The Mind-Riders (4 page)

“He receives all his visitors this way?” I queried.

“Only when the mood takes him.”

The mood, apparently, had taken him pretty suddenly. My guess was that it had taken him within minutes of Ray Angeli getting knocked over, and had built up to some fairly monstrous proportions. I didn't expect to find Velasco Valerian at his best.

We went upstairs, into the dark corpse of the house. Curman turned on a couple of stair-lights so we could find our way, but it was all very discreet. In the capstacks, light is harsh and glaring, stripping all situations naked. But here it was muted. Valerian probably liked to live inside a cloak of shadows.

He was waiting for me in his library. It was a beautiful room with bookshelves instead of walls and big bookcases forming a cross in the middle. Eight or ten thousand books, all old—the legacy of a century of more-or-less mindless acquisition on the part of Valerian's immediate forefathers, carefully constructing an image. They could never have read the books—not even a tiny fraction—but that wasn't important. Like the black car, another of the obscene gestures of pure wealth: the acquisition of purposeless property and its non-functional display. Valerian was not the man to be embarrassed by the aura of such vanities. He probably felt at home here. Maybe he even took the books out now and again to finger the sad quality of the binding.

He was enveloped by a deep, high-backed chair, wine-dark in the light of a small lamp to the side and set slightly back. His face was mostly in shadow, but he must have been able to see me quite clearly as I stood before him.

“You're Ryan Hart,” he said, smoothly, giving it the inflection of a polite question.

“Your handyman would have to be a fool if I wasn't,” I replied. My voice was too sharp, the comment slightly ridiculous. My hostility was showing but not biting. I felt compelled, though, to make the gesture. Men like Valerian can't be defied, but you have to act as if they can. I hadn't come just to lie down and be counted.

“Sit down,” he said. His voice was soft. He wasn't amused or annoyed or impatient—which meant that the fury which had overtaken him as Ray Angeli bit the dust was now perfectly controlled and disciplined.

I sat down, in a chair that was the twin to his own. There was a small table between us, where a book might be rested temporarily. There was no book. Valerian didn't go in for that brand of staginess.

“You sent for me?” I said, injecting a dishonest low-key anger into my voice.

“I have a proposition for you,” he said. Unlike Curman he wasn't about to beat around the bush in order to see what came running out. Curman had stayed with us, but he was back in one corner of the room, looking at the titles on the spines of the books. He was listening very carefully.

“Go ahead,” I said.

“I've followed your career,” he said. “In a casual manner. I've retained an interest in your abilities. I think that you're wasted in your present work. You have talent above and beyond that required for simulation stunt work.”

He paused, but I didn't bother to interrupt. I figured that it might as well all come tumbling out, hypocrisy as well. All as scripted. There was no need to slash at the curtain of soft lies. Not yet.

“You,” he continued, “are one of the few people with a genuine mastery of the active component of mind/machine communication. I think you ought to be involved in it actively, ambitiously. I think you should go back into sport.”

“Boxing?” I asked, ironically.

“Of course.”

“No,” I replied, flatly.

The refusal didn't shock or upset him. He didn't believe it. He leaned forward just a little, and the dim light caught his white eyebrows. There was sweat glistening on his forehead.

“No regrets?” he asked.

“Not your kind,” I replied. That was a better one, but it didn't score. It failed to jerk anything out of him. He settled back into the shadow, to watch me without his own eyes being visible except as the faintest of gleams. His face was a blur.

“I want to back you,” he said. “I should like to help you redeploy your talents more profitably.”

“You want to make me a star?”

“A champion.”

“You want me to beat Paul Herrera for you.”

He made no reply to that, but was content to wait.

“You know I'm blacked,” I said.

“And you know I have the power to set aside that ban,” he said. “Circumstances have changed since that—unfortunate decision.”

“How?” I said, almost spitting the word at him.

He wouldn't answer that, either. I changed the question to, “Why now?”

“Had you—” Here he paused suggestively, then went on, “—given up hope?”

