Catspaw

by Joan D. Vinge

  Interstellar travel had proved once and for all that Earth wasn’t the center of the universe; running into the Hydrans had finally shown humans that they weren’t alone in it. Human religion had done a double-take then, going through the Re-creation. What survived were kinds of religion that preached oneness with all lifeforms, and practiced what they preached by keeping a low profile. It made more sense, and it didn’t compete with the combines for loyalty.

  But Stryger wanted to bring back the old-style religion, the kind that said there was a real God somewhere who cared enough to play favorites, and humans were it. Which meant Hydrans weren’t. I couldn’t figure out when he’d started to hate Hydrans so much, or why. He was careful not to talk about it, because he wasn’t stupid, and he knew that the ones he really wanted behind him weren’t stupid either. They probably hated Hydrans as much as he did, but now that most surviving Hydrans were under some combine’s thumb, or “relocated” in dumps like Oldcity, talking genocide wasn’t easy like it had been once.

  Stryger had started traveling, gathering supporters and money, playing his Human Rights themes to get attention on the Net and to spread his word from world to world. He’d been at it for a long time; he was fifty-three. He hadn’t always looked like he did now—I’d been right about that. He’d had enough plastic work done on him so that the oldest images of him were barely recognizable. He preached about the dignity and beauty of the human form, unaugmented, unchanged, the way God had meant it to be. But little by little he’d played God on himself, transforming himself into a calculated vision of human perfection.

  And over the years he’d convinced both the combine vips and the Security Council that he was almost as perfect as he seemed. It couldn’t be easy to play both sides as well as he did, to make two enemies hear just what they wanted to hear when you spoke the same words. You had to be damned smart and slick, but more than that you had to have the kind of belief in yourself that made other people want to believe in you. He had it; I’d felt it. And too many other people believed in him already. His Movement had a higher financial profile than a lot of combines. He could buy himself anything he wanted; he had that kind of money.

  Only, he hadn’t done that. He actually fed most of his profits into creating the kind of help for life’s losers that he preached about. I’d seen some of the shelters he’d sponsored, in Oldcity … I’d used some of them.

  That had stopped me cold when I found out about it. I hadn’t known what to make of it, I’d wondered if maybe somehow I was wrong about him. If he’d done it for promo, he’d get more for his money just hiring hypers. But then I’d realized that money, or even fame, wasn’t what he was after. He wanted real power. He wanted that slot on the Security Council, and it looked like he was using the pentryptine vote as a way to get himself there. Something was still driving him to reach higher and higher, and it wasn’t something holy. I’d stared at the final image of his perfect face for a long time, wondering what the hell was really going on behind those eyes.…

  I turned to look out at Isplanasky’s view; clearing Stryger’s image out of my mind. I had to shut my eyes then, as they suddenly told me how high up I was. I pressed my hands against the couch, hanging on for a second until the dizziness passed. The couch was covered with something that felt and smelled like real leather. I ran my hand over it, back and forth.

  “… if this gains him any more support we’ll be in trouble,” Isplanasky was saying. “The majority of the Assembly is for deregulation already. Aside from the fact that you are clearly the best candidate, Stryger is completely unprepared for the real demands of a Council position. He’s not even cybered—calls it unnatural, for God’s sake.”

  “Yes, exactly: ‘for God’s sake.’” Elnear rested her head against the high back of her seat, staring at the ceiling. “He really believes God is on his side. You know, I have always tried to do what I understood to be right, in keeping with the manifold ways of God. But sometimes I can’t help wondering.… I think about this debate night and day. I dream about it, and wake up arguing with myself.”

  “I know how you feel, believe me.” Isplanasky moved restlessly back to his bar. “If combines start using pentryptine on their citizens—”

  “You might be out of a job,” I said. The FTA rented out contract laborers to whatever combine wanted extra bodies, usually to do things their citizens wouldn’t do. No questions asked. It also used them in its own operations—things like the Federation Mines, where they mined their telhassium on a piece of burnt-out star called Cinder out in the Crab Colonies.

