Catspaw

by Joan D. Vinge

  “Who says so?” he asked, stalling.

  “The Governor.”

  “You spoke to him?” His incredulity got to a lot louder. “How?”

  “Friends in the wrong places.”

  He sat a minute longer trying to decide if I was telling the truth. “They really want to kill me,” he said at last. “Why?”

  “Deregulation. They don’t like it that you’re working so hard for it. They don’t like you playing on Stryger’s side.”

  He frowned. “I explained that to them; that I couldn’t go against my family’s interests, or the combine’s. It’s too important, the potential profit gain—”

  “Is their loss,” I said. “They’re real concerned about that.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake—” He looked away, searching for something calm to rest his eyes on, focusing on waves of sand, black stones. “This is absurd. Some consortium of social deviants actually expects me to put them ahead of Centauri—and if I don’t they threaten to kill me?” His body jerked with exasperation.

  “They will kill you. They’ve already tried.” I made him look at me. “The human bomb was just the first one. Who the hell do you think you’ve been playing with, Daric?” He stared at me, as the reality of what was happening to him finally began to sink in. “You think this was all some game to them, like it’s been to you? They’ve even threatened to hit Stryger.”

  He flinched as my voice got loud; that wasn’t supposed to happen here. None of this was supposed to be happening, here, in his life.… He said sullenly, “Why don’t you just let them do it, then? It would get you everything you really want, wouldn’t it?”

  I opened my mouth, shut it again. Because there wasn’t any point in asking him if he thought I wanted two more dead men on my conscience right now; in telling him that what Elnear wanted mattered to me, was important to me. I only said, “If deregulation passes, they’ll kill me too.”

  He heard it, but it didn’t seem to mean anything to him. “Tell Braedee,” he said distractedly. “He’ll protect me until the vote is over.…”

  “I already told him. He’s already trying. But they won’t stop, not until you’re dead. It’s a matter of—business with them. You understand about business…?” I felt my mouth try to twist into a smile. “Even Braedee knows that much about the other side. He knows that if you want to keep breathing it’ll take a total identity wipe—there won’t be a Gentleman Daric taMing any more. No board member, no Assembly member. You’re a null set, dead or alive … if deregulation passes.”

  He was as gray as a cadaver now. “Only if it passes—?” he said weakly. I nodded. “But it’s going to pass.…” He looked out at the still, rippling sea of black-and-whiteness around him, clutching his knees with his hands. “I can’t stop it.”

  “You’re going to try,” I said. He looked back at me. “You’re going to help me do it, if you want to stay alive.”

  “How?” There was no sullenness, no sneer on his face now. No questions about what it would mean to Centauri or his father. The survivor was in control, looking out at me through clear eyes.

  “I want to show Stryger for a freakhater in front of the Assembly. I want you to tell him you can get me for him to do … you know what I mean.” I looked away; forced myself to look at him again. “I want to make a full-sensory tape of what he does to psions, with Argentyne’s equipment, then feed it through the system in the Assembly Hall before the vote, so that everybody in that room knows what he is. Is he going to be there?”

  Daric nodded, picturing Stryger’s final address to the members. His own mind was still caught in the middle of taking it all in.

  “Good.” I wiped my mouth with the back of my hand, feeling sweat on my upper lip; feeling trapped in this silent rectangle of sunlight, inside the shadowed symmetry of its perfect walls.

  “Let me make certain I understand this.…” Daric muttered, his hands twitching in his lap like poisoned mice. “We humiliate Stryger in public, and that will weaken his support?”

  “More or less,” I said.

  “The vote will be close; that might be enough.… And the Council slot—” He broke off, as the full weight of the betrayal and the likely repercussions began to come down on him. “If this works, he’ll lose it; Elnear will take it.” He looked up at me again, wavering, as the two sides of him fought over his survival.

  I had to be sure I had him. “You want to know the truth about what you are?” I asked.

