Jack the Bodiless

by Julian May

  Paul sighed and helped himself to iced lemonade. He had conveyed the Directorate ruling to the others almost instantaneously in baldly stated telepathy, in the manner that operants often used to deliver the worst of news.

  Lucille said, “What a shame.” Paul sat down beside her, at some distance from Teresa.

  “Have you told Uncle Rogi?” Aurelie asked.

  “I farspoke him right after the vote. But I felt I owed it to Teresa to come here.”

  “Thank you,” Teresa said in a neutral tone.

  “I agree that forcing the decision onto the entire Concilium would have been a bad move,” Denis said. “Davy MacGregor is bound to come through for us with executive clemency.”

  “Do you really think so?” Cheri asked anxiously.

  “He and I are very old friends.” Denis’s face was serene. He was staring out to sea. “All the political shenanigans are over and done with now. Paul’s made his grand high-principled gesture—”

  “Dammit, Papa!” Paul cried.

  But Denis sailed on. “—and Anne’s made hers, and the Milieu loyalists have had their day in the media limelight and so have the advocates of human reproductive freedom. Now it all comes down to the simple matter of whether two harmless, well-meaning people should be severely punished for giving life to a supremely intelligent baby.”

  “Paul—do you think it’s a foregone conclusion that the Dirigent will let them off?” Cheri asked.

  “Yes.” The First Magnate kept his eyes lowered. There was a silence.

  Then Teresa said abruptly, “I’ve been asked to sing Turandot at the Met opening. Kumiko Minotani canceled out. I’m going to accept.”

  “Super!” Cheri exclaimed.

  “My God,” Paul groaned. “Is that all you can think of?”

  Lucille was solicitous of her daughter-in-law. “Do you think you’re really up to it, dear?”

  “It’s more of a lyric-dramatic than a coloratura role, and not exceptionally strenuous—except for having to up the decibels in the finale. Of course, I’ve been away for a long time. But there’s nothing whatsoever the matter with me physically anymore. If anything, being exiled at Ape Lake did me good. I’ve been practicing like mad, and my voice is coming along nicely, and by the end of the month I ought to be ready.”

  “How marvelous!” Aurelie said. “We’ll all come down to New York to cheer you on opening night.”

  “I hope so.” Teresa’s eyes were on Paul, but he continued to stare at the porch floor. Cheri tactfully changed the subject, and they chatted in a desultory fashion for another half hour or so. Then Paul left them, saying he wanted to go swimming while the sun was still up.

  When he was gone, Teresa said, “He never asked about Jack.”

  “He has too many other things on his mind,” Denis said. “The Directorate turning down your application for pardon will mean another media circus.”

  “I’m sure Paul’s been keeping a close eye on the baby’s progress,” Aurelie said comfortingly, “just as we all have. Little Jack’s always in our prayers.”

  “And he looks just wonderful,” Cheri added. “I didn’t want to say anything while the baby was here—but how’s the therapy going?”

  Lucille said, “Colette is very encouraged. The three lethals on Chromosome 11 are expunged, and it looks as though seven or eight of the other defective enzyme genes are surrendering to the inserts.”

  “And his body still shows no bad effects from the active lethals he still carries,” said Teresa. “It’s his mind fending them off. I know it.”

  Denis nodded. “It could very well be. Jack is one very extraordinary human being. Marty Dalembert told me that if his brain continues to mature at its present rate, it’ll be fully developed by the time Jack is four or five. Of course, that’s consonant with the rapid prenatal development.”

  “He doesn’t have the immortality complex,” Lucille said, her voice low. “Colette is at a loss to explain it, since it seems to be a genetic dominant.”

  “Mutation,” Denis suggested. “A pity—but the baby has other anomalously programmed DNA as well.”

  Teresa only laughed. She got to her feet and headed for the interior door. “It doesn’t make one bit of difference! The regen-tank has made the whole human race as immortal as we want to be.” She flipped her unbound dark hair gaily. “I think I’ll go swimming, too!” And she was gone.

  “That dear, brave woman,” Cheri marveled. “I don’t know how she does it. If only …”

  She left the thought unsaid, but all their eyes strayed to the beach path, where Paul Remillard was striding along toward the sea with a towel flung over one shoulder, not looking back.

