The Mind-Riders (14 page)

I wasn't immune, because there's a world of difference between knowing no feelings and keeping them under control. I lost control, under the irresistible pressure of the E-link. The charge pouring into my mind generated wild currents that my mind just had to translate into feelings.

As Paul Herrera's gloves reached the face and body of the black sim again and again and again, I
felt
everything.

I felt savage determination, and the sheer elation of complete superiority. I was high as a kite on adrenalin, cruising the clouds of the mental stratosphere. Seventh heaven. The sensation of winning, exaggerated beyond anything I'd ever felt on my own account.

And the gloves crashed into the sim's jaw, knocking the body sick, grinding the bone, felling the fighter.

I felt the blow burning ecstatically through and through my mind.

They'd crossed the wires. I was in Franco's body, but I was E-linked to Herrera.

I was going to take everything that Herrera would hand out over the next three rounds, get hammered into oblivion. And all the while, I would be feeling what Herrera felt.

Crossed connections, to make a new kind of sense, to spell out a new message, to give me the sharpest lesson of my life, to teach me how to hate.

Maria had set me up two viewpoints for the final rounds of the fight—a crazy kind of binocular vision. I was seeing it all in a totally new perspective, seeing the real four-dimensional depth of what had really happened.

There were just ten more minutes until the end of the fight—ten minutes until Franco went down forever. But those ten minutes I had to spend in mind-split agony. Pain and glory—the one Franco's, the other Herrera's, but both arising from the same pattern, the pattern of the event. It was only a pattern of light, synthesized by a computer, but its meaning was real and its consequences were real.

I saw both sides of the
charisma
of Paul Herrera, that made him what he was. I saw him as no one—least of all himself—had ever seen him before.

It used to be that you had to die to go through hell, but not in the superscientific age. Not today. They can serve it up off the shelf, just like the heaven you get on prescription. In all versions of hell, from the Inferno on, there has always been some regard for the essential tenet of poetic justice—that punishment should be tailored to fit crime, to provide the horror which the particular subject is least able to bear.

For ten minutes, I was in hell.
My
hell. Paul Herrera was echoing inside me, echoing like something vast and Satanic. I was made to believe that I could feel what Paul Herrera felt, that the human potential in him was in me too. It was the discovery of evil—in him, in me.

And it burned my mind.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

I came back to life, very slowly. It wasn't really difficult. Franco could have come back too, if he'd only known the way.

With my eyes once again looking out into the real world, and my head throbbing like a great machine as the blood pumped the chemicals of fury away, I was isolated once more.

Maria didn't wait. She began to talk, quickly and quietly.

“It had to be that way,” she said. “You had to be made to see. You had to be made to see what it's all about. Now you can win. Now you have the force inside you that will allow you to dedicate yourself
completely
to beating Herrera. This way will work. It has to.”

The words just bounced off. Hailstones off a tin drum. A meaningless assault on my sensibilities. I was too sick to stand, too weak to hit out at them, any way at all. And what good would it have done? What was the point? What words could I possibly use to hurt them?

The only way to resist was to take it, to absorb it all. To take it, and remain unchanged. It had to be humanly possible. If I held out against them, they couldn't break my mind. I was only as helpless as I allowed myself to be. I didn't have to react. I could take it all, get up, and walk away, and put it all behind me. What Franco should have done instead of dying.

So I didn't answer back. Not even with clever, sarcastic asides. I just let it all ride on. I let the routine take over, and paid no attention to the vultures. I let Valerian and Maria just fade away, and I didn't care.

The only one I really had to face was Stella. I didn't go to her. She came to me, to say, “I told you so.”

And she had. She was entitled.

She found me late in the evening, by the goldfish pond. The setting sun was on my back and I was admiring the total composure of the idle, gawping fish. They just hovered, contemplating the murky infinity beyond their little microcosm. They were perfectly still, as if dreaming.

She came up behind me, and said, “I told you so.”

I said, “I know.”

“I told you not to do it,” she persisted. “Why did you let her?”

“Not just her,” I said. “It was a world-wide conspiracy. Fifty million consumers can't be wrong. Not in a democracy.”

“You didn't have to take it.”

“I want to win.”

She must have felt like kicking me, or shoving me into the water.

“Can't you see further than that?” she demanded. “Is that the sum total of what you are—your life, your ambition, your purpose?”

“It doesn't seem such a bad thing to aim at,” I said. “Where's your destination in life?”

She didn't answer.

“Did your greyhounds win their races?” I asked, to change the subject.

