Dreamer's Cat: a sci-fi murder mystery with a killer twist

by Stephen Leather

  ‘And what am I looking for?’

  Ruth sighs deeply and nuzzles her head under my chin, her thick coat is soft and warm and I can feel her whiskers pricking gently into my skin. She says nothing for a while and I start to feel that I’m actually going to fall asleep for the first time when suddenly she stiffens.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ I ask.

  ‘I’ve just had a thought,’ she says. ‘What will become of me if something happens to you?’

  ‘I don’t know, Ruth,’ I say quietly. ‘I really don’t know. What do you think will happen?’ She sighs and it feels as if she shrugs.

  ‘I suppose I’ll have to find another master,’ she whispers, so softly that I can barely hear her.

  *

  I’m alone when I wake up. There’s a phone by the bed and I ask it the time and it tells me its eight o’clock and I tell it to get Herbie. Seconds later he’s on the line. I keep my eyes closed and my head still as I talk with him because my head still hurts.

  ‘Are you okay, Leif?’ he asks and I say sure, just my migraine playing up. He understands and knows there’s nothing he can do to help. The pressure effects Dreamers in different ways, some break out in rashes, some develop a stammer or have nervous twitches. Me, I get headaches. At first I tried to do something about them, but after half a dozen medics examined me and took X-rays and ultrasounds and God knows what else and then just shook their heads and muttered that they’d have to do further tests, I knew that I’d just have to live with them.

  ‘Are you going to be in the recording studio with me?’ I ask him.

  ‘Do you want me there?’ he says, and I sense a barrier, a reluctance, that suggests the studio is the last place he wants to be, but I say yes, I’d like him close by and he says he’ll be there.

  Max wants me in bright and early, nine o’clock, so I’ve plenty of time. I shave and shower, but the voice activated thermostat seems to be playing up and I spend most of the time saying ‘hotter’ or ‘colder’ but can’t get the temperature right.

  The phone rings while I’m lathering my hair and I have to shout to make myself heard over the running water.

  ‘Are you up?’ Max asks, obviously worried that I’m gonna chicken out. ‘I’ll be there, Max,’ I say.

  ‘What’s the noise?’ he says. ‘I’m in the shower,’ I tell him.

  ‘Really?’ he says and then at the top of his voice yells ‘Colder! Colder! Colder!’ He hangs up as the water temperature drops twenty degrees in response to his commands and I curse him and tell my shower not to be so stupid. Max can be a big kid at times.

  Ruth reappears while I’m standing in the dryer, moving around slowly and enjoying the feel of the warm air playing over my skin.

  ‘That looks like fun,’ she says, and sits down to watch.

  ‘It’s not polite to stare,’ I tell her. ‘And you know what curiosity did to the cat.’

  ‘You’ve got nothing that I haven’t already seen,’ she says.

  I get out of the drying cubicle and walk around Ruth to the wardrobe in the bedroom. ‘Any thoughts on what I should wear?’ I ask her as she pads in after me.

  ‘You always look good in the grey,’ she says and so I take the grey suit and a light blue shirt with a button-down collar.

  ‘Tie?’ I say and she shakes her head.

  ‘Casual,’ she says.

  She watches me as I dress. ‘Can I have some milk?’ she asks.

  I squat down in front of her and hold out my cupped hand. I imagine it’s half full of white, creamy milk and offer it to her. She purrs and bends her head over my hand, butting it as she laps up the milk. When she’s finished she mews loudly. There is milk on her light brown nose but my hand is bone dry. Imaginary milk for an imaginary cat.

  ‘Yeah, but it tastes so good,’ she says.

  *

  Max is polishing his glasses when Ruth and I walk into his office. Herbie is there, too, drinking a cup of tea, finger crooked daintily. They both seem nervous and try to jolly me along with small talk about the weather, the stock market, anything to keep my mind off what it is they’re asking me to do. We take the lift up to the recording studio together and even the synthesized lift voice seems to be on edge. Ruth sits at my feet and is first out when the lift stops. There are three technicians waiting for us in the studio, all wearing white coats. One of them has a brass star like Max’s but his has the word ‘Deputy’ embossed on it. I look at Ruth and she says ‘Three. All real. Stop worrying.’ I have to check, to make sure that my mind isn’t playing tricks on me, and the more nervous I get the more likely it is that I will start seeing things. When I woke up this morning the canopy above my bed was pink and I was sure that it was silver last night. And there was the smell of green apples in the lift. It could have been the aromatiser on the blink but I didn’t want to ask Max or Herbie.

