Jaguar

by Bill Ransom

  He had babbled to Max about the other side, about being the Jaguar, but it had been a fortuitous babble. Max thought he had taken him too far and broken his mind completely. That ended the debriefing, but not the threat. They believed in his domestic cattle because they could see them. They would no more believe in another universe than they believed in UFOs.

  His big breakthrough six years ago gave the Ops boys specs to a classy little jamming device. He told them he got it from Wu Li. The truth was, one of his priests had handed him his first link to an engineer of the Roam, Zachary Lee. That link had provided a pathway that ran both ways, and Zachary Lee had found it.

  The Jaguar had stumbled from a dreamway directly into the mind of the great Zachary Lee. Inventions, particularly information-gathering devices, information-gathering-jamming devices and magnetic motors had been Zachary Lee’s contribution to the Roam. His political clout meant nothing to the Jaguar. Lee’s charisma at the end proved nothing except that the Roam would not give up one of its own, not even to keep the Jaguar at bay.

  He had told Operations about his limits, but it was not in their interests to believe him. They stole his own blood and gave it back, they duplicated hormones and subhormonic compounds, they knocked him out, they kept him up but never could they get him to duplicate his sleep of the dreamways. Nor could he.

  It always just happened.

  Their job was to remain suspicious, and he respected that. When their job fell to make sure he was holding nothing back, he would tell them everything, he knew that. He had before. Not for awhile; but they did it before, and he knew they’d do it again.

  He allowed himself a flicker of amusement through his pain.

  They didn’t dare believe that a world coexisted beside their own. Amusement, again. The more he ranted about it, the less likely they were to believe it. And they would stop when he ranted because clearly he had told them everything.

  The Jaguar simply preferred to avoid them, and sleeping for months at a time had been perfect. He gave them less and less, pretending to burn out. It was not in their best interests to believe that, either.

  He prayed that they would not find out just how little pain he could stand anymore.

  I could stop it, he thought. I could sever my pain centers.

  But he couldn’t, no more than a surgeon could open his own chest and take out a lung. Self-tinkering was too dangerous to risk, and there was no one he trusted, in this world or the other, to go mucking about in his brain.

  His priests were ranch foremen to him, each in charge of a herd. They kept the Lees of the herd from seeking him out. The priesthood was both security and early warning system to the Jaguar. To get to him, the other side would have to get one of the priests. The Jaguar kept close tabs on the condition of his priests.

  A perfect, white pain slashed his cranial nerves and another snatched him in the belly for a hard twist.

  Breathe . . . ! he commanded himself.

  It eased, and the weight on his chest eased up, too. He pushed the pain away from his face by imagining it as a handkerchief, a very light handkerchief that he could keep away by blowing slowly, slowly through his pursed lips. . . .

  They didn’t yank me back!

  Chemicals brought him out faster. This time his own body did it. This time he had surprise on his side. He thought he might bear the pain that he knew was coming if The Agency didn’t know he was waking. They might not be watching, after all this time.

  All this time. . . .

  Moments? months? years? . . . since they’d juggled his blood chemistries drastically to raise him up. Chemistry allowed no wait for the rest of the pain. The waking was a full sprint down a very long straightaway of jagged glass every time they tinkered his blood. When he came out naturally he roller-coasted back to himself, back to the same white pain.

  When they woke him chemically, they received unreliable product, and they endangered his life. His life was their project, their jobs, and they dare not lose him. The unreliability of the product was not entirely his own doing, though he contributed to the disinformation whenever it suited him.

  The Jaguar homed in on the Roam because he needed information, and the chief product of the Roam was information. They traded it to the fortified cities like farmers traded potatoes. Gadget production and repair were tangent functions that employed most of the tradesmen of the Roam who were protected by the accords. Yet, in the occasional den of a city, harm did come. That’s why the Roam preferred the wild stretches outside city walls and wandered them gladly.

  The Jaguar nearly ended all that, tinkering around with that world. Now he had all he could bear to worry about this one.

  May you always wander in hunger. May you never eat to your heart’s content.

