Jaguar

by Bill Ransom

  Through his dreams Rafferty learned how to slip the walls of the dream and enter the mind of the dreamer. He could see, feel or know anything that the dreamer knew, one thing at a time. Three years of practice taught him to navigate in there. He thought of himself as a crow, sometimes, swooshing at treetop level through the canyons. Only these canyons were inside somebody’s head. Several more years passed before he realized the terrible damage he had done.

  This year, by chance, he stumbled undetected into a dream of the Visionmaster and got himself well lodged with a passkey. Rafferty enjoyed frequent access to his teacher’s mind during the nine months of his absence and made the most of it, retrieving puzzle pieces and reassembling them inside his own head later. Out of respect, or perhaps instinct, he left the personal stuff alone.

  He’ll be surprised, Rafferty had thought. When he gets back he’ll just be expecting some ignorant gaje kid. . . .

  The Roam had returned to a brighter Rafferty, one who frightened them but whose innovations and inventions dazzled them, as well. The Visionmaster did not return with them. The night before their return he had died in a headlong rush into a refrigeration van, screaming, “Bubble of life! Bubble of life!” He had been inconsolably depressed for months, despite his considerable talent with magnetrics and ions.

  Rafferty’s daydreams, too, sought out the dreamways and many of his days were spent recovering from the surreal aftermath of those crippling headaches that plagued him more and more.

  He’d begun to dream that Uncle would pull up with them to tell him tales of the highland jungles of their winter camp. He’d been captivated by the flips they’d showed him when he was only six, flips that showed broadleaf jungle and the stone monuments of their ancestors.

  This year he determined to see the highlands for himself. Since Verna snatched him from the city, Rafferty had never been more than a half-day’s walk south of the creek. The Tattoo boys turned the perimeter vans at Uncle’s into a jungle for him once. They told him they’d tuned the picture so fine that he should be able to smell that jungle, but all he smelled was the garlic that roiled out of their breath.

  The Roam appeared and disappeared each year for five years, and out of this he learned something of hope. Ever since the first time they left, Rafferty hoped with all his heart that they would come back, and every time they had. He supposed that Uncle learned the same lesson when he was a boy, and it had been evident in his joy each time he’d seen them staking down.

  Cristina and her Roam set up their miraculous city in the twenty-acre meadow behind the barn. Uncle called it a meadow, and so did the Roam, but Rafferty had only known it after the bugs so he called it the mud flats. He walked down there after the Roam pulled up stakes and found no tracks, no sign that hundreds of people had lived there for three months.

  He reveled in memories of their bright-colored clothing and their music. Like Uncle, Rafferty shared their passion for gadgets and soon found himself apprenticed to the Visionsmith.

  “It’s something I wanted more than anything,” Uncle told him. “I never got the chance, but I learned plenty by watching, tearing things apart. . . .”

  A hyperactive older man, the Visionsmith called himself the “Romno of Research,” but Theo Kekchi was the Roam’s official Master Tinker. He believed that everyone should know as much about everything as quickly as possible. Before the bugs, before The Jaguar, he had designed a homegrown bioelectronics system.

  “It was like woodcarving,” Theo had explained to Rafferty. “I just used smaller tools.”

  Theo Kekchi had designed what he called a “chemical chisel,” a substance that he could coax the body to manufacture. This substance made the DNA of certain cells replicate wildly. During this time he attracted the DNA to a template which he had chemically introduced. It would replicate there, a dozen strands to a cell.

  When the cell burst, guide-dog molecules enveloped the DNA, protecting it. Then Theo transferred this DNA to any cell he chose, also chemically. In that manner, he insisted, he could build virtually any kind of creature imaginable, and many more that are not. He theorized that this was the method that someone had used to produce the plague of bugs.

  Theo Kekchi chose the bioconductor for development and production, and it was fast rewriting the manuals on the world’s technology. Though living tissue, bioconductors were free of the ethical question of creating a creature of more complexity.

  Whoever had tried this same experiment with a few little bugs had it get away from him. Unlike the rest of the Roam, Theo retained the highest respect for the attempt while displaying the highest contempt for the experimenter’s sloppy methods.

