Catspaw

by Joan D. Vinge

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  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Dedication

  Epigraphs

  Prologue

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  Twenty-Three

  Twenty-Four

  Twenty-Five

  Twenty-Six

  Twenty-Seven

  Twenty-Eight

  Twenty-Nine

  Thirty

  Thirty-One

  Thirty-Two

  Thirty-Three

  Thirty-Four

  Thirty-Five

  Thirty-Six

  Epilogue

  Books by Joan D. Vinge

  Somebody in that room …

  About the Author

  Copyright

  This one’s for you, kid.

  You know who you are.

  (With his glared off face glued back into position

  A dead man’s eyes plugged back into his sockets

  A dead man’s heart screwed in under his ribs

  His tattered guts stitched back into position

  His shattered brains covered with a steel cowl)

  He comes forward a step,

  and a step,

  and a step—

  —Ted Hughes

  We are afraid of truth, afraid of fortune,

  afraid of death, and afraid of each other.

  —Ralph Waldo Emerson

  To understand a cat, you must realize that he has

  his own gifts, his own viewpoint, even his own morality.

  —Lilian Jackson Braun

  PROLOGUE

  SOMEONE WAS AFTER me. The feeling, the knowing, was like the touch of ghost hands on my back all through the long afternoon. I knew it, the way I still did sometimes, picking things up like bits of song heard through static. It had got hold of me first in the bazaar of the orbiting spaceport. I’d been standing under the colored sunscreen at the jeweler’s booth, letting a dark woman with long fingers puncture my earlobe with a ring. “Duzzin hurt,” she was crooning, in some kind of accent as thick as the smoke from the charred meat in the next stall. “Hold still, duzzin hurt, duzzin hurt…” like she was talking to a child, or a tourist. It did hurt, but not much. And I was a tourist, everybody here was a tourist, but that didn’t make acting like one feel any less strange to me.

  I winced, and then the second of sharp pain was over. But in the second of empty whiteness that followed it, while I was waiting for more pain, I got something else: the touch, the whisper of something’s interest brushing against my mind. Not someone, something—neutral, patient, mindless. I looked up and away, jerking free of the jeweler’s hand as she wiped blood from my ear. But there was nothing to see, no one I knew, or who seemed to know me. Just the shifting crowd of colors that were too bright, faces that were too soft, like the crowds in an Oldcity night.…

  I shook my head as the past slid across the present like a membrane. It still happened to me too often—that suddenly I felt like I was dreaming, like I didn’t know who or where I was. The green agate beads on the wire bumped the side of my jaw.

  “Anuzzer—?” the woman was asking, reaching out. I pushed away into the crowds, and let them carry me on down the street under the light of the artificial sun.

  Once I knew the thing was onto me, I couldn’t stop feeling it—that whispering, toneless song like a hook caught in my brain. I tried to tell myself it was my imagination; my crippled mind feeling something the same way an amputee felt phantom pain. But it didn’t work. I knew what I knew. It went with me along the twisting, gaudy streets that tried to hide the fact they were only going in circles; into the quiet, shadowed sprawl of the museum complex and out again; into a food bar; into the silver-fixtured hotel men’s room. It watched me, only me, tuned to the electrical fingerprint of my brain, locked in. I thought about going back on board the Darwin, but even a ship’s walls wouldn’t keep it away from me. There was no reason in hell why anybody at all would put an ID trace on me. Maybe it was a mistake, a trace meant for someone else, an echo-reading.… If somebody wanted me, where were they? Why didn’t they just ask? Why shadow me through this crowd of vacant-faced marks in their showday clothes—

  “Cat—oh, Cat!”

  I turned, my fists knotting up, even as I recognized the voice. My hands were slippery with sweat. I opened them, working my fingers.

  It was Kissindre Perrymeade, her half-dozen brown braids dancing down over her khaki shirt, her smiling face like scrubbed ivory.

  I stopped, letting the crowd flow on around me until it brought her to my side. “Hi, Kiss.” Her nickname always made me smile. I pushed my hands into the pockets of my jeans. “I’m glad to see you,” I said, meaning it for once.

  You are? her face asked, with that mix of aching shyness and trying-not-to-stare that usually left us both acting stupid whenever we met. We’d walked the surfaces of half a dozen worlds together, along with five hundred other students in the Floating University, but I’d never really gotten friendly with her, any more than I was friends with any of the rest of them. She was a teaching intern, which made me half-afraid to say anything to her to begin with. And the fact that she was rich and pretty and stared at me only made it worse. Because the same things that made most of the others keep their distance from me pulled at her. I didn’t talk like they did, I didn’t dress like they did. I hadn’t come out of the same places. I had eyes with long slits for pupils, in a face that wasn’t put together right by human standards: a halfbreed’s face. I never talked about any of it, but that didn’t make it go away.

  And yet the things that made most of the others snap shut like traps made Kissindre stare. I knew she sketched my face with her stylus on the edges of her glowing noteboard, as if I was something she thought was beautiful, like the artifacts and scenic views she made painstaking drawings of—things everybody else holoed once and would never look at again. I didn’t know what I was to her, and if she knew she wouldn’t admit it; and that made me feel even more awkward whenever we were together.

