I felt curiously naked. I never like coming out of a sim if there are people around who have been riding my mind, but this was even worse. After being in the ring, I know exactly what has happened. I know what the vamps have been sucking. But this time I had just been a piece of window-glass.
I felt very tired.
I wanted to ask questions, but I didn’t want to hear the answers.
“Well?” I said, harshly.
She smiled faintly. “Take it easy,” she advised.
“Sure.”
When the last of the electrodes was tucked away, and the caps replaced, I got up and flexed my arms.
“You seem to be okay,” I told her. “How am I?”
“Balanced,” she said.
“As sane as you are?”
She shrugged. “Tomorrow,” she said. “I’ll come out here again. We’ll talk about it then. Not now.”
I was half-glad of the way out—but only half-glad. I went back to the house and to bed. Where I thought for a while—and then dreamed.
I can’t remember where I went in my dreams, but I know that when I woke next morning I was in a better frame of mind. I was not simply ready, but anxious, to get answers to the questions—to find out how the enemy’s plan of campaign was coming along.
I had to wait, of course—all day. But the routine was just routine and it was easy enough to cruise through by now. I finally got to see her after the evening meal, in one of the multiplicity of small rooms with neither name nor function which seemed to proliferate endlessly throughout Valerian’s great house. She seemed well-satisfied and confident, but it might just have been the face she wore for such occasions as this one.
“Well,” I said, in my customary opening tone of jovial hostility, “have you catalogued the contents of my soul?”
“More or less,” she replied.
“And what are my secret fears?”
“Nothing so very unusual. Or particularly secret. Like most of us, you fear death and other people, not necessarily in that order.”
I couldn’t tell whether this was an answer or whether it was a subtle brand of repartee. I didn’t say anything. She leaned forward slightly in her chair.
“There’s only one way that you’re going to win this fight—the fight against Herrera,” she said.
I waited.
“You have to overcome your present ambiguity of attitude. You can’t go into the ring with your resentment of Valerian getting in the way. You want Herrera to lose, and you want Valerian to lose, and there’s a conflict of interests. That conflict has to be resolved.”
“You want me to learn to love Valerian?” I said. It was something I’d always suspected.
“That wouldn’t work,” she said. “What can be done, though, is to make you desire to see Herrera beaten stronger than your desire to cross Valerian.”
“There’s nothing stronger than my desire to beat Herrera,” I said.
“That’s not quite what I said,” she pointed out. “You want to win—but winning isn’t such a simple thing. In your present state of mind you could get slaughtered in the ring and come out believing—honestly and sincerely—that you’d won, that you’d beaten Valerian out of his revenge. That’s the danger of the mixed motives, you see—they offer you an excuse. I want to sharpen your personal animosity against Herrera. You don’t like him, or what he stands for—but you don’t quite hate him, not the way you hate Velasco Valerian.
“What I went looking for in your mind is a way to sharpen you against Herrera, a way to make him into an image to be destroyed.”
“In other words,” I said, quietly, “to make me feel about him the way Valerian feels.”
“Yes.”
I stood up and went to the window, not because I wanted to look out but because I wanted to get away from her for a few minutes.
“And you think you can do it?” I asked.
“Yes.”
Outside, there were starlings on the grass, pecking at something. I couldn’t imagine what. Everyone knows that it’s only early birds who get worms.
“Seen your way,” I said, “this is a thoroughly dirty business, isn’t it? We have nothing in which to trade but hatreds and fears. Suffering and anguish. That’s what makes your world turn around. That’s what people are made of, according to your recipe. Not even frogs and snails and what the hell. Just neuroses, just tastefully draped vices. You want me to win, and in your book that’s synonymous with wanting me to hate. You see no more in it than that. You live in a cruel world.”
I turned back to look at her. She was perfectly relaxed in a chair that seemed a couple of sizes too big for her. Her silver hair was neat and slick, as if sprayed with molten metal. Her slender features were made-up, the flaws in her skin—the moles, the pores, the thin lines—all covered over. Packaged. And behind the mask? When she took off her face, was there a snake-locked gorgon waiting within? For all I knew, she might cry vitriol tears.
“My methods work,” she said.
“They shouldn’t,” I told her.
“Your cynicism slipped then,” she said, calmly. “Just for a moment.”
I couldn’t think of anything to do with my hands, and all of a sudden I thought they seemed spare, ugly. I put them in my pockets.
“I had this dream,” I said to her, keeping a perfectly straight face, though she couldn’t see it. “I was swimming in the Arctic Sea. I was just on the point of freezing to death when I was swallowed by a giant flatfish. It was the same one that got Jonah—never mind that crap about whales, it was a giant flatfish. Inside, it was pretty dark, so I struck a match and found myself alone with this transparent girl. I held the match a little closer to get a better look at her, never having seen a transparent girl before, and she recoiled from its heat. I saw the surface of her arm begin to melt, and I realized that she was a water nymph who’d somehow frozen over.
“And that, you see, was my introduction to one of the great enigmas of life. Right there and then, the question popped into my mind, and I said, ‘What’s an ice girl like you doing in a plaice like this?’”
Surprisingly, she laughed.
“Someone,” I said, “should found a new school of psychotherapy based on the analysis of the jokes their patients tell. Even if no one got any saner everybody concerned could have a damn good laugh. As a method, it’s just mad enough to catch on. Nobody ever lost money by inviting the public to make fools of themselves and demanding a fee for the privilege.”
There was a brief silence.
“And?” she prompted.
“And what?”
“And now you’ve steered well away from the point at issue. Now what?”
I turned back to the window. “You can forget the point at issue,” I said. “I’ll do my own fighting. I won’t be programmed like a guard dog to go for the throat as soon as I see the bogey man.”
“What about the tests?”
“What about them?”
“Don’t you want to know what they indicate? Don’t you want to know how you can learn to hate Herrera?”
“No,” I said. “I’d rather not. Lead us not into temptation. I think the matter is better left where it belongs—inside my head. I’ll work out my own way to beat Herrera. In a boxing match—not a war of extermination. It’s not a matter of life and death.”
“Maybe not death,” she said, demurely, “but life—”
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.
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