Jaguar

by Bill Ransom

  The Jaguar hated the waking and the being awake, except now, when he needed the rest. He hated this side of the curtain, and he still feared the other. He recognized the psychoses that his dreamhunting brought out in his cattle. He relied on it; he cultivated madness in those around him who failed to treat him right. Mercy was not a quality that the Jaguar cared to explore.

  Always the race back to his skull to rob every available cell in his mad rush to reconstruct the matrix that he’d seen in someone else’s. The more complete the reconstruction, the more perfect the memory, the more the thing actually became his own.

  The hospital’s i-v helped sometimes, depending on its own experiments, but most often it hindered. Even so, he couldn’t live without i-v and he couldn’t convince Max to make them leave him alone. Max didn’t trust anyone, much less a resource like the Jaguar. The Jaguar was a prisoner, and a rare prisoner indeed did not want to escape, wreak harm on its captors and turn the tables. Otherwise, they’d call him a guest.

  He had been at this many years and, though he remained a novice, he had explored branches of the dreamways that Max believed to be pure fiction. Max didn’t believe that the Jaguar had scrambled the genes of a bug on the other side and created such a marvelous hybrid, and the Jaguar hoped Max would live to regret it. If he had to leave this side, the Jaguar planned on getting even in style.

  Escape into some poor wretch like Nebaj?

  He shuddered.

  Straits aren’t dire enough to consider that.

  The spleef kept Nebaj on the other side, where he belonged. The Jaguar ran the other side like a fiefdom, with bursts of influence into his handful of priests, who plied the dreamways for him and ripened the climate for his eventual arrival. At times, their experiments went wild but that, too, worked to their advantage. The Jaguar was good at playing to advantage.

  He knew that others had crossed the great fabric, the evidence was too ample to ignore. Drunks did not cross, nor did the slaves of the drug-masters. Influences from this side (perhaps it was vice-versa, there was no way of knowing) had always come from cultures that used nothing more than dance and exhaustion as a medium.

  The ancient Maya, the dervishes and others who ritualized exhaustive dance had left their mark on the fabric. The Maya touted a certain mushroom as their ticket to the dreamways, but the Jaguar knew this was a red herring. What transported them was their fasting to vision. The mushroom was for show when they came down the mountain to account the correct wonders to their people, the wise priest’s way of keeping the dreamways to himself. With the mushroom came illusion, and the illusion satisfied the curious.

  Jaguar did this with his own priests, his spleef-whiffing minions across the great sailcloth that powered the universe. The Jaguar had one worry—that someone would catch him on the dreamways as he caught his priests, and shackle him forever to some mental chain gang. The hospital’s drugs were a danger that he kept to himself.

  To Max the agency man and to the Colonel he was a freak, an anomaly, a one-of-a-kind. He cultivated that notion, all the while knowing there had been others, there would be others, there were others now, others who endangered him and over whom he had no control. He resented the fact that the hospital limited his ability to defend himself, he resented his worry, his healthy paranoia and the incursion of these others to his territory.

  Perhaps he could escape into one of the invaders from this side, one whom his nose sniffed out in the valley. The uncertainty was too great, and his greater fear was to be trapped on this side, in an unacceptable body.

  His relationship with the hospital was nearly symbiotic, and he had fallen into it by chance, but the Jaguar would have preferred that they’d never begun the experiments on sleep-disordered combat vets. Perhaps he’d have slipped through the cracks to a nursing home where he could ply his dreamways in peace.

  The Jaguar would prefer to dream his life away. He would gladly donate his body to anyone who wanted it, though the few glimpses he’d had of his body these days revealed less than first-class material. He had seen a movie once of a huge brain that controlled the world. The Jaguar wanted to be a brain without the millwheel of a body around his neck. And he didn’t intend to settle for something as paltry as a world. He did not want to live in shackles in this or any other universe, and he did not intend to die.

