The Mind-Riders (10 page)

It didn't take long to find out why he was back. He was
infected.
Somehow, it had all got through to him. It had eaten into his skin and into his heart. He was still thinking, months after his big night, that the one thing of importance in the world was seeing Herrera beaten—not necessarily beating him, but seeing him beaten. Valerian had screwed his head, twisted him somehow. Poor Ray had lived with Valerian and been a part of the crusade for long, long months, and it had all taken hold of him. He had got involved with it. And he still felt at home in the game. He wanted to help me.

He put me through my paces inside the ring, really forcing me through some pretty tough work. Outside the ring, though, he didn't stop. He was still trying to corner me, always trying to get through my guard and hit me—with words, with arguments, with regrets, with advice. It was almost enough to make me scream. Most times, I got away. The house was a refuge—he was no longer the golden boy and he was out with Wolff and the other hirelings—but I knew there couldn't be any real or permanent escape. It was just one of those things that have to be faced. Someday I was going to have to sit still and let him pour out his bitter soul on to my lap.

Eventually, on a day off when I felt so detached from life in general that it seemed I wouldn't mind if World War Ninety-Nine broke out, I agreed to go along with him on a trip into the mountains. The idea was to get—so he said—some clean air and a look at a different world. Wolff declined an invitation but Stella found out and opted in—which meant that Curman was assigned to us as well, because Valerian apparently didn't approve of his granddaughter running round loose, especially in the kidnap season.

I was assigned the front seat, beside Angeli, by a kind of conspiracy of presumption. He talked at me for mile after mile after mile. All the way. He kept his eyes on the road, but his hands were never still on the wheel. They kept wandering to reinforce the points he was making.

“You can beat him,” he assured me. In fact, he seemed to assure me of that at the beginning of eighty percent of his paragraphs. It was his premise, his jumping-off point for rhapsodies and fantasies of method and theory.

“I couldn't quite crack him, you see,” he explained. “But he can be cracked. And once he is, he's just meat like anyone else. It seems to me he hasn't got quite his old edge—like there's a seam which has been taking all these years of strain and could open any time. Maybe in five years I could take him myself—right now I haven't the experience. But I ran him close and you can follow up, you can take up where I left off and you can break him. For a long time when I was in there with him it was all even. And I began to feel him—you know what I mean—
feel
him taking it in, going back on his reserve tank. Just that little bit extra is all it needs. Do like I did—conserve your strength, don't let him hit you too hard too often—that's your style, I know. If you can do that, hang on in like me, stay with him or ahead of him, keep the tally guessing, I think he'll run out of gas. Twelve, maybe fourteen, he'll go up in smoke. Nothing left. Important thing is not to give, not to crack yourself—but you won't, because you're not the type to give. You're too tough for him. I see you got an edge when we're in the ring. You can take me, you can take him.”

I listened. I listened to it all.

I remembered sitting and hoping this fatuous creep could beat Herrera. I prayed for him to do it. But that's sim fighting for you—you never get to see the guy inside the machine. All you see is his image.

“Maybe someday,” he said, “I'll come and take the title from you.”

Thanks a lot, I didn't say. Thanks for the thought, if such it can be called.

As testimony to the power of a myth, Angeli had a certain fascination. He was roped and tied by ideas which would confine him until the end of his days—unless he got a new revelation in the meantime.

Someone—a whole crowd of someones, including himself—had hammered switches in Angeli's mind until they were sealed closed forever, barring cross-circuits in the brain. Herrera had to be beaten—next time. Had to be. He had no regard for logic—there always had to be a way to do it, a way it could be done. There was always a new formula, a new plan—a recipe for achievement. Racehorse trainers operate on the same kind of basis with regard to slow horses. Every time a nag comes back looking like a tired dog, sweat all over and feeling the whip marks on its arse, beaten out of the finish for lack of speed, class and spirit, there's the trainer explaining to the owner that the race was slowly run. It had a bad draw, it had the wrong jockey, it needs blinkers, it was the way he didn't eat his oats last night. It's never the fact that the horse is a loser. Never. That's the one thing the owner doesn't want to know, doesn't want to hear. It always has to be circumstance.

So there was Angeli, talking to himself
via
me. Every time he found a new word, a new angle, a new excuse, it poured out again. Every time he said, “You can beat him” he meant, “I could have beaten him”. He meant, “He can be beaten”. He meant anything except, “I lost”, “I'm a loser”, “He's too good”, “He beat me”.

Ray Angeli was a tangled man. And yet—he could box.

He had looked good. The vamps drank their fill from him. Losers thrive on illusions. Excuses off the peg, filed and cross-indexed, a logic to support every conceivable event. His intentions were good, of course.

