The Mind-Riders

by Brian Stableford

  Damn near twenty years, I thought, puppet-jerking spares. And now—I can jerk myself. As Valerian’s puppet.

  Like hell, I added.

  I locked the door and went slowly along the corridor. I hadn’t bothered to pack. Not even a gun. Curman would look after my health and safety.

  The elevator, dropping thirty-nine floors, took a little of the weight off my stomach.

  He was waiting for me, wearing a smile like a cheap plastic sphinx. He had a big black limousine down in the drop, looking very lonely. Nobody in the capstack had the credit or the pull to rate a car in these economically stagnant days. This car was a rude gesture directed at the world—all the things a car shouldn’t be according to today’s priorities. Such gestures are the prerogatives of pure wealth—the toys of a rich man who doesn’t have to bother courting public goodwill. Apolitical wealth, if there is such a thing.

  The superintendent let us out through the double doors, holding his shotgun in the crook of his elbow. Absently, I wondered when he ever found the time to sleep. He probably didn’t.

  The car drove smoothly and silently. The capstacks loomed around us like fiery needles even at this time of night. Curman threaded a way through the maze of streets back to the arterial highway, and then he turned outwards, away from the urban complex. Valerian, I knew, lived a long way out—up in the foothills where darkness actually fell, and where the sun shone throughout the daylight hours. His home was his castle, and from its battlements he could look down at the sprawling city, the civilization which laid futile siege to his way of life. Valerian was determined to maintain feudalism as a living social system within his own little enclave, and he had the money to do it.

  My eyes probed the shadows that littered the roadside, searching for the perennial population of gypsies and hitchers camping just beyond the city limits. But everything was quiet, nothing showed. Today’s world doesn’t shut down at night, but it watches from behind half-closed eyelids.

  I didn’t really want to talk to Curman, and he had said just about all he had to say to me. But he didn’t like the silence, and he was easy enough in his mind to break it instead of putting up with it.

  “Quiet night,” he said.

  “All the little mice are home in bed,” I said. “Overloaded. Zapped out when their sets switched off. Network’s contribution to bringing down the crime rate. More effective than the S.S.”

  “I thought it was the people who haven’t got E-links who commit all the crimes,” he said.

  I didn’t bother to respond to that. The exchange was pretty meaningless anyhow.

  “You know Valerian well?” he asked.

  “Never met him.”

  He glanced sideways at me then, his face showing his surprise.

  “I thought—” he began, and then abandoned the sentence, not sure what he had thought. He tried again. “He talked as if he knew you. And you talk as if you knew him.”

  “Oh,” I said, lazily, “we know one another. We just never met. We have this kind of mutual understanding. I think.” I was willing to let it lie there. He had been content to let me wonder what the hell was what when he first rang my doorbell. Now I was willing to let him stay puzzled for awhile.

  I inspected his profile from the corners of my eyes. His face had tightened slightly. Maybe he wanted to ask questions but didn’t like to drop his act. He had his image to think of.

  He settled for silence. We were too close to home for him to get the whole story. Valerian would be waiting. He drew away from me slightly, maybe because I wasn’t what he’d expected.

  Valerian’s palace was at the top of a long shallow rise, along a private road through a small wood. The gates were pretty but I was willing to bet a lot that the tasteful aspect of the layout discreetly concealed some very effective equipment for discouraging ramblers. Even in the dark I could see that the gardens were pure kitsch—but yesterday’s kitsch always becomes today’s vanity. This place was something entirely disconnected from the reality of contemporary life: an alternative dimension, with its own cocoon of space-time and sense of values.

  The doors of the underground garage were oak outside and good clean steel inside. They shut with a quiet firmness.

  “Don’t make too much noise,” said Curman, as we got out and shut the car doors. “Mr. Valerian appreciates discretion.”

  “He receives all his visitors this way?” I queried.

  “Only when the mood takes him.”