  Marc and Jack spent some time discussing a thrown Frisbee, comparing its peculiar flight path to the more easily analyzed trajectory of a volleyball that some of the cousins were tossing around. Then, when the joys of simple physics palled, Jack wanted to know the life cycles of the American lobster and blue crab, which he had studied with his deep-sight as they steamed inside the cooking pit. Marc said he didn’t have the faintest idea how the crustaceans lived, and he was equally ignorant of the natural history of the potato and the much-hybridized maize cooking along with them.

  “All I know,” the older boy said, “is that they all taste fantastic, especially if you slather them with butter and a little bit of salt.”

  Jack said: I would like to try them.

  “Tough titties for you, sprout. You need a full set of teeth for that, and you’ve only got four.”

  The baby said: In my judgment the mealy substance of the potato would be perfectly compatible with my limited dentition. Especially with butter.

  Marc laughed. “We’ll give it a try if Mama okays it.”

  Jack’s mind fell silent. He was ruminating over something, but Marc hadn’t a hope of eavesdropping. The baby was a better screener than he ever hoped to be, zipped up tighter than a Lylmik. The two of them were about half a klom down the beach from the house, resting at the foot of a miniature sand cliff topped with marram grass and sand-bur and scrawny shrubs. The infant was propped upright on his papoose board so he could watch the marine scene, and Marc lay flat on his back, idly studying the small cumulus clouds overhead and seeing if he could influence their changing shapes with his creativity.

  Then: Marco?

  “H’mm?”

  Please explain why Cousin Adrienne’s physiological response to your kiss differs so drastically from my response to Mama’s kiss.

  Marc floundered up in a cloud of sand. “What?! Oh, you damned little Peeping Tom! You were spying on us!”

  Jack uttered a surprised whimper. Marc was on his knees, shaking his index finger in the infant’s face. “Don’t you ever do that again, you hear me? It’s rotten. It’s an invasion of privacy. It’s something operants don’t do unless they’re perverted voyeuristic dipshits!”

  Oh … Like not watching Grandpère and Grandmère in bed when we stay at their cottage?

  “Yes.”

  I had not realized that kissing could sometimes be classified as a sexual activity.

  “Well, it can, sometimes. So watch it.”

  I will. I’m sorry I made you angry. I want to be a civilized person.

  “Yeah, yeah,” Marc muttered. He stood up and stared stonily out to sea. There were a handful of powerboats puttering around, and a beautiful schooner he’d never seen before was entering Rye Harbor.

  The baby said: I was puzzled you see at the explosive discharge of neural energies that occurred in the body of Cousin Adrienne when—

  “Will you belt up? I don’t want to discuss it!”

  She died you know.

  Marc turned slowly, then knelt beside his tiny brother. “She what?”

  Died. Cousin Adrienne. I wondered if the seven subsequent discharges of energy from her body just prior to her life’s end might have had a connection with the lesser paroxysm following your kiss.

  “Oh, Jesus. Oh, Jesus …” Marc had leap
t to his feet again and began desperately scanning the ocean for Addie’s aura. “I can’t find her! She’s gone!… What do you mean, she’s dead? Are you sure? When did it happen? Did she drown? It wasn’t the damned shark—”

  No. People have been talking about sharks [image] that eat people all summer long but there are no sharks doing that. I would have been glad to clarify the situation if anyone had asked me. It was not a shark doing the killing but a Hydra [peculiar fuzzy image]. It absorbed the vital energies drained from Cousin Adrienne about eight minutes ago. While you watched the clouds.

  “What the hell do you mean?” Marc whirled back to the baby. A terrible hollow nausea clawed at his guts. “Jack, did you really see Adrienne with your ultrasenses when—when she died?”

  Not exactly.

  “Can you farsee her body now?” he cried, frantic with dread.

  It is macerated except for the bones and teeth. They are sinking toward the sea bottom and the bits of flesh will soon all be consumed by fishes and other marine animals.

