Catspaw

by Joan D. Vinge

  “‘Twinkle’.” I kept my face expressionless, as I went to Twinkle and sat down to ask it for what I wanted. It pulled the map for me. I put on the trodes, let the data slowfeed into my memory so that I could get a clearer idea of what I was learning. It was a good map, with a lot of overlays—of the underlying substructures, of major landmarks, of where to find a place to eat, to pray, to get your teeth fixed.… Once it had settled in I’d be able to get around almost like a native. At least that was one kind of lost I wouldn’t have to be any more.

  But there was one area on the map that was still a blur when I was through … an area at the southern tip of the city, called the Deep End. There was a street grid, but it was incomplete, and what happened there wasn’t on any reference lists. The fact that it was missing was a warning; if you went there, you were on your own. You didn’t find spots like that on the map of a combine clave; but the Federal Trade Districts always had them. Free zones, safety valves, escape hatches—feeder tanks. Oldcity had been one of those. I knew what I’d find in the Deep End. I hoped I wouldn’t need it.

  Only about ten minutes had passed while I let my thoughts walk around inside the map grid. When I came up for air Elnear was lost in her own business, even managing to forget for ten minutes that I was in the room. I went back into the datafiles and chose a dozen other things that looked interesting or useful; mostly things that would tell me more about how a vip’s aide filled up a day. I tried to get them to transfer continuously, but the best Twinkle would do was three at a time. Absorbing all the files I’d chosen took me about another twenty minutes.

  Then I asked for the threedy scan, looking for something to help pass the time while my mind cooled off. Even watching threedy shows had been an education, once I’d gotten out of Oldcity. At first I’d watched the most mindless shit on the Net, all the time, the same way I’d eaten food—just because I could. But it hadn’t taken me long to see that the threedy could teach me things I’d never get out of a datafile, about how people who always had enough to eat and a decent job acted around each other. I’d already learned, the hard way, how much I didn’t know about that.

  And coming here had given me a whole new level of ignorance and inadequacy to sink to.… As I thought about that my stomach began to hurt. I tried not to think about it, tried to concentrate on what I was seeing in the air in front of me as show after show winked by. I couldn’t believe the number of channels Elnear had open—all the public accesses, and five times as many pay ones with full sensory feed. Most of the subscription channels were only corporate propaganda, the combines’ way of sending messages and warnings to each other without seeming to. But some of the channels were experimentals, sending incredible visions, sounds, and sensations vibrating like drug dreams through my brain.

  I dropped back into public access finally, too strung out to enjoy anything that intense. Ordinary light and noise was enough.… “Stop,” I said suddenly, freezing a talking head in the air in front of me. It was a man giving a speech; not the kind of thing I liked to watch even now unless I wanted to catch up on my sleep. But there was something different about this face—something I couldn’t look away from, once I’d seen it. Something I had to see more of.

  He had one of the most beautiful faces I’d ever seen. I leaned back in my seat, watching him speak, somehow forced to listen to what he was saying: “… And I believe that we lost something more than simply our identity as a people,” he was saying, “when we left our home-world for the stars. We lost our understanding of our uniqueness in the eyes of God. The combines have become our idea of heaven, where all our physical needs are provided for, our lives laid out for us in perfect comfort from birth until death. It has become too easy to forget that there was once a higher purpose that drove us to succeed where other beings failed—”

  “Greed,” I muttered, disgusted. A religion hyper, shilling for some combine, probably. Holy war. I thought I was about to change the channel, but somehow I went on listening instead; not because I liked what he was saying, but because I couldn’t help liking him. It wasn’t just the way he looked, but something about the way he was—the openness, the earnestness, the sincerity as he told the people accessing him to “see the humanity that bound them together, as they looked into a stranger’s face…”

  You could change the way your own face looked, and he probably had. But you couldn’t buy that kind of charisma. You had to be born with it. I stared at him, fascinated, even while I felt a kind of envy twist inside me.

