The Mind-Riders

by Brian Stableford

  Anyhow, the old life—the false life—had been easy enough to screw up and throw away. I started anew, without my past hanging round me like a stuffed albatross. There was a whole new structure to my time and my habits and my thoughts, which came ready-made and precisely defined, thanks to Valerian and Carl Wolff.

  A new world, off the peg.

  For the most part, the life of Ryan Hart mk.III consisted of full days and empty evenings. Wolff and the techs and Ira Manuel took up my days, hustling me through a punishing program calculated to leave me mentally and physically exhausted—and pliable. I only existed, from their point of view, when I was connected to the machine. When they switched off, I retired into electrical oblivion. Occasionally, Wolff would remonstrate with me gently, but he always did so as if I were somehow unreal, like the way some people talk to their cars. There was no human-to-human interaction. I guess the territories in my mind had been pretty clearly demarcated, so that Wolff knew where his jurisdiction ended and Dr. Kenrian’s began.

  The good doctor evidently believed in not rushing in. She was a real angel. For long periods during the first two weeks she was in attendance while I was being hustled inside the sim, but she did little more than observe through the B-link. She didn’t deliver any more speeches, ask any embarrassing questions, or even ask to do the standard psycho-profile tests you have to ham your way through in order to change your job or enlist in the IA. After awhile, I got positively anxious about her refusal to communicate. It’s like being in the hospital, with the doctor coming to look you over every day, and then just going away shaking his head morosely. You may only have a bunion but he’ll have you convinced it’s terminal cancer in no time. I began to suspect hidden depths in my mind.

  I had to admit, though, that what she’d said on the first day had a strong element of truth in it. Ira Manuel, who was nothing but a consistent hack fighter, with nothing to distinguish him from the average, did give me a hard time in the ring for awhile. In the first week he was obviously acting on instructions to show me how my cockiness was betraying me because he went after me in a rather more aggressive manner than sparring partners are supposed to do. In this day and age, of course, you can spar as hard as you like, because no one gets injured, but generally you take it easy so as not to lose the edge that real competition gives you. It doesn’t pay to punish yourself in training. But Ira took care to punish me.

  I didn’t hold it against him. I can take a hint. But if you get hit, you hit them back. It doesn’t have to be vindictive—it’s just the pace the situation sets. Week one he was hurting me, but by the tail end of week two I was hurting him. We threw some pretty hard punches around, and I was reminded sharply of the fact that fighting is for real. Being convinced is half the battle, but it’s the quick half. Retraining my subconscious was going to take time.

  Valerian came in to watch me a couple of times, early on, but soon dropped the habit. Having roped me in and established me in the schedule he seemed to lose interest entirely. For him, it was now a matter of waiting—waiting until I faced Herrera. The sand that drained through the hourglass in the meantime was just a waste, to him: a slice out of his life, just one of those things you have to keep going through until you come out the other side. Any day his dialyser might clap out or his all-electric heart might give up the ghost, but there was nothing that could be done except wait. I saw him at mealtimes, and though over-the-table conversation was anything but free-flowing I could see his resentment of me and the whole situation slowly growing. The world had condemned him to going through it all, and he wasn’t used to being dictated to, even by the inevitable.

  He hated me with an awesome, silent fury. But he sat down with me, and ate with me, and passed the salt with a self-control I could almost admire.

  Curman always ate by the clock, just as we did, but he was invariably silent as a ghost when his boss was present—just an extra limb for Valerian to command, with no perceptible identity of his own.

  Stella rarely turned up on time, though her place was always set. Either she found time completely irrelevant to the business of living or she preferred to avoid her grandfather as much as was convenient. On a number of occasions she came in just as he was leaving. They didn’t seem to interact much—they maintained a policy of peaceful co-existence without conflict or companionship. It was as if they were living on different intellectual and emotional planes. Valerian’s world permitted such things to happen. It was possible for countless utterly lonely lives to be lived within the shadowed confines of his sprawling house.

  I took to reading in the library to occupy a significant percentage of my spare time. I steered clear of the holo, which seemed to absorb most of Curman’s free time, and maybe Stella’s as well. The opportunity to handle and read the books in the library—printed on a wide variety of types of paper, with no economy measures in evidence—was one I suspected I might never have again. Most of the Valerian heritage—the big house, the grounds, the abundant paraphernalia of wealth and nostalgic style—struck me as being ridiculous and ugly, but the books were different. They were the one aspect of the carefully preserved past that seemed to me to have value.

  I excused myself on the grounds that my interest in the books was very different from Valerian’s. I was interested in them as devices of communication, while to him they were merely objects. The excuse was almost entirely honest.

  It was while I was in the library one night, maybe three weeks after I’d first moved in, that the first faint breath of human contact finally came my way. Stella had become interested enough to investigate me. I was glad to see her. The interpersonal vacuum into which I had been cast was less than comfortable.

