The Mind-Riders (8 page)

“That,” she said, “is the problem. The question you ask yourself now is,
How badly do I need the chip on my shoulder
?”

“Caine won today,” I said, doggedly, “because he didn't know when to stop. He hit me, and I went down—because there was no point in carrying on. It just didn't matter any more.”

“That's exactly right,” she said. “And that's exactly why you'll lose again. You'll have a hard ten or twelve rounds, and your opponent will still be standing, worn out but not beaten. You'll see him coming at you again, and you'll start looking in your mind for excuses. What's the point? Does it matter? Why am I trapped here hyping up Valerian, hyping up the world? Why?

“And then you lose.”

“No,” I said.

“Down you go,” she went on. “Because it just doesn't matter
enough.
It's all too heavy to bear—carrying Valerian and the mind riders and your halo and your spirit of callous indifference towards existence in general. All that is too expensive. You can't afford it—not in the ring. The ring is its own little world, and there's nothing beyond its ropes. Your mind has to get inside that microcosm and conform to its laws. You can't stand back outside, and try to stay in the real world as well. Herrera won't.”

This time, I was silent. I couldn't even manage a weak disclaimer. I believed her. She was convincing me. There was no earthly way I could know whether it was true or not, but she was convincing me.

She knew it.

“So?” she prompted.

I dropped my gaze from the sky to study the goldfish. They were big, ugly things with patches of silver scale and expressions of utter vacuity. The water where they hung suspended was dull, except where the fountain stirred it up and let the sun shimmer delicately in the droplets.

“So you want to restore my will to win,” I said, dryly. “You want to strip away all the paintwork, rip out all the fittings, get back to the basic frame—and then make it into a replica of its old self. Ryan Hart, Mark One—they don't build them like that any more. How do you go about it?”

“That's for you to decide,” she said.

“I have a choice?”

“All the choice there is.”

“I can choose my own prizes? Plan my own shock therapy?”

“You can co-operate. You can help me find out how to break down that tangled mass of resentment and confusion, help me reach the motivational structure underneath.”

“And help you wind me up and set me going. A clockwork toy.”

“That's a fool's way to look at it.”

“And I'm a fool. Valerian's fool. That's what he wants. He beckons me out from under my stone, after all these years, and he waves his magic wand to wipe out eighteen years and turn me into the kind of pet he always wanted.”

“He wants you to win.”

“
His
way.”

The goldfish opened and closed their mouths, completely passive, completely uncaring. Bone idle and fearless, unaware of the turgid rhythm of their lives, perhaps of life itself.

I spat in the water, and they didn't even swim away.

CHAPTER EIGHT

The next day they put me in the ring again. Wolff was against it, I think, but higher authority called the tune. If Wolff had been the kind of man who took an exaggerated pride in his work maybe he could have had his way, but he was no absolute dictator of circumstance. He let it go.

Maria Kenrian wasn't there. She had left it all up to me, for the time being. She had left the conversation of the previous day hanging limp and unfinished. She was waiting. It was my move.

I knocked the kid clean off his feet in three. I did it quite calmly and with not the slightest hint of malice aforethought. I could even have pretended I was doing it for his own good, but I didn't. I pretended, instead, that I was doing it for mine. It was a clean K.O.—I didn't have to beat him up much to set him up for it.

He was then disposed of. He had made his point—or Maria's point. We washed our collective hands of him and sent him back to oblivion with his fists full of money and his nervous twitch intact. I didn't suppose I'd ever hear of him again. He wasn't good enough to climb off the bottom rung of the ladder and he never would be.

They informed me the same night that I was fixed to fight for real against a steady but undistinguished fighter named Joe Tobias. Valerian had persuaded Network to finance the fight, though it would only be broadcast on channel X at an ungodly hour. I wondered that they didn't want to record it and hire a feeler to dub in my part, but even Network didn't want to set precedents like that. They would be guaranteed a fair audience because I was Valerian's new white hope—the Valerian crusade was something of a public joke, but everyone accepted it as a major source of lovable boxing thrills. The Network controllers knew that I wasn't going to be a good winner, from their point of view, but they were sure of their pitch and they could let me in. One lousy cold fish wasn't going to threaten the whole fry-up. Not now. They might not like me, but they could tolerate me.

Preparation for the fight was no sweat—that is to say, the physical side of it was no sweat. But I worried just a little bit. My favorite psychotherapist made no show—she was content to leave it in my hands. I saw it as a sort of challenge,
How far dare you go before you lose your nerve and capitulate?
I was going to go one fight, at least. I was going to have a long, hard look at doing it my way before I gave her a ticket into my soul, with an option to buy pending the surveyor's report.

She didn't have to be there. I asked myself all the questions she would have asked. I took over her job in her absence. I was stirred up by the ideas that she had introduced into my mind. I gave myself a long hard look in the psyche every time I passed a mirror.

