The Mind-Riders (13 page)

“I know,” she said, in the tone of one who did. “And I know she's a bitch. I know one when I see one. I've got two chasing a hare for me tonight. They're stupid, because they don't know the hare's electric. Don't let them hustle you. It can't be worth it.”

I was surprised by the venom in her voice when she talked about bitches. I conjured up a lightning fantasy about Maria seducing Valerian, marrying him and inheriting everything, leaving Stella to play Cinderella. It didn't seem very likely.

The waiter appeared with the main course.

“Forget it,” she said. “I'll get a sandwich.”

Just like that, she was gone.

“Fooled you,” I commented, as the poor guy looked down at his lovely food, and then round at the uncaring walls and the open door.

I sat there for long minutes, toying with the cannonade of phrases Stella had fired before leaving. If she was right, the barriers were down. Valerian wanted action from his pet boxer and action he was going to have. A dirty game.

But what was there to do? Running was out of the question. Whatever they had planned for me I'd have to take. And resist. I'd spurned the velvet glove and the chance to cooperate with a smile. Now I'd have to grit my teeth. There was no possible escape.

Sometimes, you just have to be a hero and let the bastards come at you.

CHAPTER TWELVE

Despite what the proverbial wisdom of the masses has to say, forewarned is not necessarily forearmed. I sallied forth next morning expecting to face the torturers of the Inquisition, but in no way prepared or ready for them.

The techs strapped me into the apparatus just the same way as ever, and there was no sign of anything out of place, but I could feel that something was amiss. I was looking over my shoulder until the last possible moment, trying to spot Dr. Kenrian making one of her famous unobtrusive entrances.

But it wasn't until they were about to clamp the mask in place, when I was immobile and totally helpless, that the trap finally clicked and I was in it. It wasn't the doctor, but Valerian. I think he enjoyed it.

They were putting the mask on, so that I couldn't see him. His voice was tinny and muffled.

“We're going to try something new this morning,” he said.

With my jaw tied, I couldn't say a word—and that was a cruel twist, because there was some real poison I wanted to pour out. I couldn't stop him, but I could sure as hell let him know what I thought about it. He wouldn't have minded listening—he was honest enough to let you say things to his face—but he wanted the operation to go smoothly, without any interruption.

“We had a conference last night,” he said. “By ‘we' I mean Mr. Wolff, Dr. Kenrian and myself. We thought that it was time your training became a little more
specific—
directed toward the particular goal that we all share. What we intend to do is to allow you to get a long, hard look at Paul Herrera—his style, his strength. It's important that you should know your enemy, and know everything about him. That's an advantage he won't have, because you've not yet been extended to your limit in the ring. He has, or very nearly so.

“What will happen now—and on a number of mornings yet to come—is that we'll implant your viewpoint in the sim of the challenger during recorded playback of a number of Herrera's fights. Not too many, because we don't want to get you into the habit of being knocked out by Herrera. From your viewpoint you'll have the perfect opportunity to study Herrera, in all respects. We want you to undertake this coolly and calmly—stay detached as far as possible. This is perhaps the most important element in your entire training program.”

And there, his voice still oozing malicious irony, he let it lie.

I knew there was a catch, and he knew I knew. He had hinted at the fact in his tone. Yet on the surface, it seemed reasonable. Get a good long look at Herrera in the ring. Study him. Coolly and calmly—as an academic exercise. Wolff had helped draw up this plan, so it seemed like a good idea to him too. So where was the barb?

And then I was in the ring. I consoled myself with the thought that here, at least, even the Inquisition had to fight by the rules.

While the body I was riding was still in the corner I could feel that it was for real. You can be a passenger in a handled sim and know that it's fake, staged or programmed. The whole way the body is held by its handler testifies to the priorities in operation. This body was tense, active in a thousand small ways, ready to go.

I felt the sim moving, walking into the center of the ring. The other fighter came to meet me. I was riding the black, and for a moment that didn't click. I knew who the white sim was but I looked into the features, searching for recognition-signs, and wondering why it was so strange, so unfamiliar. It was the standard blank face, not yet tightened up by its wearer into a recognizable expression.

The gloves touched, and we were moving in earnest.

I was caught up, for a few seconds, by the sensation of being in a wholly alien situation. It was so familiar and yet so different. I was just a passenger, riding the body of another fighter, a man who had fought Herrera—and failed.

