The Mind-Riders

by Brian Stableford

  I knew by then that even now, I didn’t hate Herrera. I wasn’t horrified by him, or disgusted by him. In a sense, I knew him too well. I knew all about him, and I understood. I understood him better than Valerian, far better than the multitude of other people who’d barely impinged upon my life. Stella, Maria, Jimmy—they were shadows beyond the ring. But Paul was central. I knew Paul Herrera far too well.

  As we came out for the seventh, the face was there, in all its crazy glory. Anguish and rage, tearing the false face apart. I looked into his eyes, and nothing stirred. No flood tide of emotion. There was nothing of Franco Valerian in me. None of it had taken. The graft had been too alien, and my mind had rejected it.

  Maria had failed.

  And he came at me with everything he had to throw. I tried to drive a hard right into his ribs—a blow to weaken him and take some of the lightning out of his motion—but he made it ineffective with a swerve and hooked his left into the temple above my right eye. The flesh swelled, and it hurt. The brain inside the sim’s head was staggered. My mind, momentarily, was shaken and sickened.

  I went into retreat. I sheltered from a rain of blows. I ran, I dodged, and finally I clinched, trying to hold him, trying to recover composure. I wanted to hold hard but when the voice says “Break”, you break. You don’t have the option.

  I escaped, I overcame the lapse. On the tally I was probably still winning, but I knew that the only exchange which mattered now was the next one. What had gone before counted for nothing. The crisis was coming fast.

  Again, the rest between rounds. Again, the thoughts crowding my mind. All the wrong thoughts, or so they say. I could hear a chorus building—a chorus singing, “I told you so”. Not Stella this time but all of them. They’d tried to make me into their kind of toy and failed, but that wouldn’t be their failure—not the way they’d write the script. This would be down to me. It would be my failure, my shit-out.

  Then the change of state, which perhaps I needed desperately, happened inside my mind.

  I became ultra-conscious of a presence—a presence I’d somehow forgotten, pushed deep in my mind during the early rounds. I became conscious of the people in my mind, with a new kind of awareness. They were there, suddenly, with a stark extrasensory clarity that made me wonder how I’d never seemed to notice them before.

  It was the eighth, and somehow I carried in that round knowledge which had evaded me in the first seven. I could feel the millions of minds that were riding mine. I could feel their closeness, and it suddenly seemed very offensive.

  I could smell them.

  And I reacted against them.

  I went cold. Completely cold. And I went out to mow down Paul Herrera with the same detachment and indifference and fatalism that a scythe might feel as it goes through ripe corn. I was sheer efficiency again, as crisp as I’d been in the first. Herrera had come to find me out, expecting to catch me weakening, giving way. From his point of view, time must have turned back. And with time, the tide of the fight. All the work he had put in suddenly showed for nothing, and that was something new to him. It was something he hadn’t met before. He was used to wearing fighters down. They always pulled out extra, always lasted longer than they showed likely to—but they always wore on. They never turned back and came again. Not this way.

  He sensed the change, knew the difference. He was as aware of it as I was. We fought out the round, and from the ringside we must both have looked like champions. Great fighters. But through the E-links, I knew—we both knew—that we didn’t seem the same at all. As different as black and white, dead and alive, high and low. He was a blaze of glory, I was a black, cold knife.

  There was no possibility of a standoff. One of us had to win, and win utterly. He was feeding the vamps, pouring himself into their heads. I was walling them off, fighting them, maybe even hating them.

  The riders—the riders I couldn’t satisfy, who wanted from me a tribute I could not and would not pay them—became the focus of my mental force. And with them—inextricably enmeshed with them—their figurehead, their beloved, their prime victim, Paul Herrera.

  We came out for the ninth both knowing that he was losing, that fate had changed hands. He came at me full of the compulsion to force the critical moment he already knew must go against him. He attacked, with all the venom that was still in him.

  And as his fury mounted beyond effect, so my calm settled over me like a cloak.

  The first blow, when I breached a gap in his guard as he tried to hook at my eyes, was a solid one—the best punch of the fight. It should have rocked him and thrown him back, but it didn’t. It brought him on, more determined, more furious than before.

