Catspaw

by Joan D. Vinge

  I went up the steps, through the door, into the cool shadowy hall, blinking as I followed it to Elnear’s study. My mind was still lost somewhere back along the path from the garden. I didn’t know what Elnear was going to say to me; worse, I didn’t know how I was going to answer it. “Ma’am?” I said at last, my voice hoarse, as I stopped in her doorway.

  Elnear turned away from the windows. She came toward me, silhouetted by the light. At first I couldn’t make out her expression. But I felt it.

  “I don’t know what you think you are doing here,” she said, not even bothering with the usual polite pretensions. “But you are not here to insinuate yourself into the private lives of this family. I will not have you using your—telepathy,” she said it like an obscenity, “to take advantage of children, or of a troubled woman who doesn’t know what she wants.”

  I felt my face burning. “I wasn’t—” I broke off, realizing that it was no use. That true or not, nothing I could say would make any difference to her. And that was the worst part of all. “I don’t understand it,” I said, finally.

  “What don’t you understand?” She kept the length of a long tabletop inlaid with stars between us, and a wall of anger contempt fear.

  “Why Jule thought you loved her. She asked me to help you because she said you were the only one who ever loved her. That’s the real reason I came here—because she asked me to. You must have hated her just as much as everyone else did.”

  Her mouth worked; she wanted to blame me for the pain that was suddenly there inside her, but she couldn’t. She turned away, looking at something across the room. Her husband’s picture. She said, her voice almost inaudible, “Jule was so helpless … so lost … she needed someone so much, someone who would love her unconditionally…” She looked back at me, and suddenly in her mind there was the unwanted image of how I’d looked that first day, as she’d left me standing there alone in the sunroom. “Jule was different.”

  I turned, moving too fast because I wanted to get away from her so much. My shirt caught on the outstretched arm of a sculpture standing by the doorway. I heard cloth rip as it jerked me up short; the loose-knotted sleeves came undone around my neck, and my shirt dropped to the carpet. I leaned down, grabbed it up, swearing. It was torn right across the front.

  “Cat.” Elnear’s voice caught at me like the sculpture’s arm.

  I straightened up, the shirt wadded between my fists, facing away from her.

  “How … who did that to your back?”

  “Nobody.” I took a step.

  “Cat.”

  “Ask Isplanasky.” I turned to face her again. “I got out of Contract Labor with my skin intact, right? So there’s nothing wrong with my back.” I threw my ruined shirt over my shoulders, tied it in a knot again, covering my scars.

  “That happened to you while you worked for Contract Labor?” Not really a question. “I have heard that some of the combines treat their laborers badly,” she said, awkwardly. “The FTA tries to maintain—”

  “The FTA did this to me.” I remembered how it had felt as the charged prod laid a line of liquid fire across my naked back, and another, and another. “At the Federation Mines, out in the Crab Colonies … If it hadn’t been for Jule paying off my contract, I wouldn’t be standing here right now. Forty-five percent of the bondies there don’t live long enough to last out their time. But you probably never access that kind of information.”

  She looked at me for what seemed like hours, bracing herself by her hand on the back of a chair … looked at me and thought about my words, and looked, and thought … like someone looking at a square with five sides. At last she said, “I understand now why you said what you did yesterday. But I don’t understand how it could happen. Natan would never allow—”

  “You said it yourself. Humans don’t run the FTA; it runs itself. Isplanasky doesn’t run the Federation Mines—he doesn’t even run Contract Labor, any more than I do.”

  She’d said it, but she hadn’t heard what she was saying. “But the whole reason the FTA exists is to protect the welfare of … of the dispossessed,” she said. “Not to create more suffering. Why should it exploit with one hand as it stops exploitation with the other?” There was no echo of recognition in her mind; she was so deep inside her own vision of her work that she couldn’t see anything else.

  “Do you eat meat?” I said.

  She looked at me blankly. “Yes, I do.”

