The Mind-Riders (9 page)

“It's still the public that pays,” he said.

“So okay,” I said. “The best man has to win. I'm the best fighter. Herrera's the best feeler. The audience wants Herrera, but under the rules—under the conditions laid down by the men who believe in competition and not in comedy—it's going to be me that wins it. You can whine, but you still can't have it both ways.”

He went back to eating, his dignity intact. He didn't have to win arguments at his own table. He could just cancel them out of his consciousness. It was his world.

The slight tension drained out of the atmosphere, and I re-directed my attention to scanning the reports.

I was surprised to find that there was one which wasn't hostile—either that or its hostility was sublimated into an invisible irony. It was by a man named Sacchetti, writing for a sheet that probably had an anti-Network axe to grind.

It could be,
said the article,
that the neurotic overkill to which our innocent senses and feelings are subjected by the current style in boxing may be tuned down in the near future. It may be that we shall be offered the opportunity to recover a more refined sense of values—perhaps an old fashioned stoicism according to which emotional outbursts are regarded as signs of personal weakness. A new brand of unresponsive, stiff-lipped heroes may soon be launched by the shapers of men. Perhaps such a move is long overdue. Perhaps we may even see the infusion of some of the skill and character of classical boxing into a simulated sport which has so far been notable only for its brutality.

“Now him,” I commented, “I like.”

“He's the court jester,” said Valerian, barely glancing at the paper and recognizing it from its typeface. “The establishment's pet cynic.”

“You think he doesn't mean it?”

“On the contrary,” said the old man. “He believes it all too seriously. He wouldn't be amusing if he wasn't grotesquely sincere. But he's only the lone voice who confirms the majority belief by presenting the unpalatable alternative. Even his style is the sort of fancy glibness readers love to take exception to.”

“I bet he loves you too,” I murmured. I caught Curman's eye but there was nothing in his gaze but calculated blankness. There was not the faintest aura of an opinion about him. He had watched the fight, I felt sure. Hooked into me. He might even have appreciated it.

After breakfast, it was straight back to work. Time marches on and so did the great crusade. Joe Tobias was just one step on the way, and there were plenty more to come.

CHAPTER NINE

A couple of days later I saw Stella again. I was still spending time in the library even though I'd become bored with the books—saturated with their antiquity and no longer fascinated by their feel. Reading the words I still enjoyed, but they felt so remote and so unconcerned. The ideas, as well as the objects which contained them, were stained by the dust of time, alien things in a world which used different instruments for the same purpose. In spite of it all, however, I still found the library the best place for a psychological escape from the heavy, morbid atmosphere. I had all but abandoned going into town, for whatever reason, and was slowly sinking down into the rut Valerian and Wolff had dug for me.

Apparently, my fondness for the library was accepted and approved of by the household, and it was acknowledged as my bolt-hole, my private space. No one ever bothered me there, except Stella, who came to find me. Even she had something of the attitude of an invader.

“Well?” she demanded peremptorily. “You know what you're in for yet?”

“The same as always,” I told her.

“You still want to be champion.”

“Pretty ridiculous if I changed my mind now, wouldn't it be?” I said. “Do you expect me to have a sudden revelation—hear the call? Decide that all these years I've been looking at the wrong stars? Should I just throw away my entire life?”

“Try another one,” she said.

“It's not as easy as that. We only have one each.”

“Suppose,” she said, carefully, “you lose.”

“I won't.”

“That's a coward's way to answer,” she said. “A refusal to face probabilities. That's not you speaking, it's a defense mechanism. You know you could lose. You must have thought about it.”

I'd thought about it all right.

“Well then,” I said, trying to keep it light and breezy. “Like Angeli and all the rest. On to the ex-Valerian scrap heap. Or maybe further—all the way back to 3912 and the kiddy-thrills. I won't be short of a job, or a life. I can just put my old habits back on and continue wearing them. There's lots worse off in the IA and the Social Services.”

“And grandfather?”

“He'll find another last chance. The shock won't kill him. I don't know that anything ever will. He's tough. He'll just rewrite the screenplay for his declining years. From a man like that there's no way to steal such things as hope. Herrera may crack before Valerian does.”

“You don't believe that,” she said.

“How should I know what to believe?” I replied, carelessly. “I only work here. Just passing through.”

“I'm not,” she said. “It's my life.”

“I'm the last person to come to for advice about how to live it.”

“I don't want advice,” she said. “I want to know where I'm up to. If you fail, where are we?”

