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

by Stephen Leather

  ‘To sleep,’ I say.

  ‘Perchance to dream,’ we all chorus, and drink each other’s health. It’s an old joke.

  ‘What’s it going to be about?’ asks Robbie and Rick jabs him in the ribs with his elbow, spilling his drink.

  ‘It’s bad luck to ask,’ says Rick. ‘You know better than that.’

  Robbie looks shamefaced and apologises, but I say no, it’s okay, and I give him the bare bones of the plot. Hell, it’s not as if anyone can steal a dream.

  They both say that it sounds good and wish me well, but I can see that there is something on their minds, something they want to tell me but don’t know how to raise the subject, like maybe there’s something unsavoury stuck to my upper lip, or more likely they’ve heard what’s been happening to the other Dreamers.

  We sit and laugh and joke and drink, and twice Rick takes a small gold tube from his shirt pocket and uses a small gold spoon to sniff cocaine. Nobody pays him any attention. Both times he offers it to Robbie but he turns it down, maybe out of respect to me, I don’t know.

  Every now and again one or the other would lapse into silence and look off into the middle distance as if occupied with some weighty mental arithmetic and after a few seconds would snap back as if awaking from sleep, and a couple of times Rick would jump as if somebody had prodded him in the small of the back. I wonder how they managed to keep themselves sane, what with dreaming and taking drugs, and then I have a flash, a sudden vision of the three of us sitting here, each with our own individual guardians of our sanity. Me with my bobcat with hazel eyes, and Robbie and Rick with whatever their minds had conjured up, as real to them as Ruth is to me.

  ‘How do you keep sane?’ asks Rick, as if he’s been reading my mind. ‘What do you mean?’ I say, not sure if I understand him.

  He looks to the right and to the left and then juts his head forward so that it’s just inches from mine. He grins and it’s an evil smile, but his eyes are warm. Watering and bloodshot, but friendly. ‘Sometimes, Leif, I see things. Things that aren’t there.’ He laughs, a jerky, uneven sound that sets my teeth on edge. ‘And sometimes I don’t see things that I know are there.’

  Robbie looks very uneasy and seems unsure of how to react to Rick. Maybe he’s worried that I’ll report him to the Corporation shrink and that his contract will be killed. Robbie smiles nervously at me and says that Rick is spaced out and that he doesn’t know what he’s saying. Rick slams his fist down on the table, rattling our glasses, and tells his friend to mind his own business.

  ‘Hey, stay cool,’ I say. ‘I know what you mean, it’s okay. It happens to us all.’

  ‘I know that,’ says Rick. ‘We all know that. But what they don’t tell us is how to stay sane. Why the hell won’t they tell us?’ He leans forward and his head thuds against the table top. He begins to bang his head again and again against the hard wood surface. Considering the amount of powder he’s been pushing up his nostrils, I doubt if he’s feeling any pain. I put my hand on his shoulder and shake him softly but he ignores me.

  Robbie shrugs. ‘He gets like this a lot,’ he says.

  ‘We all do,’ I reply. ‘It’s just that we show it in different ways.’

  Robbie looks grateful, like a hungry dog that’s been thrown a meaty bone. ‘You mean, you see things too?’

  Ruth growls, deep and low, the sound of a piece of wood being rubbed against tree bark. ‘Careful Leif,’ she says. ‘Careful what you say.’

  I know what she means. I don’t know these guys well enough to start spilling my guts to them. Just because they wear their hearts on their sleeves is no reason for me to open up to them, at least not about Ruth.

  ‘You have to keep a grip on your senses, Robbie,’ I say, choosing my words carefully. ‘You have to know what is real, and what isn’t. And you have to hold onto that.’

  He closes his eyes and shakes his head. ‘God, I wish it was as simple as that,’ he says. So do I. ‘Try and get someone to act as a benchmark,’ I say. ‘Someone who can tell you what is and what isn’t reality. Someone who can tell you when you are dreaming.’ And that is as close as I am going to get to opening up about Ruth, my benchmark.

  My pearls of wisdom don’t seem to make him feel any easier, but Rick stops banging his head against the table, thank God, and sits back in his seat, watching the lights above the dance floor and sniffing.

  The couple in the booth next to us, a young man with slick-backed hair in a dark blue Italian suit and a blonde girl in a tight lime-green body stocking, sit with their hands clasped on the table, wearing psi-disc headsets and spaced out grins on their faces.

