The Mind-Riders (6 page)

I noticed that Maria Kenrian was hitching up to one of the E-link receivers. Wolff didn't bother—he just wanted to see how the sim was handling. The receiver, of course, had no direct contacts because the resonance induction works across the skull bones, so she was ready long before I was. She wasn't getting anything through, though, because the sim image has to be called up and integrated before the circuit is complete and the miracle of MiMaC begins to happen.

To begin with, they just put up a punch bag. No opponent, programmed or handled. Ira Manuel had made no move to get hooked into the other control unit, and it looked like he was going to have an idle day. He had only come out for the introductions.

I had one last look round the edges of the mask before they switched me in and I had to forget all about the outside world. I abandoned my body while the essential me—the mind, soul,
ka
and so on—became possessed of the sim body. The five-nine, two-hundred pound vehicle which God had issued me was traded in for six-three and two forty-five. All muscle, king-size and powerful.

You'd think that the guy who'd be mentally best equipped for handling a sim would be the guy who's own vital statistics are six-three and two forty-five, but that's not so. You have to be aware of doing something different, to switch over to a new mental regime. Otherwise you make mistakes—you reproduce in the sim all the stupid habits your own body's lapsed into, and you become confused by the limitations of the sim. Different kinds of possible and impossible are involved.

I moved round the bag, handling lightly and comfortably, hitting out without power, trying to show off my speed and ease instead of burning up the energy carefully programmed into the sim. I felt good—not excited, but pleasant. At home.

After the bag, Wolff put me through my paces with a selection of miscellaneous exercises and feats of strength—the kind of thing you have to do to be super sportsman of the year, all petty tests of coordination and control. It's all a matter of making the best use of the sim's abilities. For me, it was facile. Any one of a hundred Network handlers could do the same—this wasn't where the real difference between one man and the next came in. Any Network hack could beat the super sportsman of the year, but what he couldn't do is control his efforts into one set of skills and potentials well enough to get the absolute maximum out of a sim in terms of one specific set of demands. That takes talent as well as craft.

Nevertheless, they kept me farting about with the play stuff for more than an hour, and they—apparently—didn't get bored.

Eventually, though, when I was beginning to get a little tired, and the sim was beginning to slow down—manifesting all the symptoms of fatigue exactly as if it were a real body—they decided it was time for something better.

Instead of sending Manuel in they used a programmed sim—one that just shuffled around and blocked punches, without throwing any of its own. It couldn't react much, and without a real mind inside it it couldn't get involved. It was really only a glorified punch bag, but it had the advantage of being manipulable. Its reflexes could be turned up, its blocking made much faster, so that over a period of time you had to keep getting more out of yourself in order to keep putting punches through its defense.

I started off slowly, well within myself. I didn't go all out to impress anyone. I treated the shambling zombie with a certain amount of respect.

They turned up the speed, as I knew they would. They were going to test me—to expose a few limitations, find out where work had to begin. I didn't try to turn it into a competition—I was as interested in measuring my performance as they were. I continued to stay within myself, but I continued to put punches through the dummy's defenses until they had the thing up within a thousandth of a second of optimum. By then I couldn't hit it any more but, I was willing to lay odds that Ray Angeli had had to work for months before he had reached that kind of standard. That zombie could have gone fifteen rounds with Herrera and not taken too much punishment.

I was well content with the shape I was in, though I knew I was going to attract some criticism anyhow.

Carl Wolff just condemned it out of hand. “Sloppy,” was his sole judgment. He wasn't an easy man to please.

“After twenty years,” I said, “it was damn good.”

He shrugged.

“There's a good deal more to it than shaping up your reflexes,” said Maria Kenrian.

They were still unlocking me from the equipment, and I could do little more than glance sideways at her. She held up the B-link headdress and said, “I'm not talking about what comes over this. I'll need to look a lot longer and harder. But you have other, inevitable problems of attitude. The way your body is geared to respond to your mind has all the wrong assumptions built in. For almost half your life you've been working as a handler in simulation drama, where the priority is looking good. All your actions are deliberately exaggerated, held long enough to show an audience what you're doing. When you throw a punch you're not concentrating on hitting what you're aiming at, but on looking as if you're throwing a punch. You're faking, and you've been faking so long that you're no longer conscious of the fact. There's a world of difference between fighting for real and fighting so that it looks as if it's for real. Fiction always looks more real than reality, because fiction is so self-conscious, whereas reality is slipshod.

