Catspaw

by Joan D. Vinge

  When I was clean enough to suit the security registers, and imprinted on their system forever, they let us go back into the flow of human traffic heading deeper into the maze. By now I was completely lost, all over again. I didn’t like the feeling. People passed us on all sides—riding bicycles, some of them pulling buggies; in floating carts; even on skates. We walked, because Elnear believed in exercise. I thought about the only FTA plexes I’d ever seen the inside of: their Corporate Security station in Oldcity, and the Contract Labor processing center where I’d started a one-way trip to hell. They both looked like prisons. This place didn’t bring back any memories; the only thing that looked the same was the Federation Seal plastered on everything and everyone in sight. The imitation reality around me was as full of reflecting surfaces that turned your eyes away from the truth as the walls of any combine’s HQ.

  We were passing through the fringes of the actual Assembly nucleus. I began to notice more and more different combine colors around us; more than I’d ever seen in one place before. But then, I’d never been here before. Lady Elnear wore no logo at all. Jardan was wearing the logo that wasn’t Centauri’s at her throat again. Finally I asked what it was, just to break up the monotony. She glanced at me with a kind of bleak annoyance, and said, “Why do you bother to ask?”

  I stopped where I was. “You really think all I want to do is get into your mind, or hers?” I gestured at Lady Elnear, who was walking ahead of us, talking with someone wearing an FTA insignia. I picked his name out of his thoughts, and some random bits of what he was thinking about, like Braedee had ordered me to. He’d told me to memorize everyone she talked to, and why, in case there was some clue in what happened that I wouldn’t recognize. In the back of Elnear’s own mind a strand of her attention was always turned toward me, making every word she said painfully self-conscious. “Don’t flatter yourself.”

  Jardan’s mouth tightened.

  “I’m working for you—”

  “You’re working for Centauri.”

  I looked down at the logo on my jacket. “Then who the hell are you working for?”

  “This is the ChemEnGen logo.” I felt the heat of the defiance behind it, and remembered: Lady Elnear was a controlling stockholder, with a place on ChemEnGen’s ruling board. But now Centauri controlled ChemEnGen, and Jardan’s boss. And now I understood what that badge really was—a finger raised in the face of every taMing who saw her.

  “That takes a lot of guts,” I said, but she didn’t smile. I looked away from the wall of her eyes.

  Elnear stood waiting up ahead, looking back at us—listening. I wondered how much freedom she really thought she had, just because she didn’t wear a logo here. This was her real work, Jardan had said. I rubbed the patch on my jacket as we went on.

  A part of my mind was always reaching out ahead of us and behind while we walked, scanning the other minds around us. I told myself I was looking for something wrong; but I knew I was like an exblindman, really looking just because I could. Almost everyone I scanned was interested in seeing someone else dead, but none of them had Elnear in mind. And none of them were crazy enough even to think about trying anything here. It was hard to imagine anywhere that Elnear could be safer. But Braedee claimed that his own security had picked up someone tracking her here with a dartgun.

  Eventually we reached the Drug Enforcement Arm nucleus and Elnear’s office in it, deep in the FTA’s sector of the plex. I looked up at the Arm’s logo riding beside the FTA’s above her door—the black wings of a shadow-thing reaching out and down to circle a galaxy. I wondered if that was supposed to reassure anybody. After my walk through the minds of the Federation Assembly, I felt like I’d been cleaning toilets with my brain. I let the thought tracers shrivel up and die, relieved. Two days ago I’d been ready to do anything to get back my Gift.… Somehow it was too easy to forget that everything had two sides.

  “You’re unusually subdued,” Jardan said to me, as we went inside. The translucent office door began to slip shut behind us.

  “I’m doing my job.” I said. I followed her past a couple of curious office technicians toward Elnear’s private inner office.

