Catspaw

by Joan D. Vinge

  And then some lousy left-out part of my brain remembered why I was wearing an illegal jack, and what I was really here for. And the pleasure went out of everything, like blight rotting a flower. I shut down my access, feeling the lines of contact wither and die.

  Argentyne and the players followed me, dropping out of symbiosis, shutting down one by one until I was alone in the middle of their silent curiosity again.

  “Why did you stop?” Argentyne asked.

  “I’ve had enough,” I said.

  “It was really good, really something new—” There was frustration in her voice that had nothing to do with me. “It’ll get better … work with us some more. Open up, you didn’t get far enough—”

  I shook my head.

  “Come on, Cat,” somebody else said. “Lose yourself.”

  “Come cloud-walking—”

  “Yeah, come on, lose yourself.”

  “It feels better than anything—”

  “I’m not doing this because it feels good! Just leave me the fuck alone.” I went out of the room, away from their questions and their sudden embarrassment.

  I went out the back way into the alley behind the club. I stopped when I got outside, sagged against the building wall; letting it hold me up because suddenly my legs didn’t want to any more. Tomorrow. Tomorrow night it would be me and Stryger.… Something howled inside my brain, hungry for it to happen; something that wasn’t me. My hands started to tremble; but this time it didn’t stop there. It crawled up my arms, spreading, until my whole body was shaking like I had a fever. I wrapped my arms across my chest, holding on until it passed.

  The door opened and Argentyne came out, alone. She stood looking at me, her costume sparking like a live wire in the dim light. Finally she reached into her pocket and handed me a camph. I stuck it into my mouth; she put one into her own. It didn’t help much, but it kept us from having to say anything for that much longer. I looked at my distorted reflection in the mirror she’d made of half her face, looked down again.

  “I’m sorry,” she said at last, staring at the ground.

  I nodded without meaning it, my hands still knotted over the heavy folds of my jacket. My head hurt.

  She leaned against the wall beside me, studying my face. “I know we get kind of caught up in the symb, inside our own world, sometimes.…”

  I looked away, sucking on the camph. The small cone of light we stood inside of was artificial, fragile, unreal. The night was all around us, closing in, and I was the only one who could feel it.…

  “… I mean,” she said, “when you discover a new dimension like that … you want to hold onto that, get deeper into it. You don’t want to let go. You kind of forget everything else, you know?”

  I didn’t say anything, barely listening, waiting for her to go away.

  She didn’t go away. “All my life,” she said, “I’ve had this thing that happened inside me—” I looked back at her finally, feeling her need force me to. “When I hear somebody’s name I feel a color. Sometimes hearing music makes me see a place I’ve never been … or remember things I haven’t thought about since forever, and makes it seem like they happened yesterday.… And always, everything has a mood—colors do, the sea does, or a song. Not one that has anything to do with what the thing is, or what I’m doing with it … but a separate thing that’s like its soul, speaking to me. I can always feel it, inside me. But no matter what I try to do, even with the symb, I can never make anybody else feel it. All my life, I’ve been trying to make other people feel it.” She looked away at the night, and back. “And then you came here … and you can. You did. You made it real for me—” She caught hold of my jacket with her jewel-gloved fist. “You can’t just stop like that. I know it’s not what you were trying to do. I know it’s not what you wanted, or what’s important to you. But it made you feel good, I know it did. Maybe it’s what you really need, too—” She had hold of me with both hands, now.

  I took a step forward; pushed her up against the cold brick wall with my body. I held her there with my mouth covering hers, my hands against the sides of her face as I kissed her, lost in her silver hair.

  She struggled for about half a second, mostly from surprise. And then her body went boneless against me, the way it had done once before. Her hands slid down my back, pulling me close until it hurt. Her mouth was wet and open over mine, and the truth about what we both really needed, right now, hit us head-on like a freighter.