“Since you were last in the ring, Ryan, you've become a very accomplished actor. And if you were to go back into the ring tomorrow you'd do so
as an actor
—you couldn't help yourself. You'd put up a show, and you'd lose.

“You suppose that the job you've had these last eighteen years has kept you fit. You think it's given you a better knowledge of handling sims than most boxers, and you think this experience will stand you in good stead. In a way, you're right—it will have kept
certain aspects
of your talent in trim. But what we have to recover is the other aspects—the ones you don't even realize are gone. We have to override some of the assumptions eighteen years have ingrained into your mind. It can be done—but not if you persist in an attitude of quiet hostility and inflexibility. If you continue in the firm belief that you have it all under control, and that it will all be easy, you'll lose. And not only to Herrera—you simply won't get that far. You can't just slip back eighteen years in your life to your younger self—and even if you could, you know that Herrera is no longer the same man he was then.

“If you won't accept all this, then I suggest you watch yourself very closely when you start sparring with Ira. At present, he's a better boxer. He'll give you a rough time for a week or two. Only when we see how fast you improve to beat him can we gauge your chances of recovering the class and skill you once had. You must realize that it isn't automatic. You have your chance now, but you've no God-given right to succeed.”

When she finished, I didn't have anything to say. It was all too likely to be true. My self-assurance took a dive, kayoed in round one.

“That,” said Valerian, “is what you need a PT for.”

“Thanks a lot,” I said, my voice congealed and unyielding.

I eased myself out of the chair, with sweat sticking my shirt to my back. I stretched slightly, to get the feel of having my own body back again. I appreciated the tingle of circulation reviving forgotten limbs. Minutes dragged by while the tingle became uncomfortable and I dared not stand in case I couldn't support myself. I felt like I'd had fifteen rounds with Herrera already. It always feels that way when you come out.

My eyes moved from face to face, studying them all, trying to figure out what was behind their patient masks. Only Curman was smiling.

I shrugged slightly. It's never easy.

CHAPTER SIX

Over the next few weeks I gradually settled into a new routine for living. I expected it to be difficult, but certain aspects of it were very easy. When you're pushing forty you don't really expect that you can be uprooted and thrown into a world which is totally alien to everything you've encountered in your past without extreme feelings of dislocation. But it wasn't like that, for several reasons.

For one thing, I never really thought of Valerian's fortress as anything but an alien place. I never made any attempt to “adjust” to it, to “fit in”. I just stayed there, and in a way my real life remained back in 3912, just temporarily stored away, in a borrowed suitcase. Secondly, of course, this was something I'd always half-expected. All the time I'd been working as a stunt man at the studios I'd carried around this notion that I was
in transit,
that it was only a way station in my life. I'd never really settled at all. I guess I'd always felt like Cinderella—in the cellar by mistake while my real destiny was to K.O. Prince Charming. I'd even known that Valerian was—or would be, however reluctantly—my fairy godmother. They say that there are only two basic plots—Cinderella and Jack the Giant Killer—and that applies to the way you script your life as well as the way writers script your fantasies.

Anyhow, the old life—the false life—had been easy enough to screw up and throw away. I started anew, without my past hanging round me like a stuffed albatross. There was a whole new structure to my time and my habits and my thoughts, which came ready-made and precisely defined, thanks to Valerian and Carl Wolff.

A new world, off the peg.

For the most part, the life of Ryan Hart mk.III consisted of full days and empty evenings. Wolff and the techs and Ira Manuel took up my days, hustling me through a punishing program calculated to leave me mentally and physically exhausted—and pliable. I only existed, from their point of view, when I was connected to the machine. When they switched off, I retired into electrical oblivion. Occasionally, Wolff would remonstrate with me gently, but he always did so as if I were somehow unreal, like the way some people talk to their cars. There was no human-to-human interaction. I guess the territories in my mind had been pretty clearly demarcated, so that Wolff knew where his jurisdiction ended and Dr. Kenrian's began.

The good doctor evidently believed in not rushing in. She was a real angel. For long periods during the first two weeks she was in attendance while I was being hustled inside the sim, but she did little more than observe through the B-link. She didn't deliver any more speeches, ask any embarrassing questions, or even ask to do the standard psycho-profile tests you have to ham your way through in order to change your job or enlist in the IA. After awhile, I got positively anxious about her refusal to communicate. It's like being in the hospital, with the doctor coming to look you over every day, and then just going away shaking his head morosely. You may only have a bunion but he'll have you convinced it's terminal cancer in no time. I began to suspect hidden depths in my mind.