  His hands lightened. For once his mouth didn’t get the best of him; he only said, “Tell me.” And then, before I could, “It was Triple Gee, wasn’t it? The marriage, somehow they managed to use that woman—” he meant his mother—“to hide defective gene.…” It was what his father had always hinted at, wanted everyone to believe.

  I shook my head. “Your mother had nothing to do with it. Every gene in your body and Jule’s was laid out like a streetmap before you were born; you really think nobody would have noticed? Your father did it.”

  He stared at me, his mind floundering.

  “It was Charon,” I said again, before he had the chance to call me a liar. “He planned it, he had the extra genes planted on purpose. Nobody else knew.”

  “That’s insane,” he whispered. “Why would he want to ruin the family line—?”

  “He didn’t think he was ruining it. He thought he was improving it. He wanted to give the taMings an edge—he wanted mindreaders nobody would suspect, or detect. To help you keep one up on the competition, outside Centauri and inside it.”

  He looked down at his hands, his body, as if he was seeing them for the first time. “But it didn’t work…?”

  “Not the way he expected. He didn’t really understand: it’s like trying to make somebody a holo artist—and maybe you wind up with a musician instead, or a dancer.” Jule had almost been what he’d wanted. She was an empath, she felt emotions, and projected her own—but she couldn’t read a formed thought, and without any training she couldn’t control what emotions she read, or when she projected. She could teleport too; that was easier to control, but it was only an extra embarrassment to her family. She’d been a setback to Charon, but still he’d tried again, one more time—

  Daric’s eyes moved, sliding away as I tried to make him look at me again. “Then why did they kill her—?” Centauri. His mother. He quivered.

  “Maybe it really was an accident. Daric—she didn’t die till you were old enough to remember it, and they all thought you were normal.” He looked at me again, finally, a little sanity coming back into his eyes. “How did you keep them from finding out—” I asked, “all the while you were growing up?” I wondered again how he’d ever managed to keep a secret like that, when Jule couldn’t.

  “Jule … Jule hid it.” He chewed his lip.

  “But she was only a little girl,” I said.

  He nodded. “But she already knew that there was something wrong with her, that it made people hate her. She protected me, covered for me, taught me to hide what I could do.…” She’d tried to save him from the pain she felt, the pain that she couldn’t stand to feel happening inside him too. “That’s why I hated her so much.” The pressure, the constant fear, the suffering that Jule felt and didn’t know how to hide; he’d blamed her for all that. “I didn’t know what else to do.… She was the only one I could trust, the only one who would forgive me. So I always hurt her. But no matter how much I hurt her, or she wanted to hurt me, she never gave away my secret.…” In the end, he’d even hated her for that. He shook his head, blinking too much.

  He looked up at me again with bleak eyes, both of us realizing that it was too late to change anything at all; and that he’d never forgive me for letting him know the truth. But now his betrayal of his father and Centauri only seemed like justice. His mind went back over everything I’d said about the setup again, step by step. “Does Argentyne know about this … this perversion of her equipment?”

  I nodded.

  “She’s agreed
?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Elnear said you were staying at Purgatory.…” He gave me a look that carried feeling as thick and dark as blood.

  “That’s right.” I met it, lifting my chin a little.

  “And you want me to tell Stryger he can have you?” he said. The pupils of his eyes opened wide.

  My jaw tightened until it hurt. “Make it convincing. It’s got to happen before the Assembly meets to vote.”

  “And that’s all I have to do?” His eyes flickered away, following his thoughts.

  “Probably.”

  “That won’t be any problem,” he murmured. I watched the knife-twisting smile come out of hiding. “In fact,” he looked back at me, “it sounds like fun.”

