R.Scott Bakker - Disciple of the dog

“Like a good skeptic, huh?”

I shook my head with mock seriousness. “Not at all. A skeptic suspends judgment. A cynic just doesn’t care.”

“A perilously fine distinction, wouldn’t you say?”

I shrugged my shoulders. “Whatever.”

Once again, Xenophon Baars roared with laughter, a minute-long ho-ho-he-fucking-he-he that forced him to take off his glasses and wipe the tears from his eyes. Say what you will about the guy, he definitely dug my brand of humour. “The story is absurd, I admit, Mr. Manning. Claiming that the world is five billion years older than it appears, that our lives are a kind of spectator sport for an inhuman generation. Madness! It has to be. But if you think, if you really honestly consider, you’ll see that we’re not saying anything surprising at all. Only that we’re the ignorant children of ourselves, Mr. Manning.”

I couldn’t resist. “Cool name for a band.”

“Excuse me?”

“Ignorant Children of Ourselves.”

I could even see the album cover: I-C-O in giant golden letters across the top. Three angels smoking a joint below. A bag of weed leaning against a sandalled toe. Because of the link between memory and sleep, my memory shrink sent me to this sleep researcher, Philip Ryle, who wanted to see whether there were any significant differences in the way you and I dream. Apparently not. But the guy was definitely one of the more interesting eggheads ever to stick pasties to my head.

You see, the thing about dreams is that they pretty much prove that the outside world is all in our heads. We have a “world generator” in our brain, which, when we’re both awake and sane, is anchored to the world-world through our senses. But when you fall asleep, your brain draws anchor, and your world generator drifts through time, place, and possibility. You dream the crazy-ass shit you’re afraid to tell your wife in the morning.

Ryle was always going on about how this meant dreams and waking life were of a piece-two versions of the same thing. He was a big fan of something called lucid dreaming-you know, where you wake up in your dream, realize that your dream is a dream, then take control. One of his grad students told me Ryle had this Playboy Mansion dream that he was able to replay at will. The kid could have been joking, but I was inclined to believe him. I’ve never met anyone who loved his sleep quite as much as Ryle.

But Ryle was also a believer in what he called lucid living. In the same way you could develop “metacognitive awareness” of your dreams and take control of them, you could also develop metacognitive awareness of your waking life-and so take control of it. This, he liked to say, was pretty much what meditation and “enlightenment” were all about. Unlike dreams, you couldn’t control what happens, but you could control how things happen, and, more importantly, whom they happen to.

He liked to claim that he could dissolve his “self” at will, and simply become the “raw space of existence.” Sometimes he would say crazy things like, “Yeah, sorry, Diss, I’m not here right now.”

I always wondered what it was like for all those dream Bunnies screwing a “raw space of existence.” I suspected it felt an awful lot like banging a dirty old man.

What Baars was saying was that the world generators in our heads had been hijacked to make it appear as though we were living in the early twenty-first century, when in fact we were living in some absurdly distant future. And in a curious sense, he was advocating a kind of lucid living not so different from the one recommended by crazy old Philip Ryle. Like the song said, we needed to party like it was 1999-give or take five billion years.

Either way, I could give a flying fuck. Here and now, baby. Dream or not, this is where the bad stuff happens. This is where beautiful young women like Jennifer Bonjour vanish, and this is where they are found.

Besides, I got the feeling my paycheque would bounce in the Frame.

I drained the last of my tea. “I gotta ask… You don’t think that Jennifer, you know, has… crossed over, or something… do you?”

“That depends,” Baars replied, his eyes troubled beneath the glare of his glasses.

“Depends?” Something told me he wasn’t talking about my favourite brand of diapers.

“On whether she’s dead, Mr. Manning.” Thanks to Baars’s little explanation, I now knew the Framers were every bit as crazy as they seemed. But thanks to Albert and his phone call, I knew this meant jack shit, simply because everybody believed in some kind of madness. Except me, of course.

Convinced I had a handle on the kooky dogma, I walked the Professor through the wonky events the night Jennifer vanished. He claimed he knew something was wrong the instant Stevie told him that Anson had called to check on Jennifer.

“I never approved of their forays,” he said. “The dancing I understood. She was… young. Very young. But they insisted on walking for some reason. I always told them it wasn’t safe… “

I could hear it in his voice, the let’s-move-on hesitancy. Even though Baars wielded absolute authority, he was still accountable to his past. He couldn’t make it up as he went along-at least not the way I did. Power turns on legitimacy, and legitimacy-to the chagrin of more than a few tyrants-turns on consistency.

What could he say, really? It was all a simulation, wasn’t it? Dead factories. Abductions. Rapes. How could the almighty Xenophon Baars tell anyone to be afraid of “worldly” things?

Perhaps this was the motive for her recklessness. Perhaps she had resented Baars’s domination even as she surrendered to it. Perhaps making him worry was one among a dozen ways to get even…

Perhaps Baars had had enough.

When I asked him whether she was sexually involved with anybody in the Compound, he said, “Yes,” without missing a beat. “Jennifer and I were lovers.”

A clipped response, and the one I expected. Perhaps Jennifer’s dancing- and not the walking-had been his real concern all along. A cult leader is one thing. But a jealous cult leader? The first thing this business teaches you is that there’s nothing more murderous than ambitious genes.

“Another undergrad infatuation, huh?”

“On the contrary,” he said. For the first time he looked almost offended, which was amazing considering the number of zingers I’d laid on him so far. “I’m quite convinced that… that this level of me, at least, is in love with her… Yes. Quite in love.”

Fawk… This level of me?

Mad as a fucking hatter. What would it be like to be at once in love and to look at that love as a kind of gift shop curiosity-like a snow bubble from Montreal or something?

I have to admit, I was getting excited, not in the woody way, though given who I am and what I suffer, it would have been more than understandable. This was utterly-almost over-the-top-new. Totally unlike any case I had ever worked. So even though I was shocked, even bewildered, by what Baars had said, I sat there smiling my fucking- bootiful smile. You couldn’t make this shit up if you tried!

“Tell me, Dr. Baars. Does anyone get… you know, impatient?”

“I don’t follow.”

“You know. Like the Jains in India. Or the Cathars in medieval France. When you make death a virtue, when you make this world some kind of perversion, moral or whatever, you have an incentive to die, don’t you? Take you guys. For the Framers, death is a kind of waking, a supreme form of enlightenment, isn’t it?”

A hard look. “Are you suggesting she committed suicide?”

I wagged my head in a big naw. “Look. I’m big on circumstances, on the ways they warp the stakes of things. I don’t think about bad apples so much as bruising bushels. The fact is, Dr. Baars, at a basic level there’s precious little that distinguishes your lot from the rest of the planet. You guys are at least as fucked up as the rest of us-at least. Add to that the fact that death doesn’t carry the same cold water for you as it does for someone like, say”-I shot him a big cheesy grin-”me.”