculty. But the maddening compulsion was not imaginary; it was undeniably coercive and focused with considerable precision upon him, and it increased in strength every hour that he attempted futile analysis of its source.

He farspoke his sensible twelve-year-old sister Marie, who was trying to write her first novel at their grandparents’ old summer place on the Atlantic shore. Marie told him she had seen their mother last weekend, and things were as normal back at home as they ever were. Teresa was clearly
grateful for her time alone. She displayed no overt symptoms of mental dysfunction. She was doing some gardening and was working with every evidence of enthusiasm to transpose an obscure folk song cycle from the archaic Poltroyan into modern human notation.

In Marie’s opinion, Marc’s premonitions and uneasiness were nothing more than mental indigestion. His giant brain was doubtless suffering overload from all the weird cerebroenergetic experiments he had inflicted upon himself, and he should slow down and smell the flowers before his synapses snapped.

Marc told Marie thanks for nothing.

Next he tried to bespeak his Great-granduncle Rogi, who lived above his bookstore only a block and a half away from the family home. Rogi’s puny mentality did not respond to Marc’s farspoken hails, and that probably meant that the old man was in one of his downslide phases and stinko again. However, there was only a small chance that Uncle Rogi would know the truth about Teresa anyway. He had always been leery of Marc’s parents and the other Galactic celebrities of the Remillard clan, even as he was surprisingly congenial toward Paul and Teresa’s aloof eldest son, Marc …

In the end, the boy decided that there was no way to resolve the dilemma but to go home and check things out personally, and at all possible speed.

It took three days for the CSS Funakoshi Maru to travel from Okanagon to Earth at the highest displacement factor endurable by masterclass humans. Marc Remillard scarcely felt the pain of the three deep-catenary hyperspatial translations at all. Enmeshed in his premonition, he had also neglected to note that the cost of his ticket on the premium-class superluminal transport had eaten up nearly all of his remaining personal credit-card allowance. When the starship docked at Ka Lei, Marc discovered that he couldn’t afford to travel the rest of the way home from Hawaii via express eggliner and taxi. For emergencies, he carried the family corporation credit card, with its unlimited rating; but since he was legally a minor for three more years, no matter how extraordinary his metapsychic quotient, using the card would require parental authorization and thereby alert his father. And the damned premonition
seemed to urge that he not let anyone—most particularly not Paul—know that he had returned.

So Marc took the cheapie local shuttle, which took twice as long as the express to fly from Ka Lei to the North American spaceport on Anticosti Island. It was from there that he had embarked for the planet Okanagon the previous June, leaving his BMW T99RT turbocycle in the long-term parking facility. He considered but rejected the idea of sneaking his wheels out without paying. The garage exit was fully automated against that very contingency, and its computer notably sneetchproof, even to the likes of him, and if he blew it and got nailed, he might as well have stayed on Okanagon. There was nothing to do but play it straight. Unhocking the turbocycle reduced the credit on his personal plass to just about zero; but fortunately the BMW was fully j-fueled and ready to roll, and the tolls would be automatically debited to the family account.

Marc removed the cycle leathers from the machine’s boot and put them on. He checked the charge and ran an internal test of the circuitry in the cerebroenergetic guidance helmet, then clapped it on, effectively plugging his brain into the bike the moment the hard-hat electrodes came alive at his imperative thought and pricked his scalp. The BMW’s instrumentation became part of his own senses, and its operating controls belonged to his voluntary nervous system, answering to his mental commands. There was nothing unique about the cerebroenergetic system except the fact that it was designed to operate a mere turbocycle instead of a starship or another highly sophisticated piece of apparatus. And instead of being manufactured by IBM or Datasys or Toshiba, it had been built by Marc himself.

Ordinarily, he drove his overpowered BMW in a scrupulously law-abiding manner except when he was on a racecourse; but now, in the emergency, he’d crank the bike flat out in the maxcel lanes of the autoroutes and screw the scofflaw monitors with his metacreativity. If a living police officer spotted him, he’d just have to risk brainwiping the cop.

The mind-controlled two-wheeler with the boy aboard rolled out of the spaceport parking garage, adhering to the speed limit all through the Jacques Cartier Tunnel leading to the Labrador Autoroute on the north shore of the Saint-Laurent. Once it reached the maxcel lanes of the major
groundway, the boy hung out the spoilers and commanded maximum throttle. Luckily, no human traffic police eyeballed him en route, and no busybody civilian drivers happened to be alert enough to note his tag number as he scorched past. He reached Hanover, New Hampshire, shortly after noon, having achieved an average velocity of 282.2 kilometers per hour.

The beautiful old college town was swathed in a summer heat wave and seemed nearly deserted. Marc drove the bike in quietly and decided that it would be a good idea to scan things out at close range before going to the house.

He went to the empty parking area of the Catholic Church on Sanborn Road, just around the corner from his home. It was so hot that the birds had quit singing and the tarmac that paved the lot was semiliquid between the bits of gravel. When he unzipped the environmentally controlled leather suit from left shoulder to right ankle and stepped out of it, he felt as if he had stepped into a sauna.

He was able to mentally adjust his body thermostat easily enough; but the feeling of impending disaster had now become almost overwhelming. During the shuttle trip and the drive from Anticosti, he had deliberately refrained from any attempt to farsense Teresa or try to make mental contact with her. The premonition had seemed to warn him that this would be dangerous, that she would inadvertently give away his presence on Earth and somehow preclude his helping her. But now, standing in the dusty shade of a gigantic mutant elm with the cooling engine of the Beemer ticking gently beside him, the boy reached out with the most heavily shielded farsensory probe he could manage and entered the old white colonial-style house at 15 East South Street.

Neither Herta Schmidt, the operant nanny, nor Jacqui Delarue, the nonoperant housekeeper, was anywhere in the place. His mother, Teresa Kaulana Kendall, was in her music studio on the second floor, sitting at a keyboard in front of an open window, playing a soft guitarlike improvisation. As Marc’s ultrasense lingered on her face, which was lightly sheened with perspiration, she brushed a damp lock of dark hair from her eyes with a sharp gesture at odds with her tranquil aspect.

Her mind was enveloped in a grandmasterclass screen
that no Remillard—not even her husband or her eldest son—had ever been able to breach.

Across the room, sitting stiffly on a ladder-back chair between the computer desk and a bookcase stuffed with old-fashioned printed musical scores, was Lucille Cartier—Marc’s redoubtable grandmother and Teresa’s mother-in-law. Lucille’s rejuvenated beauty was unsullied by sweat, and her dark brown hair, cut in bangs and a classic Chanel bob, was perfectly groomed.

Lucille said, “Now that we’re certain that the prognosis for successful prenatal genetic engineering is negative, you must agree that only one course of action is possible.”

Teresa said nothing. The music she played was technically brilliant but completely lacking in depth or nuance.

Lucille was reining in her famous temper admirably, projecting regret, sympathy, and feminine solidarity at the same time that her coercion was working overtime. “Teresa, dear, there is no other way the family can protect you from the legal consequences of your irresponsible behavior. And the child is—”

“Doomed anyhow,” Teresa finished, smiling abstractedly.