The Mind-Riders (11 page)

Strangely, I got a sudden burst of curiosity. I wondered what all this would look like from an objective viewpoint—from Maria Kenrian's shoes. I tried to estimate how much of what might be getting through.

Somewhere, I told myself, my secret fear is being reflected in the jigging of a mechanical lever—pointed out by a needle swinging across the face of a dial. I'm being read, like one of those frustrated virgin books in the library—my calf covers tipped aside to make the pages yield up their meaning, display it to the naked eye.

Some people, I know, find themselves enmeshed by terror in dreams where they experience a sudden loss of support. Others find the ultimate self-test in sensations of utter immobility, where they find themselves desperate to run while their bodies are too heavy to allow them to lift a limb.

But I felt no terror, no desperation. What happened, happened—all that resounded in me was a casual nausea—a gut-twisting that threatened to knot my being. There was no semblance of retreat or of mental collapse.

But I felt lonely.

When it was over, and my sim body was sitting in a sim chair in a sim room, waiting for phase two to begin, I was struck by the thought of how absurd it is that we know ourselves so very slightly.

As the music soothed me, I almost laughed at the trivial cosmic joke which makes us need psychotherapists. How is it that we must be so unfamiliar with our own minds? How is it that we need ingenious tests of subtlety and sophistication in order to decoy the consciousness away so that outsiders can get a peep at what we really are?

Why
aren't
we aware of the roots of our fears, the bases of our hopes, the fundamentals of our ambitions? Isn't it ridiculous that
others
should see us as we need to see ourselves, while for the most part we cannot?

Sometimes, I think the only explanation for human existence is that God must be a committee.

Suddenly, in the room with the piped music, an image appeared. It was Dr. Kenrian, complete with white coat and synthetic smile. A nice touch.

“All set?” she asked.

I didn't respond, not by so much as a twitch of the face. I wasn't programmed for it.

“Phase two begins now,” she said.

Then it all went dark again. The silence rang in my ears. The sense of touch fell away from me, leaving me enfolded by nonexistence.

The vague feeling of disturbance, of existential dislocation, was still lurking in the canyons of my mind like one of those black dogs people used to talk about. I let it lurk, and tried to remain easy and comfortable while the SD magnified my mind for the second time.

Then the fragments began to feed in.

Again the rate of flow seemed fast—up-tempo of normal experience—but this time the abstraction of shapes which had initially served to conceal the visual cues from consciousness was replaced by the juxtaposition of absurd assemblies of coalesced images. The whole images usually included action—events as well as images—and seemed to last some time longer than the thirty seconds or so they actually did. They ran into one another, making a sequence which seemed totally fantastic—unreal or surreal. Consciously I could identify and make sense out of the parts of each vision, but when it came to integrating the whole into a “situation” my conscious mind was left flatfooted. Only the subconscious, with a vocabulary of symbols far more versatile—if less rich—than that available to the rational mind, had any chance to make something of them.

As is the case with dreams, very few of the elements of the sequence made more than the most transient impression on the surface of the memory.

There was a street, outside a room whose perspective misled the eye. A bulbous lamp, lighting the room from without, an external stair winding down the outer wall from above. Cobwebs over a bed—slept in but no longer occupied, possibly left untended for years. A feeling of dryness. Movement slow, invisible. Light creeping in through corners—

running into—

An eye. Reflections in the eye of standing screens, like Venetian blinds, mounted on curved legs. Between the screens, sand, wind-drifted. Clouds above. At the back of the image, behind all other reflected objects, the reflection of an eye, staring into the eye which holds it. And in the eye, screens—

