Vinge, Joan D - SS - To Bell the Cat.pdf - Joan D Vinge - przemosta

To Bell the Cat by Joan D. Vinge

Another squeal of animal pain reached them from the bubble tent twenty meters

away. Juah-u Corouda jerked involuntarily as he tossed the carved gaming

pieces from the cup, spoiling his throw. "Hell, a triad.... Damn that noise;

it's like fingernails on metal."

"Orr doesn't know the meaning of 'surrender.'" Albe Hyacin-Soong caught up the

cup. "It must be driving him crazy that he can't figure out how those scaly

little rats survive all that radioactivity. How they ever evolved in the

first place - "

"He doesn't know the meaning of the word 'mercy.' " Xena Soong - Hyacin

frowned at her husband, her hands clasping her elbows. "Why doesn't he

anesthetize them?"

"Come on, Xena," Corouda said. "They're just animals. They don't feel pain

like we do."

"And what are any of us, Juah-u, but animals trying to play God?"

"I just want to play squamish," Albe muttered.

Corouda smiled faintly, looking away from Xena toward the edge of the camp. A

few complaints, hers among them, had forced Orr to move his lab tent away from

the rest. Corouda was just as glad. The noises annoyed him, but he didn't

take them personally. Research was necessary; Xena - any scientist - should

be able to accept that. But the bleeding hearts are always with us. No

matter how comfortable a society became, no matter how fair, no matter how

nearly perfect, there was always someone who wanted flas to pick at. Some

people were never satisfied; he was glad he wasn't one of them. And glad he

wasn't married to one of them. But then, Albe always liked a good argument.

"Next you'll be telling me that he doesn't feel anything either!" Xena

pointed.

"Keep your voice down, Xena. He'll hear you. He's right over there. And

don't pull down straw men; he's got nothing to do with this. He's Piper

Alvarian Jary; he's supposed to suffer."

"He's been brainwiped. That's like punishing an amnesiac; he's not the same

man - "

"I don't want to get into that again," Albe said, unconvincingly.

Corouda shook his head, pushed the blond curls back under his peaked cap and

moved further into the shade. They sat cross - legged on the soft, gray -

brown earth with the studied primitivism all wardens affected. He turned his

head slightly to look at Piper Alvarian Jary, sitting on a rock in the sun;

alone as usual, and as usual within summoning range of Hoban Orr, his master.

Piper Alvarian Jary, who for six years - six years! Was it only six? - had

been serving a sentence at Simeu Biomedical Research Institute, being punished

in kind for the greatness of his sin.

Not that he looked like a monster now, as he sat toying endlessly with a pile

of stones. He wore a plain, pale coverall sealed shut to the neck in spite of

the heat; dark hair fell forward into his eyes above a nondescript sunburned

face. He could have been anyone's menial assistant, ill at ease in this group

of ecological experts on an unexplored world. He could have been anyone -

Corouda looked away, remembering the scars that the sealed suit probably

covered. But he was Piper Alvarian Jary, who had supported the dictator Naron

- who had bloodied his hands in one of the most brutal regimes in mankind's

long history of inhumanity to man. It had surprised Corouda that Jary was

still young. But a lifetime spent as a Catspaw for Simeu Institute would age

a man fast. Maybe that's why he's sitting in the sun; maybe he wants to fry

his brains out.

" - that's why I wanted to become a warden, Albe!" Xena's insistent voice

pulled his attention back. "So that we wouldn't have to be a part of things

like this ... so that I wouldn't have to sit here beating my head against a

stone wall about the injustice and the indifference of this society - "

Albe reached out distractingly and tucked a strand of her bound - up hair

behind her ear. "But you've got to admit this is a remarkable discovery we've

made here. After all, a natural reactor - a concentration of uranium ore so

rich that it's fissioning. The only comparable thing we know of happened on

Terra a billion years before anybody was around to care." He waved his hand at

the cave mouth 200 meters away. "And right in that soggy cave over there is a

live one, and animals survive in it! To find out how they could have adapted

to that much radiation - isn't it important for us to find that out?"

"Of course it is." Xena looked pained. "Don't patronize me, Albe. I know

that as well as you do. And you know that's not what I'm talking about."

"Yes, I know it isn't...." He sighed in surrender. "This whole expedition

will be clearing out soon; they've got most of the data they want already.

And then the six of us can get down to work and forget we ever saw any of

them; we'll have a whole new world all to ourselves."

"Until they start shipping in the damned tourists - "

"Hey, come on," Corouda said, too loudly. "Come on. What're we sitting here

for? Roll them bones."

Albe laughed, and shook the cup. He scattered the carved shapes and let them

group in the dirt. "Hah, Two-square."

Corouda grunted. "I know you cheat; if I could just figure out how. Xena - "

She turned back from gazing at Piper Alvarian Jary, her face tight.

