Catspaw

by Joan D. Vinge

  I slumped down in my seat, aching, not sure if I was exhausted or just depressed. These vips had the augmentation and easy access that let them keep up with the flow of interstellar empires. But it didn’t give them a clue about what went on behind another human’s eyes. I didn’t know if I felt disillusioned, or just relieved, to know that they were only deadheads like anybody else, when it really counted.

  Finally the board meeting ended; but that wasn’t the end of my duty. There was another room waiting for us, this one piled high with food and drinks under a ceiling crawling with gold and white plaster flowers. I was hungry, but I didn’t touch anything this time. It wasn’t worth the risk. I only watched and listened, staying by Elnear like I was supposed to. Jardan shadowed me at first, but when she saw I wasn’t eating or talking, she left me alone.

  I was only an aide, and if I didn’t talk no one talked to me. I stood listening to the mortal gods of the Federation discuss how to get around the FTA’s back, and how to get into somebody’s pants; how much they needed pentryptine to stop the rioting on Belke’s World … how much the franchise disputes had hurt production … what a pain in the ass the FTA had been about their labor practices.… Advising and bitching and gossiping, sometimes all in the same breath.

  I watched a tall, blond man spit out a skagweed cud and leave it lying halfway under the table; someone else stepped in it while I watched. Jeezu, he had worse manners than I did—But manners didn’t seem to matter, if you were rich enough; just like they didn’t matter if you were poor enough. It was only the billions suspended in between, those who had something to lose, who had to know how to act. I touched the logo on my sleeve; let my hand drop.

  There was a crash and then laughter and cursing somewhere behind me. I turned around fast, because just for a second I’d thought I’d felt something, psi energy. But I wasn’t sure, and it was only somebody who’d spilled a plate of food. Probably nothing, probably just liquor or nerves.… It got on my nerves, remembering there could be a psionic practical joker in this crowd somewhere, just waiting to try me again. But maybe they’d realized why the joke hadn’t worked on me. If they knew, they hadn’t given me away. Maybe they had something to hide, too. Maybe that was why they only did little things, things nobody could trace. Maybe they’d leave me alone; but I doubted it. Braedee had told me to back off. But what he didn’t know could still hurt me. I began to loosen up my brain, starting to scan—

  “Mez Cat.”

  I turned. Lazuli taMing was standing beside me.

  I blinked. “Ma’am?”

  “You look like you’re asleep on your feet.”

  I pulled my mind back into focus in a hurry. “No, ma’am. Just … uh, doing my job.” Shit. Don’t say that. “I mean—”

  “It’s quite all right. You’ve barely had time to take a breath before being thrown into all this. It must seem very alien to you.”

  I heard the unconscious condescension in it; felt it. But she was standing here talking to me, something nobody else would do. And besides, she was right. “Yes, ma’am. Very alien.” Seeing Jule’s face when I looked at her was more comfort than I’d had in a long time. It helped me remember that all this was supposed to have a point.

  Charon was watching us, frowning. I touched his mind with a quick finger of thought—pulled back again, tasting jealousy, suspicion, frustration … hatred. The last one for me, the rest for his wife. I felt the twisted uncertainty in him every time he looked at her. He hadn’t married her for love, only for politics; he knew she didn’t love him. But when he looked at her he saw Jule too … his own daughter. Only perfect, this time. And it made him uneasy and uncertain, things he never wanted to be; made him feel things no man ought to feel when he remembered his daughter. There was an emotion still alive inside him that should have died long ago.…

  I looked away from him again, my skin crawling.

  “What did you say?” Lazuli asked.

  I hadn’t said anything. “Nothing, ma’am,” I answered, not sure if I’d let something leak, or only made some sound. “Is Jiro here?” I changed the subject, because I had to get my own mind off it. I hadn’t seen Jiro anywhere, but if I had to pick someone who’d use psi as a bad joke, he’d be my first choice.

  She shook her head. “No. He wanted to come, to observe the meeting, but I told him he couldn’t. That was his punishment for lying to me.”