—and
failed.

Then it struck me. Herrera was wearing the white. But Herrera was the champion. Herrera wore black. Always. Except—

I knew then that I was trapped in the body of Franco Valerian. This body had taken a pounding worse than any other in the short history of this wonderful sport. And the man who had handled it had died of the experience. Franco, of course, had gone through the fight in a state of blissful innocence. He hadn't known what was happening. But I did.

And this was Maria's way to my innermost heart. I realized then how exquisitely mixed were the motives that had led the three conspirators to set this thing up. Wolff wanted me to learn to fight Herrera, Maria wanted me to learn to hate him, and Valerian—Valerian wanted me in Franco's place, the place I should have been, the place where Franco died instead of me.

It all tied up.

And the tests—the tests Maria had conducted. They had confirmed what she already knew, and what I
ought
to have known. They had confirmed my weak point—a horror of violence. Not fear—I wasn't
afraid
of being hurt—but horror. Something like disgust. The disgust which had stopped me and let Burne Caine knock me down. The disgust that made me fight the way I did. The disgust that I felt for the vamps, who fed on violence, and for Herrera, who manufactured it for them.

I thought, for one brief moment, of one of the images that I recalled from the artificial dream sequence she had fed to me—one significant moment out of many. There had been a scene where I was witness to a rape, and I had seen the victim of that rape as a
statue,
something unreal, something that was
folded up
and put away afterwards. I knew, suddenly, that that was only the way my mind had chosen to interpret it. The rape had been real, but I had masked it, seen it another way. A horror of violence.

I realized then, perhaps for the first time in my life, the foundation stone upon which my life as a fighter had been built. We all sail close to our everyday fears, steering a course that will help us avoid them while seeming to overcome them. I knew, in that moment, what my need to win really was.

And thus Maria Kenrian's work was done. All in a flash. Everything she wanted to tell me, wanted to force me to know. It was all there. And now I had to live in it, and in Franco Valerian, while Herrera destroyed us.

I was floating round the ring, being carried round by Franco's head. The body was probing, parrying, dodging. I could almost relax, be carried along, paying no real attention to it all. As if it was a dream. But I knew that pain, if nothing else, was going to break through the euphoria and confirm the reality of it all. If it was a dream, it was a dream from which I could not wake up.

I watched the white sim.

I saw Herrera.

I looked at what the white was doing, and how. I could see in its style, its tempo, its character, something I knew very well, something that reached out through all the years—a great continuity of familiarity. I'd watched Herrera in the ring so many times, and faced him there once. Through all that, there had been aspects of his action that marked him—aspects of his identity that time and skill and experience had not changed.

In the first two rounds, it was just an ordinary fight. It lacked finesse, it lacked a thousand little things that no one had mastered in those distant days. From the point of view of an old-style boxing purist it was a lousy fight, one cut above a brawl. After the second, maybe even being one cut above was a compliment. It became a brawl—and it stopped being ordinary.

In the third, Herrera came forward and forward and forward. He put solid blows into the body of the sim I was riding, shaking it, weakening it, hurting it. This was far more the Herrera I'd fought and beaten than the Herrera Angeli had fought and lost, but one
vital
change had occurred. Something inside him, invisible to the eye, had turned him into a winner.

My mind strayed back, searching for the memory of this fight, trying to remember exactly the way it had gone. It should have been engraved on me forever, but all I could remember was that Herrera had started hammering and had gone on hammering. In the fourth and the fifth and the sixth. And on, and on. The only thing I could remember was the wonderment I'd experienced when I couldn't understand what unearthly power kept bringing Franco back for more.

Franco had put up the most astonishing display of blind, stupid courage ever seen in Technicolor. An exhibition in taking punishment. An exhibition, as it was ultimately to prove, in sticking it out to the bitterest end of them all.

And why?

In my mind, I could only plot the pattern of the event. I couldn't separate causes from effects. Sometimes you can't.

Paul Herrera had come out of a childhood and adolescence of poverty and unbearable misery. To say he had a grudge against the world would be an understatement. He needed so desperately to win because he knew so acutely everything there is to know about losing. He was flat out to take every advantage of the situation which allowed him, temporarily, to be on the same terms—absolutely equal terms—with
the enemy.
Nothing personal—it wasn't that Franco was a rich man's son. To Paul Herrera, life itself was
the enemy
. He didn't blame the system, because he didn't know any alternatives.

