“They can’t do that!”
“No? How many minds are there inside yours during a big fight? A hundred thousand. A million. All over the world—and you don’t feel the pressure. You don’t feel that they can do anything to you. You think they’re just passengers.”
“That’s the way the link works,” I reminded her.
“Is it?” she asked. And even though she was talking nonsense there was something in her voice which threatened me. She was trying to retail an old nightmare—mind control via MiMaC. Brain washing, mind distortion, change of personality, Jekyll and Hyde. When vultures settle on a corpse it becomes vulture-meat, no matter what it might have been before. The parasite absorbs the host, and the host’s flesh becomes parasite flesh. The virus invades a cell, and the cell is converted to the production of virions. The integrity of the body can break down under a whole host of stimuli, go mad and lose control of itself, become cancerous. And what of the mind? How secure are its walls, how absolute is its structure? When you let in the riders, you surrender yourself to demonic possession. How can any one say that they come through it all unchanged, unsullied, unaffected? How can anyone say that the riders in your mind don’t even leave their smell behind?
When Stella was gone, I was still looking for answers. From every side the assault was coming. There was no way to turn without running into someone’s challenge, someone’s accusation. I wished I could believe it was all a PT plot to undermine my self-confidence, that everyone came with a roster of questions prepared. But I didn’t believe that.
I could have shrugged it all off, dismissed it all as irrelevant, settled back into perfect faith in my own aims, my own abilities. But I had to admit that I didn’t have such perfect faith. I never had. The only perfect thing I had, untouchable by fate, was my will to win.
I was fixed up for another fight within a fortnight. Then another, and another.
One by one, I disposed of a trio of young hopefuls looking to get a significant start in life. They would all have other chances—nobody expects you to win everything right from the start. In the meantime, they were convenient cannon-fodder. I was never really extended and no fight went the distance.
But we all knew that it was just play—strictly for the record. It was a matter of the quantitative accumulation of wins, to build up my putative reputation as a hard man, a genuine contender. It was for publicity purposes as much as for anything. It was trivial.
Then came the first real fight, against a boxer of good quality. For this one, the pressure came on. Maria Kenrian stepped from the shadows back into the limelight of my life, reminding me by her continual presence of all the things she stood for. This one, she believed, was going to show me the light—it was going to make clear to me just how much I needed the ministrations of a first-class angel.
Again, the apprehension. Again, the determination to attack, to take my courage in both hands and go in to do what I could do, alone and unaided.
But this time, I couldn’t just waltz through the first half dozen rounds, stacking them up to my credit like Valerian’s servants stacked plates.
It was tough—a genuine contest. I was hustled, and I was hit. I was called upon to produce more power and energy than naturally flowed into my fists. I was called upon to find extra, and keep finding it. Not the kind of extra strength and coordination and fighting style I’d had to call back into the ring against Ira Manuel—that was just something I’d lost and had to find again—but something more. I was in fresh territory, pushed out of my natural depth for the first time.
I tried hard not to lose sight for the merest second of precisely what I was doing. I worked hard, in the sim and in my mind. I never once lost any semblance of control over either. For a while, the fight looked even, but as early as the third I was conscious of a certain superiority. I was a shade better. It wasn’t easy making that superiority tell, making a margin of effort between us and keeping that margin widening steadily as rounds went by, but I did it.
It was like running uphill—the further I went the harder and the more punishing it got, but I edged ahead early and he was never catching up. After eleven he began to get desperate, to rush himself, overcommit his moves, and I began cutting him to pieces. He was on the floor in the twelfth and he took the count in the penultimate round.
It was a good win, and it confirmed me as a fighter of class. It made me into an eventual contender, and the way that Valerian was rushing it made me into a man who was likely to climb into the ring with the champion at the earliest possible moment. The press and the audience still didn’t like me, but their hostility was being dissolved by a torrent of chatter. The public relations angle of their work began to take over from the opinionating.