  Robbie sees me looking at them. ‘It’s killing the art of conversation,’ he laughs.

  ‘Yeah,’ I agree. ‘It’s killing everything. Why bother living if you can buy dreams instead?’

  He nods. ‘I thought of getting a dog,’ he says quietly.

  ‘A dog?’

  ‘Yeah, a pet. I figured it might help, you know? Like they used to have seeing-eye dogs in the days before transplants. Maybe the dog would tell me.’

  I don’t know what to say to him and I feel sort of embarrassed. Rick slaps him on the back. ‘I’ve got a great idea,’ he says.

  ‘What,’ says Robbie, and he sounds wary.

  ‘I’ll buy you a dog,’ he says. ‘And we’ll call it Stay. Great name for a dog. Every time you want it to come you’ll have to shout ‘Come here, Stay. Come here.’ He’ll soon be as crazy as we are.’ He starts to giggle and Robbie pushes him away, a look of disgust on his face, but after a while he begins to laugh, too. Our glasses are empty so I wave at a waitress and she staggers over on four inch high heels and pushes her cleavage in my face. I guess the barman told her about the chipcard. She looks me full in the eye and pouts her lips and in a husky voice asks me what I’d like. Just a hunch, but I reckon that if I play my cards right I could have her. Rick reaches over and runs the back of his hand over her breasts and she makes to swat it away with her tray and then she notices his chipcard on the table in front of him and she points her impressive bosom at him full on like a battleship aiming its guns. Fickle bitch.

  ‘How much?’ he asks, looking her up and down, following her curves with his eyes. She’s pretty, in a tarty way, with big, trusting eyes and long lashes and wavy, chestnut brown hair.

  ‘I beg your pardon?’ she says, but it’s obvious that she knows what he means.

  Rick leans over the table and plays with his chipcard, flexing it backwards and forwards. He smiles and raises his eyebrows and sniffs. ‘You,’ he says. ‘And me,’ he says. ‘In a big bed with satin sheets,’ he says.

  She breaths in sharply and we all watch her breasts rise and fall.

  ‘What sort of girl do you think I am?’ she asks, but we already know what sort of girl she is, all we’re doing now is fixing the price.

  ‘Ten thousand,’ he says quietly.

  ‘Twenty five,’ she says, totally unfazed about selling herself in public.

  ‘Fifteen,’ says Rick, even though it doesn’t matter one way or another what the final price is because the Corporation will pick up the tab.

  ‘Twenty two,’ she says and Rick leans back in his seat.

  ‘Naw,’ he says. ‘I’ve changed my mind. Get us another round of drinks instead.’

  She doesn’t believe he’s serious and stands there smiling, pursing her lips and holding her chin up so we can see what a long, smooth, sensuous neck she has, and how it flows unflawed down to her soft, inviting cleavage.

  ‘Behave, Leif,’ says Ruth archly. ‘You’re old enough to be her father.’ She jumps up next to Robbie and sits there cleaning her whiskers.

  ‘OK, fifteen,’ she says. ‘Fifteen is okay.’

  Rick waves her away, and the smile has gone from his face. ‘You had your chance, love, and you blew it. Run along and get us some drinks, will you?’

  She glares at him with pure hatred and then turns on her heels and clicks away, and we all watch her backsi
de writhe under her tight skirt.

  ‘You are an animal,’ says Robbie.

  ‘Huh,’ says Ruth, and I know what she means. Animals don’t treat each other like that, not with such contempt. That’s the prerogative of us humans.

  ‘Silly bitch,’ sneers Rick, and Ruth gives him a warning growl. ‘But a great figure. Maybe I’ll change my mind later.’ He helps himself to another blast of white powder and his eyes get the same glassy look as the two kids plugged into the psi-disc. I wonder which is the more addicted, and whether the dreams or the drug has the more potent side effects.

  ‘How did you get to be a Dreamer?’ Robbie asks me, and I shrug.

  ‘Took the tests, like everyone else.’

  ‘But you’re….’ He hesitates, unsure what to say, but I get the drift.

  ‘Older than usual,’ I finish for him and he nods.

  ‘Yeah,’ he says. ‘No offense, but….’

  ‘That’s okay,’ I say. ‘I never set out to be a Dreamer. I was a novelist.’