  I almost said I thought lying was what vips learned first; but I didn’t. Maybe it wasn’t the lie he was being punished for, anyway. Maybe it was just for admitting the truth. I looked at Charon again, saw him begin to move toward us. “Ma’am—” I ducked my head and turned away from her.

  I made my way through the crowd to Elnear. She stood in a shadowed alcove, talking to Jule’s great-uncle Salvador, who looked younger than she did but was twice as old.

  “Mez Cat,” Elnear said, nodding to me as she noticed me. She looked tired, and felt worse. “I think it’s time we were leaving. I have my own work to get back to.” I felt a little heat stir in her, and a lot of relief. Relief that she could finally get free of this nest of relatives; relief that I’d been here the entire time without embarrassing her. I nodded too, more relieved than she was. Jardan came up beside me, glancing at me without frowning, for once. “Thank God,” she said.

  Daric taMing was walking behind her as she said it, holding a lot of liquor in a large crystal mug. He stopped, looking at us, his eyes glittering. I met his stare, because this time I knew I hadn’t done anything he could shaft me for.

  “So you’ve been a good boy today, new aide—” he said. He started on, hesitated, looking back. His mouth quirked up. “Did you know that your fly is open?”

  I looked down, because everybody else did; knowing it was impossible, knowing he was wrong— He wasn’t wrong. Everyone watched me fasten it.

  EIGHT

  I WENT WITH Lady Elnear to the Arm again the next day, and the next. Before I knew it I’d been on Earth for a week. It seemed like a lot longer. But nothing happened that hadn’t before, except that I became an aide. I digested the data I’d swallowed whole the first day, and used it; and every time I used the console I swallowed more. The fact that sometimes I knew more about a job than Jardan did, and other times didn’t know whether to input what she gave me or eat it, didn’t go over very well at first. But by now most of the surprised looks I was getting from her were relieved. Lady Elnear could even forget that I was a freak for long enough to look at me without startling, sometimes.

  One lunch hour I hired a legal program and got my contract with Centauri cleaned up and registered. Some of the other hours I spent wandering the floating paths through the streets and levels of the city near the Federation plex. The bizarre combinations of old and new, soaring curves and knife-blade edges, stone and steel and ceramoplast, glass and composite, made me feel like I was caught inside the mutating guts of some ancient, cancerous crystal being. I could see the layers of time in the layers of its structure, feel the crazyquilt of lives going on all around me in its heart, a separate reality flowing through the unoccupied spaces of its body. I got myself some new jeans, right from the source, but never got to wear them.

  And nothing happened to anyone that shouldn’t have, except that I had to see more of Jule’s brother Daric than I wanted to. And more of Lazuli.

  I thought I knew why she and her children were staying with Elnear instead of at the Crystal Palace where they belonged. It didn’t have anything to do with me. But that didn’t make it easier to be around them. I avoided Jiro and his sister like I’d avoid a street gang, and for pretty much the same reasons. I stayed away from their mother as much as I could; but short of staying in my room until I starved to death, I couldn’t keep away from her completely. And whenever I saw her, I had to feel her think about me. And feel myself think about her. Her face stayed with me in the nights, while I lay awake waiting for Braedee to call. I knew that mindlarking about Charon taMing’s wife made about as much sense as thinking ab
out setting myself on fire. It couldn’t have made me feel any worse; or any hotter.

  And every night after everyone else was asleep, Braedee’s ghost materialized over the console in my room, and I reported everything I’d seen and heard. What the hell, I figured; what real difference did anything make, anyway?

  * * *

  By the second week, I could stumble through the Lady’s office routine without driving the system and everybody around me crazy. Sometimes I could almost forget that this was anything but an honest job.…

  “Mez Cat,” Elnear said suddenly, from across the room. “Haven’t you anything better to do?”

  I was watching “You Are There,” the Independent Daily News fax; getting a lurid sensurround of a shipping disaster. I had everything damped out except the picture; screams and the smell of burned bodies were more than I really needed. The Indy was always desperate for ratings because their coverage wasn’t subsidized by combine credit; they were a strange mix of honor and sleaze, and I kind of liked them.

