Jack the Bodiless Read online

  “Oh, Professor Remillard! I’ve been wanting to talk to you, but Mr. Philip and Dr. Severin said you were too ill—”

  “I’m feeling better.” He calmed her redactively. “Draw the drapes, will you, please? I’ll just check the machine.”

  He stood at his younger brother’s side for a few moments, looking at the pale, tranquil face of the man he was certain had damned himself. Then he went to the console of monitoring and life-support equipment set up at the foot of the big canopied bed.

  The nurse persisted. “Doctor Cournoyer was here yesterday. He’d like to discuss Mr. Victor’s deteriorating condition with you. The urgent need for therapy if the anemia is to be arrested.”

  Denis did not reply. He finished his inspection of the equipment, drew a chair up to the bedside, and sat down. His extraordinary bright blue eyes now lifted and caught those of Mrs. Gilbert, holding her hypnotized as she stood with the drapery cord in one hand.

  “When my brother’s coma was pronounced irreversible many years ago and the authorities allowed me to take responsibility for his care, they assumed I would do the usual thing—order the cessation of intravenous hydration and gastrostogavage so that he would soon die. For reasons that seemed valid to me, I did not follow this course of action. Instead, Victor has been given food and water and ordinary nursing care for more than twenty-six years. Up until two months ago, his body maintained itself in perfectly normal condition through self-redaction. And his mind, although incapable of any external manifestation, apparently continued to function as well. Victor is blind, deaf, and mute, unable to respond to any sensory stimulus, incapable of voluntary movement, incapable of telepathic communication, coercion, or any other external metapsychic manifestation … But he still thinks. A mentality such as his would not have continued to live unless he wanted to. Do you understand, Mrs. Gilbert?”

  “I—I think so.”

  Denis inclined his head, so that the terrible eyes were shuttered and he suddenly seemed to be only a very weary, very frail young man. “If Victor is declining now, it’s also because he wants to, and we will undertake no special measures to arrest the deterioration. Only carry on as usual. Is that clear?”

  “I—yes.” The nurse slowly closed the draperies, then touched a switch that lit two shaded brass sconces on either side of the bed. The only other illumination in the room came from the machine readouts, the small lamp at the nursing station, and a single candle in a ruby-glass cup, mounted beneath a wall crucifix opposite the bed.

  “Please ask my family to come in now.”

  “Yes, Professor.” She went out, closing the door softly behind her.

  Denis lifted the coverlet and took out Victor’s arms, folding them across his breast. The comatose man was dressed in gold silk pajamas, and none of the life-supportive equipment was visible. His handsome face had lost its usual ruddiness to the anemia but seemed otherwise normal, with the hint of a smile lingering about the bluish, motionless lips. Victor’s crisply curled black hair had no more strands of silver in it now than it had had twenty-six years before, when he was struck down by … something on top of Mount Washington at the start of the Great Intervention.

  Victor Remillard had killed nearly a hundred people without compunction, including his father and several of his own siblings. He had stolen billions of dollars and violated a bookful of criminal, financial, and commercial regulatory laws. He had conspired with the maniacal Kieran O’Connor to seize control of Earth’s satellite laser-defense system. And he had very nearly managed to murder the cream of operant humanity, the three thousand delegates of the Last Metapsychic Congress, on the very day of Intervention.

  Victor had also had the opportunity to ruminate over his sins ever since, thanks to his brother Denis.

  “Vic,” Denis whispered. “Vic, have you found the truth? Have you finally discovered where you went wrong?”

  Mind wide open and completely receptive, Denis listened.

  Rogi was at the tail end of the procession as they trooped up to Vic’s bedroom, the seven metapsychic stalwarts of the Remillard Dynasty, their brave spouses, and him—scared shitless. At least baby Marc had been spared. The nurse had taken charge of him when Teresa declined to put him into the care of poor fey Yvonne, who now stood downstairs in the hall with Louis and Leon, the three of them watching with haunted expressions as the others climbed the stairs.

