The Mind-Riders (7 page)

“He wouldn't let me go. He never will. He needs me to prop up his image.”

“He can't stop you,” I pointed out. “You're over sixteen.”

She didn't answer that, because she didn't really have to. Valerian could enforce his will, irrespective of circumstances. He was the great dictator. I wondered what she wanted from me. Not help. Perhaps just the understanding—the understanding that Valerian demanded. Maybe she did want me to get out, to stop playing the game. But she must have known she couldn't end it. And in any case, there was no way she could turn me back.

She went to the door, and left, without saying anything more—without even looking at me again. She'd said her piece, poured out all her half-formed ideas. There were probably no words to express what she really felt.

In a way, she was on my side.

I intended to beat Paul Herrera in such a way that Valerian could get no real kick out of vamping me when I did it. I wanted to beat him calmly, without any animosity. Cleanly, and simply. I thought she might approve of that. It was something—an appropriate gesture. But she wanted so much more. She wanted out, and there was no way. All she could do was wait, and when the old man died she could take the money and run. Wherever she wanted to go.

Or, alternatively, she could take over where he left off. You don't just inherit money—you inherit the assumptions that go with it. I felt sorry for Stella.

CHAPTER SEVEN

In training, I gradually worked up to the point at which Ira Manuel could no longer trouble me. I could read his moves and react in the way that was appropriate to a boxer rather than an ET taking a dive for the heroes of the Space Patrol. The familiarity of my rediscovered role did not recur overnight, but as it did come back it brought a complete and safe contempt for Ira Manuel. He became less useful, and was demoted in importance so far as my program was concerned.

Then Wolff brought in a replacement. At least, I thought at the time that Wolff was responsible, but maybe not.

The new boy was named Burne Caine. It wasn't his real name—just something picked for show—but he clung to it as if he loved it dearly, and we never found out what daddy had put on the birth registration. Probably something vapid and boring. There are few Smiths left in today's world of disposable labels.

Caine was by no means the same kind of instrument that Ira was. Ira had been something dull and unyielding—something I could sharpen my claws on. We hit one another hard, but we never really found any true sense of competition.

But Caine had hot blood. He took everything seriously, and he always looked ready to spit in my eye, inside the sim or out. He was a teenager, half-Asian and still wearing the livid scars of a hard past. He was nervous with his hands, and it was easy to see that translating his fighting into the sim hadn't drained the tensions out of his body.

I could look at Caine and see Paul Herrera twenty years earlier. Herrera, like most good handlers, was a guy who'd never had much success handling his own body. He'd never been at home in his own flesh. He'd been a sickly kid growing up in a concrete jungle. He'd had a brain and bad eyesight. He'd had the shit kicked out of him here, there and everywhere. Anything near his size was an enemy. Most kids like that have no option but to wait it out, to grow up into another world—in the meantime staying meek, mild and ready to run like hell. But not Paul. He'd always had the compulsion to fight back, even when it was hopeless. He was more than just a sucker for punishment—he was something of diabolical single-mindedness. He just could not accept defeat, although his whole life and his whole environment were saturated with it. He lost every real fight, but compelled himself to keep going. The fact that he survived to enter the adult world at all had been a minor miracle. Once in it—

And here was Caine, looking at me out of eyes that mirrored the same kind of implacable hatred for everything animate and inanimate.

Caine wasn't there to spar with me. He was there to show me what a real fight was.

The first time we were hooked up together, facing one another in the ring, I knew this wasn't routine. I wasn't ready to go into a Network ring for an officially-recorded fight, but that didn't mean that I was exempt from the fury and the determination of a fight to the bitter end. That was what Caine was for—to push me in a way that Ira Manuel never had.

The worst thing about it was knowing that the kid had his own brand of invincibility. No matter how many times I hit him, he was going to keep coming back, trying ever more desperately to hurt me as much as he could.

Caine had no class. He had very little skill. But he had guts. For three rounds, he hammered his sim, coming in at a pace which had to tire him out in minutes. I was content to defend at first, keeping his jabs and hooks out of my face and body, and just moving round the ring to make him chase me. I tapped him a couple of times, to let him know how easy it was, but made no attempt to hit him hard.