  The mood, apparently, had taken him pretty suddenly. My guess was that it had taken him within minutes of Ray Angeli getting knocked over, and had built up to some fairly monstrous proportions. I didn’t expect to find Velasco Valerian at his best.

  We went upstairs, into the dark corpse of the house. Curman turned on a couple of stair-lights so we could find our way, but it was all very discreet. In the capstacks, light is harsh and glaring, stripping all situations naked. But here it was muted. Valerian probably liked to live inside a cloak of shadows.

  He was waiting for me in his library. It was a beautiful room with bookshelves instead of walls and big bookcases forming a cross in the middle. Eight or ten thousand books, all old—the legacy of a century of more-or-less mindless acquisition on the part of Valerian’s immediate forefathers, carefully constructing an image. They could never have read the books—not even a tiny fraction—but that wasn’t important. Like the black car, another of the obscene gestures of pure wealth: the acquisition of purposeless property and its non-functional display. Valerian was not the man to be embarrassed by the aura of such vanities. He probably felt at home here. Maybe he even took the books out now and again to finger the sad quality of the binding.

  He was enveloped by a deep, high-backed chair, wine-dark in the light of a small lamp to the side and set slightly back. His face was mostly in shadow, but he must have been able to see me quite clearly as I stood before him.

  “You’re Ryan Hart,” he said, smoothly, giving it the inflection of a polite question.

  “Your handyman would have to be a fool if I wasn’t,” I replied. My voice was too sharp, the comment slightly ridiculous. My hostility was showing but not biting. I felt compelled, though, to make the gesture. Men like Valerian can’t be defied, but you have to act as if they can. I hadn’t come just to lie down and be counted.

  “Sit down,” he said. His voice was soft. He wasn’t amused or annoyed or impatient—which meant that the fury which had overtaken him as Ray Angeli bit the dust was now perfectly controlled and disciplined.

  I sat down, in a chair that was the twin to his own. There was a small table between us, where a book might be rested temporarily. There was no book. Valerian didn’t go in for that brand of staginess.

  “You sent for me?” I said, injecting a dishonest low-key anger into my voice.

  “I have a proposition for you,” he said. Unlike Curman he wasn’t about to beat around the bush in order to see what came running out. Curman had stayed with us, but he was back in one corner of the room, looking at the titles on the spines of the books. He was listening very carefully.

  “Go ahead,” I said.

  “I’ve followed your career,” he said. “In a casual manner. I’ve retained an interest in your abilities. I think that you’re wasted in your present work. You have talent above and beyond that required for simulation stunt work.”

  He paused, but I didn’t bother to interrupt. I figured that it might as well all come tumbling out, hypocrisy as well. All as scripted. There was no need to slash at the curtain of soft lies. Not yet.

  “You,” he continued, “are one of the few people with a genuine mastery of the active component of mind/machine communication. I think you ought to be involved in it actively, ambitiously. I think you should go back into sport.”

  “Boxing?” I asked, ironically.

  “Of course.”

  “No,” I replied, flatly.

  The refusal didn’t shock or upset him. He didn’t believe it. He leaned forward just a
little, and the dim light caught his white eyebrows. There was sweat glistening on his forehead.

  “No regrets?” he asked.

  “Not your kind,” I replied. That was a better one, but it didn’t score. It failed to jerk anything out of him. He settled back into the shadow, to watch me without his own eyes being visible except as the faintest of gleams. His face was a blur.

  “I want to back you,” he said. “I should like to help you redeploy your talents more profitably.”

  “You want to make me a star?”

  “A champion.”

  “You want me to beat Paul Herrera for you.”

  He made no reply to that, but was content to wait.

  “You know I’m blacked,” I said.

  “And you know I have the power to set aside that ban,” he said. “Circumstances have changed since that—unfortunate decision.”

  “How?” I said, almost spitting the word at him.

  He wouldn’t answer that, either. I changed the question to, “Why now?”

