Jack the Bodiless (Galactic Milieu Trilogy) (60 page)

They also argued about Fury and Hydra, even though neither entity had manifested itself for over a year. Marc had had many troubling dreams of Fury, but his conscious mind by now had almost managed to convince itself that Jack had imagined the fearsome events attending Addie’s death. Jack stubbornly maintained that there was a real Fury and a real Hydra, and that Marc should make a stronger effort to bar Fury from his dreams, or one of these days, when everyone least expected it, the monsters would be back.

The brother minds were very different. They were natural antagonists by nature, and one can see that the rivalry that eventually led to the Metapsychic Rebellion had its inception during these intimate, clandestine walks in the pine forest, when the warmth of Indian summer filled the air with the scent of resin and the two of them, weary at last of their colloquy, would simply stand watching the great river flow by, Jack fashioning tiny boats out of forest debris with his creativity and Marc influencing the wind and river currents with his to make the little things dance on the water.

In November, just as the last leaves had fallen and the frost began to settle in to stay, the scanner detected in Jack incipient adenocarcinoma of the pancreas, formerly one of the fastest-acting and most intractable cancers. Gene therapy was tried, and once again it failed. The child’s pancreas had already been removed before the genetic procedures were
attempted, and Colette hoped that no metastasis had taken place.

Unfortunately, it had. New deadly cancer seeds were detected soon afterward in vital organs adjacent to the pancreas—in the liver, the spleen, the stomach, the large and small intestines, the kidneys—and in the great blood vessels of the heart. Pinpoint chemotherapy and laser microsurgery were brought to bear, but no sooner had one crop of seeds been destroyed than another wave appeared to take its place. The baby was put on full cerebro-isolate life support while Colette, her colleagues, and consultants brought in from all over the world tried to find a way to get Jack into a regen-tank, wipe his genetic slate clean, and put him back together again.

None of the cancers or the therapies affected Jack’s brain or his central nervous system. He remained alert, fully operant in all his metafaculties (except, apparently, self-redaction), and in considerable pain. He refused to accept any anodyne, chemical or electronic, saying that it would dull his mind and inhibit the “work” he was engaged in. What this work was he could not explain, and the mental images he projected were incomprehensible to Paul, Marc, and the professional attendants. Because of Jack’s extraordinary precocity, both his father and the doctors acceded to his request, hoping that the “work” was some grand, all-encompassing mental program that would eventually initiate a spontaneous cure.

Paul still had a small hope that Jack would survive. Teresa was another matter. When the new and devastating pancreatic cancer was diagnosed, she insisted at first on visiting him daily, even though the sight of the awesome paraphernalia now enveloping him frightened her almost to the point of hysteria. When Jack truthfully admitted to her that the pain was intense, she begged him, day after day, to let the doctors install a blocking device. His continuing calm refusal and rapid physical deterioration as organ after organ shut down culminated in her having a nervous breakdown in Colette’s hospital office, blaming herself for the baby’s ordeal in an orgy of self-recrimination, saying Jack should never have been born, and demanding that he be removed from the machines and allowed to “die in peace.”

Stress and guilt brought about Teresa’s total collapse. Once it was determined that there was nothing wrong with
her physically, she was given medication and put to bed in the house on South Street, with a full-time private duty nurse to keep an eye on her. Marie and Maddy were away in boarding school until the Christmas holidays, and Luc, who was tutored by the nanny, was shipped off with her to stay with Cheri and Adrien in their winter home in Loudon, just outside Concord. After several futile attempts to aid Teresa through his redaction (she shut him out, accusing him of damning their baby to a travesty of life), Paul left her once again.

For some weeks Teresa languished, eating very little and sunk in profound depression. She no longer had any desire to see Jack, and when I visited her from time to time, bringing from the bookshop rare musical tomes that I thought might interest her, she was sweetly apathetic. And then, just before Christmas, she suddenly began to speak of her youngest child in the past tense, and her condition greatly improved.

