The Mind-Riders (12 page)

She got up and went to the door.

“You can always phone me,” she said, as she left. “Any time between now and the big night.”

CHAPTER ELEVEN

I won the preliminary fight, and I won it very much my way. Skillful, efficient, easy in my mind.

It pulled an audience of nearly a million and the sixty percent who tied into me saw an exhibition of boxing that might even have come close to teaching them what it was all about. A lot of them, though, were probably bored stiff, cruising on whatever enthusiasm their own humble, tired brains could work up. But you get no guarantees when you set off on a free ride. They'd just have to put up with it.

Afterwards, there were a few reporters to be seen, and a tiny knot of fight fans who'd fluttered in from the environs in helicabs as soon as the fight was over, in the hope of finding an argument or a good screw, depending on sex (theirs, not mine). It never ceases to amaze me how it doesn't click with some suckers that the guy who's handling a sim is not necessarily gifted by nature with the same six-three Apollonic persona as the image in the holo set. There must be thousands of ex-teenagers whose dreams of super-orgasm were smashed forever the first time they set eyes on the
real
Paul Herrera.

Out of the crowd I picked the one man who interested me, and invited him to join our party for a drink. I was entitled to a mild celebration, though Wolff came along to make sure I didn't do anything which might faintly prejudice my peak condition. The fact that I leave my body behind when I go into the ring didn't mean that I could have
carte blanche
to mistreat it—not as far as Wolff was concerned. He believed that a
mens sana
needs a
corpore sano
, and he had jurisdiction over that particular aspect of my life. To get anywhere at all in this world you have to give bits of yourself away—surrender your sacred choices two by two.

Only four of us wound up sitting round the table in the club, however. Valerian declined to accompany us. Of the four, only one was drinking as if he meant it, and he seemed to mean it very hard indeed. Wolff, Angeli and myself practiced moderation, but such considerations as we had in mind obviously didn't bother our companion, Mr. Sacchetti.

The cabaret was awful, and I wondered how come the entertainment business was supposed to be thriving. But I hadn't really come to watch bouncing breasts and listen to sculptures in sound.

“Did you enjoy the fight?” I asked the reporter.

“Sure,” he said. “I enjoy all fights. Some people are hard to please, but I'm easy.”

“Your comrades-in-arms are going to slay me again,” I said. “They still think I fight too fair. How about you?”

He shrugged. “We'll all be in the middle ground tomorrow,” he said. “They'll have advanced, I'll have retreated. The controversy has to die. No more point in it.”

He wasn't saying anything particularly bitter, but I could feel a real hardness in the way he spoke. Most people, when they take a lot of liquor, get softer in the voice, begin to slacken. But this guy just turned to stone. He could say, “I love you” like he was spitting powdered glass. I realized that he hated the fight game. That was why he wrote about it. In his reports, I'd looked for a kindred spirit, and hadn't found one. Even so, I'd been reluctant to believe that Valerian was right and that he was just a damn-it-all committed cynic. I'd hoped to find him able to believe in the same things I did. Skill and sport. But he didn't. He was a skeptic through and through.

“It was a good, clean fight,” I told him. “Nothing for the vamps. That's the way it should be.”

“It was a straight kill,” he said, neutrally. “You want a medal?”

“Why not?”

He looked at me in a peculiar way. His face was pointing somewhere else, but his eyes were on mine. “You think you're something special?” he asked.

“Don't you?”

“You're okay,” he said, rather grudgingly. “You maybe have a heart of gold. You don't do much for the hungry fans. Yet. But if you think you can beat the system you're a mug.
It
will beat
you.
It already is.”

“I don't get you,” I said.

