The Mind-Riders

by Brian Stableford

  In the imaginary dialogue, she was unintimidated. She had the answer tucked up her sleeve. She knew me that well.

  Very good, she replied, sarcastically. Humanity, hang thy head in shame. Ryan Hart will diagnose the social sicknesses of the modern world. He is a hero. He doesn’t use the E-link, and maintains his emotional independence, his emotional integrity.

  But where is it, Ryan?

  Where is this rich, self-sustained emotional life you are able to lead thanks to your rejection of the consumer product? What is there to recommend your emotional existence? Is it beautiful, unique, aesthetically magnificent? Where is your own joy, that is so superior to the custom-made variety? Is your home-made happiness so much better than the pills? Does it even exist? How, exactly, are you such a wonderful advertisement for psychic independence? Who is impoverished—the vamps, whose emotional wealth is purchased off the peg, or you, who feel hardly anything at all, most of it bitter?

  In a real dialogue, I would be unperturbed by such comments. I would laugh at them. I would manufacture a suitably witty reply, or simply rule them out of court with a gesture. But inside, you can only say something along the lines of, very clever, but it doesn’t get us anywhere, does it?

  And it doesn’t.

  That’s the trouble.

  Despite it all, I went into the ring for the first time in half my life with my mind unbent. I carried into the sim all the legacy of my latter days. It was a test—an experiment.

  I was nervous as I guided the sim out from the corner. A wholly irrational apprehension gripped my guts—mostly below the belt. I resented it, because there was no need for it and because I couldn’t understand it. Also because it was going out to a hundred thousand viewers. It wasn’t private. It wasn’t something I could keep confined. It was being sucked out of my soul and cast to the winds, tossed to the scavengers.

  I couldn’t see the meter from within the sim but I guessed that well over sixty percent were riding me. I wouldn’t be far short of the proportion that Herrera carried in his fights. Nobody could really fancy Tobias. I wouldn’t be fighting him if he had any real chance. I was favorite to win comfortably, not on the strength of my past performances, which were so deeply buried by the years as to count for nothing, but on the strength of my job as a stunt man. In the pre-fight publicity, Network copy-writers had made a big thing about the possibilities of talent being transferable. They hadn’t been able to build me up as a fountain of joy so they were making a puzzle out of me, stirring up intellectual interest. I guess the marks probably fell for it. You can sell anything to anybody. Once.

  Tobias was a deceptive boxer, with a good line in change of pace. Half the time he was wanting to get on with it, hurrying in to spray punches and always looking like he might cause trouble, and the other half back-pedaling, trying to lure some action out of his opponent. He always gave the impression of being more dangerous than he really was. He was not famed for punching power, and people he beat rarely took a brutal hammering. They just got harassed into submission.

  He wasn’t too easy to hit, and he didn’t mind taking punishment—he, too, like many second raters, was a victim of the it-ain’t-my-body syndrome. It ain’t, but you have to believe that it is in order to get the best out of it. He’d been brought along fairly carefully by his backers, but they knew by now that he was never going to make them any real money. They were putting him in today knowing he was on a bummer, but hoping he was ready for a long twilight, putting up noble performances against ambitious youngsters for pin money.

  I’d decided beforehand that there was no virtue in show, and no point at all in messing about. Right from the first moment I would be addressing myself to Paul Herrera—he was what it was all about. I wanted to start spelling out a message to Herrera with every punch.

  So, apprehension or no apprehension, I went out to attack. I went to chase and find Tobias, and I did it. When he came forward, I fought fire with fire, when he went back I gave him no rest. The first round was punishing, and I felt him falter before the end. In the second, and again in the fourth, his determination came fluttering up inside him. For a minute or so he looked capable. But each time he could not sustain himself. He could make nothing of it. He wilted.

  With every round he inched closer to defeat.

