Jaguar (12 page)

“That monster what started this thing—that prikaza, Jaguar . . . ,” Old Cristina pulled out her blouse, spat on her breast and snapped the elastic back, “we are onto him, yes. We have done him much harm. His stupidity killed many, it’s true, but we have done him harm.”

“How can we harm what doesn’t exist?” Stefan asked.

Stefan was Old Cristina’s cousin and one of her political advisors.

“The Jaguar is a myth. It’s those priests, who
say
there’s a Jaguar, who ruin the accords we fought for, who do these things. . . .”

“Yes,” Cristina swept her arm around her head, indicating the gray barrens around their encampment, “the priests would destroy the accords. But this . . .
this
is the doing of something more than a handful of spleef-whiffers. The Dark Ages. The plagues. . . .”

“Henry said the government made the plagues. . . .”

“Don’t interrup,” Cristina waved a finger at Stefan’s nose. “Don’t interrup when the elder talk. Nobody interrup the Romni Bari. Got it?”

Stefan nodded and answered in a low voice, “Yes.”

“Good. Yes. The plagues maybe was a government job. Lab says they are a
doing
. Or an undoing, by someone who is playing with some big fire. Not God.”

Afriqua Lee’s familiya travelled the northlands every year from May to September, spending an extra month or so on the coast when hard times dictated.

Trips up and down the coast included boat-trading and selling, manufacture of small hovercraft, electronics and magnetics devices—each under the auspices of a different familiya. Transportation, communication and repair were the way of life of the Roam, under the new accords.

“Buy ’em, sell ’em, trade ’em. Vera’s magnometries and holographic art.”

The sides of their many vans hawked their wares.

The Roam stored components and electronics gear in huge refrigerator vans with air conditioning and temperature regulation—all offshoots of their meticulous cleanliness.

“Peoples have good ideas, yes, and the accords start us out a good government. But those priests. . . .” Again, she spat. “Anyway, now somebody makes these bugs. Nobody can find who. Cities think awhile maybe it’s the Roam. Now peoples be saying it’s this Jaguar. Peoples dying every day, noplace to bury in cities . . . horrible, girl, horrible.”

Afriqua Lee had heard of the huge death vans cruising the streets. The vans were for hauling away bodies.

“Did they want to kill
everybody
. . .”

A plump finger tapped the girl’s nose and her eyes watered from the strong garlic smell.

“There is a Jaguar,” the Romni pronounced, “I say it is his doing. He unleashes his priests on us while he brews a bigger pot of misery. I think he just likes to.”

Afriqua Lee closed her eyes, saw something like a shadow with bright, blue eyes. She shuddered off the sudden chill, and slipped out the door to school.

Marie de Manaceine . . . kept puppies awake for periods from
four to six days and found to her surprise that this killed them.

—Christopher Evans,
Landscapes of the Night

In Rafferty’s memory of that bleak, muddy autumn five years ago Old Cristina and the Roam materialized with the mist one morning, as the Roam had appeared on this spot every autumn for centuries. They mourned Uncle Hungry in their raucous, spirited way and made a place for Rafferty at their tables.

Then, with the stiffening of winter, they ghosted away one night as suddenly as they had come. Teenagers of the Mopan kumpania rode cleanup for the Roam, returning the site to normal, covering their tracks. They would straddle their little scoutcraft and catch up to the Roam’s convoy of giant vans by midday.

Pulling up stakes was a serious matter among the Roam. Many a generation had survived over several thousand years because the entire Roam could strike even the largest rendezvous overnight. At its peak, the Roam numbered seven million souls. As many as two million had shared rendezvous at one time and they became, for that three months, the largest city in the world. But when they pulled up stakes, they did it in one night.

Uncle’s place settled into its winter silence. The familiyi disappeared every year but their influence lingered through all four seasons. Now that he travelled the dreamways, Rafferty found it possible to keep them with him, to learn from their greatest minds in his sleep.

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.”