Julian May - Jack the bodiless

Jack the Bodiless

Book One

The Galactic Milieu Trilogy

Julian May

CONTENTS

I will praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made!

My soul knows how marvelous are your works. You were aware when my very bones were formed,

Growing secretly inside my mother's body

As a plant's root grows beneath the earth. You knew me before I was born.

The days of my life were all written in your book

Before they had ever begun.

Whereas in the familiar closed systems of physics the final state is determined by the initial conditions, in open systems, as far as they attain a steady state, this state can be reached from different initial conditions and in different ways.

Ludwig Von Bertalanffy

God writes straight with crooked lines.

SNOW GROTTO PLANETARY PARK

KANNERNARKTOK TERRITORY

SECTOR 14: STAR 14-661-329

[SIKRINERK] PLANET 6 [DENALI]

GALACTIC YEAR: LA PRIME 1-400-644

[17 MAY 2113]

It was a dark and stormy night, as so many nights were on Denali, where topography and climate conspired to produce some of the Galaxy's worst weather. Worst from a human point of view, of course, unless that human was addicted to Nordic skiing...

The mind of the supervising Lylmik entity named Atoning Unifex smiled as Its material essence hovered above the blizzard-lashed park. Denali was a rugged planet, wintery throughout most of its year, the veritable haunt of the Great White Cold celebrated in a certain Earth song that was very familiar to the First Supervisor. On most of Denali's continents, glaciers and permanent snowfields spread wide amidst a fantastic landscape of dazzling peaks, black precipices, and crags that thrust up like the broken tusks of primordial monsters. Denali had no sapient indigenous life-form. No rational creatures had as yet evolved on it when it was assigned to the Human Polity by the world evaluators of the Galactic Milieu. Its most famous honorary native son, Saint Jack the Bodiless, was conceived before the first Earth settlers arrived.

The hardy people who originally colonized Denali in the mid-2000s had hailed from Alaska and other parts of the United States having severe winters. They were quickly joined by Canadians, Siberians, Samoyeds, Lapps, and a host of others who craved a life of challenge that could be lived in a setting of wild natural beauty. The World-Mind those human colonists engendered might have been expected to be as dark and moody as Denali's weather; but for some reason the very opposite mental climate prevailed, and Denali was an invigorating place with an aether that fairly glowed with friendliness and verve. The original rationale for establishing the colony had been the planet's deposits of valuable gallium ore, and this was still a major economic resource. But Denali had also become a popular vacation resort, first appealing mainly to Human Polity winter-sports fans (including the famous Remillard clan of New Hampshire) and later attracting hordes of like-minded Poltroyans as well.

Atoning Unifex let memories crowd to the fore of Its consciousness, recollections that had been repressed for aeons. This small planet had been loved by both of them...

She, of course, had been born here, living and working in the colony's capital city of Iditarod until a fateful tragedy had taken her to Earth, where the two of them had so improbably met. On the very brink of their great adventure she had spoken casually of her own experiences as a native of Denali, and they had laughed together over the unexpected mutual reminiscences. The shared laughter had come to an end long ago, but the memories remained in a deep level of the Lylmik's ancient mind, guarded and cherished and eventually becoming almost too precious to contemplate. The pain that had once darkened these memories had long since faded, and their scrutiny at this particular time was now actually appropriate.

And so Atoning Unifex lingered there in the middle of the storm, Its mind in a state that a human being would have recognized as part reverie and part prayer, thinking of a person who had once been a woman, who had twice loved deeply, and who had mothered Unity in countless nonhuman minds in a distant Galaxy.

Finally the Lylmik uttered the mental equivalent of a deep sigh. The epilogue of the comedy was nearly complete, but One waited upon the inimitable Uncle Rogi, who kicked at the goad as usual, dawdling while cosmic destiny hung suspended.

Unifex focused Its mind narrowly on the subsurface snow cavern that sheltered Rogatien Remillard from the raging snowstorm. It saw a hunched, lanky man sitting beside a tiny tent, taking off his ski boots. Like other members of his famous family, Uncle Rogi possessed the genes for self-rejuvenation. His face was that of a raddled fifty-year-old, belying his actual age of 167 Earth years. His gaunt cheeks were frost-reddened, and his nose and eyes watered a little when he forgot to mop them with the red bandanna handkerchief he carried up the cuff of his old L. L. Bean Penobscot parka. He had tossed aside his knitted toque, and sweaty silver curls straggled over his forehead and ears. He was whistling as he peeled off the archaic twentieth-century ski garb and stripped faded red long johns from a pale and sinewy body. Then he lowered himself with exquisite care into a geothermal pool in the center of the small snow cave. The telepathic emanations from his ever obstinate and uncoadunate mind were happy ones.

Uncle Rogi said to himself: If the storm lasts, I'll forget about the final leg of my trek and call the park's shuttlebug and go wallow for a week in the lodge's apres-ski entertainments casino cabaret string quartets Lucullan food good company perhaps a new science fiction novel savored in the Wintergarden while the bar waitrons keep the drinks coming and I check out the snowbunny crop!

The old man settled deeper into the steaming water, smiling.

Poor Uncle Rogi! Unifex had other plans for him. But Rogi had had a good enough holiday, ski-touring more than 200 kilometers throughout the beautiful park during an unusual three-week spell of calm bright days. Now the weather pattern had changed, and whether Rogi was willing to admit it or not, he was adequately refreshed and recreated after his first stint of journalistic labors. It was time for both of them to get back to work.

Unifex descended toward the planetary surface. The negligible physical substance of the Lylmik mind-receptacle deflected only the tiniest of the hard-driven snowflakes and easily penetrated the three-meter-thick crust of ice and snow above the grotto where Rogi had elected to camp. The place was typical of the subnivean hollows that gave the Denali planetary park its name: an irregular cave as big as a good-sized room, melted from the permanent icefield by the heat of a small geothermal spring. The walls and ceiling were ice, but the rocky floor was cushioned with a dense lichenoid carpet of tough gray and lavender saprophytes. Close to the shallow burbling pool grew larger and more fragile exotic lifeforms, sessile animals that resembled scarlet onions with peculiar flowers that gave off a pungent sulfurous scent if they were bruised. As the mildly carnivorous blossoms of the onion creatures bent toward Rogi's exposed shoulders, he flicked hot water at them by way of discouragement.

The walls of the grotto were cupped and dripping near the ground and glittering with crystals of hoarfrost in the cold upper reaches. There thin tendrils of vapor coiled golden in the light of Rogi's antiquated electric lantern before disappearing into a natural flue. Touring skis were propped against one wall, and a backpack lay near the little tent. On the far side of the chamber was the closed entry door, fashioned of harmonious translucent plass, that led to the enclosed surface-access tunnel and modern latrine. (Park visitors were strictly forbidden to dig down into the snow grottoes directly, or to camp in undesignated "virgin" caves except in emergency situations.)