  “Someone blew it,” Theo had said. “That’s how we got the bugs. They knew how to scramble some proteins but they didn’t know what they were getting. But how could they come up with it? How?” His fist banged the conductor vat. “Nobody’s doing anything like I am in the cities. Somebody would have to be inside my head. . . .”

  Rafferty knew he hadn’t been the one messing around in there, not that time. He shuddered when he thought of the sick person who had invented the bugs. He didn’t want to meet him in some dark tunnel of a twisted mind.

  The bugs had ravaged half the world with their unquenchable appetites.

  “Like your appetite, youngster,” Theo had told Rafferty. “Never have I heard so many questions. . . .”

  Theo started to make a joke, then shook his head.

  “Listen,” he said, “you keep that up, boy. You’ll be Visionsmith yourself someday. Hah.”

  Rafferty would miss Theo, in person and in his dreams, and it would be years before he understood the mechanism of his teacher’s death that would haunt him throughout his years.

  Every year when the vans and trailers of the Roam wound their way to the farm, Uncle Hungry had been a truly happy man. He liked people all right; he just didn’t like cities. That’s where his brother had learned to drink. He agonized greatly that his family made the whiskey that ruined him.

  Whiskey had been a family matter for a long, long time. The Roam had run whiskey for Henry’s great-grandfather and kept the sales business at a healthy distance from production. Old Cristina and Henry agreed to shut down the still and go out of the liquor business. At first, a lot of grumbling swept the Roam.

  “You’re shutting off trade incentives,” they said.

  “Bribery is bribery,” Uncle had said, forgetting that bribery, too, was a longtime tradition of the Roam.

  “Whiskey violates the accords,” Cristina pronounced. “If we want them to stick to it, we stick to it.”

  There was no vote on the matter, and it didn’t hurt business a bit. The Roam had information, and that’s what cities needed. They’d get by on their raisin wines and spleef just fine, but they’d all be up a creek without the word.

  Rafferty first met the Roam right after the hatch, in that gray autumn of mud and despair. Uncle took him down there when they came out of the still that time. Rafferty walked right to the wall of the camp and would’ve bumped into it, too, if Uncle hadn’t stopped him. An invisible wall that his hand could feel, that shimmered with the image of an empty pasture, surrounded the mudflats. He touched the full life-sized picture and felt something behind it, like a hum.

  The Romni Bari’s quarters and her component support vans set up in the south pasture with her immediate family beside her. A half dozen buses and vans pulled in by nightfall, each taking its precise position from the Romni Bari’s bus as dictated by family or tribal status. Rafferty didn’t know this of the status until later. There, in the glare of his sixth autumn, he soaked in their color, their wealth, their virtual impenetrability.

  Five years later, in the mire of despair over Uncle Hungry’s death, he pulled up his own stakes to join the Roam. He headed northward, at first, as Ruckus showed him the way through the Blue Mountains. Then they turned downcoast to his first winter in the sun.

  When the boy first set foot to the road Ruckus determined
to lead him to the sea. Like all crows, like most people, he was sick to death of the dried bug meal that the humans called “flour.” From the time the boy hit the road the crow had been dreaming of clams, mussels and ripe fish delivered up by the tides. He had never been there. These memories he, too, had stolen from dreams.

  Ruckus led him to the seacoast that year and guided him on his forays into the outside world. The dreams were changing. Rafferty was drawn to the other side—when the dreams were on him nothing else mattered. He couldn’t always make them come, but when he did, their landscape was empty and very, very lonely.

  He always felt afraid and exposed those times, the way Ruckus must have felt when he sensed a hawk. Only for Rafferty it wasn’t a hawk, it was the Jaguar. Many a Jaguar priest had been snared while casting out solo on the dreamways. Sharing a dream was safer, but the company wasn’t always that good. Even Uncle had spoken of the Jaguar, and when he did he hissed through clenched jaws.

  “Did us a favor, he did,” Uncle told him. “Thinned things out a bit, stirred up the gene pool.”

