Catspaw

by Joan D. Vinge

  This ship-in-a-bottle world’s foster sun lay framed inside the arch of stone they called Goldengate, as if time itself was trapped there, frozen in the moment. The black silhouette of the bridge was shot through with a pattern of bright rays, riddled with the precision of lace. And as the wind rose, lifting a pale curtain of dust, I could hear it: the thin, high piping far up in the air, the song the wind made in the hollow flute of stone. The sound reached into my chest like an invisible hand to break my heart. I started away from the others, forgetting them, forgetting everything, sunblind, stone-deaf.…

  Loud bleeping cut across my senses, jerking me back. I stopped at the edge of a sheer drop, the boundary of the access area. I stepped back onto safe ground and waited for my ringing ears to clear. Then I stood on the edge between worlds, listening to something else.… After a minute I crouched down, making handprints in the burnished dirt. I picked up a smooth, striped stone no bigger than my hand. I put it down again, in a different spot; it still looked perfect. The voice of the wind turned cold inside me.

  “Whatever made them do it?” Kissindre murmured, not to me but to the wind, and I realized she was standing beside me now. “Was it just for its own sake, all this beauty…?”

  “A ritual object,” Ezra said, “part of their structure of worship.” That was the answer we usually heard while images of strange artifacts poured into our heads. It meant the experts didn’t know what the hell it was either, and probably never would.

  “No.” I straightened up, brushing my hands on my jeans. “It really is a monument.”

  “To what?” Kissindre asked, her eyebrows rising. Beside her Ezra frowned.

  “Death,” I said, feeling the word fall out of my mouth, cold and hard. “Bits and pieces, the bones of planets, that’s what it’s made of. That’s why there’s nothing alive here.” The sun was disappearing beyond the cliffs. The wind was beginning to feel as cold as I did.

  Kissindre caught at my arm. “Who told you that?”

  “Huh?” I looked back at her, seeing sunspots where her eyes should have been.

  “Who—?”

  I shook my head. My thoughts felt heavy and slow, like molten glass. “Dunno. Heard it, I guess.…”

  “I’ve never heard that one.” She shook her own head, but it wasn’t denial. She squinted out across the sea of stone, her body tightening with excitement.

  “He’s making it up,” Ezra mumbled, without the guts to say it to my face. Kissindre began to murmur notes into the recorder on her necklace, her eyes back on me.

  Still feeling like I’d been hit on the head, I bent down, trying to hide what was happening inside me. I pulled the knife out of the sheath inside my boot, straightened up. Leaning against an outcrop of rock, I reached into the pouch pocket of my tunic and found the eggfruit I’d bought this afternoon. I began to peel it, steadying my hands, before I looked up at them again.

  Their faces were like two six-year-olds, the naked fear slowly draining away, leaving them slack-jawed. Like they’d never seen anybody pull a knife before.

  “I don’t make things up,” I said finally, and then wished I hadn’t, while they nodded, too eagerly. I didn’t know how I knew what I’d just told them about this place, couldn’t remember ever knowing it before that moment. All I was certain of suddenly was that I was an alien. Had always been, would always be.

  I put my knife away. “See you.” I looked back at Kissindre and Ezra for as long as it took to say the words. I started toward the waiting shuttles, and they didn’t follow.

  “Cat—?” Kissindre called suddenly, her voice pale.

  I turned back, waiting.

  She licked her lips. “Can you … can you really read my mind?”

  So that was it. She knew I was a psion, knew it was Hydran blood that made me half a stranger. But she didn’t know the rest of it.… Probably she wouldn’t want to. “No,” I said, “I can’t.” I went on alone.