  “But you consider yourself a moral person, right? You love animals, you have them for pets, you’d never kick a dog in the street. How do you justify eating meat?”

  “I…” Her face reddened. “I have to eat to survive.”

  “Jule never eats meat.”

  She looked away, her fingers stretching open at her sides. I wondered which of us was more surprised by this conversation.

  “Okay,” I said, “so maybe the FTA even considers itself a moral being. You called it a Humane Society for humans. But it’s got to eat. And eating meat is easier.”

  One hand rose to her head, ruffling her hair. “Your point, Cat,” she murmured, finally. “A point well taken. I will speak with Natan about it, when I get the chance.”

  “You really think that’ll make any difference?”

  She frowned slightly; the frown faded. “Individuals have been known to change their minds. Even on such a scale. But they need input, information. Just as you said.”

  “Is that why you’re doing this debate?” I’d wondered why she bothered, if she didn’t think that what individual humans wanted or believed made any difference any more. Maybe it explained why she wanted to be on the Security Council too; maybe her reasons really went deeper than just wanting power, or to escape from the taMings. “You really think there are some ways you can still matter?”

  “I suppose I do.” She nodded, but she wasn’t sure of anything now, not even of why she really wanted that Council slot. She moved back toward the windows, the bright heat of anger gone out of her, her movements slow and almost aimless. She wanted me to go away. It was what I wanted, too, but somehow I couldn’t. I couldn’t let go of that invisible line between us that neither of us knew how to snap.

  She stared down at the gardens, outlined by the light. Lazuli was gone; gone from sight, but not from her thoughts. “How is Jule?” she asked at last. “What is her life like now, with Dr. Siebeling? Is she finally, truly happy?”

  “As happy as anybody ever is, I guess.” I crossed the room until I stood beside her on the balcony. But not too close. “She and Siebeling have a little place upside in Quarro. She’s got it full of stray animals … she can’t leave anything alone that needs help. Doc just steps over them, and smiles.” I’d been her first stray. After he’d learned to live with me, he hadn’t minded the rest. “Siebeling’s good for her. She’s good for him. They have a place in Oldcity where they help other psions to pull their lives back together, like they did for themselves … and for me.”

  “I’m so glad.” She was. I felt her thoughts begin to find a center, an anchor, in the image of Jule smiling, helping others to smile. Maybe there was still hope after all, even for herself.… She glanced back at me, her eyes questioning.

  “Have you ever been to Quarro, ma’am?” Asking it before she could ask a question nobody really wanted answered right now.

  “Yes, many times. I keep a house in Quarro.”

  “You ever go to the Hanging Gardens there?” It gave me a chance to look away from her, out at these gardens again. When I’d first seen the Hanging Gardens, when I was sixteen or seventeen, I couldn’t believe that what I saw was natural, barely even believed it was real. I remembered the colors had been too bright, the forms too incredible, the rich sweet perfume of the flowers too intense. The Gardens rimmed the access well that was the only way in or out of Oldcity. They’d been right over my head all my life, always just out of reach.

  “It’s a beautiful place,” Elnear said. “Some of the most exquisite gardens I’ve ever seen.�
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  “It’s beautiful here, too. Sometimes it reminds me of … of Quarro.” I couldn’t quite make myself say “home.”

  “Does it?” She looked surprised, looked out at her own gardens again. “I guess you have to be a stranger to a place to really see its beauty.”

  “Did you ever look over the edge when you were there at the Gardens?”

  “Over the edge?” she asked, trying to imagine what I was talking about.

  “Into the Tank. Into Oldcity.”

  She shook her head. “No.”

  “You have to live in a place to really know its ugliness.”