  Rafferty could tell by the flat tone of his voice that Uncle didn’t mean it. He thought of the Jaguar as a wizard in black robes—he’d seen one in one of Uncle’s flips—stirring a huge pot of blue jeans.

  “The governments, they all blamed each other at first,” Uncle said. “But the infection that Jaguar turned loose didn’t know anything about borders, skin color or prayer. It only knew how to stay alive by eating, and that’s been plenty. Some say it was an accident. But he was at the center of it, and he’s still going strong. Don’t seem accidental to me.”

  That first autumn that Rafferty had returned with the Roam they had staked down the rendezvous as usual, but first the old woman had sprinkled dried petals on Uncle’s grave. The toolbox lid was still there, and one tattered cluster of wings.

  The Roam were a fastidious, secretive lot, and Rafferty didn’t understand the nature of their true product, the depth of their mystery, for years. Information was their product, as well as misinformation, and in these desperate times nothing was more valuable.

  Their fastidiousness required access to a lot of water, and their intricate structure required large open ground for meetings. Uncle Hungry’s place was one of about two dozen that Rafferty was to visit over his next ten years with the Roam. They deferred to his ownership of it after Henry’s death, though ownership was a very fluid concept in their culture.

  The official language of the Roam was a trading language they had concocted hundreds of years ago. But the Roam had a speaker for every language of every city in the world. Rafferty was good at gadgets, and Afriqua Lee mastered language. Only Rafferty knew how she’d done it.

  Finally, they told Old Cristina. She made the sign of the noose behind her back and ordered them to stop. She ticked off the casualties they had caused, all ending in madness or death. This secret even the Romni Bari couldn’t keep forever.

  The Roam brought music to the farm, and tents, and colorful wonders of the world. They stored wind power in air compressors. Large Barnard wind valves popped up all around the community. They sold components, power adapters or compressor drives for storage and for their marvelous devices. The Roam lived well without ever plugging in to power generators in the cities, but their thrifty nature demanded that they take advantage of someone else’s power wherever they could.

  That first fall when Rafferty was six, Old Cristina handed him a black basket. Two bone catches fastened the lid.

  “Careful,” she said.

  The basket wobbled when he took it, and whatever was inside moved by itself.

  He set the basket down on the stoop and squatted next to it. A little bit of red ribbon decorated one side of the basket, and something inside pecked at the red ribbon. Rafferty undid the pins and eased the lid off.

  A sorry little rag of a fledgling crow stared back at him; he could see himself reflected in the glossy eye. It opened its beak wide and squalled, demanding food. When Rafferty made no move to feed it, the little crow made a stab at his fingers. He dropped the lid back down and heard it thump the little crow’s head.

  Rafferty snatched the lid off again and those little black eyes glared at him. The crow ruffed its feathers and fetched a half-hearted peck at the ribbon.

  “Remember,” his Uncle had said, “don’t be too good to him. If something happens to you, he’s got to know how to take care of himself. Don’t let him forget how to be a crow.”

  Old Cristina gave the crow to Rafferty, and Old Cristina introduced him to Afriqua Lee.

  By the time his uncle died, Rafferty had learned that no one truly owns a crow. He had learned as well that the uncle gave him roots, and the sickly young crow gave him something to care for. And Old Cristina had given him the crow. Between Uncle and Old Cristina he pieced together the series of disasters that led to their secret lives on the mud flats in this small mountain valley.

  Not many talked of family, even then, the first plagues had seen to that. Rafferty and his uncle had netted the birds that swarmed around their drying tables and cooked them, mindful to let the crows go free because of Ruckus, who kept watch from the barn roof. Sometimes he lured birds in by imitating their calls. He also learned that the boy would feed him his fill if he waited until the business was done. Ruckus was a patient bird. Now the telltale crows flocked around him in twos and threes. The first took to traditional perches in the scraggly snags that surrounded the barn. Others balanced on what remained of the house. Rafferty’s crow, Ruckus, called out rank as the gentry appeared and reassured Rafferty with sidelong mutterings and pointed glances. The elder crows gathered with Ruckus along the sagging ridge of the barn, and Rafferty knew old Cristina couldn’t be far behind.

