Catspaw

by Joan D. Vinge

“I won’t,” he said, and then, softly, “We’re not on Cinder. Not for a long time, brother.…”

  “I know.…” I mumbled, trying to raise my head. “Where—?”

  “—are we? Off the Deep End.” His deathshead grin came back for a second.

  “Figures.”

  He half smiled, waiting while I caught up with reality. Then he pulled the red scarf out of the neck of his armor. Lifting my head, he wiped blood and drool off my face with the end of it.

  “You hear’…?” I squeezed the words out, not even sure he’d be able to understand them. “You hear’ me…?” Right then hope hurt me almost as much as my body did.

  “Heard?” He shook his head. “I didn’t hear a damn thing after you hit me with your psi that once. That’s why I came. It was taking too long. I figured something went wrong—”

  I began to cough; choking on disappointment. The pain in my chest and ribs hurt so bad when I coughed that it made me gag. He lifted me up so I could sit, held me there. I whimpered, every crawling millimeter of my body hating the agony of being upright; but not as much as it hated lying on my raw, bleeding face. His hand touched the binders on my wrists, and he grunted with disgust.

  “Daric’s—” I mumbled, trying to turn my head. “Get him to…”

  But I felt the shock as something sparked out behind me, as Mikah cancelled the lock himself. The binders fell off my hands; my arms flopped forward. Mikah propped me up like a doll against the side of the bed, and cut the rope around my ankle. He turned to look at Daric. Daric stood pressed against the pitted wall, staring at Stryger’s body, at us, back at Stryger. “What happened?” Mikah asked, asking me, but still looking at Daric. “What went wrong?”

  “Him. Double-crossing bastard—” I said, still looking at Daric too, not able to stop. “Took my drugs. I couldn’t…” My voice broke. “Scumsucker, you would’ve let him—”

  “You want me to kill ’em both?” Mikah asked, getting slowly to his feet.

  “No,” Daric whined, going rubber-mouthed as he tried to make it sound reasonable. “I would have stopped him, Cat. Just a little longer.…” He wiped his face on his sleeve. “Just a little—it had to look good.… You saw how I could control him. He’s not dead, is he dead—?” He looked at Stryger.

  “Not yet,” Mikah said. “But I’ll take care of that right now.” He turned, raising his hand.

  “No—!” I gasped. “Jeezu, don’.” Blood splattered as I shook my head.

  He looked back at me. “Why the hell not?”

  “Because … you’ll make him … goddamn … martyr.” I dragged myself up the side of the bed and collapsed on it. The pain of moving that far gave me the dry heaves. Mikah stood waiting until I could speak again. “You kill him now … he’ll win in spite of … everything. Besides, I wan’ him to live … Because it wouldn’t hurt enough, this way.”

  His face twisted. He lowered his hand. “Just wanted to be sure.”

  “Of what?”

  He gave me a strange look. “That it wasn’t because you knew how he felt.” He smiled for a second, showing me his teeth. “What about the Gentleman?” He jerked his head at Daric.

  “I still need him … until tomorrow.” I looked at Daric. “You know what you have to do. If you don’t do it … I’ll kill you myself.” He nodded silently, licking his lips.

  “Get it out of here,” Mikah said to Daric, pointing at Stryger’s body.

  “How?” Daric asked. He looked like he was the one who’d been stunshot.

  “Drag him.”

  “But … I have to tell him something, when he wakes up…?” Daric looked at me again, his face as hollow as his voice. “He’ll know that something—”

  “Jus’ tell him … he made my lover … real jealous.” I laughed, and then swore, because even that hurt more than I could stand.

  Daric stared at me, his face twisting. But he nodded, and stumbled across the room. He picked up the body by the armpits. I watched him go out through the ruined doorway like an undertaker, dragging Stryger behind him, cursing under his breath.

  “That’s something I never did before,” Mikah said, when we couldn’t hear them any more.

  “Wha’?”

  “Let somebody live when I should have killed him.”

  I grunted. “I did somethin’… I never done, too.”

  “What?”

  “Peed in my pants.”

