Jack the Bodiless (Galactic Milieu Trilogy) (61 page)

Well, he thought, if she’s gone off to sleep, I’ll just tuck her in and turn out the lights.

He opened the door and nearly jumped out of his skin. For the merest instant, he imagined that he saw a tall man in evening clothes bending over Teresa as she lay sleeping, giving her a tender kiss on the forehead.

“Paul …?”

But there was nobody there after all. Trembling, Rogi came into the room, thinking that the night’s excitement really had been too much for him, and he’d have to think seriously about going on the wagon during the new year. Damned imagination! Next thing, he’d be seeing snakes or pink elephants instead of Paul.

 … But it hadn’t been Paul. The phantom had been beardless and of a more muscular build than Teresa’s husband. But for all that, there had been a distinctly familiar air about him.

Espèce d’idiot, Rogi called himself.

He drew up the coverlet a bit, turned off the bedside lamp, and gave Teresa a gentle farewell pat on one hand.

The hand was cold.

Rogi stood stock-still. But Teresa was even more motionless, and when the truth finally penetrated and he frantically switched the lamp back on and snatched up the bedside phone, he saw the empty pill bottle.

N
OT EVEN
J
ACK KNEW WHAT
T
ERESA HAD PLANNED TO DO
, so skilled was she in guarding her most secret thoughts. When she took the pills, her youngest son was asleep, exhausted from his visitors and from the psychocreative gifts he had fashioned for them. As his mother began to slip into death, Jack woke, for in her deranged state she sought to force him to accompany her, and the final transmutation of her vital energies lent her a terrible gentle strength that the child could barely countermand. When Teresa passed on at last, Jack was comatose for ten hours, and his medical attendants and his distraught father were certain that he would surely die, too. He did not, but his condition worsened, and a new crop of rapidly infiltrating malignancies appeared.

Teresa’s suicide provoked a wave of prurient public interest in the Remillard family, its tragedies, and its personal affairs that reminded me uncomfortably of the media madness attending the family of the assassinated U.S. President John F. Kennedy. The actual condition of young Jack had been carefully hidden from reporters, who knew only that
the First Magnate’s youngest son was being treated for cancer; but with the vultures circling around more and more closely, it seemed only a matter of time before the child’s bizarre condition would become known—and then there would be a fresh spate of adverse publicity.

In January 2054, Paul took a month-long leave of absence from his official duties and went into seclusion on the planet Denali, with Laura Tremblay accompanying him. The inhabitants of the frigid little world were so grateful for Paul’s help in getting their colony established that they kept his place of refuge secret, frustrating any journalists who might have pursued him.

There had been a star-studded public memorial service for Teresa in Concord between Christmas and New Year’s, overflowing the Catholic cathedral in the capital of Earth and covered by all the news services. Her interment was to be private, and since she had been cremated, the media and the general public assumed that her ashes would be scattered. However, in a handwritten codicil to her last will and testament, Teresa had requested that I return her ashes to Kauai, the island of her birth. Marc wanted to accompany me, but I held off until he assured me that he had successfully completed the work for his Bachelor of Science degree and was well along on his Master’s thesis. Then, on 5 February, the day after Marc’s sixteenth birthday, when he was finally able to pilot a rhocraft legally, he borrowed Paul’s silver Maserati and flew us to Poipu. The two of us carried Teresa’s remains in an elegantly carved little pine box.

We picked up Teresa’s father at the beach house and flew almost immediately to a historic little old church out in the wild canefields, Saint Raphael’s. The ninety-three-year-old astrophysicist Bernard Kané Kendall looked sallow and middle-aged when he greeted us, although he had undergone rejuvenation less than a decade earlier. His mind was in a perennial state of abstraction, rapt in cosmological mysteries; and although he mourned the loss of Teresa, Marc and I could see that he was anxious to get back to the great complex of observatories on the Big Island, where he lived and worked during most of the year.

Teresa’s mother was not in attendance. Annarita Donovan Latimer, the only child of my onetime fiancée, Elaine
Donovan, was seventy-eight years old at the time of her daughter’s death and living as a recluse in New York City after a long and successful career as an actress. She had been separated from Kendall for over twenty years and was adamantly opposed to rejuvenation. (Annarita would succumb quietly to heart failure in 2056, the year that the new Teresa Kendall Opera House had its inaugural season on the cosmopolitan planet Avalon, thanks to the beneficence of the Remillard Foundation.)

