Catspaw

by Joan D. Vinge

  “Yeah.”

  “You don’t look happy about it.”

  “I’m not.” I shut my eyes.

  “Because now you’re on the list too, if deregulation passes?” It sounded casual; but he was thinking that if it came to that, there was nothing at all he could do to help me.

  I grimaced. “Worrying about that’s the least of my problems, right now,” I said.

  He shook his head, and looked out again at the Governor’s private world fading like a memory behind us. “You catch that? He says he wants to see us again.” He actually sounded a little wistful, behind the hard, ambitious grin that was pulling his mouth up.

  “Yeah, I’m flattered.” I opened one eye to look at him. “And I’m touched by how glad he was he didn’t have to drop an electric current through the water in that room after he went upstairs.”

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  I REACHED PURGATORY again just as Argentyne’s doorkeeper was heading home for the day. She flipped me a handsign that could have meant have a good day or fuck you. Neither one seemed like much of a possibility.

  I went on inside, scooping up a handful of leftovers off a table. I didn’t feel hungry, and whatever it was tasted like garbage. I ate it anyway, because I couldn’t remember the last time I’d eaten anything, or even felt like I wanted to. Argentyne and her symb were still shutting down, clustered together at the back of the empty stage above the empty room. Random bits of music began, fell away, segued into someone else’s melody as I crossed the dance floor.

  I climbed up onto the stage, feeling self-conscious as soon as they noticed me, six heads all turning at once. The club was closed; they weren’t expecting anybody to walk in on them now, while they were coming down from a performance high. A couple of them were half-naked, in the middle of peeling off costumes, but that wasn’t what made them feel naked. It was being caught half-in and half-out of symb; not quite one being any more, not quite separate individuals either.

  I stopped. “Sorry,” I said. “I’ll come back.…”

  “Wait a minute,” Argentyne called.

  I stopped again, hearing her leave the others and cross the stage, feeling her hand catch my arm to pull me around.

  Her eyes were still a little glassy, but the hard light of her need to know cut through the fog in her brain as she said, “Where did you go with that Marketeer friend of yours?”

  I glanced down at her hand touching my arm. “I went to get Daric a stay of execution.”

  Her hand tightened, then went loose and dropped away. “Did you?” she asked softly, almost afraid to say the words.

  I nodded. “For now.”

  “What does that mean?” She half frowned.

  “It means that if Daric helps me set up Stryger for a fall, then maybe the Market will forget it wants him dead. They want him dead because he’s helping Stryger push for that drug deregulation. If it costs them, it’s going to cost him.”

  She shook her head slightly, feeling dazed again. “The Market’s going after Stryger?”

  “No. I am.”

  “You—?” She blinked at me, and made a sound that wasn’t quite a laugh.

  I nodded again.

  “I can’t deal with this right now.” She waved her hand at me. “It’s too surreal.…” She started to turn away.

  “Argentyne, wait,” I said. “I need your help.” Finally able to make myself ask what I hadn’t been able to ask her before. “Help me do it.”

  She turned back. “Me?” Her sense of unreality was getting stronger all the time. “How?”

  “The symb. You said you could teach me how to work it.”

  “Just for laughs.” She shook her head. “I didn’t mean going political on it. Holy lights, you said to me you didn’t want any trouble!”

  “To save Daric—?”

  She broke off, looked away suddenly. “If you need the symb, everybody’s got to agree.” She went away, spoke quietly to the players still standing inside their desultory cloud of music at the other end of the stage. I waited, trying to get my buzzing thoughts straight so I could explain everything when I had to.

  She came back again after a minute. “They want to know everything first. So do I.”

  “That’s what I figured,” I said.

  “Come on, then.” She nodded. I followed them backstage, down a hallway to what passed for a living room. Mismatched furniture that looked like somebody had dragged it in off the street made a soft harrier along the acoustic-fiber walls. The walls were plastered with holo stickups of performers they admired. Old musical instruments, the kind that had never been intended to be grafted into anyone’s body, lay around on the furniture like kids’ toys. Everything was comfortable, loose, real—everything the club out front wasn’t.

