Free Jack the Bodiless (Galactic Milieu Trilogy) by Julian May

fast losing its childish contour and taking on the distinctive Remillard aquilinity that made Marc’s father’s face so striking. But the boy’s eyes weren’t blue like Paul’s; they were gray, with a startling luminosity, set deeply in shadowed sockets and topped by oddly shaped brows that were thickest at the temple ends, giving them a resemblance to dark wings. On the rare occasions when Marc neglected to maintain his “social” mental screening, those eyes could flash with a power that was almost heart-stopping.
    Rogi, whose own operant mindpowers were unexceptional, was the oldest surviving member of the family. He had experienced the metapsychic usage and abusage of every one of the Remillard stalwarts, and he had no doubt that Marc was the most highly endowed of the lot. He also suspected that the boy might be the most marginally human. For that very reason, Rogi had taken special pains to reach out to him—not always with success. From infancy, Marc had contrived to hide behind a barrier of nearly perfect control and self-containment. More unfortunately, therewas something about the boy’s mind-set that reminded the old man of his late nemesis, Victor Remillard, the brother of Marc’s grandfather Denis. Like Victor, Marc was emotionally cold and prideful, determined to do things his own way while letting the rest of the world go hang. On the other hand, the boy’s arrogance seemed not to be malicious, as Victor’s had been, but rather the almost inevitable consequent of having a skull crammed with more metafaculties than the human soul could safely support.
    Marc had badly needed an adult friend. His father Paul, a fiery politician busy about many things, was undeniably proud of his son’s brilliance and his preeminent metapsychic powers; but Paul Remillard seemed to have given up years before trying to establish an intimate rapport with his remote eldest child. Marc’s mother Teresa, distracted in his early childhood by her operatic career and her artistic temperament and later traumatized by personal tragedy, loved Marc with the same vague affection she bestowed upon her other three children. But she, like her husband, had failed in her halfhearted attempts to penetrate the boy’s personal shell. Rogi had never quite managed to break through that wall of mental armor plate, either; but he wasn’t about to stop trying …
    They went into the garage, and Marc put Rogi to work gathering equipment while the boy himself installed the ancient canoe rack atop the old Volvo groundcar. There was no verbal conversation, and Rogi was patient as he tossed tent, cooking gear, tarpaulins, and nearly all the rest of the camping equipment he owned into the car’s trunk and backseat. Marc finished with the rack and revealed how agitated he really was by using his PK to loft the canoe into place, psychokinesis being considered a déclassé metafunction among most operants of stature.
    Finally, while the two of them clamped the canoe down, Marc came out with an edited version of the emergency in formally cadenced mental speech:
    My seminar on Okanagon ended early. I thought I’d surprise Mama and didn’t teleview or farspeak her—just grabbed the first flight to Earth and shuttled from Ka Lei to Anticosti, then drove my bike home. When I got into Hanover I didn’t see a soul I knew. I think the whole town is on vacation break. I figured nobody would be at our place except Mama, since Papa’s not due back from Concorduntil the weekend, and the three pipsqueaks are still at the beach at Grandpère’s place. I sent my mind on ahead to the house and up to Mama’s music studio. I discovered that Grandmère Lucille was there. I listened to what they said—
    !! You’re too damned good at eavesdropping my lad it’ll get you in a peck of trouble one day.
    [Impatience!] Never mind that!… How much do you know about the genetic heritage of the Remillard family?
    [Confusion.] You mean the immortality thing?
    Not the