Catspaw

by Joan D. Vinge

  Because you’re a psion—His father’s image filled his mind like a black storm: a child’s terrifying night monster, etched forever on the lens of his memory. “Who else did you tell---?”

  “Nobody.”

  His expression changed. (Maybe,) his mind said. Maybe it still wasn’t too late.…

  “Don’t even think about it,” I said. “You can’t kill me yourself. And if you try to hire it out, I’ll know. Nothing better happen to Argentyne either. Just think of me like a jar of toxins. You break me, and I take your whole world with me.”

  He wiped his mouth again with a trembling hand. “You son of a bitch. You freak! What do you want—money?”

  I shook my head. “I’m getting plenty of that already.”

  “Then what?” Drops of spit glittered in the air between us.

  I didn’t answer. I wasn’t used to having power over somebody; I was just beginning to realize how it felt … that it felt good. I looked at him, letting the dark, sweet pleasure fill me; letting him realize along with me how easy it would be for me to destroy him. He’d treated me like shit, and Jule, and everybody else he’d gotten close to; contaminated our lives like a disease. Destroying him would be a public service.

  For just a second I cracked my defenses, let myself into his mind, wanting to enjoy the fear that must be eating his guts out right now—

  It slammed into my thoughts, nauseating. bitter, blinding. I spat him out again, shaking my head. “I want…” I swallowed. “I want you to stop pimping for Stryger. If you ever get him another freak to work over, you’re gone. That’s all.” I turned away, started for the door.

  “No—” His hand clamped my arm like a binder. “Don’t say that. That’s not all, it can’t be. You can’t tell me you know, and then tell me you don’t want anything. Tell me what you want from me!” He shook me, his whole body floundering with the motion.

  I stood still, feeling myself go rigid under his hand. (Just leave me alone.)

  His hand came loose and dropped to his side. He stayed where he was, motionless but still quivering, his mouth hanging open, slack and wet. I left him like that, sealing the door behind me as I went out, so that I didn’t have to know what he did next.

  Back in Elnear’s office again I pretended to work, but I couldn’t concentrate. Finally facing Daric, I’d broken the thin ice between the light and the dark. My mind was out of synch with the fantasy around me, the world that only existed as long as you believed in its reality. I was back in the nightworld, the otherworld, where people like Daric and Stryger really belonged … people like Mikah and Deadeye … people like me. I sat staring at the wall, seeing Oldcity, where I’d learned the truth—that light was an illusion, that only the darkness was forever, the night that had existed before there were stars, and would still be there long after they died.

  I couldn’t do Elnear’s work, work that suddenly seemed meaningless and stupid, like her faith in human nature—and so I began to play with the terminal, trying out my new knowledge, trying to see if I could find Deadeye’s secret passage to inner space on my own. But it was no use. I understood the tech of information storage, the interface of EM and chem that made up the artificial brains of an information net, that manipulated the data. But I couldn’t find anything more that I had in common with it than I had in common with the molecules in a wall. After a while I gave up on that, too, wondering if there was even any point in going back to Deadeye’s. But I knew I’d go back anyway.

  The day’s end finally came, and set me free. I took the Tube down under the bay, made my way on foot to Deadeye’s building with no problems; maybe because tonight I moved like I belonged here. I buzzed his brain, and he let me in. “Where’s your brother?” he said, suspicious like always.

  “He’s someplace he’d rather be.” I hadn’t asked Mikah to come with me this time. I figured we’d all be better off if I did this on my own, even if it meant risking my skin on the streets.

  Deadeye loosened up, with a grimace that looked like pain, but that meant he was relieved. I’d forgotten how shitty his eye looked. I tried to forget it again as I handed him back his headset. “I’m finished with this.”

  (Let me see.)

  I let him into my head, let him see for himself that the data had all copied perfectly in my brain.

  He nodded. (Think you’re ready?)

  I shrugged, and couldn’t help remembering this afternoon—how I’d tried, and failed.

  (You don’t believe it’ll work,) he thought, reading my hesitation. (Because you already tried it.) He laughed suddenly, a rusty, scraping noise that said it figured. (Show me what you did.) He jerked his head toward the console across the room.

