Magnificat (Galactic Milieu Trilogy) (16 page)

And then there was Jack the Bodiless …

The soupy ball of organic matter slowly elongated and rose, becoming a misty, turbulent column. The upper part engulfed the floating brain and the vapor swirled eerily, generating a faint, not unpleasant odor that Paul’s perfect memorecall recognized as the scent of a very young baby. Within moments the reincarnation intensified to the point that the ectoplasm assumed substantial human form. Beginning at the feet and continuing up the legs to the trunk and arms, it solidified into an accurate representation of living human flesh. All that was lacking were the scars, blemishes, and other irregularities of natural bodies. The head and face appeared last of all, and Jon Remillard finally stood before his father like a normal man. He was of medium height, having dark wavy hair, blue eyes with a disturbing luminosity, and the high-bridged nose and square jaw characteristic of most of his family. He struck a statuesque pose and smiled shyly.

“This body design is something completely different from the
usual run. Usually I only do a detailed job on my head and arms because clothing hides the rest. How do I look?”

Paul kept his voice level. “Fine, son.”

“Are the sex organs proportional? I modeled them on Marc’s, but he’s twenty-three cents taller than I am and outweighs me by more than twenty kilos.”

“They’re appropriate for your build,” Paul said heartily. “They’re perfect.
You’re
perfect. You look like the goddam Apollo Belvedere without the fig leaf.”

Jack began to dress. “Funny thing about me and Marc. I suppose he’s my closest male friend, besides being my older brother. Intellectually, we’re ideal colleagues. When we work together our minds sometimes slip into metaconcert with no effort at all, like a pair of musicians playing an intricate duet in precise tempo. But … he tried to talk me out of becoming a sexual entity. He thinks it’s a waste of time and vital energies. He called me a fool for wanting to experience that part of human nature.”

“Sometimes,” Paul said briskly, “Marc is a paramount grandmasterly ass. Just you wait: One of these days he’ll fall head over heels and make a fucking idiot of himself.”

Jack laughed as he slipped into his shirt and installed the cuff links and studs. “I sincerely hope so. But his celibate mindset left me with a nice personal problem. Up until now, the bodies I’ve fashioned for myself have been little more than hollow shells activated by my creativity and PK. Their rudimentary internal organs merely imitated natural function to enhance the overall realistic aspect. I never bothered with things such as extracephalic endocrine glands at all.”

“I didn’t know.” Paul sat down on the edge of the bed.

Jack began to put on his stockings and garters. “This particular body took me quite a while to design. It’s still far from being a faithful replica of the real thing, but it does have a fairly complete set of sensory equipment, nerves, and blood vessels. The male organs are as perfectly constructed as I could manage to make them and the gonads produce the appropriate hormones. I got most of the function data I needed from reference materials—including Denis’s book on operant sexuality. But I still have to fine-tune the imaginative programs for male erotic stimuli response. And for that I need help.”

“Uh—would you say that your brain structures and sensory network are typically human?”

“Reasonably so.”

“I asked because normal human sex is largely mental. The data
you seem to require are concerned with integrating the ancient limbic system of your brain—the part responsible for the sex drive and emotion—with the more highly evolved neocortex that thinks and exercises imagination. My redactive metability’s not in the same class as Marc’s or your Uncle Severin’s, but I’m willing to give it a shot.”

“I’m afraid I haven’t made my needs clear, Papa. Actually, the integration process you mentioned is already well established in me. So are the hormonal patterns, the mechanisms for erection and ejaculation, and the pleasure pathways. But I’m … still lacking in libidinous spontaneity. What I need help with are the more subtle aspects of eroticism in both the male and female. My new body reacts to physical stimulation, but not to imaginative images or fantasies. I’m still incompletely human.”

Paul frowned to cover his apprehension. Surely this creature didn’t expect him to—

“I’d like my first act of intercourse with my wife to be as transcendent as possible for both of us. As Uncle Rogi’s was, with Elaine Donovan. When he told me about their experience, I knew I’d somehow have to find a way to emulate it with my own lover.”

Paul’s silvery brows shot up. “Rogi? Transcendent? Well, I’ll be damned! The old roué never compared notes with me.”