  The technicians are standing in front of a bank of computers and VDUs, the equipment that captures the impulses from the brain of the Dreamer and translates it into binary code which is then transferred to the psi-disc. Today, though, we’re going to be doing it in reverse, the impulses are going to be fed into my brain.

  ‘Stop worrying,’ soothes Ruth, ‘you’re breathing like a train.’

  At the far side of the studio is the soundproof glass cubicle where the Dreamers do their stuff. The glass can be electronically darkened or lightened to suit the individual Dreamer. Some prefer to work in complete darkness, some want as much light as possible. Me, I like it midway, the sort of gloom you get on an autumn evening. Inside the cubicle is a leather couch, twice as wide as a man and half as long again, raised slightly at both ends for the head and the feet, and there are two restraining straps because sometimes Dreamers thrash about when they’re laying down a disc in the same way that sleepers move during amateur dreams. At the end where the head goes is the impulse collector, similar to the commercial headbands that you use to play back the psi-discs, but a hell of a lot more expensive.

  There’s a screen to the left of the door and I go behind it and take off my clothes and hang them on the hooks there. I slip on a white robe, the sort they give you in hospital.

  ‘Are you ready, Leif?’ asks the Deputy and I nod and walk with him to a side room where there is a big adjustable chair.

  ‘Short back and sides,’ I say as I sit down. He laughs but with little warmth. I guess he hears the joke from every Dreamer who sits in the chair.

  He shaves my head with a minimum of fuss with a buzzing razor that sounds like a swarm of angry wasps. The hair falls in clumps to the floor. It doesn’t worry me, I’ve been through it nine times before and I’m well passed the stage of bothering about my looks. I’m 48 years old for God’s sake. When he finishes shaving my scalp he takes a blob of greasy, metallic smelling stuff from a glass bottle and massages it into the skin.

  ‘OK, Leif,’ he says when he’s finished. ‘That’s us.’

  ‘Why the haircut?’ asks Ruth. ‘I thought you were just observing.’

  She’s right, of course. The shaving is only necessary when you’re laying a psi-disc down, it improves the connection, not by much admittedly, but enough so that it’s worth the trouble. Playback is different, hair doesn’t effect the reception much, but Max reckons that as I’m using the same equipment that the first dead Dreamer used that we might as well make sure that as many of the conditions are the same. We’ll be playing the disc back at slow speed, too, at the same rate the Dreamer was laying it down. The only difference would be that the disc would stop a few seconds before the end. I just hope that he times it right.

  ‘Stop worrying,’ says Ruth as Max leads me to the glass booth and helps me get comfortable. Ruth sits by the side of the couch and watches as Max attaches the headset and checks the connections.

  When the average punter plugs into a psi-disc he gets the ultimate thrill - to live another life, to experience somebody else’s dream first hand. He never thinks about the Dreamer who lays down the disc, the sweat and the pain th
at goes into the making of it. A psi-disc can run from a few minutes up to several hours, but most last for between two and three hours. The record is held by Andy Hedges and his five hour version of ‘A Christmas Carol’ but he went loopy shortly afterwards and swallowed a bottle of sleeping tablets. The tablets were so that he wouldn’t die dreaming, I guess. Snag is, it takes about three hours to lay down one hour of psi-disc time, so a three hour run takes nine hours and it has to be done in one go. It’s only by speeding up the disc time that you can produce the depth and pack all the information in, and it has to be done in one operation because you can’t edit like you used to be able to do with film or video tape. There are so many variables involved - sound, colour, texture, smell, feel - all the five real time senses - that any stopping and starting produces such jolts that anyone playing the psi-disc is immediately jolted back to reality, and it’s not a pleasant feeling, like having a bucket of ice cold water thrown over you while you’re asleep. Some medics reckon the shock could actually be enough to kill you, but what do they know? They’re still looking for a cure for AIDS for God’s sake, with three million dying from it last year.