And Franco? Franco knew nothing. There was nothing in his background that could have taught him. He was the son of Velasco Valerian, last of the feudal overlords, heir to a heritage of decay that was no less ridiculous because it was all fake, pretense and imitation, dating all the way back to 1920. Franco had never lost in his life, never known the meaning of the word. He had never been on equal terms with anything in the world before, and he didn't know what an enemy was.

Winning and losing, like loving and hating, are not things which happen to you. They're things you have to learn to do.

Franco wouldn't have had the sense to come in out of the rain. He'd have asked for the sky to be switched off. He didn't have the sense to lie down when Herrera kept hitting him—he just kept getting up and trying to switch the sky off. He'd expected a miracle. It was his birthright.

Only those rules don't hold in the ring. Whom the gods of wealth destroy, they first make poor. Poor Franco. In the currency of the ring, he was a bankrupt.

And I was locked inside his body, getting beaten up along with him. Supposedly learning to hate. I felt the gloves finding my flesh time and time again, marking the sim body, marking Franco's mind. This was Valerian's justice. I was supposed to be suffering.

But I wasn't. Not his way. I was hurting, but I didn't mind the pain. I'm not afraid of being hurt—I've been hurt too often for that. The wounds which had killed Franco were psychological, not physical, and I wasn't feeling those. I was just getting hit. But as an actor, handling villains, I'd been hit and killed—in simulation—a hundred times and more. It didn't bother me. The things I'd handled had been shot, impaled, burned to death, and as often as not I'd been in there to the bitter end giving the last few twitches to make it all look as corny as hell.

Sims in melodramas feel no pain, but it wasn't the pain that had killed Franco. It had been commitment and involvement to a false notion of the way the world worked. I didn't have that, and not even Velasco Valerian's sleight of mind could give it to me. Phase one of his revenge was a bust.

The fight went on, through the sixth and the seventh.

The seventh, I knew, had been the real crisis point. At the end of the seventh Franco's sim was virtually staggering as it was driven back to its corner. I could feel the dull, sullen hurt virtually consuming the swollen, pulpy flesh. It all seemed quite meaningless, quite irrelevant. From now on, it seemed to me, Franco could feel no more in his body. From now on it was just a farce—from my lonely, unfeeling viewpoint, that is.

As the sponge danced I was just waiting, waiting for it all to end, and thinking vaguely that I was somehow winning, that they hadn't got me yet.

And I felt a stir of apprehension, as I realized that it was too easy. My mind dredged up a fleeting, faded half-memory that I'd retained through nearly twenty years—from
my
fight against Herrera. It was a kind of internal snapshot, which I'd saved up in the album of my life. It was the image of Herrera's face, seen in close-up as he came out for one of the later rounds. He'd come out like some howling, berserk savage. The image showed a face that was twisted into a shape like no other—like nothing the handsome, neutral features of the sim should have been able to assume. Somehow, then, Herrera had torn aside the cosmetic curtain that was the sum face and let something of his own—something demonic—peep through.

I remembered that, over all the years.

And then I saw it again.

The bell had gone, we were up and moving, and there was the face, reproduced as Herrera worked up the same degree of fury. Only this time, the demon was going to have its way.

And that was the moment that Maria chose to produce her extra ace. I thought it was all over, but it was really only just about to begin. The
real
torture—the mindbender.

People talk about floods of emotion, but I don't know what they mean to imply. I don't know the way people live their emotions, and I can't tell whether the words they use to describe such experiences are appropriate. But I'm sure that there is no way they could understand the deluge of feeling which caught me up in that moment.

The people who were E-linked to the fight on that dim and distant day felt what I felt, but they had been built up to it, slowly prepared for it. I was hurled into it, at its deepest point. One moment there was nothing but dull pain, the next the full force of the current whipped me away out of my depth.

A flood of emotion. And I thought I would surely drown.

People commonly believe that in the E-link they are actually experiencing someone else's feelings telepathically, transmitted to them through the machine. But that's not so. What they feel is what they've learned to feel, aroused and stimulated by the resonance-induction mechanism in the headdress. They're stimulated to arouse their
own
feelings.