Jack the Bodiless (Galactic Milieu Trilogy) by Julian May Read Free Book Online Page A

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 clearlygrateful 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.
    In Marie’s opinion, Marc’s premonitions and uneasiness were nothing more than mental indigestion. His giant brain was doubtless suffering overload from all the weird cerebroenergetic experiments he had inflicted upon himself, and he should slow down and smell the flowers before his synapses snapped.
    Marc told Marie thanks for nothing.
    Next he tried to bespeak his Great-granduncle Rogi, who lived above his bookstore only a block and a half away from the family home. Rogi’s puny mentality did not respond to Marc’s farspoken hails, and that probably meant that the old man was in one of his downslide phases and stinko again. However, there was only a small chance that Uncle Rogi would know the truth about Teresa anyway. He had always been leery of Marc’s parents and the other Galactic celebrities of the Remillard clan, even as he was surprisingly congenial toward Paul and Teresa’s aloof eldest son, Marc …
    In the end, the boy decided that there was no way to resolve the dilemma but to go home and check things out personally, and at all possible speed.
    It took three days for the CSS Funakoshi Maru to travel from Okanagon to Earth at the highest displacement factor endurable by masterclass humans. Marc Remillard scarcely felt the pain of the three deep-catenary hyperspatial translations at all. Enmeshed in his premonition, he had also neglected to note that the cost of