Catspaw

by Joan D. Vinge

  Behind me, flanking the entrance, there were two bouncers—huge grotesques who’d had themselves built into shells of augmented alloy that made them damn near indestructible. Near the wall on my left three more or less naked men were wrestling in a pool of green jelly, splattering the shrieking onlookers with slime. Four gilled, sexless exotics did an underwater ballet inside a clear bubble of glass drifting past overhead. One of them put a hand against the glass, gazing down at me. Slowly I reached up, stretching to meet it; the hand twitched away as I touched the glass. Its owner was gone in a swirl of silent laughter. A pair of chained-up black dogs yelped and snapped at me as I edged past them and out into the room. The strange danced with strangers, shaking and flailing like they’d been set on fire, or sprawled exhausted on jewel-colored cushions by low tables covered with food and drinks. There was nothing here I hadn’t seen before, but I’d never seen it all in one place.… There were clubs in Oldcity more bizarre than this, but I’d never had the credit line to get past their doors.

  There was a stage at the far end of the room. It was empty now, the only spot in the place where nothing was going on. Musicians were performing all around the club; each one singing, playing something different, lost in some separate auditory hallucination. And yet somehow it was all one sound; half a dozen kinds of synths playing half a dozen kinds of songs fusing into one perfect web of music, the changing rhythms meshing like gears … Argentyne’s symb. I’d never heard one this good. But I didn’t see Argentyne anywhere; there was no lightsong happening yet either. She must be the spirit, the one who did the visuals, who made it all work.

  I waded on through the dance, my body twitching to passing rhythms, my vision changing color as I passed through bands of amplified light, searching for Daric and Jiro. My eyes did a double take as my sight suddenly turned black-and-white. All the color was missing from the far corner of the room. I looked down at myself, back at the people around me; we were all still in living color. I reached the split in reality, stepped across it. I turned black-and-white, like everyone and everything around me. I stepped back again, not ready to go colorblind.

  Someone pushed a drink into my hand. It was Daric, from out of nowhere, with a couple of female exotics hanging on him. “Come on, Cat. Do something. I promised everyone you’d be interesting—”

  I took the drink. It was blue and steaming. I tapped Daric’s thoughts just long enough to be sure it wasn’t loaded. It was safe enough. I took a sip. “Where’s Jiro? He shouldn’t he left alone here. He shouldn’t he here at all.” One of the women blew kisses at me with tattooed green lips.

  Daric laughed. “My God, you sound like Auntie! I thought you were supposed to be some kind of wild boy; I thought this was your element. Don’t get stiff on me—”

  “I’ll get him stiff.…” One of the women oozed away from him, toward me. I backed up, and behind me someone else’s hand slid down over my ass. I jerked forward again. The woman with a single horn growing out of her forehead threw her arms around me. There was something long and shapeless squirming in her hand, something grayish-pink and wrinkled. “This is a suckworm,” she whispered. “Guess what it does.…” She pushed it at me, trying to slip it into my clothes.

  I let my disgust slam into her brain without control, without warning. She squealed and fell back. Daric didn’t bother to catch her, and she sat down hard on the floor, blinking, dazed. “Well, fuck you,” she said, to nobody in particular. She picked up the worm and crawled away through a forest of legs. The crowd around Daric murmured, and I heard a ripple of applause.

  “What did I tell you?” Daric said to them. “Mental powers!”

  I turned back to him. “I used to live off divers like you—night trippers with fat credit, pretending they were something they weren’t. You think this is all a big joke. You’re wrong. I don’t want Jiro hurt. Where is he?”