  I was sitting in the chair that Valerian had occupied the first time I had seen him. She came in, shut the door behind her, and seated herself in the other chair—the one which the old man had offered to me on the night of our confrontation. She made no pretence of being interested in the books, but simply looked at me.

  I gave it a couple of minutes, then lowered my book to my lap, keeping it open at the right place with my fingertips.

  “I didn’t know boxers could read,” she said.

  “You don’t get punch drunk from operating in a sim,” I replied.

  “You can get killed.” She obviously didn’t consider it a delicate matter. I didn’t know what to say in reply, so I waited for her to begin again.

  After a few seconds, she said, “That book has probably remained virginal since it was first acquired. Maybe a hundred and fifty years of unopened, undisturbed bliss. Now you come and assault it. How do you think it feels?”

  This approach seemed much more promising. It lacked intensity.

  “Profoundly grateful?” I suggested.

  “A pig attitude,” she said.

  I looked at her carefully. She seemed suddenly completely out of place. In the library, in the house, in the world. She looked very small. Remembering all the times I’d seen her previously I could not find one moment in which she’d seemed to be interwoven with the situation or the circumstances. She was living in a kind of cocoon, letting everything flow on around her. A wild card in a carefully stacked deck.

  “Tell me,” she said, apparently tired of waiting for my move in the exchange of trivial remarks, “what’s in it for you?”

  “In what?” I stalled.

  “You know what,” she replied, shortly. “I don’t quite see you as a part of it. The others—they all fit in. Common sense says what was in it for them. It was easy to see what they expected to get out of it. Ray, and the one before, ad infinitum—they had it all to gain. Boys wanting a boost into becoming men. Full of hope and empty of sense. And even now they’re still chasing their moonbeams to the bitter end. But you’re not one of them. You’re not stupid. So why take the part?”

  “Second childhood,” I said, easily, trying to resurrect the trivial tone she’d abandoned. “I always wanted to be world champion. There comes a time when you think maybe you did
it all wrong and it’s time to go back for a second chance. A last fling before existential paralysis sets in.”

  “You’re lying,” she said.

  “True,” I conceded.

  “Whatever’s pushing you,” she said, “it isn’t the same kind of thing that pushed all the others. It isn’t a wide-eyed hunger for fame and applause. There’s something different.”

  “I want to win,” I said.

  She waited.

  “It’s all there is,” I told her. “There’s no more. I just want to win. That’s the whole story.”

  I thought she was going to call me a liar again, but she didn’t.

  “Ask Dr. Kenrian,” I said. “She must have me analyzed by now.”

  She shrugged off the mention of Maria’s name. “She’s just bait,” she said.

  The statement surprised me. “Why do you say that?” I asked.

  “I’ve seen it before,” she said. “We’ve been through this game more times than I can remember, and I know how it goes. It’s part of the package—one of the prizes. It’s all a matter of motivation. You’re supposed to get hung up on her, get the juice flowing in your glands. It mixes you up, makes you fight a little harder.”

  I shook my head. “Not this time,” I said. “It may be the way they tackle the youngsters, but I don’t need that kind of motivation. I don’t mix easily. And my glands are subject to rigid discipline.”

  She didn’t believe me. She wasn’t a great one for taking statements on trust. I wondered whether there might be a grain of truth in what she said. It was Maria Kenrian’s job to get my head right for the fight, one way or another.

  “Who do they use to bait the boys?” I asked. “You?”

  “I don’t play.” She said it firmly, perhaps slightly contemptuously.

  It was an opening. “Why not?” I asked.

  “Why should I?” she countered, reversing the age-old turnabout.

  “You tell me,” I said. “It’s you we’re talking about.”

  “Because it’s a farce,” she replied. “A hypocritical pantomime. I hate it.”

  “I’ll believe the last of those reasons,” I said.

  She had no reply ready for that one.

  “He was your father, wasn’t he?” I followed up, more gently. “And the old man’s only son. Don’t you think the feeling that underlies it all is natural?”

  “No,” she said. “There’s nothing natural in it at all. I wasn’t even born when my father was killed. All I know about him is second hand. And what they say about him isn’t about a real person at all. Just about an idea. That’s not natural. I don’t think my grandfather even remembers his son. The big grief, the determination to equal the score—all that’s synthetic, plastic, a mask he bought in a magic shop.

  “I don’t believe that my father and my grandfather ever knew one another. I don’t believe they liked one another, or ever really met. The part my grandfather is acting was written for him after the event. It helps to keep his strength up—his strength of character, that is. Whatever he pretends to be, he has to be intensely. It’s the only way he knows how to live. He’s a hard man, made out of stone, claws of pressed steel. He’s doing what he thinks he has to do—not for my father but for his own self-respect. He’s made Herrera a whipping boy, to take all the punishment he won’t take himself. All his sins get shifted, one by one, on to other people. His friends, his enemies, you and me. But Herrera is our figurehead—the representative of all that he wants to destroy. He’s the victim in the great ceremony.”

