Catspaw

by Joan D. Vinge

  (Shut up.) The hot human clarity of his contact felt good, even while he jabbed me with irritation for breaking his silence. This place terrified him … and yet the only peace he ever knew was when he lost himself here. He was as glad as I was not to be here alone; but he didn’t like being reminded of the fact.

  (Deadeye—) I interrupted him again, because it wasn’t peace that was eating away at me. (When does it end?)

  (Shut up!) he thought. (Just keep moving. Don’t fuck my concentration.)

  I kept moving, trying to concentrate on making my own roadmaps of Nowhere, just in case he decided that this time he didn’t want to bother coming back. Wherever we were now, the density of the matrix had thinned out: there were less crusted data sinks, less lines of force to track … less than nothing. I wasn’t sure what that meant, wasn’t sure that Deadeye wasn’t lost or crazy, wasn’t sure of anything except that if it didn’t end soon I was going to start screaming—

  (There,) Deadeye said, a millisecond before I snapped. (That’s it: where the good Doctor buries his secrets.)

  Dizzy with relief, I felt him turn me until I was fixed on the data citadel he wanted me to see, a warping of density no different from a million others I’d already seen. A chip, a blip, nothing impressive on the scale of most of the corporate constructs that had deformed the spectral badlands behind us. But there was something about it … it was too dense, almost smoky-looking somehow; hard to see into even with my ghost eyes. (It looks funny. How do you know this is it?)

  (Take my word for it,) Deadeye thought.

  (That’s not good enough.)

  I felt his irritation stab me again. (We tracked a security checker from his lab address through about a dozen false stops to this. This is the end of the line. This is the real thing.) Satisfaction now, sleek and smug.

  (Where are we?)

  Something bubbled through my mind: laughter. (You mean, where in the world? On an orbital station out in cislunar space. Don’t look down.)

  I made a face, or tried to. (Why’s it look like that? Cloudy—)

  (Privacy. Real privacy. Most of the big combine cores look transparent, because a lot of their business ain’t hidden—don’t have to be. Believe me, the good stuff is under a lot of ice, deep in their cold, cold hearts.)

  (But that shouldn’t make any difference to us, right—?) Something in the shifting tone of his thoughts made me uneasy.

  (It could … the fact you can’t see clear through it means DeAth’s security is a lot denser than most, that it covers more of the EM spectrum. We’re part of that spectrum, kid, and don’t forget it. This system’s too specific to be really sentient—you can sense that, it’s not curious. But it’s real good at what it does. Shouldn’t be any problem for somebody like you, though. You used to be a thief. It’s the same kind of thing. Go on in there like a pro, remember all your tricks—just don’t lose your head. Don’t even sneeze—you might trigger it, and if it starts looking, it might find you.… Blow through the files till you see what you want, and then pull out.)

  (What’s this “you”—) meaning me, (—shit? You’re the cracksman!)

  (And you’re the mental pickpocket. You know what you’re looking for. I might miss something important. What are you bitching about?)

  (I’m paying you to do the hard part—)

  (You’re paying for the chance to learn a new trade. The hard part is finding the place. We’ve done that. Go on. Just hold onto the link, don’t let go. Those data sinks are like dead stars; their density’s so great it’s hard to find the way out once you get inside. You come out in the wrong place, you could get all twisted around, never find your way back where you started.)

  (Great.)

  I felt him give me a mental shove, felt my concentration begin to drift, my spectral body oozing out like protoplasm toward the place where DeAth kept his bodies buried. I tried to concentrate on why I’d started this insane trip, what I had to do to finish it … felt my need energize me again. I felt the nothingness begin to slide, drawing me down and in faster and faster, until I collided with the colorless formless waiting wall that would stop, turn back, destroy anything it could sense and codify—was sucked through it, through ripple rings of blaring burning silence, and swallowed up inside.

  I was inside a hive; a hive full of insects, crawling with energy, charged particles swarming through me, each doing its own separate dance all in perfect synchronicity. I could still feel my link with Deadeye reeled out behind me like a fragile thread, reassuring me as I moved like a wind through DeAth’s hidden soul. Code strings passed across my mind like glowing fog. The things Deadeye had made me learn turned flickering light and darkness into numbers, figures, facts, the truth—

  I searched through years of DeAth sentences in the space of a nonexistent heartbeat; all those years, all the clean antiseptically stored details of a thousand different ways to ruin a human body beyond anybody’s ability to put it back together again. I tried not to stop long enough to look twice, to really remember—because it wasn’t my business, there was nothing I could change in here. I was only a ghost in the machine. And there was only one death sentence I really cared about, or could do anything about now—I kept searching, looking for the right sequence, one that would spell out a victim I knew … Elnear. Not finding it, and not finding it. knowing it had to be there, but still not finding it.

