Catspaw

by Joan D. Vinge

  My mouth left hers, traveling down over her throat, her shoulders, her breasts … following her lead, granting her every unspoken wish with growing urgency. Her breath came in shallow sobs, she whimpered, and then began to tremble, as the realization grew in her mind of what was being done to her. Wonder, joy, frantic longing, rising panic—

  The hands that had clung to me, caressed me, urged me, suddenly were trying to push me away. Gasping for breath I let her go, backing off, putting space between us for the length of heartbeats it took for the heat of her unfinished desire to burn away her fear. And then I began again. This time I took more care, not answering every need, or not too soon; drawing it out, letting her feel that there were still secret places that she could keep hidden, if only in her mind. Soothing, lingering, exploring, until my mouth reached the place where she had ached for someone’s mouth to be—

  And the rising wave of her pleasure reached its crest and broke over her, over me, through every synapse of my body, until it was all I could do to hold myself under control. I swung my hips over her again, down into the waiting space between her open thighs. I slid into her, deep into the final place that now at last she was ready to share. I began to move, feeling myself, feeling myself inside her, stunned with sensation. Her hips rose to meet my thrusts, while the tide rose inside me this time, rising and rising toward that impossible crest, and exploding over me, out of me, back along the filaments of contact I had woven and into her unprotected mind. I felt her come again, her climax recoiling through my own like a riptide, fusing us into one. I covered her mouth with mine to drown out her cry, and she kissed me and I kissed her, echoing echoing echoing, until there was nothing left of us but warm ashes.

  She held me inside the circle of her arms, I held her inside mine, and there were tears on my face, but I didn’t know whose they were. Still clinging to each other while the darkness slowly faded into dawn, we slept.

  FIFTEEN

  WHEN I WOKE up again it was the middle of the morning, and my mind was still half in a dream. I sighed, reaching out into the warm band of sunlight to touch warm skin, reaching out with my mind. The bed was empty. My mind touched the mind of a total stranger.

  I pushed myself up, confused—jerked back as my eyes registered the pair of uniformed legs standing beside the bed. The Corpse looked down at me, expressionless, and said, “The Chief and Gentleman Charon want to talk to you about last night.”

  Lazuli—I bit my tongue to keep from blurting out the question before I found the answer. No. She was nowhere in sight, nowhere in his mind. It was about the explosion, that was all. If the Corpse wondered why I looked so guilty, or why I looked so relieved, he didn’t let it bother him. A one-track mind had its points. “Sure. Just give me a minute.”

  While I pulled on some clothes I wondered about why they’d sent a body to deliver the message, instead of calling me. Maybe they were that paranoid about security, after last night. Or maybe they just wanted me paranoid.

  As I passed the bathroom mirror, a sudden flash of green caught my eye. I stopped, looking at myself, turning my head—saw the light wink again. My ear. I reached up, touching it, with a slow smile starting. There was an earring in my ear, one I’d never seen before. Green glass, catching the light when I moved, like a cat’s eye. I knew I hadn’t put it there … I figured I knew who had. I stuck a drug patch behind my ear, and went out of the room.

  The first thing the Corpse did when I came downstairs was make me take the patch off. Braedee’s orders. It took about half an hour for the effects to wear off. By the time we reached the city, he wanted me deaf and dumb. The Corpse threw the patch away. I didn’t bother to tell him about the second patch I’d stuck on behind my other ear.

  He took me back into N’Yuk, to the taMing townhouse. You’d never have known there’d been three murders and a lot of blood there the night before. I followed the Corpse through the room where it had all happened, and everything in it was immaculate—walls, carpets, furniture. Some of the furniture looked different than I remembered, but otherwise it fit the room perfectly. It made my skin crawl.