  The symb spread out around me, standing, sitting, collapsing on the dusty rug … but still keeping physical contact. Hands touched hair, clung to ankles; bodies brushed hip against shoulder, or folded into someone else’s arms. Their eyes were getting clearer as they watched me. I could feel them still shifting response centers in their brains, switching out of the instinctive, almost automatic modes of cyberenhanced creativity. I’d never felt anything exactly like it; most humans had their logic and comm functions enhanced, not their creative side.

  “How’s the hand?” Aspen asked me.

  I looked down at it. “Useful.”

  Argentyne settled onto a couch next to Kiroku, the piper, watching me with wary copper eyes. “Okay,” she said, “spill your guts, kid.”

  I looked down at my boots, feeling all their eyes locked on me now, judging my performance. “I guess you all know how I used to work for Centauri, protecting Lady Elnear. And I guess you’ve all seen Sojourner Stryger. Now I’m going to tell you what I know about him.” I told them what lived inside that perfect shell; how he felt about psions and what he wanted to do with the deregulated pentryp tine; what he’d try to do if he got that Council slot. How the combines that were hacking him were getting more than they bargained for. “I think you already know something about Lady Elnear.…” I glanced at Argentyne. “Lady Elnear wants that Council slot too. She deserves it. But she doesn’t have the backers that Stryger does—and Stryger’s done everything he can to make sure she loses. He even used me. She’s going to lose, and he’s going to win, and the whole Federation’s going to get even worse about how it treats freaks, if he gets his way.… I’m a freak, and I take that personally. Okay, so maybe it doesn’t matter to you, maybe it’s not your problem—”

  “Hey, look, nobody said that,” Midnight murmured.

  “But how can you stop Stryger, if Lady Elnear can’t?” Aspen asked. “You planning to assassinate him?”

  “He thinks our act’s bad enough to kill him,” somebody else said. There was laughter, mixed with synth sounds.

  I waited until it stopped, and then I said, “There’s something else about Stryger.” I glanced at Argentyne again; her gaze hung on me. “He doesn’t just hate freaks. He likes to hurt them.… You remember that girl Daric brought here—?”

  “Stryger did that?” Aspen said, incredulous.

  “She was a fr—a psion?” Kiroku echoed.

  I nodded. “Daric is Centauri’s private liaison with Stryger. He’s also his pimp—he gets him victims.”

  “Shit, man.…” somebody muttered.

  “—a pervert?”

  “Daric. That figures.…”

  “So what’s that got to do with us?” Raya, the other piper, asked. “I’m getting to it as fast as I can!” I rubbed my neck, trying to ease the crawling itch under the surface of my skin.

  She shrugged. “Right, so he’s a pervert. Why don’t you just tell everybody?”

  I shook my head. “That’s not good enough. The Assembly’s not easy to move. I’ve got to show them what it means … I’ve got to make the whole fucking Assembly feel like his victims, or it won’t change anything—” I closed my fist, and opened up my mind.

  The players jerked and sw
ore in a cacophony of sudden uncontrolled sound. They shook out their hands, touched their heads; held onto each other a little tighter.

  “Damn it!” Argentyne said, and then, catching her breath, “All right—so you can make everybody hurt. What’s that got to do with my symb? You don’t need us if you can goose the whole Assembly yourself with one thought.”

  “No—” I shook my head. “That’s not the point. If I went in there and made them all puke, they’d fry me, and all it would prove was that Stryger was right about psions all along. He tried to use me against the Lady once already; I’m not gonna make it easy for him.” I frowned. “I got to have a record, proof of what he does … how it really feels.” I looked back at Argentyne. “You said I could actually feed feeling into the symb, right? Can I record it, and make it into a show…?”

  Argentyne sat forward on the couch, her own hands making fists; not listening. “Oh God … what do you want, you mean you want Daric to let Stryger torture him?”

