Catspaw

by Joan D. Vinge

  Trying not to think about Jule’s stepmother touching my arm, I stuck on a fresh drug patch, and asked the desk terminal for my contract with Centauri. Braedee was as good as his word; it was waiting for me. Like a bucket of cold water. Now I knew what was funny. I stared at the document scrolling up the screen. I didn’t understand half the words I saw there, and even those were broken up by strings of legal code. I made a hard copy and stuck it in my pocket, before I finally went downstairs.

  Everyone else had already eaten. The octagon-shaped dining room with its long embroidered curtains and wood-paneled walls was silent and empty. Almost empty. I went to the table.

  “Beat it,” I said to the silver-plated drone that was trying to clear away the leftovers. I gave it a shove, and it went back into the closet. The way these people wasted food was a crime. I drank a half-full cup of coffee that someone had poured too much sweetener into, piled up a plate with untouched spice pastries and half-eaten eggs, a piece of cold smoked fish, some fruit salad. I sat on a cushioned seat beside the table and began to eat.

  Lady Elnear walked into the room, with an empty cup in her hand. She stopped.

  I reached across the table and picked up the teapot, held it out to her.

  Wordlessly she came across the room, and let me fill her cup. “Thank you.” Her eyes were still fixed on the plate beside me. “MezCat,” she said, with a strange gentleness, “no one is forced to eat scraps in this house. Please, there’s always plenty of fresh food.…” She gestured vaguely toward the kitchen.

  “No, ma’am,” I said. “There’s not.”

  She looked at me, not understanding.

  I shrugged, and ate another spice roll. “I’ve never been picky about food, ma’am.”

  She sighed faintly, and went out of the room.

  SEVEN

  THAT MORNING WE didn’t go into N’yuk again. Instead we met Lazuli in the hallway, and a mod took us all on up the valley. Jardan told me we were going to attend Centauri’s board meeting. I didn’t say anything, wondering why they even bothered to tell me, when I didn’t have any choice about going. I sat next to Lazuli, because neither of the other women wanted to sit next to me. Lazuli was wearing a sexless gray-and-silver business suit now. The plainness of it made her look more like Jule, and yet it made the softness in her face that much easier to see. She stared out the window like she didn’t notice that I was there. But she knew it, just like I did. Her mind kept remembering what I’d looked like naked. Feeling her remember it was like being tortured with ice and a heat pencil.

  The mod set down in the courtyard of a mansion that felt older than any building I’d seen yet on the taMings’ land. It was far up the valley from the other houses, almost to the end, crouched like a hermit on a rock ledge above the river. The water roared over the lip of stone there like it had a suicide urge, crashing and drowning in the pit of rocks and shadows far below.

  Inside, the mansion was one gigantic work of art—arched ceilings painted with murals, framed by scrolled carvings, white marble pillars, congealed flows of stairway with golden banisters. Paintings of long-dead people in bizarre clothes covered the walls; sculpted busts of total strangers lined the entrance hall like the cut-off heads of taMing enemies If moving through the Crystal Palace had been bad, walking here, on the way to a combine board meeting, was agony. Somebody like me hadn’t been meant to walk through places like this; hadn’t even been meant to know they existed.

  I couldn’t get up the nerve to ask whose house this was. I picked the answer out of Elnear’s thoughts, feeling like a thief: The mansion belonged to Gentleman Teodor, the one who’d sat at the head of the table when we’d all eaten at the Crystal Palace. The head of the family, the oldest living taMing.

  Braedee met us in one of the endless halls, and I read his smug satisfaction as he saw me, right where he wanted me. He greeted the others like this was his ground, and not theirs. While the Centauri board met, it was. He told them the way to the board room, as if they didn’t already know it, and let them pass. But he blocked my path as I tried to follow, nudging me toward a doorway. “He’ll be right with you, Lady Elnear,” he said, as she turned back, waiting, frowning. “I have some further instructions for him.”