  “Yes.” Suddenly she wasn’t seeing the gardens any more. Sorrow settled over her, graying her mind, sloping her shoulders, until I was sorry I’d said it. “I must get back to my work.” She meant getting ready to face Stryger in the debate, to defend her belief in the FTA’s incorruptibility (she glanced at me as she turned away from the window), to take another step toward a slot on the Security Council, and away from here, the taMings, Centauri—this trap that her world had become. “If you’ll excuse me…”

  “Ma’am—” I said. She turned back. “I hate Centauri nearly as much as you do. I…” as she looked at me, “I just wanted you to know that. Braedee won’t hear anything from me again that you don’t clear first.”

  Suddenly she was remembering what I’d said about the real reason why I’d come here to work for her; suddenly she was really hearing it. She looked down, moving random objects randomly on her desk: a statue of a child, a glass ball with a fragile puffball flower suspended impossibly inside it.… For just a second I stared at it, because the ball looked so much like something I’d had once: a Hydran thing, full of hidden secrets, that had felt warm and almost alive when I held it in my hands.… But that was gone; this was only a cold ball made of glass, with an image inside it that never changed. Like a memory. She looked up again, and caught me still staring. I turned away from the look in her eyes and went out of the room without saying anything more.

  TEN

  SOME WAD ONCE said to me, “Cheer up. Things could always he worse.” He was right about that much.

  The face debate on drug deregulation was set for late afternoon the next day. I got to the place where it was going to happen about midday, before Elnear and Jardan, working with Braedee’s Security crew this time. I’d had to argue Braedee into letting me come. I wasn’t sure whether it was the news that Daric knew about me, or the trouble I’d caused in Isplanasky’s office, or just his own fear of psions that made him try to tell me that before Elnear got there I didn’t matter. He finally gave in, the way someone would stop chasing a fly because it wasn’t important enough to waste time on.

  The floating Independent News studio had been set up inside a historic landmark deep in the heart of N’Yuk. It was a thick-walled building made of gray stone that had been a godshouse before the Recreation. Since the Indy couldn’t count on an interplanetary freighter to crash-land during the debate, they’d wanted to give the viewers something to look at besides heads if their attention wandered. When I walked in, it was like walking into a kaleidoscope. The tall, arching windows along the side walls were made of thousands of bits of colored glass fused together, pictures of paradise painted from fragments of pure light. The Indy production crew had backlit them all for perfect effect, and rainbows of color bled into the stagnant air above the stage.

  It had been Stryger’s idea to have this debate; but the Indy News had made it a reality. They’d even gotten an exclusive lock on it. They were plugging a lot of other vips into the same circuits with Stryger, so that curious citizens all over the Federation could get close to them in a way they didn’t get to very often—while they were simply speaking their minds, not sending hidden messages through channels that only they could access. With all the publicity support Stryger had gotten, the ratings for this event would probably be astronomical. Everybody involved with it hoped they would be. The thousands of channels that wove the Net’s million separate corporate systems into something like a coherent whole were mostly there to keep their citizens amused; but they were also a way that combines too paranoid to communicate directly could send out messages under a white flag to each other, and to the rest of the galaxy.

  Shander Mandragora was moderating the debate. Mandragora was the Indy’s most popular fax hyper; even I knew who he was. He covered anything important the Federation Assembly did, and what they did was always important to somebody. Other hypers, from more combine networks than anybody knew existed, had been crawling all over the floating studio where the debate was set since before dawn that morning. Most of them were bitching about the Indy’s calculated generosity in letting them help it spread its logo all over their private systems.

  The media techs were easy to spot—their attitude was if you got it, flaunt it. They wore their cyber equipment openly as they swaggered past; third eyes and hand-cameras, all their senses wired to record. Like street gangs, they liked the idea of standing out from the crowd. It gave them a special power, like psi … but it was one the combines wanted and needed, so it made them different, but it didn’t make them freaks. I felt a kind of jealousy as I watched them, the easy arrogance their portable territory gave them.

