Catspaw

by Joan D. Vinge

  The Speaker stepped between them. “Sojourner Stryger,” he murmured, putting out his hand. “I’m sure there is some explanation for all this. But considering your current and future interests in the Federation, I think that perhaps the explanations had better come from you. Lady Elnear.” He stepped back again, giving the floor to Elnear; giving her the right to ask the questions.

  Stryger bristled; backed off, as he realized he didn’t have any choice except to go ahead and face her down. “Surely no one—even you—” looking from the Speaker to Elnear, “takes seriously something as easily counterfeited as a threedy tape: two actors play roles, their images are altered to look like myself and a psion.…” Listening to him, watching him, I could almost believe he meant every word. I wondered what I’d see if I could get into his mind right now.

  Elnear stiffened as he used the word psion, but she only said, “Tapes can certainly be counterfeited. But I have never in my life experienced pain while watching a threedy tape. Have you—?”

  “Lady Elnear,” he said, with patronizing calm, “I’m sure it was upsetting for you to see someone you thought you knew suffer—”

  “I’m not talking about that.” She cut him off, her own voice sharp and cold now. “I mean that I felt physical pain in every nerve-ending of my body—as if I was the victim every time you struck a blow.”

  “That’s absurd,” he said, looking at her like she must be crazy.

  “It should be.” She nodded; her face was still white and drawn. “But everyone in this Hall felt it.”

  “I felt nothing of the kind,” he snapped, looking out at the slack, stunned faces of the Assembly as if he thought they were all lying, or insane.

  “Evidently you did not,” she said bitterly. “Sojourner Stryger, why exactly did you choose a psion as your victim?”

  He was still looking out into the Assembly Hall. “I did not ‘choose a psion’!” he said to them, almost shouting it.

  “That was how you identified him. Not as my aide—someone you knew—but as ‘a psion.’”

  “Someone else chose the act, and the victim, to discredit me!”

  There was color back in Elnear’s face now; her blue eyes were alive and intent. “Then why did they—whoever they were—choose to show you attacking a psion? Psions are not the objects of much compassion in our society. Why not a child, or an old woman?”

  “I don’t know,” he murmured, as if he really didn’t. “Perhaps they were stupid, as well as evil.” He looked at her, away from her; up into the air like he was searching for guidance, wondering why God was letting this happen to him.

  Her own eyes never left his face. “My aide tried to tell me, on several occasions, that you had a pathological hatred of psions,” she said quietly. “I never really believed him, until now.”

  I sat up straight again, my teeth clenched in a grin.

  “Your aide lied about me. He tried to discredit me to the entire Net!” He looked back at her, his face burning. “He tried to make them believe that I had lied—”

  “You did lie. About him,” she insisted. “Or have you forgotten?”

  His mouth snapped shut. “That isn’t true. As God is my witness … I may have been misinformed, but I never lie. God guides everything I do—”

  “Even when he takes a piss?” Argentyne murmured beside me, and laughter drowned out the rest of his words.

  “Has God told you that psions are evil?” Elnear asked. All the cams were on the two of them again.

  “Yes…” he murmured. “That is, the evidence of society itself has shown that they are deviants of the most degraded sort, the kind of underclass I hope to eliminate through the wider use of pentryptine.”

  “The most degraded…” Elnear said softly. “Do you truly believe that, Sojourner? That all our drug dealers are psions? Our child molesters? Our contract killers? Are psions worse than someone who would set out to destroy an entire people, as some of our own ancestors have done to each other … all in the name of God?”

  He was staring at her now. I kept waiting for the smooth denial to pour out of him. But this time it didn’t come. “God…” he murmured finally. “God has shown me what they are. I have done nothing but follow God’s Word as I understand it.…” His eyes narrowed. “But that does not mean that I persecute them! I only want to improve their lot.”

  Elnear folded her hands together in front of her, looked down at them, nodding as if she conceded the point. “Why is it that you have never had any augmentation done, Sojourner?” Her voice was calm now. The question sounded like a complete change of subject, but I didn’t believe it.