  So he had sensitized the fabric like a web, with himself as a great fat spider. Weather in the web was always sunny, just like the hospital was always gray. He felt ripples when his priests approached the fabric, he felt the blows as someone else passed through. He knew they had to be nearby, because as far as he knew there only one weak point in the fabric allowed passage, and the valley was it. For ten years he had hunted the dreamways for intruders, and for ten years they had evaded his paw.

  Nebaj knew of one, and pursued, and his blood would soon be sacrificed on the altar of the Jaguar’s greater good. This, he thought, would lure the local rustlers out of the valley.

  The Jaguar had found the father of the girl. Alcohol had battered the brain into mush, and this father was one of his poorest instruments. The Jaguar could not find her on the dreamways, but he found the father and that would have to do.

  He felt someone bearing down on him. Someone sought him out as he sought others, and he felt two of them. Their weakness was their time awake, when the Jaguar closed the gap and set his snares.

  He’d thought of telling Max, but that would not work. Then Max would have another pilot, and the Jaguar’s value on the agency’s tally sheet would plummet. For a week now the Jaguar had nosed into Mel Thompkins, but this time he could not hold on. Like stirring the coals of a hot fire, he would reach inside and poke, but he could not stay. A day, two days more and he would have the place prepared for himself, he would be safe—if the hospital didn’t catch him. A mere day from now and he could be free from the natterings of this pest, this tinhorn rustler.

  If he lasted a day.

  To experience a dream and its interpretation is very different

  from having a tepid rehash set before you on paper. Everything

  about this psychology is, in the deepest sense, experience;

  the entire theory, even when it puts on the most abstract airs,

  is the direct outcome of something experienced.

  —C. G. Jung, Collected Works

  Thanksgiving night was a tough one for Mark White. He couldn’t sleep. A heavy feeling of dread had its hooks into him and he couldn’t shake it. He didn’t believe in premonition, but he did believe in the subtlety of subconscious clues. He rattled his subconscious the best he could and precious few clues sifted out.

  Maybe the clue was too big. No matter where his mind raced, it always rounded the same turn, it always came back to Eddie and Maryellen. Other patients were patients, but these two were special. As far as he knew, he was the only one who did not believe that they had fabricated the dreamways, the headaches simply to be special, to get attention. Yet he couldn’t bring himself to believe all that the experiment had revealed.

  What would it be like? he wondered. What would it be like to be a kid, inside somebody else’s brain, able to actually tinker with it as though it were a wind-up clock?

  Eddie’s journals had described for him some of their limitations and a few of the dangers.

  “We can’t just go spying around in other peoples’ brains, you know,” Eddie lectured Mark. “How we find somebody . . . it’s an accident; I can’t do it on purpose. At least, the first time I can’t. After that I can find them sometimes, but not every time. We have to be dreaming at the same time.”

  “Have you ever dreamed inside my brain?” Mark asked.

  Eddie shook his head.

  “No,” he said, and his face looked very sad for a moment. “Didn’t you hear me? We try not to do it with friends. It’s . . . prying. And it’s dangerous.” He thought for a moment, then added, “But if I do, I’ll leave you a sign so you’ll know.”

  So far, Mark had found n
o sign.

  Eddie’s notebooks included a warning: “Good thing I didn’t dream many people on this side. It just gives the Jaguar a way in, a way to track us down.”

  Mark didn’t find this important at the time. He pursued what he perceived to be Eddie’s paranoid fantasy and sent him home with another prescription to help suppress the dreams. Mark felt uneasy even then. What he’d wanted to do was explore the dreams, establish clinical controls, study Eddie and, later, Maryellen. He’d kicked himself many a time for not fighting for an EEG on her while she was in the hospital, in the dream-state. Her parents had refused, and since he was more concerned with Eddie he let it pass.

  Damn!

