The Mind-Riders (5 page)

“It's not as clear as that in his mind, of course. He probably hasn't worked it out. He doesn't know what he thinks—only what he feels. And what he feels is concentrated hatred for Herrera, diluted hatred for me. Unjust, maybe—but whenever did feelings respect justice?

“And that, basically, is it. All tied up with a pink ribbon. End of story. Except that near the end the plot sickens. Because Velasco discovers the thing that Ryan Hart knew all along—that the only way Valerian is going to engineer the ritual destruction of Paul Herrera is by matching him with Ryan Hart. A cruel twist of ironic fate, you may say. The innate comic justice of the way the world goes, maybe. Either way, a tangled knot. One that can't be untied, but only cut. End of story—all except for punch line. But I told you there was no punch line. Not yet. In time—”

I let it go.

The silence that fell was limp and haggard. It extended itself slowly, tiredly.

“You're crazy,” said Curman, finally, pouring himself another drink.

“So's he,” I replied. “Aren't we all?”

But of course, we aren't. Curman wasn't, for one. He was okay. He knew the way of the world. He cooperated, with the occasional shrug of his shoulders. He let things go on the way they were. He probably never wondered who was to blame for anything.

I resumed packing, leaving him to think. It probably didn't make any sense to him. There were probably a lot of things about other people's actions and motives that didn't make sense to him. But he always made perfect sense to himself. He had his wants and his needs clearly mapped out in the cosy little space that was his imagination. He led a disciplined life.

If everyone else were like him, the world would be a much easier place to live in.

“But why now?” he said, “after so many years.”

“You were there,” I said. “You heard him.”

Curman had heard him, but Curman had been unable to comply with the demand for understanding. Curman
didn't
understand.

But I knew. For once in his life Velasco Valerian was having to compromise with the way that chance had stacked the deck. He was having to accept one of the decisions of fate. For him, it was the end of the road. Mortality had got him in the end. You can't fight the four horsemen. Everyone arrives at his own private apocalypse, someday.

CHAPTER FIVE

The first ordeal I had to face following my introduction into the Valerian household was breakfast. I didn't want any, but I didn't get the option. It was phase one in my adoption program. Valerian wasn't just hiring me, he was absorbing me into his particular form of life. I think the theory is called “indoctrination by example”. Or something.

By the time Curman and I got back to the rotting mansion and dumped such of my erstwhile life as was portable it was late—nearly ten. Valerian, a creature of casehardened habit, had eaten at his usual hour. But he stayed to preside.

The meal, like the house and the fittings and the life Valerian had molded, came out of the past. I guess the aristocrats of finance have always taken advantage of their privilege in separating themselves and their whole personal environment from the turgid present and the ugly world they prey upon. All vultures are graceful flyers.

So breakfast was a time-machine, a doorway into a myth-world where everything was pretense and pretentiousness. There was an abundance of servants. I saw five. I didn't know what their official denominations might be, so I thought of them all as waiters. Good servants are so easy to find nowadays—that's the benefit of labor redeployment planning, the industrial army and the multiple redefinition of work.

The taste of the food meant nothing to me. It was too foreign. I'd been eating out of plastic packs all my life, and to me, that was real. Eating was a function, not a vice. In times of resource crisis, that's the way it has to be. But there were no crises inside Valerian's time machine. It was exempt.

I ate calmly, maintaining an attitude of careful self-assurance. Valerian watched me. Curman ate with me, as was obviously his habit. He was Valerian's good right hand, not just a hired gun.

The table had been originally set for four, and I tried to add that up. Valerian had eaten but the last place remained empty. I figured that if someone in the house was accustomed to eating at any old time instead of sticking to the timetable he or she had to be family. I couldn't quite work out what family Valerian might have. Franco had been his only child and the old man's wife had long since given way to the pressure and departed for a kinder existence, or lack of it.

The coffee was brought in, solemnly and with ceremony. I could hardly conceal my fascination for the way the minutiae of life were so carefully structured.

“Did you enjoy the meal?” asked Valerian, politely. I could see that he was ready for a sarcastic reply.

“How much did it cost?” I asked, quite blandly.

“Does it matter?”

“I don't know,” I countered. “Does it?”

“In nutritional value, of course,” he said, “the food you're used to is at an advantage. It gives you what you need without any other considerations being taken into account. But this food has aesthetic qualities which you may care to learn to appreciate.”

“I don't think I need antique vices,” I said. I didn't think I could learn them either. I'd been brought up with the idea—carefully nurtured by government propaganda—that food is fuel, that eating is a boring necessity with no more inherent pleasure than elimination or excretion. That's the attitude which has to be evolved to meet circumstances of supply-limitation. Valerian had lived since the moment of his birth with a different system of values. Neither of us could change, and it was futile for Valerian to be laying down that kind of challenge.