  Braedee and Charon taMing were waiting for me in the room beyond, a space like a cell, which didn’t make me feel much better. As I walked through the doorway I felt something not-human whisper across my brain and fade again. Then I understood. It was a white-room—so thick with security that my psi actually registered it. I stopped, uncertain, as Braedee stood up from the couch. Charon stayed where he was, deep in its folds, staring at me. I made myself look right at him, my face as stupidly expressionless as I could manage. Trying not to look like I’d just slept with someone’s wife was something I didn’t have a whole lot of practice at.

  “Why are you looking at me like that?” he snapped.

  “Nothing, sir.” I glanced away from him, at Braedee, at the door.

  “Sit down,” Braedee said, and pointed at a chair.

  I followed his hand, glad to have somewhere else to look. But my mind was still focused on Charon, just as paranoid as he wanted it to be, for all the wrong reasons. But not deaf, or dumb. Inside the forest of his augmentation, I felt him daring me to sit in that chair. Somehow I managed not to turn back and stare at him. I kept looking at the chair, the one Braedee had pointed out. Soft, humpbacked, blue-gray—there was nothing unusual about it. But whoever sat in it was going to get one hell of a shock, right where it hurt him most.

  My own disbelief made me freeze. Why—? A trap. If my psi was really shut down the way he wanted it to be, then I’d go to the chair and sit in it, and he’d get to watch me jump. But if I could read him, I’d know—

  Braedee was looking at me again. I clamped down hard on my body functions, hoping I could keep the readings normal enough to suit him. Forcing myself to stay calm, forcing myself to move, I crossed the room. Without taking a deep breath, I sat down in the chair.

  They weren’t bluffing. I leaped up again with a curse, as the current sank its teeth into my ass. “What the hell—?” I yelled, as if I didn’t know. I didn’t have to fake the anger that came with it. “Is that supposed to be some kind of fucking joke?” I looked at Braedee and shook out my smarting hands.

  Braedee stood where he was, his arms clasped behind him. He didn’t move to do anything, which had to mean I’d passed his test. Charon settled back into the couch, his body going loose as the suspicion flowed out of him; satisfied, because Braedee was.

  “Not a joke, I assure you,” Braedee said mildly. “A test.”

  “Of what?” I remembered to ask, still frowning.

  “Of whether you were reading us.”

  “Shit,” I said. “Maybe that’s where your brains are,” rubbing my butt, “but mine are up here.” I jerked my head at him. “Whose chair is that—Daric’s?”

  His mouth twitched. “Sit down … I promise you, it won’t happen again.”

  “You sit in it,” I said. He was telling the truth, but I didn’t feel much like sitting down, anyway.

  He shrugged, and sat down in the chair. Nothing happened to him.

  “Why do I have to play deadhead for you, anyhow?” I asked.

  “The Gentleman prefers it that way,” Braedee said, and glanced at Charon.

  I turned to look at him again. It was easier, this time. “I thought you were paying to keep me switched on.” I wondered if it was just his disgust at the thought of being touched by my mind, or if he really had something to hide. By the time I got out of this room, I was going to know which it was.

  His anger was like a wave of heat. “I’m paying you to do what you’re told,” he said. “We will ask the questions. You answer them—civilly.” He shot a dark look at Braedee, one that said he thought Braedee was letting me get away with too much, letting me mouth off without stepping on me. I remembered what Braedee had done to me before the board meeting. He hadn’t let me get away with it then. But then I hadn’t known something that could ruin his career. He’d finally stepped off the edge.

  I said, “Y
es, sir,” anyway, because Charon was making a fist of his cybered hand. I didn’t have to read his mind to know what he’d like to do with it. Knowing what he owed me for saving his family and Elnear last night hadn’t changed how he felt about psions, except maybe to make him more bitter. I went to the couch and sat on it, because it was the only place left to sit down. I kept as much space between him and me as I could. Its soft folds were filled with something that shifted out of my way like water. I tried not to flounder. “What do you want to know? Sir.”

  “You read the mind of that assassin last night,” he said. I nodded, even though it wasn’t a question. “And you saw something that gave him away to you, something that didn’t register on any of our security scans. What was it?”