  “Mez Cat.” Jardan’s voice broke in on his, making me jump. “What are you doing?” she asked, staring at the image flickering in the air in front of me.

  “Nothing.” I blanked the port, and shrugged.

  “Sojourner Stryger,” she said. “Somehow I didn’t expect that he would he to your tastes.”

  I frowned. “Why? Is he a friend of yours?”

  Her mouth pursed up. “He is the leader of the Revival Movement, and an extremely active lobbyist for humanitarian causes.”

  “One of those,” I said. She ignored that, and told me to come with her. In the outer office she introduced me to the rest of Elnear’s staff. They nodded and mumbled, looking at me with their disbelief showing. I wondered what Elnear’s other aide had been like. Not like me, I guessed.

  The work Jardan expected me to do was dull, but I did it. Finally Elnear left her office to go to the Assembly. Jardan and I went with her as far as the transparent-walled viewing gallery; that was as close as nonmembers ever got to the Assembly floor. The Assembly Hall looked just like it did in all the media pieces: long and high, with the ancient logo of a flaming sun circled by nine worlds, the original Federation. A lot of combines hated that logo; hated even the name of the Federation, because it suggested too much centralized control. But by now it was tradition, and they were stuck with it, just like they were stuck with the Charter that allowed the FTA to initiate its own policies, independent of them.

  Tier after U-shaped tier of seats faced the curve of the Security Council’s High Seat, enough to hold a thousand combine representatives. The fact that my mind was working again only heightened the reality of the Assembly members moving restlessly in the seats down below. With a bug in your ear you could actually hear what they said—the arguments, the charges and counter-charges, the options open in whichever endless resource war they were trying to settle today. Most of the data I’d accessed in Elnear’s office this morning had to do with what happened here.

  This vote was something strictly among the combines. The FTA’s Security Council was mediating, but they weren’t inputting anything … at least not anything we could witness. They weren’t even here in the flesh. At first I wasn’t sure, through the murmur of so many other minds down below. But I narrowed my focus until I was positive—they were only projections, holos, ghosts. “Why aren’t they up there?” I asked Jardan.

  “What are you talking about?” she said.

  “The Security Council. They’re holos, not the real people.”

  She looked at me, startled. She bit her tongue before she could ask me how I knew that; because she already knew how I knew. “For security reasons.”

  “Is that why they call it the Security Council?” I knew the second I asked it that I should have kept my mouth shut. No, it wasn’t.

  “No, it isn’t. Spare me your sense of humor,” she said, and looked away.

  I looked down at the Assembly floor again. The eerie thing about it—the thing that you only realized here—was that unless you were wired for sound nothing seemed to be happening. There was nothing but silence on the chamber floor. All the debate or discussion was done subvocally, or in ways even stranger and more private. I wondered what was happening down there that never even touched us, up here in the gallery.

  Jardan pointed out Elnear, sitting motionless in the middle tier, waiting to cast her predetermined vote. I wondered whether most of the ‘neutral’ parties down there had had their minds made up for them the way she h
ad, by pressure from merger partners with a lot of arm. I remembered what she’d told me about the combines, and as I watched disembodied numbers begin to tally on my chair arm, the feeling inside me that something important was happening down there died. Maybe she was right—those hundreds of humans around her really were nothing but mouths, ports; the combines were tallying the outcome for them. And yet her single vote still mattered, at least to Centauri.… I found Daric taMing up in the first tier of seats—each tier was a little more comfortable than the last, as they got closer to the High Seat. All the combine reps had equal votes; but some were still more equal than others.

  And then there was the Security Council, up there on the High Seat, independent of them all and flaunting it. The Security Council made the FTA’s rules, played out its own games that were usually played against the will of some part of the Assembly. The Assembly could vote down a Security Council ruling, but it took a two-thirds majority, and with the combines always at each others’ throats, it had to be a damned unpopular law to get them all united against it. The Council was the FTA’s brain, and Elnear was up for one of its slots. I wondered how much more satisfying that would be than what she had now. Maybe it would just be different.

