Jack the Bodiless (Galactic Milieu Trilogy) Read Free

million … Ah, those self-rejuvenating Remillard genes! A real drag, immortality, eh? Not that I’m ready to knock it myself yet, you understand. Um … do you know … can you foresee when I’m …”
    Not really. Moi, je ne suis pas le bon dieu, j’t’assure! But I do intend to see to it that you survive at least long enough to finish the family chronicle.
    “Well, thanks all to hell for small favors.”
    Rogi licked the last of the apple cobbler from his spoon and drank the dregs of the coffee. Then he switched the stove to the dishwashing mode and thrust the tableware inside. A moment later, he began to pack everything away, singing the chorus of Dartmouth College’s “Winter Song” under his breath.
    At length the Remillard Family Ghost said: Are you ready, Uncle Rogi? The trip home will take only a moment. There will be none of the usual discomfort of hyperspatial translation experienced in a starship.
    “Not in my underwear, dammit!”
    The old man began to throw his clothes back on. Hemanaged his pants and shirt before he disappeared abruptly from the snow grotto, and all his gear with him.
    The lichenoid cast a faint phosphorescent glow about the newly darkened chamber. There was a rustling sound, then a medley of plops as the crablike exotic animals came rushing from their burrows to scavenge leftover bits of Earth cheese. Outside the snow grotto, the Denali blizzard wind howled.

1
FROM THE MEMOIRS OF ROGATIEN REMILLARD
     
    I STILL HAVE THE NIGHTMARE SOMETIMES . I HAD IT ON THE night that I was unceremoniously translated from the planet Denali to Earth at the truncated end of my skiing holiday and commanded to resume writing these Memoirs.
    As always, the dream played itself out in a weird, accelerating time-lapse mode. There is nothing terrifying about the scene at first. A beautiful mother holds an infant, completely wrapped in a blanket, and she looks up from the baby as a fourteen-year-old boy approaches. This older child of hers has a strangely ominous aura about him. He has come hurriedly home from his classes at Dartmouth College on a blustery day, and he wears black turbocycle leathers and carries a much-modified visored helmet tucked under his arm. His eyes are gray and his mind opaque, and his smile is tentative and quirkily one-sided as he accepts his mother’s invitation to open the blanket and see his new little brother for the first time … in the flesh.
    The black-gloved hands are trembling slightly with an emotion that the older boy despises and tries vainly to check. And then the baby lies revealed, unclothed, perfect. And the minds of Marc and Teresa mingle in joy:
    Mama he’s all right!
YesyesYES!!
Papa was wrong the genetic assay was wrong—Yes dear wrong wrong wrong little Jack’s body is normal and his mind
his mind …!
Mind?
Oh Marc dear his mind just speak to him it’s wonderful don’t be afraid to wake him …
     
    The baby’s delicate eyelids open.
    And in my dream, there are no eyes.
    I hear laughter, and I recognize the voice of Victor. But it can’t be Victor because he died twelve years before Jack was born; and for nearly twenty-seven years before that he was helpless, disembodied as Jack would be but unlike Jack deprived of all metafunction, all physical and mental contact with the world outside himself. In my dream, the devilish laughter fades in a smell of pine and a cataract of pain. Tears pour down Marc’s face for the first time in his austere young life. The eyeless infant smiles at us—
    And suddenly the
real
nightmare takes charge.
    No eyes. Only a void, a starless darkness that is somehow alive with fearsome knowledge. My dream races on, and Teresa and young Marc are gone. There is only a pathetic little child shackled to complex life-supportive equipment, and while I watch in horror, his human form begins to disintegrate.
    I try to tear my gaze away from the awful sight, but I cannot. Faster and faster, the self-destructive process