I asked myself how I'd go about it if I had her job. It wasn't an easy question. I wasn't impressed by Stella's unsubtle suggestion that I should be guided gently into infatuation. It wasn't my style. I can dissociate myself all too easily from sexual anticipation and sexual pleasure.

I thought of conditioning, but that was looking at the problem from the arse end. It wasn't that conditioning had to be superimposed but that the conditioning I'd acquired throughout my life as a Network hack had to be removed. It was all the new reflexes—the ideas I'd built into the concept of winning, that ought to go.

If
they ought to go.

That, of course, was the most worrying point of all. I wasn't sure that I believed in her purist idea of winning. Not any more. I wasn't sure that winning in the ring was the only winning I had to do. Surely, I thought, I had to win other battles, other games. I wanted to win against Herrera. I wanted to win against Valerian. I wanted to win against Maria Kenrian. I wanted to win against Network. Add it all up, and it all came down to the same fight.

They say that you can't win them all. But I wasn't satisfied by what people say. I thought there had to be a way out—a way that wasn't Maria Kenrian's way. She had pointed out the simple answer, but simple answers are very rarely right.

I held an imaginary dialogue, in which I defended my lack of emotion against her charges.

The vamps, I argued, live on second hand emotion. The intense feelings they need and love so much are provided for them by a chrome-plated headdress. The dilute feelings—tranquility and happiness—they get in pills. What's left that's theirs? Nothing. They become utterly dependent on Network and the Medical Association. Everything in their lives—in the environment around them and inside their stupid heads—is provided commercially, shaped and tailored to popular demand. What are the vamps except puppets? What do they think or feel that comes from themselves and not from some machine or some chemical? What are they but ciphers in the grand scheme of the human world, no more real than the images in the holo? But I'm not like that. I have individuality. I am what I am, and I intend to protect that. I don't intend to unhappen the events, the feelings, the meaning of eighteen years just so I'll be a better image in the sim, just so I can be packaged as a consumer product, just so I can win with a thrill.

In the imaginary dialogue, she was unintimidated. She had the answer tucked up her sleeve. She knew me that well.

Very good, she replied, sarcastically. Humanity, hang thy head in shame. Ryan Hart will diagnose the social sicknesses of the modern world.
He
is a hero. He doesn't use the E-link, and maintains his emotional independence, his emotional integrity.

But where is it, Ryan?

Where is this rich, self-sustained emotional life you are able to lead thanks to your rejection of the consumer product? What is there to recommend your emotional existence? Is it beautiful, unique, aesthetically magnificent? Where is your own joy, that is so superior to the custom-made variety? Is your home-made happiness so much better than the pills? Does it even exist? How, exactly, are you such a wonderful advertisement for psychic independence? Who is impoverished—the vamps, whose emotional wealth is purchased off the peg, or you, who feel hardly anything at all, most of it bitter?

In a real dialogue, I would be unperturbed by such comments. I would laugh at them. I would manufacture a suitably witty reply, or simply rule them out of court with a gesture. But inside, you can only say something along the lines of,
very clever, but it doesn't get us anywhere, does it?

And it doesn't.

That's the trouble.

Despite it all, I went into the ring for the first time in half my life with my mind unbent. I carried into the sim all the legacy of my latter days. It was a test—an experiment.

I was nervous as I guided the sim out from the corner. A wholly irrational apprehension gripped my guts—mostly below the belt. I resented it, because there was no need for it and because I couldn't understand it. Also because it was going out to a hundred thousand viewers. It wasn't private. It wasn't something I could keep confined. It was being sucked out of my soul and cast to the winds, tossed to the scavengers.

I couldn't see the meter from within the sim but I guessed that well over sixty percent were riding me. I wouldn't be far short of the proportion that Herrera carried in his fights. Nobody could really fancy Tobias. I wouldn't be fighting him if he had any real chance. I was favorite to win comfortably, not on the strength of my past performances, which were so deeply buried by the years as to count for nothing, but on the strength of my job as a stunt man. In the pre-fight publicity, Network copy-writers had made a big thing about the possibilities of talent being transferable. They hadn't been able to build me up as a fountain of joy so they were making a puzzle out of me, stirring up intellectual interest. I guess the marks probably fell for it. You can sell anything to anybody. Once.

Tobias was a deceptive boxer, with a good line in change of pace. Half the time he was wanting to get on with it, hurrying in to spray punches and always looking like he might cause trouble, and the other half back-pedaling, trying to lure some action out of his opponent. He always gave the impression of being more dangerous than he really was. He was not famed for punching power, and people he beat rarely took a brutal hammering. They just got harassed into submission.