“Since you put it like that,” I said, “I guess in my secret heart of hearts I think I'm the last of the last chances. He blames me for what happened as well as Herrera, and this, finally, is the main feature. In putting me up against Paul he's trying to tie his whole life up with a pink ribbon. He's reached the end. If I win, he'll hate me as fiercely as he ever hated Herrera, but he'll enter it in his book as a victory. If I lose—well, I guess he loses too. Once and for all. Maybe it
will
kill him, or maybe he'll find his way on to a whole new existential wavelength. Either way, it'll be over. For him, for you.”

She was silent for a few moments. I wondered why she came to me. Maybe she couldn't work it out for herself. Maybe the gulf between her and Valerian was uncrossable, unfathomable.

“I watched you the other night,” she said.

“And?” I prompted.

“You were so cold,” she said. “I didn't understand.”

So she'd done more than watch. “It's the way I am,” I said.

“It's cruel,” she stated.

“Why?”

She waved a hand in the air, groping for the words. “If you were angry, excited—all the hitting and the hurting would be natural—in context. It would all make some kind of sense. But your way, it seems cruel. Callous. Hurting just for its own sake.”

I shook my head. “Not for its own sake,” I said. “Not at all. You have it backwards. It's when a man is excited by what he's doing, committed to it, involved with it—that's when sport becomes cruelty, when the element of viciousness and barbarity comes in. But I don't enjoy hitting anyone. I do it because I'm good at it, because it's a contest.”

“But what you're doing is still the same,” she said. “You're still hitting someone, still hurting them. Removing the motive from barbarity doesn't make it civilized. It just leaves it without a reason—pointless barbarity.”

“You don't understand,” I told her. “You look at the fight and you see two men hitting one another. I guess in this day and age that's natural—that's what the vamps see and it's what they want to see. They just like the emotional charge that goes with the violence and they don't understand how much more to it there is.

“But there's an aesthetic quality in boxing. It's a sport, and it's a skill. It's a ritual, demanding that each man get the best out of his abilities. Rituals are something we need, to confirm our identities, to let us know who and what we are. A lot of the devotees of the old sport thought that sims would destroy the element of identity in the sport by making all men start equal, but they were wrong, because starting equal doesn't mean starting identical. There's still skill and style, and getting the utmost out of a sim body is even more difficult than getting the best out of your own. The fighters know that. Even Paul Herrera knows that there's far more to it than beating up the other guy. It's the audience—the mind riders—who can't and won't understand that there's more to winning than the display of brute force.”

“Have you ever considered,” she asked, “that the audience might have it right and that you might have it wrong?”

“I know what I do,” I said.

“And you try to cheat the audience. If you don't do what they want, that makes it all right. It squares your conscience.”

“I don't have a conscience.”

“Suppose,” she said, slowly, “that they make you into what they want you to be. Suppose they make you into a substitute Herrera.”

“They can't do that!”

“No? How many minds are there inside yours during a big fight? A hundred thousand. A million. All over the world—and you don't feel the pressure. You don't feel that they can do anything to you. You think they're just passengers.”

“That's the way the link works,” I reminded her.

“Is it?” she asked. And even though she was talking nonsense there was something in her voice which threatened me. She was trying to retail an old nightmare—mind control via MiMaC. Brain washing, mind distortion, change of personality, Jekyll and Hyde. When vultures settle on a corpse it becomes vulture-meat, no matter what it might have been before. The parasite absorbs the host, and the host's flesh becomes parasite flesh. The virus invades a cell, and the cell is converted to the production of virions. The integrity of the body can break down under a whole host of stimuli, go mad and lose control of itself, become cancerous. And what of the mind? How secure are its walls, how absolute is its structure? When you let in the riders, you surrender yourself to demonic possession. How can any one say that they come through it all unchanged, unsullied, unaffected? How can anyone say that the riders in your mind don't even leave their smell behind?

When Stella was gone, I was still looking for answers. From every side the assault was coming. There was no way to turn without running into someone's challenge, someone's accusation. I wished I could believe it was all a PT plot to undermine my self-confidence, that everyone came with a roster of questions prepared. But I didn't believe that.

I could have shrugged it all off, dismissed it all as irrelevant, settled back into perfect faith in my own aims, my own abilities. But I had to admit that I didn't have such perfect faith. I never had. The only perfect thing I had, untouchable by fate, was my will to win.

I was fixed up for another fight within a fortnight. Then another, and another.

