In the fourth, I began to hustle him a bit, out-boxing him all the way. I took a couple of punches that might have rocked me, but traded better ones that should have knocked him groggy. The sim took the physical punishment, but I could almost see Caine shrugging it off. He had a bad case of the “what-the-hell-it-ain’t-my-body” syndrome. In a sense, he was punishing himself, though there was no earthly reason why.
The fifth was worse—now he couldn’t get to me at all, but he was still chasing and carving with his gloves. I could have hit him at will, but I hesitated. I knew what I was supposed to do. I was supposed to knock him out. I was supposed to knock him out today, and tomorrow, and maybe the next day. It was like spearing fish in a bathtub. He’d take it, again and again, and come back. I was supposed to be cruel. I was supposed to knock hell out of him.
But my mind rebelled, and on the point of laying him out I hesitated. I found myself adrift in the quicksands of doubt. I didn’t know what I wanted to do—capitulate with the way I was being maneuvered, or tell them to go to hell.
I had little enough sympathy for the kid, who was worse than a fool, but I didn’t want to beat all hell out of him just to make him face that fact.
He kept after me, just as mad, just as heavy as he possibly could. I began to think that by holding off I was hurting him worse than I would be if I took him apart. He knew I was playing games with him. He was still trying to hurt me, trying all the more desperately.
At the end of the round, I said, “That’s enough.”
Wolff’s voice came at me from nowhere. “Two more.” Not a question, or an instruction, just a statement of the way it was going to be.
“No,” I said.
But no voice came back. I couldn’t stop it myself—the only way I could switch off the sim was by staging a massive physiological disturbance which would short out the circuit with the emergency cut-out. It’s not the kind of thing you can manufacture consciously.
Caine was up and in the ring. I hung back, gloves on the ropes. I could see from his face that he was uncertain, for once. Hesitant. He wanted more. He wanted to win. He just didn’t know. He wanted me out in the middle, where he could exhaust himself trying to reach me.
When he knew I wasn’t coming he was stranded momentarily.
Then he came after me anyway, bombing in, looking to land good, solid punches before I could get my arms up. Reflexively, my guard came up and I ducked. But the sheer force of his attack carried his blows through.
They took me in the head.
I didn’t hit him back. I didn’t attempt to crash a fist into his exposed ribs. I just took what he handed out, and then I went down on one knee. A slight touch of nausea from the punches took hold of me, but faded fast.
I looked up into the face of Caine’s sim. He was using the white and the pale features were ruddy under the glow of the lights. Sweat was glittering on his forehead. The features were twisted out of their sculpted reality in almost exactly the same way that Paul Herrera twisted them. For a moment, I was left with the illusion that it was Herrera I had been fighting, that it was Herrera who had put me down. I wondered whether I had been intended to fall under that spell right from the start, and be committed by the similarity.
But I hadn’t. I remained cool, and I didn’t get up.
His eyes told me he wanted to hit me again, and again, and beat me to a simulated pulp.
But he couldn’t. The rules wouldn’t let him, and a sim can’t break the rules. He was as helpless as a baby. I took the count feeling that the whole thing was stupid, irrelevant—a waste of time.
And I began to laugh.
As in the old joke, it hurt when I did.
Back in reality, when they peeled the electrodes from my head, I no longer felt like laughing. I was confused. So was Caine. Even when they had him stripped he just couldn’t understand it. He was looking to catch my eye, and I let him. He looked at me as if I were a dead caterpillar in his supper pack. But he couldn’t think of anything to say.
It was only then that I noticed Maria Kenrian waiting by the door. She must have come in late. But I didn’t need to ask whether she’d seen it all. She’d been eavesdropping on my mind, and she’d done more than simply see it. I suddenly felt angry with her, for the deception and the staginess of the whole affair.