In the fourth, I began to hustle him a bit, out-boxing him all the way. I took a couple of punches that might have rocked me, but traded better ones that should have knocked him groggy. The sim took the physical punishment, but I could almost see Caine shrugging it off. He had a bad case of the “what-the-hell-it-ain't-my-body” syndrome. In a sense, he was punishing himself, though there was no earthly reason why.

The fifth was worse—now he couldn't get to me at all, but he was still chasing and carving with his gloves. I could have hit him at will, but I hesitated. I knew what I was supposed to do. I was supposed to knock him out. I was supposed to knock him out today, and tomorrow, and maybe the next day. It was like spearing fish in a bathtub. He'd take it, again and again, and come back. I was supposed to be cruel. I was supposed to knock hell out of him.

But my mind rebelled, and on the point of laying him out I hesitated. I found myself adrift in the quicksands of doubt. I didn't know what I wanted to do—capitulate with the way I was being maneuvered, or tell them to go to hell.

I had little enough sympathy for the kid, who was worse than a fool, but I didn't want to beat all hell out of him just to make him face that fact.

He kept after me, just as mad, just as heavy as he possibly could. I began to think that by holding off I was hurting him worse than I would be if I took him apart. He knew I was playing games with him. He was still trying to hurt me, trying all the more desperately.

At the end of the round, I said, “That's enough.”

Wolff's voice came at me from nowhere.
“Two more.”
Not a question, or an instruction, just a statement of the way it was going to be.

“No,” I said.

But no voice came back. I couldn't stop it myself—the only way I could switch off the sim was by staging a massive physiological disturbance which would short out the circuit with the emergency cut-out. It's not the kind of thing you can manufacture consciously.

Caine was up and in the ring. I hung back, gloves on the ropes. I could see from his face that he was uncertain, for once. Hesitant. He wanted more. He wanted to win. He just didn't know. He wanted me out in the middle, where he could exhaust himself trying to reach me.

When he knew I wasn't coming he was stranded momentarily.

Then he came after me anyway, bombing in, looking to land good, solid punches before I could get my arms up. Reflexively, my guard came up and I ducked. But the sheer force of his attack carried his blows through.

They took me in the head.

I didn't hit him back. I didn't attempt to crash a fist into his exposed ribs. I just took what he handed out, and then I went down on one knee. A slight touch of nausea from the punches took hold of me, but faded fast.

I looked up into the face of Caine's sim. He was using the white and the pale features were ruddy under the glow of the lights. Sweat was glittering on his forehead. The features were twisted out of their sculpted reality in almost exactly the same way that Paul Herrera twisted them. For a moment, I was left with the illusion that it was Herrera I had been fighting, that it was Herrera who had put me down. I wondered whether I had been intended to fall under that spell right from the start, and be committed by the similarity.

But I hadn't. I remained cool, and I didn't get up.

His eyes told me he wanted to hit me again, and again, and beat me to a simulated pulp.

But he couldn't. The rules wouldn't let him, and a sim can't break the rules. He was as helpless as a baby. I took the count feeling that the whole thing was stupid, irrelevant—a waste of time.

And I began to laugh.

As in the old joke, it hurt when I did.

Back in reality, when they peeled the electrodes from my head, I no longer felt like laughing. I was confused. So was Caine. Even when they had him stripped he just couldn't understand it. He was looking to catch my eye, and I let him. He looked at me as if I were a dead caterpillar in his supper pack. But he couldn't think of anything to say.

It was only then that I noticed Maria Kenrian waiting by the door. She must have come in late. But I didn't need to ask whether she'd seen it all. She'd been eavesdropping on my mind, and she'd done more than simply see it. I suddenly felt angry with her, for the deception and the staginess of the whole affair.

When I was free again she opened the door to the outside world and we strolled out together. It was late afternoon and it was hot and hazy. There were a lot of wasps in Valerian's gardens—there was presumably a nest somewhere near the training unit that the legion of serfs hadn't troubled to destroy—and I waved a couple away as I stepped out into the sunlight.

“You see the point of what happened today?” she asked.

“Not really,” I replied. “I think the message got a little garbled.” My voice was brittle and bitter, still antagonistic to the whole idea.