  That didn’t reassure her. Maybe it wasn’t supposed to. She turned and went on, still frowning.

  “In here.” Braedee moved into the room, making me follow him.

  “What?” I said, when I was standing in front of him again. The sight of a Corpse uniform and the memory of last night made me knot up inside as I looked at him. “Jeezu, don’t you have anything better to do than hassle me—”

  His hand shot out and smacked me across the face. I staggered, hanging into a table. Something fell and smashed on the floor.

  “You are not an equal here,” he said. “Don’t act like one.” He looked down at the pieces of broken crystal glittering like knives around my feet. He crushed a shard under his boot heel, looked up at me again. “The price of the vase will be deducted from your salary.”

  I rubbed my cheek, glaring at him, blinking too much.

  “Two ambassadors of Triple Gee are attending the board meeting today, as are the regular Centauri associates and controlled interests. I want you to pick their brains—especially the Triple Gee representatives. I want to know their real thoughts on what they hear.”

  “Wait a minute,” I said. I had to force the words out this time. “That’s not what you hired me for. I’m not here to spook for Centauri—”

  He looked at me. I flinched, even though I was trying not to. But he only said, “You are here to protect Lady Elnear. Since we still do not know who wants her dead, we have to make use of every opportunity to explore the real motives of everyone she comes in contact with. Triple Gee is our primary competition. That’s all.”

  It sounded logical. I didn’t believe it, any more than he did. I was afraid to try reading him face to face, but I could figure that much out for myself. I was protecting Lady Elnear, but he could force me to pull data about the competition too, because I didn’t know enough about anything to know when I was crossing the line. I was the perfect tool. No wonder he couldn’t stay away from me.

  “I want to know what everyone who is not Centauri thinks, you understand—”

  “Everyone? Even the Lady?”

  “Particularly the Lady.”

  I glared at him. “‘For her own good’?”

  “And yours,” he said softly. He jerked his head at the doorway.

  I looked down, and nodded. I stepped out of the ring of broken glass, and left the room.

  I reached the boardroom at last. A security screen blinked off, showing me a hall that must have been fifty meters long, with angels dancing on its ceiling. The air was blue-silver; the light that poured in through the high, narrow windows was like light from another age. I wondered what people had done in a room this size centuries ago. Probably not what they were doing now. I looked toward the table in the center of the room. Or maybe they had: Lying, cheating, fucking each other over … some things never changed.

  As I entered the room I heard a noise, and saw a head disappear down at the far end of the long white-and-gold table. The people nearest that end turned in their seats, rising up, reaching out. Somebody had fallen. My eyes and my mind leaped, looking for Elnear. My mind found her first.

  She had one of the ornamented, high-backed chairs at the near end of the table. She was standing up, leaning forward, looking toward the noise. Jardan was sitting in one of the seats lined up in a second row just behind the board seats: the row of aides and advisors. Security guards wearing a rainbow of combine colors lined the walls of the room. A couple of them had moved forward, but none of the rest looked worried. They were just there for show. The real security here wasn’t anything you could touch or see.

  I sat down beside Jardan. “What happened?”

  “One of the Triple Gee ambassadors,” she murmured. “He seemed to miss the seat as he sat down.…” S
he was thinking people who met in rooms like this one never made mistakes like that. I heard/felt the tittering amusement of the Centauri board members all around me. Triple Gee had just lost a whole lot of face.

  Jardan turned to look at me again. “I suppose Braedee was simply reminding you of your duty.…” she said, taking my mind off Triple Gee.

  “Yeah,” I muttered. I looked away along the table until I saw Lazuli, sitting next to Daric … her stepson. She didn’t look any older than he did; I wondered how old she really was. He murmured something to her; she laughed. There were maybe thirty other people around the long table. Twenty of them were the actual Centauri board. The rest, like Elnear, represented smaller combines they’d forced alliances with because each had something they needed or wanted. I counted eleven taMings sitting around the table; just enough for a majority. Something in the way they held themselves and moved said that they never forgot that for a minute. They stood out, even at that table, and it wasn’t just because they all looked alike.… I saw old Teodor, who’d been on the board longer than anybody else, and would be until he died … saw Jule’s grandmother … a couple of aunts and uncles, great-aunts, great-uncles. Lazuli held the seat that had belonged to Jule by right. It had been filled by a proxy for years, after Jule left home.