“Some people,” I pointed out, quite inoffensively, “find self-indulgence rather obscene.”

“You don't believe in obscenity,” he said.

“No,” I conceded, gracefully, “I don't suppose I do.”

“I think you'll adjust to us, Mr. Hart,” he said. I had no difficulty winkling the hidden meaning out of that one. That was the point he'd been trying to make. Was it worth it?

I realized something that hadn't been obvious in the gloom of early morning. Velasco Valerian was not a very clever man.

“I'll get along,” I assured him. “I'm pretty tolerant.”

He didn't say anything more. He'd declared himself and his aims. He was on to a loser. I wasn't going to change. I wasn't going to twist myself into something that would fit his script for a futile revenge. I was going to do it my way. There was to be no alliance, no compromise. He owed me eighteen years, and he was going to get nothing in return for what he was giving me now.

I suspected, though, that the fight against Valerian might be as hard as the fight against Herrera.

The door opened and a girl came in. She stopped dead in surprise—she obviously hadn't expected to find Valerian here, and with company to boot. Her eyes went first to him, and then to me. She almost changed her mind and went away again, but not quite. After momentary hesitation she came in and took her place at table. Like the genie out of Aladdin's lamp a waiter appeared. In a house like Valerian's the walls don't need ears. They're telepathic.

She ignored Curman as if he was part of the furniture. “Don't get up,” she said. To me.

I hadn't. Her tone suggested she wasn't serious.

“Mr. Hart,” said Valerian, “this is my granddaughter. Stella, this is Ryan Hart. He's a boxer.”

She looked at me, her eyes saying something to the effect that I didn't look like a boxer. The name obviously meant nothing to her. I sensed a gulf between Valerian and his heir. I looked back at her. She had to be Franco's daughter. I hadn't known Franco had a daughter. My mind did some quick arithmetic. She looked sixteen but was presumably older—unless Franco hadn't known he had a daughter either. She was slim and small, with straight hair and a face which hadn't yet grown to the potential of its features.

“Don't stare,” she said, flatly.

I looked away, at Valerian. He didn't say anything but I thought he was mildly amused.

The waiter put a plateful of joy in front of Miss Valerian. She didn't look joyful. Another waiter whispered something in the old man's ear. How wonderfully, comically discreet, I thought.

“Excuse me,” said Valerian. He went out.

I let my eyes stray back to the girl. She was staring at me. She obviously had no sense of justice. One-way protocol. I glanced at Curman, but he was in a world of his own, thinking peacefully. He didn't get involved in family affairs.

“You didn't waste much time,” she said, conversationally.

“
I
didn't waste much time?”

She shrugged. “Either way,” she said, “You're here.” She didn't sound as if she resented it, but she didn't sound as if she approved. The continuing saga of grandfather's boxers and their quest for the unholy grail probably left her cold. She must have lived all her life in the midst of it and she was at the time of life when you get disenchanted with whatever you're in the middle of.

I tried to think of a question which retained some vestige of diplomacy, but couldn't. I began to hope that she'd help me out. She did, after her fashion.

“You're too old,” she said.

“Just old enough,” I told her.

“You're supposed to be the angel of death,” she said. “You don't look the part. No way.” Her tone was level, slightly mocking. I guessed she'd picked up her habits of speech in the wrong kind of company. She wasn't exactly a charmer.

“I'm just a fighter,” I said. “Your grandfather's the one with angelic pretensions.”

There was a brief pause while she chewed and swallowed. Obviously she didn't talk with her mouth full. There's something to be said for everybody if you look hard enough.

“I quite liked Ray,” she said. “But I guess he won't be back. He'll have gone where all the failed angels go.”

“Hell?” I suggested.

“The city,” she replied. It wasn't original, but Curman smiled briefly, interrupting his silent contemplation of the infinite.

“I guess there's a regular cycle,” I said. “A kind of system. The boys appear, go through the works, and then go. A complete processing—from hopeful to failure in seven stages. And poor you wakes up every ninety-ninth morning to find a new face at breakfast and another dream in ruins in the trashcan. The old wheel of fortune just keeps on rolling, and there's nothing new under the sun.”

“Very poetic,” she said, grinning faintly to herself. “Very boring.”

I decided that diplomacy could go wherever the failed angels went.

“Do you care?” I asked. “Does the nobility of the quest to avenge your father help your little world go round?”

She liked that. I could tell.

“No,” she said.

“But your granddaddy loves you anyway?”