And so, ad infinitum—

An eagle in a blue-violet sky, storm clouds and silence. Heavy air. Underneath, poplars in a long line. An alleyway with stones glistening, not with rain. Figures moving—a girl, gray-white and unreal, perhaps a statue—is raped. The rapists move in jerks, like puppets. She is forced to the ground, then folded. One of the men has sandals, their eyes are all concealed. An abundance of red in the image, but it will not settle on any object or field of vision. It escapes any direct association—

but flees—

Cold fire in the air, or perhaps we are under the sea. The world swirls, and sparkles. Figures entwine. It is impossible to identify the arms with the legs, to separate the limbs into sets, into identities. There is simply a liquid mass of humanity, a coenocyte. There may be volcanoes in the distance, there may be fish skimming the surface of the sand. There are plants—dendritic weeds—etched in shadow—

which falls—

Bulbous leaves. A rich, all-engulfing foliage. In the branches, movement. In the stillness, an owl, with entrails hanging from its mouth—the torn body of mouse or shrew. In the grass, movement, but sitting still, with infinite patience in its eye, a leopard. Alive, but motionless. Hungry. Alert.

Blink—

Cobbled streets. Downhill, a river. Many bridges, so that the river flows mostly under concrete, exposed to the air in bare patches. Its waters rank. In the streets, soldiers. Other people walk too quickly, everyone in a hurry. A double-decker bus carries us among them. We are the enemy, but undetected. At any moment, there may be fighting or an escape. The bus moves too slowly. The street gets steeper. The waters are black—

swirling and swelling—

And more.

I search for faceless men, soft clocks, snakes, guns. I look for staircases enclosed by tight walls, battlements and bandages. There are none of these. The symbols are always elusive—when the mind begins to decode, the code is changed. The symbols shift and obliquity retains its supremacy. One part of the mind enquires, another conjures.

I feel sweat on my face, and realize that reality is seeping back into the dream. The tech is dismantling the apparatus. Maria is standing by, having already discarded the B-link by which she has been a spectator in my mind.

Blink—

I felt curiously naked. I never like coming out of a sim if there are people around who have been riding my mind, but this was even worse. After being in the ring, I know exactly what has happened. I know what the vamps have been sucking. But this time I had just been a piece of window-glass.

I felt very tired.

I wanted to ask questions, but I didn't want to hear the answers.

“Well?” I said, harshly.

She smiled faintly. “Take it easy,” she advised.

“Sure.”

When the last of the electrodes was tucked away, and the caps replaced, I got up and flexed my arms.

“You seem to be okay,” I told her. “How am I?”

“Balanced,” she said.

“As sane as you are?”

She shrugged. “Tomorrow,” she said. “I'll come out here again. We'll talk about it then. Not now.”

I was half-glad of the way out—but only half-glad. I went back to the house and to bed. Where I thought for a while—and then dreamed.

I can't remember where I went in my dreams, but I know that when I woke next morning I was in a better frame of mind. I was not simply ready, but anxious, to get answers to the questions—to find out how the enemy's plan of campaign was coming along.

I had to wait, of course—all day. But the routine was just routine and it was easy enough to cruise through by now. I finally got to see her after the evening meal, in one of the multiplicity of small rooms with neither name nor function which seemed to proliferate endlessly throughout Valerian's great house. She seemed well-satisfied and confident, but it might just have been the face she wore for such occasions as this one.

“Well,” I said, in my customary opening tone of jovial hostility, “have you catalogued the contents of my soul?”

“More or less,” she replied.

“And what are my secret fears?”

“Nothing so very unusual. Or particularly secret. Like most of us, you fear death and other people, not necessarily in that order.”

I couldn't tell whether this was an answer or whether it was a subtle brand of repartee. I didn't say anything. She leaned forward slightly in her chair.

“There's only one way that you're going to win this fight—the fight against Herrera,” she said.

I waited.

“You have to overcome your present ambiguity of attitude. You can't go into the ring with your resentment of Valerian getting in the way. You want Herrera to lose, and you want Valerian to lose, and there's a conflict of interests. That conflict has to be resolved.”

“You want me to learn to love Valerian?” I said. It was something I'd always suspected.