  Daric winced. “You’re telling me the truth again. That’s against the rules—” He raised his hands as my own hand made a fist. “He’s safe! He’s backstage with Argentyne. She’ll watch over him like a nanny, he’s in perfect ecstasy. Relax.” He shrugged, still amused. The crowd of hangers-on around him kept changing, like a kaleidoscope, leather and lace, flesh and fur. “Meet your fans, Cat. It’s such perfect timing.… Today you became notorious, a media star. Tonight you can celebrate it, among people who really understand what it means to be unique, a freak—”

  I grimaced, taking another gulp of my drink as he dragged me through the crowd to a table next to the stage. “My personal table, my guest of honor.” He caught my shoulders, chivvying me around. “You’ll have a perfect view of Argentyne’s performance from here. Sit down—” He pushed me down onto a pillow in the sea of colored cushions, keeping an arm around my shoulders. His face was flushed, his eyes were too bright; he looked like a man with a fever. Excitement, eagerness, pride—I was his prize catch, a moment’s inspired impulse, proof to the inhabitants of the Deep End that he was as twisted as they were inside his silver-gray straitjacket. He lived his double life with a vengeance that was hard to believe. Flaunting Argentyne at the family estates was only the surface membrane of his secret self, a hint to his family that if they dared to push through it they’d find a lot more secrets than they were ready for. He played the perfect combine vip by day, but it was only a role, just like the jaded deeve he played here by night. I wondered what the real Daric was, or where, or whether there was anything at all behind the masks.

  The seats around me at the table filled up before I had time to set down my drink, and the questions started flowing. “Is it true that psions—” “—tell me what—” “Read my mind!” “What’s your Prime?” “How does it feel…?”

  I let the hungry curiosity seep into my brain, the eager titillation as they waited for me to rape their minds with a thought.… Even fear could be a pleasure—a new kind of drug.

  As the drink loosened me up I started to let myself believe that nobody around me hated my guts, or wanted to get away from me, or was actually laughing at me inside. At least I knew what kind of people these were; at least here I didn’t have to worry about everything I did, everything I said, even the way I said it.… I felt myself relaxing for the first time in days. I answered their questions, out loud at first, until I saw that that wasn’t what they wanted. Then I answered them with my mind—slowly, gently, so that nobody panicked. They giggled and held their heads like children. Daric smiled with anticipation, not asking any questions of his own.

  “Read my mind—” the woman with scales glittering on her skin whispered again beside me. She licked her lips with a slitted tongue.

  (I don’t need to.) I grinned, and so did she. I finished off my drink, and there were two more in front of me before I could even ask. I took a meat-filled bun from one of the platters heaped with food in the center of the table, bit into it, still grinning. Across the table from me a bald, thick-necked slug in patchwork leather was stuffing food into his mouth as fast as he could, choking it down, hardly bothering to breathe. He’d cleared off half the platter closest to him already. I watched him eat for a minute longer; realized I was forgetting to chew the food in my own mouth. I glanced away, at a couple a few cushions past him. They could have been male or female or both, and they were slowly peeling away each others’ clothes, like somebody peeling the layers of an onion. Somebody else began to give me a back rub while I watched, kneading my neck and shoulders, pressing their thumbs into the hollows along my spine. It felt good, and I let the hands strip off my jacket without even looking around.

  I answered more questions as the crowd around me changed again. I drank more drinks, ate more food from the tray that never seemed to get completely empty, while everything began to feel better and better. I’d had dreams about this: about being at the center of a diver’s private fantasy, as an equal.… I felt myself letting go, an almost physical thing, as if my bones were melting and my body was moving away in seven different directions at once. My mind began to drift,
floating in a warm, hazy sea of acceptance, where the only tension was sexual, and there was no fear at all.

  After a while Jiro came dancing out from behind the stage. He jumped down into the cushions beside us, panting, his face flushed with excitement, and wriggled like a puppy into a spot beside Daric. As he settled in, the music that had been all around us until I didn’t even hear it any more changed, in a way that made everyone stop everything and look toward the stage. Reality shrugged, and suddenly the stage wasn’t empty any more. Shimmering above it now was a gleaming black filament like the web of some mutant bloodspider. There were human victims, half a dozen men or what looked like them, dangling in the wires, with blood or something like it dripping from their wounds. The air smelled like ozone. I shut my eyes and looked at them with my mind, and they were the musicians who’d been playing all around us. They were still playing, still hooked into the symb net. Their writhing agony was a freeform dance, tied to the heartbeat of their music.