“Rogi also told me that he fell in love at first sight,” Jack added quietly. “And he’s never stopped loving Elaine, even though he’s tried to put her out of his mind. My own experience with Diamond was nearly instantaneous, too—except that the initial attraction was cerebral in nature, an immediate apprehension of spiritual affinity. Rogi says that his falling in love with Elaine Donovan was irrational. That seems to be a common phenomenon. But I understand that other natural human beings such as Grandpère Denis have experienced intellectual love first, then achieved mutual sexual passion later.”

“It can work that way. I wouldn’t know from personal experience.”

“Would it be tasteless or impertinent of me to ask how you and Mama fell in love?”

Paul stared straight ahead. “As a young man I was rather inhibited sexually. Much like Marc—although I had an occasional unsatisfying adolescent affair, while he seems to have kept himself pure for science.”

Jack grinned.

“I first saw Teresa on the stage at the Metropolitan Opera in New York in 2036. I was twenty-two, a wet-behind-the-ears
politician with an excessive metaquotient and a fine reputation for running rings around the Simbiari Proctors. She was only nineteen, and that night she made her debut singing the title role in
Lucia di Lammermoor
. At the end of the opera the audience got to its feet and screamed and stomped and applauded for nearly fifteen minutes. A new superstar was born—but she was more than that to me. When I first heard that extraordinary voice of hers I was … overcome.”

“Do you mean libidinously stimulated?”

Paul winced. “Let’s just say that it took all my self-redaction to keep my poor body under control. It was my first experience with an aphrodisiac, and the magic was all in Teresa’s voice. Denis claimed it had something to do with her incredible creativity. I don’t know about that. I did know that I’d die if I couldn’t have her.”

“And so you were married.”

“Five months later, right there on the stage at the Met. The next four years were the happiest of my life. We had Marc, Marie, and Madeleine, three magnificent operant children. Then Luc was born with terrible physical deformities, and there were other babies with lethal genetic traits that were stillborn or aborted. It was a terrible time for Teresa. She lost her voice and her entire personality changed. Tests showed that your mother’s germ plasm had mutated—probably sometime just before the birth of our third normal child in 2040.”

“But Madeleine
wasn’t
normal.”

“There was nothing wrong with her genes,” Paul said tersely.

Jack now stared at his pair of antique lace-up shoes and spats in momentary bafflement.

“Better put the pants on first,” Paul suggested. “The spats go over the shoes and button up the sides, with the strap underneath.”

Neither of them spoke for some time. Then:

“Papa … why did you and Mama stop loving each other? Was it because she tricked you into conceiving me, and made you a party to a crime against the Proctorship Repro Statutes?”

“Not really. I forgave her that. We had drifted apart long before because … she no longer aroused me. Our falling in love was irrational and so was the falling out. Perhaps what we had together wasn’t real love at all—at least, not for me. Perhaps what I felt for her was only sexual magnetism. A kind of enchantment. I never tried to analyze it deliberately at the time. One doesn’t do that …”

“But you’ve thought about it since.”

“Oh, yes. At this late date I’ve come to believe that true love has
to be more clear-sighted and unselfish than I ever was with your mother. If I’d really loved her I would have been more accepting when she changed. I would have tried to evolve myself. Instead, when Teresa’s erotic appeal faded there seemed to be nothing I could do to save the marriage. I found myself attracted to other women. Never to a singer, though! There were all kinds of new aphrodisiacs: a lovely face, perfect breasts, an alluring body, eyes with a provocative light in them, tantalizing movements, the promise of sexual excitement that certain women can’t help projecting … My God, Jack! There must be a thousand reasons why a man is attracted to one woman and not another. Each of my women has been appealing in a different way.”

“Your women … but you didn’t love any of them.”

“I enjoyed having sex with them.”

“And your enjoyment wasn’t diminished by the knowledge that you were betraying your wife and the religious values you’d been brought up in?”

Paul exploded. “Goddammit, Jack! Don’t you judge me!”

“Papa, I’m not. I’m only trying to understand. But it seems so illogical.”

The First Magnate’s anger drained away, leaving only distaste and a terrible pity for this innocent, cerebral being, this prochronistic Adam just a few steps below the sexless Lylmik on evolution’s ladder, still determined to sample the forbidden fruit.