“Hope!”
Again I spat the word out as if it were poison. “Is that what you think? You think I've been wasting my life in hope—waiting for you to come to me and say, ‘I've reconsidered. It's all forgotten and forgiven.' Do you think I've had no ambition in life but to serve your miserable purpose and knock all hell out of Paul Herrera? No, I haven't given up hope. Not that kind. I don't want to go back to the ring to fight your battles. The hell with your crazy vendetta.”

“But you want to go back,” he said, quietly. “To fight your own battles.”

I waited a minute, letting myself calm down, not wanting to go off like that again.

“I used to.” I said. “A long time ago.”

“Not any more?” he said, challenging the implication.

“Not any more,” I confirmed.

Valerian let a moment slide by. Then, abruptly, he told Curman to switch on the light. Curman didn't have to move far. He was waiting right by the switch. The electric chandelier flooded the room with yellow radiance, the four arms of the cross-shaped array of bookcases blooming forth with thin shadows while the gloom was dispelled.

I looked Valerian in the face, as he obviously intended that I should.

He was old. Not, perhaps, merely in years—he was maybe seventy, and could have had a long way to go if he hadn't lived those seventy so hard. He was old in terms of expended effort and hard driving. A charged-up metabolism and a diabolic energy had used and wasted him, had left him derelict. He had lived at an accelerated pace, consuming himself ravenously.

He looked at me now from a crumpled face like a screwed up piece of paper. His hair, his eyebrows, the thin beard, were all dirty white. His eyes were brown flecked with yellow and gray.

I realized why he had retired into shadows. The voice was the best of him that remained. It had kept its timbre, the quality and sureness that his features had lost.

“Do you see me?” he said, harshly.

I mustered my reserves of cruelty. “Should I care?” I said. “We all got troubles.”

“My heart,” he said, in a measured monotone, “has plastic valves and an electric motor. I plug in to my kidneys.”

“You're a lucky man,” I said. “Some people have to do without.”

“I'm not asking for your sympathy,” he said, “I'm demanding your understanding. You know what I want from you. You must know why I come to you now.

“You know—and you've always known—that I'd rather it was someone else, rather it was anyone except you. But now, after all this time, there can be no other way. Angeli was the last. No young man can beat Herrera, and no young man ever will—not until his mind begins to rot. I can't wait. Not any more. Another year will see me dead, and it has to see Herrera dead too. Literally, or metaphorically. He has to be beaten—and it needs a man who understands fighting, and who understands Herrera.”

He might have gone on. But he'd already said more than enough. Perhaps more than he'd said in a good many years. We were even now—we'd both spilled out what we felt.

“That's it, is it?” I said. “I'm your last resort. You've been saving me up, locked away in a safe inside your memory. Now, when you figure you've reached your last crack, it's back to the beginning, back to Ryan Hart. Eighteen years of leading lambs like Ray Angeli to the slaughter, and then, just like
that—da capo
.”

“It has to be,” he said.

“No,” I told him.

“You have an alternative?”

“Sure,” I said. “I have the alternative. The alternative is no. How the hell do you think I feel? I was a fighter once, and then I wasn't. I was blacked. Hounded out. In those days there was nothing I wanted more than to fight again. The fact that I was good—the fact that I was maybe even better than Herrera—made it all the worse. I was a winner who couldn't even fight. And I wanted my chance back. I knew then that the only way I was likely to get back into the ring was with your backing. I
waited
for you. You needed me, I needed you. But where were you? For eighteen years, where were you? And you think that now you can lose your temper at three in the morning, and right out of the blue you can say, ‘Where's Ryan Hart? Find him. Fetch him'.

“Do you think those eighteen years count for nothing? Do you think I'm the same man now that I was then? I know
you
are. But not me. Those eighteen years came out of my life, out of the good years. And I
counted
them—to me they mean something. It's too late, Mr. Valerian. It's sixteen, seventeen, eighteen years too late. There's no going back now.”

“You have to,” he said.

“An offer I can't refuse?”

“If you like. I can take your job, your home, your life. I can buy you. But it doesn't come down to that.”

“You can threaten me all you want,” I said, scratching my cheek. “But there's a nice banal saying. You can drive a horse to water but a pencil must be lead.”