  After a while the debaters themselves began to arrive. Besides Stryger and Elnear, the main draws in this particular infotainment, there was Isplanasky repping the FTA, three Assembly members fronting various combine blocs, and a couple of Corporate Security Chiefs. Stryger came in first with his band of ass-kissing disciples, carrying his walking stick in his hand. Sojourner meant seeker. He always carried the staff, as a kind of symbol of his journey. The wash of colored light from the windows only made him look more beautiful. There was no doubt in his mind that he was going to make this day his. He was in his element; I wondered if somehow he’d had something to do with them choosing this place for the debate.

  He spotted me in the crowd, almost as if he could feel me staring at him, feel my hatred, or my fascination.… He saw me, and suddenly his confidence screamed, rattling through my skull.

  I stood there watching while he stopped his forward momentum, lifting his staff to stop the momentum of everyone around him as he saw me. They swirled to a halt in a kind of confused slow motion while he looked into my eyes and thought, (I know you’re listening.…) The words were fuzzy and shapeless, formed by a mind without any sensitivity to the Gift, but clear enough. He raised his staff to me in a kind of benediction, and smiled, as if he knew some secret that only we two shared. (Bless you, boy, you are the answer to all my prayers.) He smiled, a smile so sweet it should have been a lover’s, a smile that leered at me like a slashed throat. I wanted to use my psi on him, to find out what he meant by that—to see his smug face crack, to feel his loathing, disgust, raw hatred—anything but what I felt inside him now. But his confidence was real, and it turned my concentration to random noise. At last he looked away from me and went on, setting me free to slink off like a coward and lose myself in the crowd of techs.

  Elnear came in with Jardan a few minutes later, and the media imageshapers crawled all over her like bugs, like they’d done with the rest. Only Stryger had his own personal image crew. I sat in a corner close by Elnear, trying to make myself invisible while I kept track of the swarms of hypers buzzing around her. She was wearing a bodyguard, like all the speakers, but I did my job anyway. Now and then Jardan sent me to fetch something or someone, her voice like a barbed whip; waiting for me to do something half-assed again. Isplanasky stopped by for some kind of last minute exchange, and glanced at me like he expected me to explode. But as he passed me on his way out he said, “I want to see you later.” At least it didn’t sound like a threat.

  Finally every piece was pushed into place. I settled onto one of the hard historical benches beside Jardan, herded together by Security with all the other aides and hangers-on and hypers. Up on the stage the speakers seemed to float above the curving band of light that was their mutual podi
um, flowing into the sea of light behind them. I wondered how anyone would be able to concentrate on anything but that light. The words had better be good.

  They were good. I leaned back, listening to one speaker after another, the talking heads that gave human faces to the beliefs and policies of faceless economic networks. These people had been chosen because they knew how to come across well—and because whatever they were saying about the deregulation of pentryptine, that it was a disaster or a blessing or didn’t really matter in the Great Motion of Time, they believed it. They were all augmented, and they were plugged into Mandragora, letting him monitor their sincerity electronically. The viewers could readout for themselves exactly how much to trust what they saw and heard. Even Isplanasky came across clean and sincere in everything he said.

  But in the end it all came down to Elnear and Stryger, the unspoken rivalry between them, the opening on the Security Council that they both wanted. Nobody was saying anything about it, not yet anyway, but everyone knew: all the hypers waiting with their questions and their prefab points of view, the Federation Assembly members, the Security Council itself. They’d all be weighing the impression the speakers made, their impact on the audience … the leverage they could get on the Assembly, which would prove their strength when the votes on deregulation were counted. Deregulation was still being data-modeled by an Assembly special committee. But Elnear—and everyone else—knew that the committee would approve it in the next few days. And the way things stood the measure was almost as sure to pass on the Assembly floor.

  Isplanasky finished his speech and Mandragora gave the audience to Elnear at last. She looked out over the crowd, her eyes searching their faces as if she was looking for someone; but there was too much light. She looked at Mandragora again. “I had a very unusual conversation yesterday,” she said. “With someone who asked me why I was participating in this debate, when I had told him that I thought individual human beings no longer had control of the Federation’s fate, that our lives were ruled by the whims of interstellar commerce.…”