Saint Raphael’s Church was packed with islanders who had known and loved Teresa in her youth, many of them native Hawaiians. When the service was concluded, the people filed up to the altar, where the little box of ashes rested on a kind of wide wooden stand with handles at the corners, and draped it with gorgeous leis of island flowers. Four Hawaiian men wearing brightly patterned traditional shirts and horseshoe leis woven of ferns then took up the litter, and I thought there would be a procession to the local cemetery. To my surprise, the pallbearers and the file of mourners moved directly to our silver Maserati, where the priest said a last blessing and sprinkled the box of ashes with holy water. Then the people began to sing “Aloha Oe,” and a plump brown hand fell upon my shoulder. I looked around, to discover Malama Johnson, the woman who had taken care of Teresa and Jack and me when we spent the last months of our exile at the Kendall beach house down in Poipu.

“Now you and I and Marc will take dear Kaulana’s dust to Keaku,” she whispered. “We will fly in your egg.”

The box and most of the flowers fit in the backseat, and the three of us climbed into the front. Keaku, it seemed, was in the direction of cloud-cloaked Mount Waialeale, in the center of the island north of us. Our inertialess aircraft lofted us 1700 meters into the air in a few seconds under Marc’s pilotage, and we flew noiselessly through thick clouds almost as featureless as the gray limbo of hyperspace.

The heights of Kauai are the wettest place on Earth, with an annual rainfall of over twelve meters. I knew only a little about the country up there. It is called the Alakai Swamp and is a windswept ancient volcanic plateau of almost perpetual rain and mist, where the bogs shelter rare plants and hundreds of waterfalls plunge over precipitate fern-clad cliffs into the fertile lowlands. Of all the Hawaiian Islands,
Kauai is the greenest and, to me, the most inviting. It was also the island that had been the last refuge of the legendary Menehune—the dwarfish “magical” people whom the conquering Polynesians found and enslaved when they first migrated north from Tahiti.

The place Malama had indicated on the rhocraft’s large-scale local navigation display was a lava cave on the southern edge of the swamp, near the head of Olokele Canyon. Marc had the egg on autopilot, and the terrain indicator warned us that we were about to touch down while the ship was still totally enveloped in cloud.

I stepped out into a cool drizzle that immediately soaked the white tropical suit I had chosen for the obsequies. All I could discern with my regular sight was swirling mist, gnarled little trees, and a lush growth of ferns and other rain-forest vegetation. There was a delicate fragrance like anise in the air.

Malama carried the box of ashes in her arms and started off among the bog pools. Marc and I followed, loaded with flower garlands, casting about with farsight and deepsight lest we sink into the muck. Almost immediately we came upon the cave, which was of a fair size, girt about with rampant, dripping greenery.

“You stay here,” Malama told me sternly, “and keep your farsight under control.” And then to Marc: “Boy, bring one lei strung with green berries and leaves—the mokihana and maile that belong to our island. And bring one other that you think your mother would have liked.”

His face frozen, Marc took the modest green garland and another of white dendrobium orchids. The other flowers were left at the cave mouth. He followed the Hawaiian woman into the darkness, and dutifully, I did not spy. This remote spot wrapped in chill, sweet-smelling mist was not one I would have chosen as a last resting place, and somehow I found myself doubting that Teresa would approve of it, either. But neither Marc nor I had thought for a moment of going against the kahuna’s command.

After less than ten minutes, the pair of them reappeared. We returned to the egg in silence and were back in sunny Poipu in short order. Dr. Kendall was already gone from the beach house, leaving only a curt note, and Malama disappeared almost as soon as we landed. Her husband Ola, an uncommunicative stocky fellow with grizzled, curly hair,
showed us where we could dry out our clothes and then gave us a hearty lunch (which was actually supper for us New Englanders) of roast chicken, taro biscuits, a salad of corn, tomatoes, and watercress in spicy mayonnaise, and pineapple with sweet coconut sauce for dessert.

Marc said nothing during the meal. As we started back for the egg, he looked up with a grimace at the sky to the south, which was rapidly filling with black storm clouds.

“It’s going to be pouring cats and dogs pretty soon,” I said.

“Yeah.” He talked to Air Traffic Control and got us a superexpress Vee all the way to Boston.