  ‘Books?’ says Robbie in amazement and Ruth snorts at his deductive powers.

  ‘Yeah, believe it or not.’

  ‘There’s no money in books, surely?’

  ‘Not now there isn’t, no. But there used to be. I was good enough to make a decent living at it, before psi-discs came on the market. By then I had two ex-wives and seven figure alimony payments to make and my agent told me to take the test. I don’t think either of us thought I’d get anywhere, but I was a natural.’

  ‘What’s it like, writing books?’ he asks. He looks really impressed and that surprises me because he’s a Dreamer, a real talent using pure imagination to build fantasy worlds, and he wants to know what it’s like putting words on paper. Weird.

  ‘Hard work, a real grind,’ I answer, my head full of memories of hours sitting in front of a VDU when the words wouldn’t come, when the pictures would be in my head but I simply couldn’t find the words to describe them, when I knew what the characters wanted to say to each other but I couldn’t write the dialogue. Wordless days would turn into wordless evenings and then I’d turn to the bottle. Other days the words would pour onto the page and sometimes that was worse, because the fictional world that I created was always so much better than the one I lived in. The women were prettier and more loving, the conversations always wittier, the settings always perfect, so much so that I began to resent the imperfections of the real world. And that made me turn to the bottle, too.

  ‘Let’s face it, Leif, you were just looking for an excuse to drink,’ says Ruth and I want to argue with her and tell her that she’s wrong, that I was just a victim of the constant battle between perception and reality, an innocent bystander, but what the hell, maybe I am just fooling myself.

  Robbie is still hanging on my every word while Rick has slumped back in his seat and is squinting at the flashing lights.

  ‘It’s a totally different skill to Dreaming. When you’re laying down a dream you have to hold the whole thing in your head, but when you’re writing you have to do it bit by bit, with more explanation, more descriptions.’

  ‘More depth,’ says Robbie, and he’s right. More depth. Dreams are the big sellers, the mega money earners, but they’re shallow. They’re in three dimensions but they have no depth. You plug in, it’s real, you pull out, it’s gone. The experience is vivid and moving, but it doesn’t require any thought or analysis. I’d forgotten that, how I used to treat the psi-disc Corporations with the same contempt that Rick had shown the waitress. How I swore I’d never prostitute the talent I thought I had. Yeah, well that was then and this is now. My ex-wives lawyers want cheques, not unpublished manuscripts.

  The waitress comes back with murder in her eyes and puts the drinks down on the table with enough force to register on the Richter Scale, but Rick doesn’t even notice her. My drink tastes metallic, at least the first mouthful does but the second seems okay.’

  ‘I tried writing a novel while I was researching my second disc,’ says Rick and he sounds as if he’s ashamed, as if he’s just told me he had a social disease. ‘I never finished it.’

  ‘You should,’ I say. ‘Mostly it’s just a matter of sticking at it, getting the words down on paper, and then correcting it and polishing it until it’s right. What’s it they say, ninety five perspiration and five per cent inspiration?’

  ‘Yeah, the exact opposite of Dreaming,’ says Rick, his eyes still fixed on the flashing lights. We all nod in agreement. It doesn’t matter how hard you work at being a Dreamer, you can either do it or you can’t, working at it doesn’t help. Sure, you can improve the quality by researching and checking locations and so on, but at the end of the day you still have to have the genetic make-up, the gift, or whatever the hell it is that separates Dreamers from the rest of the world.

  ‘Has the Corporation been asking you to beef up the content of your next psi-disc?’ I ask Robbie.

  ‘Beef up?’ he says.

  ‘Yeah, you know, more sex and violence, that sort of thing.’

  ‘Yeah, my minder has been suggesting that I make them more realistic, let the viewer take part rather than just observing, so that they get in close. And not to be inhibited by the regulations.’

  ‘By the censors, you mean?’

  ‘Yeah, he hinted that the law might be changing soon and that we should get ready to take advantage of it.’

  ‘Full sex?’

  ‘He didn’t say that, no.’

  ‘And killings?’

  ‘Killings have always been okay, you know that. But the viewer’s not allowed to participate, that’s not going to change, is it?’

  ‘I dunno. What about you, Rick?’

  Rick seems to snap back to reality with a jerk and I wonder what he was looking at and if it was real or something that his mind had created.

  ‘Say what?’