  “Elnear!” someone called, from out in the hallway. I turned, looking back as the outer door flashed open again to let in Daric taMing. I caught a whiff of his thoughts as my mind crossed his track. I broke contact: he stank. He was part of the family. That was one mind nobody was going to force me into headfirst. I hadn’t been able to scan him last night, but what I caught today matched what I’d seen then better than I would have liked. It was still hard for me to believe he was actually Jule’s brother. But then, she was the one the family thought was crazy.

  He pushed between me and Jardan as if we didn’t exist, and went on across the room to Elnear’s inner office. She stood behind the antique metal desk looking like she hoped he wasn’t going to climb over it. He was violating her sanctuary, she couldn’t stop him; she didn’t like it. “What, Daric?”

  “Vote today, Elnear. Just wanted to remind you. You will be there, of course—Centauri is counting on ChemEnGen’s support, as always.” He knew she wouldn’t forget, knew that she’d vote their way. He just enjoyed rubbing in the salt.

  “Of course,” she said, and sat down, doing her best to pretend he’d already gone. “Goodbye, Daric.”

  “Goodbye, Elnear.” He turned on his heel, all his motions still full of too much energy, the way they’d been last night. He started back through us toward the door. I moved out of his way. It was the wrong thing to do. He stopped, cocking his head at me. “Hey, new aide,” he said, as if he’d just noticed me. “How’s your first day on the job? Just fascinating, I’ll bet.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “Oh, come on.” He folded his arms. “You can speak frankly. We’re all friends.”

  I shrugged. “It’s all right.” I forgot to say “sir.”

  He didn’t call me on it. “Only ‘all right’?” he repeated, enjoying himself a lot more than I was. “Where are you from, anyway?”

  “Ardattee. Quarro,” I said, not meeting his eyes.

  He was actually surprised. “The Hub?… No wonder we don’t impress you. You’ll have to tell me all about it—are table manners really passé there?” He was watching to see if he drew blood. It took all the control I had left, but I didn’t bleed. “Well, be sure to enjoy your stay on Earth. All of human history is here for you to enjoy, stuffed and mounted … if my aunt ever allows you any time off for good behavior.” He looked away from me, back at Elnear. “Loan him to me some evening, Elnear. My friends would kill one another to meet him.… Oh. Sorry. Pardon the expression.” He was already moving toward the door; he was gone before anyone could ruin his fun, or his face.

  I followed Jardan into the inner office. A security screen blinked on across its door. Jardan went to Elnear’s side, murmuring something I didn’t bother trying to hear. I sat down on the window ledge. It wasn’t actually a window, but a holo that did a decent job of looking like a view of the ocean. I looked at it, sunlight winking on blue water far away. I could see why she needed one.

  I looked back again at the Lady and Jardan. The air was so thick with bad feeling that it was hard to breathe. I felt like a lightning rod. I thought about all the things I wanted to say about Gentleman Daric, and tried to forget them again. Instead, I said, “What would happen if you didn’t vote the way the taMings want you to … ma’am?” as Jardan glared at me.

  Elnear sighed, looking around her for something that didn’t seem to be there. “Well…” she said, her gaze still wandering, as if she were discussing a missing stylus, “I leave that to your imagination, Mez Cat.” She meant that I could find out if I really wanted to, but she didn’t feel like spelling it out just to satisfy my curiosity. She was thinking that they would sell off ChemEnGen’s patents and chop its network into small separate bits, and feed the pieces one by one into the open jaws of the biosci Lack Market.… At least, that was how Charon had put
it to her. He was the head of Centauri’s ruling board, and she didn’t have any reason to doubt what he said. She pushed away from the desk, her formfoam chair resettling around her as she looked up at me; there was something in her eyes that I hadn’t seen there before. Suddenly I was remembering what I’d said to Braedee about blackmailers—and what he’d said to me about politics.

  “Does it really matter that much to you?” I asked. “Enough to let them blackmail you?”

  “Yes,” she nodded, “it does.” She didn’t tell me why.

  I glanced at Jardan. “I thought Jardan said you set up some kind of noninterference contract when you married in, Lady.”