“The bitch did,” she said, her voice pregnant with undeclared sarcasm. “But the dog got kicked to hell and gone on the first bend. These things happen.”

“Sure,” I said.

“But I don't mind,” she went on. “Because it's only a game. It doesn't matter all that much.”

“Did the dog know that?” I asked.

“Suppose you
don't
win,” she said. It was a point she'd raised before. She was determined to chase it home.

“Then it will all have been for nothing,” I told her.

“It's a big gamble,” she commented. “You must really trust your luck.”

“There's no such thing,” I assured her. I was still looking at the fish. The fish believed me. They knew there was no such thing as luck. Their life was ordained from the word go. No problems.

“Well,” she said, slowly, “I guess they haven't exactly changed you into Sir Lancelot. Whatever they did you seem to have lived through it.”

“That's the answer,” I said. “Live through it. Wait for the time to come. The meek inherit, in the end.” I glanced at her then, and I knew she was listening. Maybe I made more sense to her in that moment than ever before—or ever again.

She went away—meekly—to live out her time. And so did I.

The next few weeks were long, but they went by. There were no more dirty tricks where that ace had come from—I played through a few more of Herrera's fights, but I did it the easy way, doing what Wolff thought was proper. Studying the man and his fighting, not the filthy landscapes of his mind. Maria didn't show again, though I knew she'd be back for the kill. Valerian simply co
ntinued to be himself, in his own particular way. There was no reference to what had been done by either of us. We just tucked it away in our memories. That part of the game was over. It was a clear run to the next and last. Time dragged while it was going by, but once it had gone it just seemed to disappear. It made no impression on the past, only on the present. Once dead, it just evaporated. I know I lived those weeks and lived them slowly, but in my memory now there's just a hole. From where I stand now in the tangled thread of time, the two events seem almost juxtaposed. Hell—and judgment. Nothing between them but a snatch of conversation with Stella and a vague sense of desolation. They have fled from me like fugitive dreams.

Just like the dream in the sim—

Blink—

As simple as that.

At Network, before the fight, I met Jimmy Schell. He had a new suit and the same stammer. He was making it. It was coming together for him. He was a good feeler, and he was getting good parts to feel. He could feed his riders the kind of charge they needed to wake up what they wanted to feel. That's real talent.

So Network had bought him a new suit. And maybe a new life. And they
loved
his stammer.

“I'll—
be
with you all the way,” he assured me.

I thanked him.

“I've seen every fight,” he told me. “And I think you're great.”

I thought,
I see a lot of your commercials, and I think
—but what I said was, “Thanks, Jimmy.” Again. I couldn't afford to be a bastard. I wanted him along with me. Someone on my side. More important, perhaps, someone who would still be on my side after the fight.

When the bell rang to end the fifteenth, or one of us was counted out, I knew I'd be alone. The proprietary interests would end there and then. If I won, it would be easy enough to find new ones. But win or lose, there'd always be Jimmy.

Valerian had a new suit, too. It almost seemed as if everyone had, except me. But it was a public occasion, and people always like to parade their newness on big nights. They like to show that they're at home in the wonderful disposable society, and that they have new clothes, new character, new feelings to replace the ones which went out with yesterday's garbage.

The old man didn't want to talk to me, but he couldn't help needing to look at me—to drink in my appearance and reinforce the idea that I was
his
instrument, the thunderbolt with which, from his Olympian heights, he was about to strike Herrera down.

“I want you to remember,” I told him, “that I don't want you to get the least satisfaction out of this. I'm going into the ring the way I always have, to fight and win without any malice or emotion. I'm going to turn on a display of calculated, skillful boxing and I'm going to beat Herrera crisply and cleanly. You can suck at my mind for every instant of the fight, but you'll get absolutely nothing in the way of sadistic pleasure or vengeful fury out of me. You'll have to do your own fighting there.”

It was a poor speech, but I was under strain. I tried to put it right, and I didn't, but I think the message was clear—maybe just a little too obvious.

I only hoped that I was right, and that I could keep it all down, where it belonged—submerged in my unconscious mind. Under constraint.

Valerian, of course, didn't try to argue with me. I don't think he even took exception to what I'd said. He just looked at me, memorizing my face because he'd never see me again.

While they were putting me into the sim there was a real crowd clustered round, each member of it with nothing to do and nothing to say, but each with some personal reason for wanting to be close, wanting to be involved. Some of them, I'd never even seen before.

Maria was there, silver hair still perfect, eyes steady, wearing an aura of perfect confidence. She had it all taped, all worked out according to theory. She was the only one who really knew the result in advance. We all had our doubts except her.

