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

by Stephen Leather

  I find nothing, but the time goes quickly and when I get back Jake and Doc are already there waiting for me. Doc has found the Indian camp, some ten miles to the west, so we sit down and brew coffee while we wait for Reb to return. The coffee is black and bitter and hot and Doc serves it in chipped blue and white enamel mugs. I burn my tongue and it really hurts. Reb wants to go right away, there’s a bloodlust in his eyes and I can see that’s he’s thirsting for revenge, but Jake says no, it’ll be dark soon so we wait.

  The following morning we ride the ten miles to where Doc found the Indian camp and we hide the horses behind the brow of a hill. The camp lies in the valley where three hills meet. A river runs through the valley and there are Indian women up to their knees in it washing clothes while their babies play on the river bank. There are the skins of some wild animals stretched out to dry on poles and a cluster of a dozen or so small tepees. There are no horses, which means the men must be out hunting. Or stealing cattle.

  ‘Let’s get the bastards,’ says Reb, but Jake pulls him back. We lie down among the rocks and watch.

  ‘The men aren’t there,’ says Jake. ‘There’s only the squaws and children.’

  ‘They’re still Indians,’ says Reb, hatred in his voice.

  ‘Easy boy,’ says Doc.

  A dozen tepees means at least a dozen warriors, I think, and there are only four of us.

  Jake says we wait until the men return but as evening begins to draw in there is still no sign of them, and we know they won’t travel at night.

  ‘Come on, Jake,’ says Reb. I don’t like the way this is working out. There’s a sour feeling in my stomach and my mouth is dry. Jake asks Doc what he thinks and Doc says that we can’t let them get away with what they did to Dave and that it was their fault in the first place for stealing our cattle.

  Nobody asks me what I think, I’m just there for the ride, but I want to tell them that this is wrong, that they are only women and children, but I follow them to the horses. We take our guns out and ride together over the brow of the hill and down towards the tepees, threading our way through the rocks until we reach the bottom of the slope and then we start galloping. A young girl carrying firewood sees us first and she starts to yell a warning. Reb shoots her without even appearing to aim but he hits her straight in the face and it explodes inwards and she falls backwards, the twigs and branches still in her hands. Reb howls with pleasure and kicks his horse’s flanks. Doc and Jake start firing, too, as we sweep through the tents and down towards the river bank. The women start to run out of the water, leaving their clothes on the rocks as they rush to pick up their children. Jake fires at an old woman and hits her in the back and then he shoots a mother holding a small baby. Doc is screaming and firing at a group of children, no more than toddlers. I’m caught up in it all, the adrenaline is coursing through my body and I start yelling as well and then I start firing. I hit a young girl but I’m not sure if I kill her and I pull the horse around, away from the water, and Jake and I chase after a group of three women who are running to one of the tepees. They hide inside and Jake and I ride around it, firing through the material of the tepee and laughing as the women inside scream and die.

  I know this is wrong, I know that this should not be happening, but at the same time I’m enjoying it, I’m getting a buzz out of it that I’ve never experienced before. I’m shouting and cheering like an animal and my hands are shaking so much that I drop some bullets when I’m reloading.

  Reb has climbed off his horse and has grabbed a teenage squaw down by the river. He throws her to the ground and starts to pull off her dress.

  ‘I’m gonna have me an Indian girl,’ he shrieks and hits her about the head with the butt of his gun before climbing on top of her.

  ‘Sounds like a good idea to me,’ says Jake and he gets off his horse and ties it to one of the skin-drying poles. I follow his example. The horses whinny and stamp their feet. A woman runs past us with two young teenage girls and ducks into one of the tepees. We follow her. They scream as we force our way into the tent. Jake holsters his gun.

  ‘Say, aren’t they pretty young things?’ he asks me and I say yes.

  The older woman - their mother perhaps - steps in front of them as they cower on the ground behind her.

  ‘Get rid of her,’ says Jake. For some reason I put my gun away and pull out my hunting knife. The woman is waving her hands at me and crying. The girls hide their faces. I know this is wrong but I can’t stop myself. I don’t want to stop myself. I move towards the woman and I grab her around the neck, pulling her onto the knife as I thrust it upwards. She gasps and I pull out the knife and stab her again and again until the handle is wet with blood. She falls to the ground. I wipe the knife on my trousers and then put it back in its scabbard.

  Jake grabs one of the girls and uses his knife to cut away her dress. Her skin is soft and brown. She is very young. ‘Take the other one outside,’ says Jake. ‘Enjoy yourself.’