  A lot of crows flocked in this year, and, like himself and some young men of the Roam, they were early. Raferty studied the skyline.

  Nearly two months early.

  The birds luffed the breeze, tucked their wings in tight and spiraled down to the dirt around him, unusually quiet for crows.

  Thanks to Ruckus, Rafferty had caught up to the migrating Roam a month after Uncle Hungry’s death and Old Cristina took him in. He was ten, and technically a gaje, but the Roam respected Henry too much to leave the boy on a stone. Besides, the boy displayed the same skill with gadgets that Henry had, and he made himself useful from the start.

  They had been amused that Rafferty had loaded one change of clothing, some dried bug meal, a water jug and twenty kilos of Henry’s best hand tools into Uncle’s old backpack. His first day in camp Rafferty repaired the refrigeration unit on the kumpania’s grain van and saved what food stores they had. Besides, Cristina liked him, with that alone no one could turn him away.

  The night he caught them on the high road south was a starry night, typically cool for the highlands. The kumpania had been bogged down for days restructuring a bridge across a deep, bare ravine. The kumpania threw itself into frantic preparation for a night of music and dance, of hot food, bright skirts and bracelets flashing in the firelight.

  The pump on the refrigeration van had been an easy repair, one that he recognized right away as a gasket problem by the whistling sound it made on the upstroke. The men of the Roam had concentrated on clearing the lines that held the refrigerant. They saw that the pump was pumping, but they couldn’t tell it was sucking air and fouling the system. Rafferty made a gasket out of a piece of old shoe leather and, since he had such small hands, managed to replace it without dismounting and dismantling the entire pump.

  “Clean up in my tent, youngster,” Old Cristina said, “then have some coffee. We will be all night celebrating stakedown.”

  Old Cristina’s furrowed brow furrowed further.

  “Afriqua Lee dreams as you do.”

  “I know . . . we know.”

  “Do not endanger the Roam.”

  “I won’t.”

  He fidgeted from one foot to the other, keeping her gaze.

  “How’d you know?”
<
br />   “Henry. He was worried, he say you get headaches, sick, dream funny. My Afriqua Lee, she is the same thing.”

  She made the sign of the noose.

  “‘The big zero,’“ he said, quoting Uncle, the fervent non-believer.

  “You sound just like your . . . just like Henry.” She turned her head for a moment, and sighed. “Go clean up,” she told him, and didn’t look back. “The kumpania will think you’re a gaje.”

  Rafferty luxuriated in the first hot shower since Uncle died. He lathered on the foamy fragrance of their strange soap and scrubbed his scalp until it tingled.

  He toweled down and, when he reached for his clothes, saw that they had been replaced by fresh trousers, shirt and jacket all embroidered with the bright complexity of the Romni Bari familiyi.

  The black, mid-calf trousers had a red stripe sewn down the outer right leg and his cap draped two cloth braids of red, black and blue halfway down his back. He rubbed the steam from the mirror and checked his appearance.

  Everything fit him well except the jacket, which was a little tight in the forearms. Rafferty was not a tall boy, but working with Uncle had made him strong for his age. His skin was pale next to theirs, and his nose narrow, but he found he could flare his nostrils acceptably with practice. His steady gaze, though blue-eyed, would also mark him a person of honor in the Roam. He squared his shoulders and the jacket sleeves slid above his wrists. People of the Roam were small, and Rafferty already outsized many men.

  Rafferty was unaccustomed to the effects of the suppressors, so he barely heard the tap on the bathroom door.

  Theo’s replacement, Stephan, wore the colors of The Network, which Rafferty didn’t know much about, but he knew that it represented a lot of power.

  “I’m your sponsor,” Stephan announced, and pulled him into the hallway. “It was Theo’s wish. Nice suit. There’ll be some ritual stuff, some language stuff and a vision thing. Not for awhile, don’t twitch. You’re a shoo-in.”