  —curse of the goddess of roads

  Every morning throughout the gray, muddy spring of her sixth year, Afriqua Lee snapped awake from a dream of the earth split wide beneath her. Each time she reached upwards for the iron grip of Old Cristina’s hand, and each morning she wept for her beautiful mother, who would never be back. She sought out her mother in the mirror, in the flare of her nose or in the sparkle of her green eyes. Her permanent teeth filling the gaps in front would duplicate her mother’s white, even smile.

  This morning, like so many mornings, she languished under the strong fingers of Old Cristina who stroked her hair to tame the pounding headaches. She always hurt so bad after the dreams. She had so many dreams.

  “Your eyes are so wild, girl, first thing in the morning.”

  Afriqua Lee smiled, and forgot to hide her mouth.

  “Yes, girl, those teeth are coming. Your two in the bottom are coming back straight and the ones on the sides are wigglety already.”

  Old Cristina, Romni Bari, always took time for Afriqua Lee.

  “I used to have nightmares, but now I don’t,” Afriqua told her.

  “You don’t? That’s good. Do you have nice dreams, now?”

  “Now I have a plane. A magic plane.”

  “What do you mean, ‘A magic plane?’“

  The strong old hands rubbed the girl’s scalp, nearly lulled the headache away.

  “Like my magic ears. I can hear things, you know.”

  “I didn’t know,” the Romni said. “What kinds of things do you hear?”

  “People talking. But my magic plane is the best. I take off when I get to sleep and I’m flying and up there’s a blinking star. A white star brighter than the rest, and it’s blinking.”

  “Do you fly around the star?”

  “No, I just point the nose of my magic plane and follow it. Well, we always fall out of the sky.”

  “That sounds scary to me. You don’t get hurt?”

  “No. I never get hurt. I follow the blinking star until it turns into a bright blue butterfly, and when my magic plane lands, it lands inside a dream. Somebody else’s dream. And I can change it if I want to, so it’s not scary. Unless I want it to be scary. . . .”

  “Why would you want it scary? To scare the person having the dream?”

  “Yeah,” she smiled. “Sometimes I do that.”

  “Girl, you’re some dreamer yourself. Magic plane.”

  This morning, like every morning, bigshots came on business from the other kumpaniyi. Afriqua Lee sat table as Old Cristina’s personal fetch. She learned the Roam’s business in the world, as well as whom to bow to. At noon, when the bigshots cleared out, the older woman and the girl shared soup and green tea on their special table.

  They sat in a glass alcove of Cristina’s home positioned for its view and for the personal privacy of the Romni Bari. During stakedown, the Romni Bari’s tent was positioned first, and all the rest related to it according to rank, familiyi, privilege.

  Their silent vehicles, their tents, interlocked at stakedown to form their own city, its walls a webwork of light-play and solar nets. At sunset, the Roam engineers threw the power to the high walls and adjusted the resolution. Anything inside the walls was now
hidden behind an electrosonic camouflage. When they caravaned to the real cities, the sides of each van lit up to advertise the wares or skills of the owner.

  Each time they went through stakedown, the vans repositioned themselves to reflect status changes over the past four months. Repositioning meant that Afriqua Lee and the other children had to learn a new way to school. She thought that life in the city must be pretty boring, if everything stayed the same all the time.

  Old Cristina made tea for Afriqua Lee, but for herself she always brewed coffee. She was a large woman with a larger laugh, who swathed herself in bright scarves and billowy skirts to match. She walked with the roll of a seaman on leave and Afriqua Lee would forever associate the smell of talc with Old Cristina. Size was a mark of status among the Roam, and Cristina was a Romni Bari of size. Under her gray hair she stood eye-to-eye with most men, taller than some. She strolled the kumpania daily, with Afriqua Lee in tow. Old Cristina laughed a lot, in spite of hard times. She laughed without her teeth, her mouth a wet, pink flower.