  He looked at me and almost laughed; didn’t. I didn’t, either. There was red in the wet stain on my jeans. “Come on,” he said, “I better get you out of here.” He started back to me.

  “Wait … Mikah. Drug patch.…” I put up a hand, touching the pulped mess that Stryger had made of my ear. “I need it.” I tried to get up, couldn’t. “It’s here someplace.” I looked up at him. “Help me. Can’t think—”

  “You can’t think because that scumbag busted your goddamn skull,” Mikah said, frowning. But he turned away, searching the floor until he found it. He stuck it behind my other ear.

  “Be awright now,” I said. I wiped my chin with a shaky hand. I got up off the bed, and fell on my face.

  He let me fall, and then he picked me up again, holding me there, almost gently. “Junkie.”

  I nodded, pain-tears squeezing out of my eyes. I couldn’t stand up by myself. Stryger’s staff was still lying on the floor in front of me, covered with my blood. “Mikah…”

  “Yeah?”

  “Is it really over?”

  He looked down at the staff. He kicked it across the room. “It’s over. I’ll take you home.”

  THIRTY-FOUR

  MIKAH TOOK ME to a clinic before he took me anywhere else; one where they didn’t ask a lot of questions. It took them the rest of the night to put me back together. They wanted to make me stay; but it was morning, and I had things to do. They took one look at Mikah, and didn’t argue. We went back to Purgatory.

  Argentyne stopped dead in the middle of the hallway as she saw us come in. Her hands clutched the sleeves of her smock and she hugged herself silently, waiting while we came toward her. As we reached her, she called, “Aspen—!”

  “S’all right.” I shook my head, moving in slow motion because of all the tranks and painkillers. Her eyes didn’t believe me, looking at my face.

  “Took care of it already.” Mikah nodded, as Aspen materialized behind her.

  “Daric has the box,” I said.

  “Fuck the box.” Her voice wasn’t steady. “Did it work for you—?”

  I nodded.

  “Daric did everything he promised to do—?”

  “Everything … and more,” I said sourly. “You heard from him?”

  She shook her head, still looking at me uncertainly, glancing at Mikah.

  “I got to go up to the Assembly.” I had to know that he was there, that Stryger would be there; that everything was set.

  “You can’t.” Argentyne looked at me like I must still be in shock.

  “The jack’s gone.” I touched my head. They’d taken it out at the clinic. Stryger had already scrambled it, along with my brains. “I wanna be there, to watch it happen.”

  “You and a few billion other people,” she said. “They won’t let anybody near the place who doesn’t have a right to be there.”

  I swore. “I have a right—”

  “Cat,” Mikah said. “You thought about this: What’s going to hit after Daric feeds that program through their system? You’re messing with the Federation. You better keep your head down, boy. Catch it on the Indy.”

  I stood glaring at him, at her; until the combined weight of their common sense finally crushed me. “Yeah.…” Suddenly I wasn’t so sure that I really wanted to be there when the entire Assembly relived what had happened to me last night. “I guess I will.”

  “Rest a while,” Argentyne said, putting her hand on my arm. “Nothing’s even starting for hours.”

  “Yeah. I guess I will.…”

  “You get lamped for those head wounds?�
�� Aspen asked me, running a professional’s eye over my glued-up face. I shrugged, not sure if I didn’t know, or just couldn’t remember.

  “He got the full course,” Mikah said. “They know what they’re doing at Soule’s. They get a lot of trauma cases.”

  Aspen nodded. “You’ll feel like you have a new body in a few days,” he said to me, looking as pleased as if he’d fixed it up himself.

  “But I’ll still remember being in this one.” I turned my back on him, feeling the bile rise up in my throat as I stumbled away down the hall.

  The stairs to the upper level looked like they led to the moon. With one eye covered, I couldn’t even tell where they started. Mikah helped me make it up them and settled me in Argentyne’s room. I lay on her bed with my eyes shut, not moving … but underneath the haze of painkiller and sedatives, my body was still trembling, still waiting for the next blow to fall. Because the last three years of my life I’d been living a lie. Pretending I was a free citizen of the Human Federation, with a mind and a name and the right to feel some kind of pride.… But Stryger had torn away my illusions, the way some nameless pervert had torn away my clothes so long ago, and taught me that I was nothing but a victim in a room without exits.