And who, Paul asked himself, am I supposed to represent in this weird little biblical scenario?

He stared at the floor. “Sex is often illogical, just as your brother Marc maintains. It’s part of our animal nature, but it’s also evolved into more than that. We don’t just do it in order to reproduce. We do it for solace and the relief of nervous tension and fun and even for the hell of it. Sometimes sex is only mindless fucking. But it can also be sacramental.” He paused. “At least that’s what they say.”

“I’d like sex to be that way for Diamond and me. Perhaps not every time, because that would make it too solemn. But numinosity should definitely be a part of it. How does the old marriage prayer put it? ‘With my body I thee worship …’ ”

The First Magnate laughed without humor. He still had not met his son’s eyes. “The wedding vows also say that the bride and groom are supposed to forsake all others until death parts them. But that’s an ideal some people can never five up to. I couldn’t, after I stopped loving your mother. The basis for erotic attraction is obscure and capricious and it can vary over the years. I know
I’ve hurt a lot of my sexual partners by rejecting them—particularly Teresa. But I didn’t act callously, in cold blood. I’m truly sorry that your mother’s heart was broken. But I couldn’t stay with her when our love ended, and I don’t consider myself culpable in the matter of her death.”

“I don’t either, Papa.”

“You know my reputation as a galaxy-class womanizer. I’m not proud of it. Objectively I realize that promiscuity and an unwillingness to commit to a stable sexual union are psychological flaws. But it’s the way I am. I need sex and I’ll have it and I’ll do my best not to be deliberately cruel to my partners. And that’s that.”

Jack finished fastening his spats. “I think I know why most metapsychic operants are monogamous,” he said. “Opening one’s mind to a lover at the start of a relationship either strengthens the mutual attraction or destroys it rather quickly when incompatibilities become obvious.”

“In theory,” Paul said, “that’s true. But a marriage or a love affair can never be a linear system. They’re chaotic harmonies, like all of biological nature. Both lovers have to adapt continually to each other’s changing needs to keep the truth and beauty alive. But that’s not easy. Especially when there’s important work to do … and you must agree that my work
is
important.”

Jack said nothing. He had moved in front of the mirror to attack the tricky knotting of his silk cravat. Psychokinetic manipulation would have done the job in a trice, but like all well-bred operants, Jack felt that the casual use of that faculty while he was embodied would be déclassé.

Paul lifted his head and spoke calmly. “Can you understand me when I say that the sexual part of my life is completely irrelevant to what’s most meaningful to me—to my real passion?”

Jack nodded slowly. “Your true love is the Galactic Milieu, isn’t it. Not any human being. Not even yourself.”

“I’ve dedicated my life to the Milieu, and the consensus seems to be that I’ve been a good First Magnate. I’m damned proud of what I’ve accomplished. But …”

Jack waited.

Finally, his father said in a low voice, “But sometimes I wonder if I’m not the biggest fool in the galaxy. You see, Jack, I’ve never known the kind of sexual transcendence Uncle Rogi talked to you about. I’m the last person you should take as your role model and adviser. Find someone who knows what real love is.”

“I have.” Jack’s voice was gentle. “But I want to have a genuine
sexual relationship in my love life, too. You could make it possible.”

“How?” Paul asked warily.

“I need your memories of sexual arousal. With them I’d have a truly human male paradigm. A foundation to build my own sex life on.”

The First Magnate was stunned to speechlessness. Share the most intimate aspects of his sexual fantasies with this grotesque mutant?

But he’s human, Paul told himself. Perhaps more human than I, because he has the capacity to love a woman without reservation.

This creature.

This son of his.

Jack eyed Paul obliquely as he put on his waistcoat of silver brocade. “I know it’s asking a great deal. The sexual part of a parent’s life is an intensely private thing. Leviticus even says, ‘Thou shalt not uncover the nakedness of thy father or mother.’ ”

Paul’s mind cried out: It’s not Old Testament morality or inhibition or squeamishness that makes me deny you God help me I begat you by accident without love I would have prevented your birth I was revolted to the depths of my being at what you became I failed you even when you conquered the mutation rejecting you avoiding you letting Denis and Lucille and Rogi and Marc raise you I know I owe you reparation but—