  THIRTY-ONE

  I SAW ELNEAR’S house falling away below me, across the open fields, as the mod rose and I left Daric behind. I had to fight the urge to turn back—to stand in the stone-walled courtyard again, to walk through those halls that smelled like another age … to touch a table covered with stars that shone in the firelight. To talk to Elnear, tell her what I had to do—

  I told myself she wouldn’t be there … I told myself the truth: that if she knew, she’d try to stop me. Because she wouldn’t understand; because she wouldn’t want to see me get hurt. The less she knew about it, the better. And the less I thought about the things, and the people, I’d shared that house with, the better off I’d be now.

  When I got back to Purgatory, I found Argentyne in her dressing room, putting on her night face. She turned around in her-seat, one side of her face silver, and one side reflecting light like a mirror. I squinted.

  “Is Jiro okay?” she asked. “What did Charon do?”

  “He’s okay.” I nodded. “Too much and not enough … I saw Daric. It’s set. He’ll do what I need him to.”

  She didn’t say anything, seeing Daric in her mind with a kind of helpless hunger.

  “He says it sounds like fun.”

  A wave of sickness went through her. Her mouth pinched, guilt shutting her up when resentment made her want to call me a bastard. Instead she pulled her hair forward too hard, braiding it between her fingers, and said, “We’ve been talking this over—” meaning the symb, “about how you want to make something the Assembly’s really going to live.” She shook her head, glittering, the look in her eyes now telling me she was enjoying making my life harder too. “Nobody’s sure that’s going to work at the other end … if the systems are even compatible.…”

  “The Net’s the Net,” I said, feeling my sudden frustration start to back up inside me. “All the systems in it work the same way.”

  “But they don’t all use the same kind of specialty programming.” She hit me with the obvious. “What the Assembly uses is basically a comm net, not a sensory net; it may not even be able to read the kind of message you want to send through it. Maybe you can make them watch a threedy of Stryger, but you probably can’t make them live it.… What if it won’t work?”

  I swore. “It’s got to work.… How can I find out? Can you test it?”

  She made a noise that wasn’t really a laugh. “You think we have access to the Assembly floor—?”

  “Daric does,” I said. “Daric can help me find out for sure.”

  “And what if it really doesn’t work?”

  “Then Daric will help me fix it.” I went out of her dressing room, leaving her there to wonder, and climbed the stairs to the upper level. It seemed to take forever. I lay down across her bed, smelling the faint smell of spices and herbs that was her perfume as I shut my eyes; thinking that if I could just grab a few hours of sleep while she was downstairs in the club, then maybe I wouldn’t feel like this any more, like somebody was stretching my sanity on the rack.…

  * * *

  When I woke up again, the light hardly seemed to have changed. I checked my databand, looking for the time—looked at it again and again, trying not to believe that I’d actually slept nearly a whole day. I felt worse than before. But I forced myself to get up off the bed, and stuck a fresh drug patch behind my ear. There were only half a dozen left.

  I stumbled downstairs. Argentyne, Aspen, and Raya were sitting at a table out front, watching the air dancers drift through a freeform routine inside their sphere. Aspen and Raya were making an eerie, chiming music for the show, rubbing wet fingers around the rims of their drink glasses.

  “Why didn’t you wake me up?” I said, sounding more like I felt than I wanted to.

  Argentyne looked up at me, startled. She took the camph out of her mouth. “I tried,” she said. “You wouldn’t.”

  She actually meant it. I glanced away, rubbing my neck. “Sorry,” I muttered.

  She shrugged. “No problem.… Daric called. So did Braedee.”

  I looked up. “What did they want?”

  Trying to sound indifferent, she said, “Daric’s at the Assembly. He says Stryger wants to do it.”

  I swallowed the sudden hard lump in my throat, and nodded. “When?”

  “The night before the Assembly votes.”

  Two days. The buzzing in my head was so loud all of a sudden that I could hardly hear.

  “I told Daric that you need him to help check out the systems compatability. He’s probably still there now, if you want to go up—”

  “I can’t.” I touched the jack on the back of my head. “It’s too risky. He’d better come here.”

  She stiffened, but she didn’t say anything.

  “What about Braedee? What did he want?”

  “He didn’t say.”