  So to lay down a disc the Dreamer has to plug himself into the recording mechanism and spend up to nine hours rigidly controlling his thoughts, holding a totally different reality in his head, a world that must appear to be totally real with real characters and real situations. It’s like a dream, but it’s one in which the Dreamer must retain total control. You know what it’s like when you have your own amateur dream. You switch from place to place with no rhyme or reason, you can start a conversation in a restaurant and then be talking to the same person dressed as a cowboy and then when you look away you’re on an island and then when you are looking back it’s your father you’re talking to and he’s telling you your dog has died and then you’re being chased through a thick jungle by a tribe of head-hunters blowing bugles. Random noise, no plot or continuity. That’s fine for your own private dreams and nightmares but who in the world is going to pay good money to experience garbage like that? A few trendies, maybe, but random images have little commercial value, even among the avant garde community. So the Dreamer spends months working on the plot and the characterisation and the locations, researching and experiencing any of the sensations he wants to incorporate into the psi-disc. Then, when he’s ready, he locks himself away in his head and lays down the disc. Any disturbance, any flicker in the self-created reality, and the company makes you go back to the start and begin again. Too many attempts and you’re deemed to have broken your contract.

  Is it tough? Yeah, but it’s not impossible.

  ‘How’s that feel?’ asks Max and I tell him it feels fine. He walks around the side of the couch so that I can see him.

  ‘Right,’ he says. ‘Now remember, Leif, we’re playing at slow speed, but you shouldn’t notice because our equipment is so much better than the commercial players. If at anytime you think there’s anything wrong bring yourself out of it straight away, don’t take any risks. Okay?’

  I give him the thumbs up. Getting out won’t be a problem, I know that. Even a child knows how to pull out of a psi-disc during playback, a simple mental blink and you’re back in the real world instantly.

  ‘So why didn’t the Dreamers pull out?’ asks Ruth, voicing the question at the same time as it occurs to me, but I know there is no point in mentioning it to Max. If he knew he’d tell me.

  Max goes out of the cubicle and Ruth follows him. A few seconds later the glass darkens so that it’s as if I’m lying in a thick fog.

  Max’s voice, slightly to the right and behind me, counts down slowly from ten. Nine. Eight. Seven. Six. Five. Four. Three. Two. One. It is…….

  ….Night. But not dark, I’m sitting next to a crackling wood fire, the heat warming my face and the smell of smoke in my nostrils. I’m dressed in blue jeans and thick leather boots, a red shirt and a brown leather waistcoat. There’s a thick belt around my waist and there’s a heavy weight pulling it down the right side. It’s a gun, a cowboy gun. With me around the campfire are four men, two young, one middle-aged and one a grizzled old guy with a straggly grey beard that reaches half way down his chest. We are eating bacon and beans off battered metal plates. It tastes good.

  The men are laughing and joking, and they call each other by name so that I can identify them. The young one with the black hat and the pencil-thin moustache is Reb, the young guy next to him, clean shaven and bad skin, is his brother Dave. The middle aged man, hunched over his plate and wolfing down forkfuls of beans, is our leader, Jake. He looks strong and mean. The oldest member of the team is Doc, the group’s cook and bottle-washer. Doc has managed to get juice from the beans on his beard and he tries to wipe it off with the back of his hand.

  Doc looks at me and says ‘put another log on the fire,’ and I do. That’s the preliminaries over, anyway. It’s a cowboy disc and it will be seen from my viewpoint, but as usual I’ll just be an observer, along for the ride. Even if I say not one word the story will still go on, and if I try to throw in my own ideas I’ll just be ignored. The skill of the Dreamer is to allow the viewer to feel that he is taking part, while at the same time not introducing too many variables.

  As the guys eat I look around and drink in the atmosphere. It’s good, very good. The air is filled with the sound of lowing cattle, and I can smell them through the wood smoke. There is a full moon hanging in the night sky and occasionally night birds fly overhead. I look for faults, I move my head quickly from side to side but the effect holds up, even at the periphery of my vision. I scoop up a handful of the soil we are sitting on and smell it. Nothing.

  The Dreamer has a good visual eye but he’s weak on smell. I lick the soil. No taste. Yeah, he was good, but not first ranking. Mind you, I can’t fault the visuals or the sound. I guess he was fairly inexperienced, one of the new ones. It takes a while to develop the depth, to fill in all the details, not just the superficialities.