  I shut off the image and glanced up. “Everything’s in the system except the committee summary; we still don’t have all the data. I’m waiting for Geza to get done right now.”

  “What about the reports—?”

  “I dumped what you were through with, and brought up the rest of your list.”

  She was silent for a minute, trying to think of something else she could call me on. She couldn’t think of anything. “Cat,” she said finally, glancing down, “I confess that you have been a surprise, in some ways. You are actually managing to do an adequate job in this position. And frankly, considering that you were totally unqualified for it, I find that amazing.”

  I smiled. She did too, and turned back to her work.

  I felt her go white, suddenly, as she scanned the overnight listings on her unit. Jardan came in from the outer office, and the security screen blinked on behind her. “What is it?” Jardan asked, answering some summons I couldn’t hear. I’d figured out days ago that she was more than just Elnear’s assistant, and my keeper. She knew everything that mattered; she even wore enough augmentation to hold it all. She was the only one Elnear trusted that much.

  “Look at this.” Elnear put something on the screen of my unit that lobotomized the news fax. I sat back in my chair while Jardan read over my shoulder. She looked at Elnear; jerked the headset off of me and stuck the trodes on her own forehead. All that I recognized that I could see was the name of Triple Gee. “Triple Gee is boxed out—?” Jardan murmured, as if it was more unimaginable than even the thought of her smiling at me. “You only communicated with Suezain yesterday. How could Centauri have learned about the dispersal ruling—?”

  “There’s no way. I took absolute measures.…”

  Suddenly there were two sets of eyes drilling into my skull, two minds with the same idea. I sat staring at the screen, trying not to make it three. No one asked the question; figuring there was no point. I didn’t answer it, either.

  Elnear got up from her seat, heavily, and pulled on her drape. “I have a face meeting with Isplanasky to go to, Philipa. Lingpo can see to this business, and Geza can cover Cat’s duties.…” She glanced at me, resigned. I went where she went, like it or not. Right now she didn’t like it at all.

  We went through the halls, on foot as usual, deep into the heart of the FTA’s office plex. Elnear walked seven or eight klicks a day. I didn’t mind it, but it always surprised me that she didn’t either. For someone who didn’t seem to care what her body looked like, she took damn good care of it.

  This time we passed through a huge open space I’d never been inside of before. It was hung with banners and drifting light sculptures. Gigantic holo representations of Historic Earth shimmered in the walls, behind things inside stasis fields that looked like relics from a museum. It was a place that could only be for show, for the tourist trade that helped keep Earth alive. It startled the hell out of me after the nondescript halls and offices I’d gotten used to. But once I thought about it, I realized a place like this had to be here somewhere. The FTA claimed it represented all of humanity. It had to have a public face for humans to look at.

  Elnear kept walking ahead of me; navigating the trajectories of the crowd that had come to gape or take spoon-fed tours. I tried to keep up, but my own eyes kept being pulled away, toward a huge block of jade hand-carved into an incredible miniature landscape … a holo on the wall of a city, before and after it had been melted down by primitive nukes … a perfect zero-gee crystal floating inside a sphere.

  “Cat!” Elnear’s voice jerked my leash. “If you want to take the tour,” she said, when I reached her side, “please do it on your own time.”

  “I didn’t know there was a tour … ma’am.” I looked away, staring at the mosaic mural on the wall behind her.

  “Well, now you do,” she said, but her irritation was fading. She turned, glancing over her shoulder to see what I was looking at instead of her. “A family portrait of the human race,” she said.

  It was a picture of maybe thirty people, old, young, all different sexes, sizes, colors. Once I’d started to look at them, I couldn’t stop until I’d looked at them all. Whoever had made that portrait over four hundred years ago had done a good job of catching their souls.

  “It hung originally in the plex of the old world government that preceded the Federation,” Elnear said, “to remind the people of the nation-states that met there of their common humanity … something which they constantly forgot, anyway.” She wasn’t sure whether what we had now was better or worse; but she thought that at least individual humans didn’t kill each other as often, or in such big numbers.