“Fuck off,” she said. I think I strayed over the limit.

She seemed to lose interest then, and devoted her attention to her food.

Curman nudged me, and stood up. “Let's go,” he said.

I tried to catch her eye as we went out, to semaphore an apology with my eyebrows, but she wasn't allowing it to be caught. It didn't matter. I knew it wasn't goodbye, and there'd be plenty of time to heal the breach if it needed to be healed.

I went with Curman out behind the house into the grounds. About a hundred yards away from the house and its satellite buildings there was a small, squat edifice with no windows. This was where the action was.

It housed a holo unit with a twice-life-size image capacity, a number of E-link receiver sets and a couple of simcontrol units. Even Valerian didn't own a computer with the capacity to stage a fully-comprehensive situation-simulation, but he had a private hook-up to a machine which had—not one of Network's machines but one owned by an Industrial Research Corporation which used it for experimental purposes. Valerian probably owned more than half the company, and if research was slowed down because he requisitioned too much computer time, that was mainly his loss.

Waiting for us with Valerian was an assorted company. Apart from the technical staff there were two men and a woman. I was introduced to them one by one.

The first and least important was Ira Manuel, a fighter. I tagged him immediately—he was small and pale, with a grim look about his face, the kind of guy who, thanks to an accident of birth, got handed out a body which didn't fit his character, and who used the sim to try and correct nature's mistake.

The second man was Carl Wolff—a man I knew slightly from way back. He was a trainer. He was one of the handful of men who'd been recruited to sim sport from the old-style real version in the very beginning. He had a real interest in the new medium and he had a substantial contribution to make in helping adapt the knowledge and experience of the old game to the new circumstances. Most trainers are hard men who drive their fighters but Wolff was mostly remarkable for his softness. He didn't hand out orders, just told you what you were doing wrong. He knew everything about boxing and nothing about anything else. He was a man completely without character, just someone who was necessary, who had to exist. He didn't say much and he didn't have anything to contribute outside his job.

The woman, who was introduced last despite etiquette, was called Maria Kenrian, and she was a psychotherapist. I'd expected it, but I was still resentful.

“I don't need a PT,” I told her, as we shook hands lightly—formally, like fighters touching gloves.

“Everybody needs a PT,” said Valerian. “This is the twenty-first century.” That was an exaggeration. But for the most part, fighters did need psychotherapy. Sim boxing is something you do with your head and your head has to be in shape for it—not just the motor connections but all of it. The psych aspect is very important. But I thought I was exempt. I didn't admit that I needed PT. I wanted to do it my way. And there was an extra reason that I had to be wary—on paper, Valerian would be paying Dr. Kenrian to help me win. But the real contract might be slightly different. She might be there to make me win his way. I wasn't about to let any fancy mindbender turn me into a plastic imitation of Paul Herrera.

I looked her over. She was in her thirties, with silvery hair curling under at the shoulders. Her face was crisp and hard—pretty, in a way, but pretty like glass or metal, not like flesh. She was an
objet d'art,
not a human being. She didn't look particularly bothered by my attitude but it wasn't exactly lust at first sight. The way she was looking at me I felt like an object too.

“Dr. Kenrian will be here to observe for some time each day until the end of the week,” said Valerian smoothly. “After that, you'll fix up appointments between you when it's deemed necessary. Either Curman will drive you into town to see her or she'll come out here—it depends on the way she wants to handle the case.”

I didn't bother objecting to the word “case”. I just shrugged.

We all moved to one side to look over the equipment.

“It's all new and up-to-date,” said Valerian, “but you'll be used to working with all types. There'll be no adjustment difficulties. You start with a big advantage. Thanks to your work you're virtually in full-time training.”

I nodded, noting the slight note of irony in his voice. I'd been in training for eighteen years. I just hadn't been allowed to apply it the way I wanted to.

After a shade more preliminary chatter I got into the chair and allowed the techs to begin wiring me up. One of the techs maneuvered the headrest into position and adjusted the seat to fit the contours of my frame, while another began fitting the electroreceptor net over my skull. Each contact had to be made separately, and there were eight electrodes implanted in my skull—four afferent, four efferent. Each one, of course, could carry a vast number of coded impulse-sequences simultaneously—the actual number of organo-metallic synapses was something on the order of sixteen million. Adjusting the set to my convenience was a long drawn-out task, initially. The techs had a lot of very accurate measuring and calibration to do. At the studio I could get loaded up in a matter of minutes, because my personal data was on file, but this was a new ball-game and they were doing a thorough job. There was a little pain. Don't ever let them tell you that having your head wired for cyborg-symbiosis is the easiest passport to an exciting new career. It hurts.