Jack the Bodiless (Galactic Milieu Trilogy) by Julian May Page B

Street before starting to walk his bike toward the house, bespeaking his mother on the way.
    MARC : Mama. I’ve come.
TERESA:
Marc?
It’s you? But … why, dear? What about the little holiday you were supposed to take with your friends after finishing the undergrad seminar on Okanagon? The trip to the Singing Jungle! I know you were looking forward to a break before beginning at Dartmouth this fall—
MARC : I’ve come to help you.
TERESA : I told you there was nothing wrong. Nothing that need concern you. [Detachment.]
MARC : I know better. I felt your need. Your danger. There was an irresistible compulsion. You coerced me and I came.
TERESA : Oh no Marc. You know my mind you of all people. I’m weak in the coercive faculty unable to project a compulsion into the next room, much less five hundred light-years to Okanagon.
MARC : Unconsciously, you could do it … under the circumstances. It had to be you. It certainly wasn’t him.
TERESA : Oh Jesus you can’t mean … 
Marc do you know?
MARC : Not all of it but enough. I can read your subliminal thoughts now, Mama. Your barrier is down, and you’re thinking so loudly that I can hardly avoid it! Does—does he really speak to you?
TERESA : Lucille insists it’s impossible. He’s only five months alive and his brain hasn’t developed far enough even an eight-month fetus is barely able to conceptualize much less achieve the bilateral cerebration necessary for even the most primitive form of self-awareness or communication it’s not anything I can understand. I only
know
it know HE IS THE ONE not you not the others my poor wonderful babies forgive me forgive me I had to do it he must live mutant or not HE IS THE ONE Marc can you help us how can you
possibly
help you’re only thirteen Lucille and Severin will kill him to save me but I won’t let it happen I’ll run away I’ll do away with both of us before—
MARC: Teresa be still!
TERESA : … Yes.
MARC : I’m here. In the house. Coming upstairs. I know whatto do how to save both of you your unconscious mind was right to call me. Trust me .
TERESA : Yes.
    Teresa did not look up as Marc entered. She stared at her hands, silent on the electronic keyboard. “You’re only a boy. A boy with an amazing mind, but hardly powerful enough to counter the law enforcement authorities of the Galactic Milieu. What I’ve done is a serious crime, and if you help me you’ll be an accessory and liable to the same penalty as mine.”
    “As Grandma and Uncle Sevvy will be, too, if they do the abortion.”
    “The danger of their being found out is infinitesimal, whereas you would almost certainly be caught if you tried to help me escape.”
    “I won’t be caught. I’ve already worked it out. Look!” [Image.]
    “I see,” Teresa whispered. “I see.”
    She reached out to him mentally, to this oldest child, who had distanced himself from his parents in the earliest years of life, keeping himself to himself, apparently rejecting love as a needless distraction as he cultivated the awesome metafaculties that might someday make him the leading human operant of the new Galactic Age. Teresa seemed genuinely astonished that it should be Marc who would try to save her … save both of them. He had shown no particular affection for his other siblings and seemed to have only an Olympian regard for his mother and father. Even now he instinctively froze at her attempted mental caress, as though he knew that love’s interface would breach his precious self-sufficiency and render him vulnerable.
    As it had.
    “Marc, are you sure?” she asked, taking his hand. It was warm, unlike the ramparts guarding his soul’s core.
    “Yes,” he said.
    Teresa kissed the young hand, then smiled as she guided it to her belly, which had hardly begun to swell. Marc’s muscles tensed, and she feared he would pull away; but then—
    “There,” she said reassuringly, and the boy relaxed. “You must listen very carefully. His—his