  “Daric—?” I said. I felt her freeze as she realized what she’d done. “Daric’s not a psion.” I said each word with just enough confusion; felt the surprise drain out of the minds around me. Argentyne sank back into the couch. (And if you really still give a damn about him, you’d better find some way to make yourself believe that.) She gasped, touching her head; looked back at me with gratitude and resentment blurring her sight. “Of course he’s not.…” she murmured. “Then what do you mean—you expect us to record it while Stryger beats the crap out of another freak, is that it?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “That’s right.”

  “God’s teeth! You’re a real vip, aren’t you? Now you’re going out to pick up some poor bastard off the street who’s so pitiful he’d let a deeve like Stryger do that to him—”

  “No.” I shook my head, feeling my face flush. “I’ve already got my poor freak bastard.”

  She broke off. “Who?”

  “Me.”

  She stared at me like she was waiting for me to laugh, like she thought it was really all just a sick joke. “Oh God.…” she said at last. “You really mean that.”

  “You really think I’d use somebody else to get what I want from Stryger? I’m not Daric,” I said. I sat down on a couch, rubbed my sweating hands on the knees of my pants. The pressure of everybody’s sudden silence sat on my back like an animal.

  “You said … you said you needed Daric in this with you. Why?” Argentyne asked.

  I looked up at her. “He’s got to set me up. Stryger’s not stupid. I can’t just walk up to him and say, ‘Kick the shit out of me, will you?’ It’s got to look good. If Daric offers to get me for him to use, he’ll trust that.”

  “But you work for the taMings, for Centauri—you saved their lives,” Argentyne protested, her mind still tumbling like a bird knocked out of the air.

  “Not any more. Not that Stryger knows. Daric’s probably already told him how Charon got rid of me. I’m a degenerate, I seduced Lady Lazuli. I’m a fucking freak rapist as far as the taMings are concerned.” I listened to myself talk about it like I was listening to a stranger talk about someone else. “I got no friends on this world … no protection.…” The back of my hand rose up to my mouth, hard and sudden. I forced it down into my lap again; made myself stop counting the shinestones in the constellation on her tunic. “Stryger hates my guts,” the stranger went on, calmly, steadily, “as much as I hate his. It’s perfect.”

  “It’s crazy.” Argentyne got up from her place beside Kiroku and turned her back on me, moving away across the room. She turned around suddenly, her hands out in front of her. “What if he kills you?”

  “I’m not stupid either,” I said. “I’ll make sure I’m protected. I’m not going to let it get serious. All I need is just enough to give those marks in the Assembly a good kick in the balls. I figure not one of them’s ever felt real pain. It won’t take much to scare the shit out of them. I can take that much.” My lips felt numb. I pushed to my feet again, as the wild darkness inside me made me want to move. “Are you going to help me out, or not?”

  Nobody said anything … nobody said, “No.” But they didn’t know where to look, because none of them wanted to look at me, right then.

  “What do you want us to do?” Argentyne asked finally.

  “Teach me how to use the symb to make a recording. Let me use your equipment for an evening. That’s all.”

  “You’ll need a socket.”

  I nodded. “I know.” I couldn’t use Deadeye’s trick-entry if I wanted to do something that would leave a record.

  “Aspen—” She gestured at him. He nodded and got up, going out of the room to get his medical equipment. She looked back at me. “You know, this might not even work. When I said that, about making people live it … well, nobody’s ever done that.” She shrugged. Part of her was afraid it wouldn’t work, and part of her was afraid it would.

  I didn’t say anything, more afraid than she was. My fingers explored the cracked formfoam beside me restlessly; found something hard and pulled it out: a blunt rectangle of rusted metal, with a line of square holes showing along its side, like teeth in a grinning mouth. I turned it over and over, staring at it.

  “Do you know anything about how a symb functions?” Argentyne asked, a little impatient.

  I looked up, shook my head.