  We finish eating and Doc collects the plates. Dave and I pull the first watch and we saddle up our horses and as the rest of the men roll out their blankets we ride slowly around the herd. Somewhere in the distance a coyote throws back its head and howls at the moon.

  The herd seems uneasy, constantly moving and stamping their hooves. We hear a noise, a scuffling and the sound of a horse neighing over at the far side of the herd and we kick our mounts, hard, and urge them in that direction. Dave sees them first and screams ‘Indians!’ and draws his gun, firing two shots in the air to attract the attention of the sleeping men and then gives chase. I follow, holding the reins tight and keeping my head low, my horse’s hooves pounding into the dirt, jolting every bone in my body, my backside slapping into the saddle.

  My horse is breathing heavily and so am I. My gun is in my hand and I see three Indians ahead on white ponies, no saddles, gripping with their knees. Their bodies shine in the moonlight, sweat glistening on their shoulders. They have rifles, and paint-smeared faces, and one of them has hair flowing down to the small of his back, kept clear of his face with a band of red cloth. Dave is shooting at them and Long Hair reins in his horse and aims and fires and I see Dave spin off his horse and smash into the ground, blood soaking his shirt. Jake and Reb are by my side, guns drawn. Reb leaps from his horse and kneels at his brother’s side, shouting and swearing, while Jake yells at me to follow him and we gallop after the Indians. Their ponies are smaller than our horses but they have more stamina and they gradually pull away and we lose them in the boulders at the base of a towering sandstone cliff.

  We ride back in silence. Dave is dead. Reb wants to take him with us but Jake says we’re three days from the railway terminus where we have to deliver the cattle and that we can’t carry a body through three days of sweltering heat, so we bury him. Reb says a few words about his brother over the shallow grave and Doc recites the Lord’s Prayer. We pile stones on top of the freshly-dug earth to keep the coyotes away.

  Reb says he wants to stay and hunt
down the Indians but Jake tells him not to be stupid, it’s already going to cost us a day rounding up the cattle, most of them had scattered when the shooting started. Reb is angry and he throws a punch at Jake but his heart isn’t in it and Jake blocks it and kicks his legs from underneath him.

  Jake grabs Reb by the shirt and pulls him up. He puts his face right up close and tells Reb that he understands, that he’ll help track down the Indians who killed his brother but that we deliver the cattle first. Reb calms down and agrees.

  We ride back in silence, then we hand over the cattle and hit town with our back pockets full of money. Despite Dave’s death we’re all determined to enjoy ourselves, and we settle down at a corner table in the saloon with a couple of bottles of rough whisky and a dog-eared pack of playing cards. We play poker and I win consistently. Reb drops out quickly and goes and stands at the bar drinking. A stranger asks if he can sit in, a swarthy guy with a week’s worth of stubble on his chin and dark, brooding eyes. He’s wearing a black hat, so you know right away that he’s a baddie. I keep on winning and when he’s fifty dollars down he pushes back his chair and gets to his feet, going for his gun and calling me a cheat. He’s fast, very fast, and his gun is in his hand before my hand reaches my holster. I start to panic and the one thought in my mind is maybe this is where it happens, this is where I die, shot in a seamy saloon in a one horse town in the middle of nowhere, and I start to scream that it’s not fair, that I don’t deserve to die over a few dollars, when suddenly Jake is there, smashing one of the bottles of whisky over the guy’s black hat. Whisky and bits of broken glass fly everywhere and the guy crashes down onto the table and it splinters and collapses. I scramble for the money and Jake tells us that it’s time to go so the four of us leave the saloon and climb on our horses.

  ‘Where we going, Jake?’ asks Doc and Jake says the general store for provisions and then we’re off on the trail of the Indians that killed Dave.

  We ride through the desert, the brims of our hats down to shield us from the fierce sun, sipping from canteens of warm water and lying up in the shade during the worst of the mid-day heat. We find Dave’s grave, still marked with the rocks. At least the coyotes hadn’t got him. We ride out to the boulders where we lost the band of Indians. No tracks, of course, not with the desert winds, but Jake tells us to spread out and search for the Indians and then to meet back at Dave’s grave.