  And the next thing I remembered we were in her room, across her bed, not bothering to take off more than would let us reach each other, and she was ready and I was inside almost before I knew what was happening to me. And then I began to move inside her, and I knew, and she knew, rising to meet me until there was nothing else but sensation. She came, and I came with her, with a desperate urgency that had almost nothing to do with sharing each other’s bodies.

  I rolled off of her, lying motionless across the bed; feeling like I’d never move again. She lay silently beside me for a few minutes more, staring at the ceiling, not seeing it in the rainbowed half-light filtering in from the street outside. But then she pushed up on her elbow until she was looking down into my eyes, and she smiled. She held up her finger, kissed it, ran it along my cheek. And then, slowly, piece by piece, she began to take off my clothes. I let her, too tired to protest. When I lay there completely naked she slowly took off her own, until finally I could see the body I’d wanted to see, without ever quite realizing it, ever since that first night in Purgatory. I wasn’t disappointed.

  She leaned over me, covering my mouth with hers again.

  “Argentyne … I can’t,” I murmured.

  “Don’t worry.…” She kissed me again, used her tongue. “It’s all right.” The kisses moved over my face, closing my eyes, circling down into my ear. Then on down along my throat, my chest. She rolled me onto my stomach and kneeled between my sprawled legs, while her fingers slid over every inch of my back, probing the hollows along my spine, soothing and urging. “You will—” she said softly, as they moved down and in between my thighs. She did things that no woman I’d been with before had ever done to me, and each one felt better than the last. I felt myself sliding into the warm, heavy rhythm of her own patient longing, felt myself begin to come alive again, felt her feeding me strength with every touch. “How did you get that tattoo?” she asked, her voice gently laughing as she massaged my buttock.

  “I don’t remember,” I mumbled, and she laughed again and kissed it.

  I rolled onto my back, letting her hands follow, letting them work, until finally I opened my eyes and looked down, hardly believing what I saw rising like a defiant finger. She smiled, pushing up on her knees, lowering herself onto me with a sigh. She leaned forward, her breasts warm against my chest as she found my mouth again. “I want to know how it feels to a man,” she whispered, starting to move, slowly, on top of me. “Let me feel what you feel.…” And inside her there was no fear. She wasn’t Lazuli, and her mind was as open to me as her body, reaching for me, for one more experience she’d never believed she’d live long enough to have.

  I entered her mind, going deep as I felt her wanting more and more. I went deeper into her body too, let my fingers move over her silver skin, her breasts, her belly; letting her surround me with her warm secrets. And I let her feel everything, my hardness, her softness, every nerve-ending in my body coming on line, and all the while as I opened my mind to show her how I felt, she was feeling what a woman felt, feeding back into my brain, feeding my own pleasure with hers, doubling it and redoubling it. I felt her excitement climbing, centering, circling that place where our bodies were fused together and making my own need hotter. For once every touch, every motion either of us made seemed like exactly the right one. I wanted to make it go on and on, always almost reaching the end but never ending … but she couldn’t wait. She came—I felt it trigger inside her, spreading through the nerve net of her body like a shower of stars.

  And back thro
ugh the link into my own, until the lightning struck me and I couldn’t stop myself. I cried out, falling like a meteor, dizzy and spinning, into the warm sea of our release.

  But even as I felt myself fading, softening, growing dim and dead, I felt the heat still pulsing somewhere inside me. She was still on top of me, her head back, her eyes clouded and bright as she began to move again, her body caressing what was left of me, her hands touching my sweating skin and her own, like she was expecting the impossible to happen one more time. I felt her arousal growing inside me, knew at last how it felt to be able to be ready and willing all over again, and again; to have a capacity for pleasure as deep and endless as a sea.…

  I let her fill the utter emptiness inside me with the sensations she was creating, playing our bodies like she played the symb; demanding, depending on me to let her go on using my mind and body along with her own to explore this thing she’d only dreamed about. I felt her pleasure beginning to climb again, and her need and her wonder at being two people in one, one mind with two bodies—so different and yet so much the same that if they could only be this way forever.…