When I was free again she opened the door to the outside world and we strolled out together. It was late afternoon and it was hot and hazy. There were a lot of wasps in Valerian’s gardens—there was presumably a nest somewhere near the training unit that the legion of serfs hadn’t troubled to destroy—and I waved a couple away as I stepped out into the sunlight.
“You see the point of what happened today?” she asked.
“Not really,” I replied. “I think the message got a little garbled.” My voice was brittle and bitter, still antagonistic to the whole idea.
“You’re screwed up inside,” she said. “It’s getting in your way. You’re thinking about too many things at once, looking at it from too many angles. You’re not reaching anything like a fighting pitch because you’re perpetually looking over your shoulder to see who’s pushing, asking yourself how and why and what the hell.”
“It was a farce,” I said.
“Of course. But that isn’t your concern. All you had to do was go out and beat him—knock him out. But you couldn’t do that. You had to hesitate and wonder what it was all about and who was trying to trick you into doing what. You lost that fight half a dozen ways, and it’s no good telling me or telling yourself that you could have won if you’d wanted. Of course you could have. But you didn’t. You were looking to foul up.”
“So?”
“You think it doesn’t matter,” she said. “You think that this is all a pantomime, and that when you finally get to face Paul Herrera it will all be real, and when it’s real it will all be different. Then you can win. Perhaps you can. But you won’t—not unless you can cure your state of mind.”
I shook my head. “I like my state of mind,” I told her. “I’m entitled to it. It fits me like a glove. I don’t want to cure it.”
“But you want to win.”
“And you think I can’t? You think that what’s going on in my mind will stop me?”
She didn’t say anything for a couple of minutes, probably wanting to make me think about the answers myself.
“I beat him before,” I said.
“Do you know how?”
“I hit him harder and oftener than he hit me.”
“And do you know why?”
“Because I wanted to win.”
“And you think that’s enough?”
“It was then.”
She didn’t say anything again, but her answer was written all over her face. It isn’t now, she was implying.
We had almost reached the house, but as I made a turn to take us round to the nearest door she put her fingertips on my arm and pointed to another way, along a footworn path that led toward the wood via a paved diamond with an ornamental pond. It had goldfish. Also bronze figurines that were mired and patinated. One was a bronze Cupid that had been some ancient humorist’s idea of a fountain.
“In those days,” she said, speaking quietly, “wanting to win was all there was. You wanted to win—and that was just about the whole story. You didn’t question your own decisions, you didn’t see anything beyond or behind the business of winning. It was enough to go on, and on—
“But not any more. You’re eighteen years older—eighteen embittering years through which you’ve carried that need to win triumphantly, as if it were the trophy you never got. Carrying it all that way may not have changed it much, in itself, but you’ve brought it into an entirely new context. It’s no longer the dominant force in your mind, it’s no longer the focus of your personality and your ambitions. It’s a kind of bloody relic of a broken past, and it carries with it a host of conditions and uncertainties.
“If you want to beat Herrera, you’re going to have to recover
something of that old single-mindedness. You’re going to have to put everything else aside. You can harbor your grudge against Valerian, you can try to cheat the mind riders and the system and Network and the world. You can assert your injured pride. Or you can win. But you can’t have it all ways.”
I reached the edge of the pond a stride ahead of her and pivoted quickly. We ended up facing one another, both standing still. She’d stopped abruptly.
“I’m not a fool,” I said to her, softly. “I’m not just a lump of human clay to be molded by you or Valerian, poked and prodded by PT tricks. I can play the game too. I’m good at games. Don’t try to tie puppet-strings to my balls.”
She stepped sideways smoothly, increasing the distance between us and making me half-turn to keep my eyes on her face.
“Why do you think I brought Caine in?” she asked.
“To get some emotional action out of me. To make me angry or vindictive. To let some of his fire rub off, or bounce off, or—what the hell.”
“I brought him to show you the difference between yourself and Herrera. He’s the other side of the coin—your mirror image.”
“Sure,” I said. “Burne Caine and me. Twin souls.” I didn’t bother to laugh.