  But now, with something inhuman locked on my brain, I was glad of any face that wasn’t a stranger’s, more glad that it happened to be hers, even smiling that painful smile. I noticed she was wearing jeans. Nobody else on the ship wore jeans, except me. Jeans were cheap, common, worker’s clothing. It hit me suddenly that she’d only started wearing them after I met her.

  “Is something wrong?” she asked, glancing up at me again.

  I shook my head, only partly for an answer. “Why? Because I said I’m glad to see you?” My eyes kept wandering away, searching the street. I took her arm, felt her start but not pull back. “Come on, let’s take a jump, let’s get out of here. Let’s go see something.” Thinking that if I could get away from the space
port for a few hours, maybe I could lose the mistake that was dogging me.

  “Sure,” she said, brightening now. “Anywhere. It’s incredible—” She broke off, as if she knew she was starting to talk too much. At least she meant it. Most of the students on the Darwin were too rich and too bored and only looking for a long vacation. But a few of them were really here for what they could learn. Like her. Like me. “Your ear’s bloody,” she said.

  I touched it with my fingers, remembering, feeling the earring. “Just got this. Supposed to be a relic.”

  She stiffened.

  “Don’t worry,” I said. “It’s not.” I didn’t like the way humans helped themselves to pieces of the scenery without asking any more than she did. Maybe less. Concentrating, I tightened the fingers of my mind into a fist; something I could still do, even if I couldn’t reach out. The scratching alien hum stopped. With luck, I’d just stopped existing for whoever was on the other end. But it was like holding my breath.

  We made our way back to the museum, went down ten levels to the wide shadowy cavern where the shuttles squatted in patient rows like opalescent beetles, waiting on the smooth ceramic pavement to carry people like us down to the planet’s surface. There was no permanent human structure of any kind on the world that lay a thousand klicks below our feet, the world humans called the Monument. The whole planet was a Federation preserve … an artificial world, constructed millennia ago and dropped into an orbit around a bleary orange star out here in the middle of nowhere.

  The spaceport station orbited high above it, as big as a small town, which it was. The museum complex occupied about half of its core; it was a center for the study of the vanished race that had created the Monument: rooms and rooms full of artifacts and questions without answers. It was supported by the flesh and flash of the tourist resort that made up the rest of the port.

  As we came out of the dark hallway under the heavyalloy pillars, three shuttles rose up together with a hum like invisible wings and circled away into the dark mouth of the airlocks. On the far side of the field the polarized hull of the station let in the sky: midnight blackness shot with stars. The orangey streetlight of the Monument’s nameless sun shone in one corner; the world itself rolled silently past down below our feet. It had been left here by a civilization humans had named the Creators, because they couldn’t think of anything better. The Creators had vanished long before humans ever crawled up out of their own gravity well and spread like roaches across the stars. Nobody knew where the Creators had gone to, but everyone agreed they were gone, leaving behind almost nothing except this monument to their mystery. Even the Federation respected it.

  “What do you want to see?” I asked Kissindre, as we drifted up to join the usual long line of tourists and students putting in their requests at the gateway. I didn’t care where we went, as long as it got me out of range. You could take tours that took only hours, or as much as a couple of days, to any part of the world. It wasn’t that big a planet; its diameter was only about thirty-five hundred klicks, even though its gravity was almost Earth-normal. It was one of the things the xeno experts couldn’t explain: why a world put together by aliens seemed to fit humans so well. If they hadn’t been like us, then maybe they’d wanted to tell us something. But then, there were the Hydrans, who were so close to human that the differences didn’t even matter on a genetic level. I was living proof of that. And what was left of the Hydran race was living proof that humans didn’t listen very well.

  “Well…” Kissindre bit her lip, staring up at the shifting images on the screen over our heads, the deep views changing, the overlying digits in bright yellow flashing the transit times and the fees. “The Moonpool Caverns are supposed to contain some of the best examples of synaesthetics … and if you want to dive…” She glanced back at me. It was an overnight trip.

  “Great,” I said. “Anything you want.” The effort of holding my mind shut was making me sweat again. I focused on her face, concentrating on that. She was staring at me, her eyes as transparently blue as deep water, her lips parted. It made me realize suddenly that I was horny as hell. That I wanted to kiss her.

  She looked up at the screen, away at the view of space, back at me again. She blushed. “Except…” she mumbled, “I promised Ezra I’d meet him for supper.”

  “No problem,” I lied, glancing away this time. “Another time. Something short…” I stared at her back, feeling even worse than usual, and pinned my restless hands against my sides with my elbows. We were almost to the gateway.

  “Yes, maybe we—”

  “Kissindre!”

  She jerked around as the voice—Ezra’s voice—suddenly caught us from behind. I turned with her, saw her boyfriend come galloping out into the square toward us. He always moved like he was about to fall over. He spent most of his time with trodes taped to his head. His face was red as he cut into the line beside us; so was hers. Different reasons … or maybe not. Once I would have known for sure.