"Xena, if it makes you feel any better, Jary doesn't feel anything. Only in

his hands, maybe his face a little."

She looked at him blankly. "What?"

"Jary told me himself; Orr killed his sense of feeling when he first got him,

so that he wouldn't have to suffer needlessly from the experiments."

Her mouth came open.

"Is that right?" Albe pushed the sweatband back on his tanned, balding

forehead. "Remember last week, he backed into the campfire.... I didn't know

you'd talked to him, Juah-u. What's he like?"

"I don't know. Who knows what somebody like that is really like? A while back

he came and offered to check a collection of potentially edible flora for

me...." And Jary had returned the next day with the samples, looking tired and

a little shaky, to tell him exactly what was and wasn't edible, and to what

degree. It was only later, after he'd had time to run tests of his own, that

he had understood how Jary had managed to get the answers so fast, and so

accurately. "He ate them, to see if they poisoned him. Don't ask me why he

did it; maybe he enjoys being punished."

Xena withered him with a look.

"I didn't know he was going to eat them." Corouda slapped at a bug, annoyed.

"Besides, he'd have to drink strychnine by the liter to kill himself. They

made Jary into a walking biological lab - his body manufactures an immunity to

anything, almost on the spot; they use him to make vaccines. You can cut off

anything but his head and it'll grow back - "

"Oh, for God's sake." Xena stood up, her brown face flushed. She dropped the

cup between them like something unclean, and strode away into the trees.

Corouda watched her go; the wine-red crown of the forest gave her shelter from

his insensitivity. In the distance through the trees he could see the stunted

vegetation at the mouth of the reactor cave. Radiation had eaten out an

entire hillside, and the cave's heart was still a festering radioactive sink

hot enough to boil water. Yet some tiny alien creatures had chosen to live in

it ... which meant that this expedition would have to go on stewing in the

sun until Orr made a breakthrough, or made up his mind to quit. Corouda

sighed and looked back at Hyacin-Soong. "Sorry, Albe. I even disgusted

myself this time."

Albe's expression eased. "She'll cool down in a while.... Tell her that,

when she comes back."

"I will." Corouda rolled his shirtsleeves up another turn, feeling

uncomfortably hot. "Well, we need three if we're going to keep playing." He

gestured at Piper Alvarian Jary, still sitting in the sun. "You wanted to

know what he's like - why don't we ask him?"

"Him?" Incredulity faded to curiosity on Albe's face. "Why not? Go ahead and

ask him."

"Hey, Jary!" Corouda watched the sunburned face lift, startled, to look at

him. "Want to play some squamish?" He could barely see the expression on

Jary's face, barely see it change. He thought it became fear, decided he must

be wrong. But then Jary squinted at him, shielding his eyes against the sun,

and the dark head bobbed. Jary came toward them, watching the ground, with

the unsure, shuffling gait of a man who couldn't find his footing.

He sat down between them awkwardly, an expressionless smile frozen on his

mouth, and pulled his feet into position.

Corouda found himself at a loss for words, wondering why in hell he'd done

this. He held out the cup, shook it. "Uh - you know how to play squamish?"

Jary took the cup and shook his head. "I don't g - get much chance to play

anything, W - warden." The smile turned rueful, but there was nothing in his

voice. "I don't get asked."

Corouda remembered again that Piper Alvarian Jary stuttered, and felt an

undesired twinge of sympathy. But hadn't he heard, from somebody, that Jary

had always stuttered? Jary had finally loosened the neck of his coveralls;

Corouda could see the beginning of a scar between his collarbones, running

down his chest. Jary caught him staring; a hand rose instinctively to close

the seal.

Corouda cleared his throat. "Nothing to it, it's mostly luck. You throw the

pieces, and it depends on the - "

Another mindless squall came from the tent behind them. Jary glanced toward

it.

" - the distribution, the way the pieces cluster.... Does that bother you?"

The bald question was out before he realized it, and left him feeling like a

rude child.

Jary looked back at him as though it hadn't surprised him at all. "No.

They're just animals. B - better them than me."

Corouda felt his anger rise, remembering what Jary was ... until he

remembered that he had said the same thing.

"Piper! Come here, I need you."

- - - - - - -

Corouda recognized Hoban Orr's voice. Jary recognized it too, climbed to his

feet, stumbling with haste. "I'm sorry, the Doctor wants me." He backed away;

they watched him turn and shuffle off toward Orr's tent. His voice had not

changed. Corouda suddenly tried not to wonder why he was needed.... Catspaw:

person used by another to do something dangerous or unpleasant.

Corouda stood up, brushing at his pants. Jary spent his time outside while

Orr was dissecting; Piper Alvarian Jary, who had served a man who made Attila

the Hun, Hitler, and Kahless look like nice guys. Corouda wondered if it were

possible that he really didn't like to watch.

