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

multifactorial self-rejuvenation trait. The lethal equivalents!
     … Aside from knowing the hell our weird family genes have put Teresa and Paul through I have only an incompetent layman’s knowledge of the matter.
    All four of us children inherit from the Remillard side of the family a dominant polygenic mutant complex: we’re smart, we have extremely high metafunctions, and our bodies age up to a certain point and then persistently rejuvenate. The traits have a reduced penetrance and exhibit variable expressivity. You know what that means?
    Quelle chierie don’t be so damned patronizing. It means some Remillards get a little some get a lot and I’m on the short end of the stick while
you’re
up to your young stuckup pif in the good stuff just like your siblings&cousins&father&uncles&aunts&GrandpereDenis—
    Exactly. Now, because of Mama’s consanguineous relationship through Annarita Latimer, her offspring have an enhanced chance of manifesting one or another of the good traits. Unfortunately, Mama has also contributed a deleterious gene complex to some of us kids. She herself doesn’t display any harmful traits, and neither do Marie and I, so it’s been assumed that Mama was subjected to a mutagenic factor at some point in her life after Marie’s birth in 2039. The deleterious mutagenes appear to be sex linked, and they have lethal expression in male offspring most of the time. Because Maddy’s female, she escaped. But she’s a carrier. Luc inherited the harmful mutation, but at least he could be pasted back together into a semblance of normality. Mama’s stillborn babies and the aborted ones inherited intractable lethal traits that defied all attempts at genetic engineering—
    Hence the revocation of your parents’ repro license.
    But should it have been revoked?
    Marc what the hell are you driving at? It’s the law.
    But is the law just?
    The Galactic Milieu thinks so. The Reproductive Statutes are intended to purge the human gene pool of—
    The Milieu is a nonhuman organization. How can it know what’s best for our race—what genes are good and bad in the long run? Study after study has shown that the human brain is not susceptible to genetic tinkering. The hereditary factors are too complex and interlinked for any eugenic manipulation. What gives those exotics the right to tamper with
physical
aspects of our human genetic heritage that may harm our mental evolution as an unintended side effect?
    That’s a question without an answer Marc. And it’s been knocking around ever since the Intervention and there’s no use at all you stewing over it. The Milieu took over the right to control reproduction as a condition of admitting humanity to the Galactic civilization and we accepted it and that’s that … How come you’ve all of a sudden got your ass in an uproar about this? Damn you boy let me see what’s really on your mind instead of beating around the bush like this!
    The Remillard family includes the most powerful metapsychic practitioners on Earth. Who’s to say in a crazy mixed-up genetic complex like ours what is an
unacceptable
heritage and what isn’t? The genetic assay of Mama’s five dead babies showed nothing about their mental potential.
    So what? Physically the poor little things were losers. The genetic engineering attempts on them failed. The stillborn ones never saw the light of day and the aborted ones would have been horribly deformed and dysfunctional and destined to die before reproducing.
    But the minds of the aborted babies might have contributed something invaluable to the Earth Mind before their disabilities killed them.
    Marc I don’t understand what you’re driving at. Do you mean to say that the brain genes of the babies should have been evaluated along with those for the rest of their bodies? Even I know that it can’t be done! Human genetic science has come a long way under Milieu guidance but it can’t assay the mind from examining brain tissues any more