  There’s a fable about an adder which struck at a file, and was hurt. Instead of the hurt making it desist, it only made the adder strike again, and again and again and again, the agony of each strike driving the compulsion to strike again harder, in a positive feedback loop that could only be broken by the death and destruction of the snake.

  And that’s how it went.

  Herrera shed his skill, his speed—everything but his fists and his need to keep them flying. His defense evaporated, and it became so much easier to hit him. I couldn’t miss.

  With ten, a dozen, a score of punches driven into his face and body in a matter of four, six, eight seconds, the legend of Paul Herrera exploded—tested, at last, beyond his capabilities.

  He should have gone down long before he did, but something kept him standing, left him stranded in the middle of the ring to soak up the punishment. Twenty years of winning and hurting all turned back on Herrera then, and perhaps he had to unlive them all before he fell.

  I did it without anger in my mind. There was blood on my gloves but none on my hands, no stain on my soul. I had no sense of triumph. I simply knew that in beating Herrera I was beating the mind-vampires—the real killers of Franco Valerian.

  You don’t hear cheers inside a sim.

  After you win, you’re all alone.

  Until—

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  A world was waiting for me—an artificial world ruled by the mythology of victory and acclamation. Into that world I had been reborn. I could never be no one again—not until the moment comes when I, like Paul Herrera, will end up as the wreckage of a defeated sim.

  With the electrodes stripped away, the knowledge that I had beaten Herrera retreated reluctantly into the past, and I faced the future. There was a clamoring crowd of new thoughts, new ideas. In a way that made me want to laugh, I believed that I had beaten them all, robbed them of their petty triumphs.

  And I did laugh.

  “Where’s Valerian?” I demanded. “I want to know what he got for his money.”

  Maria was there, with the techs. She stepped forward to take the question.

  “He got what he wanted,” she said. She looked calm and composed, not angry. “You won’t be hearing from him again,” she added. “You’re on your own now.”

  “He didn’t get what he wanted,” I retorted. “I didn’t do it his way. Nor your way. My head was straight.”

  She smiled, and there was a gleam in the smile that mocked me.

  “He was hooked into Herrera,” she said.

  The last surprise. The last trick. They had it saved up. In a way, it was still funny, though it didn’t make me laugh. Of course he was hooked up to Herrera. It was obvious. In eighteen years, he had always been hooked to Herrera. Crossed connections, for a different angle. He had got what he wanted—not out of my empty head but out of Herrera’s. He had seen Herrera beaten, and sucked up his suffering. Herrera—the greatest feeler of them all—must have gone out in a real blaze of agony. A real freak-out.

  “And you?” I said. “Whose head were you on?”

  “Yours,” she said. That gleam was still there. She wasn’t about to give in.

  “And?” I prompted.

  “You won,” she said.

  “Not according to the script.”

  “I don’
t write scripts,” she said. “I make pens, for people to write their own.”

  “You think you can claim responsibility for what I did tonight?”

  She shook her head. “I never claim responsibility. I just do what I can and watch the results. I’m still watching, and I’ll go on watching. You have to go into the ring again and again and again, because that’s the way you want your life to run. Every time, you’ll take those people inside you, and you’ll make power out of hating what they are. It’ll win your fights, and it’ll tear you apart. You come back in ten years and you tell me whether I taught you anything or not.”

  “Stella’s right,” I said. “You’re a real bitch.”

  “What does that make you?” she asked, sweetly. “An electric hare?”

  I was grateful that she’d had to say that. I was pleased to find a hole, however small, in her quiet arrogance.

  “I’m the champion,” I told her. “The best man. The winner.”

  “And they’ll hate you for it,” she reminded me. “They’ll detest your callousness and your lack of feeling. But in time, they’ll find that they love to hate you. They’ll ride you like Valerian rode Herrera—looking to see you broken up and destroyed. And when the time comes they’ll dance on your grave. You can’t beat the public—not in the long run. They’ll get their kicks out of you no matter what you try to peddle them.”

  And that little speech replaced, “Goodbye.” She left. It was the end of a beautiful relationship.

  Outside, Jimmy was waiting for me, waiting to claim his slice of my reflected glory. We were both big men, now—with the world opening its doors for us.