  On board the shuttle I ate my dinner, and stuffed the pit into the ashtray, next to some skagweed user’s stale cud. The smell of the cud was overwhelming the air scrubbers. There was the butt end of a camph in the ashtray too. I almost took it … let it fall back. Still too much memory. Maybe there always would be. Maybe the monument to death wasn’t falling away below me now, maybe it was inside my head.…

  That was easier than believing that somehow I could just know things about a place. Or maybe I was just better than the rest at reading the subliminals embedded everywhere in the Monument. That made a kind of sense. Maybe the Creators had been more like Hydrans than like humans, after all. But it didn’t ease the feeling of being out-of-focus that had only been getting thicker all day. I tugged on the earring again. First the tracer, then Kissindre, now this.… I remembered I was falling back into the tracer’s electronic net right now. Humans were always making my life lousy, still hounding me, like they’d done to the whole Hydran race.… Screw it. Stop acting like a shadow walker. I unclenched my fingers, pulling them out of the holes they’d dug into the formfoam armrests.

  I held my mind shut, holding my breath, the rest of the way back to the station. When we landed I stepped out again into the perfectly antiseptic, climate-controlled womb below the museum. The port’s massive ceramic/composite hull was all around me, like the walls of a fortress. There were half a hundred people within reach of my voice, and none of them looked too interested in me. I let go, setting the crippled receptors of my brain as free as I could, listening: nothing. The toneless static of the trace wasn’t there … if it had ever been there in the first place. My telepathy had gone dead three years ago, but sometimes my brain still played practical jokes.

  I shrugged the shadows off my back and went on across the tiles, out through the gate with the rest of the sightseers. They flowed on into the echoing mouth of the walkway that led back through the museum’s labyrinthine guts, and eventually to the lifts that would carry them on up to the port levels. I went with them, letting my shoulder hug the reassuring closeness of the wall along the edge of the crowd.

  And then suddenly I stopped, staring. Spraypainted on the wall, inside a clumsy heart, was my name. CAT. CAT & JULE. People swore as they bumped into me, but I didn’t care. I didn’t even notice as all the rest of them passed me by: didn’t notice that I was standing there all alone now, with only the sound of my breathing and the sign on the wall. I felt a kind of panic begin to rise inside me. The day had just gone from out-of-focus to completely insane. I looked back over my shoulder. Light and darkness shifted around me, flowing across the pillars and walls like water, as if they had a life of their own.

  I turned, feeling a sudden bright stab of warning a split second before my eye caught real motion. Two shadows peeled off from the darkness of a passageway, and closed in on me. I caught a flicker of orange, the flaming badge of some combine’s colors on somebody’s sleeve. And then the cold bite of nothingness hit my neck, chemical teeth sinking toward a vein, finding it. And that was all.

  ONE

  I CAME TO on board a ship, but it was no ship I’d ever seen before. I was lying on a foam-padded, fold-down bunk, in a room that I couldn’t mistake for my cabin or any other place on the Darwin if I’d been blindfolded. The last thing I remembered was a flash of combine colors on a Corporate Security uniform jacket; the gray-green garbage-can walls around me now, the stripped imitation asceticism of the single desk and chair, the storage nets, the bed, all screamed military.

  I’d been bodysnatched by some combine’s Security arm … which made no sense at all, except that here I was. I tried to sit up, and was more surprised than not when I found out I could. No binders on me, no straps. My knife was missing. I felt along my neck and stripped off the patch I found there. I’d been drugged, all right, but my head seemed clear enough now.

  The door of the cabin was shut. Just then it slid open, as if they’d been waiting for me to wake up. Two men entered, probably the ones who’d done it to me. One dark-skinned, one pale. They wore interchangeab
le faces and interchangeable silver-on-gray duty fatigues. They stopped inside the doorway, waiting, tense. I wondered if the combines made their Corpses get face jobs so they’d match. Then my eyes found the insignia on a jacket front, and I froze. Data flowed across the ID patch below the sunblaze logo of Centauri Transport. A giddy flash of double-sight hit me. I didn’t know what this was about, but I knew now it wasn’t a mistake. And it wasn’t good. Cold anger, or maybe cold fear, slammed though my brain. I stood up, and said, “Wha’s goin’ on—?”

  And sat down again with my stomach up in the back of my throat. “Shid.” Now I knew why there were no binders. No need. Whatever they’d drugged me with left a hell of a hangover.

  The twins looked at each other and grinned, but it was more like relief than like they thought it was funny. They came across the room, as if they’d been afraid to get too close to me before. “Okay, freak,” one of them said, “the Chief wants to see you.” They hauled me up again, and half-dragged me out the door. I wished I’d eaten more dinner, because I wanted to see it all over them when I puked.