  I went to it and sat down, started to press the trodes to my forehead; glanced back at him.

  He nodded, his own mind riding piggyback inside mine. I did what I’d done that afternoon, trying to make something real and recognizable out of that lifeless flow … failing again.

  (No, no!) he said, too loud inside my brain. He jerked me loose from the contacts. “You’re doing it all wrong!” breaking into speech as exasperation broke down his control.

  The sudden noise hurt my ears. “Well, how’m I supposed to—”

  (You’re looking for something alive. It’s not alive!) His mind shut me up. “It’s a system, you shithead,” he said, slowly and too clearly, like I was stupid. “It’s only a system. You’re not gonna find anybody else in there.”

  “I know, but—”

  “You don’t know shit, kid. Those tapes didn’t tell you everything. You don’t understand the important part—”

  (Wait,) I thought. (Don’t tell me. I’ve got Centauri’s Corpses on my back. I dunno if I’m being snooped.)

  He frowned, but he nodded. (Fuck’em. They can’t hear us now.…) He liked it better this way, anyhow. So did I. (Nothing in the Net is like you or me, you understand me? Look—) Showing me: The Net wasn’t using any kind of energy I’d ever used; I only recognized neuron-fire patterns, because that was how a psion sensed another person. Now I had to learn to see into a new part of the spectrum, and recognize new kinds of forms. (It’s not going to come to you, you got to go to it.… You ever pick up any random EM readings, in a heavy security area, say?)

  I nodded, remembering the hissing whiteroom doorways I’d passed through lately.

  (Means your talent’s wideband; you got no problem there … but you got to quit looking for something else, first.) That was why I’d never heard of a psion doing this before—they’d never even think to work this way. (Even the humans using that system are nothing but EM flow patterns once they get inside. The Net’s made up of billions of mice—)

  “What—?”

  (Shut up. Human mice, stupid. Billions and billions of ’em, working parallel all at the same time, all trained to touch the right plate, to register on or off …) Human microcomponents inputting data, calling it up, changing the patterns over and over … following orders. (The combine boards make the rules and they filter down. The mice follow ’em. They eat their pellets and shit and go home.) They’d never imagine the real reach of the supersystem they were a part of; but at the same time, it couldn’t exist without them. Human brains were limited-function, but they were cheap, flexible, reliable equipment. There were always plenty of them. And when they were linked together into a network, with superspeed access fusing them into a whole, those puny, slow-moving human-sized intelligences became something more—

  (Superbeings,) I thought, remembering what Elnear had told me. (In their own ecosystem. With superminds.…)

  (Exactly.) He looked at me, surprised, and nodded. (That’s a relief—)

  (What?)

  (You’re not as stupid as I thought.)

  I rolled my eyes. (But you mean the combines actually exist, in the Net? You’ve really seen them? They talk to each other, they fight, just like in the real world—?)

  He frowned. (I said they exist, didn’t I?… But they’re not like you or me, t
hey don’t play Square/Cubes, for God’s sake.)

  (How about chess?) I said, irritated.

  He grunted. (They communicate, they change course, but it’s usually real slow, because they’re so big—they’re spread out over light-years, their realtime’s in slow motion. They’ve got personalities of a kind—depends on who runs their board, and the population of their networks. They don’t really interact with me direct. I know a lot of their subsystems better.)

  (You know them…?) I asked, wondering if he meant personally.

  (Yeah. There’s stuff going on in there on a million intermediate levels. It’s like being a rat in the pantry; you can take your pick.) The subsystems were all supposed to be bound, under control; but some of them were so complex that they actually had conversations on the side with him all the while they were performing their programmed functions. (They get lonely. The more independent they get the riskier it is for them: then they’re like cancers. If they don’t keep a low profile, some tuning checker will lobotomize them.)

  I shook my head. (If all this exists in there, why doesn’t anybody know? Why don’t the cybertechs know it’s going on, or the board members, with all their augmentation?)

