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

(pronounced, appropriately enough, as “rogue he”) by those who find my Christian name impossibly ethnic. It is of French origin, and the Remillards are a sizable family who originally were colonists in Quebec and later migrated to the northeastern United States, where there was a large but unobtrusive Franco-American population.
    I have for most of my life been a bookseller in the college town of Hanover, New Hampshire. I have a small antiquarian bookshop, The Eloquent Page, where rare old twentieth-century fantasy and science fiction books printed on carefully conserved paper are offered to connoisseurs at atrocious prices. Although I belong to a family of acknowledged mental giants, my own intellectual and metapsychic functions are meager. This has not prevented me from being caught up in the chequered careers of my more illustrious relatives. On the contrary, I have played at times a rather significant role in the family’s machinations—something that Milieu historians have seen fit to ignore—and I have witnessed from my worm’s-eye view the rise and fall of many a Galactic worthy and villain, including two saints and one notorious individual whose misdeeds were so appalling that he was known as the Angel of the Abyss.
    I have never married, but I have loved unwisely several times. I have faced imminent death on quite a few occasions and survived through improbable happenstance. I have killed three persons in cold blood, even though I am themost easygoing and peaceable of men, and one of them was a person I loved deeply.
    My fraternal twin brother, Donatien, and I were born in the year 1945, in the New England mill town of Berlin, New Hampshire. Our young father had already been killed during World War II, and our mother died giving birth to us, so we orphans were raised by our kindly aunt and uncle, who had six children of their own.
    But no members of the Remillard clan except my brother and I had the “immortality” genes, whose existence was not confirmed until after the Intervention, nor did they possess the genes for higher mindpowers. (It was many years before my twin brother and I discovered that we were not unique in our metapsychic operancy.) How we two responded to our more frightening metafunctions is a story that I have already related at some length. In brief, I learned to live with such powers as telepathy, psychokinesis, and metacoercion, while Don was ultimately destroyed by them, tragically killed when he was only forty-four.
    I was rendered sterile by a childhood illness. Don had ten offspring, and all of them inherited the genes for high metafunction and self-rejuvenation; but only the two oldest children were able to utilize their extraordinary mindpowers. Circumstances made Don’s oldest child, Denis, become a foster son to me; and it was he who founded with his operant wife Lucille Cartier the so-called Remillard Dynasty, which eventually included many of the most powerful minds the human race has ever known. Don’s second son, Victor, was not as intellectually brilliant as his older brother; but his metapsychic mindpowers were probably even more formidable, and he used them ruthlessly for his own self-aggrandizement until he was finally struck down, immediately prior to the Great Intervention, either by me or by the mysterious being I had learned to call the Family Ghost.
    From time to time, especially when I am drunk and morose and seized with that melancholy feeling of inescapable doom that francophones call malheur, I have been tempted to believe that the Family Ghost is nothing more than a construct of my own imagination. But if that is true, then by default
I
am responsible not only for the Great Intervention but for the Metapsychic Rebellion as well, and ultimately for the even more momentous events that came afterward, bringing the long story full cycle.
    But that would be too farfetched a practical joke, even for le bon dieu, who is so full of them.
    So let me begin this