Joan D. Vinge - Catspaw

Copyright 1988 by Joan D. Vinge

This one s for you, kid.

You know who you are.

(With his glared off face glued back into position

A dead man s eyes plugged back into his sockets

A dead man s heart screwed in under his ribs

His tattered guts stitched back into position

His shattered brains covered with a steel cowl)

He comes forward a step,

and a step,

and a step-

- Ted Hughes

We are afraid of truth, afraid of fortune,

afraid of death, and afraid of each other.

- Ralph Waldo Emerson

To understand a cat, you must realize that he has

his own gifts, his own viewpoint, even his own morality.

- Lilian Jackson Braun

PROLOGUE

Someone was after me. The feeling, the knowing, was like the touch of ghost hands on my back all through the long afternoon. I knew it, the way I still did sometimes, picking things up like bits of song heard through static. It had got hold of me first in the bazaar of the orbiting spaceport. I d been standing under the colored sunscreen at the jeweler s booth, letting a dark woman with long fingers puncture my earlobe with a ring. Duzzin hurt, she was crooning, in some kind of accent as thick as the smoke from the charred meat in the next stall. Hold still, duzzin hurt, duzzin hurt like she was talking to a child, or a tourist. It did hurt, but not much. And I was a tourist, everybody here was a tourist, but that didn t make acting like one feel any less strange to me.

I winced, and then the second of sharp pain was over. But in the second of empty whiteness that followed it, while I was waiting for more pain, I got something else: the touch, the whisper of something s interest brushing against my mind. Not someone, something- neutral, patient, mindless. I looked up and away, jerking free of the jeweler s hand as she wiped blood from my ear. But there was nothing to see, no one I knew, or who seemed to know me. Just the shifting crowd of colors that were too bright, faces that were too soft, like the crowds in an Oldcity night

I shook my head as the past slid across the present like a membrane. It still happened to me too often- that suddenly I felt like I was dreaming, like I didn t know who or where I was. The green agate beads on the wire bumped the side of my jaw.

Anuzzer-? the woman was asking, reaching out. I pushed away into the crowds, and let them carry me on down the street under the light of the artificial sun.

Once I knew the thing was onto me, I couldn t stop feeling it- that whispering, toneless song like a hook caught in my brain. I tried to tell myself it was my imagination; my crippled mind feeling something the same way an amputee felt phantom pain. But it didn t work. I knew what I knew. It went with me along the twisting, gaudy streets that tried to hide the fact they were only going in circles; into the quiet, shadowed sprawl of the museum complex and out again; into a food bar; into the silver-fixtured hotel men s room. It watched me, only me, tuned to the electrical fingerprint of my brain, locked in. I thought about going back on board the Darwin, but even a ship s walls wouldn t keep it away from me. There was no reason in hell why anybody at all would put an ID trace on me. Maybe it was a mistake, a trace meant for someone else, an echo-reading If somebody wanted me, where were they? Why didn t they just ask? Why shadow me through this crowd of vacant-faced marks in their showday clothes-

Cat- oh, Cat!

I turned, my fists knotting up, even as I recognized the voice. My hands were slippery with sweat. I opened them, working my fingers.

It was Kissindre Perrymeade, her half-dozen brown braids dancing down over her khaki shirt, her smiling face like scrubbed ivory.

I stopped, letting the crowd flow on around me until it brought her to my side. Hi, Kiss. Her nickname always made me smile. I pushed my hands into the pockets of my jeans. I m glad to see you, I said, meaning it for once.

You are? her face asked, with that mix of aching shyness and trying-not-to-stare that usually left us both acting stupid whenever we met. We d walked the surfaces of half a dozen worlds together, along with five hundred other students in the Floating University, but I d never really gotten friendly with her, any more than I was friends with any of the rest of them. She was a teaching intern, which made me half-afraid to say anything to her to begin with. And the fact that she was rich and pretty and stared at me only made it worse. Because the same things that made most of the others keep their distance from me pulled at her. I didn t talk like they did, I didn t dress like they did.

I hadn t come out of the same places. I had eyes with long slits for pupils, in a face that wasn t put together right by human standards: a halfbreed s face. I never talked about any of it, but that didn t make it go away.

And yet the things that made most of the others snap shut like traps made Kissindre stare. I knew she sketched my face with her stylus on the edges of her glowing noteboard, as if I was something she thought was beautiful, like the artifacts and scenic views she made painstaking drawings of- things everybody else holoed once and would never look at again. I didn t know what I was to her, and if she knew she wouldn t admit it; and that made me feel even more awkward whenever we were together.

But now, with something inhuman locked on my brain, I was glad of any face that wasn t a stranger s, more glad that it happened to be hers, even smiling that painful smile. I noticed she was wearing jeans. Nobody else on the ship wore jeans, except me. Jeans were cheap, common, worker s clothing. It hit me suddenly that she d only started wearing them after I met her.

Is something wrong? she asked, glancing up at me again.

I shook my head, only partly for an answer. Why? Because I said I m glad to see you? My eyes kept wandering away, searching the street. I took her arm, felt her start but not pull back. Come on, let s take a jump, let s get out of here. Let s go see something. Thinking that if I could get away from the spaceport for a few hours, maybe I could lose the mistake that was dogging me.

Sure, she said, brightening now. Anywhere. It s incredible- She broke off, as if she knew she was starting to talk too much. At least she meant it. Most of the students on the Darwin were too rich and too bored and only looking for a long vacation. But a few of them were really here for what they could learn. Like her. Like me. Your ear s bloody, she said.

I touched it with my fingers, remembering, feeling the earring. Just got this. Supposed to be a relic.

She stiffened.

Don t worry, I said. It s not. I didn t like the way humans helped themselves to pieces of the scenery without asking any more than she did. Maybe less. Concentrating, I tightened the fingers of my mind into a fist; something I could still do, even if I couldn t reach out. The scratching alien hum stopped. With luck, I d just stopped existing for whoever was on the other end. But it was like holding my breath.

We made our way back to the museum, went down ten levels to the wide shadowy cavern where the shuttles squatted in patient rows like opalescent beetles, waiting on the smooth ceramic pavement to carry people like us down to the planet s surface. There was no permanent human structure of any kind on the world that lay a thousand klicks below our feet, the world humans called the Monument. The whole planet was a Federation preserve an artificial world, constructed millennia ago and dropped into an orbit around a bleary orange star out here in the middle of nowhere.