  I rolled onto my stomach, burying my face in the smothering darkness of the bedding as I heard Mikah start to leave, leaving me there alone. But as he reached the door he hesitated. I felt him look at me. And then he turned hack, very quietly, and sat down in a chair instead. I raised my head and opened my good eye halfway to look at him sitting there, staring out the window. I reached out and touched his mind with my own; not so he knew it, hut only so I did. And then, finally, I felt safe, and I slept.

  * * *

  He was still there when I woke up a few hours later. Argentyne was there too, calling my name, telling me that coverage was starting on the Net. I felt better than I had before I went to sleep, but on a scale of one to ten my body was still about minus-five.

  I got up somehow and we went downstairs into the club. The other players were there, and a few people who worked for Purgatory, already waiting. I felt their morbid curiosity glance off me as I came into the room. Nobody wanted to look at my face for long. “Anybody need a headset?” The doorkeeper waved one at me as I passed. Wearing one would bring the visuals up closer, make it that much more real.… I shook my head.

  A threedy image of the Federation Assembly Hall was already taking up the stage as I eased myself down onto the cushions beside a table. Shander Mandragora was drifting in and out of reality up front, keeping the audience hooked with flashbacks, replaying all the controversies, real and imaginary, that had led up to this; trying to hold audience interest in a vote that he thought they knew the outcome of already. He explained it all, to the billions of present and future viewers who would never really understand what it meant any more than he would. I watched the shifting scenes and faces flow by, feeling dizzy as the background circled behind him and I searched for someone I knew. The cams showed Elnear, waiting on the speaker’s platform. She’d asked for permission as a Member to address the Assembly before the vote, and she’d gotten it.… And then Stryger had demanded the same right. He was there too, alive and clean and perfect. The two of them sat in their places like game pieces. But there was one more face I still needed to see.

  “Daric,” Argentyne said, lifting her hand as a slow scan of the Assembly’s faces finally passed over him. He was there and gone again almost before I saw him. But he was there. I nodded and sank back into the bed of cushions again, letting my one eye unfocus. Argentyne pressed a mugful of something hot and harmless into my bandaged hands. I drank it down.

  Finally the endless shuffling and shrugging and switching accesses stopped, as the Assembly’s Chosen Speaker called the delegates into the closed system for the session. I pushed myself up again as he announced the guest speakers, explaining their requests one more time, as if they actually had some meaning. He called Elnear forward first to the floating podium. Her speech was mainly what she’d said in the open debate—because there was nothing else to say; because that should have been enough. I could hear the intensity in her voice that I couldn’t feel inside her, as she drove against the impossible inertia of too many preset minds.… And then she was finished speaking, and Stryger was walking forward to take her place.

  I watched him move toward me through the gleaming white-and-blue respectability of the Federation Assembly, wearing its approval like an aura. He wasn’t carrying his staff with him. But if what he’d done to me, or even what had happened to him last night, had had any effect on him, I couldn’t see it in the way he moved, the way he shone. Maybe it had only made him more sure that God was on his side, that his crusade was just … that he was finally about to get everything he wanted. I watched him come, feeling like somehow he could actually see me; feeling like I was drowning.…

  Mikah leaned over and nudged me. “Breathe,” he said.

  I sucked in air. Stryger had reached the podium now. He began to speak, while Shander Mandragora reminded us again that for Stryger speaking out loud wasn’t just something he did for effect, but the only way he could communicate with his audience … like it was a pledge, a symbol of his purity, of his dedication to the common people.

  “Because he’ll never have the Gift,” I muttered. “Because if he can’t have it, he won’t ever take second best.”

  Argentyne glanced at me. “I thought he hated psions—” Her eyes flickered down and away as she saw the proof of it again on my face.