He glanced down at his drink, checking to see if there were enough dregs to make it worth the effort of lifting the glass to his lips. There were. He shook his bead as he swallowed. “There's no way out. Okay, so first time out you were a poke in the eye with a sharp stick. They deserved you. But they'll make you over into what they want you to be. You think they're only sitting on your skull, picking up the crumbs you care to drop, but it's not that simple. They suck you up, they weaken you, they stir around in your head, and in the end you give them what they need. Vultures don't just wait for things to die, you know—they give a helping hand now and again, like a peck or a slash with their claws. You can't keep cold with a hundred million hungry worms in your skull. It isn't possible. Tonight, six hundred thousand—tomorrow, the whole world. Even tonight, you were yielding, just a fraction. When you take on Herrera you can't resist. If you beat him, you'll become him. That's the way it goes. The vamps make their victims.” He ran a rigid finger across his throat, and looked at me as if the vultures were sitting all around me, waiting to begin.

I'd heard it all before, of course. Even from Stella.

Ray Angeli objected violently to Sacchetti's line of argument, though I wasn't quite sure why. He strung together some semi-articulate challenge. I didn't listen to the words—I already knew the tune too well.

Sacchetti was cruel to the kid. I guess he was cruel to everybody. He didn't even look as if he liked his mother. “You lost, son,” he said. “You weren't good enough. You don't know what the score is any more than your friend does. But I've seen it. I've been around a long time. I know you, and I know how you'll be in five years and ten, and right up to the day they've sucked you dry of fight and feeling. Even Herrera was a man once, but now he's what they made him—a flash storm. Everything he ever was only exists when he's in the ring, to be yanked out by the vamps. Have you seen Herrera in the flesh recently? Have
you?”
This last was addressed to me.

I hadn't seen Paul Herrera in the flesh. Not for more years than I cared to remember. In my mind's eye, he was still a kid—a Burne Caine.

“He's just a dance,” said Sacchetti. “A dance to the music of the mind-riders.”

“That's pretty,” I said. “Pure journalese, subspecies inside back page. But you're missing out. You're painting it all black, and it isn't.”

“Every silver lining is locked inside a cloud,” he said, and laughed politely at himself. It wasn't funny.

There was no point in insisting. I was disappointed by Sacchetti. It seemed that everywhere I looked for the least vestige of moral support there was nothing but black humor or an intellectual vacuum. Even Wolff couldn't really be on my side, because in his eyes only half the problem existed. To him, there were no vamps. They didn't exist. Wolff's idea of the universe didn't extend outside the ropes of the ring. I bet he didn't believe in atoms, either.

I begrudged paying for Sacchetti's liquor. He was as much use to me as a pet mockingbird.

I withdrew into my thoughts as Ray Angeli began to tell me again how to beat Herrera. I withdrew, but I couldn't switch off my eyes. They kept roaming around, showing me bleak faces and colored light and actors on a stage paid to make fools of themselves for the delectation of the public. But there were no vamps here. All the applause was polite, and anyone who got high did so on innocent chemical compounds.

I was assaulted by the thought that nobody in the world wanted me to win the title fight—not my way. Some other way, maybe. But nobody wanted to come over to my side of the fence, to look at it from my angle. They all wanted to stay up on their own safe pedestals. I wished I could topple the lot—Valerian, Stella, Wolff, Angeli, Sacchetti, Maria—tumble them into doubt, make them all re-think themselves out of utter confusion.

But there's no way you can do that. Those pedestals are built to last.

In the papers next day there were rumors.

Above, below and beside reports on my fight and my title hopes there were carefully-constructed whispers about Paul Herrera. He was ill, scared, mad, old, disappointed in love. Nobody actually said so, but they sowed the seeds. It was the idlest of idle speculation, but that's how the so-called news is made. It was all due to Valerian. He was cleaning the dead bodies out of the arena, putting down new sawdust to cover the old blood. The lions were back in their cages, the disemboweled Christians in Heaven, and the gladiators were sleeping with their swords. Somebody had to go out and make the masses believe that tomorrow it was all going to be new, unexpected, exciting. Not just the same old circus served with yesterday's stale bread.

You have to admire the technique. The sun never sets on Network's Empire, and they worked hard to ensure that it was never likely to.