  “I thought so, too.” A sadness filled her that had nothing to do with any betrayals of trust. It was gone again before I could see more. “While my husband was alive, everything went well. Then after his death … well, you remember that I advised you to have your contracts with the taMings reviewed…?”

  “You mean you didn’t?” I said, surprised. I got up from my seat.

  “Not carefully enough, it seems. They have some of the most powerful legal advisories operating in the Federation.”

  I looked down. “You don’t think … is there anybody at ChemEnGen who’d be angry enough to want you dead over that?”

  Jardan stiffened. Elnear shook her head. “I’m all that stands between them and a complete loss of autonomy. I don’t think so.”

  I nodded. “I guess everything works like that around here.” I didn’t expect an answer; figured I already knew it.

  But she smiled faintly. “Not in this office,” she said, as if somehow the FTA’s symbol over her door had some kind of power to protect what she did.

  “What makes you think the Arm is any better than anything else?” I waved a hand at the door and what lay outside it. “It’s just what they call it—arm. Another way for the Security Council to use muscle on the combine vips when the Council’s out to get it their way. The FTA’s no better than the combines. It controls the telhassium market; it runs Contract Labor. It’s all the same, just power plays. More blackmail.”

  “For someone who’s been here less than one day, you seem to have formed some strong opinions,” she said, mildly; but I felt her impatience and irritation stick me in the ribs. And as I watched her, suddenly she changed again: suddenly she wasn’t a vague, empty, aging woman, but someone who belonged behind that desk. “If you are going to work for me, you had better understand how we look at things in this office.” She motioned at me to sit down again. I sat.

  “To begin with,” she said, “let me tell you something about the society we live in. Most people believe that human beings still run it. But I think they’re wrong. All these centuries we have been waiting for our machines to get too smart for us and turn us into dinosaurs. We never realized we’d already created the next step in our own evolution…” The interstellar combine. She went on, telling me her pet theories about how the Federation really operated. She claimed no single human, or even a ruling board, actually controlled the largest combines now. Instead, humans had become the combines’ tools; just like the AI systems and databanks they’d developed to make the interstellar networks possible in the first place.

  “You really believe that?” I said, trying not to let her hear how I really felt about the idea.

  She nodded. “And I’m not alone. There are many logic-studies that conclude the same thing. No one has absolute proof—no one has ever directly communicated with a network core. But I really believe that the combines are the evolving beings of a new order; that they are the way the living universe is accommodating itself to space travel.”

  Human space travel. I thought about the Hydrans, the Net of psi energy they’d based their own civilization on.

  “The combines are the lions and tigers of a new age,” she said, “ruthless, and totally amoral.” They had evolved and changed to till the niches of the super-ecology called the Federation, and their individual styles and levels of operation were the mutations that had fitted them to their functions. Some of them had evolved toward such massive augmentation that one or two or a handful of what had been humans became an entire network. Most of them had gone the other way, using millions of separate human beings as the cells of their supersystems. The combines took care of those individual cells as well as it suited their needs—some better, some worse. But most of them expected the kind of unquestioning loyalty in return that a body would expect of its own flesh. If you betrayed them, you were dead, or as good as. And any individuals or human services that fell between the cracks of their needs were invisible, as far as they were concerned.

  I glanced down at my databand. I’d been invisible for a long time; it hadn’t been an easy life.

  “We can’t judge the combines by human standards,” she said, “any more than we can expect them to treat individual human beings as if we were their equals. The FTA is the only independent system capable of interacting on an equal basis with the combines.” Her eyes never left my face, even while I looked down. “Over the centuries it’s taken on the job of filling those empty spaces, protecting the rights of the individual human being. The FTA maintains a safe balance—a kind of Humane Society, if you will, working for the protection of our no-longer-dominant species. And that is what we do here, and that is why I choose to work for them.”

