Jack the Bodiless (Galactic Milieu Trilogy) (7 page)

“Severin himself performed the genetic assay, confirming the presence of at least three intractable lethal traits in the fetal DNA. And I needn’t remind you”—Lucille’s voice hardened—“that doing those tests makes Sevvy just as much of an accessory to your crime as I am. But he was willing to put himself in jeopardy just to prove to you that the situation is irremediable.”

“And I thank you both for trying. And for not reporting me.”

“We never considered reporting you to the Magistratum!”

The smallest movement uplifted Teresa’s lips. “Of course not. The Remillard family honor—and the honor of the first human Magnate-Designate—would never recover from the scandal.”

“You don’t know what you’re saying.” Lucille’s words were still objective, composed. But her mental substratum, clearly perceptible to Marc’s spying ultrasense, smoldered with outrage. “Any more than you really knew what you were doing when you deliberately flouted the Reproductive Statutes.”

“Oh, I knew … but I never intended to harm Paul or the rest of the family. I—I only knew that this time the risk was worth taking.”

“How you ever expected to get away with it—”

“I had a plan. Once my condition became obvious, I’d slip away to my family’s old beach house on Kauai, where only native Hawaiian people and a handful of haoles live now. It would have been easy to make some excuse to Paul.” Teresa uttered a small laugh. “He certainly would never miss me, what with the hullabaloo over the upcoming ending of the Simbiari Proctorship and the formal induction ceremonies for the new Earth Magnates at Concilium Orb. I thought that afterward, when the Human Polity finally took its place in the Milieu and the Dynasty was settled in as magnates, I’d eventually be exonerated.”

“That is by no means a certainty.”

“I’m not the only person who thinks the Reproductive Statutes are unjust! Nor am I the only operant who’s attempted to circumvent them. For normals, the penalty is only a fine and sterilization and the loss of a few entitlements. Why the Simbiari decided to deal with
us
in such a draconian manner—”

“We operants have more privileges,” said Lucille gently, “and we also have more responsibilities.”

“To hell with them both.” Teresa’s voice was level. Her musical improvisation became Bachian, faster and almost frenzied in its intricacy. “To hell with the whole ungodly Proctorship scheme. To hell with the exotics and their Milieu. What fools we all were to think it would be so wonderful to become part of a Galactic civilization.”

“There are some normals who would agree with you, and a few operants. But most of humanity believes that the Intervention saved our planet from catastrophe.”

“The price—in human freedom and dignity—has been too high.”

Lucille Cartier’s mental veneer of sympathy thinned momentarily to reveal the thought:
Poor neurotic fool!
And if any love or pity for Teresa tinged this stark judgment, it was imperceptible to Marc.

Teresa seemed to notice nothing and continued equably. “But all this is quite beside the point. My little scheme failed to reckon with your own maternal astuteness, Lucille. You found me out.”

Her playing slowed, and the music passed into a minor mode. Almost as an afterthought, she said, “If you and Severin are prepared to perform the procedure, we’d best do it early tomorrow, before Paul comes back from Concord.”

“Thank God you’ve finally come to your senses!” Lucille sprang up from the chair and came swiftly to her daughter-in-law, taking Teresa’s hands from the keyboard and drawing her to her feet. “Darling, I know how terrible this is for you. And I’m so sorry it has to be this way. We should have realized what emotional turmoil you were suffering.
Paul
should have known …”

Teresa freed her hands. “Not Paul,” she said very quietly. There were tears in her eyes now, but the mental façade that she displayed to her mother-in-law was suddenly casual, uncaring—almost as though the secret, once discovered, was no longer worth agonizing over. “Paul never would have known. It took another woman to find out the truth. Well, it will all be over tomorrow … Lucille, you mustn’t worry about me anymore. You’re quite right and I
am a
fool, and that’s an end to it. I think you’d better go now and arrange things. I’d like to be alone for a while … to do my vocal exercises. You know how I am about letting anyone hear how awful I’ve become.”

“That’s nonsense!” said Lucille stoutly. “Your voice is as fine as ever. How many times must we tell you that your singing difficulties are entirely psychosomatic? And this other—this obsession of yours would also respond to therapy if you’d only—”

“Please.” Pain flashed briefly from Teresa’s eyes. “Just let us be alone together for these last few hours.”

“It’s
not
sapient! Not at five months!” Lucille’s voice was shrill, and her eyes blazed. “It’s only your sick imagination hearing it!”

“Yes, of course.”

Teresa turned her back on Lucille, took her seat again at the keyboard, and toggled a fortepiano patch. She began to play Chopin’s Berceuse. “I’ll be ready tomorrow. Just call me. Tell me where and when.”

Lucille’s mouth tightened as she recognized the lullaby. But she only nodded and left the room, hurrying down the staircase and out of the house to her waiting groundcar. Marc waited until his grandmother drove off and turned
away on Main Street before starting to walk his bike toward the house, bespeaking his mother on the way.