  I heard Jiro suck in his breath, half frowning as he tried to guess whether what he saw was real. Knowing it couldn’t be, but still not sure—

  “It’s just an act,” I said. He nodded, frowned a little deeper, pushing his hair back from his eyes. “I know that.” He hunched his shoulders and looked away at the stage again as lightning played down the web.

  Argentyne was there, suddenly, drifting down through the web like some pitiless goddess of death, her hair a shockwave of silver white. Black leather cupped her like the petals of a nightflower; black silk fringe slid over bare flesh like the groping hands of her victims, reaching out for mercy as she passed. As her feet hit the floor she began to sing, swiveling out of the web and along the tongue of stage in spike-heeled killer shoes, stretching her silvered arms to embrace the crowd. Watching her strut it was hard to take my eyes off her; almost impossible to separate her from the beat that drove her motion in through every pore of my body, or her voice from the reverberating air. I couldn’t make out the words she was singing, even as they etched themselves across my brain, like acid eating its way into glass … a song about men and women, a song of war, in and out of the flesh …

  And as she sang and as she moved her flesh began to heave and buckle, as if something monstrous inside her was trying to force its way out. With the music screaming, her perfect flesh tore open like rubber. Glistening limbs flailed, pushed, burst free, her mutilated body fell away, withering like a cocoon.…

  … about getting inside each others’ skins, would it really be so different?…

  A silver-haired man, the sheen of sweat on the silver flesh laid bare above his tight black leather pants, heavy codpiece, thigh-high armored boots. Armed to the teeth, he raised a metal-studded fist to the crowd, and his voice was Argentyne’s, and no one else’s but his own.…

  … Would it really still be war?

  And he turned, and Argentyne was waiting there behind him. Alone, defenseless, she held up her hand, as if she could stop his slow, hungry advance on her by nothing but willpower.…

  And the gun dropped from his hands as his chest began to heave and tear, showing velvet as red as blood; as his face contorted and the music screamed while a hand struggled out through his mouth … as his body exploded like porcelain dropped from a height.

  A silver-haired woman in a red velvet gown emerged like a snake, shedding the man’s skin, shuddering free of it as it sloughed to the floor, kicking it away. I watched Argentyne walk toward Argentyne, undulating like the sea. As they passed each other like figures in a mirror, the two women lifted their hands, blowing kisses, while Argentyne segued into the final verse of her song.…

  … if you were a woman, and I was a man … inside the other side of life tonight …

  The crowd howled, its voice strobing inside sound like a sun gone nova … as Argentyne appeared and disappeared, moving through curtains of synthesized reality, shouting and applause … to settle, as the music rolled away and the visions faded, into the space that had somehow opened for her between Daric and me.

  I stared at her, hardly believing she was actually right beside me. She looked back at me, blinking with a kind of startled recognition as she realized she’d seen me before. As she realized now, like everyone else did, what I really was.

  “Argentyne … magnificent…” Daric murmured. He put his arms around her, kissing her lips, her throat, her breasts … laying claim to her and all that she was, all that she’d just created, in a way that nobody who saw them could fail to understand. She didn’t resist him, dissolving against his body, turning the kiss into an extension of what she’d done on the stage, still radiating the white heat of her performance energy. What drove into my dazzled brain then surprised me as much as anything I’d just seen on the stage: she actually wanted him, wanted to feel his lips against her skin, and it was her own pleasure that let the contact continue long after it could have ended.