  I glanced at Braedee. He hadn’t told them. He was looking back at me, looking a little grim, but that was all. I slipped in through the hissing grids of his implants, waded too-clear streams of biosoft, treading as lightly as I could: He knew I hadn’t told anybody what he’d done—or hadn’t done—last night. He was counting on me to cover for him again, even though he wasn’t sure why I’d done it, any more than I was.… He figured I must want something from him.

  I realized he was right. I just had to figure out what it was. “Somebody had stripped his brains. He’d been reprogrammed to act human, but he wasn’t. He was just a … a bioware death machine.” The memory of what had been done to him made my jaw clench until my teeth hurt. “Who was he?” The poor bastard.

  “A midlevel official of Centauri.” Charon waved his hand, pushing the dead man aside like yesterday’s weather report. “No one important.” I looked at him, looked away again. “What is important,” he said, his voice dropping until it was barely audible, “is who did it to him.” Now his face showed something. Now he was angry, frustrated, sick with rage, aching for revenge. They’d analyzed every dripping millimeter of the human bomb’s remains, without finding a clue. But he had to know—not because whoever had done it had destroyed one life, or four, in a way that would make a hit man retch. How they’d done it, what they’d done, didn’t matter to him half as much as the fact that they’d done it to Centauri … to him.

  “I don’t know who did it,” I said, too softly.

  He leaned toward me, his eyes hot and hard. “You have to know. You saw inside his mind. Who wired him? Who sent him here?”

  I shook my head. “I told you, I don’t know! Whoever did it was good—they didn’t leave any fingerprints.”

  “Is he telling the truth?” Charon said to Braedee. Braedee nodded.

  I frowned. “He didn’t even know who he was looking for. They’d set him up so that when his eyes registered the right visual cue, he’d drink that drink. He didn’t know anything until he saw it—” Her. Elnear. I saw him in my mind, trying so damn hard to swallow that drink down before she got away from him. If only Jardan had really made him spill it. If only I’d understood what it meant, before it was too late.…

  “You knew about the drink?” he asked, his voice jerking my attention back.

  I nodded. “I knew—but it was too late. It was the way he had to drink it.…” I glanced at Braedee again. “I just didn’t figure it out until there wasn’t time to stop him. All there was time for was hitting the floor. What the hell was in it?” You said it was harmless. The words almost got out of me.

  “A glass of wine with a few random molecules of ceboric in it,” Braedee said, thin-lipped. “It appeared perfectly innocuous—and it was, until it catalyzed the LDA they’d planted in his stomach. Then it blew him up.”

  “I know. I saw that part.” I looked down, swallowing.

  “Then there’s nothing—absolutely nothing else you can tell us about who set up this attack?” Charon said.

  I hesitated, searching my memory for something I might have forgotten, or refused to remember because it was too ugly.… Finally I shook my head. “No sir. I told you everything. There just wasn’t anything in there to see.”

  Charon swore, turning back to Braedee. “Now what? This is critical, goddamnit. I want answers. You said nothing could go wrong—and everything has. You slipped, Braedee, you nearly cost Centauri Elnear. She’s no good to us dead—” He stood up, looking like he had something down his shirt, gnawing at his flesh.

  Braedee glanced at me, frowning, as if he was afraid I was hearing too much.… Too much about what? He looked back at Charon, his face under control again, as he said, “The psion served his intended purpose, sir.” Every word carried a weight on it. Iron. Irony. It took me an extra beat to realize that he was talking about me. “He filled a breach in our security, just as I said he would; one that could not have been filled any other way. Because of that Lady Elnear is still secure.” Not alive; secure. “Your son and your wife, as well.” Taking the credit as calmly as if it belonged to him. “The attack was almost undetectable. Not many of our competitors have the capability for something like that, even if they have the intent.”

  “What about Triple Gee?”

  “Their ambassadors didn’t know anything about it,” I said.

  “That doesn’t prove anything,” Braedee murmured. “But the way it happened was too imaginative for Triple Gee’s Security.”