The road to hell is paved with good intentions, and each one has its loser sitting right on top of it, saying, “Where I went wrong was here. If—”

If—

Slowly, the words tumbling in my ears became meaningless. I listened to the sounds, divorced from their meanings. I turned off the language and listened to the stupid, fumbling rhythm.

It was good to get right up into the mountains. I'm no nature lover but I love height. The great stands of green trees don't inspire me at all—they're alien, hopelessly and irredeemably, so far as people who are born and live their lives in a matrix of concrete cages and arterial roads are concerned. But the faces of rock above the tree line—that's something else. On a murky day even the snow on the caps looks as gray as the grime which dresses the crowns of the capstacks and the twilit towers. That's beauty—the reflection of man in nature.

Even today, in the second Age of Enlightenment (or the third, or the fifth, depending on the brand of your pocket calculator) they still champion the beauty of the untouched, unspoilt, unpolluted, unadorned. But that's an archaic view—the romantic syndrome, the aesthetics of fake nostalgia. To me, and to any authentic child of today, there can be nothing intrinsically pleasing about a tree, or a flower, or a carefully-conserved deer with a government-protection tag in its ear and a medical history in some bureaucrat's filing cabinet. No one, bar the self-deluding, can see anything clean or pretty in the round of nature with its thousand parasites and diseases, the biochemical pollution of its scents and pollen dust and its leaking sap. The hell with spring and hurricanes—sulfuric acid rain is clean, and it purifies. That's the sense of values appropriate to the real world, no matter what fantasy land you believe in up above the clouds.

But as I said, losers live on illusions. So do the rich.

Stella got a kick out of it—and, I think, Curman too. Curman was innocent enough to enjoy the things he was supposed to, and clever enough to take them as they came.

I wanted to talk to Stella, but I never got the chance. She didn't seem interested in people at all—not for a while. She hardly even looked at me—or at Ray Angeli. She had said that she liked Ray, but the liking obviously hadn't cut deep. Like Curman, he was relegated to being part of the human furniture of her immediate environment. I don't think he noticed. Or maybe he just didn't allow it to show.

We ate out at a roadhouse that was full to the seams with aging participants in the great nostalgic dream. They were all bubbling with love of the woods and maintained an ostentatious piety in their communion with Eco-God and his unspoilt angels. Come back Pan, all is forgiven.

If they crucified Christ tomorrow there'd be a million and a half people walking on Washington to petition against cutting down a tree to make the cross.

By the time we got back, night had fallen, and as we came down into the city we could see the Valerian estate as an enclave of shadow in a metropolitan corpus that was blazing with atom-fed electric glory. A cast in the eye of civilization.

CHAPTER TEN

And the next day, the sky fell.

It had been hovering a long time.

“I want you to take some tests,” said the good doctor.

“PT tests?”

“Emotional reactivity tests, situation resistance, psychophysiological integration. You know the line.”

“Why now?” I wanted to know. “Why not in the beginning?” I was manifesting what the PTs call “suspicion and hostility” toward the idea of undergoing what they considered to be the A-1 route to self-repair.

“You know how we do the standard tests,” she said.

“You sit the subject down in the middle of a sim projection and then throw in giant spiders and naked ladies. The poor sap gets switched from scene to scene in a matter of seconds and gets thoroughly confused and frightened. A headdress taps the echoes in his brain. When you let him out you tell him which of his mental washers need replacing and give him an estimate for a whole new gearbox. Then he pays over half the credit he'll earn in the next thirty years. You bung him back in the sim, and he sits through an hour a week taking passive part in horrible and embarrassing situations until he's a nervous wreck. Or, to use the correct jargon, sane.”

She ignored the greater part of this lucid account and said, “And you know why I couldn't give you the standard tests.”

“Sure,” I said, deflating myself just a little. “They wouldn't be any good. I spend all my working life in sims—not just sitting in them but
inside
them. I don't get confused or frightened or embarrassed. I've been called upon to attempt rape with the most wonderful naked ladies the computer can produce and I've been some of the nastiest spiders. My reactions wouldn't exactly be—what d'you call it?—
normal
.”

“And so,” she said, “I've devised some tests tailored to your particular requirements.”

I didn't like that idea, though I should have seen it coming.

“I'd have to be wired up to take these tests, I suppose?” I asked, soberly. I'd given up being a facetious churl for the time being.

“Yes.”