  I looked at Charon, sitting at the table’s head, as far from the Triple Gee ambassadors as he could get. He gave me a look that made me feel cold inside. Braedee had told him that since they had me they might as well use me; but having me in the same room with him made him damn uncomfortable. I realized the real reason Braedee took such a personal interest in me was because I was his idea, and Charon didn’t like it. Charon was Centauri, as much as any single human being could be. If I caused any trouble while I was here, I wasn’t the only one who’d pay. I looked back down the table again. “Why is Triple Gee here, if they’re the enemy?” I asked Jardan.

  “To keep lines of communication open,” she said. “They exchange ambassadors whenever a board meets. They have more in common than the same potential market for their services—”

  They both hated the FTA. I nodded. “I know.…” I said.

  She gave me a strange look. I didn’t bother to answer it, and she looked away again, leaning forward to say something to Elnear.

  I remembered suddenly that Braedee had said Elnear held her dead husband’s board seat. That must give her two votes. “How can the Lady be on the Centauri board?” I asked, as Jardan sat back again. “She’s not really a taMing.”

  “Because they never found her husband’s body,” Jardan murmured. A technicality. Everybody knew he was dead, but nobody could prove it legally. Until someone did, or she died too, she’d continue to be his proxy.

  I grimaced, sorry I’d asked. I settled back as Charon called the meeting to order, remembering that it wasn’t the taMings I was supposed to be watching. The two Triple Gee reps were sitting like statues at the far end of the table, rigid with surface calm, groping for the dignity they knew they’d lost for good in one second’s lack of attention. The one who’d hit the floor was chewing the inside of his mouth. He was sure that somebody had done it to him on purpose, but he couldn’t figure out how.

  Inside both of the Triple Gee reps, suspicion, hatred, grudging respect mixed like oil and water, leaving a scum of envy on everything they thought, everything they heard as the meeting started. From what I could see, if Triple Gee was behind trying to assassinate Lady Elnear, neither one of them had heard about it.

  I glanced at Lady Elnear’s back, feeling her accessing information; feeling her own self-conscious awareness of me. She wanted to tell everyone there what I was; hated herself for not having the balls to do it. I swore under my breath, hating that bastard Braedee for making everything harder for me than it had to be. I didn’t even want to think about what would happen if anybody else—or everybody else—in that room suddenly found out what I was. Most combines never used telepaths for snoopware, because they were too paranoid about getting snooped themselves—by somebody else’s psion, or by their own. Triple Gee would probably declare war if they knew what I was doing. Their security would kill me on the spot anyhow, even if all they did was walk out on the meeting.

  I made myself focus again, shutting my eyes, trying to look like I was just bored, and not groping a lot of unsuspecting minds in the dark. The board was reporting what had been done about handling an upsurge in communications traffic in some critical sector. The Triple Gee reps took it all in, the envy static getting louder in their brains. One of them thought about the hostile takeover move on a local competitor that Triple Gee was making in that sector of their own network. Triple Gee figured the force-merger was what it would take to compete efficiently. Centauri was going to be surprised.…

  Until I told them about it. I realized Centauri wasn’t going to discuss anything here that would actually surprise Triple Gee. It was all to test out their responses. I went on around the table, until I was back inside Elnear’s mind again. She was thinking about the ironies of communication, around this table, and across the Federation. That for all the technology that let them access the way they did, there was still no simple, instantaneous communication that could reach between star systems. Board members and combine representatives and millions of daily messengers still had to travel in the flesh from all across the Federation, their ports and heads crammed with artificial memory, in order to keep the universal data Net functioning, and a combine’s brain alive. Centauri had it better than most combines, because outside a single solar system communication was just another commodity, and they handled it themselves. But data was the lifeblood of an interstellar network, and if somebody ever cut off the supply, even Centauri would be braindead in a week.