  He was all smiles. He’d been hooked up to me, and he hadn’t resented the way I’d done it. He probably hadn’t even noticed. What the hell did he need with an E-link? He’d done all the feeling himself—he’d felt my victory like nobody else, his way.

  He shook me by the hand, and every inch of him believed it when he said, “You—did it.”

  “Sure,” I said, shaking his hand as hard as he was shaking mine, “I sure as hell did.”

  Then I went out, to find a new home within my new life.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Brian Stableford was born in Yorkshire in 1948. He taught at the University of Reading for several years, but is now a full-time writer. He has written many science-fiction and fantasy novels, including The Empire of Fear, The Werewolves of London, Year Zero, The Curse of the Coral Bride, The Stones of Camelot, and Prelude to Eternity. Collections of his short stories include a long series of Tales of the Biotech Revolution, and such idiosyncratic items as Sheena and Other Gothic Tales and The Innsmouth Heritage and Other Sequels. He has written numerous nonfiction books, including Scientific Romance in Britain, 1890-1950; Glorious Perversity: The Decline and Fall of Literary Decadence; Science Fact and Science Fiction: An Encyclopedia; and The Devil’s Party: A Brief History of Satanic Abuse. He has contributed hundreds of biographical and critical articles to reference books, and has also translated numerous novels from the French language, including books by Paul Féval, Albert Robida, Maurice Renard, and J. H. Rosny the Elder.

  BORGO PRESS BOOKS BY BRIAN STABLEFORD

  Alien Abduction: The Wiltshire Revelations * Balance of Power (Daedalus Mission #5) * The Best of Both Worlds and Other Ambiguous Tales * Beyond the Colors of Darkness and Other Exotica Changelings and Other Metaphoric Tales * The City of the Sun (Daedalus Mission #4) * Complications and Other Science Fiction Stories * The Cosmic Perspective and Other Black Comedies Critical Threshold (Daedalus Mission #2) * The Cthulhu Encryption: A Romance of Piracy * The Cure for Love and Other Tales of the Biotech Revolution * The Dragon Man: A Novel of the Future * The Eleventh Hour * The Fenris Device (Hooded Swan #5) * Firefly: A Novel of the Far Future * Les Fleurs du Mal: A Tale of the Biotech Revolution * The Florians (Daedalus Mission #1) * The Gardens of Tantalus and Other Delusions * The Gates of Eden: A Science Fiction Novel * The Great Chain of Being and Other Tales of the Biotech Revolution * Halycon Drift (Hooded Swan #1) * The Haunted Bookshop and Other Apparitions * In the Flesh and Other Tales of the Biotech Revolution * The Innsmouth Heritage and Other Sequels * Journey to the Core of Creation: A Romance of Evolution * Kiss the Goat: A Twenty-First-Century Ghost Story * Luscinia: A Romance of Nightingales and Roses * The Mad Trist: A Romance of Bibliomania * The Mind-Riders: A Science Fiction Novel * The Moment of Truth: A Novel of the Future * Nature’s Shift: A Tale of the Biotech Revolution * An Oasis of Horror: Decadent Tales and Contes Cruels * The Paradise Game (Hooded Swan #4) * The Paradox of the Sets (Daedalus Mission #6) * The Plurality of Worlds: A Sixteenth-Century Space Opera * Prelude to Eternity: A Romance of the First Time Machine * Promised Land (Hooded Swan #3) * The Quintessence of August: A Romance of Possession * The Return of the Djinn and Other Black Melodramas * Rhapsody in Black (Hooded Swan #2) * Salome and Other Decadent Fantasies * Streaking: A Novel of Probability * Swan Song (Hooded Swan #6) * The Tree of Life and Other Tales of the Biotech Revolution * The Undead: A Tale of the Biotech Revolution * Valdemar’s Daughter: A Romance of Mesmerism * War Games: A Science Fiction Novel * Wildeblood’s Empire (Daedalus Mission #3) * The World Beyond: A Sequel to S. Fowler Wright’s The World Below * Writing Fantasy and Science Fiction * Xeno’s Paradox: A Tale of the Biotech Revolution * Zombies Don’t Cry: A Tale of the Biotech Revolution