Teresa did not look up as Marc entered. She stared at her hands, silent on the electronic keyboard. “You’re only a boy. A boy with an amazing mind, but hardly powerful enough to counter the law enforcement authorities of the Galactic Milieu. What I’ve done is a serious crime, and if you help me you’ll be an accessory and liable to the same penalty as mine.”

“As Grandma and Uncle Sevvy will be, too, if they do the abortion.”

“The danger of their being found out is infinitesimal, whereas you would almost certainly be caught if you tried to help me escape.”

“I won’t be caught. I’ve already worked it out. Look!” [Image.]

“I see,” Teresa whispered. “I see.”

She reached out to him mentally, to this oldest child, who had distanced himself from his parents in the earliest years of life, keeping himself to himself, apparently rejecting love as a needless distraction as he cultivated the awesome metafaculties that might someday make him the leading human operant of the new Galactic Age. Teresa seemed genuinely astonished that it should be Marc who would try to save her … save both of them. He had shown no particular affection for his other siblings and seemed to have only an Olympian regard for his mother and father. Even now he instinctively froze at her attempted mental caress, as though he knew that love’s interface would breach his precious self-sufficiency and render him vulnerable.

As it had.

“Marc, are you sure?” she asked, taking his hand. It was warm, unlike the ramparts guarding his soul’s core.

“Yes,” he said.

Teresa kissed the young hand, then smiled as she guided it to her belly, which had hardly begun to swell. Marc’s muscles tensed, and she feared he would pull away; but then—

“There,” she said reassuringly, and the boy relaxed. “You must listen very carefully. His—his thought-mode is like nothing I’ve ever experienced before, human or exotic. It’s
rather frightening until you get used to it. At least it was for me! Probe deep. Be open for something quite different. And be gentle, because he feels he must hide, sometimes, like a little frightened animal …”

Marc knelt beside Teresa, placed both hands on his mother’s abdomen, and closed his eyes. Transfixed, he hardly seemed to breathe for many minutes. Finally he gave a low, inarticulate cry. He opened his eyes and regarded his mother with mingled elation and fear.

“It’s all right,” Teresa said, smiling. “He’s really very happy to meet you. And—yes. It seems that he was expecting you after all.”

T
HE ANTIQUE BELL ON THE FRONT DOOR OF
T
HE
E
LOQUENT
Page tinkled, and the teenaged boy came inside. Even before she looked up from her computer inventory check, Perdita Manion was aware that a metapsychic operant of exceptional stature had come into the bookshop. The mind-signature was not only unreadable; it was encrypted to the point of nonexistence. It could belong to only one person.

She smiled a greeting both with her lips and with her mind. “Well, hello, Marc! So you’re back home in time to enjoy the last days of this beautiful New Hampshire summer, are you? I thought you were going to be off-world until the start of the Dartmouth fall term.”

“The undergraduate seminar on psychocreative ambivalence at the Okanagon Institute ended earlier than I expected. The Simbiari prof came down with some kind of exotic allergy and couldn’t stop dripping green.”

“Good heavens!”

“And then there was the big news about the selection of the first human Magnates of the Concilium. Anybody named Remillard was fair game for the local media. So I caught the next ship for Earth.”

“But it was your first star trip all alone. Didn’t you want to stay on and explore for a bit? Okanagon is such a gorgeous world. All those flowering trees and the singing fire-moths in the jungle gardens … Lindsay and I seriously considered settling there in 2020, when the first colonial planets were opened.”

Marc’s response was edgy and formal. “The planet is certainly very attractive physically, but I found it mentally unsettling. It has such a large cosmopolitan population of nonoperants. Their excessively mercantile mind-set has generated a very anharmonic planetary aura.”

“Oh.”

“I suppose I’m oversensitive. But … there’s no place like home.”

“Well, of course.” Perdita Manion offered him maternal sympathy well flavored with humor. Masterclass adolescents had such a difficult time coping, poor things! The brighter they were, the harder it was for them to adapt when they were first cut loose from the hothouse of operant training they had known since early childhood and were forced to swim in the perverse mainstream of “normal” humanity. Her own brilliant son, Alexis, who like Marc had recently graduated from Brebeuf Academy, was a sore trial himself these days—an idealistic champion of the Altruism Ethic one moment and a power-tripping little fascist the next, in spite of the best efforts of the school’s operant Jesuit preceptors. It was high time that both boys were off to college, where their psychosocial adjustment to nonoperant people and to members of the five exotic races would be even more closely monitored than their academic progress.

Perdita said, “Alexis will be very glad to see you, Marc. He and Boom-Boom Laroche and Pete Dalembert are planning a fishing trip to Maine next week. I know they’ll want you to go along. That might help calm your nerves.”

“I’ll catch Alex later, Miz Manion—but I’m afraid I may be too tied up with other business to go on the trip.”

Marc spoke casually; but for the briefest instant, Perdita caught a hint of anxiety, flashing involuntarily from the
expertly shielded young mind. “There’s nothing wrong, is there?” she asked.