  He’d always taken on too many patients. Each fragment that he’d gleaned from their lives loomed larger and larger. He’d let things slip through his grip that suddenly crystallized in his mind as crucial: the EEG on Maryellen, the mystery patient at the Soldiers’ Home whose EEG matched Eddie’s, attempts to induce the dream-state in both kids instead of suppressing it with his drug therapy. . . .

  That line of thinking wasn’t productive now. Mark concentrated on what Eddie had told him about dreams.

  Just at the threshold of dream, according to Eddie, we are in the skin between worlds. Our time there is a fraction of a second, but for that time the dreamer passes through a fabric shot through with dreams and the paths that dreams take.

  “If you meet somebody else’s dream head-on,” Eddie told him, “then you get that quick twitch that wakes you up and knocks you back into your own skull. Like trying to put the same ends of two magnets together. I don’t know why it’s so different for us.”

  Magnets.

  Mark had felt Sara twitch beside him just a short while ago, and he wondered where she had almost gone. He resisted the temptation to snuggle up closer. He didn’t see any reason for her to lose sleep just because he was restless and too lazy to get up.

  “What happens to you?” Mark had asked.

  “Blue light flickers very fast, but it’s not the light going fast, it’s me, somehow. I just dissolve inside and follow it home,” Eddie said. “I don’t know how else to describe it.”

  “Is it like TV? Do you just watch the other person’s dream or can you change it?”

  Eddie shrugged.

  “It depends. At first I didn’t know I could do anything. It was like watching a movie, a 3-d movie, dreaming in somebody else’s head. Usually I don’t even know who it is.”

  “You mean, you’re inside somebody’s brain and you don’t get a name, an image . . . ?”

  “Well,” Eddie sighed a trying-to-be-patient-with-ignorance sigh, “it’s awfully big in there, like coming to earth in a spaceship and expecting to find the name ‘Earth’ written everywhere. Have you ever dreamed your own face?”

  Mark suppressed a snicker at the memory. Here was a little boy setting him straight on the landscape of dreams. Ten years since they’d had this conversation, and Mark had to admit that he had not yet met himself face-to-face in a dream.

  “The first time I tried exploring I got my times tables for school,” Eddie said. “I had to get out of the dream area and into another place, like wandering through a warehouse that goes as far as you can see. I just sort of ride around, take whatever turns look like they’ll take me to what I want to see. You know whose dream it is if you recognize people they know.”

  “Is it like a highway?”

  “Not exactly, but that’s why I call it the ‘dreamway.’ I see bits of everything, hear things, smell things . . . it can be pretty awful but I stay away from the awful parts. Like for the times tables, I found that one stored with rhymes.”

  “This was a schoolmate of yours?”

  “Yeah. I found his times tables. But everything inside a dream is made up of puzzle parts. When I get back to myself, I look around inside me for the puzzle parts in my head that match the ones I saw in his. When I get them together, then I know the times tables just like I’d memorized them myself.”

  Maybe because he was in the twilight between waking and sleep, Mark visualized for the first time what Eddie had been talking about. Then he realized what it could mean.

  Molecules, he thought. He puts together a molecule that encodes the information.

  Viruses did that, why not people?

  The blood series that he’d done on both Eddie and Maryellen indicated some very peculiar hormonal variations, and in Eddie they coincided with his EEG aberrations. Both kids had a high hemoglobin, which didn’t seem important. Until now.

  Hemoglobin . . . iron . . . magnets.

  Mark sat upright in bed and leaned back against his headboard.

  If they’ve learned how to encode memory chemically. . . .

  The possibility, like many that involved the kids, seemed so great as to be impossible, preposterous.

  But it’s worth testing.

  “Yet you stopped doing that, didn’t you?” Mark had asked Eddie. “At some point you quit doing your homework the easy way. Why?”

