Jaguar (30 page)

Maryellen kissed his face and ear and neck, rubbed his back with both of her hands, shifted her legs slightly to relieve some of his weight and noticed, with the shifting, that the tickle was still there, only now it had a pulse. So she moved against him there a while longer, an hour longer, all night, tomorrow. Then Eddie moved away and lay beside her.

“Whew!” was all he said.

But he held her, and she liked that. His hand rustled along her belly, over and under her sweaty breasts, back to her belly. It dropped down into her hair, damp and matted, and traced circles around the tops and insides of her thighs.

She didn’t know why, but she didn’t want to touch him
there
. Maybe the dampness, the layer of slickness that she felt cooling on her own skin, maybe the thing he was wearing kept her hands on his back and hips. She pressed against him again, her back slightly turned, and rested one hand on his thigh and the other under his head.

Eddie jolted upright.

“Dammit!”

“What?” she asked, and jerked her sleeping against her chest. “What’s the matter?”

“It’s gone.”

“What’s gone?”

“The rubber,” Eddie said. “It’s gone.”

He felt around their tangle of a bed.

Maryellen felt around, too, and hoped that he would find it first. Then she knew where it must be.

“I know where it is.”

“Oh, yeah?” he asked. “Where?”

She sat up, cross-legged, with her back to him at the foot of the bed. The tilt from the broken slat made holding her balance difficult.

“Don’t look, please,” she said. “You’ll embarrass me.”

“I can’t see, it’s dark in here.”

“Not that dark. Don’t look, anyway.”

She slid her fingers inside herself, swampy, her cheeks blazing.

“Here,” he touched her thigh, “let me.”

“No, I can do it. . . .”

He heard it
thlap
to the floor.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

He sat up beside her. The gusting rattle of rain slowed, rattled, slowed, and stopped. His hand still held lightly to the inside of her thigh.

“I
am
sorry.”

“It quit raining,” she said.

Eddie knelt on the bed in front of her, looked into her eyes that were huge and black in the low lamp glow. Now that the rain stopped he heard the tiny liquid
click click
of Maryellen’s eye blinks marking time. Her hand brushed the back of his neck, her eyes closed slowly and her mouth moved to his. This time, at the foot of the bed in the loft hot with the stove and in the stillness of the clearing night, the tingle in her belly exploded and she answered his unasked question
Yes, oh yes
in his rushing ear.

III
BEYOND

The dream is a natural occurrence, and there is no earthly reason
why we should assume it is a crafty device to lead us astray . . .
Nature is often obscure and impenetrable, but she is not like
man, deceitful. We must therefore take it that the dream is
just what it pretends to be, neither more nor less.

—C. G. Jung,
Collected Works

The Jaguar had done a lot of sniffing with other peoples’ noses, and the trail of a certain rustler became hotter by the hour. He left that task to his underlings. The Jaguar’s energies were better spent on himself. Lately, he had invested them well and now he would reap the returns.

He had isolated the chemistry of the butterfly effect and found that it was not only a chemistry but a pathway. When he linked his Jaguar priests, he witnessed part of the principle that had taken him years to understand.

Like a coil, an old magneto, an accelerometer,
he thought,
they work in series to extend my reach, my power.

But the source of the power itself eluded him. At first, he was frightened by his power, by the illness it brought him. Then, he saw his salvation from the military, from his petty, pitiful life and, ultimately, he saw his crown.

Why me?

He’d wondered this thousands of times over nearly twenty years. Now he knew.

His brain was different. He presumed an accident of birth made him this way, but it could well have been one of his many beatings as a child. At times he felt his brain accumulate a charge, like the arming sequence on a missile. Discharge threw lightning into a neural circuit of the cortex that flung him through the fabric. It also generated a bit of heat, and swelling, and the charge took time to build.

But I have it now,
he gloated.
I can charge up that battery at will.

One day the rustler would discharge, and the Jaguar would move in, and the problem of his pitiful body would be solved. He shuddered when he thought of how close he’d come to making a fatal mistake. Had he taken one of his cattle, one without the pathway, no amount of chemistry would have helped him back to the dreamways. The Jaguar might have become cattle to one of his own priests, and the danger had passed too close to be amusing.

Maybe others tried this, and the histories called it “possession.”

Except the possession was mutual—the body trapped the intruder while the intruder overrode the mind.

No exit,
he shuddered again,
a living death.

The Jaguar felt the shudder this time, his real body was coming around. The Thanksgiving holiday made masking his awakening easier in spite of monitors and electrodes. He was saving up his charge in case his priests needed him.

They’ve botched things again,
he thought.
If I have to rescue them this time, heads will roll.

He corrected the thought, and allowed himself a sliver of a grin.

No. Heads will
glow
.

The hospital fielded a skeleton staff for the holidays. Most of the psych patients had been fed to lethargy, permitted leave or drugged to drool. The Jaguar kept this waking quiet. He would rest awhile, safe from the medical records clerk whom he knew to be the agency’s man. This sneak reported back to the brass every time his electrodes betrayed him. The Jaguar was getting a handle on the electrodes, too.

Max still had a way of getting product and the Jaguar had long since learned the folly of making it up. Max had a way of getting answers to questions he asked and to the more important ones that he didn’t. As far as Max was concerned, the Jaguar wasn’t asleep; he piloted a unique craft on a mission for his nation. Each time the Jaguar returned, Max was at his bedside for the landing, for the . . . debriefing. Each time this unpleasantness was finished, Max gave suggestions, inquiries to make, orders. He never made promises, he didn’t have to.

The dreamways pulled at the Jaguar now, he knew the clues: lapses of time, glimpses of shadows dancing behind the blue translucence of the great fabric of being. The valley itself was a great, green vortex, a spot where the fabric pulled itself into a funnel that drained into the other world.

When he wanted back on the other side, the funnel was reversed and he felt like a salmon battering its way up a fishladder. This time, he had the feeling something had slipped past him, some quick shadow through the throat of the funnel too quick for a glimpse or a grab.

The hardest part of playing possum was the natural stuff: bowel movements, personal hygiene, restlessness. The corners of his eyes were wired to betray his dreaming or to report his slip into his peculiar non-coma coma. Since full coma was non-productive, they titrated his drugs to balance him below waking but above coma. No wonder he took twenty years to figure out the chemistry of the beautiful blue butterfly in his mind.

He didn’t know how he appeared when he was out. No amount of relaxation or self-reasoning countermanded his mother’s toilet-training, so simply letting it all go into the old man’s diaper they gave him was the hardest of all. He had to pick up clues from the occasional orderly or nurse who talked to themselves while they worked.

“Weeks go by you reglar as a clock, but you in trouble, now. One more shif like this an we gon do you a enema. But not on my shif, no sir.”

The Jaguar hated hearing their talk about him, yet he slavered for it. All he knew of the self that was left of him on this side came from them. The occasional nurse or doctor tried to elicit a pain response from him to measure the depth of his sleep. One nurse, a burly veteran of Korea, enjoyed this so much that the Jaguar spent some of Max’s precious time hunting him down on the dreamways and unplugging his brain axon by dendrite. Try as he might, he never got a chance at Max.

He must be reptilian,
the Jaguar thought.
Only insects and oysters are tougher brains to crack.

The techs didn’t like their duty over the Jaguar. They cursed him, and he heard their curses. He heard everything, even when he was out, and what he didn’t catch could be played back later from storage in some convolution of his brain that he had developed to help him catch up on this side. He knew what they felt, their revulsion. It must be a fearful thing to see a human vegetable wake up every month or two or three, talk to save its pasty skin then fall back into the blessed relief of the dreamways.

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.”