  The voting was over. I stared at the numbers on the screen; blinked, realized I’d been staring at them without blinking for way too long, while my brain shuffled through the information I’d swallowed whole this morning. “Who won?” The numbers didn’t mean anything, when I didn’t know what they’d been voting for.

  “It doesn’t matter,” Jardan murmured, and left her seat.

  “That’s cosmic,” I said, and she frowned.

  Elnear met us down below, and we started back through the maze of halls. Her face was longer than I’d seen it all day.

  “Lady Elnear…” Someone called her name from behind us. I looked back, tracking through the crowd with two sets of eyes and ears. No one I knew … someone Elnear and Jardan did know. I watched a small, slender man coming toward us, still pushing people aside even though Elnear had stopped to wait for him. And suddenly I realized I knew him, too; he was the one I’d been watching on the threedy. Nobody else could have a face like that.

  “Sojourner Stryger,” Elnear said, nodding uncertainly.

  “Lady Elnear.” He stopped in front of us; about a dozen people materialized around him in the seconds that followed. His people. “It must be God’s will that we should meet by chance this way…”

  Chance, hell. Surprise pinched me hard. He was out of breath; he’d chased her through the crowds all the way from the Assembly Hall. I stared at him. Even in person he had the most flawless face I’d ever seen. Skin, hair, eyes—every feature so perfect that my own eyes couldn’t find anything wrong with them … except that they were too perfect. It had to be a cosmo job; but even realizing it, my eyes kept liking him.

  I made myself look at Elnear without listening to what he said. I felt the blow of her ordinariness hit me, breaking the spell of his face; felt the raw pain of her self-consciousness as she looked at him. She struggled past it, trying to listen and not to look.…

  “… about the upcoming debate before the media,” he was saying. “I hope you will not take this in a negative way, since we’ll both be speaking in support of the same viewpoint … but have you considered whether your principles might not be compromised? After all, if the Federation does in fact deregulate pentryptine, ChemEnGen stands to make a great deal of profit … they do hold the ancestral controlling patent on the entire pentatryptophine family, I believe.”

  Pentryptine. It was a drug he was talking about. Back in Oldcity they called it bliss.

  Elnear blinked, moved her head. What Stryger had said wasn’t the thing she’d been expecting to hear. “In fact, Sojourner, my stand is, and has always been, against deregulation. As you know, I will be representing the Drug Enforcement Arm in this public forum.…” I wondered why she called him by his first name; until I realized it wasn’t a name. It was a title, one he’d taken for himself.

  He raised his perfect eyebrows as if he was surprised. But he wasn’t. I kept watching him, confused, because nothing about him fit. “Well, I must have been misinformed.…” He tapped his forehead with his finger, looked at her almost quizzically. “But surely a person with your long dedication to individual rights can’t believe that there is something wrong in allowing more widespread application of these drugs? I can cite hundreds of criminal incidents that have occurred right here in N’Yuk in the past month.… The pentatryptophine drugs have proved safe and harmless in suppressing overt aggression, as well as in controlling many other forms of antisocial behavior. These things should have been eradicated long ago. It has seemed to me for some time that we have the way—but not the will—to completely control criminal behavior.”

  Elnear lifted a hand, shook her head slightly. “Sojourner Stryger, it isn’t that I disagree with you on that. Not at all. It’s simply that if these drugs become widely and easily available there is such potential for their abuse. The pentryptine subfamily is also a perfectly safe and harmless way for a combine to control its population illegally, to drug them into believing their lives are wonderful, when in fact they are not. I’m afraid many combines are far too willing to take the easy way out—to take away freedom of choice, and replace it with mindless gratitude.”