Just one month after that crucial fifth fight my final program was arranged. One more medium-sized bogey to dispatch, and then Herrera. The dates of both fights were fixed, although the second was conditional on my winning the first.
I was surprised—not by Valerian’s hurry but by Herrera’s willingness to cooperate. Generally, he let a long gap go by between fights these days. It wasn’t that he needed the time, but that his image did. Network needed a long lapse to keep the vamps hungry and to do a careful cosmetic operation on the probabilities pertaining to the next fight. They always had to make Herrera’s invincibility look cracked, to show that each and every challenger had a measurable chance. Even a massacre has to look like a contest in the public eye.
A manufactured myth needs careful and constant maintenance.
But this time Herrera wanted to fight. He wanted to take me early. Network was willing to let him, though they might have preferred to give it a little more time. Herrera was anxious to have me out of the way, and so—for different reasons—were they.
It wasn’t that Herrera was frightened of me. He knew as well as I did that the result of the fight we’d had eighteen years ago didn’t matter a damn in today’s world. It would be two different fighters in the ring this time. But it wouldn’t be two different men. What Herrera wanted—and what made him hurry—was his revenge for that solitary defeat. Like Valerian, he wanted to wipe out an insult, and the fact that eighteen years and more had passed only meant that there was no reason to drag his feet now. He had been given the opportunity to redress the balance, and he was ready to grab it at the earliest possible moment. Herrera had a long memory, and in his mind he still had a way to go in paying the world back for the agonies of his youth. He was still a sensitive man.
Once the schedule was settled, my training program was stepped up. To keep me under pressure through the weeks until the big crunch Wolff imported a new sparring partner—a man who could probably get as much out of me in the ring as any other boxer short of the champ himself.
Ray Angeli.
I was surprised to see him. He had a lot of money to make yet, despite having been demolished by Herrera. A few more wins, careful management, and he would be in the top bracket of the big league. He had vamp appeal, he had skill. So what if he wasn’t the world’s greatest? There can only be one at a time, and Ray had a long life ahead of him. He’d have more chances, and in the meantime he could cut himself a big slice of the cake. Valerian’s money wasn’t behind him anymore but there had to be managers queuing up to sign him on.
But instead, he was back in the game. He was a spare in a new operation. Sure, he’d be well paid, but in his shoes I’d have been thinking about my pride.
It didn’t take long to find out why he was back. He was infected. Somehow, it had all got through to him. It had eaten into his skin and into his heart. He was still thinking, months after his big night, that the one thing of importance in the world was seeing Herrera beaten—not necessarily beating him, but seeing him beaten. Valerian had screwed his head, twisted him somehow. Poor Ray had lived with Valerian and been a part of the crusade for long, long months, and it had all taken hold of him. He had got involved with it. And he still felt at home in the game. He wanted to help me.
H
e put me through my paces inside the ring, really forcing me through some pretty tough work. Outside the ring, though, he didn’t stop. He was still trying to corner me, always trying to get through my guard and hit me—with words, with arguments, with regrets, with advice. It was almost enough to make me scream. Most times, I got away. The house was a refuge—he was no longer the golden boy and he was out with Wolff and the other hirelings—but I knew there couldn’t be any real or permanent escape. It was just one of those things that have to be faced. Someday I was going to have to sit still and let him pour out his bitter soul on to my lap.
Eventually, on a day off when I felt so detached from life in general that it seemed I wouldn’t mind if World War Ninety-Nine broke out, I agreed to go along with him on a trip into the mountains. The idea was to get—so he said—some clean air and a look at a different world. Wolff declined an invitation but Stella found out and opted in—which meant that Curman was assigned to us as well, because Valerian apparently didn’t approve of his granddaughter running round loose, especially in the kidnap season.
I was assigned the front seat, beside Angeli, by a kind of conspiracy of presumption. He talked at me for mile after mile after mile. All the way. He kept his eyes on the road, but his hands were never still on the wheel. They kept wandering to reinforce the points he was making.