  I watched them, like everybody else was watching them, with the heat of Argentyne’s energy still burning inside me, mutating, shifting, getting hotter; Daric’s arousal, my own.… Slowly realizing that there was a whole hidden layer of sensation that only I could share, out of everyone in that room who saw them. I shared it, hungry, greedy, not able to stop myself … knowing all the while that they knew I knew, and wanted me to know, and liked it that way.…

  They broke apart at last, to more whistles and howls. Jiro sat gaping, caught somewhere between awe and panic. Daric looked straight at me, grinning, still with one arm holding Argentyne close. He said, “How did you like the show?” He didn’t mean just the one on stage.

  I grinned too, leaning back in the soft embrace of the pillows. I could sense the entire room now, as I let my focus dissolve: the flow, the heat, the pressure, the wild energies … feel it all funnel back along the lines of contact until my mind felt like a star. I let out a little of that raw fissioning fire, feeding it into him, into Argentyne, into every mind around me at the table; letting them feel exactly how much I enjoyed it. There were gasps and giggles, aftershocks of stunned disbelief, and then everyone’s eyes were on me again. They all wanted more—The slug across the table even stopped eating for long enough to look up at me. I opened myself to them, feeling the contact ebb and flow as I dropped the circuit breakers in my mind. A strangled laugh escaped from Daric. I felt his craving for the forbidden touch … the terror that squeezed it, compressed it until it became a kind of lust.…

  I broke contact with him as I suddenly remembered Jiro. Jiro was staring at me too, his throat working. He was even more terrified of what I’d just done than Daric was, but he was trying desperately to look like he’d enjoyed it, to look like everybody else.

  I wanted to say something to him, but then Argentyne leaned away from Daric, toward me, looking directly into my eyes with all her attention; really seeing me for the first time. “That was incredible,” she murmured. She laughed, shaking out the silver mane of her hair. I felt her enjoy the feel of it down her back, felt her titillated by the sensation of thoughts turned inside out; felt her wanting to feel another mind run its fingers through her own again. I brushed her mind with an image, and she shivered. “I’m ruined.…” she said, her voice caressing me like warm fingers. “You’re like silk. Accessing is going to feel like sandpaper in my brain for the rest of my life. You’ve ruined me with one touch.…” Her hand reached out this time, brushing my cheek. She was only half serious, but Daric’s grip on her tightened, pulling her away. She glanced at him, more amused than annoyed, pulling her spike-heeled feet in closer to her on the cushions. “You brought him here, love. Let us enjoy him. We don’t see nearly as many psions here on Earth as you worldjumpers do.”

  “Why not?” I asked, half realizing that down here where nothing was a surprise, telepaths shouldn’t be as interesting as I seemed to be to them.

  “This is Earth,” Daric said, his smile twitching with spite. “Psions are … well, abnormal.” He shrugged. “They’re discouraged from settling here. They might poll
ute the stock.” His eyes moved, not meeting mine, as his own paranoia suddenly set in again.

  My anger shot out past my control, spilled over into the open lines of my mind and hit him. The people gathered around the table jerked and gasped … laughed, nervously. Daric wiped at his eyes, shook his head—looked at me again. Eager again, in a way that should have made me want to get away from him. But the warm feedback of everyone else’s acceptance melted my anger, dissolved my resentment. I couldn’t hold onto my thoughts, any more than I seemed to be able to keep them to myself … and somehow I didn’t even care that something was going wrong.

  “Have you ever plugged in?” Argentyne asked, leaning toward me again, her copper-colored eyes intent. “Have you ever worked a symb circuit? Would you like to try?” Do what she did—the music, the images, creating a mass hallucination out of the artist’s imagination. I shook my head. “God’s teeth,” she said, “you’d be astounding—you could make people live what they see and hear. The ultimate.”

  “That’s socketwork. It’s illegal,” I said, the words flat, “for psions.” Even I knew that. “If they catch you, they brainwipe you.”

  “If I could create that kind of effect, even once,” she said, “it would be worth it.”