  Stryger nodded. The agreement shining in his eyes was real this time. “Of course, precisely. That was never my intention, and of course I will emphasize that the deregulation should never be allowed to further misuse—”

  Elnear shook her head again, regret showing on her face. “I’m afraid our individual warnings or precautions won’t be enough to stop a flood, once someone removes the dam. I simply don’t have enough faith in the power of individual will. I wish I did.” Her eyes clung to his face.

  I was staring at him again, too. There was a kind of golden transparency to his skin, his hair, that his simple street clothes only made brighter. He looked about thirty-five, old enough to look responsible but still look young. He was probably older than that. He carried a long wooden pole in his hand, half as thick around as my wrist, and with half its length covered with carving; the designs looked like words, but I couldn’t read them.

  “If everyone had your own strength of will, you would not say that, Lady Elnear.” He smiled with honest respect. His eyes were wide and clear; his voice was like water flowing. I touched his mind again, just to be sure he was real.

  He turned toward me. I realized suddenly that he’d been looking at me, too, from the corner of his eye the whole time he was talking to her. “Excuse me…” he said to Elnear, breaking off like he’d only just noticed me. “Who is this?”

  “My new aide.” She sounded relieved, at the sudden change of subject, and that he’d stopped looking at her.

  “Really.” He turned those searchlight eyes on me, looking everywhere but into my own eyes. “You have a rather unusual facial type … do you have Hydran blood, young man?” He met my stare at last, found what he’d expected to when he saw green eyes.

  And when I saw what was in his eyes then, suddenly I hated his guts. “No.” I started to turn away.

  “Forgive me—” His hand caught my arm, pulling me back. “I don’t mean to offend you. It’s just that the Hydran people have been a particular interest of mine for a long time. I’m not often wrong.” Calling me a liar. The tip of his tongue slipped out, wetting his lips just a little.

  “Get your hand off me,” I said, very softly. “Or I’ll break your fingers.”

  “Cat—” It was Jardan’s hard, high voice. The warning sounded far away and almost frightened.

  Stryger’s hand let me go, but I couldn’t shake his stare. Even as he turned back to Elnear, he was still looking at me. Someone had set him on me. He’d come all this way, forced this meeting, just to have a look at me. Hydran blood.

  When he looked at Elnear again, finally, I was still what he was seeing, making him see her in a ne
w and unexpected way. “Of course,” he murmured, like an apology but not one, “someone in your position would hardly have a psion on her staff.”

  I stared at the back of his head, through it; saw the nest of maggots squeezed into the space where his mind ought to be. He was human, all right.

  He went on speaking to Elnear about meaningless details of whatever the thing was they’d been discussing. I didn’t really listen; the buzzing of his brain was too loud inside my head. He called himself a religious man. He was absolutely certain that he knew what God was, and exactly how God wanted it all to be.… Those people standing around him, waiting with inhuman patience and goodwill for him to finish, thought he knew, too. He kept glancing at me, as if he couldn’t keep his eyes off me. My own eyes kept turning traitor, still wanting to like his face, even when I could see what lay behind it. I wondered if he had that effect on everybody; the thought scared the hell out of me.

  Finally he finished his business. He took one last look at me and went away down the hall, his disciples trailing him on an invisible string. I stood watching him go for too long, until I had to run a few steps to catch up with Jardan and Elnear.

  “What does that scumbag really want—?” I said.

  They both glanced back at me, surprised, almost outraged.

  “That was Sojourner Stryger,” Elnear said, “of the Revival Movement. It’s an extremely popular prespace-fundamentalist religion; his media appearances draw huge numbers. I would not refer to him as a … as you did, if I were you.” She looked back at me again, letting me see her disapproval, as if I couldn’t feel it. “He has done more for the dispossessed and exploited in our society than anyone I know of. He has an impressive record of speaking out in defense of human rights.”

  “I know that … ma’am. I saw him on the threedy. But what’s he doing here?”

  “Lobbying, probably,” Jardan said bluntly. “He has also almost single-handedly made the deregulation of pentryptine a real possibility. As a result of his influence, he’s under consideration for the same position on the Security Council as the Lady.”