I had to admit, though, that what she'd said on the first day had a strong element of truth in it. Ira Manuel, who was nothing but a consistent hack fighter, with nothing to distinguish him from the average, did give me a hard time in the ring for awhile. In the first week he was obviously acting on instructions to show me how my cockiness was betraying me because he went after me in a rather more aggressive manner than sparring partners are supposed to do. In this day and age, of course, you can spar as hard as you like, because no one gets injured, but generally you take it easy so as not to lose the edge that real competition gives you. It doesn't pay to punish yourself in training. But Ira took care to punish me.

I didn't hold it against him. I can take a hint. But if you get hit, you hit them back. It doesn't have to be vindictive—it's just the pace the situation sets. Week one he was hurting me, but by the tail end of week two I was hurting him. We threw some pretty hard punches around, and I was reminded sharply of the fact that fighting is for real. Being convinced is half the battle, but it's the quick half. Retraining my subconscious was going to take time.

Valerian came in to watch me a couple of times, early on, but soon dropped the habit. Having roped me in and established me in the schedule he seemed to lose interest entirely. For him, it was now a matter of waiting—waiting until I faced Herrera. The sand that drained through the hourglass in the meantime was just a waste, to him: a slice out of his life, just one of those things you have to keep going through until you come out the other side. Any day his dialyser might clap out or his all-electric heart might give up the ghost, but there was nothing that could be done except wait. I saw him at mealtimes, and though over-the-table conversation was anything but free-flowing I could see his resentment of me and the whole situation slowly growing. The world had condemned him to going through it all, and he wasn't used to being dictated to, even by the inevitable.

He hated me with an awesome, silent fury. But he sat down with me, and ate with me, and passed the salt with a self-control I could almost admire.

Curman always ate by the clock, just as we did, but he was invariably silent as a ghost when his boss was present—just an extra limb for Valerian to command, with no perceptible identity of his own.

Stella rarely turned up on time, though her place was always set. Either she found time completely irrelevant to the business of living or she preferred to avoid her grandfather as much as was convenient. On a number of occasions she came in just as he was leaving. They didn't seem to interact much—they maintained a policy of peaceful co-existence without conflict or companionship. It was as if they were living on different intellectual and emotional planes. Valerian's world permitted such things to happen. It was possible for countless utterly lonely lives to be lived within the shadowed confines of his sprawling house.

I took to reading in the library to occupy a significant percentage of my spare time. I steered clear of the holo, which seemed to absorb most of Curman's free time, and maybe Stella's as well. The opportunity to handle and read the books in the library—printed on a wide variety of types of paper, with no economy measures in evidence—was one I suspected I might never have again. Most of the Valerian heritage—the big house, the grounds, the abundant paraphernalia of wealth and nostalgic style—struck me as being ridiculous and ugly, but the books were different. They were the one aspect of the carefully preserved past that seemed to me to have value.

I excused myself on the grounds that my interest in the books was very different from Valerian's. I was interested in them as devices of communication, while to him they were merely objects. The excuse was almost entirely honest.

It was while I was in the library one night, maybe three weeks after I'd first moved in, that the first faint breath of human contact finally came my way. Stella had become interested enough to investigate me. I was glad to see her. The interpersonal vacuum into which I had been cast was less than comfortable.

I was sitting in the chair that Valerian had occupied the first time I had seen him. She came in, shut the door behind her, and seated herself in the other chair—the one which the old man had offered to me on the night of our confrontation. She made no pretence of being interested in the books, but simply looked at me.

I gave it a couple of minutes, then lowered my book to my lap, keeping it open at the right place with my fingertips.

“I didn't know boxers could read,” she said.

“You don't get punch drunk from operating in a sim,” I replied.

“You can get killed.” She obviously didn't consider it a delicate matter. I didn't know what to say in reply, so I waited for her to begin again.

After a few seconds, she said, “That book has probably remained virginal since it was first acquired. Maybe a hundred and fifty years of unopened, undisturbed bliss. Now you come and assault it. How do you think it feels?”

This approach seemed much more promising. It lacked intensity.

“Profoundly grateful?” I suggested.

“A pig attitude,” she said.

I looked at her carefully. She seemed suddenly completely out of place. In the library, in the house, in the world. She looked very small. Remembering all the times I'd seen her previously I could not find one moment in which she'd seemed to be interwoven with the situation or the circumstances. She was living in a kind of cocoon, letting everything flow on around her. A wild card in a carefully stacked deck.