  I pushed down the frustration that was starting to blind me, and began again. Searching by date, by location, by details of the job, narrowing it and narrowing it.…

  TaMing. The name exploded out at me like a flare. Daric. Victim. The place was right, the time, the specs … but it was the wrong victim. Daric. Not Elnear. Nobody wanted her dead, Mikah had told me. She wants what they want. But the first time I’d said Daric’s name to somebody in the Deep End, they’d nearly killed me. It was Daric somebody wanted dead. Daric they’d tried to hit … only making it look like an attempt on Elnear because they thought she was already marked.… I watched the shockwave of my own disbelief echoing away, saw it absorbed into the subatomic song of the hive. Daric, that twisted bastard who was always there trying to ruin somebody’s life every time I turned around. Somebody had almost gotten rid of him for good; only I’d stopped them.…

  Something was happening around me. The exponential curve of the nonwalls was steepening … the particle-hive was churning like a stomach suddenly registering that it had swallowed poison. Barely remembering to save the codestrings I’d eaten, the private account numbers of whoever wanted him dead, I tugged on the lifeline that tied me to Deadeye. (Shit. Shit—Get me out of here!) I tried to erase myself, turn invisible as the wind again, while the walls closed in, wanting to squeeze me down into nothing. Getting in had been a free ride; getting out was like climbing a mudslide, while DeAth’s security system thickened the blinding soup all around me, trying to nullify an intruder it couldn’t put its finger on.

  And then my lifeline snapped. (Deadeye!) I shouted, but I was shouting at myself. The formless, suffocating pressure intensified, homing on my panic, trying to make me real enough to catch.

  But I was already one panic-leap ahead, pushing blind through the stupefying waves of energy, holding out in my mind like a prayer, willing myself out as the bandwidth of my invisibility narrowed and narrowed—

  Out. I was back in the outlands … alone. Behind/in front of me, the citadel of Doctor Death was as black as a singularity’s heart; it had my number, and I’d never get back through its security again. At least it couldn’t track me down and follow me, out here—I didn’t leave any footprints.

  And I’d never need to crack its walls again. I’d gotten what I needed—more. (Deadeye—?)

  No answer. For a second I wondered if DeAth’s defenses had caught up with him. Probably he was still out here somewhere; probably he’d just let go of me to save his own mind. He’d warned me about two mistakes, and I’d made both of them: I’d made DeAth’s system notice me, and then I’d lost the link. Now, looki
ng around me, I realized I’d just made number three: I hadn’t come out where I’d gone in.

  I began to move, groping for something familiar, trying to circumnavigate DeAth’s citadel or get a fix on some bulge I recognized in the restless night mountains all around me. But if there were three dimensions here, they were mutant ones, changing when I tried to make them hold still, refusing to move when I did. Without Deadeye’s mind to focus my own, it was hard to find enough landmarks to be sure of anything. If he was still here waiting for me, I was never going to find him in time, at this rate.

  I kept searching, groping for his image, calling his name. I began to wonder how long I’d been gone out of my body … how many minutes or hours had passed; if it was getting hungry, thirsty … desperate. What would happen to me here if it died … if I’d just wink out of existence in this other plane too, or if I’d go on wandering here forever, random energy.…

  Panic started inside me, making it even harder to keep hold of the half-seen images in my mind. Deadeye must have abandoned me when the link broke, gotten the hell out, afraid of DeAth’s security and figuring I was dead. He was probably halfway back to his own room by now—into his own skull. I wondered what he’d do then. Would he come back and look for me? Not too damn likely. What would he do with my body? Dump it in the street, just something else he was finished with, probably. And then I’d never get out of here—

  I felt my mind begin to diffuse, gibbering apart into a blur of unfocused energy. I pulled myself back together again, damned if I was going to give up and disappear, and give Deadeye that satisfaction. Down below me in the void—I wanted it to be down, because Deadeye had said we were up in space—I thought I could sense something I knew, the strange warp of crystals that might be the core of some orbiting station we’d passed on the way here. And beyond it, faintly, I thought I could sense the massive energy pulse of Earth’s own commweb. I took aim at it, forcing myself to concentrate. And then, before I could lose my nerve or my hold on the map, I headed back the way I’d come.

  There was no trail to follow, since we hadn’t been able to leave one, to change anything with our passing. I traveled by feel, by instinct, spiraling down through the void; sensing the energy fields growing more intense, more complex, as I sank into Earth’s data well. I felt surer of my vision as there was more to sense; began to really believe that my inner sight might even guide me true. It was like using the night vision you had when you looked out of the corners of your eyes, like navigating by lightning-light.

  Over and over I plunged into something familiar only to come out someplace I’d never seen; made wrong turns and had to double back because any way I came at a thing, it always seemed to look the same. I tried to become nothing but a logic machine, analyzing, correcting, changing my course … searching for identifiable fragments in the noise, for the formless mutterings of combine cores, the whisper of a curious subsystem. I told myself over and over that I was just winding myself in, I wasn’t really here any more than I was real here. That when I got to the other end there’d be an end to find.…

  But no matter how I thought about it, I knew I’d been here too long. And the longer I wandered here the realer it got, the easier it was to hear the spider voices of the ghost things that lived in the void. I tried to ask them questions, got answers I almost understood, pointing me in directions I couldn’t really see.… And if I’d thought on the way out that I was ready to start screaming, the thought of spending forever with nothing but the souls of machines for company left me so terrified that screaming seemed as meaningless as laughter, or tears.…

  I stretched out toward something I thought looked familiar for what seemed like the thousandth time … ended up inside the glowing, hissing aura of a system that seemed alien even here—the thing that Deadeye had claimed was the core of the FTA’s Security Council. Stay away from it, he’d said … but I wasn’t even sure how I’d reached it. I tried to pull out, turn back, go on.…

  (What do you want?) something sang like a crystal wire inside me, all around me.