  Stryger gave her a strange look, but he answered her. “Because I see it as a violation of humanity’s basic nature, the pure state which I believe God meant to be our chosen form of existence.” He raised his head, back on firmer ground.

  “Then God regards augmentation as wrong?” She sounded honestly surprised.

  He laughed, his hands fluttering. “I’m not saying it’s wrong for everyone. Our society could not function without its technological aids. God intended for us to have these tools, or we would still all be living on one planet. But to go so far as to challenge God’s omniscience and power, to try to put oneself in the place that is naturally God’s—that is always wrong.”

  “And do psions do that? I believe you said that was why the Hydran civilization fell, because they tried to put themselves in God’s rightful place.”

  “Yes.” He nodded. “Yes, I believe that … I—I’ve said that many times.” A shadow touched his face as he realized the slip he’d almost made, almost acknowledging that he’d said it to me.

  “How is it that you share my interest in the Security Council slot, then?” Elnear asked. “It is certainly the ultimate in augmentation available to any human being alive today. Surely the near-omniscience and power available to a Council member goes beyond the limits you believe God had in mind?”

  My splinted fingers were tapping nervous code on the tabletop, like I could reach her somehow that way, when my mind couldn’t reach her through the wilderness of minds between us. Even I hadn’t seen the whole truth, seen the connection, until now.… Make it—I thought. Make it, Elnear—

  I saw Stryger tense. “It really isn’t the same thing. In order to continue to do God’s work here in the Federation—”

  “What do you plan to do, then—if not, in effect, to play God yourself?” Her voice sharpened. “Like the people you evidently hate so much?”

  He frowned, like a dog trying to decide which flea to bite at first. “How dare you—”

  “Sojourner, where is your staff today?” she asked, cutting him off again. “The one that you always carry, that you have said was ‘the symbol of your journey toward the truth’?”

  “I left it behind,” he said. “It’s only a piece of wood. It gets in the way.”

  “You seemed to use it without any difficulty when you used it to torture my aide.”

  His face reddened. “I am not on trial here! This is a fraud, a vicious lie, to ruin me! He was your aide—maybe you even planned it together, to hurt me, to claim the Council slot for yourself!” His voice was getting louder, as the idea took hold inside him. “That’s it, isn’t it? It was you, you made that tape—sent him to me, because you knew I—I—mean that it was a forgery, a lie, it never happened.…”

  His voice died, and there was silence in the Hall, and all around me in the club.

  “We’ll know that soon enough,” Elnear said softly. She hesitated, listening to something he couldn’t hear, and nodded. “The Speaker has analyzed the Assembly record of the tape. The databand keycodes of the two subjects appear to belong to my aide, and to you. There has been tampering with the Assembly system as well.” She looked up at him again. “Eventually we will get to the bottom of this, and then we will know exactly how it happened. But I think that everyone already knows the truth, Sojourner Stryger.” She looked back at him, with more sadness than anger showing on
her face. “Even you.”

  “No,” he said, and his mouth began to tremble. “No, it isn’t true! I mean them no harm. I only want to do good—I have come to do God’s work. I want to save them. Let me do good! Give me the power to bring about change! I need the power, I need it—” He was screaming now at the silent Assembly, at us where we sat watching; his face swelling, getting bigger and bigger, as the Net closed in on him pitilessly. I shut my eyes this time, but I couldn’t stop hearing him, his voice, screaming, “You can’t stop me! God has chosen me, and only God can stop me—”

  Suddenly his voice went dim. I opened my eyes. Somebody had dropped a security shield around him. Half a dozen Corpses were surrounding him on the stage now, forcing him to leave it; dragging him, when he tried to resist.