  And I felt myself respond, incredibly, growing hard again with a need so hot and sudden that it was more like pain. She felt my disbelief; I felt her own, and laughed as we began again. This time we circled the center of each other’s pleasure without any urgency at all, letting every kind of sensation pass in slow motion through the lines of contact between us as we rose and rose, and fell again.…

  This time she was satisfied and more than satisfied; and I was more than grateful. She slid off of me, moving slowly and tenderly; kept contact, body against body, as she lay next to me, with her arm still across my chest. “God, it feels so good.…” she murmured. “Stay inside me.…” But she was only asking for my mind inside her now—to go on being two in one, as she drifted away into sleep, too heavy with pleasure and release to say anything more.

  I lay where I was, stupefied with sensation, wondering as it ebbed away where I was even going to find the strength to keep breathing. I thought about Lazuli, felt the hollow ache start inside me again as I remembered how she’d wanted this too. She’d been too afraid of me to take it this far, as close to a real joining as any human without psi could ever come. I wondered, if we’d had enough time, if I could have shown her.… But all the while I knew, in the parts of my mind that Argentyne couldn’t reach and never would, that even if Lazuli and I had been two people in one body, we’d never have been two in one mind.

  THIRTY-THREE

  WHEN I WOKE up again Argentyne was still sleeping, her arm still lying across me, as if neither of us had even moved during the rest of the night. It was halfway into the next afternoon, but I felt like I’d barely slept. Sleep was trying to pull me back down, and I wanted to let it. But it was the next day. When I remembered what day that was, I felt like I’d been jabbed with a prod, and I knew I wasn’t going to sleep any more.

  I slid out from under Argentyne’s warm arm, kissed her face gently until she smiled, her eyelids flickering. She sighed and stretched. “Again…” she murmured. Her eyes closed again.

  I pulled on my clothes and put on another drug patch, and went downstairs. A couple of the players were in the kitchen; they watched me stumble in, glanced at the ceiling and made knowing faces. Midnight pushed a plate of food at me, and shoved a cup into my hand. “Eat,” he said. “Better keep up your strength.” He raised his eyebrows. I gave him a sick grin, trying to look grateful. I ate a couple of bites, almost gagging, and left the rest of it.

  I went to the phone and called Daric, to make sure everything was set. And then I called Mikah, to make double sure.

  When I’d finished talking I went back into the empty club and sat alone, not wanting anything more than that … except maybe to turn today into tomorrow. After a while Argentyne came into the room, wrapped in her bathrobe, and sat down beside me. I felt the sudden hot rush of feeling inside her as she looked at me, her memory flashing back to the night, struggling to remember now, going back—But when I met her eyes something else happened, and it made her look away suddenly. Face to face in the light of day, the memory of what we’d done last night became too real for her even to think about. She tried to say something; couldn’t. Because she was afraid, after all … so afraid that she wouldn’t admit even to herself what she was really afraid of.

  I sat looking at her look away, not answering what she didn’t say; afraid of the same thing, deep inside.

  After a while she reached up behind her head, took out the symb box and handed it to me. “I guess you’ll be needing this,” she said. “Try not to carry it on you; it’s kind of fragile. We’re not performing tonight, so there’s … I mean, you can use it all night…” She broke off, sickened.

  I took it, with fingers that suddenly couldn’t feel anything.

  “When are you meeting Daric?” She watched herself fold her hands on the tabletop, trying to sound matter-of-fact.

  I grimaced. “Not soon enough.”

  “Is there anything else you need, that we can do?” Still looking at her hands.

  “Give me a place to come back to?”

  She smiled a little. “Any time.” She got up again when I didn’t say anything more; kissed my forehead and walked away.