  We were on board some kind of small scoutship; at least they didn’t have to drag me far. They pushed me through the doorway into another cabin, and down onto a wall couch.

  I was wrong; I wasn’t on some scoutship. This was some combine vip’s private cruiser. It might have been on a different world from the room I’d come to in.

  “Here he is, sir. He’s safe,” one of the guards said beside me. I realized they didn’t mean safe and sound. They meant crippled.

  I’d been wrong … and right. “The Chief” was Centauri’s Chief of Corporate Security. He was sitting in a tapestry-covered recliner behind a perfect black semisphere of desk, staring at me from across the room. He had a face like the blade of a knife, thin, sharp, and cold … no beard, except high up on his cheekbones in a feathery line, as if his eyebrows grew around to circle his eyes. His eyes were so dark they looked black. He was wearing a full-dress uniform—a gunmetal-gray helmet with Centauri’s logo and his insignia dancing on it, a conservative business suit in silver tweed, a drape crawling with shining crap that made my eyes swim. I’d never seen so much flash on one body before. The fact that he was wearing it said either he wasn’t worried, or he wanted to impress me. I didn’t know what that meant, either way.

  I looked away from him, because he was staring at me without blinking. We seemed to be inside a bubble, hanging out over the black heart of space. The Monolith’s sun hung just above his left shoulder, like a floating lamp. I couldn’t see the world itself. I looked down at my feet, glad that at least there was a rug. Sapphire blue, it had the Centauri logo shot through it in gold. Subtle. I pressed deeper against the back of the couch, waiting until my stomach caught up with the rest of my body again. Then, as carefully as I could, I said, “Wha’. Do. You. Wan’?”

  “Your name is Cat. My name is Braedee.” The black eyes were still fixed on me like cameras. “I’m Chief of Security Systems for Centauri Transport. Do you understand what that means?”

  It meant there was probably nobody higher in the combine’s power structure except the controlling board members. It meant that he was probably the most trusted man in that entire structure. Also the worst enemy anybody who crossed them would ever have. The ruling board itself must have sent him after me. Did they really know who I was? My paranoia started doing the multiplication tables. I shook my head to answer him. It was cold in his office; the sweat crawling down my ribs made me shiver.

  “It means that I don’t see just anybody. It means,” a muscle in his face jumped, “that we need…” twitch, “a telepath.” Twitch. “Now I’m going to explain why.”

  Surprise caught in my chest, then relief, and confusion, and anger. I sucked in a breath. “No.” I touched my head, meeting the telephoto eyes. “Nah. Till. Fix. Dis.”

  “The drug blunts your psionic ability. The speech is an unfortunate side effect. Your comprehension is completely unaffected. There’s no reason for you to say anything until I’ve finished.”

  “Fu’ you.” I stood up, turning toward the doorway. The two matching Corpses filled it up. I turned back again to face Braedee. “Fix. It!” If they knew what I was, they should know I was no more danger to them than any deadhead they picked off the street. Less—I wouldn’t kill them. But from the way his face worked, I knew he was as piss-assed scared as anybody else. Maybe more, considering what he did for a living. The more someone had to hide, the more they usually hated psions.

  Braedee shook his head. He said, “Gentleman Charon taMing heads the Centauri board. He ordered me to keep you drugged.”

  TaMing. I jerked as I heard the name. “Fu’ him too,” I said, trying to cover my surprise.

  Braedee glared at me for a long minute, considering the alternatives, probably feeling the invisible fist of Centauri ready to come down on us both. There was something wrong with his eyes, more than just the way he looked at me; but I didn’t know what it was. At last he said, “I’ll give you the antidote if you’ll submit to a scan.” Calling my bluff.