  I looked at the faces again. Some of them looked less like each other than she looked like me. But none of them were Hydran faces. None of them really looked like me. There were words embedded in the picture, in some pre-space script I couldn’t read. “What does it say?”

  “‘Treat others as you would like them to treat you,’” she said.

  I didn’t say anything. She started on and I followed her. The mural’s eyes watched my back as I walked away.

  I didn’t know who Isplanasky was until we reached the end of our stroll; I was too busy thinking about what had happened back in her office to bother picking it out of her thoughts. I only looked up as we finally reached his doorway, in time to see the logo on the wall above it: Natan lsplanasky. Director of Operations, Contract Labor Services. The past put its hands around my throat. I went inside, but I didn’t want to.

  Isplanasky actually had a room with a view, a room at the top; which made sense, for someone at the top of the FTA’s biggest and most profitable operation short of the Federation Telhassium Mines. His secured inner office was huge, and it had a view of the city’s rolling peaks, tier on tier of artificial mountains.

  “Elnear…” Isplanasky got up from what looked like a purple reclining chair with some strange design quirks. He shook off a slow-moving daze as he came toward us, and at first I thought he’d been sleeping. He’d been accessing. He was loaded with augmentation, but none of it showed. “God, what a pleasure to see your face. It’s been too long. Sometimes I think I’ve been buried and forgotten in the Net.…” He shook his head again, rubbing his temples, blinking. “It was good of you to come, when a call would have done it.” He was wearing black, like the Labor press gangs, but his was pretending to be a suit, not a uniform. It looked good on him. He looked about forty standards; he was heavyset but not fat, with bronze skin and long black hair caught in a clip, a thick curling beard. He moved like maybe he really didn’t leave that chair for days on end.

  “Natan, I will use any excuse, any time, for a chance to get together with you.” Elnear flashed him that shapechanging smile, and he grinned, white teeth showing in the black beard. Just friends, no more … but real friends. She thought he was one hell of a guy. But then, she admired Stryger, too. “Besides, you need someone to remind you to come up for air.”

  “Who’s thi
s?” he asked, his voice still a little thick. He smiled at me like he actually wanted to know.

  She introduced me, and he crossed the room to shake my hand, telling me how damn lucky I was to be working with one of the best in the Arm. I didn’t answer; my throat felt paralyzed. My mind kept trying to find the dead black core in his own mind, that would tell me how someone could head the largest slave labor operation in the Federation and still smile at anyone like he meant it. Except I couldn’t find one.… Frustration started to burn a hole in my concentration. I might as well still be psiblind as have the kind of gray half vision Braedee’s drugs had given me.

  Isplanasky gave Elnear some tea. He handed me a beer and opened one for himself like we were all having a picnic on top of the world. My bottle said “since 1420” on it; it was made of brown glass. I popped it and took a long drink of thousand-year-old beer. It was pretty good. I finished it off.

  “I don’t like this debate with Stryger.…” Isplanasky said to Elnear. I looked up again. “The very fact that it’s happening stinks of interference. Too many combines want deregulation—”

  “Yes, I know.” Elnear nodded, sipping at her tea. “He’s quite sincere in his beliefs, but he strikes me as naive. He may make a deal with the devil simply because he believes in angels—to use his own terms.”

  His grin came back. “Unlike you and I, who are quaintly cynical down to our socks.”

  I leaned back on the couch by the window, listening to them discuss Stryger as if he was some kind of harmless crank. When I’d had a couple of free minutes on the Net, I’d called up everything I could find on him. I’d listened to him speak, I’d studied his background. He’d always been a godlover; he’d been a minister of the Universal Ecumen on Gadden. He hadn’t always been a fanatic about it. Everything I could dig out on his early years said he was a decent man who pretty much lived what he preached, working to make other people’s lives better.

  But then he’d had some kind of religious vision—at least that was what he claimed—when he’d been braindead for a couple of minutes after a fall. And he’d started to change. After that he’d come to Earth to study pre-space religion, because his vision had told him he’d find God’s Real Truth waiting for him here.