  She sat down again, resting against Kiroku like she was a chair back. “We’re all pretty heavily augmented. If I’m right, you won’t need that, because you know how to tap into our heads direct.… The way it works, each of the players has their own repertoire—the songs they’ve stored, new compositions happening, whatever they can get their personal system to do. Everyone’s different. Everyone does their own riffs—unique, you know, self-contained. But they feed together into a larger pattern through the symb. Working the augmentation lets us improvise fast enough to keep track of it, keep everyone moving and flowing, when it’s really good.” Kiroku looked up at her, smiling, and kissed her arm.

  “Sometimes we work it so everyone’s words and music fit the same theme, weaving together like threads—” She lifted her hands, wove her fingers together. “Sometimes everybody takes a different theme, and we let it explode—” Her hands flew apart. “But it’s all coming out of the same heart, and it all has to pull back into the center, come together again by the end. When it’s right, it’s like the cosmos, you know? Like the expanding and contracting of the universe, like centripetal and centrifugal forces, the motion of worlds and suns.…” Her hands circled each other in space. She was somewhere else now, forgetting who she was talking to or even why as she groped for a way to explain something that ran so deep in her that it had no explanation. The other players were hanging on her words, all of them lost inside their own private visions of how it felt to be caught up in that epiphany.

  “Like a joining,” I murmured.

  “A what?” Argentyne said, coming back into focus again.

  “Nothing.” I looked down, still turning the metal bar over and over in my hands.

  “You mean sex?” Kiroku asked, and giggled.

  I shook my head, still looking down. “It’s something psions can do. Not very often. It’s opening yourself up to somebody else, completely, until you’re like one person in two bodies.…” I was thinking about Jule; about how our minds had caught fire with nameless colors, burning brighter and brighter … how for one brief moment outside of time the emptiness inside me had been filled with all the answers I’d ever need, all the comfort, the understanding, the love.…

  “Sounds like sex to me,” Argentyne said, with a strange half-smile.

  I glanced up; wanting to say something … changing my mind. I shook my head again, not meeting her eyes. Instead I said, “Seems to me like most of the people who see your act don’t catch half of what’s really going on. They’d have to be cybered too, to follow it.”

  She shrugged, nodded. “I know. That’s why I envied you, what you did at the club the other nigh
t.… But they get as much as they can take, and if they have a good time, that’s all they care about. And we don’t really do it for them, anyway, in the end.”

  “What about the visuals, all that holo stuff I saw that night. Where’s that come from?”

  “That’s Argentyne,” Jax said. “She’s the spirit. She projects the visions. She makes it all flow.”

  “Shut up,” she said, turning away. The sudden irritation behind it surprised me. She was afraid of being singled out, cut off, separated from the group—afraid that fate was waiting to slap her down, that in the middle of all this tech the Evil Eye was still watching. “We all input on what we’re trying to make it say. I image them with what I’ve got up here, yeah; I mix the colors, I control the visual. But the pieces of the dreams belong to all of us.” And I realized she was right: all the augmentation in the galaxy couldn’t make them fuse well enough to do what they did unless their human halves, with their human egos, were willing to cooperate. I wondered if having their brains rewired like that was what made it possible, or whether collecting the right mix of personalities to make this kind of art was the first, and hardest act of creation. I wondered how long it would last; how long anything that complex could hold together.

  Aspen came back into the room, carrying his kit, and sat down beside me. “Lean over.” My body tensed, fighting him as he tried to make me stretch my neck. “Relax,” he said, sticking on a patch of painkiller. “You won’t feel a thing.”

  That wasn’t what I was afraid of; but I didn’t say anything, I only bent my head. I didn’t feel a thing while he wired me, until the very end: a tingling, like bells ringing inside my skull, and that was all. Getting my ear pierced had been worse.

  “You feel that?” Aspen asked.

  I nodded.

  “Good. You’re live, then.” He handed me a mirror. “One of us.” He grinned.

  I pushed up my hair and looked, even though I didn’t want to. I touched the fresh spot of synthetic flesh on the back of my neck. Nothing else even showed. I looked at my reflection, at the round, perfectly normal pupils of my eyes. One of them.