  “Had you—” Here he paused suggestively, then went on, “—given up hope?”

  “Hope!” Again I spat the word out as if it were poison. “Is that what you think? You think I’ve been wasting my life in hope—waiting for you to come to me and say, ‘I’ve reconsidered. It’s all forgotten and forgiven.’ Do you think I’ve had no ambition in life but to serve your miserable purpose and knock all hell out of Paul Herrera? No, I haven’t given up hope. Not that kind. I don’t want to go back to the ring to fight your battles. The hell with your crazy vendetta.”

  “But you want to go back,” he said, quietly. “To fight your own battles.”

  I waited a minute, letting myself calm down, not wanting to go off like that again.

  “I used to.” I said. “A long time ago.”

  “Not any more?” he said, challenging the implication.

  “Not any more,” I confirmed.

  Valerian let a moment slide by. Then, abruptly, he told Curman to switch on the light. Curman didn’t have to move far. He was waiting right by the switch. The electric chandelier flooded the room with yellow radiance, the four arms of the cross-shaped array of bookcases blooming forth with thin shadows while the gloom was dispelled.

  I looked Valerian in the face, as he obviously intended that I should.

  He was old. Not, perhaps, merely in years—he was maybe seventy, and could have had a long way to go if he hadn’t lived those seventy so hard. He was old in terms of expended effort and hard driving. A charged-up metabolism and a diabolic energy had used and wasted him, had left him derelict. He had lived at an accelerated pace, consuming himself ravenously.

  He looked at me now from a crumpled face like a screwed up piece of paper. His hair, his eyebrows, the thin beard, were all dirty white. His eyes were brown flecked with yellow and gray.

  I realized why he had retired into shadows. The voice was the best of him that remained. It had kept its timbre, the quality and sureness that his features had lost.

  “Do you see me?” he said, harshly.

  I mustered my reserves of cruelty. “Should I care?” I said. “We all got troubles.”

  “My heart,” he said, in a measured monotone, “has plastic valves and an electric motor. I plug in to my kidneys.”

  “You’re a lucky man,” I said. “Some people have to do without.”

  “I’m not asking for your sympathy,” he said, “I’m demanding your understanding. You know what I want from you. You must know why I come to you now.

  “You know—and you’ve always known—that I’d rather it was someone else, rather it was anyone except you. But now, after all this time, there can be no other way. Angeli was the last. No young man can beat Herrera, and no young man ever will—not until his mind begins to rot. I can’t wait. Not any more. Another year will see me dead, and it has to see Herrera dead too. Literally, or metaphorically. He has to be beaten—and it needs a man who understands fighting, and who understands Herrera.”

  He might have gone on. But he’d already said more than enough. Perhaps more than he’d said in a good many years. We were even now—we’d both spilled out what we felt.

  “That’s it, is it?” I said. “I’m your last resort. You’ve been saving me up, locked away in a safe inside your memory. Now, when you figure you’ve reached your last crack, it’s back to the beginning, back to Ryan Hart. Eighteen years of leading lambs like Ray Angeli to the slaughter, and then, just like that—da capo.”

  “It has to be,” he said.

  “No,” I told him.

  “You have an alternative?”

  “Sure,” I said. “I have the alternative. The alternative is no. How the hell do you think I feel? I was a fighter once, and then I wasn’t. I was blacked. Hounded out. In those days there was nothing I wanted more than to fight again. The fact that I was good—the fact that I was maybe even better than Herrera—made it all the worse. I was a winner who couldn’t even fight. And I wanted my chance back. I knew then that the only way I was likely to get back into the ring was with your backing. I waited for you. You needed me, I needed you. But where were you? For eighteen years, where were you? And you think that now you can lose your temper at three in the morning, and right out of the blue you can say, ‘Where’s Ryan Hart? Find him. Fetch him’.