“That wouldn't work,” she said. “What can be done, though, is to make you desire to see Herrera beaten stronger than your desire to cross Valerian.”

“There's nothing stronger than my desire to beat Herrera,” I said.

“That's not quite what I said,” she pointed out. “You want to win—but winning isn't such a simple thing. In your present state of mind you could get slaughtered in the ring and come out believing—honestly and sincerely—that you'd won, that you'd beaten Valerian out of his revenge. That's the danger of the mixed motives, you see—they offer you an excuse. I want to sharpen your personal animosity against Herrera. You don't like him, or what he stands for—but you don't quite hate him, not the way you hate Velasco Valerian.

“What I went looking for in your mind is a way to sharpen you against Herrera, a way to make him into an image to be destroyed.”

“In other words,” I said, quietly, “to make me feel about him the way Valerian feels.”

“Yes.”

I stood up and went to the window, not because I wanted to look out but because I wanted to get away from her for a few minutes.

“And you think you can do it?” I asked.

“Yes.”

Outside, there were starlings on the grass, pecking at something. I couldn't imagine what. Everyone knows that it's only early birds who get worms.

“Seen your way,” I said, “this is a thoroughly dirty business, isn't it? We have nothing in which to trade but hatreds and fears. Suffering and anguish. That's what makes your world turn around. That's what people are made of, according to your recipe. Not even frogs and snails and what the hell. Just neuroses, just tastefully draped vices. You want me to win, and in your book that's synonymous with wanting me to hate. You see no more in it than that. You live in a cruel world.”

I turned back to look at her. She was perfectly relaxed in a chair that seemed a couple of sizes too big for her. Her silver hair was neat and slick, as if sprayed with molten metal. Her slender features were made-up, the flaws in her skin—the moles, the pores, the thin lines—all covered over. Packaged. And behind the mask? When she took off her face, was there a snake-locked gorgon waiting within? For all I knew, she might cry vitriol tears.

“My methods work,” she said.

“They shouldn't,” I told her.

“Your cynicism slipped then,” she said, calmly. “Just for a moment.”

I couldn't think of anything to do with my hands, and all of a sudden I thought they seemed spare, ugly. I put them in my pockets.

“I had this dream,” I said to her, keeping a perfectly straight face, though she couldn't see it. “I was swimming in the Arctic Sea. I was just on the point of freezing to death when I was swallowed by a giant flatfish. It was the same one that got Jonah—never mind that crap about whales, it was a giant flatfish. Inside, it was pretty dark, so I struck a match and found myself alone with this transparent girl. I held the match a little closer to get a better look at her, never having seen a transparent girl before, and she recoiled from its heat. I saw the surface of her arm begin to melt, and I realized that she was a water nymph who'd somehow frozen over.

“And that, you see, was my introduction to one of the great enigmas of life. Right there and then, the question popped into my mind, and I said, ‘What's an ice girl like you doing in a plaice like this?'”

Surprisingly, she laughed.

“Someone,” I said, “should found a new school of psychotherapy based on the analysis of the jokes their patients tell. Even if no one got any saner everybody concerned could have a damn good laugh. As a method, it's just mad enough to catch on. Nobody ever lost money by inviting the public to make fools of themselves and demanding a fee for the privilege.”

There was a brief silence.

“And?” she prompted.

“And what?”

“And now you've steered well away from the point at issue. Now what?”

I turned back to the window. “You can forget the point at issue,” I said. “I'll do my own fighting. I won't be programmed like a guard dog to go for the throat as soon as I see the bogey man.”

“What about the tests?”

“What about them?”

“Don't you want to know what they indicate? Don't you want to know
how
you can learn to hate Herrera?”

“No,” I said. “I'd rather not. Lead us not into temptation. I think the matter is better left where it belongs—inside my head. I'll work out my own way to beat Herrera. In a boxing match—not a war of extermination. It's not a matter of life and death.”

“Maybe not death,” she said, demurely, “but life—”