  I stayed where I was, glad to be alone again, and hating every second of it. I didn’t know why it was so hard to wait; so hard to think about tonight. I’d set it all up, covered my ass, made sure I had backup. I didn’t even have to depend on a mechanical link if I needed help. I had my psi, in perfect working order. I was going to get roughed up a little; that was all. Nothing I couldn’t handle. It was my game, I was calling the throws. But still my guts turned to water every time I thought about what was going to happen to me tonight. Maybe because I’d thought I’d never have to do this kind of thing to myself again.

  The message beeper on my databand suddenly came alive, making me jump. I sat listening to it, trying to decide if I should answer it here or go to the public phone; half afraid of what I might hear from anybody who’d call me now. Finally I went to the phone in the hall.

  The face I found waiting for me when I answered was so unexpected that for a second I couldn’t even put a name to it. “Natan Isplanasky,” the face said, as if he could tell that I didn’t recognize him.

  I didn’t say anything, because I couldn’t think of anything at all to say.

  “Elnear told me about your … falling out with the taMings. She’s concerned about you,” he said, sounding concerned too.

  I felt myself frown as I wondered if she’d told him all the details. I wondered what was really going on in his mind. “She told you to call?” I asked, not sure whether resentment or disbelief was stronger inside me.

  “No,” he said. “I called because I wanted you to know I haven’t forgotten about what you said.”

  “About what?”

  He looked surprised, or at least confused. “About Contract Labor.”

  “Oh.” I looked down, laughed once. “That.”

  “Elnear told me you have your reasons. I still want to hear them.”

  I lifted my head again. “What’s the point?” Suddenly I wanted to smash the screen. I clenched my fists until the feeling passed.

  He didn’t answer the question. “Will you come up and see me?”

  I shook my head. “I can’t.”

  “Can’t?” he repeated, as if he thought I meant something else.

  “I can’t.”

  He hesitated, nodded. “What if I come there? Or meet you somewhere else? Whenever you say.”

  I stared at him. “You mean that?”

  He nodded again.

  “I can’t.” I looked away from his eyes. “There’s something else I’ve got to do. And I don’t know where I’ll be after that.”

  “Something more important to you than this.”

  “Yeah,” I said. I was starting to tremble again. I almost said the words to cut the connection; stopped. �
��Look, I’ll call back if—when I can. As soon as I can.”

  He nodded. “Good. I’ll be waiting.”

  “Tell Elnear … tell her I think it’ll all work out.” I cut him off. Then I leaned back against the wall, waiting for the shakes to leave me alone. When I felt in control enough to move again, I left Purgatory, not telling anybody I was going, and went uptown toward Daric’s.

  Daric’s city place was sleek and faceless on the outside, a vip’s sacred ground, the kind of place that probably had almost as much to hide as its owner did. I stood in the twilight in the mall garden for a long time, looking at it, getting the feel of it; trying to force myself to go up to its door. Mikah had promised he’d track me; but there was no trace of him. I had to believe he’d keep his word, just like I had to believe nothing would go wrong that I couldn’t handle. I didn’t believe either thing as I crossed the vanilla-scented lawns to Daric’s door.

  The door opened when I stepped up onto the polished terrace, answering the security clearance Daric had given me. Daric was waiting inside. He gestured me in with a nervous hand.

  “What were you doing out there for so long, for God’s sake?” he hissed, as the door solidified again behind us. “Everyone in the stack could have seen you by now.”

  “Nobody else was watching,” I said. Nobody else at all. Even the security scanners didn’t see me, as long as the codes told them not to. It was all very discreet. I looked around me in the dim light, my hands twisting inside my jacket pockets. The asceticism of his house on the taMing estates had turned so impersonal here that it was like standing in a clinic. “Stryger’s not here.”

  “Of course not,” Daric said, still irritable. “It’s early. Come inside.” He wanted to play host about as much as I wanted to play guest, but I followed him down the long ramp into the ceramic hollow of his living room. There was a round enameled table in the center of it, ringed with low seats inside a cylinder of sourceless light. He sat down; I sat down on the far side of the table, staring at him.