  “Oh, God, no. No! Not Addie. Not poor old Addie—”

  I’m sorry too Marco. She was a domineering individual but she was kind to me. She put grape jelly on my pacifier this morning. But there was really nothing I could do to stop the Hydra from eating her—

  Whattheflaminghell is a Hydra?

  I don’t know how to classify it nor can I obtain a clear image. It’s 5in 1 and another very strange mind called Fury sustains it and controls it and loves it. I’m not sure but I think you would call Hydra and Fury evil. Hydra ate the energies of six other operants besides Adrienne. As it feeds it produces sequential lesions of radially symmetrical form on the body of the victim [images].

  Marc snatched up the cradleboard. He began to run. He ran faster than he had ever run in his life, mind-screaming on his father’s intimate mode:

  Papa! PapacomeoutofthewatercoMEOUTOFTHEWATER COMEOUTCOMEOUT …

  Paul Remillard surfaced, shook his wet hair out of his eyes, and envisioned his two sons back on the shore. The infant was calm and the adolescent wildly agitated. Both had impervious mind-shields in place.

  Torn between annoyance and concern, Paul headed back to shore with powerful, steady strokes.

  31

  FROM THE MEMOIRS OF ROGATIEN REMILLARD

  THE TRAGIC DISAPPEARANCE OF ADRIENNE REMILLARD WAS officially attributed to a fifth fatal shark attack, the last of the summer. Not even her mother, Cheri, knew the truth until years later, nor did Teresa, nor any of the other dynastic wives, nor the gaggle of young cousins. Saying nothing of his suspicions to the Human Magistratum, Paul resolved that he would conduct his own investigation into the crimes of the monster called Hydra. He felt with sick certainty that it was somehow intimately connected to the Remillard family and that it posed a mortal threat not only to them but to the entire Human Polity under the conditions of the probation.

  Marc and baby Jack were willy-nilly part of the new conspiracy. Only Marc had been able to get young Jack to agree to a voluntary scan of his memories. The child flatly refused to open to his father. He trusted only Marc to rummage around in his brain, and it was Marc who transmitted to the shocked Paul the damning mental depiction of the monster called Hydra, and showed the seven lifeforce-draining chakras inflicted by it that Jack had perceived for the merest instant before Adrienne’s body was quietly disintegrated and consigned to the depths.

  At this point Paul took Denis into his confidence, because of his father’s special knowledge of Victor. The two of them then asked Marc to determine if the baby had any other concrete data pertaining to the entity called Hydra. Marc showed them the puzzling fivefold image that was Jack’s representation of the murderous thing—an image that seemed to correspond to no sapient lifeform in the known Galaxy. No creature had a fivefold mind. But Paul was only too aware of the enigmatic thought that Margaret Strayhorn had projected to Davy MacGregor as she died. She had said: Five. And now it seemed undeniable that Margaret, like Brett McAllister and poor Adrienne, and doubtless the four alleged victims of nonexistent sharks, had all been victims of Hydra.

  Hydra, the thing that killed as Victor had killed but was not Victor.

  Hydra, that was somehow quintuple—perhaps a metaconcert of five minds, perhaps a single perverted mind that had somehow split into five distinct personalities.

  Paul and Denis managed to impress upon Jack the necessity of keeping his dangerous knowledge to himself. They also warned him as discreetly as they could to be on guard himself and to immediately notify them or Marc if he should ever perceive the least trace of Hydra again. The two adults enjoined Marc to secrecy, too, citing the potential danger to himself, to Jack, to the other members of the family, and even to the human race, should the exotics of the Concilium get wind of the new Hydra killings. Marc promised to keep mum.

  But as soon as he returned to Hanover, he came rushing to my bookshop to tell me everything.

  It was my first inkling of the activities of the Hydra, for the exact nature of Brett McAllister’s killing had never been made public, nor had the grave suspicions of the Magistratum and the family about the “suicide” of Margaret Strayhorn. I sat appalled as Marc gave me a recap of everything Paul had told him about the two earlier deaths, plus his own account of the Labor Day tragedy and its probable relation to the four operant deaths that had been attributed to sharks.

  “What a crock of shit,” I groaned, when the boy finally seemed to have finished. “And the only genuine witness to poor Adrienne’s death is a precocious eight-month-old baby! No wonder Paul and Denis want to keep the thing under wraps. Can you imagine Ti-Jean being examined by forensic redactors?”