  They looked at me.

  “Well, that wasn’t exactly my concern,” Isplanasky said, still good natured. “My concern is the same as the Lady’s. I oversee Contract Labor; it involves the lives of a vast number of people, who would be more at risk from combine drug abuses than most of their population. I believe that human dignity and freedom of choice are worth fighting for; that individual rights have to be protected and maintained at any cost. I don’t want to see the people under my charge treated badly and unable even to protest it.”

  “You want your bondies left free to eat all the dirt some combine feels like feeding them, without drugs to make it easier?” I asked. “As long as somebody keeps paying you for ten standards of their time—”

  His smile disappeared. “Not at all. I work for the FTA because Contract Labor exists as a viable, humane alternative, so that those individuals who lack regular combine citizenship have somewhere to turn. It gives them a start, a second chance; useful training. ‘Contract Labor builds worlds’—” He gestured at the logo on the wall behind him.

  I stared at him. He had to be the most perfect hypocrite I’d ever seen, or a pathological liar—because he meant every word of that.

  “Are you all right?” he asked.

  I said, “How many bondies did you have to skin to cover this couch?”

  “By the Nine Billion Names of God!” he murmured. “Are you an anarchist, son, or is it just that you can’t hold your liquor?”

  I unfastened my databand and let it drop off. I held up my arm, letting him see the wide, smooth band of white scar tissue. He didn’t know what it was. “I used to work for you,” I said.

  He raised his eyebrows. “You seem to have come through the experience with your skin intact.” His voice was cool and dry.

  I reached behind me for the tail of my shirt. Just then Elnear’s desperate anger caught in my mind like a thorn. I glanced at her, saw the disbelief in her eyes. “Ma’am, I—”

  “Yes, certainly, you may go.” She raised a dismissing hand. “Back to my office. I’ll speak with you there.” It was the closest thing to a threat I’d heard from her. She’d speak; but she wouldn’t listen. She murmured an apology to Isplanasky, something like, “… he isn’t feeling well…”

  I left the room, leaving their stares behind. The memories still followed me, because there was nowhere I could ever go where I’d be able to leave those behind.

  “Well, squire—” Daric taMing’s twitchy, grinning face pushed in front of me as I dragged my aching stupidity back through the halls. “Where’s your Lady in white armor?”

  Damn. The one person in the entire universe that I wanted to see the least. I shrugged, not even sure what he was talking about, as usual. I wondered if he spent all his days like this, wandering the halls looking for victims.

  “She’s supposed to be with you, I thought.” He kept pushing, matching my steps. “Or vice versa. That’s what you’re paid for. Am I right?”

  “Not today,” I said, my hands making quiet fists.

  “‘Sir.’”

  “What?” I looked at him.

  “Say ‘sir.…’ You’re just not very good at this, are you? You know what Elnear says about you behind your back? ‘You can dress him up, but you can’t take him anywhere.’”

  “I thought ‘sir’ was only used as a term of respect.”

  It took him a minute, because he didn’t believe I’d said t
hat. Then he laughed. “You know, I think I admire you, Cat. You actually don’t give a damn what we think of you … or is it just that you’re really so naive that you don’t know what we could do to you?”

  I felt myself go cold as I realized he meant that. I kept walking, watching my feet take one step after another. “Jule never told me she had a brother.”

  He sniggered. “That’s hardly surprising. She always hated me, because I’m normal. She tried to kill me once, when we were children. She tried to push me off the balcony at the country house on Ardattee.”

  I looked up, frowning. He was still smiling at me. “Then she must have had a good reason.” I looked ahead again, walking faster.

  He kept up with me, hanging onto me like a dog with its teeth sunk in my leg. I wondered what he wanted—because this was building up to something, I could feel it. He hadn’t run into me by accident. I wondered what his problem was; if he was on drugs, or if just being a taMing was enough to fuck him up this bad.

