Jaguar Read Online Free PDF Page B

there is a solid geometry, so there should be a solid psychology
for the cases where the calculations of plane psychology are not exact. . . .
    —Marcel Proust, Maxims

    The Jaguar didn’t think about his life before he tinkered in dreams. He didn’t want to, had no need to, refused. He was born to the dreamways by accident, and the unbridled wealth that he stumbled upon diverted him forever from the smelly mess that he had made of his life. His body anchored him to the world, but if all went well he could break that link without sacrificing his life in the process.
    The Jaguar couldn’t remember his own body—the body of Lieutenant Marco Reyes—without considerable effort. He lived on the cusp of coma. His room in the old soldier’s home that housed his body contained the standard-issue mirror, but he rarely had the opportunity to use it.
    The Jaguar recalled dark, wavy hair and narrow nose . . . no, the nose had been broken at his first debriefing . . . green eyes. Last time he saw a mirror, dark hollows surrounded those eyes. His face had been flaccid, like the rest of him, not like the ruggedness of his lean army days.
    People from real life wanted Lieutenant Reyes back in the world; they wanted what he could deliver. Marco Reyes had become the Jaguar to satisfy the people he’d met on the other side of dreams. The first dream he’d tracked across the curtain led to a jaguar priest desperate for a god, so Lieutenant Reyes crowned himself one. Now the Jaguar was infinitely greater than the GI that his small-minded world had committed to the Soldier’s Home. The high-level stuff he’d scooped from the dreamways got him off the petty charges that his body had racked up, but it also guaranteed that they would never let him leave the home alive.
    The Jaguar tracked dreams in his own world long before he ever discovered the other side. He had been the intelligence weapon who made the bomb happen for his own country while he single-handedly sabotaged certain resources in others. Those resources had been people, but that was not how the Jaguar saw them. They were a live drill to him, an opportunity to hone a skill from theory to practice. No one could prove this in any hearing in the world, since what he had done he had done through dreams.
    His military record certified him as both psychic and psychotic, and that suited the Jaguar. The brass kept off his tail except for the occasional ridiculous experiment.
    He kept a model of the world in his mind, even now, and checked off contacts as he’d made them to form an intricate webwork of light. Since he had nothing to do but explore his own mind and others, the Jaguar had no trouble recalling each of them. He stroked them with his mind, appreciative of such fine cattle. Milking them was no trick, now, though it had taken him years to learn.
    Once he realized that he dreamed in other peoples’ heads, the Jaguar took very little time to learn to explore those heads. Memories looked like tinker-toys to him, and he found that he could take them apart, rearrange them for fun. If he could recall the structure of a memory he could reproduce it within his own mind when he returned. He mined vast stores of data without ever turning a page.
    Manipulating emotions, the chemistry of the brain itself, and, eventually, the genetic makeup of the dreamer became elementary. The genetic experiments had a tendency to go wild, so he confined them to the other side of the fabric. Travelling the dreamways to the other side took a toll on him, so he set up a control by proxy and enlisted the jaguar priesthood as his primary tool.
    His subjects on this side disintegrated with alarming regularity, so he could not milk his local cattle too often.
    He discovered the fabric, the thin gauze that separated this universe from another, by accident, and by accident he survived the plunge through its shimmering weft. The other side of that nebulous fabric was all that interested him, now. He resented