“You can beat him,” he assured me. In fact, he seemed to assure me of that at the beginning of eighty percent of his paragraphs. It was his premise, his jumping-off point for rhapsodies and fantasies of method and theory.
“I couldn’t quite crack him, you see,” he explained. “But he can be cracked. And once he is, he’s just meat like anyone else. It seems to me he hasn’t got quite his old edge—like there’s a seam which has been taking all these years of strain and could open any time. Maybe in five years I could take him myself—right now I haven’t the experience. But I ran him close and you can follow up, you can take up where I left off and you can break him. For a long time when I was in there with him it was all even. And I began to feel him—you know what I mean—feel him taking it in, going back on his reserve tank. Just that little bit extra is all it needs. Do like I did—conserve your strength, don’t let him hit you too hard too often—that’s your style, I know. If you can do that, hang on in like me, stay with him or ahead of him, keep the tally guessing, I think he’ll run out of gas. Twelve, maybe fourteen, he’ll go up in smoke. Nothing left. Important thing is not to give, not to crack yourself—but you won’t, because you’re not the type to give. You’re too tough for him. I see you got an edge when we’re in the ring. You can take me, you can take him.”
I listened. I listened to it all.
I remembered sitting and hoping this fatuous creep could beat Herrera. I prayed for him to do it. But that’s sim fighting for you—you never get to see the guy inside the machine. All you see is his image.
“Maybe someday,” he said, “I’ll come and take the title from you.”
Thanks a lot, I didn’t say. Thanks for the thought, if such it can be called.
As testimony to the power of a myth, Angeli had a certain fascination. He was roped and tied by ideas which would confine him until the end of his days—unless he got a new revelation in the meantime.
Someone—a whole crowd of someones, including himself—had hammered switches in Angeli’s mind until they were sealed closed forever, barring cross-circuits in the brain. Herrera had to be beaten—next time. Had to be. He had no regard for logic—there always had to be a way to do it, a way it could be done. There was always a new formula, a new plan—a recipe for achievement. Racehorse trainers operate on the same kind of basis with regard to slow horses. Every time a nag comes back looking like a tired dog, sweat all over and feeling the whip marks on its arse, beaten out of the finish for lack of speed, class and spirit, there’s the trainer explaining to the owner that the race was slowly run. It had a bad draw, it had the wrong jockey, it needs blinkers, it was the way he didn’t eat his oats last night. It’s never the fact that the horse is a loser. Never. That’s the one thing the owner doesn’t want to know, doesn’t want to hear. It always has to be circumstance.
So there was Angeli, talking to himself via me. Every time he found a new word, a new angle, a new excuse, it poured out again. Every time he said, “You can beat him” he meant, “I could have beaten him”. He meant, “He can be beaten”. He meant anything except, “I lost”, “I’m a loser”, “He’s too good”, “He beat me”.
Ray Angeli was a tangled man. And yet—he could box.
He had looked good. The vamps drank their fill from him. Losers thrive on illusions. Excuses off the peg, filed and cross-indexed, a logic to support every conceivable event. His intentions were good, of course.
The road to hell is paved with good intentions, and each one has its loser sitting right on top of it, saying, “Where I went wrong was here. If—”
If—
Slowly, the words tumbling in my ears became meaningless. I listened to the sounds, divorced from their meanings. I turned off the language and listened to the stupid, fumbling rhythm.
It was good to get right up into the mountains. I’m no nature lover but I love height. The great stands of green trees don’t inspire me at all—they’re alien, hopelessly and irredeemably, so far as people who are born and live their lives in a matrix of concrete cages and arterial roads are concerned. But the faces of rock above the tree line—that’s something else. On a murky day even the snow on the caps looks as gray as the grime which dresses the crowns of the capstacks and the twilit towers. That’s beauty—the reflection of man in nature.
