Catspaw

by Joan D. Vinge

  I thought about the shining beings I’d met inside the Council core when I’d been lost in inner space with Deadeye … and for just a second I went cold inside, as I imagined what it really would have meant if Stryger had become one of them. But then I thought about how it felt to make a joining. The Hydrans had been able to share a single mindspace with as many others as there was need for. But to share just one other person’s mind totally was something that no normal human could ever do; it was almost impossible even for a human who was a psion … even for me. Something that might have been envy, but wasn’t, stirred inside me. “Did you know it would be like this, all along?” It was almost more than I could believe, or wanted to. “That if you won you’d never be able to see anyone face to face again, or smell coffee or paint a picture or walk in the woods—?” The memories of all the things I’d watched her do that gave her pleasure filled my mind.

  “Yes.” She nodded. “I knew that much. I didn’t know it would be like this—I couldn’t really know. It’s impossible to describe in human terms. But I knew there would be no coming back from it.”

  “You still wanted it.” I couldn’t make it a question, because the answer was obvious. “Weren’t you afraid—of disappearing?”

  “Weren’t you afraid,” she asked, “of what would happen when you let Stryger get his hands on you?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I sure as hell was.”

  She laughed. “I sure as hell was, too. But Cat, someone described the process of augmenting the human mind as pouring indigo dye into a bucket, and then pouring the bucket into a vat, and the vat into the sea.… The dye is still there, no matter how diffused. It’s rather like seeing God in all things. And I think that it’s fitting, perhaps even the key to our survival as a species, that we stay a part of the systems we create, however we can: as cells, as organs … and, I hope, as souls. Because we have already set in motion our transformation, like it or not. Progress is always the process of leaving something behind. Every choice we make means that we are forced to give something up, as well; to sacrifice the thing not chosen.”

  I shook my head. “No regrets, then?”

  “Oh…” The smile didn’t quite work, this time. “A few. Phantom pains for my lost body. I’m told they will get worse, and then fade with time, as the past fades. But I am only my memories now, and so even my regrets are precious to me.”

  I looked away from her, disappointment rising up so suddenly in me that I couldn’t speak. I’d come here to see Elnear, the living, breathing, human woman I’d gone through so much with, and for … to see her once more before the drugs wore off and I lost the ability to really see her: her mind, her soul. But because of those damned drugs I’d slept away three days of my life; I’d missed her, and now I’d never have the chance again.

  “And what about you?” she asked, to my turned back.

  “Lousy,” I said, my hands tightening. “Really lousy.”

  “Are you angry?”

  I shook my head.

  “Disappointed, then—?”

  I shrugged.

  “Afraid of me?”

  I turned back. “No…” I shook my head again. “I don’t know.” My voice sounded hoarse and thick. “I don’t know how to feel, because I don’t know what you are any more.”

  “Then you probably feel something like I felt when I first met you.” she said gently.

  I looked down again. Finally I said, “I just wish you’d told me. So I could have been … ready.”

  “We’ve both had painful secrets to keep, it seems.” Chiding me, still gently. “What I knew about the real nature of the Security Council was not something that I was permitted to share freely. Those who do know feel—and I think justifiably—that the people of the Federation, the people the FTA is meant to serve, would rather believe that it is still run by identifiable human beings. And so they … we try to preserve that illusion. Now you know the secret too. You know it because I know I can trust you to keep it.”

  I looked at her image, my eyes unfocused, not saying anything.

  “There is something I still need to discuss with you.” Her voice got stronger, pulling me back. “Being on the Council leaves me in an awkward position, Cat. I am legally neither dead nor alive. I wanted to see you, not only to say goodbye, but also to discuss with you the disposition of my estate.”

  “With me?” I said.

  “My personal holdings, including my controlling interest in ChemEnGen, will have to be overseen by a trusteeship in my … absence. I would like to name you to the board.”

  “Me?” I said again, sounding stupider than before. “I don’t know sh—anything, about overseeing—”

  She held up her hands. “That isn’t necessary. Philipa will head the board. She will see that the actual duties are taken care of. I simply need individuals I know I can trust, to fill the other seats—I suppose that’s why they call them ‘trustees.’ It would give you the freedom to live your life as you want to. You’d never again have to let someone like Braedee blackmail you into a job you hated.”

  I felt a smile start. “It wasn’t such a bad job … But yeah.” I nodded. “Maybe I’d like that.” Freedom. But more than freedom … security. She smiled too as I looked back at her again. “You have all the seats filled?”

  “Do you have candidates?”

  “Jule.”

  She hesitated, nodded.

  “Jiro.”

  This time her surprise showed. But then she smiled, and nodded again. “Thank you.”

  I shrugged, staring at her image. “I just want to know one thing. Are you really happy, Elnear?”

  “Yes,” she said, and there was no hesitation in it. “Yes, I am.”

  “Then I guess it’ll be all right.” I took a deep breath.

  “What are your plans,” she asked, “now that this ordeal has finally ended, for both of us?”

