"May, Julian - Galactic Milieu 3 - Magnificat" - читать интересную книгу автора (May Julian)

Come in Papa, said Marc.
Paul entered the suite occupied by the groom and the best man and found four Gilded Age dandies lounging about drinking champagne amidst the scattered remains of a lavish lunch. Uncle Rogi was still sitting at the table, clearly feeling no pain. Paul's sons Marc and Luc and Luc's spouse Kenneth Macdonald stood near the window, checking out the scene below. All of them were dressed in the same elegant gray formal wear as the First Magnate.
"I've come for my boutonniere," Paul said. "Where's the bashful bridegroom?"
Rogi hauled himself up. Swaying a little, he declaimed: "Waiting for his dear papa to arrive and impart a few last words of paternal wisdom before he marches down the aisle ... Ti-Jean! Tire ton cul de lр!"
The inner bedroom door opened. The four gallants tried to keep straight faces as a disembodied brain sailed slowly out, suspended in mid-air. It was wearing a pearl-gray top hat.
"Good God!" said Paul.
Marc kept his composure but the others fell about laughing. Uncle Rogi thrust a glass of champagne into the First Magnate's hand and helped himself to more.
"I couldn't resist it," said Jack the Bodiless, wreathed in mental smiles. "Can you believe that Uncle Rogi tried to talk me into going down to the ceremony like this?"
"Wrong!" Rogi declared in ringing tones. "I said Ti-Jean should go on his honeymoon like that." He went into a fresh fit of laughter, delivering salacious toasts to the floating brain in broken Canuckois.
"Uncle Rogi," Luc Remillard observed redundantly, "is as sozzled as a boiled owl."
"You lie, mon cher fagot," the old bookseller said sweetly. "I am as drunk as a skunk in a trunk!"
Paul grimaced in distaste. "Couldn't you boys have kept an eye on him?"
Luc shrugged. "It's a wedding, Papa. Rogi has a right to celebrate."
"I guess somebody'd better redact him sober," Ken Macdonald said. "Can't allow a swacked ring-bearer, can we? My sister the exalted Planetary Dirigent would have our balls for bidet-swabbers." He turned to Luc. "What say we two give it a try, luv?"
"Nobody touches my mind!" Rogi yelled. He dodged nimbly away from both men, simultaneously tossing down the last of his bubbly, and headed for the outer door.
Marc Remillard casually reached out and touched his fleeing great-granduncle's shoulder. Rogi froze in mid-skitter, paralyzed by coercion. Without effort, Marc frog-marched the skinny old man toward the bathroom. "We won't have to redact him. Black coffee and a modicum of simple emetic therapy will do the trick."
"Don't mess up his clothes," Jack said.
Luc and Ken cackled heartlessly and followed along to watch the fun.
The levitating brain doffed its topper and said: "Will you help me get ready, Papa?"
Paul slammed his strongest mental shield into place. "If you like." Uneasily, he followed the thing that was his youngest son into the bedroom and shut the door behind them, muffling the pitiful offstage noises.
"I have a confession to make," Jack said.
"Oh?" Paul pretended to inspect the groom's clothing, which was laid out neatly on the antique colonial bed.
"I'm responsible for Uncle Rogi's overimbibing. I coerced the poor old guy into guzzling too much champagne in order to distract him. You see, he'd got it into his head that it was his solemn duty to give me my prenuptial sex instruction. He's been trying to get me alone ever since he arrived."
Paul barely suppressed a snort.
"You know how close we've always been, Papa. I didn't want to deliberately hurt Rogi's feelings, and I confess that I do need certain information. But not the kind of thing he had in mind. I hoped... to get the data from you."
"I see." The First Magnate smiled tightly at the hovering mass of cerebral tissue. "Well, I'll certainly do the best I can--under the circumstances."
Jack's psychokinesis opened the cherrywood wardrobe door and a considerable quantity of thick, grayish-pink liquid matter flowed out like a colossal glistening amoeba. Paul stood motionless and his eyes widened as the amorphous blob moved across the fine oriental rug without leaving a trace and gathered into a large spheroid directly beneath the suspended brain.
"Didn't you know, Papa?' Jack's pseudovoice was good-humored in the face of his father's evident repugnance. "I usually keep the artificial plasm now when I disincarnate. It saves a lot of time if I don't have to regenerate a new body from scratch--to say nothing of averting wear and tear on my surroundings from molecular scavenging."
Paul hadn't known. If truth be told, he had not lived with his mutant son or otherwise shared the ordinary day-to-day domestic intimacies with him for over twenty years. When Jon Remillard was five years old, the widowed First Magnate had given him and his older siblings into the care of their grandparents, Denis and Lucille. Paul's work, which took him to every human-colonized planet in the Galactic Milieu, to Concilium Orb, and to hundreds of exotic worlds as well, had made any kind of normal family life impossible for him. In later years, when the First Magnate's heavy responsibilities finally eased, he discovered that his meager parental instincts were almost completely atrophied. His children matured into adulthood without him.
Paul had convinced himself that he loved his offspring dearly (except, of course, for the prodigal Madeleine, who was hiding God knew where, plotting God knew what). His relations with his four other children were amiable but rather formal; but that could hardly be helped, since they saw one another so seldom.
The oldest, Marc, was the most estranged of the lot, a quirky, self-centered genius who neglected his duties as a Magnate of the Concilium in favor of dubious researches into the cerebroenergetic enhancement of the human brain. Marie, the second-born, a quiet and circumspect woman who often seemed embarrassed by the antics of her more colorful brothers, was a Professor of History at Dartmouth College who wrote popular gothic novels under a pseudonym. She had recently moved into the old farm out on Trescott Road where Denis and Lucille had lived before returning to their original home on South Street. Luc Remillard had completely overcome the physical disabilities of his youth and now enjoyed robust good health. He and his life-partner Ken Macdonald were consulting metapsychologists at the research institute headed by Paul's older sister Catherine.
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 grand-masterly 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 rouщ 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 Grandpшre Denis have experienced intellectual love first, then achieved mutual sexual passion later."