  I frowned, and went to use the phone.

  Daric was still in his office. He smiled when he saw me on his screen. “Did Argentyne tell you? It’s all set. Two days. I told Stryger you planned to leave Earth right after the vote.” He looked like he could hardly wait.

  “It’s not quite set,” I said. “Not unless I’m sure the Assembly’s really going to eat it all. I need you down here tonight to check things for me.”

  “At the club—?” His shoulders tightened. “Of course.… I’ll leave immediately.” The screen went blank.

  I stood there a minute, not sure whether to be surprised or worried. Then I called Braedee. I got a recording. That didn’t make me feel any better. I called Mikah instead. He came onscreen, alive and half smiling. “Who’s trying to kill you this time?” he said. I couldn’t tell for sure whether that was a joke.

  “Sojourner Stryger.”

  Now he couldn’t tell. I explained everything to him, now that I was as sure as I could be that it would really happen. His smile disappeared while he listened. “You’re out of your fucking mind,” he said finally. “Cat, it’s the drug talking. You’re not indestructible. He will kill you.”

  “Not if you’re there to back me up—”

  “Uh-huh,” he murmured. He hesitated, looking down, considering the possibilities. “That’s different. I’ll clear my calendar.” He looked up at me again. “Call me when you got the details.”

  I nodded, fingering the patch behind my ear. “Mikah—”

  “Yeah?”

  “Don’t get me any more topalase. No matter what I say.”

  “Right.” He made the truth-swearing sign, his hand clenching around his closed fist, before he cut contact.

  I left the phone, starting back along the hallway into the club.

  Two Centauri Corpses stepped into the hall in front of me, blocking my path.

  My first instinct was to turn and run; but they were ready for that. I wouldn’t get two meters before they stunned me. I stopped where I was, instead. “Braedee—?” I called.

  “Braedee wants you,” one of the Corpses said.

  There was only one reason why he’d want me picked up now: the Centauri board wouldn’t cooperate. They wanted Stryger and deregulation more than they wanted Daric alive. “I’m not talking to you,” I said to the Corpse. “Braedee—I’ll bet tens you’re monitoring this pickup. Call them off—or Charon hears everythi
ng.”

  The phone I’d just left began to beep. I went back to it and thumbed on the privacy screen. Braedee’s face filled in on the monitor in front of me. “Leave me alone,” I said, “or Charon hears about the human bomb.” He’d lost his check on me, but I still had mine on him.

  He stared at my image on his screen for a long minute. “All right.”

  I frowned. “That’s too easy.”

  He smiled faintly. “I can leave you alone. But that doesn’t mean someone else won’t be watching over Stryger. Centauri is not the only combine interested in his continued well-being. I have no control over that.”

  “Damn it, Braedee—” I broke off, my hands spasming on the edges of the monitor. “You know what he is! You really think letting him win is going to be in Centauri’s best interests?”

  “I’m in no position to judge that,” he said. “I simply follow orders.”

  “Sure you do.” I looked away from his face, because I couldn’t think when I looked into those eyes. “Listen.…” I said finally. “And you better listen good, damn you. I set it up with the Market to leave Daric alone until after the vote, because I need him. If deregulation fails, he lives; if it passes, he doesn’t. But to get them to deal I had to make them believe Stryger’s a threat to them. They threatened to kill him too, if deregulation passes.”

  He stared at me; kept staring, for a long time. But he didn’t say anything.

  I cancelled the connection and shut off the security screen. When I turned around, the hall was empty.

  I went back into the club. Argentyne was sitting at the table alone now. Even the air dancers had gone away. “What did those Corpses want?” she asked.

  “Nothing.” I looked toward the door, still frowning. “Daric will he here soon.”

  I watched her sit there, motionless, while half a dozen different impulses burned themselves out inside her. “Oh, what the hell.…” she murmured. She sank back into the cushions, pushing at her hair.

  I felt like my stomach was full of worms. “Argentyne.…”