  I shook my head. “I don’t know. I guess I’ll go back to the University, until I figure out what to do with the rest of my life.” My mouth twitched, not really a smile. I reached up, feeling for the patch behind my ear; feeling my teeth clench. “But first I’ve got to find a place where I can be alone and scream for a while.” I tried to make it sound like a joke, but it didn’t.

  Sympathy and pain that I couldn’t feel showed in her eyes. But then her face changed. She murmured, “I know just the place. It’s spring there, now. No one will bother you. It’s a place that can make you remember the good.… Will you let me arrange it?”

  Surprised, I almost said no. But instead I thought about it, and nodded. And as I did, I felt my body loosen with relief, letting go of a fear that I hadn’t realized I’d been holding all this time. I rubbed my eyes with my hand.

  “Goodbye, Cat,” she said.

  “Goodbye, Elnear.” And then, because it was better than admitting the truth, I smiled at her, and said, “Think about me sometimes. Maybe I’ll hear you.”

  She smiled too, and held out her hand. I even tried to touch it, before she disappeared.

  * * *

  After she was gone I let myself out of Isplanasky’s office. I walked through the halls of the Federation plex for the last time, alone. When I reached the display area, I stopped inside the crowd of tourists who were staring at the mosaic of the People of Earth. I studied the faces on the wall, the faces around me, for a long time. Human faces. I hadn’t done it for them. That was what I’d told Isplanasky. But somehow those faces weren’t so hard to look at, this time. Somehow they’d changed; or maybe I had. “You’re welcome,” I said at last. No one turned to look at me as I went on my way.

  EPILOGUE

  I STAYED IN the cottage halfway up the mountainside for as long as it took—to learn to live with myself, and only myself, again. About once a week I had to walk down into the nearest village to pick up supplies. It was an independent crafters’ commune, not a Federal outlet or a combine clave, and they didn’t seem to care if I looked like hell or sometimes I couldn’t make myself
speak to them. I didn’t want to speak to them, or even hear them speak to me. They might as well have been the hallucinations of my own sick mind, because I couldn’t feel them inside my thoughts any more.

  At first sometimes facing even fifteen minutes’ mindless contact was more than I could stand, and I’d just go hungry. Sitting inside the one room, sometimes I wouldn’t move all day. I stared at the silent, whitewashed walls, wishing they were black. All I could feel was pain. Some of the pain was physical, but that was almost a relief compared to the pain that wasn’t. Sometimes I did scream. Once I called Mikah, ready to beg him to get me what I needed. Nobody answered the call.

  But all the while I was healing. My battered body mended fast. The broken bones of my defenses mended a lot more slowly. In time the blackness inside me began to break up into shades of gray, telling me my inner eyes were finally adjusting to life in a darkened room. After enough time, I could even begin to see how far I’d come, in spite of everything, from the place I’d been when I first came to Earth. I started being able to look at the scars on my face and body for long enough to recognize that they were really fading … to look at the memories that strobed behind them directly enough that I could even begin to believe what had happened to me with Stryger wasn’t the same thing that had happened to me back in Oldcity; to believe that this time it hadn’t been random, meaningless suffering. This time I’d made a hard choice, for a good reason, and made a difference by doing it. And this time my survival hadn’t been as random as my pain … this time I really hadn’t been all alone in hell.

  And slowly, painfully, I was able to see that even if Oldcity had been reality for me for seventeen years, it didn’t make the life I had now a lie. Not the good parts of it; not the bad. I wasn’t a victim any more. I wasn’t a telepath any more, either. The drugs I’d used to blind me to the truth were the lie, just like they’d always been. Unless I wanted to live without my Gift forever, I had to face living without it now, for however long it took. But the truth was the bitterest drug I’d ever had to swallow; it burned my mouth every time I had to speak a word.

  As my need died, day by day, I began to rediscover the world waiting for me outside. I heard birds calling, smelled damp earth and new grass, finally knew the color of the flowers and the sky. I tried to learn how to make music on the mouth harp Argentyne had given me along with one last kiss as we said our goodbyes. I watched spring turn into summer all across the valley below me, until finally I knew I was glad to be alive again … knew this world for a part of my heritage, a place that I had a right to love; a place I wanted to come back to again, on my own terms. And then at last I understood the real gift that Elnear had given me.

  After the worst of the pain had died, I realized that what was left didn’t hurt me the way it had before. That it let me reach out a little further before I ran into the wall. That maybe Jule had been right about what I’d done; that by helping someone else I’d helped myself, and the past had really gotten just a little further away for me.

  One day I went into town when I didn’t have to, because I wanted to hear a human voice that wasn’t my own. And then I knew I felt human again, if not Hydran … and that I was ready to live like a human again, on their terms.

  I contacted Braedee and made him take me back where he’d found me. On the way there, I made him fix my eyes. Neither of us said thanks as I got ready to leave the ship; but he said I ought to study chess. I told him I thought I’d stick to Square/Cubes.

  The University was still in port where I’d left it, finishing up its session on the Monument. There was a tape waiting there for me, from Jule. I sat in my cabin and watched her smiling face a dozen times before I was ready to go out and start living the life of a student again.