Curman was around, just hovering on the periphery, taking it all as it came along. For a moment or two, when my eye caught his and he winked, I envied the ease with which he coordinated himself. He was at peace with the alien world, and it didn't much matter to him which way the fight came out.

Ray Angeli was there, with the supply of advice finally dried up, the need to participate wavering at the last moment as he rediscovered uncertainty.

I hadn't seen Paul Herrera in the flesh. It's not Network policy for fighters to meet. I probably never would see him in the flesh this time, and I'd always have to remember him as a youth, an adolescent barbarian. I wondered, briefly, what he did look like now. But I didn't really want to know. I'd see his face in the sim.
The
face. The only one that mattered.

I closed my eyes before they masked me, and the world—crowds and all—went away into some hidden fold in space, some other dimension, some ridiculous dreamland. I didn't open them again until I was sure I'd open up on reality.

The ring.

I watched his presence bring the black body to life. I listened to the ghost voice chanting ritual in my ear. Somehow, I could feel the vamps settling in a vast cloud upon the colored air. I could sense the whole world turning on.

Time crept while nothing was happening inside. Outside—in that great imaginary complex in never-never-land called Network—the product was being carefully wrapped up. There were proprieties to be observed, formulae to be followed, visual cues to be manipulated, anticipations to be nurtured.

In the ring, it was all waiting.

Crippled time, shambling by.

I was alive and alone. I just went numb inside, waiting for it all to end. And begin.

We moved, and walked to face one another in the center of the ring, touching gloves, with faces showing nothing, because we were not yet wholly there.

Then the bell rang.

There were no preliminaries. There was to be no period of acclimatization, no wary trading of exploratory punches, no quiet settling into a languid prelude to a long crescendo. Herrera came out to reach me, to put in hard punches that would rattle me, that would count on the tally. He was aware, perhaps for the first time in years, of a possibility that be might be beaten, and he was hurrying to lay the ghost.

Maybe that was half the fight. Maybe before we even psyched into the ring I had him halfway down. But he intended to come all the way up again in no time at all. He attacked like a tiger.

I knew all about his speed, and as the jab came in I was watching for every little move that meant he was setting himself up for something bigger, something harder. I was always ready. I slid sideways, economically, always away from his driving right. I pushed forward with my left every time he overreached a fraction, pushing him out of his aggressive stance, making him pay for his hurry.

Hard punches were exchanged in the first minute. The first round filled up with action well before the bell and the vamps must have known early that we were both ready to bring it to a head well before the end. It was to be a real test, fast and hard.

The first finished even.

As the seconds of rest and recovery ticked away I was reaching inside myself, testing my state of mind, wanting to be neat and tidy, undisturbed. I felt, if anything, more detached than usual. I felt like a piece of clockwork mechanism, locked into a precise sequence of actions, moving with dour, uncaring efficiency.

I didn't just feel steady, I felt hardly alive. A zombie.

And so it went in the second. He came out to get me again and I let him come. I coped, with a strange easiness that was almost worrying. He was always searching for an opening, forcing his speed and insistent in his probing. But he couldn't find a thing. There was nothing for him. His punches were deflected by my arms, or barely connected with my body. I put in two good counterpunches. I won the round. It wasn't by much, but we both knew I had it.

Again, in the third, it was the same stand-up fight. We hardly clinched at all, we both wanted to stand back and throw what we could. And I was a shade the better. The pressure, for the moment, was on him.

In the fourth, the action congealed slightly as he began to reappraise the situation. His lips formed half-words, moving silently in tune with the thoughts firing the mind behind the face. All I could see was the rhythm in the words, I couldn't read the thoughts themselves. The lips were echoing some mental prayer—not a prayer to any personal God but to the pattern of reality which made him what he was. He was threatening me, talking at me, wishing me to death. He wanted to destroy me. It was a ritual, something that had become superimposed on his boxing in late years. He was conjuring up the ghost of Franco Valerian, using the strength he had stolen from that victory.

And it wasn't working. Again, I took the round. Just by a fraction, but a fraction is enough—if you can keep the margin the same way.

And from the faint muscular distortion which tells you that a sim is being worn his features gradually changed. The eyes seemed to be kindled, and the fire of personality took hold of the face, lighting it. It was only a matter of time before it was the face. The trigger.

In the fifth he found me for the first time with a hard right, and I rocked. He hadn't got any faster, and I hadn't slowed down, but for once the probability went his way. He was very quick to try and capitalize on the break, and he hustled me with a new assurance, a new determination. He won the round, and all of a sudden my edge seemed very thin indeed, thin and ephemeral.