“Tell me,” she said, apparently tired of waiting for my move in the exchange of trivial remarks, “what's in it for you?”

“In what?” I stalled.

“You know what,” she replied, shortly. “I don't quite see you as a part of it. The others—they all fit in. Common sense says what was in it for them. It was easy to see what they expected to get out of it. Ray, and the one before,
ad infinitum
—they had it all to gain. Boys wanting a boost into becoming men. Full of hope and empty of sense. And even now they're still chasing their moonbeams to the bitter end. But you're not one of them. You're not stupid. So why take the part?”

“Second childhood,” I said, easily, trying to resurrect the trivial tone she'd abandoned. “I always wanted to be world champion. There comes a time when you think maybe you did it all wrong and it's time to go back for a second chance. A last fling before existential paralysis sets in.”

“You're lying,” she said.

“True,” I conceded.

“Whatever's pushing you,” she said, “it isn't the same kind of thing that pushed all the others. It isn't a wide-eyed hunger for fame and applause. There's something different.”

“I want to win,” I said.

She waited.

“It's all there is,” I told her. “There's no more. I just want to win. That's the whole story.”

I thought she was going to call me a liar again, but she didn't.

“Ask Dr. Kenrian,” I said. “She must have me analyzed by now.”

She shrugged off the mention of Maria's name. “She's just bait,” she said.

The statement surprised me. “Why do you say that?” I asked.

“I've seen it before,” she said. “We've been through this game more times than I can remember, and I know how it goes. It's part of the package—one of the prizes. It's all a matter of motivation. You're supposed to get hung up on her, get the juice flowing in your glands. It mixes you up, makes you fight a little harder.”

I shook my head. “Not this time,” I said. “It may be the way they tackle the youngsters, but I don't need that kind of motivation. I don't mix easily. And my glands are subject to rigid discipline.”

She didn't believe me. She wasn't a great one for taking statements on trust. I wondered whether there might be a grain of truth in what she said. It was Maria Kenrian's job to get my head right for the fight, one way or another.

“Who do they use to bait the boys?” I asked. “You?”

“I don't play.” She said it firmly, perhaps slightly contemptuously.

It was an opening. “Why not?” I asked.

“Why should I?” she countered, reversing the age-old turnabout.

“You tell me,” I said. “It's you we're talking about.”

“Because it's a farce,” she replied. “A hypocritical pantomime. I hate it.”

“I'll believe the last of those reasons,” I said.

She had no reply ready for that one.

“He was your father, wasn't he?” I followed up, more gently. “And the old man's only son. Don't you think the feeling that underlies it all is natural?”

“No,” she said. “There's nothing natural in it at all. I wasn't even born when my father was killed. All I know about him is second hand. And what they say about him isn't about a real person at all. Just about an idea. That's not natural. I don't think my grandfather even remembers his son. The big grief, the determination to equal the score—all that's synthetic, plastic, a mask he bought in a magic shop.

“I don't believe that my father and my grandfather ever knew one another. I don't believe they liked one another, or ever really met. The part my grandfather is acting was written for him after the event. It helps to keep his strength up—his strength of character, that is. Whatever he pretends to be, he has to be intensely. It's the only way he knows how to live. He's a hard man, made out of stone, claws of pressed steel. He's doing what he thinks he has to do—not for my father but for his own self-respect. He's made Herrera a whipping boy, to take all the punishment he won't take himself. All his sins get shifted, one by one, on to other people. His friends, his enemies, you and me. But Herrera is our figurehead—the representative of all that he wants to destroy. He's the victim in the great ceremony.”

“Why tell me?” I asked her. “Do you think I don't have my own ideas about what Velasco Valerian is, and what he's trying to do? Even a pawn can bear a grudge. Do you want me to give up, to refuse to play?”

“I want to know what's in it for you,” she repeated. “Why are you helping to keep this thing alive?”

“I'm going to kill it,” I said. “Once and for all.”

“You can't,” she said.

“I'm going to beat Herrera.”

“And that's all it takes?”

“For Valerian, maybe not. But it's all I want. Afterwards, I'll be on my own. What happens here is none of my affair.”

“I have to live with it,” she said.

“That's your problem.”

She didn't like that. It made her angry.

“What happened to your mother?” I asked, to steer around the bad moment.

“She couldn't stand it. She left.”

“Why didn't you go with her?”