  “They wouldn’t have a chance of probing him,” Marc averred. “The kid’s mind is invulnerable. He wouldn’t even let me really get into him. All he did was rerun the memory, and I transmitted it on to Papa and Grandpère—slightly edited.”

  “Oh?” My suspicions were immediately aroused.

  The boy was sitting on a stool in the messy little back room of the shop, scratching my cat Marcel behind the ears. His face was a mask of unremitting gloom. “There was something Jack said out there on the beach that really bothered me. I—I couldn’t bring myself to tell Papa about it, or Grandpère either … just in case.”

  “Just in case of what, for God’s sake? What are you talking about? If you won’t open your mind far enough to clarify your damned thoughts, then explain!”

  “It was bad enough finding out about this Hydra. But it’s not the only monster out there. Jack said Hydra was ‘sustained and controlled and loved’—his exact thoughts!—by still another mind. I looked at the faint image of this second thing, which was all Jack could perceive, and it wasn’t the same kind of entity as Hydra. Hydra wasn’t human. But the other thing was—and what’s more, it was vaguely familiar to me.”

  “Nom de dieu! Was the second thing Victor?”

  “I wondered about that, too. And so I replayed my own childhood memories from that last Good Friday vigil twelve years ago to see whether I’d stored any data at all on Uncle Vic. I found no trace of any mentality that I could positively identify as his … but there was a faint recollection of someone very frightening. My infantile self-redaction had done its best to erase the memory because it had really traumatized my little mind. But I was able to catch this mnemonic glimmer. I’d been scared by a human person way back then, and it was nobody that I knew at the time. But I’d stake my life that the scary person who tried to make mental contact with me when Uncle Vic died and the entity who sustains the Hydra are the same.”

  “And you have no notion of this—this controller’s identity?”

  “None at all. But Jack called it Fury.”

  I whispered, “Oh, Christ!”

  I tottered up out of my chair, ripped open the filing cabinet drawer, grabbed the bottle of Wild Turkey I had stashed inside, and downed three great gulps of the whiskey right before the eyes of the scandalized boy. And then I flopped back int
o my seat with a crash that sent Marcel leaping a meter straight up into the air. I sat there with my eyes bugging out from terror and clammy sweat breaking out all over me as my own twelve-year-old memories suddenly came rushing to the fore, escaping from the limbo I’d banished them to.

  Fury.

  … I’d refused to go into Denis’s metaconcert with the others. I’d lurked somewhere in the mental lattices outside. And I’d seen it.

  Who are you? I asked.

  And it said: I am Fury.

  Where did you come from? I asked.

  I am newborn. Inevitably.

  What do you want? I asked.

  And it said: All of you.

  Marc said, very calmly, “It’s one of them. One of the family members who were there at Uncle Vic’s deathbed. As he died, he somehow … I don’t know what he did. Infected? Merged? Coerced? Transferred his perverted ambition—”

  “Such a thing isn’t possible!” I cried.

  But Marc was lost in his own thoughts, speaking aloud. “And that’s why my own unconscious made me hold back from telling Papa about Fury. Fury could be any of them!… No, wait, not the wives, and certainly not poor Uncle Brett. Fury has to be a Remillard. He could even be Papa himself—maybe a disjunctive part of his personality that he’s not aware of.”

  “Then who the fuck is Hydra?” I croaked. “Some other member of the family? Five of them?”

  Marc frowned but only shook his head.

  I took another slug of whiskey to quell the shudders. It didn’t work. But the old eau-de-vie must have given a momentary boost to my frazzled cerebral synapses, because a brilliant thought popped into my head.

  “Adrien’s out of it!”

  Marc stared at me in perplexity.

  “Your Uncle Adrien. He was here on Earth when Margaret Strayhorn died on Orb, ergo he’s not Fury or Hydra! He’s the one member of the Dynasty who stayed behind. All the others were in Concilium Orb at the same time Margaret was … And your Aunt Anne is safe, too! When Margaret was attacked on Halloween, Anne had already gone with you to Orb, in advance of the rest of the family.”