He wasn't too easy to hit, and he didn't mind taking punishment—he, too, like many second raters, was a victim of the it-ain't-my-body syndrome. It ain't, but you have to believe that it is in order to get the best out of it. He'd been brought along fairly carefully by his backers, but they knew by now that he was never going to make them any real money. They were putting him in today knowing he was on a bummer, but hoping he was ready for a long twilight, putting up noble performances against ambitious youngsters for pin money.

I'd decided beforehand that there was no virtue in show, and no point at all in messing about. Right from the first moment I would be addressing myself to Paul Herrera—he was what it was all about. I wanted to start spelling out a message to Herrera with every punch.

So, apprehension or no apprehension, I went out to attack. I went to chase and find Tobias, and I did it. When he came forward, I fought fire with fire, when he went back I gave him no rest. The first round was punishing, and I felt him falter before the end. In the second, and again in the fourth, his determination came fluttering up inside him. For a minute or so he looked capable. But each time he could not sustain himself. He could make nothing of it. He wilted.

With every round he inched closer to defeat.

I didn't lose a round out of the first seven, and in the eighth he went down for good. I can't honestly say that I knocked him down—I think he just faded out from a sense of despair. I hit him with a left hook when he was slightly off balance and he just didn't find the motive force necessary to drag himself back off the canvas. Convinced of the pointlessness of it all, he just lapsed into mental turmoil and stayed crumpled.

It was an easy, untroubled, impressive victory. Curiously, though, the quivering in my belly was still there once he was down. I'd stopped feeling it during the fight, but it was there, in abeyance. As soon as I was still again it took hold of me. Apprehension. Anticipation. Not fear, but a sense of impending events whose uncertain outcome was manifest as a vacillation in the determination to go forward and meet them.

I wasn't expecting a round of extravagant congratulations when the fight was over, and I didn't get one. Carl Wolff signaled his satisfaction in his usual taciturn and unexcited fashion. Valerian hadn't come to the studios but I knew he'd be hooked in at home, not feeling particularly delighted but fairly content that I was on the way. Dr. Kenrian was there when I came out of the machine, having turned up late and unobtrusively, as per usual, but she didn't have anything to say beyond token acknowledgement of the fact that I'd won.

I wondered, briefly, about Stella. I couldn't make a guess as to whether she was in the habit of watching—or even hooking into—her father's avengers, or whether she'd make an exception in my case. I didn't suppose I'd find out.

But there was one man there who wanted to tell me that I'd done a great job, and that was Jimmy Schell. We met him in the studio, and though it looked accidental I was pretty sure that he'd contrived it. I was slightly surprised that he bothered to make it seem like a coincidence, but I guess he still had little or no confidence in himself.

We shook hands, and he expressed his stammering surprise at the way I'd turned up again. The question he didn't ask was,
why didn't you tell me?
I hadn't an answer, and I almost felt guilty about it. When I'd talked to him before, I'd worn a false face. I'd never so much as hinted that I had been a fighter and intended to be again—not even when he had asked me about the Herrera-Angeli fight.

He was working regularly now—small parts, but enough to make a living with a little icing on top. He was still going up. I wished him well and he promised to look out for my next fight. He was a fan. I knew he'd hook in. I didn't like the idea of his vamping my mind, but I didn't want to tell him I didn't like it. To him, it came naturally.

I was only half pleased by the enthusiasm in his voice and his manner. I knew that he was likely to be a maverick. The general reaction could well be hostile—it hadn't been much of a contest from any point of view, least of all the vamp angle. I expected something of a hammering from the free press.

I wasn't disappointed.

The papers were lying in wait at breakfast the next morning. The fight hadn't been important but it had provoked enough interest to warrant giving it space in just about every sheet.

Most of the comments were brief, and if not exactly abusive were far from complimentary. Nobody read anything out loud, but I knew that they all had a pretty good idea of what they said. Even the waiters.

Strangely, it was Valerian himself who was anxious to know my reaction.

“You didn't win many friends,” he said, snidely—failing to keep the edge out of his voice.

“I won the fight,” I reminded him.

He tapped a couple of the papers. “Not in here you didn't. Not really. To them, it was a joke. They don't say so, but they suspect a fix. They couldn't see that it was honest—you didn't give them any reason to think so.”

“If they think honesty is an emotional orgy they're crazy,” I said. “Those bastards are just consumer panders, wanting to rearrange the world the way it looks best from inside a headdress. That's how they sell papers.”

“It's how they sell fights,” he said. “It's their money. They pay you and your opponent and the techs.”

“You pay me,” I said.

“They pay
me
,” he retorted.

I shrugged that off. “The public wouldn't know an honest fight if they saw one,” I said. “They don't want honesty—they want kicks. They're in it for spectacle, not for sport. They only want to pretend it's real. But they can't have it all ways—it can't be real and fake as well. If you want to hire a writer to script the title fight, hire one. Buy Herrera and a first class feeler to act it for you. But if you want a boxer, don't try to tell me that I have to act up so as not to attract dirty sneers about fixing.”