One by one, I disposed of a trio of young hopefuls looking to get a significant start in life. They would all have other chances—nobody expects you to win everything right from the start. In the meantime, they were convenient cannon-fodder. I was never really extended and no fight went the distance.

But we all knew that it was just play—strictly for the record. It was a matter of the quantitative accumulation of wins, to build up my putative reputation as a hard man, a genuine contender. It was for publicity purposes as much as for anything. It was trivial.

Then came the first real fight, against a boxer of good quality. For this one, the pressure came on. Maria Kenrian stepped from the shadows back into the limelight of my life, reminding me by her continual presence of all the things she stood for. This one, she believed, was going to show me the light—it was going to make clear to me just how much I needed the ministrations of a first-class angel.

Again, the apprehension. Again, the determination to attack, to take my courage in both hands and go in to do what I could do, alone and unaided.

But this time, I couldn't just waltz through the first half dozen rounds, stacking them up to my credit like Valerian's servants stacked plates.

It was tough—a genuine contest. I was hustled, and I was hit. I was called upon to produce more power and energy than naturally flowed into my fists. I was called upon to find extra, and keep finding it. Not the kind of extra strength and coordination and fighting style I'd had to call back into the ring against Ira Manuel—that was just something I'd lost and had to find again—but something more. I was in fresh territory, pushed out of my natural depth for the first time.

I tried hard not to lose sight for the merest second of precisely what I was doing. I worked hard, in the sim and in my mind. I never once lost any semblance of control over either. For a while, the fight looked even, but as early as the third I was conscious of a certain superiority. I was a shade better. It wasn't easy making that superiority tell, making a margin of effort between us and keeping that margin widening steadily as rounds went by, but I did it.

It was like running uphill—the further I went the harder and the more punishing it got, but I edged ahead early and he was never catching up. After eleven he began to get desperate, to rush himself, overcommit his moves, and I began cutting him to pieces. He was on the floor in the twelfth and he took the count in the penultimate round.

It was a good win, and it confirmed me as a fighter of class. It made me into an eventual contender, and the way that Valerian was rushing it made me into a man who was likely to climb into the ring with the champion at the earliest possible moment. The press and the audience still didn't like me, but their hostility was being dissolved by a torrent of chatter. The public relations angle of their work began to take over from the opinionating.

Just one month after that crucial fifth fight my final program was arranged. One more medium-sized bogey to dispatch, and then Herrera. The dates of both fights were fixed, although the second was conditional on my winning the first.

I was surprised—not by Valerian's hurry but by Herrera's willingness to cooperate. Generally, he let a long gap go by between fights these days. It wasn't that he needed the time, but that his image did. Network needed a long lapse to keep the vamps hungry and to do a careful cosmetic operation on the probabilities pertaining to the next fight. They always had to make Herrera's invincibility look cracked, to show that each and every challenger had a measurable chance. Even a massacre has to look like a contest in the public eye.

A manufactured myth needs careful and constant maintenance.

But this time Herrera wanted to fight. He wanted to take me early. Network was willing to let him, though they might have preferred to give it a little more time. Herrera was anxious to have me out of the way, and so—for different reasons—were they.

It wasn't that Herrera was frightened of me. He knew as well as I did that the result of the fight we'd had eighteen years ago didn't matter a damn in today's world. It would be two different fighters in the ring this time. But it wouldn't be two different men. What Herrera wanted—and what made him hurry—was his revenge for that solitary defeat. Like Valerian, he wanted to wipe out an insult, and the fact that eighteen years and more had passed only meant that there was no reason to drag his feet now. He had been given the opportunity to redress the balance, and he was ready to grab it at the earliest possible moment. Herrera had a long memory, and in his mind he still had a way to go in paying the world back for the agonies of his youth. He was still a sensitive man.

Once the schedule was settled, my training program was stepped up. To keep me under pressure through the weeks until the big crunch Wolff imported a new sparring partner—a man who could probably get as much out of me in the ring as any other boxer short of the champ himself.

Ray Angeli.

I was surprised to see him. He had a lot of money to make yet, despite having been demolished by Herrera. A few more wins, careful management, and he would be in the top bracket of the big league. He had vamp appeal, he had skill. So what if he wasn't the world's greatest? There can only be one at a time, and Ray had a long life ahead of him. He'd have more chances, and in the meantime he could cut himself a big slice of the cake. Valerian's money wasn't behind him anymore but there had to be managers queuing up to sign him on.

But instead, he was back in the game. He was a spare in a new operation. Sure, he'd be well paid, but in his shoes I'd have been thinking about my pride.