“I don't have to threaten you,” he said. “Because even if you do hate me worse than you hate Paul Herrera, you want to get back to the ring. You want to win. And you'll do it whichever way you can.” He said it with a curious note of triumph in his voice—the certainty of a man who knows that he is right and who knows that even if he is wrong he can enforce what he is saying.
I may not know what I am talking about but I will defend to the death my right to say it—and make it stick.
That's justice—the exclusive brand.

Velasco Valerian only had to reach out and take what he wanted. Right now, I was inside his fist.

Trapped.

And he was right. I would fight. I would win. I would do my utmost to avoid winning
his
way, and use every scrap of my ingenuity to get what I wanted without compromising, but I would win. I had to.

At long last, the moment had come.

I stared at him, and he knew that the understanding he had demanded was there.

CHAPTER FOUR

We rode the elevator up to the thirty-ninth just as the milling hordes were clamoring to ride it down. The working day was launched and on its way.

I wouldn't have been with them anyway—I had a couple of days off owing to me—but I couldn't help feeling alien as I jostled with them, heading in the wrong direction and not intending to turn back. Not ever.

As I walked along the corridor to 3912 Jimmy came out of 3909. We almost collided.

“—
Hey,
Mr. Hart,” he said, in a tone far too jocular to be decent at eight-twenty, “you're going the wrong way.”

I clapped him on the shoulder and made as if to go right on past him, saying, “I know it, kid, I know it.”

He didn't get it. He was suddenly frozen, the wheels of his mind sticking as he tried to follow me with one eye and look Curman over with the other. Curman was behind me, carrying a big suitcase Valerian's valet had lent me.

“He looks like a gangster because he is one,” I told Jimmy. “I'm being snatched by a millionaire and held to ransom. My intellectual chastity is in deadly danger.”

Not unnaturally, this didn't do a lot for the kid's state of confusion. He was going purple with the effort of getting his ideas under way again.

“Sorry, Jimmy,” I said, a little more gently, stopping to face him. “I won't be going in today. I won't be going in when I'm due back on Monday either. I quit. I'm going to work for Velasco Valerian.”

He looked a little disappointed. Things had moved too fast and left him stranded. He'd figured me for a human contact, something to hang on to in a world which was still, from his point of view, fearful in its pace of change. I had been his first barricade against the amorphousness and indifference of life in capland. Now I was gone. Like that. That's the way it is, of course. There's nothing you can depend on for long. But in this particular instance, he was unlucky. He'd come in at exactly the wrong moment.

“I'll be dealing with Network,” I told him. “Though not quite in the same way. We'll maybe run into one another at the studios. You'll hear about me, and I guess I'll hear about you. Look me up and say hello. Okay?”

He was still just staring at me, with bewildered eyes. He couldn't string any words together—no words that he could get past his block. He just nodded, and then he went on his way, uncomprehending.

I looked after him, finding the thought that he cared faintly ironic, faintly—though I don't know why—disturbing.

I opened the door to the box that had been my home for as long as I could call anywhere a home. I went in, and wasted no time unsealing all the folding units where I had things stacked and stored. Opened up like that, the capsule was like a flower in bloom. Everything all over the place, with no space left.

Curman threw the case open and stood back by the door.

“Want any help?” he asked.

I told him I didn't. It was my life I was uprooting and ripping apart.

He watched me sorting through things, shoving the shards of my personal history into the case. His attitude toward me had changed completely since he'd watched me sparring verbally with Valerian. Last night he'd picked me up like a package, but now he didn't know what the package contained. He was uneasy with me. He felt like an outsider because he didn't know what was going on between his boss and me. It dated from before his time.

He hadn't said anything while he drove me back, but his hands and mind had been partially occupied then. Now, standing in the doorway watching me, he had nothing to do with himself but think. Curiosity kills cats, and they have nine lives, but most humans still haven't the sense to steer clear of it.

“You never met Valerian before last night?” he began, tentatively.

“I never did,” I said. “But we didn't need any introductions.”

“Not many people talk to him that way.”

“I do,” I said. I carried on carving up the stuff in the lockers and the folding drawers. There wasn't very much I wanted to take, but I was afraid that there was something I'd regret having left at some time in the unknowable future. I kept hesitating over decisions.