  The bedroom furnishings, of dark and massive oak, were exactly as Rogi remembered them from twenty-four years earlier. The life-support gadgetry was more compact and sophisticated now, and there were new rugs and draperies and hangings about the bed. But the blackened old crucifix with its red vigil light was the one poor lost Sunny, Don’s wife, had nailed up as a newlywed in the cottage on School Street; and the face of the man lying in the bed still struck Rogi with a terror so profound that he found himself reeling and had to clutch at the back of a chair to keep from fleeing the room.

  The participants in the ritual were ranging themselves about the bed in couples. On the left side, nearest Victor’s head, stood Philip Remillard, portly and comfortably homely, oldest of the seven siblings and the shrewd CEO of Remco Industries. With each passing year he reminded Rogi more and more of good old Onc’ Louie, the hardworking mill foreman who had raised him. Philip’s elegant wife, Aurelie Dalembert, stood calmly at his side, fingering a crystal rosary. She and her late sister Jeanne, who had married the second son of Denis and Lucille, had made careers of being wives to men destined for greatness and mothers of their children. Maurice Remillard, as fair and mild-looking as Denis but more sturdily built, had recently taken an extended leave of absence from the Department of Sociology at Columbia University to join his three younger siblings, Anne, Adrien, and Paul, as an administrator in the Human Polity of the Galactic Milieu. His second wife, Dr. Cecilia Ashe, wearing country tweeds in contrast to the dark suits and dresses of the other women, was looking down at the comatose man with clinical interest. Next to her stood Severin Remillard, who had been Cecilia’s colleague in the Department of Neurology at Dartmouth Medical School and her unsuccessful wooer. He was a tall blond man with a dashing air and an iconoclastic view of the Galactic Milieu, which Rogi tended to sympathize with. Severin’s third wife, Maeve O’Neill, formerly a successful Irish horse-breeder, was a ravishing redhead, now pale as milk and with her large eyes alight with apprehension, flinching away from her husband’s proffered arm.

  On the right side of the bed’s foot, standing hand in hand with their minds entwined in mutual redactive commiseration, were Catherine Remillard and her husband Brett Doyle McAllister, colleagues in a Child Latency Project at the Polity capital, where both were also Intendancy bureaucrats. Next to them were Adrien Remillard and the wealthy pop sculptor Cheri Losier-Drake. Like Maeve, Cheri looked unhappy and anxious. Her husband, for all his metapsychic talents, was often considered by family detractors to be a rough-hewn, slightly unfinished prototype of the youngest and most famous member of the dynasty, Paul. Paul Remillard was not only tall, built like an athlete, and endowed with princely good looks, but he also possessed what was perhaps the most powerful set of metafaculties in the entire human race. He had married the acclaimed coloratura soprano Teresa Kendall. Besides Marc, their eldest, they had an infant daughter named Marie. The unborn child Teresa carried, also a girl, was to be called Madeleine.

  The only unmarried sibling, Intendant Associate Anne Remillard, came up to Rogi with a sardonic twinkle in her ice-blue eyes and coerced him to stand at her side near Catherine and Brett, on the side of the room nearest the door. Denis himself stood next to them, at the very foot of the bed.

  As always, the Remillards faced the crucifix and recited La Oraison Dominicale in the French language of their ancestors. Aurelie, Cecilia, and Teresa, who were also Catholics, joined in the prayer. Rogi was too petrified to utter a sound.

  Then Denis spoke softly. “Thank you all for coming. Especially you, Cecilia, because I realize this family custom must seem bizarre to
you this first time … and you, Uncle Rogi, for reasons that I know you would rather I didn’t discuss.”

  Someone coughed, and there was a general shuffling of feet.

  “For Cecilia’s sake,” Denis continued, “let me explain what we are about to do. I intend to link all of our minds in a metaconcert and pray in a very special way for my brother Victor. For over twenty-six years he has lain in this room, in a deep coma. We know from the monitoring machine that he thinks. Orderly thought patterns that are almost certainly rational are generated by his brain. But he is totally cut off from the world of sensation, receiving no input at all as far as we have been able to ascertain. Victor is alone with his thoughts, alone with his memories, alone with recollections of the terrible crimes he committed. It has always been my personal prayer—my hope—that Victor would ultimately repent of what he had done, and when this was accomplished he would either recover or pass peacefully into death.”