  My hands tightened, went loose again. I nodded finally and sat back down. One of the Corpses came and dropped the veil of silvery mesh over my head. I flinched and shut my eyes as it molded to my flesh, tingling like a thousand insects crawling on my face. The urge to rip it off was almost more than I could stand; the first time one had been used on me they’d had to use binders, too. At least by now I knew what was coming. I’d been through so much testing, so much therapy since the killing that I’d learned to live with it. I clenched my jaw, trying not to resist—resisting anyway, not able to stop blind instinct as the sensation began. Worms ate my brains for dinner, while somewhere the scan sequence vomited a useless data simulation of my mangled psi.

  It was over in less than a minute—subjective time of about fifty years. The mesh dropped into my lap. I brushed it off and kicked it away, wanting to spit.

  Braedee was staring into the air, at me, but through me. I looked over my shoulder but there was only the single wall that backed me up. “She was right,” he murmured. “The shape of your profile is … well, see for yourself.” He really was looking at me now.

  I didn’t see him move, but suddenly the sun disappeared behind him, and instead my scan profile flashed across space in pure light lines of red, blue, and green. Data into symbol—making it comprehensible for humans, who had to input everything the hard way. I stared at the dead end that had turned me into a deadhead, the wall I’d built myself and couldn’t tear down again. “Seen. It.”

  The image disappeared. I blinked at the sudden reappearance of the sun. “All right. Give him the patch,” Braedee said.

  One of the guards stepped forward again, and stuck another patch over the vein in my neck. “Leave it there for twelve hours, or you’ll regress,” he said.

  I nodded, and waited a minute longer before I tried to speak again. “Okay, deadhead.” My voice was raw and shaky, but I heard what I expected to. “I’m ready for the reason. It better be good.”

  His mouth lifted, just a little, like I amused him. Then the thin, pale lips stretched over his teeth again; he pressed his fingertips into a steeple on the lifeless surface of his desk. “You were once briefly … involved … with Lady Jule taMing, who is a member of the founding family of Centauri Transport.”

  “A friend,” I said. “I was her friend. I’m still her friend.”

  He frowned, at the interruption, or the implication. My own face appeared suddenly in the air behind him: a little younger, a lot thinner, hair curly and white-blond, skin brown, eyes green and slit-pupiled. The story of my life was summed up in about half a dozen depressing lines underneath it. No living relatives … criminal record … psionic dysfunction …

  “We know all about your … relationship with the Lady and Dr. Siebeling, her husband,” he went on, still frowning. “About their Center for Psionic Research, about the … service you performed for the Federation Transport Authority.” He seemed
to be having a hard time getting the words out, coughing slightly every time the taste got too acid for him.

  “I’ll bet. I’ll bet the FTA would be amazed at how much you know about that.” I leaned back, putting one boot up on the couch. One of the guards moved forward and slapped it down.

  “That patch on your neck comes off just as easily as it went on.” Braedee stared at me, not blinking. I realized he never seemed to blink. I wondered if he was really alive. I couldn’t tell.

  I swore under my breath, suddenly feeling stupid for saying anything. Stupid and scared again. Nobody sane crossed a combine the size of Centauri and opened their mouth about it. Just seeing a uniform was still enough to make my stomach knot. I’d had a lot of run-ins with Corpses in my life, enough to know that if they had you they always made you pay. The only people who knew where I was right now were all Centauri Corpses, and all in this room with me. And there were worse things than a speech impediment.

  “All right,” I mumbled, not meeting his eyes. “What do you want?”

  “We need a telepath. As I said before.” He leaned back in his seat, easing off. His drape flashed and shimmered as he took a deep breath. “Lady Jule recommended you. She said that even though you were young, you were … extremely intelligent, and … loyal.” He shifted again. He looked like he trusted her judgment about as much as he trusted me right now. But I was here, and that meant either he did believe her, or he was desperate. Maybe both.

  I thought about Jule, let her face form in my mind, the details getting a little hazy when I tried to focus on them now. The surprise was back in place, hot as coals: that Jule would tell her family anything about me; that they’d ever want anything to do with a psion. Jule was a psion, like I was. Her freak-hating family had made her life a living hell because of it, until she’d finally tried to cut all her ties with them. But blood was still thicker than water, and the taMings were a family with a long reach. They didn’t like to lose something that belonged to them, even if it was flawed. They kept in touch.