Jack the Bodiless (Galactic Milieu Trilogy) Read Free Page A

programmed by his own body proceeds.
    The child’s despairing mother blames her own hubris for his suffering. His father, Paul, countering his own pain with clinical detachment, finds the disincarnation bleakly fascinating. Marc sees his first glimpse of Mental Man. Denis Remillard and Colette Roy and the other scientists of the Human Polity call the child a prochronistic mutant, an anomaly born out of proper time, too early in the scheme of biological evolution, a throw-forward in the pattern of orderly human development. Four of the exotic races of the Galactic Milieu, pitying, call the little boy pathetic and doomed. The enigmatic Lylmik refuse to discuss his case at all, except for flatly prohibiting his euthanasia.
    In the dream, my mind is shrieking: No no Ti-Jean no God no how can you let his body die while his brain lives the brain the wonderful potent superbrain God why why—
    Then I see the brain naked.
    I plead: Let it die too let the poor thing die stop the machines the genetic engineering attempts the futile meddling let him go in peace let him go!
    A monster that does not know its self sees the brain as the Great Enemy, and in a cataract of flame the machines are stopped.
    I hear the laughter of the dead fiend again as Victor savors the hideous irony of the situation. For the brain that is Jack the Bodiless does
not
die, but lives. Impossibly, it lives, impervious, sustaining itself in some arcane psychoredactive fashion, nourished by the atmosphere and by photons, enduring and adapting and learning and growing in wisdom and grace and dieu de dieu I am so afraid of it paralyzed with dread even as it tries to reassure me and in my dream I call its name:
    Ti-Jean! Jack!
    This horrifying mutant, this
thing
, is still my dear little great-grandnephew Jon Remillard, a brilliant and vibrant little human person only three years old, trapped in 1.7 kilograms of unsupported humanoid encephalic protoplasm.
    None of Jack’s eventual triumph penetrates my nightmare. I know only my own fear and revulsion and a demonic whisper:
Who will be the next to disincarnate? Perhaps you, Rogi?…
    Then Marc is at my side again, much older. This time his dark armor is the glistening wet body-monitoring coverall of a cerebroenergetic enhancer, the perilous mind-boosting device outlawed by the Galactic Milieu. Marc studies the bodiless thing that is his mutant brother with open admiration. And a paradoxical envy.
    I see a warning reflected from eyeless depths, and Marc sees it, too.
    Jack’s mind tells us: No. Human is better. For you, Marc. For all of you.
    Marc smiles and shakes his head, denying. Mental Man is the inevitable, the culmination of all rational being—and there is no need to wait upon evolution’s laggard pace for His coming. He can be summoned—
    Suddenly I see three persons suspended in interstellar space: a faceless woman clad in a suit of diamonds, a blazing plasma that enfolds the first Mental Man, and a black armored shape leading an interstellar armada in opposition to the other two. The Metapsychic Rebellion of humanity against the Galactic Milieu has begun.
    At my dream’s climax, a blue-and-white planet explodes,haloed by a mass death-shout. And in that terrible moment the Galactic Milieu, the benevolent confederation that saved the human race from its own folly and gave us the stars as a playground, itself begins to die …
    The dream always ends at this point, before the final resolution, and I return to consciousness freezing and paralyzed, with a half-strangled scream caught in my throat.
    Peace! T’en fais pas, Rogi! Calm yourself and relax. It all happened long ago, and now at last in the writing of this personal chronicle you have a way of exorcising the nightmare once and for all.
    Perhaps you already know me from the introductory volume of these Memoirs. If you do not, let me introduce myself briefly. My name is Rogatien Remillard, and I am sometimes called Roger but more often simply Uncle Rogi