  Denis paused and turned his gaze upon Rogi, who was caught by those coercive blue eyes like a jacklighted deer, too frozen even to feel fear. And then Denis looked away.

  “Recently, Victor’s body has suffered a severe decline in hematopoiesis, the manufacture of blood cells. In a person with the self-rejuvenating gene complex, this signifies a very grave prognosis. My brother is dying, and this is probably our last chance to come together on his behalf. Now let us prepare our minds for the metaconcert … Cecilia, the process is a very simple one for the participants in the configuration I’ve designed. Just open your mind wide, with all barriers as low as possible, and trust me. I’ll do the linkage very slowly, one of you at a time. When the concert is complete, I’ll direct it. You need do nothing except relax. Ready?”

  Rogi closed his eyes. Immediately, a deluge of memories seemed to engulf him. He seemed to see again his twin brother Donnie, whose juvenile assaults on his mind—non-malicious in the beginning—had prompted in Rogi the spontaneous development of strong mental shielding. Only once had the two of them conjoined in a self-defensive, triumphant metaconcert. But after that, seeking to renew the experience, Donnie had instead attempted to violate Rogi’s self, make the two of them into an inseparable whole. When Rogi refused, Donnie hated him—and hated himself for the hating—until the day that he died.

  In the mnemonic flood, Rogi also saw Don’s son, baby Denis, at the baptismal font, felt the new young mind bond to him. Denis had made Rogi his adoptive father, taking the love Rogi vouchsafed to him freely after his own father had denied him—in favor of Victor. As young Denis’s mind matured and the shy child turned into one of the great minds of the world, Rogi had learned to fear him—even though the love was still there as well—and especially to fear joining mentally with him in metaconcert. Denis would never knowingly harm his beloved foster father; but he was so powerful, so different, that Rogi could not help being afraid.

  He was very much afraid now.

  Rogi’s mental screens were still up; he had defied Denis, refused conjunction at the last moment, so that the others had been forced to complete the mind-edifice without him. Rogi was dimly aware of the metaconcert hovering apart from him, engrossed in whatever esoteric activity Denis was conjuring. Elsewhere, deep within the ineffable, immense dynamic field of mental lattices that was called the aether, something without tangible form was looking at Rogi.

  Not Denis. Not Victor. Not any of the other persons who had gathered around the bed, nor anyone that Rogi knew.

  Something else watched him from deep within a great mental chasm, a thing horrible that encompassed an evil beyond anything he had ever experienced before. Rogi had known Kieran O’Connor and Victor Remillard, the two most iniquitous minds that the human race had ever spawned; but this thing was worse. And it was beckoning to him.

  Who are you? Rogi asked.

  And it said: I am Fury.

  Where did you come from? Rogi asked.

  I am newborn. Inevitably.

  What—what do you want?

  And it said: All of you.

  Rogi’s mind screamed its fear and loathing. He seemed to hear laughter—and this time, the voice was recognizably Victor’s. Rogi cried out again, pleading, begging for Denis—for anyone!—to come to his rescue. But Denis seemed to be gone, and the minds he had woven so skillfully about him were gone as well.

  I require assistance, Fury said, reaching out. And I’ll take you to start with. Silly, flawed old Rogi! But you’ll be useful.

  You can’t! You can’t!… See? I told you so!

  Now Rogi was laughing hysterically, and the horror that was Fury roared, and the negation of the mental chasm was lit by a crimson radiance that grew brighter and brighter, becoming a red sphere suspended in utter darkness.

  He is mine, another voice said. A familiar voice. You may not have Rogi. Do what you must do, but not with him.

  The red sphere hovered, seeming to become more solid, a glowing thing that Rogi thought he recognized. He took hold of it somehow, and it pulled him away, away, out of the depths, away from the mind-monster named Fury, and back into ordinary reality—

  —the bedroom. Severin and Cecilia Ashe bending over the supine figure, she seeking a wrist pulse, he lifting an eyelid to reveal a dilated, fathomless pupil. Denis on his knees, head bowed, hands touching the covered feet of the body, weeping. Paul and Adrien at the machine, where the once-green telltales now blinked red. Anne standing apart, her face frozen. Catherine, Teresa, and the other women together in an agitated group, murmuring. Philip, Maurice, and Brett staring at each other helplessly.