  (A lot of them suspect … but they can’t prove it, because they can’t get outside of the infrastructure. They can’t see the forest for the trees. They’re nothing but EM flow, like I said. They have to play by their own rules, or their systems stop working. Sometimes their subsystems do things they don’t expect; they know that much. They try to control the drift. But they can’t see the real picture.)

  (You’re telling me we can.) I wondered what Elnear would give to be in on this conversation … wondered what it would be worth to the cybertechs, to have proof that what they suspected was true.… I stopped wondering. Deadeye was right; all it would get freaks like us was brainwiped.

  Deadeye nodded, only answering the thought that I’d let him see. (We don’t have to play by the rules.)

  (Can those things see us?)

  (Some of them can. Most of what’s in the Net is blind to you for the same reason you’re blind to it right now. Only, once you quit thinking you’re such a hotshot, you can reprogram yourself to read it—to see the individual subsystems: the bodies, the hands, the guts, the immune systems. They can’t do that with you.) That was why we’d be safe, that was how we could walk through the walls of their security. (Some of the sentient things have evolved enough to see you, but you’re on their own plane, and they seem to like that. You’ll be like a ghost in the machine. That works both ways, though: You can look but you can’t touch—you can access any data you need, but you can’t change anything you find there. A teek might be able to do that, but you can’t.… Only, a teek couldn’t get into the system.)

  I nodded. (That’s all I need, just to read it. Tell me how to start—)

  (Sit still and shut up.) His hands pushed me down in the seat again. (I haven’t got to the best part yet. You know what a maze is?)

  (Yeah,) I thought, (I guess so. Someplace confusing. Full of dead ends.)

  He wheezed out more laughter. (You ever been in one?)

  (No.)

  (Well, you will be. This is the damnedest maze of all. The hard part isn’t getting what you want. It’s finding what you’re looking for, and finding your way out again. Because the walls are always moving. Finding DeAth’s back door isn’t going to be easy. That’s why you’re going with me—it doubles the odds of me getting back.)

  (What happens if we get lost?)

  (We just sit here.) His face crinkled. (Probably we just sit here till we die. You ready—?)

  (Yeah … sure.)

  He didn’t ask me if I wanted to change my mind. It was probably a good thing. He pulled up a second chair and sat down beside me. (Hold my hand,) he thought, leering, but all he meant was keep the mental link. (And do everything I do. And don’t break contact, whatever happens—understand?) I nodded, glad all he needed was a simple link, and not a joining. His mind wasn’t something I really wanted to get more intimate with.

  He stuck one trode to my forehead and one to his own.

  (Why do we need these? I thought we weren’t really gonna use the system?)

  (We aren’t,) he said. (But it’ll help you get the feel of what you’re looking for. Kind of like a tuning fork.) As the subliminal hum of an open access-line filled my head, I felt him begin to do something with his mind. I tried to do the same thing, trying to fake the steps of a dance I didn’t know as he supercooled his thoughts, retuning them to new frequencies. I wondered how he’d ever discovered this in the first place … found the answer in just sharing his mind, feeling his pleasure as his senses dimmed and the world he’d been born into began to fade. He’d wanted so bad to find some other world besides the one he lived in, one where nobody could bother him, that he actually had: He’d turned his brain inside out, and pulled himself into an electronic hat.

  I felt him starting to slip away from me as the machine static got louder. He was sinking into his other world too fast for me to follow him, and any second I was going to lose him completely—

  (Relax!) His mind came back for me. (Don’t fight it, don’t try so goddamn hard! It’s like Zen, kid, you can’t get there by trying to. Fix on your goal—you want that fucking data, or not?)

  I felt need fill me like a power surge as my focus narrowed down to getting the data. I let go of the reality of where I was and what I was trying so hard to do, and just believed it was happening.…

  It happened. I’d never seen a ghost before but now, just like he’d said, I was one, floating in a place outside of space and time—or maybe deep inside it, inside the electron shells of a storage crystal or drifting in some EM river. I saw Deadeye, or something like him—my mind shaping his presence into a lifeform. It pulsed with a kind of hologlow in time to something that might have been his heartbeat. I looked down at myself—except there wasn’t really any up or down—and saw my own holo shadow hovering; saw its shining hand merged into him, linking us tenuously into one form with no more reality than the two separate ones had. (Look around,) he said, the message buzzing inside me. (Remember everything you can. All the tracks will be changed some by the time we get back; you got to get the feel of it.)