  Elnear stood staring after him, her face flushed and her eyes shining; hut she didn’t look happy. The Speaker came up to her, subvocalizing something that the cams couldn’t pick up. And then he said, “It has been suggested that the vote be postponed, because of this unfortunate—”

  She turned toward him, and suddenly the outrage that I’d needed to see was on her face. She turned back to the podium, and said, “I move that we vote immediately, as planned. And I ask you all to remember that Sojourner Stryger is the man who wants you to deregulate pentryptine—who believes that you will vote his way, ‘because you are all so much like him in your hearts.’” And then she left the podium, walking down and away toward her own seat on the Assembly floor.

  Daric taMing seconded the motion.

  The motion passed. And in less time than it took to formally announce the vote, deregulation failed to get its majority. By three votes. One of them was Daric taMing’s.

  THIRTY-FIVE

  I HARDLY REMEMBER what happened next on the Assembly floor, because suddenly the club was all whooping and music and celebration. I wouldn’t have believed a dozen people could make that much crazy noise. But up in front of me I saw Elnear’s face as it registered on her that she’d actually won. I saw that smile of hers come out like the sun. And then finally I could smile too, and laugh and yell and swallow the wine Mikah was pouring down my throat, and start to live again. Because it hadn’t all been for nothing.

  The private party lasted until the club opened, and then it became a public party, as Argentyne let everybody join in. The stage was their lightshow, full of constant threedy feed, infotainment for the masses. Somewhere in the middle of it I remember her shaking me out of a warm, nodding daze, yelling, “Look! Listen!” in my ear. And it was Daric’s face up there, Daric being interviewed by Shander Mandragora as he took “exclusive responsibility” for the illegal ‘cast that had burned itself into the collective brain of the Assembly, and turned Sojourner Stryger from the Chosen One of the combine gods into a dose of scratch.

  “Gentleman Daric,” Shander Mandragora was saying, pushing in for an uncomfortable closeup. “You took extraordinary measures to reveal Sojourner Stryger as a bigot and a dangerous fanatic. What was it that made you decide to commit such a controversial—even illegal—act, something that could ruin your position and damage your distinguished career for years to come?”

  Something touched Daric’s face for maybe a second, something that nobody else even saw. And for the space of that second, I almost believed he’d done it for the right reason. That he might even find the honesty somewhere to tell everybody what he really was.… But then he only looked uncomfortable and annoyed again. “A sense of higher duty,” he said, and the answer was the empty, professional lie of a politician. He stared directly into Mandragora’s third eye, facing down the watching universe with a calculated intensity that said he knew just how to work the Net. Argentyne couldn’t look away from it. “I worked very closely with Sojourner Stryger, as Centauri’s private liaison in matters concerning deregulation. It became clear to me that he was dangerously unstable. But because of his immense public popularity, I knew that he was almost certain to be chosen for the opening on the Security Council. When I realized that might happen, I felt someone had to stop it. And because of his popularity, I knew it would take unorthodox means to effectively prevent such a travesty. So I chose to do this.”

  “And what about the victim?” Mandragora said. “I interviewed him myself, when he saved several people from an assassination attempt on Lady Elnear Lyron/taMing. He was her aide—was she aware of what you were doing?”

  “Absolutely not.” Daric barely kept the grimace off his face. “I got to know him because he saved my life too that night. He agreed to play the victim for Stryger because of his own feelings about Stryger’s bigotry. It was a courageous act on his part, and the poor fellow suffered terribly for his beliefs. He’s in seclusion now, and doesn’t want to be disturbed.”

  I swore, searching for the poisoned smile I knew was there behind the words.

  “He was in no way involved in the actual carrying out of the plan, of course; beyond offering his body as bait, so to speak.…”

  “You lousy motherfucker,” I mumbled.

  Argentyne turned toward me, frowning. “He’s covering for you, he’s taking the blame on himself. Can’t you see that? He’s protecting you from a criminal action. Do you know what kind of deep shit you’d be in if he didn’t?”

  “He’s giving Charon the finger, and taking the credit for himself,” I said wearily. I touched my swollen face, wincing. “Fuck him, he can have it.… I got what I wanted.”