  I didn’t lose a round out of the first seven, and in the eighth he went down for good. I can’t honestly say that I knocked him down—I think he just faded out from a sense of despair. I hit him with a left hook when he was slightly off balance and he just didn’t find the motive force necessary to drag himself back off the canvas. Convinced of the pointlessness of it all, he just lapsed into mental turmoil and stayed crumpled.

  It was an easy, untroubled, impressive victory. Curiously, though, the quivering in my belly was still there once he was down. I’d stopped feeling it during the fight, but it was there, in abeyance. As soon as I was still again it took hold of me. Apprehension. Anticipation. Not fear, but a sense of impending events whose uncertain outcome was manifest as a vacillation in the determination to go forward and meet them.

  I wasn’t expecting a round of extravagant congratulations when the fight was over, and I didn’t get one. Carl Wolff signaled his satisfaction in his usual taciturn and unexcited fashion. Valerian hadn’t come to the studios but I knew he’d be hooked in at home, not feeling particularly delighted but fairly content that I was on the way. Dr. Kenrian was there when I came out of the machine, having turned up late and unobtrusively, as per usual, but she didn’t have anything to say beyond token acknowledgement of the fact that I’d won.

  I wondered, briefly, about Stella. I couldn’t make a guess as to whether she was in the habit of watching—or even hooking into—her father’s avengers, or whether she’d make an exception in my case. I didn’t suppose I’d find out.

  But there was one man there who wanted to tell me that I’d done a great job, and that was Jimmy Schell. We met him in the studio, and though it looked accidental I was pretty sure that he’d contrived it. I was slightly surprised that he bothered to make it seem like a coincidence, but I guess he still had little or no confidence in himself.

  We shook hands, and he expressed his stammering surprise at the way I’d turned up again. The question he didn’t ask was, why didn’t you tell me? I hadn’t an answer, and I almost felt guilty about it. When I’d talked to him before, I’d worn a false face. I’d never so much as hinted that I had been a fighter and intended to be again—not even when he had asked me about the Herrera-Angeli fight.

  He was working regularly now—small parts, but enough to make a living with a little icing on top. He was still going up. I wished him well and he promised to look out for my next fight. He was a fan. I knew he’d hook in. I didn’t like the idea of his vamping my mind, but I didn’t want to tell him I didn’t like it. To him, it came naturally.

  I was only half pleased by the enthusiasm in his voice and his manner. I knew that he was likely to be a maverick. The general reaction could well be hostile—it hadn’t been much of a contest from any point of view, least of all the vamp angle. I expected something of a hammering from the free press.

  I wasn’t disappointed.

  The papers were lying in wait at breakfast the next morning. The fight hadn’t been important but it had provoked enough interest to warrant giving it space in just about every sheet.

  Most of the comments were brief, and if not exactly abusive were far from complimentary. Nobody read anything out loud, but I knew that they all had a pretty good idea of what they said. Even the waiters.

  Strangely, it was Valerian himself who was anxious to know my reaction.

  “You didn’t win many friends,” he said, snidely—failing to keep the edge out of his voice.

  “I won the fight,” I reminded him.

  He tapped a couple of the papers. “Not in here you didn’t. Not really. To them, it was a joke. They don’t say so, but they suspect a fix. They couldn’t see that it was honest—you didn
’t give them any reason to think so.”

  “If they think honesty is an emotional orgy they’re crazy,” I said. “Those bastards are just consumer panders, wanting to rearrange the world the way it looks best from inside a headdress. That’s how they sell papers.”

  “It’s how they sell fights,” he said. “It’s their money. They pay you and your opponent and the techs.”

  “You pay me,” I said.

  “They pay me,” he retorted.

  I shrugged that off. “The public wouldn’t know an honest fight if they saw one,” I said. “They don’t want honesty—they want kicks. They’re in it for spectacle, not for sport. They only want to pretend it’s real. But they can’t have it all ways—it can’t be real and fake as well. If you want to hire a writer to script the title fight, hire one. Buy Herrera and a first class feeler to act it for you. But if you want a boxer, don’t try to tell me that I have to act up so as not to attract dirty sneers about fixing.”