Albe stood with him and stretched. "What did you think of that? That's the

real Piper Alvarian Jary, all right. 'Better them than me ... just a bunch

of animals.' He probably thinks we're all a bunch of animals."

Corouda watched Jary disappear into the tent. "Wouldn't surprise me at all."

- - - - - - -

Piper Alvarian Jary picked his way cautiously over the rough, slagged surface

of the narrow cave ledge, setting down one foot and then the other like a

puppeteer. Below him, some five meters down the solid rock surface here, lay

the shallow liquid surface of the radioactive mud. He rarely looked down at

it, too concerned with lighting a path for his own feet. Their geological

tests had shown that a seven-meter layer forty meters down in the boiling mud

held a freakish concentration of fissile ores, hot enough once to have eaten

out this strange, contorted subterranean world. He risked a glance out into

the pitch blackness, his headlamp spotlighting grotesque formations cast from

molten rock; silvery metallic stalactites and stalagmites, reborn from

vaporized ores. Over millennia the water-saturated mass of mud and uranium

had become exothermic and then cooled, sporadically, in one spot and then

another. Like some immense witches' caldron, the whole underground had

simmered and sputtered for nearly half a million years.

Fumes rising in Jary's line of sight shrouded his vision of the tormented

underworld; he wondered vaguely whether the smell would be unpleasant, if he

could remove the helmet of his radiation suit. Someone else might have

thought of Hell, but that image did not occur to him.

He stumbled, coming up hard against a jagged outcropping. Orr's suited form

turned back to look at him, glittered in the dancing light of his own

headlamp. "Watch out for that case!"

He felt for the bulky container slung against his hip, reassuring his

nerveless body that its contents were still secure. Huddled inside it,

creeping over one another aimlessly, were the half dozen sluggish, rat-sized

troglodytes they had captured this trip. He turned his light on them, but

they did not respond, gazing stupidly at him and through him from the

observation window. "It's all right, D - doctor."

Orr nodded, starting on. Jary ducked a gleaming stalactite, moved forward

quickly before the safety line between them jerked taut. He was grateful for

the line, even though he had heard the warden named Hyacin-Soong call it his

leash. Hyacin-Soong followed behind him now with the other warden, Corouda,

who had asked him to play squamish this morning. He didn't expect them to ask

him again; he knew that he had antagonized Hyacin-Soong somehow - maybe just

by existing. Corouda still treated him with benign indifference.

Jary glanced again at the trogs, wishing suddenly that Orr would give up on

them and take him home. He wanted the safety of the Simeu Institute, the

security of the known. He was afraid of his clumsiness in these alien

surroundings, afraid of the strangers, afraid of displeasing Orr.... He let

the air out of his constricted lungs in a long sigh. Of course he was afraid;

he had good reason to be. He was Piper Alvarian Jary.

But Orr would never give up on the trogs, until he either broke the secret

code of their alien genes or ran out of specimens to work with. Orr wanted

above all to discover how they had adapted to the cave in the geologically

short span of time the reactor had been stable - everyone in the expedition

wanted to know that. But even the trogs' basic biology confounded him: what

the functions were of the four variant kinds he had observed; how they

reproduced when they appeared to be sexless, at least by human standards; what

ecological niches they filled, with such hopelessly rudimentary brains. And

particularly, how their existence was thermodynamically possible. Orr

believed that they seined nutrients directly from the radioactive mud, but

even he couldn't accept the possibility that their food chain ended in nuclear

fission. The trogs themselves were faintly radioactive; they were

carbon-based, could withstand high pressures, and perceived stimuli far into

the short end of the EM spectrum. And that was all that Orr was certain of,

so far.

Jary clung with his gloved hands to the rough wall above the ledge as it

narrowed, and remembered touching the trogs. Once, when he was alone, he had

taken off his protective gloves and held one of them in his bare hands. Its

scaled, purplish-gray body had not been cold and slippery as he had imagined,

but warm, sinuous, and comforting. He had held onto it for as long as he

dared, craving the sensual, sensory pleasure of its motion and the alien

texture of its skin. He had caressed its small unresponsive body, while it

repeated over and over the same groping motions unperturbed, like an untended

machine. And his hands had trembled with the same confusion of shame and

desire that he always knew when he handled the experimental animals....

There had been a time when he had played innocently with the soft, supple,

pink-eyed mice and rabbits, the quick, curious monkeys, and the iridescent

fletters. But then Orr had begun training him as an assistant; and

observation of the progress of induced diseases, the clearing away of entrails

and blood, the disposal of small, ruined bodies in the incinerator chute had

taught him their place, and his own. Animals had no rights and no feelings.

But when he held the head of a squirming mouse between his fingers and looked

Vinge, Joan D - SS - To Bell the Cat.pdf

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