“What've you got against him?” he asked.

“He could have had me back in the ring eighteen years ago. He didn't. Also, I don't like him.”

“What's he got against you?”

“He doesn't like me either.”

“Ah, shit,” he said, losing his cool just a little. “Are you going to tell me or aren't you?”

I thought of saying
no
, but then I thought
why the hell not?

“It's a long story,” I said. “At least, it is the way I tell it. And it hasn't much of a punch line.”

He shrugged.

I sighed. I took two bottles out of the cupboard and gave them to him. I got a couple of glasses, and held them out. “We might as well get rid of the stuff,” I said.

He poured.

“It's still too early,” I said, inspecting the stuff, “but we may as well celebrate my immense good fortune. It's not every day your lifelong ambition comes true.”

I sat down on the bed. He leaned against the wall, and eased the door shut behind him.

“Beginning of story,” I said. “I was a boxer once. In my formative days. I beat Herrera—they were his formative days, too. We were both young, both inexperienced, both learning slowly. Paul, I guess, was learning a little more slowly. Nobody else beat him, so I'm the only one. But that's just how things fell out. It could have been someone else.”

He was nodding. He already knew all that.

“In those days,” I said, “MiMaC wasn't as big as it is now. It was in use, it was working. But they were still exploring ways to exploit it. Big money men like Velasco Valerian would hold conferences and they would ask one another how they were going to sell this new miracle of science to the world—how best they could employ it to multiply their already-considerable fortunes tenfold.

“Everybody knew it was the biggest thing since the opposable thumb, and so everyone was very careful. People were anxious about it—about the way it could and might be used. Different interests were anxious for different reasons.

“Network was putting out E-link programs and B-link commercials, but the whole thing was in an experimental phase. Hardly anyone had actually bought the equipment—Network had to practically give headdresses away in order to explore the possibilities. Nobody knew enough about the marketability of the fake stuff—the new-style acting—that was being put across with the system. It had novelty value but no one could really be sure that it would ultimately become part of the structure of social life.

“They were slightly more sure of the marketability of the real thing—the live broadcast of the resonance effects of actual emotion. The one thing Network were reasonably sure of was that a whole new dimension could be added to televised sport—competition of all kinds. In a hard, tough game of any kind most men generate enough excitement to hype up an audience, even if they're only watching the damn thing. When they can actually hook in, identify with their hero all the way down to his emotions, the involvement is much greater and the hype that much better. And games have a recognizable form—the emotion is for a limited period and it builds up to a climax when someone wins and someone else loses. MiMaC provided limitless scope for the marketing of broadcast sport.

“But it wasn't quite as simple as that. Switching sport out of physical reality and into a holovisual sim made the process of mind/machine communication involved in handling the sim one with the process of broadcasting ER. But switching sport from the real world to a computer simulation was something which had to be sold to the people. It was an idea many people reacted against. Network stressed the fairness of the new sport and its genuineness as a competition of skill, but the real hook was the E-link—that was their banker bet, the key to the whole thing.

“Boxing, where one man faces one man and the climax of the contest is often a K.O. was just made for E-link broadcasting. And Paul Herrera was made for it too. He was—and is—good at handling a sim, but the chief thing which made him into a big Network asset was the fact that he was—and is—an extremely powerful broadcaster. The voltage in his brain during a fight is way above norm. He was a man with deep, rich, saleable feelings. He took—and still takes, after all these years—a savage delight in taking his opponents apart.

“Network took up Herrera and prepared to build a big market campaign on his ability to win and his capacity to glory in winning. He was their pride and joy, their ace in the hole. They needed Herrera—or, at least, they believed that they needed him.

“Of all the possible uses and applications of MiMaC, the one the men like Valerian—the men with money to invest—staked most upon was fight promotion. Maybe that's crazy, and an awful lot of people thought so at the time. Maybe it's just a commentary on human nature and the vagaries of the economic system—and one might add in that context that the government money which poured in to R & D concerned with MiMaC was overwhelmingly dedicated to the military applications. However—there was no shortage of eager fighters, men who'd always wanted to be fighters but were disqualified for physical reasons. Even a couple of real fighters, who were on the way down in the real-life game and saw a chance to apply their know-how in a new field, came to Network. Network financed the fighters, trained them and matched them.