  “It’s still the public that pays,” he said.

  “So okay,” I said. “The best man has to win. I’m the best fighter. Herrera’s the best feeler. The audience wants Herrera, but under the rules—under the conditions laid down by the men who believe in competition and not in comedy—it’s going to be me that wins it. You can whine, but you still can’t have it both ways.”

  He went back to eating, his dignity intact. He didn’t have to win arguments at his own table. He could just cancel them out of his consciousness. It was his world.

  The slight tension drained out of the atmosphere, and I re-directed my attention to scanning the reports.

  I was surprised to find that there was one which wasn’t hostile—either that or its hostility was sublimated into an invisible irony. It was by a man named Sacchetti, writing for a sheet that probably had an anti-Network axe to grind.

  It could be, said the article, that the neurotic overkill to which our innocent senses and feelings are subjected by the current style in boxing may be tuned down in the near future. It may be that we shall be offered the opportunity to recover a more refined sense of values—perhaps an old fashioned stoicism according to which emotional outbursts are regarded as signs of personal weakness. A new brand of unresponsive, stiff-lipped heroes may soon be launched by the shapers of men. Perhaps such a move is long overdue. Perhaps we may even see the infusion of some of the skill and character of classical boxing into a simulated sport which has so far been notable only for its brutality.

  “Now him,” I commented, “I like.”

  “He’s the court jester,” said Valerian, barely glancing at the paper and recognizing it from its typeface. “The establishment’s pet cynic.”

  “You think he doesn’t mean it?”

  “On the contrary,” said the old man. “He believes it all too seriously. He wouldn’t be amusing if he wasn’t grotesquely sincere. But he’s only the lone voice who confirms the majority belief by presenting the unpalatable alternative. Even his style is the sort of fancy glibness readers love to take exception to.”

  “I bet he loves you too,” I murmured. I caught Curman’s eye but there was nothing in his gaze but calculated blankness. There was not the faintest aura of an opinion about him. He had watched the fight, I felt sure. Hooked into me. He might even have appreciated it.

  After breakfast, it was straight back to work. Time marches on and so did the great crusade. Joe Tobias was just one step on the way, and there were plenty more to come.

  CHAPTER NINE

  A couple of days later I saw Stella again. I was still spending time in the library even though I’d become bored with the books—saturated with their antiquity and no longer fascinated by their feel. Reading the words I still enjoyed, but they felt so remote and so unconcerned. The ideas, as well as the objects which contained them, were stained by the dust of time, alien things in a world which used different instruments for the same purpose. In spite of it all, however, I still found the library the best place for a psychological escape from the heavy, morbid atmosphere. I had all but abandoned going into town, for whatever reason, and was slowly sinking down into the rut Valerian and Wolff had dug for me.

  Apparently, my fondness for the library was accepted and approved of by the household, and it was acknowledged as my bolt-hole, my private space. No one ever bothered me there, except Stella, who came to find me. Even she had something of the attitude of an invader.

  “Well?” she demanded peremptorily. “You know what you’re in for yet?”

  “The same as always,” I told her.

  “You still want to be champion.”

  “Pretty ridiculous if I changed my mind now, wouldn’t it be?” I said. “Do you expect me to have a sudden revelation—hear the call? Decide that all these years I’ve been looking at the wrong stars? Should I just throw away my entire life?”

  “Try another one,” she said.

  “It’s not as easy as that. We only have one each.”

  “Suppose,” she said, carefully, “you lose.”

  “I won’t.”

  “That’s a coward’s way to answer,” she said. “A refusal to face probabilities. That’s not you speaking, it’s a defense mechanism. You know you could lose. You must have thought about it.”

  I’d thought about it all right.