  “What are you doing here?” he said, trying not to sound like he sounded.

  “Studying,” she said, a little too loudly.

  “Studying what?” He looked at me.

  “The Monument! I thought you were still working on your compilation—”

  “I was in the resource center when I saw you out the window—”

  “So?”

  “So when were you planning to meet me for dinner, Kiss?” His voice rose over the muttered conversations around us. “In your next incarnation?” The black frizz of his half-grown beard quivered when he stuck out his jaw.

  “Ezra…” Kissindre hissed, hugging her sketchboard against her with white-knuckled fingers. “You’re so archaic.”

  “Three,” I said to the gate. “Student.” I let its sensors scan my databand. “Goldengate.” The station was passing right over the Goldengate window. A short jump, one we might all survive. I went on through the gate, hearing my boots click on the ceramic.

  After a few seconds I heard two sets of expensive magnetics follow, and more muttering. I ducked into the next waiting shuttle, and sat down. Kissindre climbed in and sat down right beside me. After a minute Ezra joined us, sitting on the other side of me. The door sealed; destination co-ords rippled across it. The shuttle lifted, so smoothly I hardly felt the motion, and spun toward the locks. I settled back as we passed through and out, beginning our drop down the Monument’s gravity well. I stretched out my legs; loosened the fist I’d made of my mind, finger by finger.

  Nothing. Out of range. I sighed, shutting my eyes. Now it was easy to believe it was a mistake. Or even my imagination. Paranoia was an old habit, a hard one to break, when I felt like a freak and a fraud. When every time I shut my eyes I still saw the darkness … I opened them again, blinked, stared; watched the world below swelling outward like a balloon across the viewscreens as we dropped toward it. If I thought about that too much, it made my stomach climb into my throat. I glanced at Kissindre and Ezra, remembering again that I wasn’t alone. I might as well have been. They were still arguing, across my chest, in angry whispers.

  “… Well, I can’t help it, I have to access, I don’t have an eidetic memory like the Walking Data Bank here—” His hand in my face, gone again.

  “Ezra—”

  I looked at the screens again. We were almost down now, entering the atmosphere, our trajectory altering toward our final destination. The deceleration buffering wasn’t very good. Kissindre and Ezra got quiet as it got harder to speak. The discomfort made me feel better instead of worse; at least we had brakes. Too much of the galaxy was run by things I couldn’t even see. It still made me nervous.

  The surface of the Monument was spreading out below us, like a painting coming into clearer and clearer focus. I stared at the view, letting the images seep in through my eyes, feeling a slow smile stretch my mouth. It was so beautiful. Sometimes when it was like this I felt as if I’d had a brain transplant, as if I was living in someone else’s body. The fact that I couldn’t prove
anybody else was real by their place inside my thoughts any more didn’t help the feeling.

  I tugged on my earring, feeling the pain; rolling the cool, hard surface of the beads between my fingers. I’d never had any jewelry before. Never wanted any, when it only attracted the wrong kind of attention—the kind that would get your throat slit. One morning-after back in Oldcity I’d woken up with a tattoo, but even that didn’t show with my clothes on. Getting the earring today I’d been trying to prove to myself again that I didn’t have to be invisible any more. I tried not to remember what I had to remember every time I glanced at my credit readout: that by the time the University finished its studies here I’d be zeroed, out of money. I took a deep breath, easing the tightness in my chest, watching the view.

  Anywhere you set down on this world, you’d find a scene that filled up your eyes with wonder. The air was like satin, the winds like musicians. It was as if an artist, or a thousand artists working together, had been given a whole world as clay, as lightbox, as a musical instrument. Nothing hut beauty anywhere, as perfect as diamonds. Nothing. Nothing alive to disturb its stasis. Not a leaf, a bird, an insect. Not until now.

  The changing view of beyond-the-walls had stopped changing. The hatch sighed and yawned. We climbed out, stretching, silenced by the sudden silence of the yellow windswept plateau that was the designated viewpoint. Two other shuttles were already there, and a bunch of gaudy tourists stood a few meters away. I could hear their voices, but the sound was thin and high, as if they were somehow farther away than they looked. It was nearly sunset. The reddening light burnished the sandstone cliffs, making the hills look like they’d been cast from brass. If you didn’t know, you would have sworn that only time and wind had eaten them down into those forms. But if you looked at anything too closely—anything at all, a pebble—you might find a hidden sign, an undecipherable signature, telling you that some sentient mind had laid everything out just so, and left it that way for eternity.

  I turned, stepping away from the shuttle. As I looked around me the hugeness, the sheer size of world and sky, hit me so hard I couldn’t breathe. It made me feel like there was no place to hide … the way I always felt when I took on too much open space too fast. I made myself keep looking, feeling the wind ruffle my hair with an easy hand. I took a breath—forgot to finish it. Beside me Kissindre and Ezra sighed and said, “Oh…” and broke off their argument.