  “He does,” I said. “Can you think of a better reason?” I watched as Stryger blessed the Assembly members, and called them upholders of peace and order … told them he’d come before them one last time to speak for those countless human beings who were the Federation’s real reason for existence, whose strength and numbers made its existence possible … who trusted in the Assembly to do the right thing.… Come on, Daric, I thought. Come on—I shouldn’t have let them talk me out of it; I should have been there. Stryger was almost finished; in another minute it would be too late, the voting would begin—

  “I know you will agree with me,” he said, smiling for the last time at the waiting faces below him, “because, after all, we all want the same thing … we are all so much alike, in our hearts.” He stepped away from the podium, turning, starting back toward his seat.

  “No,” I said. “No! You bastard, you doublecrossing—” Mikah caught at my arm as I pushed to my feet.

  But something was happening in the silent crowd on the Assembly floor. They began to make a sound, a restless murmuring like the sea, as larger-than-life figures suddenly materialized in the air: Stryger’s image, and then mine. Daric had used himself to get a second viewpoint on the symb box. It was happening … it was really happening. I collapsed into my seat again, staring as cams that had been focused close-up on Stryger’s face pulled back to take in the show, making Stryger seem to shrink where he stood on the stage. I watched his bloated image in the air open its mouth; I repeated the words that came out of it before they even registered on anyone else watching.

  The real Stryger stopped moving, confusion showing on his face. The news recorders were hooked into the Assembly system through the Net, picking up sound to match the picture. Without any augmentation at all, he couldn’t know what everyone else was seeing in the air above him, what they were hearing.…

  He turned around, turning back toward the podium, searching for the Speaker. He stared as he saw the billowing images above him. He was standing inside them, and like a man standing inside a cloud, he couldn’t make out their real form. Behind him Elnear and the Speaker stared in disbelief. I saw Elnear’s hand go over her mouth as she recognized me. And then it was his own image Stryger was standing inside of, a victim’s-eye view now, as the staff swung in for a blow.

  I wanted to shut my eyes as the staff came at me. But I couldn’t—I watched it come, saw the image change as it hit me. I heard the wood crack against my flesh, and
saw what it did to me. I bit down on my fist.

  Cries were registering on the audio. I heard my voice rising through them, telling Stryger why he hated psions, and I saw him answer me.… The image we were watching on the stage split open, half of it still focused on the beating, the other half sweeping the Hall as panic-stricken Assembly members fell over themselves and each other, screaming, vomiting, trying to get up or get away from what they were being force-fed over the inviolable link of the Assembly’s system. The Speaker was up at the podium now, shoving Stryger aside as he used its access to try and force the system and its users back under control. As Stryger stumbled away he finally saw what everyone else was seeing—saw himself, larger than life, beating me to a pulp in front of billions of witnesses.

  And then, as suddenly as it had come, the image disappeared from the air. It must have disappeared from the Assembly’s system at the same time, because the screaming mob scene on the Assembly floor began to die down. Members fell back into their seats, the curses and cries turning into furious demands and questions. Inside of a minute there was total silence in the Hall. I couldn’t tell what they were doing now, because even the info cams couldn’t pick it up. I leaned forward across the table, my fists clenched, ignoring what it did to my body … because I had to know if it was working; and I couldn’t tell anything, sitting here—

  Stryger started back toward the podium with hellfire in his eyes. But before he could take control of it Elnear was there, barring his way, claiming the cameras and the Assembly’s attention. The Speaker stepped aside, giving her room, giving way to one of his own.

  “Sojourner Stryger,” she said, flinching as he got near her, as if she was half afraid he’d attack her too. “What in God’s name was your purpose in forcing this hideous thing on me … on everyone in this Hall?” Her voice trembled. Her face was white; her hands were clenched over the edges of the podium, holding her there. “What have you done to my aide—?”

  “I—?” Stryger said, thumping his chest with his hands, still bug-eyed with disbelief. “This was not my doing!” I watched him struggle to control himself; struggle and win. “I was not to blame for this! This is some absurd blasphemy created in an attempt to humiliate me—”