  “What was it that attracted you to my sister, anyway? Most normal people find psions repulsive. The thought of them crawling into your thoughts, or stopping your heart with … a thought. You know. Of course, maybe you find that erotic, like necrophilia, or having someone piss on you.…”

  I spun around, my fist coming up; not even caring that half a hundred witnesses and even more security eyes were about to see me beat the shit out of an Assembly member—

  “I know what you are,” he said. “You’re one too.”

  My hand dropped to my side like dead weight. “What?” I said; and then, “Who told you? That I was a telepath—”

  “It’s true … that explains everything.” His gray eyes clung to my face like a sweating hand. “You are a psion. My father actually hired a psion.” He laughed again, high and strained, and smacked his forehead with his hand. “God, I don’t believe it.”

  “Who told you?” I felt the anger that had barely stopped short of his face try to reach out for him again as I realized he’d tricked me.

  “Father told me.” He shrugged, as if Charon taMing talked about me like he discussed the weather. “I just couldn’t believe it.” I didn’t believe that, either. He must have overheard something, gotten access to some private file. “After Jule left home, I was sure that if a psion ever crossed his range again, he’d have her—or him, in your case—incinerated on the spot. Braedee must be more persuasive than I thought. Or he knows more about us than I realized.…”

  “I’m not a psion, to most people around here. Braedee wants it kept that way. I’ll tell him you know.” Hoping that would be enough to keep his mouth shut.

  “Oh, your secret is safe with me.” His face changed suddenly, started to twitch again. “Being a psion … doesn’t it make you ashamed? Doesn’t it make you want to pull your brains out? Jule wanted to. The way everyone treated her—” Something haunted his eyes then: fear. That it could have been him, and not his sister.

  “Like you did?”

  He frowned, twitching.

  I went on down the hallway, and this time he didn’t follow.

  NINE

  I WAS READY in the usual place at the usual time the next morning. I was the only one. It wasn’t like Elnear or Jardan to be late. If anybody besides me hated mornings in that house, I didn’t know about it. I leaned against the stairway banister with my eyes shut, waiting. The nagging ache that had started in my head yesterday afternoon was still there. It had slipped away when I inhaled some painkiller, but it came crawling back every time the medicine wore off. My stomach felt queasy, and I hadn’t bothered with breakfast. I kept looking at the time, watching it get later and later, until all at once I wondered if they’d left without me. Suddenly my stomach and my head felt a whole lot worse. I spun out a searching finger of thought until it jabbed into Jardan’s mind, still somewhere in the house.

  I went hack along the hall until I found her sitting in the sun room, sipping coffee as if there was all the time in the world. “You’re late,” I said.

  She glanced up at me with a kind of cold spite. “No.” She shook her head. “Lady Elnear is attending a board meeting of ChemEnGen this morning.”

  “Without me?”

  “She’s in her study.” Jardan twitched her head in the general direction. “It isn’t necessary for her to attend this meeting in person; it’s merely a formality.” Centauri’s board held all the real power. “The rest of the day she’ll be accessing, in preparation for the debate tomorrow—”

  “Oh.” I thought about how I could still have been upstairs asleep. “Thanks for letting me know.”

  “—Although after yesterday I would hardly blame her if she chose to leave you behind.” She looked out the windows again.

  “Maybe I had a—”

  “Bound and gagged.”

  I swallowed what I’d been going to say. “Chew on rats,” I said, and left the room.

  Back upstairs I peeled off the Centauri clothes I’d been wearing and pulled on my new denims and my old shirt. Then I went down the back way and outside into the fresh air. I walked through the courtyard into the field beyond, something I’d never done before. The openness made me giddier than it usually did. I pushed myself to take one step and then another away from the high stone wall.

  “Cat! Cat!”

  I looked back, saw Talitha waving at me as she came around the corner of the wall, riding on the back of the biggest dog I’d ever seen. Her nanny was leading it by some kind of harness.