“He’s everything you’re not. And you no longer have anything except what he hasn’t got. He’s active, and you’ve become passive. You let the outcome of that fight depend entirely on what he did. You did nothing yourself. You sat back in your mind and you evaluated the situation and you worked out how to react—what reaction the situation demanded. You can’t fight that way. If you place yourself at the mercy of a situation it will kick your teeth in. It’s not the right way—and you must realize that. Your cold, clean thoughts have been a comfort to you these last eighteen years, but they’re no good to you in the ring. You’re pure and uncut, while Burne Caine is torn to shreds—but he has the one thing that you need. He wants to win and all else is irrelevant.”
“That’s no way to live,” I said—a stupid remark.
“It’s the only way to fight,” she replied.
I squinted up at the sun—a dull yellow phantom half-hidden in translucent smoke.
“But other things are relevant,” I said. “They’re relevant to me.”
“That,” she said, “is the problem. The question you ask yourself now is, How badly do I need the chip on my shoulder?”
“Caine won today,” I said, doggedly, “because he didn’t know when to stop. He hit me, and I went down—because there was no point in carrying on. It just didn’t matter any more.”
“That’s exactly right,” she said. “And that’s exactly why you’ll lose again. You’ll have a hard ten or twelve rounds, and your opponent will still be standing, worn out but not beaten. You’ll see him coming at you again, and you’ll start looking in your mind for excuses. What’s the point? Does it matter? Why am I trapped here hyping up Valerian, hyping up the world? Why?
“And then you lose.”
“No,” I said.
“Down you go,” she went on. “Because it just doesn’t matter enough. It’s all too heavy to bear—carrying Valerian and the mind riders and your halo and your spirit of callous indifference towards existence in general. All that is too expensive. You can’t afford it—not in the ring. The ring is its own little world, and there’s nothing beyond its ropes. Your mind has to get inside that microcosm and conform to its laws. You can’t stand back outside, and try to stay in the real world as well. Herrera won’t.”
This time, I was silent. I couldn’t even manage a weak disclaimer. I believed her. She was convincing me. There was no earthly way I could know whether it was true or not, but she was convincing me.
She knew it.
“So?” she prompted.
I dropped my gaze from the sky to study the goldfish. They were big, ugly things with patches of silver scale and expressions of utter vacuity. The water where they hung suspended was dull, except where the fountain stirred it up and let the sun shimmer delicately in the droplets.
“So you want to restore my will to win,” I said, dryly. “You want to strip away all the paintwork, rip out all the fittings, get back to the basic frame—and then make it into a replica of its old self. Ryan Hart, Mark One—they don’t build them like that any more. How do you go about it?”
“That’s for you to decide,” she said.
“I have a choice?”
“All the choice there is.”
“I can choose my own prizes? Plan my own shock therapy?”
“You can co-operate. You can help me find out how to break down that tangled mass of resentment and confusion, help me reach the motivational structure underneath.”
“And help you wind me up and set me going. A clockwork toy.”
“That’s a fool’s way to look at it.”
“And I’m a fool. Valerian’s fool. That’s what he wants. He beckons me out from under my stone, after all these years, and he waves his magic wand to wipe out eighteen years and turn me into the kind of pet he always wanted.”
“He wants you to win.”
“His way.”
The goldfish opened and closed their mouths, completely passive, completely uncaring. Bone idle and fearless, unaware of the turgid rhythm of their lives, perhaps of life itself.
I spat in the water, and they didn’t even swim away.
CHAPTER EIGHT
The next day they put me in the ring again. Wolff was against it, I think, but higher authority called the tune. If Wolff had been the kind of man who took an exaggerated pride in his work maybe he could have had his way, but he was no absolute dictator of circumstance. He let it go.
Maria Kenrian wasn’t there. She had left it all up to me, for the time being. She had left the conversation of the previous day hanging limp and unfinished. She was waiting. It was my move.