  I grab the second girl. She too is young, her hair tied in two long braids, small breasts and slightly plump with puppy fat. Her eyes are wide and frightened. Her fear makes me feel brave and strong and I seize her wrist and twist her towards the daylight, pushing her ahead of me and out of the tepee. Behind me I hear Jake unzipping his fly while the girl makes small, pleading noises. I am excited, and once out of the tepee I trip the girl so that she falls on her back. She draws up her legs and tries to curl up. I reach down to her. As I do I hear a noise behind me and I turn around, hand on my gun. It is………

  …..Grey. Inside the recording studio. I am trembling and sweating, and I feel both excited and disgusted at the same time. Excited at what I had been doing, thrilled at the way I’d killed the old woman and taken her daughter, yet also sick with the disgust at the way I’d been acting. Or maybe it was more that I was disgusted at the fact that I’d been enjoying it.

  Max is by my side, and Herbie is there, too. Ruth springs up and puts her front paws close to my head and she nuzzles my ear.

  ‘You look terrible,’ she says, and licks my cheek. ‘Are you okay?’ says Max.

  ‘I’m fine,’ I say, but I’m not sure if that’s the truth.

  Max removes the headset and places it on its stand. I sit up and rub my eyes. ‘You look like you need a coffee, a real coffee,’ says Ruth.

  ‘Can you get me a coffee, Herbie?’ I say, sitting up. I needn’t tell him not to bother with the decaf rubbish, he knows what I like. And what I don’t like.

  I wait until Herbie leaves the booth before I turn on Max. ‘Did you know what it is on that psi-disc?’ I ask.

  He looks surprised. ‘Western, cowboys and indians,’ he says, looking at a clipboard in his hand. ‘What’s the problem, Leif?’

  ‘Who was the Dreamer?’ I ask.

  He looks at the clipboard again and I know he’s playing for time. He knows all the Dreamers and I’m damn sure he knows everything there is to know about the three who died.

  ‘Nick Woolrich,’ he says.

  ‘Never heard of him.’

  ‘I’m not surprised. It was his first psi-disc. Was it good?’

  I ignore his question because I don’t think he’s being entirely honest with me. ‘What can you tell me about him?’

  Yet again he examines the clipboard and I want to take it from him and break it over his head. ‘Calm down,’ says Ruth. ‘You look like you’re going to explode.’

  She’s right, I feel angry and all revved up, I think it’s a spill over from the psi-disc, Max is one of my oldest friends, I’d never want to hurt him no matter what games he plays.

  ‘He’s a youngster, did very well in the entrance examination, and this was his first feature.’

  ‘Have you seen the storyboard?’ Of course he had. But he looks at me and says no.

  ‘It’s gone upstairs,’ he says. ‘Upstairs?’

  ‘The top,’ he says. ‘Chief executive’s office.’

  ‘I want to see him,’ I say. ‘Now.’

&
nbsp; Max nods, but he doesn’t seem to be taking me seriously. Ruth jumps up onto the couch and leans against me. She is growling protectively and for all I know she’s planning to spring at him.

  ‘You betta believe it,’ she says, and she continues to growl at him. ‘I mean it, Max. Now.’

  ‘I’ll speak to his secretary,’ he says and he leaves me alone in the booth.

  ‘I’m still here,’ says Ruth. Alone except for Ruth.

  ‘What happened?’ she asks, her head on one side, studying me with her hazel eyes.

  ‘It was so violent, far more violent than anything I’ve ever experienced,’ I tell her. ‘There’s no way it would get past the censors. If nothing else it contravened the rule that the viewer mustn’t directly participate in violent or sexual acts. It doesn’t make sense, Ruth. Every Dreamer knows that anyone plugging into a psi-disc must be an observer, not a participant. It’s okay to see someone being killed, and to take part in fights, but they must not kill themselves. It’s okay to watch a rape, but not to take part.’

  ‘And that psi-disc allowed you to take part,’ she asks.

  ‘Not allows,’ I say. ‘Encourages. Pushes. Entices.’

  Max returns and tells me that Louis Aintrell will see me right away. I should bloody well hope so, too. In the last four and a half years I’ve earned CBS something like $75 billion.

  ‘Aren’t you going to clean yourself up first?’ asks Max as I leave the cubicle.

  ‘No time,’ I say. Herbie returns with a plastic beaker of coffee and he hands it to me. ‘Thanks, Herbie. Can you get me a towel?’

  I go behind the screen and change back into my suit. Herbie passes me a towel over and I use it to wipe the gunge off my head. They walk me to the lift but I insist that I go up to the penthouse offices alone. Alone except for Ruth.