  “Do you think those eighteen years count for nothing? Do you think I’m the same man now that I was then? I know you are. But not me. Those eighteen years came out of my life, out of the good years. And I counted them—to me they mean something. It’s too late, Mr. Valerian. It’s sixteen, seventeen, eighteen years too late. There’s no going back now.”

  “You have to,” he said.

  “An offer I can’t refuse?”

  “If you like. I can take your job, your home, your life. I can buy you. But it doesn’t come down to that.”

  “You can threaten me all you want,” I said, scratching my cheek. “But there’s a nice banal saying. You can drive a horse to water but a pencil must be lead.”

  “I don’t have to threaten you,” he said. “Because even if you do hate me worse than you hate Paul Herrera, you want to get back to the ring. You want to win. And you’ll do it whichever way you can.” He said it with a curious note of triumph in his voice—the certainty of a man who knows that he is right and who knows that even if he is wrong he can enforce what he is saying. I may not know what I am talking about but I will defend to the death my right to say it—and make it stick. That’s justice—the exclusive brand.

  Velasco Valerian only had to reach out and take what he wanted. Right now, I was inside his fist.

  Trapped.

  And he was right. I would fight. I would win. I would do my utmost to avoid winning his way, and use every scrap of my ingenuity to get what I wanted without compromising, but I would win. I had to.

  At long last, the moment had come.

  I stared at him, and he knew that the understanding he had demanded was there.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  We rode the elevator up to the thirty-ninth just as the milling hordes were clamoring to ride it down. The working day was launched and on its way.

  I wouldn’t have been with them anyway—I had a couple of days off owing to me—but I couldn’t help feeling alien as I jostled with them, heading in the wrong direction and not intending to turn back. Not ever.

  As I walked along the corridor to 3912 Jimmy came out of 3909. We almost collided.

  “—Hey, Mr. Hart,” he said, in a tone far too jocular to be decent at eight-twenty, “you’re going the wrong way.”

  I clapped him on the shoulder and made as if to go right on past him, saying, “I know it, kid, I know it.”

  He didn’t get it. He was suddenly frozen, the wheels of his mind sticking as he tried to follow me with one eye and look Curman over with the other. Curman was behind me, carrying a big suitcase Valerian’s valet had lent me.

  “He looks like a gangster because he is one,” I told Jimmy. �
�I’m being snatched by a millionaire and held to ransom. My intellectual chastity is in deadly danger.”

  Not unnaturally, this didn’t do a lot for the kid’s state of confusion. He was going purple with the effort of getting his ideas under way again.

  “Sorry, Jimmy,” I said, a little more gently, stopping to face him. “I won’t be going in today. I won’t be going in when I’m due back on Monday either. I quit. I’m going to work for Velasco Valerian.”

  He looked a little disappointed. Things had moved too fast and left him stranded. He’d figured me for a human contact, something to hang on to in a world which was still, from his point of view, fearful in its pace of change. I had been his first barricade against the amorphousness and indifference of life in capland. Now I was gone. Like that. That’s the way it is, of course. There’s nothing you can depend on for long. But in this particular instance, he was unlucky. He’d come in at exactly the wrong moment.

  “I’ll be dealing with Network,” I told him. “Though not quite in the same way. We’ll maybe run into one another at the studios. You’ll hear about me, and I guess I’ll hear about you. Look me up and say hello. Okay?”

  He was still just staring at me, with bewildered eyes. He couldn’t string any words together—no words that he could get past his block. He just nodded, and then he went on his way, uncomprehending.

  I looked after him, finding the thought that he cared faintly ironic, faintly—though I don’t know why—disturbing.

  I opened the door to the box that had been my home for as long as I could call anywhere a home. I went in, and wasted no time unsealing all the folding units where I had things stacked and stored. Opened up like that, the capsule was like a flower in bloom. Everything all over the place, with no space left.

  Curman threw the case open and stood back by the door.

  “Want any help?” he asked.

  I told him I didn’t. It was my life I was uprooting and ripping apart.