I knocked the kid clean off his feet in three. I did it quite calmly and with not the slightest hint of malice aforethought. I could even have pretended I was doing it for his own good, but I didn’t. I pretended, instead, that I was doing it for mine. It was a clean K.O.—I didn’t have to beat him up much to set him up for it.
He was then disposed of. He had made his point—or Maria’s point. We washed our collective hands of him and sent him back to oblivion with his fists full of money and his nervous twitch intact. I didn’t suppose I’d ever hear of him again. He wasn’t good enough to climb off the bottom rung of the ladder and he never would be.
They informed me the same night that I was fixed to fight for real against a steady but undistinguished fighter named Joe Tobias. Valerian had persuaded Network to finance the fight, though it would only be broadcast on channel X at an ungodly hour. I wondered that they didn’t want to record it and hire a feeler to dub in my part, but even Network didn’t want to set precedents like that. They would be guaranteed a fair audience because I was Valerian’s new white hope—the Valerian crusade was something of a public joke, but everyone accepted it as a major source of lovable boxing thrills. The Network controllers knew that I wasn’t going to be a good winner, from their point of view, but they were sure of their pitch and they could let me in. One lousy cold fish wasn’t going to threaten the whole fry-up. Not now. They might not like me, but they could tolerate me.
Preparation for the fight was no sweat—that is to say, the physical side of it was no sweat. But I worried just a little bit. My favorite psychotherapist made no show—she was content to leave it in my hands. I saw it as a sort of challenge, How far dare you go before you lose your nerve and capitulate? I was going to go one fight, at least. I was going to have a long, hard look at doing it my way before I gave her a ticket into my soul, with an option to buy pending the surveyor’s report.
She didn’t have to be there. I asked myself all the questions she would have asked. I took over her job in her absence. I was stirred up by the ideas that she had introduced into my mind. I gave myself a long hard look in the psyche every time I passed a mirror.
I asked myself how I’d go about it if I had her job. It wasn’t an easy question. I wasn’t impressed by Stella’s unsubtle suggestion that I should be guided gently into infatuation. It wasn’t my style. I can dissociate myself all too easily from sexual anticipation and sexual pleasure.
I thought of conditioning, but that was looking at the problem from the arse end. It wasn’t that conditioning had to be superimposed but that the conditioning I’d acquired throughout my life as a Network hack had to be removed. It was all the new reflexes—the ideas I’d built into the concept of winning, that ought to go.
If they ought to go.
That, of course, was the most worrying point of all. I wasn’t sure that I believed in her purist idea of winning. Not any more. I wasn’t sure that winning in the ring was the only winning I had to do. Surely, I thought, I had to win other battles, other games. I wanted to win against Herrera. I wanted to win against Valerian. I wanted to win against Maria Kenrian. I wanted to win against Network. Add it all up, and it all came down to the same fight.
They say that you can’t win them all. But I wasn’t satisfied by what people say. I thought there had to be a way out—a way that wasn’t Maria Kenrian’s way. She had pointed out the simple answer, but simple answers are very rarely right.
I held an imaginary dialogue, in which I defended my lack of emotion against her charges.
The vamps, I argued, live on second hand emotion. The intense feelings they need and love so much are provided for them by a chrome-plated headdress. The dilute feelings—tranquility and happiness—they get in pills. What’s left that’s theirs? Nothing. They become utterly dependent on Network and the Medical Association. Everything in their lives—in the environment around them and inside their stupid heads—is provided commercially, shaped and tailored to popular demand. What are the vamps except puppets? What do they think or feel that comes from themselves and not from some machine or some chemical? What are they but ciphers in the grand scheme of the human world, no more real than the images in the holo? But I’m not like that. I have individuality. I am what I am, and I intend to protect that. I don’t intend to unhappen the events, the feelings, the meaning of eighteen years just so I’ll be a better image in the sim, just so I can be packaged as a consumer product, just so I can win with a thrill.
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