Jack the Bodiless (Galactic Milieu Trilogy) (69 page)

There was no record of the stolen egg having entered any Vee-route on the planet Earth. Wherever it had gone, it had traveled ex-vector and beneath the ubiquitous radar net of Air Traffic Control—almost certainly skimming along the surface of the Atlantic and coming ashore God knew where. Three satellites with equipment that might have recorded the path of the errant egg beneath widespread cloud cover suffered mysterious malfunctions that night. Fury had done a better job of covering the tracks of his protégés than Marc had done for Teresa and me. The red egg was never traced or recovered.

The Magistratum’s investigation and the search for Madeleine, Celine, Quentin, and Parnell were kept strictly confidential, under orders from the Dirigent. The media and the public learned nothing about the existence of the vampiric little clique haunting the First Family of Metapsychology. The Remillards cooperated fully in the inquiry—most especially those parents whose children were under suspicion—and later the entire Fury-Hydra affair was discussed in a special week-long closed-door Special Session of the Human Magnates of the Concilium held in Concord. Marc’s hypothesis of the origin of Hydra was debated and reluctantly given credence. Once again, the Dynasty was mind-reamed with the Cambridge machine and “proved” not to be Fury. No trace of the fugitive children was found.

Paul himself traveled to Orb and presented the findings of the Special Session to the full Concilium of exotic magnates. Among his recommendations were: that all the Remillards should resign their Concilium seats and be permanently incarcerated in a place of the Concilium’s choice; and that the probation period postponing full acceptance of humanity into the Galactic Milieu be extended for an indefinite period, until Fury and Hydra were captured, or identified and proved dead.

The Simbiari, Poltroyan, Gi, and Krondak magnates voted to accept those two draconian proposals. The five members of the Lylmik Supervisory Body exercised their special privilege and summarily vetoed the decision.

The case was left open, and a special task force of human and exotic investigators assigned to it. Their efforts to find the Hydra monsters were to prove fruitless—as were the efforts of Jack himself. The four remained at large, doing what they were told to do, until nearly twenty-three Earth years had passed and the Dirigent Dorothea Macdonald, who came to be known as Diamond Mask, finally neutralized their threat—with a little help from a bumbling friend. That story will be told in the second book of this trilogy,
Diamond Mask
.

Fury was another matter entirely. His fate, like that of Marc and Jack the Bodiless and so many more of the characters who people these Memoirs, is inextricably entangled in the Metapsychic Rebellion.

The principal Rebels themselves, led by Adrien Remillard, Anna Gawrys-Sakhvadze, and Owen Blanchard, pursued their cause with discretion and determination until the culminating year of 2083. They drew more and more influential operants into their conspiracy as the wider implications of mental Unity and membership in the Galactic confederation were freely debated by the Human Polity. In time Marc would join them, just as Adrien had predicted, and assume their leadership. He would broaden the Rebel agenda with radical ideas of his own that went far beyond the original ideal of Human autonomy, and eventually threaten the life of the Galactic Milieu itself.

In these Memoirs I will reveal, as the Family Ghost permits, aspects of the Metapsychic Rebellion that Milieu historians haven’t the least notion of, which I witnessed personally—and on more than one occasion even took an active part in. My own view of the cosmic conflict will be related in the third volume of the trilogy, entitled
Magnificat
.

I do not know whether the Ghost, in Its infinite wisdom, intends to release my chronicle to the Galaxy at large, or whether It intends simply to hide it away in some ineffable Lylmik archive. It refuses to reveal Its plans, just as It refuses to tell me whether I will long survive the telling of the tale.

Eh bien! Qu’est-ce que ça peut bien foutre? But it would be fun to watch the uproar.

Paul was back on Earth in time for Marc’s college commencement on 14 June 2054, when the boy received both his B.S. and an M.S. in metapsychology. His thesis dealt with “The Cerebroenergetic Interface as a Potential Bypass of Grandmasterclass Mental Shielding.” He had used himself as the guinea pig in his experiments.