  ‘We were just talking about sex and violence,’ I tell him.

  Rick raises his glass. ‘Here’s to it,’ he says.

  ‘Have you been told to put a bit more sex and violence into your next disc?’

  ‘For sure,’ he says and drinks noisily and then wipes his lip with his hand and then starts to massage the bridge of his nose. There are flecks of blood below his nostrils. ‘They told me the Corporation would prefer it if I went a bit further than usual. And my stuff has always been on the edge of good taste, you might say. The last one was touch and go with the censors, but they want me to let myself rip on the next one. I’m looking forward to it. That waitress is giving me a few good ideas already.’

  ‘Rick, who was it who told you to let yourself rip?’

  ‘Louis Aintrell of course,’ he says. ‘The Big Man himself. Right from the top. Along with the promise of a big bonus if I come up with the goods.’

  So there it is. Helen Gwynne was right, the Corporation is banking on a change in the regulations and Louis Aintrell is the sort who would quite happily engineer a change in the law if it meant a boost in ratings and profits.

  ‘What about you,’ asks Rick. ‘Are they trying to get you to do the same?’

  I shake my head. ‘They either reckon I’m too old or too close to retirement,’ I say.

  ‘Rubbish,’ says Ruth. ‘You can go on for ever.’ She looks annoyed, her claws make a slow scratching noise on the chair as she clenches and unclenches them.

  A frown suddenly crosses Robbie’s face and he looks 10 years older. ‘You don’t think there’s any connection between the new instructions and the Dreamers who died, do you?’ he asks.

  ‘I dunno,’ I say. ‘What have you heard?’

  ‘Just that there have been a few unexplained deaths among Dreamers, that’s all. The rumour is that there’s something wrong with the equipment but you never know. I don’t trust the suits, not one bit.’

  Rick snorts but I’m not sure if it’s a sign of disbelief or if the caked powder is blocking his nasal passages. ‘It’s not the equipment,’ he says. ‘Dreamers are dying all over, its not just hap
pening at CBS.’

  ‘So what do you think it is?’ I ask.

  Rick leans over the table and juts out his chin. ‘If you ask me, there’s somebody out there with a grudge against Dreamers. A nutter, a psycho. They’ll catch him before long. Or her.’

  ‘Come off it, Rick,’ says Robbie scornfully. ‘The Dreamers died in the studio, they weren’t shot or knifed. Total brain death is what I heard.’

  ‘Well, I for one refuse to let it spoil my life,’ says Rick. ‘I’ve got four months to go and I’m gonna live it like there was no tomorrow.’ He reaches for his cocaine supply and shovels a spoonful up each nostril and sniffs in short bursts.

  ‘If he keeps on like that there isn’t going to be a tomorrow,’ says Ruth. ‘How much did she say?’ says Rick.

  ‘Fifteen,’ says Robbie.

  Rick sighs and sniffs. ‘I reckon she might just be worth it. What do you think?’ he asks me. ‘Up to you,’ I say. ‘You won’t know till afterwards.’ You never do. I once got Herbert to fix me up with an Arabian princess and that set me back half a million dollars. Correction, it cost the Corporation half a million dollars. And no, she wasn’t worth it.

  I stayed with them for another round of drinks and then I left them to it because I’d found out what I wanted to know. The couple at the next table were still locked into their psi-disc, inane grins on their faces and blank eyes. The bouncer wished me a good night as I went out, Ruth at my heels.

  I hail a cab and allow Ruth to climb in the back first. There is a psi-disc player there and a selection of short-playing discs, from five minutes up to half an hour. The shorter ones were the experience type, you know, try your hand at sky-diving, skiing, scuba diving, that sort of thing. It’s getting to the stage now where the Corporations are trying to fill up every minute of the population’s spare time. I’m sure if they could manage it they’d like nothing more than to see everyone hooked up 24 hours a day. Scary.

  *

  Ruth wakes me up, gently butting me with her nose and licking my cheek with her sandpaper tongue.

  ‘Wake up, you’ll be late,’ she says when I eventually open my eyes. She is standing on the bed, front paws on the pillow, looking down at me and breathing her hot breath on my face. She puts her head on one side and I can see the tip of her tongue protruding from between her white teeth. I pull one of my arms from under the quilt and ruffle the fur between her eyebrows and she closes her eyes and purrs.