  “Look at me!” she shouted, in a voice you could have heard on the next planet. “Do you want to ride with me? Her name is Bootsie, because she has little white boots!” The nanny hushed her, frowning.

  The thing was kind of tan and white, its face half hidden in a tangle of thick hair. I backed up as her nanny jerked it to a stop beside me. If the woman had any name besides Nanny, I hadn’t bothered to find it out. She always wore gray, and usually looked like she’d been sucking on something sour. She looked that way now. “Good morning,” she said, sounding like she doubted it.

  “You can ride with me,” Talitha offered again, looking hopefully at me. “Can’t he, Nanny?”

  “Bootsie can’t carry both of you,” Nanny said flatly.

  “Thanks anyway.” I shook my head. “I don’t like dogs.”

  “She’s not a dog,” Talitha said. “She’s a pony. You don’t ride on dogs.”

  “Oh.”

  “Come on, Talitha. I’m tired of walking. You’ve ridden long enough.” Nanny jerked on the pony’s lead again, starting to turn it back the way they’d come.

  “No, no!” Talitha’s face crumpled as she clutched at her saddle. “We didn’t even go around the house! Please—”

  “No.”

  I watched them start away, feeling the nanny’s boredom and Talitha’s helpless disappointment in my head like the taste of old metal. “I’ll take her around for a while,” I said.

  Nanny wheeled the pony and its sniffling rider back again, slapped the lead rope into my hands before I could think about changing my mind. “Here,” she said. “Be careful, it bites.”

  I grimaced.

  “Bootsie never bites me,” Talitha said.

  Nanny headed hack toward the house, taking the taste of old metal with her.

  I looked at the pony; touched its mind, feeling the strange, shifting surface of an animal’s thoughts, like clouds drifting across a sky. Not afraid, not angry … content and trusting. My hold on the rope loosened a little. In the distance I could see the Crystal Palace. Spines of light hit me in the eye as the molten sun poured over the mountain wall and turned it into a burning-glass. I could see another house, closer by, off to my left. “Whose house is that?” I asked, not really caring.

  “That’s Daric’s house,” Talitha said. I was sorry I’d asked. I looked toward my right, saw the river flowing by, wide and quiet. I started toward it, pulling on the pony’s rope. At least the pony was something to hold onto as I crossed the empty field. We
reached the river’s edge and I stopped under a tree.

  “Hey, Cat---”

  I looked up, startled.

  Jiro came swooping down on us in a rattle of artificial wings. The pony shied, jerking on the lead rope. Talitha squealed in fright. I caught the pony’s mind inside a loop of forced calm, and settled it down fast.

  Jiro landed beside us, the wings folding neatly behind him as he dropped his arms. “Did you see me? Just like a bird—” He raised one arm again, the wing fluttered.

  “Jiro!” Talitha said. “You scared my pony.”

  “Oh.” He shrugged. “I’m sorry, Tally. But isn’t this really vork? Auntie got it for me. Charon said I couldn’t have one, it was too dangerous.”

  I wondered if Elnear was hoping he’d break his neck, and there’d be one less taMing in the world. But even as I thought it, I knew that wasn’t the reason she’d done it. She didn’t hate these kids; she didn’t even hate all the taMings. I wondered how she felt about the one she’d married.… Jiro was wearing a shock suit and a helmet; she’d bought him those, too.

  “Why are you dressed like that?” he said.

  “Like what?” I looked down at myself.

  “Like you’re zeroed.” Poor.

  I frowned. “Why do you always say the first thing that comes into your head, no matter how stupid it is?”

  He stuck his lip out. “You should talk. I heard about what you said to Isplanasky.”

  I looked away. Talitha sat on the pony’s back, singing, “I love my pony, I love my pony.…” over and over and over, while the pony tore at the soft green grass with its blunt teeth. The sudden fright had already disappeared from both their minds. I looked back at Jiro. “Why is it I never see any of you people talk to each other, but you always know everybody else’s business?”

  He just stared at me, blankly.