“You want to tell me what happened in the cave?” I asked.

But Marc had a question of his own. “Did Mama’s will specify that Jack was to be cremated and interred with her?”

I had said nothing about that part of the will to Marc, and he’d shown no curiosity about the document up until now. But Teresa
had
left that instruction, as though she believed that the baby would soon join her in death, and I admitted it to Marc.

It was getting very dark outside, and a sudden blast of wind made the egg totter on its splayed landing pads. The environmental unit of the rhocraft was still working to counter the island heat and humidity that had filled its interior. Marc’s face wore a sheen of perspiration and was illuminated eerily by the glow of the control-panel displays.

“Malama … In the cave, she said Mama tried to take Jack with her. As she died. She said Mama had used the anana, the kahuna death prayer.”

“Mes couilles!” I scoffed. “That’s complete bullshit.”

“Malama said she was very disappointed in Teresa for doing that. She called Mama selfish and said she had committed a sin against huna that her Middle Self was now sorry for. She said—” He paused, gritting his teeth, then continued relentlessly. “She said Mama’s soul was in purgatory, atoning for the sin, and her Low Self was still charged with mana and dangerous, and that’s why her ashes would have to stay in Keaku Cave for the time being. So Jack wouldn’t die now when he was especially vulnerable. Malama said Jack
wasn’t
going to die. Do you think she could possibly be right, Uncle Rogi?”

I felt ice-cold ants creeping up my spine. We were getting into areas of metapsychology that science knew nothing about: the possible survival after death of malignant aspects of the personality, the “evil spirits” of legend … and maybe even things like Fury and Hydra. The egg rocked with another gust. Palm trees were flailing, and out to sea I could see a pitch-black wall getting closer and closer. I said, “What with your studies and the family hassles, you’ve been so busy during the past month that you haven’t seen much of Ti-Jean. But I have, and I can tell you that Colette has just about lost hope for conquering his cancer through genetic engineering. On the other hand, the kid acts like he wants to live! He’s always talking about integrating his three selves. And he still refuses painkillers, because he says they would interfere with some special ‘work’ he’s doing. Would any of that matter worth a damn if he knew he was going to die in a few weeks? Don’t you think a mentality like Jack’s would
know
if he was failing?”

“I think he’d know,” Marc conceded. “And he would have surely said something during our daily farspeech skeds. I’m sorry I’ve been neglecting to visit him, but those media ghouls camped out around the hospital—”

“I’m sure he understands.”

The rain came roaring up the rocky beach, obliterating everything behind it. In seconds we were in an imitation of the gray limbo again, only this time it wasn’t hushed and mystical as it had been up above Mount Waialeale. A tumultuous din filled the egg’s interior as the tropical downpour crashed down on us, hiding everything outside the egg from view.

“Malama knows about Fury, too,” Marc said. “I’m supposed to be … careful. And if Jack’s ever in any
serious
trouble, we can call on her.”

“Serious trouble?” I was incredulous. “How the hell much more trouble does the poor kid have to have? Trouble! Jesus!… She say anything about Hydra?”

“No. Malama is operant, of course. But in a funny way. Up in the cave, she seemed to think I’d been there before. Isn’t that the stupidest damn thing?”

“No,” said I abruptly. “The stupidest thing is us sitting here getting battered into the sand when we could be sailing home through the nice dry ionosphere. You want to get us out of here—or should
I
drive?”

He sighed and lit the rho-field, and for us, the rain stopped.

The very day after Marc and I returned from the islands, the media catastrophe that the family had long feared finally occurred. Jack’s privacy was breached when an unfortunate nurse with financial problems sold the sensational details of his case, complete with videotapes taken while he was still comatose, to the highest bidder among the scandalmongering yellow networks of the Tri-D. There was a predictable furor among bleeding hearts and squeamish souls that even extended to the exotic races. The consensus of popular wisdom was that Teresa had been driven to take her life by the appalling and inhumane medical treatment that had prolonged the life of her doomed baby beyond any reasonable expectation of recovery. Paul, of course, was blamed. His political enemies could not use the scandal to attack him openly; but during the days immediately following the revelations, his authority was so seriously undermined that he actually offered to resign as First Magnate. This was vetoed by the Lylmik, who further astounded the Milieu by flatly prohibiting the university hospital authorities from discontinuing Jack’s treatment or removing him from life support unless he himself requested it.