  I looked up at her again. It sounded so perfectly reasoned, like a speech.… It was a speech, one she’d given again and again. She was good; really believable. And she really believed every word of it. Maybe it was even true, for her. But the FTA she thought she knew wasn’t the one I knew. I’d survived living in the cracks; but not because of anything the FTA had ever done for me. I’d gotten the FTA’s attention a few times—but what they’d done to me then had only made my life worse. “I guess I’ve got a lot to learn,” I said, but the words were as sour as vomit in my throat.

  She broke off, half-frowning. It wasn’t the response she was used to getting. She looked away from me, resenting the tone of my voice, my attitude, my presence, me. “The vote is at four,” she said to Jardan, looking down at her desktop again as she turned toward her access unit. “I won’t review the report, since I already know what my vote will be. But I have a lot of my own work to do by then. Philipa, will you call up the Sarumo file and find out what became of that data about Triple Gee? And then I guess the usual—request, turn down, and put off. Get the correspondence processing … when you get to that point, come back and show Mez Cat how to do it. He might as well earn his keep.” She glanced up at me again finally, lifting her eyebrows.

  “Yes, ma’am,” I said, almost relieved. Any kind of work at all had to be better than sitting around until my butt got numb, waiting for Braedee to tell me I was free again.

  Jardan nodded, and started for the door. She stopped again as the security screen blinked off. “Will you be all right alone—like this?” She almost looked at me.

  Elnear’s glance followed the twitch of Jardan’s head. Every time her eyes registered me a small shock ran through her, as if my face kept startling her. “I expect so,” she said, a little dryly. “I’ll keep him occupied somehow.” She was thinking that if something sensitive came up, she’d send me out on an errand.…

  “It won’t help,” I said.

  “What?” She looked at me, blank-faced with surprise.

  “Sending me out. You’d have to send me farther than that. If I want to know what happens here I’ll know it. Look, it really doesn’t matter—” I pushed on before the protest could form on her lips. “Like you said, Lady, what do I know about anything? I don’t care what you do.”

  “Centauri does,” Jardan said.

  I shook my head. “All I know is that they want you to stay alive to go on doing it. All I want is my money.”

  Elnear sighed, and waved Jardan gone. The screen came back on as she left, shutting us in together.

  “Please never do that again,” Elnear said, when we were alone.

&nb
sp; “What?”

  “You know.”

  Listen to her thoughts, and answer them out loud. I nodded. “Sorry, Lady.”

  Something that was a cross between amusement and annoyance pulled at her mouth. “You know, somehow when you address me as ‘Lady,’ it sounds entirely different … rather like you were yelling at me from a street corner.” She turned away again, as her phone chimed.

  I waited while she talked with the shimmering face on the other end, doing something strange with her left hand on the console part of the time … some kind of direct neural transfer. Somehow it surprised me to realize she was augmented—but I could feel her using, her brain transferring and calling up data, storing new facts; communicating with her caller on some other, independent level even while they talked, still pretending to be only human. And these people hated psions, and called us unnatural—when they had to rip apart their bodies, rewire half their brain with custom bioware, just to get a pale imitation of what a psion was born with.

  I looked away again, studying the office, staring at the clutter on her desk—an uneasy mix, like she was. A crystal vase filled with dried flowers, tape readers and strange little books, datadots inside a security seal, a handmade cup … old holos of Talitha and Jiro and a man who was a taMing, but not one I’d met. I realized it must be a picture of her dead husband. The access unit she was using looked like a piece of stretched black silk. Her console was totally out of my league, from what I could see of how it worked—which was nothing at all.

  Across the room under a slow-moving sculpture painting there was a more normal unit, with a touchboard and trodes; probably meant for an aide, or someone like Jardan. I stood up as Elnear finished her call. “Ma’am, you mind if I use that port?” I pointed.

  “What do you want to do with it?”

  “You have a map of N’yuk I can access?”

  She nodded, figuring that would keep me out of trouble for a while: She did something with her hand and light showed on the unit. “That one answers to ‘Twinkle’,” she said, and looked a little embarrassed, as if she’d never really listened to how the name sounded before.