  Old Cristina often told stories of the cities and the Roam, and many of these stories became important when the men came to talk morning politics. The girl knew some of the men from their dreams, but she didn’t tell Old Cristina. Even before she saw the effects on them, and knew what it meant, she knew it was something like peeking in windows, something she didn’t dare tell.

  Through her own memories and dreams that she borrowed, Afriqua Lee remembered real homes in the city. In real cities, streets didn’t change and homes stayed in one place. The Roam had chosen to take their cities with them, and the accords were clear. They had done this of their own free will. She didn’t know what it meant, but it was on everybody’s lips these days.

  Afriqua Lee never understood why her relatives in the Roam called their homes “tents.” They jigsawed themselves into the greatest city in the world in a full day of jockeying and leveling. It always seemed to the girl that stakedown was over in just a switch. She had only moved twice with the Roam. The Roam’s portable communities were perfect, clean, silent. They brought trees with them, and small, potted parks with their flatbed gardens. The cities smelled horrible, but the Roam always had fresh air.

  Afriqua Lee had lived her first few years with her parents in the city. Because of their Romni blood they moved a lot, even then. The drivable homes of the Roam were much nicer than any homes that she had slept in in the city.

  The old knock-down and bolt-together houses were fun, and they took the longest to set up. A few of the younger single men slept in real tents at the fringes of the encampment and they decorated these with old-fashioned paintings and pennants. Old Cristina’s long, sleek trailer with its light-play sides was a far cry from cold, damp cotton.

  Some of the young men loaned out to a city for two years, earning credits for themselves and for the Roam. The accords provided for women, but women seldom went. Romni, man or woman, had lived on both sides of the walls. Her mother had. She, herself, had. Everything, including the tents, plugged in for camouflage against the priesthood and its scouts.

  A secure camp, like this one behind the gaje Henry’s place, meant they didn’t need to be on raider alert all the time. Those times the Roam cooked with shielded electricals and banned the ritual coals to keep the smoke down. Those times everyone whispered and nobody played ballgame in the square.

  The first night after stakedown, Afriqua Lee helped some of the older children drag in wood and branches for a high-risk bonfire in honor of Henry, the last of a gaje family who had helped and hidden them for three generations.

  The grim aftermath of the hatch remained everywhere, even in this lush valley of their northernmost reach. In the nearby woods, thousands of trees stood shining in the morning sun, stripped of bark to their bare wood. The grasses and mosses that the familia had told her about were gone, blanketed over by a powdery, gray dirt that made her cough and sneeze, but she worked hard because she liked bonfires. She had not been outside the compound since her mother died, and it felt good.

  She had not known Henry, but the shy boy who lived with him watched everything from a window high in an old barn. She could see him in the distance from her perch in the Romni’s alcove.

  She wore one of the new blouses and skirts that Old Cristina had given her. Already the gray dirt had worked into the sleeves and the hem. She learned to work the cleaners, though. Cristina told her that they worked just like the cookers, but she didn’t see how. The clothes came out clean and the food came out cooked, which seemed like magic to Afriqua Lee. And she was glad she didn’t have to wash them in the stream every day, like the old days. She liked the stakedown ritual, when the women gathered at the stream, but once every four months was plenty.

  Old Cristina bequeathed Afriqua Lee the garment of her own familia, the mark of her personal tent—a red blouse, blue shawl and black skirt, all with the iridescent quetzal trim.

  “It’s yours,” the Romni told her in the thick accent of the Roam. She thrust the reed basket of clothing into the girl’s hands. Everyone was giving her clothes since her mom died, as though she didn’t have any of her own. But something in Old Cristina’s manner told her that this was different.

  Afriqua Lee fingered the black designs stained into the sides of the basket and the bits of red rag woven in for color. She thought it would be heavier, and she lifted a knee to catch it quick. She unlatched a thonged piece of bone and slipped the lid.

  On top lay a very old, very intricate black veil woven with the history of the Roam. Beneath the veil lay the ceremonial clothing that the Romni Bari herself had worn as a girl. Some everyday clothes, saved from a tortuous childhood were packed at the bottom. Afriqua Lee liked wearing them; they made her feel taller, like Old Cristina herself. She liked the feeling of being taller, and the feeling of new teeth growing in the front.