  I did what he told me, looking around and through myself without motion, trying not to panic as I worked to tune in a sense without a name. Around me at first there was only white noise, like the squeaking of a billion mice … the total mindlessness I’d butted up against when I’d tried this before. Except now I was trapped inside it. I forced myself to look at it through the filter of Deadeye’s thoughts, looking for the larger patterns he knew were there. Opening eyes I never knew I had, I watched as Deadeye made the invisible visible, leading me into a world that nobody else realized existed.

  I watched it unfold, warping and patterning with ever-changing density and form—crystal layers of structure rising up, spreading out, overflowing as they took on more reality for me, until they were as endless as the ice fields of Cinder. (You see where you are? You got it now—) Deadeye answered his own question. (Let’s go.) He started forward—as if there was a direction you could call forward, or a way back.

  I tried to look behind as he sucked me after him; it was like having a glass head. I saw a strand of light, our own energy reeled out behind us, arcing endlessly up out of sight: our lifeline to the real world. I wondered if my mind had really funneled down that, and how I’d ever worm up inside it again.

  I trailed Deadeye, not sure if I was moving on my own or only being towed, as he shifted focus again to match some EM bandwidth, like a traveler hitting the road. The glowing lifeline of our entry stretched out, stretched thin, was swallowed up in the random motion of inner space.

  There were other travelers on this road, but they were lifeless drones carried like dust on the electron wind blowing through the commweb that netted Earth’s solar system. Photon messengers drilled high, piercing lines of color through my lightfield; ran
dom bits of codestring burned me with impossible cold/heat.

  I concentrated on trying to see the shadowlines we were tracking clearly enough to trace them back again. The data Deadeye had made me swallow helped me shape the half-sensed fields we were passing through into images my mind could hold onto; but it was like having studied geology when what you really needed was a road map. Endless combine data cores shimmered past me, armored with crystal walls of impenetrable security. But I flowed through their unbreachable barriers like they were fantasies painted on silk, while all around me the droneslaves of a million other masters veered away, or smashed into them and were incinerated … or, sometimes, passed through, into the seething energy hearts I sensed deep inside.

  And what he’d told me was true. We weren’t alone here. Using his mind’s eyes, I could sense them: beings that were like nothing my mind had ever known, drifting through my consciousness like music heard in a fever dream … massive sentiences hovering around and through the data cores of the interstellar combines, arcing out toward infinity, waiting for their toes to twitch or their stomachs to growl or some other part of their mind to change, in some other solar system.

  And once or twice I felt eyes that weren’t eyes turn toward me as I disturbed some brooding subsystem that actually sensed our passing; felt it scan with something that wasn’t really a mind for something it couldn’t quite comprehend: me. Sometimes tendrils of contact reached out to me, greeting me wordlessly, probing my mind gently as I passed. And once I sensed something in the distance that wasn’t like anything else I’d seen—that felt stranger and yet somehow more familiar than any of the alien presences we’d blown through. (What’s that over there?) I asked.

  I felt Deadeye track my line of thought. (It’s the FTA Security Council,) he said. I strained toward it, curious, but he snapped me back like a piece of elastic. (Leave it alone. It knows too much.) He didn’t explain, and somehow I knew there was no point in asking.

  The patterns repeated sometimes, like we’d been going in circles; stabilized sometimes, as Deadeye stopped his restless datasearch and waited for some sign. And then they’d begin to flow again … as eternal as the molecular patterns they were trapped inside of and yet slowly shifting, creeping like glaciers or drifted dunes, when informational parameters changed and their data structures altered. There was no sense of time here to keep track of, no sense or sensation that had any meaning, that was more real than my own hallucination of myself. We could have traveled microns, or halfway to the moon by now. But something was growing deep inside my awareness like a dull ache … doubt, or loneliness, or something as simple as my body’s need to piss somewhere back in the real world … growing and growing as the crystallized wasteland kept passing me by … (Deadeye!)