  *

  The lift tells me that it’s thirty degrees outside and that the dollar is up two points against the yen and down four against the yuan, whatever that means, and then it starts reciting the latest Tokyo stock prices. Japanese defence stocks are up on the news that Shosadio Industries has signed a 75 billion yen deal to sell strategic nuclear warheads to Thailand. I tell it to be quiet and it obeys. I have to pass two secretaries and a personal assistant to get to Louis Aintrell’s office. He and his personal staff take up the whole of the penthouse floor and his office is big enough to land a small plane. The chief executive of CBS has an ego to match, the sort of ego that enters a room a good thirty seconds before he does.

  He is dressed, as always, immaculately, a suit of deepest blue, a dazzlingly white silk shirt and a red power tie. He walks to greet me, hand outstretched showing two inches of white cuff and a solid gold link, flashing the Aintrell smile. He pumps my hand up and down and tells me it’s great to see me and how long as it been. Almost a year I say and he shakes his head in disbelief.

  His hair is perfectly combed, as black and gleaming as his shoes, with just a hint of grey at the temples, his skin is tight and unmarked and does little to dispel the rumours that he has had a face-lift. But what the hell, who hasn’t these days?

  He gazes around his airfield of an office like a helicopter pilot looking for a landing site and chooses two dark green velvet armchairs in front of a long, low coffee table. He steers me towards them and waits for me to get comfortable before he speaks.

  ‘Well Leif, Max seems to think you have something very important to discuss with me, important enough to justify me rearranging my diary. Here I am, how can I help you?’ he says. He looks deep into my eyes like a father confessor and smiles that smile that had housewives all over America swooning when he was anchor man on prime time 3-D news for one of the major networks over a quarter of a century ago, before he switched to management and before the psi-discs were on the market.

  ‘This man is a greaseball,’ says Ruth. She has plonked herself down in front of Aintrell and is glaring at him.

  I want to laugh but I know Aintrell will misunderstand so I bite the inside of my cheek and try to keep a serious look on my face.

  ‘Have you seen the storyboard of the psi-disc that Nick Woolrich was working on, the cowboys and indians romp?’

  ‘It passed over my desk some time ago, I think it’s back with the Creative Department now.’

  ‘But you agreed it?’

  ‘Hell Leif, you know the system as well as I do. It comes from Creative to me and then to Legal and then to Recording. Of course I saw it.’

  ‘His eyes are too close together,’ says Ruth. The Aintrell smile never had any effect on her, and right now it’s doing nothing for me, either.

  ‘You saw nothing wrong with the storyboard?’ I ask and he shakes his head. ‘Such as?’ he asks.

  ‘Such as participating in killings and rape,’ I say, and even as I say it I get a tingle remembering how the girl looked as I grabbed her. Frightened. Weak. Defenceless.

  Aintrell sighs and leans forward. ‘Okay, okay, I admit it was sailing fairly close to the wind, but it was his first disc. We wanted to give him a free reign, let his creativity express itself, rather than stifling him from Day One.’

  ‘There’s creative flow and there’s downright illegalities, and the law says that psi-disc viewers can only observe acts of violence or sex. We both know it’s illegal to allow viewers to take part.’ Aintrell laughs, throwing his head back and raising his hands in the air. ‘Are you trying to tell me you’ve never plugged into a porn psi-disc?’ he asks.

  ‘No, I’m not saying that. I’m saying that making them is illegal.’

  ‘Illegal now, I agree,’ he says. ‘But laws change. Alcohol was illegal during prohibition. Until a few years ago marijuana was illegal. The law is flexible. It evolves.’

  ‘And you’re expecting the law on psi-discs to change?’

  ‘No Leif, I’m not saying that at all. Laws are for the politicians to decide, not businessmen. What I am saying is that we decided to allow the youngster free reign.’

  ‘Even though it was illegal?’

  ‘Maybe because it is illegal,’ says Ruth. ‘Perhaps he wants to stay one step ahead of the competition.’

  ‘I think I’m just repeating myself now, Leif,’ says Aintrell wearily. ‘All I can do is to assure you that there was no question of CBS releasing the Woolrich psi-disc, not as the law stands at the moment, anyway.’

  ‘But you wouldn’t be averse to stockpiling a few illegal discs on the off-chance that the law changes, would you?’ I ask, and I get the Aintrell smile. He stands up and Ruth shuffles backwards to give him room to get by. I get up too and Aintrell shows me to the door.

  ‘What do you think happened to the three Dreamers?’ I ask him on the way out. He puts his arm around my shoulders and it feels like a boa constrictor preparing to squeeze the life out of me.