Imagining Jack dead, Marc told me without emotion, was apparently the only way his mother could retain her sanity. In Marc’s opinion, she had made an eminently sensible adaptation, for unless the family was willing to keep the baby on total brain-isolate life support for over a decade, he was certainly doomed to die.

The bone cancers had returned, and they were attacking Jack’s spine and skull in spite of everything the doctors could do.

U
NCLE
R
OGI WAS THE ONE WHO ORGANIZED THE MOB OF
cousins into carolers. With both Teresa and Jack unable to attend the family Christmas party at Denis and Lucille’s, the old bookseller thought of this way to cheer the invalids a little, and the children of the Dynasty, both young adults and kids, agreed enthusiastically to participate. Two hours before they were all scheduled to attend midnight mass at the quaint fieldstone Catholic church on Sanborn Road, Rogi had all of the Remillard offspring assemble in his bookshop. He gave them songbook-plaques and then led them down South Street en masse to sing Christmas carols under Teresa’s bedroom window.

It was snowing gently, with a crisp shallow layer already on the ground and sticking to the bare bushes and trees. Hanover looked impossibly lovely in the gleam of streetlights and house windows that framed illuminated Christmas trees. There were thirty-four children in the choir. The only ones missing were two toddlers belonging to Philip and Aurelie, who were too young to participate, Cheri and Adrien’s little Cory, who had a cold … and Jack.

They sang “Adeste,” and “Il est né, le divin enfant,” and “The Holly and the Ivy,” and “Gesù Bambino,” and “Silent Night,” and “Bring a Torch, Jeanette, Isabella” in both French and English. They sang the haunting “Coventry Carol” in its entirety, and some of the young voices broke when they reached the more unfamiliar verses on the book-plaques and realized that the carol was about the slaughter
of the innocents by Herod, sung by the mothers of the dead babies:

The somber mood was lifted when they swung into “Joy to the World” and then finished with the Remillard family’s favorite carol, “Cantique de Noël.”

The nurse, forewarned by Rogi, had helped Teresa to a chair by her window. She waved to the crowd when the concert ended, and immediately the front door opened and Jacqui Delarue, the matronly housekeeper, came out with paper cups of steaming cocoa. Rogi surreptitiously added to his a slug of rum from his pocket flask.

Then—voilà! The carolers heard a sound of bells jingling and horses puffing and clomping, and two large wagons filled with hay driven by Severin and Adrien came out of the little lane beyond the library and up to the front of the house. With happy shrieks, the younger children greeted Dobbin and Napoleon, who normally lived in Denis’s neighbor’s pasture as pensioners and were called upon only during Christmas and the Dartmouth Winter Carnival.

“Everybody into the wagons!” Rogi roared. “We’ll roll over to the hospital now to carol for Jack. And as we go, everybody sing!”

So they wended their way through town to the strains of “Frosty the Snowman,” and “Rudolph” in English and in bastard French, and “Chestnuts Roasting,” and “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town,” and “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas,” and “Jingle Bell Rock.” As the wagons rolled past the snow-covered expanse of the college green, Marc and several of the other older Remillards who were students sang Dartmouth’s “Winter Song.”

Then the bulk of the old hospital loomed up, its outline blurred by the snow, and the children fell silent. The happy holiday vibes that had engulfed the hayriders vanished as
they all, except for the single uncomprehending five-year-old, withdrew behind their mental screens.

Jack.

Poor little ravaged Jack.

They were finally going to
see
him.

Rogi had carefully consulted with each family before having Marc ask Jack if he felt up to having a horde of visitors. The parents had tried to prepare their offspring by presenting a realistic mental image of Jack as he now was. His aspect was saddening but not ghastly, for the child’s head was still normal in appearance, and his baldness would be hidden under a Santa cap, and the support unit that held him could be sheeted over to hide what was inside.

The parents told their youngest children not to look under the sheet, knowing that the admonition was futile even as they said it. They also reminded the children that Jack’s mind was strong and well and there was still hope that his body could be restored.