  “Why tell me?” I asked her. “Do you think I don’t have my own ideas about what Velasco Valerian is, and what he’s trying to do? Even a pawn can bear a grudge. Do you want me to give up, to refuse to play?”

  “I want to know what’s in it for you,” she repeated. “Why are you helping to keep this thing alive?”

  “I’m going to kill it,” I said. “Once and for all.”

  “You can’t,” she said.

  “I’m going to beat Herrera.”

  “And that’s all it takes?”

  “For Valerian, maybe not. But it’s all I want. Afterwards, I’ll be on my own. What happens here is none of my affair.”

  “I have to live with it,” she said.

  “That’s your problem.”

  She didn’t like that. It made her angry.

  “What happened to your mother?” I asked, to steer around the bad moment.

  “She couldn’t stand it. She left.”

  “Why didn’t you go with her?”

  “He wouldn’t let me go. He never will. He needs me to prop up his image.”

  “He can’t stop you,” I pointed out. “You’re over sixteen.”

  She didn’t answer that, because she didn’t really have to. Valerian could enforce his will, irrespective of circumstances. He was the great dictator. I wondered what she wanted from me. Not help. Perhaps just the understanding—the understanding that Valerian demanded. Maybe she did want me to get out, to stop playing the game. But she must have known she couldn’t end it. And in any case, there was no way she could turn me back.

  She went to the door, and left, without saying anything more—without even looking at me again. She’d said her piece, poured out all her half-formed ideas. There were probably no words to express what she really felt.

  In a way, she was on my side.

  I intended to beat Paul Herrera in such a way that Valerian could get no real kick out of vamping me when I did it. I wanted to beat him calmly, without any animosity. Cleanly, and simply. I thought she might approve of that. It was something—an appropriate gesture. But she wanted so much more. She wanted out, and there was no way. All she could do was wait, and when the old man died she could take the money and run. Wherever she wanted to go.

  Or, alternatively, she could take over where he left off. You don’t just inherit money—you inherit the assumptions that go with it. I felt sorry for Stella.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  In training, I gradually worked up to the point at which Ira Manuel could no longer trouble me. I could read his moves and react in the way that was appropriate to a boxer rather than an ET taking a dive for the heroes of the Space Patrol. The familiarity of my rediscovered role did not recur overnight, but as it did come back it brought a complete and safe contempt for Ira Manuel. He became less useful, and was demoted in importance so far as my program was concerned.

  Then Wolff brought in a replacement. At least, I thought at the time that Wolff was responsible, but maybe not.

  The new boy was named Burne Caine. It wasn’t his real name—just something picked for show—but he clung to it as if he loved it dearly, and we never found out what daddy had put on the birth registration. Probably something vapid and boring. There are few Smiths left in today’s world of disposable labels.

  Caine was by no means the same kind of instrument that Ira was. Ira had been something dull and unyielding—something I could sharpen my claws on. We hit one another hard, but we never really found any true sense of competition.

  But Caine had hot blood. He took everything seriously, and he always looked ready to spit in my eye, inside the sim or out. He was a teenager, half-Asian and still wearing the livid scars of a hard past. He was nervous with his hands, and it was easy to see that translating his fighting into the sim hadn’t drained the tensions out of his body.

  I could look at Caine and see Paul Herrera twenty years earlier. Herrera, like most good handlers, was a guy who’d never had much success handling his own body. He’d never been at home in his own flesh. He’d been a sickly kid growing up in a concrete jungle. He’d had a brain and bad eyesight. He’d had the shit kicked out of him here, there and everywhere. Anything near his size was an enemy. Most kids like that have no option but to wait it out, to grow up into another world—in the meantime staying meek, mild and ready to run like hell. But not Paul. He’d always had the compulsion to fight back, even when it was hopeless. He was more than just a sucker for puni
shment—he was something of diabolical single-mindedness. He just could not accept defeat, although his whole life and his whole environment were saturated with it. He lost every real fight, but compelled himself to keep going. The fact that he survived to enter the adult world at all had been a minor miracle. Once in it—

  And here was Caine, looking at me out of eyes that mirrored the same kind of implacable hatred for everything animate and inanimate.

  Caine wasn’t there to spar with me. He was there to show me what a real fight was.

  The first time we were hooked up together, facing one another in the ring, I knew this wasn’t routine. I wasn’t ready to go into a Network ring for an officially-recorded fight, but that didn’t mean that I was exempt from the fury and the determination of a fight to the bitter end. That was what Caine was for—to push me in a way that Ira Manuel never had.

  The worst thing about it was knowing that the kid had his own brand of invincibility. No matter how many times I hit him, he was going to keep coming back, trying ever more desperately to hurt me as much as he could.

  Caine had no class. He had very little skill. But he had guts. For three rounds, he hammered his sim, coming in at a pace which had to tire him out in minutes. I was content to defend at first, keeping his jabs and hooks out of my face and body, and just moving round the ring to make him chase me. I tapped him a couple of times, to let him know how easy it was, but made no attempt to hit him hard.