  “That monster what started this thing—that prikaza, Jaguar . . . ,” Old Cristina pulled out her blouse, spat on her breast and snapped the elastic back, “we are onto him, yes. We have done him much harm. His stupidity killed many, it’s true, but we have done him harm.”

  “How can we harm what doesn’t exist?” Stefan asked.

  Stefan was Old Cristina’s cousin and one of her political advisors.

  “The Jaguar is a myth. It’s those priests, who say there’s a Jaguar, who ruin the accords we fought for, who do these things. . . .”

  “Yes,” Cristina swept her arm around her head, indicating the gray barrens around their encampment, “the priests would destroy the accords. But this . . . this is the doing of something more than a handful of spleef-whiffers. The Dark Ages. The plagues. . . .”

  “Henry said the government made the plagues. . . .”

  “Don’t interrup,” Cristina waved a finger at Stefan’s nose. “Don’t interrup when the elder talk. Nobody interrup the Romni Bari. Got it?”

  Stefan nodded and answered in a low voice, “Yes.”

  “Good. Yes. The plagues maybe was a government job. Lab says they are a doing. Or an undoing, by someone who is playing with some big fire. Not God.”

  Afriqua Lee’s familiya travelled the northlands every year from May to September, spending an extra month or so on the coast when hard times dictated.

  Trips up and down the coast included boat-trading and selling, manufacture of small hovercraft, electronics and magnetics devices—each under the auspices of a different familiya. Transportation, communication and repair were the way of life of the Roam, under the new accords.

  “Buy ’em, sell ’em, trade ’em. Vera’s magnometries and holographic art.”

  The sides of their many vans hawked their wares.

  The Roam stored components and electronics gear in huge refrigerator vans with air conditioning and temperature regulation—all offshoots of their meticulous cleanliness.

  “Peoples have good ideas, yes, and the accords start us out a good government. But those priests. . . .” Again, she spat. “Anyway, now somebody makes thes
e bugs. Nobody can find who. Cities think awhile maybe it’s the Roam. Now peoples be saying it’s this Jaguar. Peoples dying every day, noplace to bury in cities . . . horrible, girl, horrible.”

  Afriqua Lee had heard of the huge death vans cruising the streets. The vans were for hauling away bodies.

  “Did they want to kill everybody . . .”

  A plump finger tapped the girl’s nose and her eyes watered from the strong garlic smell.

  “There is a Jaguar,” the Romni pronounced, “I say it is his doing. He unleashes his priests on us while he brews a bigger pot of misery. I think he just likes to.”

  Afriqua Lee closed her eyes, saw something like a shadow with bright, blue eyes. She shuddered off the sudden chill, and slipped out the door to school.

  Marie de Manaceine . . . kept puppies awake for periods from

  four to six days and found to her surprise that this killed them.

  —Christopher Evans, Landscapes of the Night

  In Rafferty’s memory of that bleak, muddy autumn five years ago Old Cristina and the Roam materialized with the mist one morning, as the Roam had appeared on this spot every autumn for centuries. They mourned Uncle Hungry in their raucous, spirited way and made a place for Rafferty at their tables.

  Then, with the stiffening of winter, they ghosted away one night as suddenly as they had come. Teenagers of the Mopan kumpania rode cleanup for the Roam, returning the site to normal, covering their tracks. They would straddle their little scoutcraft and catch up to the Roam’s convoy of giant vans by midday.

  Pulling up stakes was a serious matter among the Roam. Many a generation had survived over several thousand years because the entire Roam could strike even the largest rendezvous overnight. At its peak, the Roam numbered seven million souls. As many as two million had shared rendezvous at one time and they became, for that three months, the largest city in the world. But when they pulled up stakes, they did it in one night.

  Uncle’s place settled into its winter silence. The familiyi disappeared every year but their influence lingered through all four seasons. Now that he travelled the dreamways, Rafferty found it possible to keep them with him, to learn from their greatest minds in his sleep.