  “Well then,” I said, trying to keep it light and breezy. “Like Angeli and all the rest. On to the ex-Valerian scrap heap. Or maybe further—all the way back to 3912 and the kiddy-thrills. I won’t be short of a job, or a life. I can just put my old habits back on and continue wearing them. There’s lots worse off in the IA and the Social Services.”

  “And grandfather?”

  “He’ll find another last chance. The shock won’t kill him. I don’t know that anything ever will. He’s tough. He’ll just rewrite the screenplay for his declining years. From a man like that there’s no way to steal such things as hope. Herrera may crack before Valerian does.”

  “You don’t believe that,” she said.

  “How should I know what to believe?” I replied, carelessly. “I only work here. Just passing through.”

  “I’m not,” she said. “It’s my life.”

  “I’m the last person to come to for advice about how to live it.”

  “I don’t want advice,” she said. “I want to know where I’m up to. If you fail, where are we?”

  “Since you put it like that,” I said, “I guess in my secret heart of hearts I think I’m the last of the last chances. He blames me for what happened as well as Herrera, and this, finally, is the main feature. In putting me up against Paul he’s trying to tie his whole life up with a pink ribbon. He’s reached the end. If I win, he’ll hate me as fiercely as he ever hated Herrera, but he’ll enter it in his book as a victory. If I lose—well, I guess he loses too. Once and for all. Maybe it will kill him, or maybe he’ll find his way on to a whole new existential wavelength. Either way, it’ll be over. For him, for you.”

  She was silent for a few moments. I wondered why she came to me. Maybe she couldn’t work it out for herself. Maybe the gulf between her and Valerian was uncrossable, unfathomable.

  “I watched you the other night,” she said.

  “And?” I prompted.

  “You were so cold,” she said. “I didn’t understand.”

  So she’d done more than watch. “It’s the way I am,” I said.

  “It’s cruel,” she stated.

  “Why?”

  She waved a hand in the air, groping for the words. “If you were angry, excited—all the hitting and the hurting would be natural—in context. It would all make some kind of sense. But your way, it seems cruel. Callous. Hurting just for its own sake.”

  I shook my head. “Not for its own sake,” I said. “Not at all. You have it backwards. It’s when a man is excited by what he’s doing, committed to it, involved with it—that’s when sport becomes cruelty, when the element of viciousness and barbarity comes in. But I don’t enjoy hitting anyone. I do
it because I’m good at it, because it’s a contest.”

  “But what you’re doing is still the same,” she said. “You’re still hitting someone, still hurting them. Removing the motive from barbarity doesn’t make it civilized. It just leaves it without a reason—pointless barbarity.”

  “You don’t understand,” I told her. “You look at the fight and you see two men hitting one another. I guess in this day and age that’s natural—that’s what the vamps see and it’s what they want to see. They just like the emotional charge that goes with the violence and they don’t understand how much more to it there is.

  “But there’s an aesthetic quality in boxing. It’s a sport, and it’s a skill. It’s a ritual, demanding that each man get the best out of his abilities. Rituals are something we need, to confirm our identities, to let us know who and what we are. A lot of the devotees of the old sport thought that sims would destroy the element of identity in the sport by making all men start equal, but they were wrong, because starting equal doesn’t mean starting identical. There’s still skill and style, and getting the utmost out of a sim body is even more difficult than getting the best out of your own. The fighters know that. Even Paul Herrera knows that there’s far more to it than beating up the other guy. It’s the audience—the mind riders—who can’t and won’t understand that there’s more to winning than the display of brute force.”

  “Have you ever considered,” she asked, “that the audience might have it right and that you might have it wrong?”

  “I know what I do,” I said.

  “And you try to cheat the audience. If you don’t do what they want, that makes it all right. It squares your conscience.”

  “I don’t have a conscience.”

  “Suppose,” she said, slowly, “that they make you into what they want you to be. Suppose they make you into a substitute Herrera.”