“They had a monopoly, of course. They were the only ones with the machines, with the programs, the only ones who would put up the cash to present a bout. They had sole governance over the fighters, and they stage-managed the presentation of the game all the way from invention to world championship as if it were a gigantic advertising campaign. And, in a way, it was.

“It worked. It was a great success. A lot of things all happening together made E-link into a social institution, but boxing was probably one of the most important. The fight game—and Herrera—sold the biggest kick of all, and the kick sold E-link.

“It was necessary to Network that everything should go smoothly in their grand campaign. They couldn't afford any slip-ups. And there was just one slight hitch. For the most part, the most successful of their fighters were the men who radiated best. The winners were, for the most part, the guys who needed to win more than the rest, who got a bigger kick
themselves
out of winning. With all else equal, that's not really surprising. But it didn't apply all along the line. Some good broadcasters were lousy fighters. And one or two good fighters were very poor broadcasters.

“I was a good fighter. But across the B-link, I was rubbish. I fought coldly and methodically. I was skillful and clever, but not emotionally involved. I wanted to win—I always wanted to win—but somehow that wanting didn't translate itself into the kind of emotion that resonates through the machine-link. I don't feel in the way that Network wanted me to feel. And they couldn't afford to include me in their ambitions. I was a poor risk. Most of all, they couldn't afford to have me challenging for their world title. So they blacked me. They banned me from any participation in sim boxing. They did it less than a week after I beat Herrera and showed them what I might do. They got rid of me.”

I paused to look at my captive audience, making sure he was still with me. He was, but from his point of view we hadn't got to the point yet. He still didn't see what it had to do with Valerian. He started to say so, but I didn't wait.

“It was a logical decision,” I said, without bitterness. “They couldn't take the risk. Network had to put on a series of fights to really blow the minds of the vamps, create a spectacle whose kind had never been experienced before. The atmosphere of the gladiatorial arena multiplied a thousandfold—everything that sport had ever offered to its audiences, and more besides. So who needs a potential disaster? My only qualification for boxing was the fact that I was good. I could win. That wasn't Network's top priority. They weren't interested in that kind of best man winning.

“Velasco Valerian was in on the decision to have me blacked. With his pull, he could have reversed it, but he didn't. All for very good and practical reasons, you understand. It was that decision which meant that on the night Herrera won the title the wrong man was facing him in the ring. Instead of the best fighter it was the best feeler—a kid who might give the vamps orgasms but who was never, not in a million years, going to beat Paul Herrera. But what did that matter? Network were putting on a show. And, of course, it was obvious that no one could really get hurt. It could have been lions versus Christians if that had made a better spectacle. Only the sims took the punishment. Only the sims—and the minds that were running them.

“The kid that fought Herrera for the title died. Not because of what Herrera did, but because of the way he was made inside. And, of course, he died decorously enough, in the hospital, long after the switch was off. He'd done his job. The death wasn't blamed on Network—how could it be? It didn't even harm their big advertising job. It was played down that much. The fault was in the fighter, not in the system. So said the coroner. No one was to blame.

“But the kid that died was Velasco Valerian's son, and Velasco had his own ideas about blame and justice. He couldn't accept what the coroner said. He had to hold his own inquiry, inside his mind, and decide according to his own tenets just who was guilty. He started from two basic and inviolable premises: that no possible blame could be attached to his son, and that no possible blame could be attached to himself. That was fundamental to his whole approach.

“And the high court of Velasco Valerian's feudal vanity brought back two findings. One: that Paul Herrera was guilty of destroying his son, and two: that Ryan Hart also had to take a portion of the blame. The first was necessary in order to justify the first premise: it wasn't Franco that cracked up, but Herrera who cracked him. The second was necessary to justify the second premise: it wasn't Network's decision about priorities, which was partly Valerian's, that was responsible for Franco's being in the ring that night, but the fault of the man who should have been in his place. Velasco blames me for not being able to broadcast, for being the kind of man I am. He has to blame me, in order to avoid taking any of the blame himself.