  My absence had been listed as being for “family problems.” I had a hard time keeping a decent expression on my face as Kissindre Perrymeade told me I looked tired, and she hoped that everything was all right at home. She asked if I wanted to talk about it. I said no. She said she was sorry about what had happened between us just before I left. I couldn’t remember what she meant, but I didn’t say so. She offered to share credit with me on the session thesis she was finishing, because I hadn’t had time to do anything for the course.

  I shook my head, still having trouble even relating to what she was saying. I felt like I’d been missing for years, instead of months; the holomuraled walls of the museum hall seemed more real than she did. “No. It’s all right.…”

  “It would only be fair,” she insisted, not understanding that I really didn’t care. “You gave me the concept yourself. What you said before you left, about the Monument as a ‘monument to Death’—”

  “I said that?” I asked, and then nodded; remembering it, finally. I thought about the sunset at Goldengate, and the music of the wind, and what it had said to me. “I guess I did.… I’ll see you later.” I started to turn away.

  “Where are you going?” she asked, with more gentleness than I would have expected.

  “Gonna take a jump down to the surface. I want to … get the feel of the thing again before it’s gone.”

  “Want some company?”

  I looked back at her. “What about—” I broke off. Ezra. That had been his name. Her boyfriend. “Ezra?”

  She made a face, and shook her head. “We’re not speaking this week.”

  I looked away again. “I don’t feel much like talking, myself.”

  “That’s all right,” she said.

  I shrugged, and nodded.

  We took the shuttle down together to Goldengate, and stood on the open plateau. It was barely dawn this time, and we were alone in the soft half-light. A handful of stars were still showing, and the arch of the Gate was a black silhouette that even my eyes could barely make out against the sky. The wind was still making mournful flutesong through the riddled stone, just the way I remembered it. I touched the mouth harp riding in the pocket of my jeans, finally remembering after all this time what something in its sound had always reminded me of.

  I started away from the shuttle, the sandy dirt whispering under my feet. It was almost cold, and I was glad I was wearing Deadeye’s sweater. Kissindre sat down cross-legged where she was, watching silently, but letting me have my space.

  I sat on the rocks at the edge of the plateau, listening, feeling the wind, waiting as day broke and the light touched the arch and began to turn it gold. And I thought about the way this world had been made, put together out of ruined bits and pieces, forged into a work of art by a technology so far beyond ours that it still seemed like magic. A monument to bad ends and broken dreams … and yet that didn’t seem right, when it seemed to be waiting through millennia just for something living to come here and touch it. Even the air I was breathing was a miracle; all the studies I’d ever seen said you needed a living ecosystem to produce an atmosphere a human could live in. But a human could breathe here, walk here, feel perfectly at home here … do everything except stay. So could a Hydran. I wondered if the Hydrans had known about this world, visited it, studied it. And I realized suddenly that it could just as well have been left here for them to find, as for the humans. Whether it had been meant for the Hydrans instead was probably a question no one had ever asked up at the museum.…

  I tried not to let the bitterness take hold of me again as I thought it. I was still a halfbreed, even if my telepathy was gone—still made out of bits and pieces like this world was, but nobody’s idea of a work of art. The two halves of me were so much alike … except for that one, fragile thing that made all the difference. In the way two peoples looked at life, and each other. I wondered how something like that could even have happened; what kind of cosmic joke I’d been made the butt of. I remembered Stryger asking me the same thing.

  And because I couldn’t face too much of that, I took the mouth harp out of my pocket and began to play, trying to make the sounds it made act like a song. The song that the wind made answered me, making me remember the symb; remember th
e good. There was more of it to remember than I’d expected.

  I thought about Elnear then; about where and what she was now … about all she’d given up, and all she’d become. If I’d been given that chance, I didn’t know if I could have taken it.… The part of me that wanted to be whole again, the Hydran part, had envied her; but the human part had known it wouldn’t be the same, and it had only been afraid. It was hard enough just living with what I knew already, just being one of a hundred billion random cells in the Federation’s evolving supermind.

  And yet knowing she’d had the courage to make that choice, and take that final step, still made a difference … as much difference, in its way, as what she’d done to help me survive in my own random life. She’d finally proved something to me about humans, and about the human side in me, that I hadn’t thought anyone could make me believe again: that maybe they deserved some respect, after all.

  And so did the ones who’d left this world here. I wondered what they’d been like, before they’d disappeared from our plane of existence hundreds of thousands of years ago. I’d told Stryger I didn’t believe in a God; and I didn’t—not any kind that he’d recognize. Probably not any kind that I would, either. But a race that could create this world, and then pull themselves into a hat and disappear … they could have played God a little before they left, done a little genetic tampering, planted some seeds and left them there to see what would happen. The Haves and the Have Nots. An experiment, a cosmic joke … the next generation.

  The Hydrans had reached the stars first, but they’d depended on their Gift too much, and spread it too thin. When the humans got there after them, it had been easy enough to sweep their psi Net away like cobwebs. The Hydrans hadn’t reached their transformation, and now they never would. Maybe they’d had it too easy. Maybe they’d never seen how much they’d been given … how much they had to lose.