  Suddenly, through the closed door, Rogi heard a baby scream.

  His paralysis evaporated and he raced to the door, yanked it open. Then he halted, stunned, at the scene in the hall.

  Three bodies lay on their backs on the Oriental runner rug. Yvonne, Louis, and Leon, their faces contorted and their eyes wide open, were stone dead.

  From the doorway of the bedroom across the hall, Mrs. Gilbert, the nurse, stared down at the bodies in astonishment, while the two-year-old boy in her arms shrieked and struggled like a wild thing.

  Rogi’s hand went involuntarily to his pants pocket, to the key ring that he always carried with him, the one with a fob like a red glass marble. His strong fingers tightened about the little caged sphere.

  It’s all right, Rogi said to Marc on the intimate mode. He’s gone.

  Abruptly, the boy’s cries ceased. Flushed and tousled, breathing in noisy gulps, Marc held out his arms to the old man. Rogi took him from the nurse, cradled the small head against his chest, and hurried off downstairs.

  3

  OKANAGON/EARTH 24 AUGUST 2051

  HE HAD BEEN SUMMONED.

  Coerced. He—the uncoercible!

  It was nothing so concrete as a call on the telepathic intimate mode. It was a compulsion, an aching cryptesthetic urge having nothing at all to do with the usual workings of his powerful and orderly young mind. It was a feeling (and that, of course, made it totally suspect) that his mother, more than 540 light-years away on Earth, was in danger from some purposeful agency that would cause her irreparable harm. And only he, Marc Remillard, could save her.

  But that was counter to all logic; and he had arranged his life so as to subdue in himself the messier, nonintellectual aspects of the human psyche. When irruptions of the feeling function occasionally got the better of him, he counted it a personal defeat, and analyzed the phenomenon rigorously, and strove to bring it under control so as to lessen his susceptibility on the next go-around. But somehow, where his mother was concerned, emotional skewing tended to persist. It was odd that he should continue to love her with such unreasoning ardor in spite of her benign indifference; no amount of metacreative sorting and rechanneling on his part had been successful in transmuting the filial bond with Teresa Kendall into something safer …

  He had dealt with his father more satisfactorily. Paul could no longer hurt him or even shake his composure. Why, then, he asked himself, should a son’s relationship with the
maternal parent be so much less amenable to rationalization? It was annoying—and in the present situation, intuition hinted that it might even be dangerous.

  But intuition was often illogical, too.

  When Marc attempted to farspeak his mother, he discovered that she had her impregnable mental barrier up. And so he was forced to place a call to her from Okanagon via subspace communicator, just as though he were a nonoperant or a metapsychic infant.

  When he reached her, Teresa cheerfully denied that anything at all was wrong. She said she missed him, as she said she missed the other three children, off on their various summer jaunts. But they would all be together soon enough, and she was feeling quite well these days, and it was so unlike him to be hyperimaginative—and was he quite sure that he wasn’t coming down with some exotic bug?

  He told her that he would get a scan, and apologized stiffly for his irrational behavior and for disturbing her.

  She laughed kindly and said it was probably only puberty, which was bound to be unsettling even to a grandmaster-class young operant like himself. She told him that she loved him, and reassured him once again that everything at home on Earth was fine, and then terminated the communication.

  Marc had no way of telling whether or not his mother was lying to him again. The notion that puberty was the cause of his malaise he rejected out of hand; his hormonal secretions were normal for a boy of thirteen, and he was confident that they, like the rest of his bodily functions, were at the moment subordinate to his self-redactive metafaculty. But the maddening compulsion was not imaginary; it was undeniably coercive and focused with considerable precision upon him, and it increased in strength every hour that he attempted futile analysis of its source.

  He farspoke his sensible twelve-year-old sister Marie, who was trying to write her first novel at their grandparents’ old summer place on the Atlantic shore. Marie told him she had seen their mother last weekend, and things were as normal back at home as they ever were. Teresa was clearly grateful for her time alone. She displayed no overt symptoms of mental dysfunction. She was doing some gardening and was working with every evidence of enthusiasm to transpose an obscure folk song cycle from the archaic Poltroyan into modern human notation.