I felt blurred, as if I didn't quite have myself in focus. In the morning session I chased Angeli round the ring for a desultory couple of rounds, and never really looked like catching him. Farcically, in the third I saw him slowing down, deliberately miscuing his gentle jabs. He wanted me to hit him, to be fast and good. He wasn't really handling his own sim at all. He wanted to identify with me. He wanted me to be superman, to beat Herrera, to do what he wanted to do but hadn't.

I knocked him down a couple of times, rousing myself slightly from my torpor. I hit him rather harder than was warranted, and after I'd thus shown off my contempt I felt rather guilty—not because I'd hurt him but because I'd somehow betrayed myself. I'd let myself be decoyed into the game, letting frustration put power in my punches.

I found it difficult to recover real poise and efficiency. Wolff bitched at me and I bitched back.

By the end of the afternoon I was feeling even lower—very much at odds with the world and with myself. It was only a mood, and it would pass, but it was a bad thing to be stuck in. The day seemed to drag, and it seemed peculiarly devoid of presence and incident. Valerian was away, and there were just two of us at dinner—myself and Curman. I asked him why he wasn't with the old man and he explained that he had to go out later with Stella. After this exchange of information I let the conversation go to hell, and applied myself with fiendish concentration to the food which still, to me, tasted alien and unpleasant. After I finished eating, though, I began to slow down, deliberately taking it easy over the coffee, letting time go by and not making any effort to carry myself through into a new phase of existence.

Curman was waiting, too—waiting, I supposed, for the mercurial Stella to show up and demand his company. We must have looked as if we were doing some really serious research into techniques for wasting time.

“Not so good,” he commented, eventually, as if in answer to an imaginary question. He apparently thought that it was time for a second attempt at conversation.

The silence didn't want to yield, but we forced it into submission.

“On the contrary,” I said. “It's heaven when the roses are in bloom.”

“All roses got thorns,” he quoted, dolefully. It was about the level of wit one would expect from a character like Curman.

“Have a drink, why don't you?” I said, nodding toward the cabinet at the side. “Or do they put wax crayon marks on the bottles.”

He shook his head, and made no move. He was inventing some new remark, which would probably be as facile as all the rest, when he was interrupted by Stella's entry into the room.

She sailed in confidently and sat down. With near-miraculous precision the first course materialized in front of her. I watched the waiter disappear, and wondered how he did it.

“How's things?” I asked, politely.

“Same as always,” she replied, and added—with a glance at Curman—“pretty deadly.”

“Why?” I inquired.

She seemed surprised by the question. She didn't answer it.

“Unrequited love?” I prompted. “Or did you lose a bet?”

“Both,” she replied. She didn't seem interested in gay repartee. “Better get the car out,” she said to Curman. He nodded and sauntered out.

“Alone at last,” I said.

“If your punches are as lousy and predictable as your dialogue,” she said, “you'll get all hell knocked out of you when you go up against Herrera.”

“He'll have to catch me first. Where are you going?”

“To the dogs,” she said.

I must have looked startled.

“They race, you know,” she added, by way of explanation. “It's a sport.”

“Oh,” I said. “You mean literally to the dogs.”

“I own some,” she said. “Cheaper than horses. It's one of my private vices—one of the few I'm allowed. The old man owns boxers, I own greyhounds. His are losers, mine sometimes win. Sporting blood runs in the family, like old books. All the way back to our remotest ancestors, in the nineteen twenties.”

“That's not so far.”

“True,” she admitted. “Some of my dogs have longer pedigrees than I have. But I can always borrow some of their respectability. Or marry into a family that can trace itself back to Genghis Khan.”

I couldn't think of a witty reply.

“You want some advice,” she said. She had somehow picked up Curman's habit of saying things like that without the question mark that other people reckon to be polite.

“A hot tip?” I asked.

“That's right,” she said. “Get out now. Don't let that bitch screw your mind. She's got something in the works. She told granddaddy that you wouldn't play and they've decided to stop giving you the option. Tomorrow, they'll cut your heart out. Or maybe the next day.”

I pretended not to take it seriously for all of thirty seconds. But I couldn't think of a way to dodge the issue. It wasn't one of my creative days. Finally, I said, “How do you know?”