“You're screwed up inside,” she said. “It's getting in your way. You're thinking about too many things at once, looking at it from too many angles. You're not reaching anything like a fighting pitch because you're perpetually looking over your shoulder to see who's pushing, asking yourself how and why and what the hell.”

“It was a farce,” I said.

“Of course. But that isn't your concern. All you had to do was go out and beat him—knock him out. But you couldn't do that. You had to hesitate and wonder what it was all about and who was trying to trick you into doing what. You lost that fight half a dozen ways, and it's no good telling me or telling yourself that you could have won if you'd wanted. Of course you could have. But you didn't. You were looking to foul up.”

“So?”

“You think it doesn't matter,” she said. “You think that this is all a pantomime, and that when you finally get to face Paul Herrera it will all be real, and when it's real it will all be different.
Then
you can win. Perhaps you can. But you
won't
—not unless you can cure your state of mind.”

I shook my head. “I like my state of mind,” I told her. “I'm entitled to it. It fits me like a glove. I don't want to cure it.”

“But you want to win.”

“And you think I can't? You think that what's going on in my mind will stop me?”

She didn't say anything for a couple of minutes, probably wanting to make me think about the answers myself.

“I beat him before,” I said.

“Do you know how?”

“I hit him harder and oftener than he hit me.”

“And do you know
why?”

“Because I wanted to win.”

“And you think that's enough?”

“It was then.”

She didn't say anything again, but her answer was written all over her face.
It isn't now,
she was implying.

We had almost reached the house, but as I made a turn to take us round to the nearest door she put her fingertips on my arm and pointed to another way, along a footworn path that led toward the wood via a paved diamond with an ornamental pond. It had goldfish. Also bronze figurines that were mired and patinated. One was a bronze Cupid that had been some ancient humorist's idea of a fountain.

“In those days,” she said, speaking quietly, “wanting to win was all there was. You wanted to win—and that was just about the whole story. You didn't question your own decisions, you didn't see anything beyond or behind the business of winning. It was enough to go on, and on—

“But not any more. You're eighteen years older—eighteen embittering years through which you've carried that need to win triumphantly, as if it were the trophy you never got. Carrying it all that way may not have changed it much, in itself, but you've brought it into an entirely new context. It's no longer the dominant force in your mind, it's no longer the focus of your personality and your ambitions. It's a kind of bloody relic of a broken past, and it carries with it a host of conditions and uncertainties.

“If you want to beat Herrera, you're going to have to recover something of that old single-mindedness. You're going to have to put everything else aside. You can harbor your grudge against Valerian, you can try to cheat the mind riders and the system and Network and the world. You can assert your injured pride. Or you can win. But you can't have it all ways.”

I reached the edge of the pond a stride ahead of her and pivoted quickly. We ended up facing one another, both standing still. She'd stopped abruptly.

“I'm not a fool,” I said to her, softly. “I'm not just a lump of human clay to be molded by you or Valerian, poked and prodded by PT tricks. I can play the game too. I'm good at games. Don't try to tie puppet-strings to my balls.”

She stepped sideways smoothly, increasing the distance between us and making me half-turn to keep my eyes on her face.

“Why do you think I brought Caine in?” she asked.

“To get some emotional action out of me. To make me angry or vindictive. To let some of his fire rub off, or bounce off, or—what the hell.”

“I brought him to show you the difference between yourself and Herrera. He's the other side of the coin—your mirror image.”

“Sure,” I said. “Burne Caine and me. Twin souls.” I didn't bother to laugh.

“He's everything you're not. And you no longer have anything except what he hasn't got. He's active, and you've become passive. You let the outcome of that fight depend entirely on what
he
did. You did nothing yourself. You sat back in your mind and you evaluated the situation and you worked out how to react—what reaction the situation demanded. You can't fight that way. If you place yourself at the mercy of a situation it will kick your teeth in. It's not the right way—and you must realize that. Your cold, clean thoughts have been a comfort to you these last eighteen years, but they're no good to you in the ring. You're pure and uncut, while Burne Caine is torn to shreds—but he has the one thing that you need. He wants to win and
all else is irrelevant.”

“That's no way to live,” I said—a stupid remark.

“It's the only way to fight,” she replied.

I squinted up at the sun—a dull yellow phantom half-hidden in translucent smoke.

“But other things
are
relevant,” I said. “They're relevant to me.”