MiMaC, apart from being a breakthrough in the management and supervision of mechanical production, a revolution in entertainment and a godsend to military training and planning—plus a hundred other applications in just about every field of human endeavor which can put up the money—provides scope for the most effective and ingenious tortures man—or woman—can devise. If I allowed myself to be hooked into a sim situation with neither knowledge nor control of what was going to happen to me therein, I'd be putting myself into a situation of total vulnerability. There are disadvantages to having wires in your head.

“I'm not playing those kinds of game,” I told her. “No way.”

“Think about it,” she said. “It's not to satisfy my own morbid curiosity or to indulge a hypothetical streak of sadism. I want you to find out what your psych profile looks like. I want you to understand better how you tick. It isn't pleasant to go through these tests, trying to identify what scares you, what you don't like, what your idiosyncrasies are. It's stripping you more naked than anyone wants to be. But if you want any measure of command over your state of mind—and you'll need that command for the life-prospectus you've drawn up for yourself—it's something that has to be done. You can no longer afford the luxury of not being able to look at yourself and see more than a face.”

“There are other ways,” I said.

“Name three.”

“Intellectual honesty?”

“You think you've gone through life without ever telling yourself a lie, without ever concealing the truth from yourself?”

I guessed not. But—

“I don't know what you have cooked up for me, but it has to be tough to break through my conscious knowledge that everything in a sim is fake. I don't know how you intend to soften me up so that I'll react, but however you want to do it I won't like it. And I won't go through with it. I don't care whether you're trying to help me or destroy me, I'd rather stay the way I am.”

“Nobody can change that except you.”

“Don't talk garbage.”

“I mean it. I'm not going to put pressure on you. I only want to put you on the horns of a dilemma. I just want to find out how you can turn yourself from a loser into a winner, and I want to tell you how to do it. From there, it's your own decision. You can act, or you can take your chances.”

“You still think I'm a loser?”

She looked at me steadily. “I can tell you one thing you're afraid of right now,” she said. “And that's being a loser.”

I shrugged. “So okay. I don't like the dark either. All kinds of things scare me. I could make out a list—or tell you all about my favorite nightmares.”

“The things that scare people most,” she said, “are the things they won't admit they're scared of. And in any case, the spectrum of your fears is only something we need to know about. The more important thing is your spectrum of hates. Fear is negative—it can make you a loser but eliminating it doesn't make you a winner. Hate is the other way round—it's hate that gets the best out of you.”

“I don't accept that.”

“That's precisely the problem.”

“Very smart,” I complimented her. “Very glib. But it makes no difference. I know damn well that your best interests and my best interests could never get together on a casting couch to make beautiful music. Whatever you want to find out I'm happy enough to keep secret. I can get by.”

“I'll show you the test first,” she said. “You can watch it played through in the holo from outside, as a spectator. No surprises, no tricks. The way you get softened up to heighten your sensitivity and increase your reactivity is simple enough—just a few minutes SD. Not enough to hurt. You have to remember that it's in no one's interests to have you get hurt. You have a fight next week and you have to win. After that, there's another fight, which you have to be ready to win. We want you in peak shape for those fights, and this is supposed to help you, not half-kill you. You can't lose anything by knowing the alternatives.”

“I don't want to do it,” I said, flatly.

“Nobody wants to do it,” she replied. “Not ever. But mostly they do. It's an accepted fact of life. If you like, take it as a challenge. Fight against the program, try to beat the tests.”

I thought about it. In a sense, it
was
a challenge. It was a deliberate challenge to my self-confidence and self-containment. I'd mentioned intellectual honesty, but if I were really intellectually honest I'd have nothing to fear in the tests. Sure, you ought to have privacy in your own head, but privacy is a limited thing, constantly eroded by the circumstances of everyday life. Other people can always see into your soul. It's one of the facts of life.

In addition, there was the fact that if she really wanted to take liberties with my mind the opportunity was there virtually every day. It would be no sweat for her to switch me off Wolff's program and into her own. The only OFF switch I had in the sim was the physiological emergency. You're all alone in unreality, and you can't run away if the rules won't let you.

I knew she didn't want to burn my mind—only warm it up a little. And she was right in saying that she couldn't do anything by force. Valerian and his hirelings wanted to add something
to
me, not build a replacement.

In all likelihood, taking her test wouldn't bother me too much. It might even be interesting. I could make it into a test of my own—a test to see how cool I could stay under pressure. Maybe if I could walk through Maria's inferno with my emotions on a tight rein there'd be no need to worry about my mental state when I met Herrera. If I could go through this, maybe I could go through anything.

I piled up my excuses one by one, building up to the critical threshold of agreement.

“Okay,” I said, finally—and the trudging seconds of the pause must have added up to a nice stack of credit notes at the rates she was charging for her services. “Show me the script.”