Sitting between their father and me in the audience at the outdoor ceremony were Marc’s sister Marie and his two younger brothers, Luc and Jack. Family friends congratulated Paul on Jack’s wonderful recovery from cancer. Paul gave all the credit to Colette Roy and her medical colleagues. Unfortunately, Marc’s second sister, Madeleine, missed the commencement. She was, Paul said, beginning her own higher education on the remote Poltroyan planet Toropon-su-Makon under a special student exchange program. The family did not expect to see too much of her for the next few years, but she was not expected to be too lonely. Three of her Remillard cousins were taking the same course of study.

On 3 October 2054, the probationary period of one Galactic year, a thousand Earth days, was declared complete. The Human Polity took its place beside the other races of the Milieu for better or worse, a full member of the confederation at last, with all the privileges and duties attending thereto.

A compromise was reached on the matter of the additional ethnic planets for humans of color: twelve new worlds were set aside that had no operant quota in their founding population. The colonies were rather remote from the home world, but they were attractive and richly endowed, and the people who settled them increased and multiplied and, in time, took a political position that would, ironically, place them in the forefront of the Metapsychic Rebellion fomented in the name of Mental Man.

Shortly after the Earth-wide festivities accompanying the human enfranchisement, Malama Johnson farspoke Marc with a special message. He and I and Jack egged to Kauai, removed Teresa’s ashes from the kahuna’s cave, and scattered
them over the green island on a day when the sky was filled with sparkling showers and myriad rainbows.

Paul had been invited to come with us, but he declined. He was busier than ever now that the probation had ended, and lived most of the time in Concord or Concilium Orb. Laura Tremblay and a number of other attractive operant women were linked romantically with him from time to time.

Young Jack the Bodiless looked and behaved—almost always—like a normal preschool child, seeming to be a little in advance of his age physically, and decidedly precocious in his social development. He resumed his daytrips about the Dartmouth campus, sometimes in the company of Marc and his graduate-student associates, sometimes alone by special dispensation of the college president, Tom Spotted Owl, who became one of the child’s dearest friends. Jack’s extraordinary mindpowers were widely known in academic circles but given no publicity. The child’s own grandmasterly coercivity ensured that he was never harassed by the media or by other busybodies, and the rest of his childhood seemed to pass peacefully without attracting the attention of the world outside Hanover, New Hampshire.

He wore his childish form when he lived at home or when he stayed with various friends or relatives in his extended family. There were also times when he chose to wear other bodies, both human and exotic, but he always did this with the utmost circumspection during his youth. Until he was nominated to the Concilium himself at the age of sixteen, only a handful of family members were aware of his true physical condition.

He visited me regularly in my bookshop and sought my opinion on some of the damnedest things, and it was easy for me to forget what Jack really was. Only on the coldest winter nights, when I sat by myself in the back of the shop, drinking and feeling lonely and sorry for myself, remembering Sunny and Elaine and Umi and even Teresa—women I had loved and lost—did I tell myself that there was one in the world even less lucky than I. At least I had known love’s warmth. Three women had found me desirable and one had loved me like a father, and in Denis and Jack and even in Marc, the strange one, I had had foster sons.

But what woman would ever love poor Jack the Bodiless?
And what kind of terrible, inhuman children could that laughing, brilliant little boy-brain ever hope to sire?

It was beyond imagining. Jack was happy now, growing in wisdom and grace, with his physical shells mimicking the human life processes in a manner that was nearly flawless. But his “bodies” were not the real thing, nor could they ever be. The fantastic biological complexity that houses the souls of each one of us is beyond the constructive abilities of even the most ingenious Grand Master of psychocreativity. Nor could Jack ever be reclothed in flesh through the technological miracle of the regeneration tank. His genes had programmed him to be as he was: a naked, self-sufficient brain. He was, if you like, a being midway on the ladder of evolution between Homo sapiens and the ethereal Lylmik.

He was unique. He was truly alone.

Sunk in my maudlin melancholy, I would drink a toast to poor Jack the Bodiless, who would never know human love, as the north wind moaned around the shopwindows, and the Great White Cold of the New Hampshire winter stalked abroad, and high in the sky the faraway star that was the sun of the planet Caledonia sparkled like the tiniest of diamonds.

How the Family Ghost must have laughed.

Julian May was born in Chicago in 1931. She has written numerous books, including
The Many-Colored Land, The Golden Torc, The Nonborn King, The Adversary, Intervention, The Surveillance
, and
The Metaconcert
. Julian May lives in the state of Washington.