The Mind-Riders

by Brian Stableford

  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 bet
ween 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.

  I noticed that Maria Kenrian was hitching up to one of the E-link receivers. Wolff didn’t bother—he just wanted to see how the sim was handling. The receiver, of course, had no direct contacts because the resonance induction works across the skull bones, so she was ready long before I was. She wasn’t getting anything through, though, because the sim image has to be called up and integrated before the circuit is complete and the miracle of MiMaC begins to happen.

  To begin with, they just put up a punch bag. No opponent, programmed or handled. Ira Manuel had made no move to get hooked into the other control unit, and it looked like he was going to have an idle day. He had only come out for the introductions.

  I had one last look round the edges of the mask before they switched me in and I had to forget all about the outside world. I abandoned my body while the essential me—the mind, soul, ka and so on—became possessed of the sim body. The five-nine, two-hundred pound vehicle which God had issued me was traded in for six-three and two forty-five. All muscle, king-size and powerful.

  You’d think that the guy who’d be mentally best equipped for handling a sim would be the guy who’s own vital statistics are six-three and two forty-five, but that’s not so. You have to be aware of doing something different, to switch over to a new mental regime. Otherwise you make mistakes—you reproduce in the sim all the stupid habits your own body’s lapsed into, and you become confused by the limitations of the sim. Different kinds of possible and impossible are involved.

  I moved round the bag, handling lightly and comfortably, hitting out without power, trying to show off my speed and ease instead of burning up the energy carefully programmed into the sim. I felt good—not excited, but pleasant. At home.

  After the bag, Wolff put me through my paces with a selection of miscellaneous exercises and feats of strength—the kind of thing you have to do to be super sportsman of the year, all petty tests of coordination and control. It’s all a matter of making the best use of the sim’s abilities. For me, it was facile. Any one of a hundred Network handlers could do the same—this wasn’t where the real difference between one man and the next came in. Any Network hack could beat the super sportsman of the year, but what he couldn’t do is control his efforts into one set of skills and potentials well enough to get the absolute maximum out of a sim in terms of one specific set of demands. That takes talent as well as craft.

  Nevertheless, they kept me farting about with the play stuff for more than an hour, and they—apparently—didn’t get bored.

  Eventually, though, when I was beginning to get a little tired, and the sim was beginning to slow down—manifesting all the symptoms of fatigue exactly as if it were a real body—they decided it was time for something better.

  Instead of sending Manuel in they used a programmed sim—one that just shuffled around and blocked punches, without throwing any of its own. It couldn’t react much, and without a real mind inside it it couldn’t get involved. It was really only a glorified punch bag, but it had the advantage of being manipulable. Its reflexes could be turned up, its blocking made much faster, so that over a period of time you had to keep getting more out of yourself in order to keep putting punches through its defense.

  I started off slowly, well within myself. I didn’t go all out to impress anyone. I treated the shambling zombie with a certain amount of respect.

  They turned up the speed, as I knew they would. They were going to test me—to expose a few limitations, find out where work had to begin. I didn’t try to turn it into a competition—I was as interested in measuring my performance as they were. I continued to stay within myself, but I continued to put punches through the dummy’s defenses until they had the thing up within a thousandth of a second of optimum. By then I couldn’t hit it any more but, I was willing to lay odds that Ray Angeli had had to work for months before he had reached that kind of standard. That zombie could have gone fifteen rounds with Herrera and not taken too much punishment.

  I was well content with the shape I was in, though I knew I was going to attract some criticism anyhow.

  Carl Wolff just condemned it out of hand. “Sloppy,” was his sole judgment. He wasn’t an easy man to please.

  “After twenty years,” I said, “it was damn good.”

  He shrugged.

  “There’s a good deal more to it than shaping up your reflexes,” said Maria Kenrian.

  They were still unlocking me from the equipment, and I could do little more than glance sideways at her. She held up the B-link headdress and said, “I’m not talking about what comes over this. I’ll need to look a lot longer and harder. But you have other, inevitable problems of attitude. The way your body is geared to respond to your mind has all the wrong assumptions built in. For almost half your life you’ve been working as a handler in simulation drama, where the priority is looking good. All your actions are deliberately exaggerated, held long enough to show an audience what you’re doing. When you throw a punch you’re not concentrating on hitting what you’re aiming at, but on looking as if you’re throwing a punch. You’re faking, and you’ve been faking so long that you’re no longer conscious of the fact. There’s a world of difference between fighting for real and fighting so that it looks as if it’s for real. Fiction always looks more real than reality, because fiction is so self-conscious, whereas reality is slipshod.

  “Since you were last in the ring, Ryan, you’ve become a very accomplished actor. And if you were to go back into the ring tomorrow you’d do so as an actor—you couldn’t help yourself. You’d put up a show, and you’d lose.

  “You suppose that the job you’ve had these last eighteen years has kept you fit. You think it’s given you a better knowledge of handling sims than most boxers, and you think this experience will stand you in good stead. In a way, you’re right—it will have kept certain aspects of your talent in trim. But what we have to recover is the other aspects—the ones you don’t even realize are gone. We have to override some of the assumptions eighteen years have ingrained into your mind. It can be done—but not if you persist in an attitude of quiet hostility and inflexibility. If you continue in the firm belief that you have it all under control, and that it will all be easy, you’ll lose. And not only to Herrera—you simply won’t get that far. You can’t just slip back eighteen years in your life to your younger self—and even if you
could, you know that Herrera is no longer the same man he was then.

  “If you won’t accept all this, then I suggest you watch yourself very closely when you start sparring with Ira. At present, he’s a better boxer. He’ll give you a rough time for a week or two. Only when we see how fast you improve to beat him can we gauge your chances of recovering the class and skill you once had. You must realize that it isn’t automatic. You have your chance now, but you’ve no God-given right to succeed.”

  When she finished, I didn’t have anything to say. It was all too likely to be true. My self-assurance took a dive, kayoed in round one.

  “That,” said Valerian, “is what you need a PT for.”

  “Thanks a lot,” I said, my voice congealed and unyielding.

  I eased myself out of the chair, with sweat sticking my shirt to my back. I stretched slightly, to get the feel of having my own body back again. I appreciated the tingle of circulation reviving forgotten limbs. Minutes dragged by while the tingle became uncomfortable and I dared not stand in case I couldn’t support myself. I felt like I’d had fifteen rounds with Herrera already. It always feels that way when you come out.

  My eyes moved from face to face, studying them all, trying to figure out what was behind their patient masks. Only Curman was smiling.

  I shrugged slightly. It’s never easy.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Over the next few weeks I gradually settled into a new routine for living. I expected it to be difficult, but certain aspects of it were very easy. When you’re pushing forty you don’t really expect that you can be uprooted and thrown into a world which is totally alien to everything you’ve encountered in your past without extreme feelings of dislocation. But it wasn’t like that, for several reasons.

  For one thing, I never really thought of Valerian’s fortress as anything but an alien place. I never made any attempt to “adjust” to it, to “fit in”. I just stayed there, and in a way my real life remained back in 3912, just temporarily stored away, in a borrowed suitcase. Secondly, of course, this was something I’d always half-expected. All the time I’d been working as a stunt man at the studios I’d carried around this notion that I was in transit, that it was only a way station in my life. I’d never really settled at all. I guess I’d always felt like Cinderella—in the cellar by mistake while my real destiny was to K.O. Prince Charming. I’d even known that Valerian was—or would be, however reluctantly—my fairy godmother. They say that there are only two basic plots—Cinderella and Jack the Giant Killer—and that applies to the way you script your life as well as the way writers script your fantasies.