  (Deadeye—?) I thought, a question and an answer; knowing it wasn’t him, wasn’t anything like the way he felt inside my mind. I thought I could see a glowing form, or a dozen, linked together like echoes.

  (You want Deadeye…?) their voice sang.

  (Yeah …) I whispered, my brain melting. (Oh god oh god yeah … please Deadeye please—) And watched the forms begin to close in on me, the coherent noise of their approach taking on too much form, until they were realer than I was, and I knew that I must be dying, or going crazy.

  I let go, fell back into the randomness and white noise, tumbling through chaos—

  And out the other side. And when I reached the other side, somehow, like a miracle, I was back where I thought I’d started from: tied to an umbilical of light, the open line from the computer port. It was still bright and alive, ready to take me in. There was only one strand, no sign of Deadeye. Whatever that meant. I didn’t know what any of it meant, by now; didn’t even care. I went for the streamer of light, and tried to funnel myself back into it.

  I couldn’t do it. It was like trying to climb through a mirror. I butted into my own reflection—my own thought energy, echoing back at me from its source, blind to me, not recognizing that I was the real self and not the reflection. I beat against the flow of light like a bug beating against a streetlamp, getting nowhere, cancelling myself out.

  (Deadeye—!) Throwing everything I had into the sending, one last time, all the panic and frustration that finally had nowhere else to go—

  (What’s the matter, kid?) Deadeye’s voice said, as Deadeye’s mind calmly linked up with me. His glowing image grew out of my arm again like he’d never been away.

  (Jeezu! Wherethehellyoubeen!!!) The question exploded between us, so hard he probably never saw the words. But he got the message.

  (Right behind you all the time,) he thought, and I tried not to believe that was really laughter inside it. (You made it home. What’s the problem?)

  (I can’t get out—) There were two lines of light leading out of here now; two reflections in the mirror, mine and his. (Get me out of here!)

  (No problem.) His image shivered, began to get fuzzy, like he was about to disappear. I clung to the link between us, digging in. (Don’t fight it!) he said. (Let go—of yourself.) I tried to do what he said; felt myself start to turn inside out as he began to suck me up.… (Remember, this isn’t really you … you’re out there. You got to accept that. Let go of it.…) I felt him begin to fade into static as he shifted further out of my range. I gave up trying to make sense of him, or hold onto his image … sank into his static, letting it infect me. I started to fade and flow into the running field that he’d become, disappearing into him as he disappeared, because it was worse to stay here alone and whole, alive or not, than to follow him through into oblivion.…

  * * *

  “You can wake up now,” somebody said.

  My eyes were already open, anyway. It took me a minute to figure that out, and another one to realize I’d actually heard those words spoken out loud … that I was actually moving, turning, breathing in Deadeye’s musty smell, seeing his godawful ruined face and not a shining phantom. There were tears on my own face, and my nose was running, the mucus dripping into my open mouth. I wiped it on my sleeve. “Jeezu,” I mumbled, “this must be real life, all right.”

  Deadeye sniggered, and patted my shoulder with that peculiar sudden motion, the way he’d done once before. “Good boy,” he said.

  I peeled the trode off my forehead and shook myself out, checked the time on my databand. We’d been gone nearly five hours.

  “You got what you needed?” Deadeye asked, looking at the floor now, like it was my feet he was talking to.

  I nodded. “No thanks to you. Where the fuck were you? You dumped me and ran when I hit trouble! I could’ve been wandering around in there forever—”

  “You could’ve got us both terminated.” He shrugged,
getting up from his seat. “I warned you. I thought DeAth swallowed you whole. But I hung around a while. And you got out—wrong place, but still that was good, you didn’t panic. You found a landmark and got back on course. Took guts.” He shuffled away, heading for the bathroom.

  “How the hell would you know?” I yelled. louder than I needed to, as he turned his back on me and used the toilet. “I screamed my fucking goddamn brains out. You weren’t there.”

  “I was there. Just wanted to see what you’d do if I left you alone.”

  “Why—?”

  “Wanted to know what you’re made of. Best way to learn, the hard way. Like I learned it.”

  “Bullshit.” I said. “You dumped me—”

  “—in the water to see if you’d sink. You swam. I followed you all the way home. I was always right there behind you, looking over your shoulder. A couple times I almost called you back, thought you’d made the wrong turn for good—but you always fixed it … or I was the one remembered it wrong.” He came back, still fastening his pants. “Couldn’t believe it when you went to the goddamn Security Council to show you the way home. Thought you’d gone crazy—”

  “Me too,” I muttered, wondering if they’d actually helped me find it. I didn’t ask, because I didn’t think I could face the answer, either way.