  “He didn’t have to do this. It’s going to hurt him. Can’t you ever give him credit for a decent act?”

  “Not until he does one.” I shook my head, and it made me dizzy. She looked away again.

  “It has been pointed out,” Shander Mandragora was saying, “that Centauri Transport had more to gain financially than almost any combine supporting deregulation. You are a member of their board, and yet you not only discredited Sojourner Stryger, but you actually voted against deregulation yourself. What made you vote against your own corporate interests?”

  “Blackmail,” I whispered, so softly that even Argentyne couldn’t hear me.

  Daric stood a little straighter, pulling at his cuffs. “There are some things,” he said, with more dignity than I thought he had in him, “more important than money.”

  “Like his own skin,” Mikah grunted. He raised his glass to me. “This one’s to you, freak,” he said, and swallowed down the rest of the brew in it. Then he got up, stretched, and shook himself out, blocking my view of whatever Daric did next. Every movement he made was perfectly under control, even though he’d been drinking nonstop all evening. Either he had a shunt or he held his liquor better than anybody I’d ever seen. “Looks like he’s met his end of the deal. Guess that means the Market will have to do the same.” He shrugged, looking down at me. “Looks like everybody wins tonight.… But maybe the Governor ought to send somebody out to kick his ass around a little anyway; just to let him know how lucky he is.” He smiled, thinking maybe he’d suggest it himself. Argentyne frowned, but she didn’t say anything. Mikah put out his hand to me; we clenched thumbs. “So long, kid. It’s been real.”

  I half smiled and nodded. And suddenly the thing I’d sworn I wouldn’t ask him for again was all I could think about. But the look in his eyes, and what lay behind it, stopped the words in my throat. I looked down; telling myself I still had three of those little red dots left on the sheet.… I looked up again. “Thanks.”

  He raised his hand, palm out, showing me the scar. “Any time, brother.”

  I lifted my own hand, and watched him go out of the club. I turned back to Argentyne; but she was gone. Some stranger with striped skin and a long striped tongue was lapping syrup out of a bowl beside me. I ate a few meat-filled buns, and stuck on more painkillers where the damage was starting to leak through. The striped stranger asked me to dance, but I shook my head, not up to it. I lay back in the cushions, watching the endless replays and interviews and flashbacks flowing across the empty stage until I was numb.

  A
s I listened to Daric’s confession for the third time, the real Daric entered the club. I felt him walk in, his mind like nobody else’s; followed him as he made his way through the crowd to Argentyne, who’d stopped moving to watch his image again. He watched her watching it, standing motionless with her eyes fixed on his holo face as he crossed the room behind her. He wanted to take hold of her as he reached her, and prove to both of them that he was alive; prove to both of them how she still felt about him.… But he didn’t. Holding himself under control, he only touched her once, to make her turn around. He handed her the symb box, murmuring something noncommittal.

  She took it and stuck it back where it belonged. She asked him how he was, told him how glad she was that everything had gone all right; feeling every word ring hollow. She told him how he’d come across on the Net, and then, like she couldn’t help herself, how it had made her feel.… Her hand stretched toward him, tentative until it reached his chest. And then it slid down and around him. And there was no going back for her, as he touched her with his hands … as his mind touched that hidden place inside her where she’d ached to feel him all these endless days.

  I broke off watching, broke off feeling it; not sure who I was more disgusted with … or why I wasn’t more surprised. I stared at the images on the stage, waiting for Daric to come to me, knowing that he would.

  He was alone again when he finally reached my table, and the grin of satisfaction on his face faded as I looked up at him. He flinched as he saw my own face. “Get out of here.” he said to the people sitting around me. They got up and left as he sat down. Dead serious, he asked, “Are you satisfied now?”

  “You kept your part of it.” I had to force myself to say the words. “What about the Market? Did they see everything? Are they satisfied too? Do I get my life back?”

  I shrugged, and it hurt every muscle in my shoulders, back, and chest.