Even today, in the second Age of Enlightenment (or the third, or the fifth, depending on the brand of your pocket calculator) they still champion the beauty of the untouched, unspoilt, unpolluted, unadorned. But that’s an archaic view—the romantic syndrome, the aesthetics of fake nostalgia. To me, and to any authentic child of today, there can be nothing intrinsically pleasing about a tree, or a flower, or a carefully-conserved deer with a government-protection tag in its ear and a medical history in some bureaucrat’s filing cabinet. No one, bar the self-deluding, can see anything clean or pretty in the round of nature with its thousand parasites and diseases, the biochemical pollution of its scents and pollen dust and its leaking sap. The hell with spring and hurricanes—sulfuric acid rain is clean, and it purifies. That’s the sense of values appropriate to the real world, no matter what fantasy land you believe in up above the clouds.
But as I said, losers live on illusions. So do the rich.
Stella got a kick out of it—and, I think, Curman too. Curman was innocent enough to enjoy the things he was supposed to, and clever enough to take them as they came.
I wanted to talk to Stella, but I never got the chance. She didn’t seem interested in people at all—not for a while. She hardly even looked at me—or at Ray Angeli. She had said that she liked Ray, but the liking obviously hadn’t cut deep. Like Curman, he was relegated to being part of the human furniture of her immediate environment. I don’t think he noticed. Or maybe he just didn’t allow it to show.
We ate out at a roadhouse that was full to the seams with aging participants in the great nostalgic dream. They were all bubbling with love of the woods and maintained an ostentatious piety in their communion with Eco-God and his unspoilt angels. Come back Pan, all is forgiven.
If they crucified Christ tomorrow there’d be a million and a half people walking on Washington to petition against cutting down a tree to make the cross.
By the time we got back, night had fallen, and as we came down into the city we could see the Valerian estate as an enclave of shadow in a metropolitan corpus that was blazing with atom-fed electric glory. A cast in the eye of civilization.
CHAPTER TEN
And the next day, the sky fell.
It had been hovering a long time.
“I want you to take some tests,” said the good doctor.
“PT tests?”
“Why now?” I wanted to know. “Why not in the beginning?” I was manifesting what the PTs call “suspicion and hostility” toward the idea of undergoing what they considered to be the A-1 route to self-repair.
“You know how we do the standard tests,” she said.
“You sit the subject down in the middle of a sim projection and then throw in giant spiders and naked ladies. The poor sap gets switched from scene to scene in a matter of seconds and gets thoroughly confused and frightened. A headdress taps the echoes in his brain. When you let him out you tell him which of his mental washers need replacing and give him an estimate for a whole new gearbox. Then he pays over half the credit he’ll earn in the next thirty years. You bung him back in the sim, and he sits through an hour a week taking passive part in horrible and embarrassing situations until he’s a nervous wreck. Or, to use the correct jargon, sane.”
She ignored the greater part of this lucid account and said, “And you know why I couldn’t give you the standard tests.”
“Sure,” I said, deflating myself just a little. “They wouldn’t be any good. I spend all my working life in sims—not just sitting in them but inside them. I don’t get confused or frightened or embarrassed. I’ve been called upon to attempt rape with the most wonderful naked ladies the computer can produce and I’ve been some of the nastiest spiders. My reactions wouldn’t exactly be—what d’you call it?—normal.”
“And so,” she said, “I’ve devised some tests tailored to your particular requirements.”
I didn’t like that idea, though I should have seen it coming.
“I’d have to be wired up to take these tests, I suppose?” I asked, soberly. I’d given up being a facetious churl for the time being.
“Yes.”
MiMaC, apart from being a breakthrough in the management and supervision of mechanical production, a revolution in entertainment and a godsend to military training and planning—plus a hundred other applications in just about every field of human endeavor which can put up the money—provides scope for the most effective and ingenious tortures man—or woman—can devise. If I allowed myself to be hooked into a sim situation with neither knowledge nor control of what was going to happen to me therein, I’d be putting myself into a situation of total vulnerability. There are disadvantages to having wires in your head.
The Mind-Riders Page 10