Jaguar by Bill Ransom Page A

the hot blades of waking work at his flesh and suppressed a groan.
    It’s worse every time, he thought.
    With that came a whiff of fear, a sour scent associated with his minions. His last awakening had nearly killed him. The subsequent debriefing had kept him on the cusp of death for weeks, a testimony to the skills of Max and the agency that paid him.
    This waking would bring the agency down on him again with their never-ending studies and the ubiquitous Max to probe his mind. Agency methods were physical and chemical and particularly persuasive. Max enjoyed experimenting with a few tricks of his own. The Jaguar had beaten them before, but the Lee intrusion from the other side had cost him dearly.
    The particle annihilation that crisped Zachary Lee had backflashed. The momentary rent in the curtain of the universe unleashed the Jaguar’s genetic experiment prematurely and burned a little of his own brain, to boot. Certain access lines were cauterized, data frozen beyond reach. Genetics had never been his strong suit.
    Goddam bugs, he thought. It took me ten years to find one that dreamed.
    If he could alter a bug to specification, he could alter a human.
    And then move in.
    If they brought him as close to death this time as they did last time, the Jaguar was going to have to risk the move to another body, suitable or not. Like any good businessman, any good politician, he would simply have to minimize his losses. The waking-blades were at him again, hot-knifing his nerve endings. A band began its slow crank around his skull.
    Relax, he commanded himself, just relax.
    Someone from the other side had worked his locks once; he would have to be more cautious. He’d felt the scratchings, the tinkerings at his secret door. He knew from experiments on his cattle that that door could be the entry to his most secret self—deeper, to the lace garment of his being, his replicable core, his DNA. Lee had been the first to try it; the Jaguar was not foolish enough to believe that he would be the last.
    The Jaguar had learned to round up his otherworld cattle by proxy. His loyal priests served as foremen and wielded his personal brand.
    Branding was sheer terror—it created a psyche as indelibly scarred as the hide. The pain and terror of branding imprinted his cattle with the infinity image, the blue gate that he passed through to mount the dreamways. Imprinting an image in the mind strengthened a dendrite, installed a password in the psyche. Such an image gave a dream-burglar free passage to the brain and all of its regulatory mechanisms: neurons, chemistry, the brain structure itself were at his command.
    Zachary Lee was the only one to discover that the image was more than an image, and Zachary Lee was no longer a problem.
    On this side, they had his body all wrapped and packaged. They watched over it day and night. Indeed, he had delivered himself into their hands, into this perfect place, for safekeeping, though none of them suspected as much. Waking to their studies and interrogations had never been a pleasure. He arranged to wake as seldom as possible. Lately they put the pressure on; they were getting serious. At any time waking could be fatal.
    Once again pain, an excruciating, skull-crushing pain welcomed him back to the world. The Jaguar was unwilling to tinker with his own brain, choosing instead to suffer during his search for another. Now he began his cycle of slow, deep breaths to cut the pain, and he hoped that he would not vomit.
    Sometimes he fooled them if he kept from throwing up. He would pass through pain and play comatose until he regained hold on his precious sleep. The EEG betrayed him, as did the hardware taped to his eyelids. But staffing at the Soldiers’ Home was sparse these days, and occasionally he carried off the sham. Waking was always a horror.
    The Jaguar kept a file of tidbits for the agency, though, so they’d stopped being hard on him right off the bat. Hardball came later, when they made sure