Magnificat (Galactic Milieu Trilogy)

Jack the Bodiless

“Witty, epic in scope, and emotionally complex,
Jack the Bodiless
is the first in a planned multivolume tale of the Milieu. If the rest is as promising as this maiden volume, the series could well be a landmark.”

—Los Angeles
Daily News

“A well-told entertainment presented with a great deal of skill and power.”

—The Washington Post Book World

“A glittering baroque extravaganza … A book about what it might be to be a different kind of humanity.”

—Interzone

“Highly recommended.”

—Library Journal

Diamond Mask

“May … is one of the few such writers I not only enjoy but read with only the faintest nagging sense of guilty pleasure.
Diamond Mask
 … shows why.”

—Locus

I
T WAS DAWN IN THE ISLANDS
. I
N THE OHIA THICKETS OF THE
highland forest, apapane birds and thrushes gave a few drowsy chirps as they tuned up for their sunrise aubade. Inside a rustic house on the mountainside above Shark Rock, the old bookseller called Uncle Rogi Remillard yawned and stopped dictating into his transcriber. He looked out of the big sitting-room window at the dark, choppy Pacific nearly a thousand meters below, pinched the bridge of his long, broken nose, and squeezed his eyes shut for a moment while he gathered his thoughts. The adjacent isle of Niihau was just becoming visible against the rose-gray sky and a few lights in Kekaha village sparkled down along the Kauai shore.

Uncle Rogi was a lanky man with a head of untidy grizzled curls and a face that was deeply tanned after a three-month stay in the islands. He wore a garish aloha shirt and rumpled chinos, and he was dead tired after an all-night session of work on his memoirs, so close to finishing this volume that he couldn’t bear to break off and go to bed.

Now only the final page remained.

He picked up the input microphone of the transcriber again, cleared his throat, and began to record:

Rogi studied the transcriber’s display. Not bad. Not a bad windup at all! He yawned again.

His ten-kilo Maine Coon cat Marcel LaPlume IX stalked into the room and uttered a faint, high-pitched miaow. Rogi acknowledged the animal’s telepathic greeting with a weary nod. “Eh bien, mon brave chaton. All done with this chunk of family history. Only the worst part left to tell. One more book. Shall we stay here on Kauai and do it, or go back to New Hampshire?”

Marcel levitated onto the desk and sat beside the transcriber, regarding his master with enormous gray-green eyes. He said:
Hot here. Go home
.

Rogi chuckled. Hale Pohakumano was actually situated high enough to be spared the worst of the tropical heat and humidity. But the cat’s shaggy gray-black pelt and big furry feet had been designed by nature for snowy northern climes, and even the joys of chasing geckos and picking fights with jungle cocks had finally paled for him.

Home
, Marcel said again, fixing Rogi with an owl-like coercive stare.

“Batège, maybe you’re right.” The bookseller picked up the silver correction stylo, tapped the display, and dictated a final word, changing “the planet Caledonia” on the last page to “Callie.” Then he hit the
FILE
and
PRINT
pads of the transcriber. “Yep, I guess it’s time to get on back to Hanover—make sure the bookshop’s okay, enjoy the last of the autumn leaves. And put my goddam stupid wishful thinking in the ash can where it belongs. There’s no reason to stay here. I’ve got to stop acting like a sentimental sap.”

Marcel inclined his head in silent agreement.

“She’s just not going to show up. Haunani and Tony must have let her know I was staying in her house. If she’d wanted to see me, she had plenty of chances to drop in, casual-like.”

Rogi looked out the window again, letting his inefficient seeker-sense sift through the human auras glimmering far downslope. The residents and holidaymakers in Kekaha village were mostly still asleep, their minds unguarded so that even a metapsychic searcher as clumsy as he was could sort through their identities quickly.

None of those minds belonged to Elaine Donovan, the woman he had loved and lost 139 years ago.

The farsensory search was a futile gesture, bien sûr, and he didn’t bother to check out any of the other towns. Elaine was
probably nowhere near the Hawaiian Islands—perhaps not even on the planet Earth.

Borrowing her house while he wrote the penultimate volume of his memoirs had been a bummer of an idea after all, even though the Family Ghost had colluded in it and mysteriously made all the arrangements. Rogi really had thought it wouldn’t matter, sleeping in Elaine’s bed, cooking in her kitchen, eating off the tableware she’d used, mooching around the garden of tropical flowers she had planted.

But it
had
mattered.

Rogi had seen her image on the Tri-D and in durofilm newsprint rather often in recent years, for she was a distinguished patron of the arts, both human and exotic. The rejuvenation techniques of the Galactic Milieu had preserved her beauty. She retained the same silvery eyes, strawberry-blonde hair, and striking features that had left him thunderstruck at their first meeting in 1974.

He had no idea whether or not she still wore Bal à Versailles perfume.

Long ago, his pigheaded pride had made marriage impossible and they had gone their separate ways. He had loved other women since their parting but none of them were her equal: Elaine Donovan, the grandmother of Teresa Kendall and the great-grandmother of Marc Remillard and his mutant younger brother Jack.

The Hawaiian couple who served as caretakers for her house told Rogi that Elaine hadn’t visited the place for over three years. But that wasn’t unusual, they said. She was a busy woman. One day she’d return to Hale Pohakumano …

The transcriber machine gave a soft bleep and produced a neat stack of infinitely recyclable plass pages. Like most people, Rogi still called the stuff paper. He riffled through the printout, skimming over Dorothea Macdonald’s early life, the challenges she had overcome, her great triumph, her eventual recognition of a very unlikely soul-mate.

“Gotta go into that a tad more thoroughly,” he said to himself. “C’est que’q’chose—what a bizarre pair of saints they were! Little Diamond Mask and Jack the Bodiless.” He thought about them, smiling as his eyes roved over the final page.

But his reverie evaporated as he reached the last line. He was suddenly wide awake with something horrid stirring deep in his gut.

“No, goddammit! I can’t get away with a happy ending. I’m
supposed to be telling the whole truth about our family.” He grabbed the mike, barked out a concluding sentence, then reprinted the page and read what he had produced.

Pain tightened Rogi’s face. He slammed the durofilm sheet down on the desk, mouthed an obscenity in Canuckois dialect, and sat with his head lowered for a moment before looking up toward the ceiling. “And you say you didn’t have
any
idea who Fury was, mon fantôme?”

Marcel the cat flinched, skinning his ears back, but he held his ground. Rogi wasn’t talking to him and he was used to his master’s eccentric soliloquies.

“You really didn’t know the monster’s identity?” the old man bellowed furiously at the empty air. “Well, why the hell not? You Lylmik are supposed to be the almighty Overlords of the Galactic Milieu, aren’t you? If you didn’t know, it’s because you deliberately chose not to!”

There was silence, except for the dawn chorus of the birds.

Muttering under his breath, Rogi pulled a key ring from his pants pocket and lurched to his feet. A gleaming fob resembling a small ball of red glass enclosed in a metal cage caught the light from the desk lamp as he shook the bunch of old-fashioned keys provocatively.

“Talk to me, Ghost! Answer the questions. If you want me to finish up these memoirs, you better get your invisible ass down to Earth and start explaining why you didn’t prevent
all
that bad shit! Not just the Fury thing, but the Mental Man fiasco and the war as well. Why did you let it happen? God knows you meddled and manipulated us enough earlier in the game.”

The Family Ghost remained silent.

Rogi crumpled back into the chair and pressed his brow with the knuckles of his tightened fists. The cat jumped lightly into his lap and butted his head against his master’s chest.