She showed me the script, and ran bits of it on the holo unit which turned her desk top into a crystal ball.

It started out with about fifteen minutes SD. That isn't enough to reduce anyone to a gibbering wreck although some people with preconceived ideas about what should happen do manage to tear themselves apart in much shorter times. So far as I was concerned it would just hypersensitize my brain.

The fear run came next. Instead of the solid models that the standard tests use she had devised vague, half-formed images that could only be suggestive in the brief times they were flashed—this was a kind of 3-D Rorschach test, reaching at my subconscious through the interpretative prejudices of my visual habits. Standard fear-reaction tests are clumsy but quantifiable—this one was sophisticated but quite unquantitative. She reckoned that didn't matter.

After this run there was a rest phase, then more SD. She explained that situation testing had been left out entirely as I'd be incapable of identifying with most sim situations as if they were real. The exception was the ring, but she'd already observed me in the ring quite exhaustively. What she'd done instead was to put together fragments of nonsensical events—bits of dreams. Dream landscapes and dream events. These were supposed to exploit the mind-opening potential of the superficially absurd. When meaning is unclear, the mind gropes for it. The subconscious will try to find meanings to fit, and will compare them against the dream sequence, hoping to impose a pattern of common sense. The incomprehensible, she thought, was bound to engage my mind and make it work—even if I was only conscious of the activity as a kind of puzzle-solving.

I looked at some of the sequences, and they seemed innocuous enough—crazy collages of ideas like surrealistic paintings.

Finally, I confirmed my agreement and we set a time for the test—in the evening, after the day's work-out. It would have to be late because the machine would have to be prepared and I would need time to recover from a long afternoon in the hot seat.

The first period of sensory deprivation was the worst part of the whole performance. SD is one of those things which works all the better when you put up more psychological resistance. Some people under SD are hysterical in a matter of minutes because they know that's what's supposed to happen and they talk themselves into it. People who fight like hell to stay calm and unbothered go hysterical in pretty much the same way—exhausting themselves in a battle that needn't be fought. It's like the old joke about winning a prize if you can spend five minutes thinking about a horse but not about its tail.

SD is not something you can get used to. Your brain remains awake and alert, but cut off from all sensory input it reacts by stages, with no reference at all to consciousness. The first thing it does is to “turn up the volume” on all the input devices which ought to be bringing in information but aren't—that is to say, it becomes responsive to stimuli which would normally be well below the awareness threshold, like the movement of the blood in the veins and the feel of internal muscular contractions.

Unless you have a particularly creaky body, though, that isn't enough to satisfy the brain's processing faculties. Then, one of two things can happen. Either the brain can begin to switch off its processing faculties (but without switching off or turning down its input receptors) or it can begin to process “secondary information”—information recovered from the memory tapes. In the first instance the subject goes into a quasi-hypnotic trance. In the second, he begins to dream or hallucinate. In either case, though, he is still awake and alert—the
pons
is not activated so as to switch off the body-machine and let the mind lapse into sleep.

A long session of SD can make the brain do peculiar things, and breaking into a long-established sequence of SD with external stimuli can cause severe disturbance. But ten or twenty minutes—provided that the subject is neither over-reactive nor over-resistant—merely serves to make the mind more receptive to stimuli, which will seem exaggerated and call forth exaggerated emotional responses. Very helpful to a PT who is vamping the subject's mind.

When the patterns began to come at me my mind was taken by storm. I was more or less helpless to put conscious shackles on my subconscious—and thus supposedly natural—reactivity.

The images were in color, but the color was just glamour, misleading my practiced eye and undermining my ability to identify shapes on the spur of the moment. It was the shapes that were important and it was the shapes that my mind would use as signs in order to design responses. Aversion reactions would go out across the B-link clear as a bell, though I'd probably not feel anything much myself—E-resonance works off physiological changes of state connected with emotion, not the way that emotions are actually experienced—after subconscious censorship—in the mind.

I could feel myself reacting, not with the kind of fear which comes to you when you see something about to hurt you, but with the kind of vague, unreasoning disturbance which sometimes assaults you in dreams—itself rather fearful because you can't identify its source.

I knew that somewhere out in the streaming shadows were all the things on the list of common and neurotic phobic responses—spiders and wasps, shadows and pet dogs, crowds and midgets, confined spaces and vast vistas of emptiness, long drops and sheer walls. But they all went by too fast for any kind of
considered
reaction.

I tried, reflexively, to recoil from it all—to withdraw, the way you sometimes try desperately to wake up from a dream which has become too nasty to stay in. But you can't wake up when you aren't asleep. And you can't shut your eyes when the visual images are being pumped through silver wires straight into your inner being.