The night supervisor of nursing met them at the front door and led them to where Jack waited. There was no need to tell the operant youngsters to keep quiet. When they reached Jack’s room they filed in, one by one, to greet him and say a few words if they wished. Jack was tilted upright in the frame of his life-support apparatus. On one side of him was a bank of monitors and the controls of the machinery that kept him alive. On the other side was a top-of-the-line minimain computer with a brainboard box, no keypads or microphone, and a jumbo display monitor on a flexarm: a toy for the invalid child. Jack smiled a lot and spoke to his guests telepathically. There was no overt evidence that he was in pain.

Then came five-year-old Cousin Norman, one of Philip’s large brood, who was the youngest caroler of the group. He asked Jack: “Why do you have to mindspeak us? Can’t you talk?”

No, Jack said. I still have my voice box, but it’s no good without lungs.

There were scattered sharp intakes of breath and gasps of dismay, but Norman plunged on. “Then you can’t sing along with us. But that’s okay. Your ears work, don’t they?”

Yes. And my eyes are still fine, too.

“How about your heart?”

It’s still there, but it doesn’t beat. It’s shut down.

“Oh,” said Norman. He was squinting, and everyone knew he was using his deepsight to look under the sheet. His older sisters braced themselves to grab him and hustle him out of the room if he became frightened and made a scene, but all Norman said was: “You’re really a mess in there, aren’t you?”

Yes, said Jack. He was still smiling.

“Now it’s time for the Christmas carols,” the head nurse said briskly to the visitors, “and then Jack must rest.”

Marc had already primed them on his little brother’s favorites. They sang “Good King Wenceslaus,” and “Angels We Have Heard on High,” and “Jolly Old Saint Nicholas,” and finally “Lo, How a Rose E’er Blooming.”

When the last sweet harmony faded, Jack said: Thank you for a wonderful Christmas present. And now I have a little present for each of you!… Marc, open the top drawer of that computer stand for me. Sometimes it sticks.

Mystified, Marc complied. And discovered that the drawer was filled with miniature white roses.

Murmurs of interest came from the carolers, and these turned to exclamations and even squeals when the little flowers began flying out and affixing themselves to the children’s coats like boutonnieres.

Jack said: Lo, how a rose e’er blooming! Merry Christmas!

“Merry Christmas, Jack!” they replied, the oldest of them with suspicious moisture in their eyes. And then they shuffled out.

The head nurse was looking into the now empty drawer and shaking her head, her lips pursed with disapproval. She glowered at Marc, who had lingered after the others left. “I suppose you were responsible for that, young man. Don’t you know that live plants can carry viruses that might interfere with your little brother’s genetic therapy?”

“I didn’t bring the roses,” Marc said. “If you want to know where those flowers came from, you’d better ask
him
. He did it with his creativity. It’s one of the things he’s good at, transforming one thing into another.” He fingered the rose in the lapel of his mackinaw, inspecting it with a critical eye. “You goofed, Jacko. Forgot the sepals. Smells nice, though. Good job on the essential oils.”

The nurse was incredulous. “Do you mean to tell me he
made
those roses? Out of
nothing?”

Jack grinned.

Marc headed out the door. “No, he used an organic raw material. But if I were you, Nurse, I wouldn’t ask what.”

Even before the long midnight mass was completely over, Rogi slipped outside and trudged toward his apartment above the bookshop. He was dead beat after shepherding the kids, and the sip of consecrated wine he’d taken at communion had reminded him sacrilegiously that his flask had been emptied long before. When he passed the house he saw that the light in Teresa’s bedroom was still on, as were many of the downstairs lights. Impulsively, he rang the doorbell. When Jacqui answered, he asked if Teresa was still up. Jacqui said that she had looked in about twenty minutes previously and found Teresa reading. The nurse was at midnight mass.

“I’ll just go up and find out how Teresa liked the caroling,” Rogi said, shedding his down jacket and stamping most of the snow off his boots. “Don’t bother coming along to play chaperone. Teresa and I know all there is to know about each other.”

Jacqui laughed dutifully at his old-fashioned notions of prudery and went off. Rogi climbed to the second floor and knocked on the door of the big master bedroom. There was no reply, and he hesitated. It never occurred to him to use his metafaculties.