  Several students in Eddie’s classes became behavioral problems, and worse. At first Eddie was grateful not to be the center of attention. Then he realized that only people he dreamed in had these problems. Eddie took stopped that kind of learning when the talk in school centered around Eddie as a “bad influence.” Investigation proved that the two students most affected had no contact with Eddie whatsoever. When this was mentioned at a monthly meeting of the valley’s mental health professionals, Mark became curious. Eddie was in seventh grade then, and seeing Mark regularly. That was when Mark had asked him about it pointblank. Eddie smiled, obviously relieved.

  “Then you do believe me!”

  “I didn’t say that,” Mark said. “I just asked . . . well, if you do get into someone’s head, do they know it? What does it do to them?”

  “I don’t think they know it,” Eddie said. “But it’s funny, I always thought I’d know if someone was inside mine. I’ve felt some nudges, you know, like from the other side. But nothing inside.”

  Eddie stopped, chewed his lower lip and took a deep breath.

  “And?” Mark urged.

  “And what?”

  “Does it do something to them?”

  Eddie squirmed on Mark’s office bench and chewed his lip again.

  “I’m not sure . . . I mean, yeah, something happens.”

  “Like with Lester and Philip?”

  Eddie’s face paled at first, then reddened. His eyes kept staring at some point on the floor.

  “Yeah.”

  “Does it happen with Maryellen, too?”

  Eddie’s gaze snapped to meet Mark’s. His lip and tone became sullen and he hunched over bitten fingernails.

  “You’ll have to ask her that.”

  “I did.”

  “And what did she say?”

  “She said I’d have to ask you.”

  A grin broke through the grim line that had been Eddie’s mouth. He coughed, squirmed some more.

  “Yeah,” he said, at last, “it happens with her, too.”

  “And you two discovered it on your own, and stopped poking about in other students’ brains?”

  “That’s about it.”

  “What about each other?”

  “We’ve never done that!” Eddie snapped. “It’s not right. But we’ve been inside the same people. That’s because anytime you go inside the dreamways, you leave a door open, or a marker that makes getting inside easier. Someone else can use it to backtrack to you, too.”

  “Someone from the other side?”

  “Or from this one,” Eddie said.

  “How far . . . except for the ‘other side,’ what’s the range of your dreamways?”

  “I don’t know,” Eddie said. “I’ve seen some pretty strange things. It’s hard to know whether I’ve been somewhere or if I’m inside the memory of someone who’s been there. I think we can go anywhere in the world, skipping from person to person. But the easy dreams are always close by.”r />
  “What about language? Do you get inside somebody and find that you don’t understand the language?”

  “No,” Eddie shook his head. “Dreams don’t operate that way. But I can learn a language on the dreamways, the way I learned times tables. But that’s different. The dreams themselves . . . they’re always in my language. Dreams are different than poking around, but the dreams get you inside to do the poking.”

  Mark watched Sara’s sleeping face in the green glow of their bedside clock. Her full lips pursed slightly, as though she expected a kiss. Her eyes flicked back and forth under their lids, and he wondered what it would be like to meet her in the dream that possessed her now, that took her far from their bed. He felt so close to her body but so far from whatever was her. Sometimes he felt closer to her when she was working in some other country than when she slept right next to him.

  And that was the last thing he remembered until Sara woke him in the morning with her soft, stroking hands.

  “You were restless last night,” she said. “Is something bothering you?”

  “Sorry.”

  He reached an arm around her hips and pulled her close, trapping her curious hand between them. “Yes, it’s the kids. I’m worried . . . I don’t know what worries me, exactly. Their situation, I guess. I keep thinking that there’s a key somewhere that I’ve misplaced, and I’m going to find it right in my pocket.”

  Her playful fingers had aroused him, and she kissed him a long, hot kiss.

  “You can look in my pocket,” she whispered. “Maybe you’ll find it there.”

  They made love that Friday morning as they often did when the world left the two of them alone—slowly, very wet and for a good, long time.

  “Well,” she said, later, “did you find your key?”

  “No,” he sighed, “but it was sure fun looking.”

  They lay still, cradling one another, listening to the percussion of rain on the roof and windows.