  “Anybody can hire a specialist,” I said. “There’s plenty of arm in the Lack Market, who’ll kill anybody for you, any way you want it done. That doesn’t take much imagination.” Something that didn’t make sense bumped up against the back of my eyes as I said it. The other attacks on Elnear had been so crude they were almost a joke. Nothing at all like this one.

  “That’s impossible.” Charon said coldly. “No combine’s board would consider that.”

  I laughed; stopped laughing as they looked at me. They actually meant that. They had their own armies, spies, assassins. They thought they didn’t need outsiders. “You mean it’s more fun if you do it yourself?” The stares got blacker. “Look, this attack doesn’t match the others at all. Maybe they gave up and turned it over to somebody who knew what the hell they were doing.”

  They looked at each other. The subvocal exchange between them said they knew I was wrong. They knew. How could they be so sure? I sank a quiet hook deeper into Charon’s brain.

  “What about the Lack Market?” Charon murmured, his eyes still on Braedee. “Could there be any possible tie-in—?”

  “Hardly,” Braedee said. He was back in the control seat again. I’d covered his ass, he didn’t have to worry about Charon any more; just me. “It’s in their interest to keep the drug restricted, and that’s what Elnear wants too.”

  Charon nodded, thinking Elnear wasn’t exactly the sort to get into trouble over secret gaming debts. But then he was back to wondering who was taking advantage of this, and why—? Panic alarms were going off inside him. He had no idea who it could be, he only knew this attack had nothing to do with the things that had happened before. I pushed deeper: There was no doubt in his mind—

  Braedee’s head swiveled around; he gave me a strange look. “What’s the matter with you?” he said.

  “Me?” I blinked, pulling back fast.

  He looked pained. “I’m not talking to myself.”

  “I’m … just trying to think.” They acted like they were thinking about this for the first time. Like they’d never really considered any of this before.…

  “Do it without your mouth hanging open.” He looked back at Charon. “What about him?” Me.

  Charon frowned at me. “He’s told us all he knows, obviously. Send him away.” He was looking straight at me, but still talking about me as if I couldn’t understand a direct command.

  “I don’t mean that,” Braedee said. “I’m talking about keeping him on.”

  Charon’s head jerked back toward him. His mouth tightened, as he barely stopped a refusal. “Are you serious?” Half sarcasm, half incredulity.

  “After what he did last night, yes, sir. We still need him.… His function has simply changed.”

  “He fed the hypers last
night, for God’s sake! Did you access the Morning Report—?”

  I sucked in a breath, imagining what kind of cretin they must have made me look like. “I only wanted to help the Lady, sir. After the way Stryger lied about me, I thought if I could make them understand the truth.…”

  “You wanted to help!” His hand jumped, fisted. I sank back into the corner of the couch, as his sudden fresh anger slammed into my unguarded thoughts. He’d seen the ’cast, and he thought I had helped her. And that was the last thing he’d wanted. He wanted her alive … but discredited, demoralized, a failure—under his thumb. “You misbegotten guttersnipe.” His hand loosened, and he pushed to his feet.

  “All the more reason to keep him here, at least until the vote,” Braedee said. “It would look bad.”

  I stopped listening as sick realization filled me up. They hadn’t planned to keep me on until they found out who was trying to kill Elnear … because nobody was trying to kill Elnear. They’d staged the attacks themselves—Centauri, Braedee, under the direction of the board; of Charon. Just enough to throw her off-balance, to frighten her, to make her dependent on them and their Security. Just enough so they could force her to accept me. They’d lied to her, they’d lied to me—they’d been using me all along, to spy on her, just like she’d figured.

  But more than that—they knew that Stryger hated psions. So they’d set me up as a target, and let him knock me down. So that they could make sure Elnear would he humiliated and lose the debate, and the vote, and the seat—

  Except that somebody had found out about the phony attacks on her, and tried to use them to cover up a separate attack, not knowing that the others had all been faked. So now Centauri really did have an attempted assassination on its hands.