Jack the Bodiless by Julian May

Author:Julian May [May, Julian]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Speculative Fiction
ISBN: 0345362470
Publisher: Del Rey
Published: 1991-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

21

FROM THE MEMOIRS OF ROGATIEN REMILLARD

DENIS DID NOTHING.

Or rather, he did nothing to harm either me or Teresa.

Once his seekersense had zeroed in on me, he could use EE—excorporeal excursion—to view me fully in an out-of-body trip and talk to me mentally in that precise, unhurried way of his without fear of exotic eavesdropping. He calmed my panic, reassured me that he had no intention of calling in the Milieu gendarmes, told me what had happened to Marc, and even advised me to get a move on butchering my moose, since a much larger winter storm was heading my way from out in the Pacific Ocean and would probably hit Ape Lake within forty-eight hours.

“Well, then,” said I, feeling cocky as all hell once it had sunk into my mind that I was not about to be handed over to the law, “perhaps you’d be so kind as to consult your library and tell me the best way to cut this monster up into steaks and chops tout de suite. I’ll be damned if I can remember what the books said.”

Yes, I can do that easily.

“If there’s another blizzard coming, maybe I just better whack off a haunch or something and get on home and leave the rest of the animal here to pick up later.”

Denis said: That might not be such a good idea. Wait a minute while I look up the procedure.

I sat there on my heels while the Nobel Laureate and Emeritus Professor of Metapsychology, who was at that moment in his office in Hanover, called up the reference on his computer. I had no doubt that he would find what he was looking for in Dartmouth’s extensive database. After a few minutes, he said:

You can’t just leave the moose carcass. Either scavengers will get it, or it will freeze into a rock-hard mass that you could never cut up later. No … you’ll have to bleed and skin the animal now. Remove the entrails and salvage the edible organs—heart, liver, and kidneys, at least. Then cut up the rest of the meat as quickly as possible into smallish portions and cache most of them for your later trips.

“Listen, it would take me two days just to build a cache!”

You don’t have to build anything. Just hang the meat up in trees. How cold is it there?

“We forgot a thermometer.”

All right, I’m farsensing your ambient atmosphere and comparing its temperature with that in my office … About minus sixteen Celsius. That should freeze your meat quickly enough to retain its quality if you cut the pieces smaller than two or three kilos. You won’t need the entire moose carcass, of course. Only about a hundred kilos of meat and fat, if you and Teresa and the baby intend to return to civilization immediately after the birth … But wait: You really can’t come out of hiding until the pardon is pushed through. Humanity will no longer be wards of the Simbiari Proctorship after the inauguration, but their arm of the Magistratum still has legal jurisdiction until the Human Polity reconvenes.

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