  ‘Leif, we’re all hoping you can tell us,’ he says.

  ‘Have our competitors lost any Dreamers?’ I say, the thought coming to me out of the blue. Recorded Cerebral Artists Inc have just as many Dreamers as the Corporation.

  ‘I don’t know, I’ll find out and get back to you. Take care Leif, I mean it. We’ll talk again soon, I promise. And good luck with the remaining two psi-discs.’ He keeps talking as he ushers me out, not giving me a chance to speak. The door closes behind me, narrowly missing Ruth’s tail.

  ‘Makes you wonder why he hasn’t already asked RCA, doesn’t it?’ says Ruth. ‘Yeah, that’s what I was thinking,’ I reply.

  ‘I know,’ she says, and sticks her nose up in the air. Cute.

  We go back to see Max and Herbie, and when we walk into Max’s office the two of them suddenly stop talking and they look guilty as if they’d been sharing a dirty joke.

  ‘How is he?’ asks Max.

  ‘Same as usual,’ I reply. ‘Ego the size of a planet.’

  ‘He wants you to plug into the other two psi-discs?’

  I nod, and so does Ruth. ‘Yeah, but not today. I’m knackered.’

  ‘That bad?’ asks Herbie and I sa
y yes, it was that bad.

  We say our goodbyes to Max and see ourselves out.

  The lift tells us to have a nice day and Ruth tells it do something anatomically impossible with a duck.

  Herbie has the limo ready and waiting outside the building but I tell him I’d rather walk.

  ‘Home?’ he asks, and I say yes. Standing on the pavement, I ask him if he has much contact with any of his opposite numbers at RCA. His eyes narrow, sensing a trap, because fraternising is strictly forbidden in our contracts. CBS and RCA are practically at war.

  ‘Don’t worry, Herbie,’ I tell him, ‘it won’t go any further. I just need to know if RCA is having the same problems that we are.’

  ‘You want to speak with one of the RCA Dreamers?’ he says.

  ‘Not necessarily,’ I say. ‘One of their minders will do. Someone in the know, anyway.’

  ‘I’ll see what I can do,’ says Herbie.

  ‘By tomorrow,’ I tell him, but he understands the urgency. He takes the car, Ruth and I walk. A down and out in a thick black coat and a red, green and yellow scarf knotted around his neck tries to bum $50 off me. His teeth are black and his skin is covered with red blotches and his breath reeks of something alcoholic, something only distantly related to a 10-year-old Japanese malt. His eyes are fixed on me but he seems to be staring into middle distance, the look of a psi-disc viewer. Ruth growls at him but he ignores her. He’s real enough. Real and poor. I take out my wallet and give him $50. He takes the note and moves away without thanking me. Without even seeing me.

  Two smartly dressed businessmen talking on video phones give me a strange look as they walk briskly past and I remember that I’m totally bald. On the way back to the flat I think back over Woolrich’s psi-disc. The images were so strong that they had stuck in my mind far more than psi-discs normally did. It had lacked depth, sure, but there was so much power and energy in it, some sort of force that had pulled me through it even though my subconscious wanted to fight against it. I wondered whether or not I could lay down a disc as strong as that. Mine tend to be more subtle, more characterisation and more complex plots. There is always action, sure, that’s what makes the psi-discs so popular, but I use action as part of the development of the plot. I’m not averse to seeing characters die, and die violently, but there has to be a reason for it. Sex can also add spice to a disc, even rape, but Woolrich’s psi-disc seemed to have no other reason than to titillate. Even that would be okay if it wasn’t for the fact that it was the viewer who actually took part in the rapes and killings. Hell, I’m no prude, and Aintrell was right, everyone gets a kick out of the illegal porno discs, but the only ones I’ve ever plugged into have been voyeuristic. And there is a difference. It’s one thing to watch a rape, it’s something totally different to take part. The psychologists have pretty much discounted on the theory that commercial psi-discs can encourage susceptible individuals to copy what they view, though a growing number of rapists still claim that they only did it because they were corrupted by porno psi-discs. But they do agree that allowing the viewer to actually experience the violence and sex is likely to corrupt, especially if viewed over a long period. The psi-discs could become a rehearsal for the real thing. I hadn’t been convinced before, but after plugging into Woolrich’s little saga I now knew what they mean. For a period after coming out of the disc I was on an emotional high that is only now starting to wear off. I actually did want to kill and to rape, it was burning through me like an intense hunger. And that was after just one viewing. Imagine what I’d be like after weeks, or even months, of plugging into psi-discs like that. I’d be an animal.