  I broke contact, shaking out my brain; wondering if the Lady ever thought about anything as simple as which shoes to wear. Maybe not. Maybe that was why she dressed the way she did.… I let my mind go on around the table again, skipping Centauri heads, reading the rest, memorizing what I found there, no matter how meaningless it was to me. As I got used to the patterns of bioware, I realized none of them wore anything that could sense me. But that didn’t make me feel any easier. Playing corporate telepath was still like playing Last Chance back in Oldcity … a suicide game.

  I sat up straighter, remembering yesterday, as Daric said something about Sojourner Stryger. The two Triple Gee ambassadors leaned forward at the far end of the table, suddenly letting their interest show. “… Stryger’s effectiveness quotient in the independent media is still rising,” Daric was saying, “because of the exposure he has been achieving in regard to deregulation. As is yours, Elnear—” He grinned across the table at her like he knew something she didn’t. He probably did. His eyes moved past her to touch on me, slid down me once. But then they were gone again, and he was looking toward the Triple Gee reps. “Apparently the Security Council is waiting for the outcome of the deregulation vote before filling the open slot. Since they are, as we all know, somewhat out of touch with life in the real world, they appear to be using deregulation as a kind of test of wills, or a way to see whose personality has the greater force, the most impact on public opinion…” He smiled, glancing at Elnear again. Her irritation prickled behind my eyes. “A moot point in the end, as we also know—but one which seems to have some curious ritual significance to the FTA.”

  The thought of Stryger ending up on the Security Council made me feel sick. Those stupid slads, didn’t they know what he was—? I remembered what Braedee had told me, and that didn’t help.

  Daric leaned forward, peering down the table at the reps again. “Tell me, Ambassador Ndala, is Triple Gee still waffling in its feelings about deregulation?”

  “Triple Gee is not so much ‘waffling,’ Gentleman Daric, as it is carefully weighing the consequences,” Ndala said. “We hardly need to point out to you how much profit Centauri stands to make on this drug, because of its controlling interest in ChemEnGen. Those additional profits could easily be u
sed against your competitors.”

  Daric shrugged. “Or … they could as easily make us mellow and content to let our network go soft just a little … especially if you were to support us wholeheartedly in the Assembly vote. After all, you must keep things in perspective. We are not really the Enemy. Sometimes we do lose track of that; but it’s true, nonetheless.”

  The Triple Gee ambassador leaned back in his seat, looking straight up the table at Charon. “Perhaps we will find something substantive waiting for us when we return to the embassy—?” he murmured. They were lying. They already knew they were going to vote for deregulation, even though they didn’t care about the drug itself. They wanted Stryger to win. But they were going to see what kind of compromises they could shake Centauri down for.…

  “Consider it done,” Charon said. He glanced at me for just a second as he said it. His word was about as safe as I felt right now.

  Elnear sighed heavily in front of me. She knew as well as any of them did that even though she had the FTA behind her on the drug vote, Stryger had his backers too. She wanted deregulation to fail, for reasons that ran so deep in her I couldn’t really read them. She was even thinking that she’d be willing to withdraw from consideration for the Council, even though she wanted that slot nearly as much, if withdrawing would keep some of Stryger’s backers from voting for deregulation just to get him into it. But she knew nothing was that easy, or that clean.

  She thought Stryger was a good man; she thought he’d be as good a choice for the Council as she was. Maybe better. She didn’t believe Stryger was really the combines’ tool any more than Braedee did; but not for the same reasons. She didn’t know what Stryger was; didn’t believe—or probably didn’t give a damn about—what I’d told her. She admired and envied his faith in God and human nature. She thought it was simply unfortunate that his belief in pentryptine as a solution to everybody’s problems played into the hands of so many combine interests.…