The Mind-Riders. Brian Stableford
is made of rougher stuff. I did some heroes when the fashion was for tough parts, but mostly I do bad boys and spares.”
Spares are characters which aren’t B-linked. They act in the sim but the characters aren’t made available to the vampires so there’s no feeler dubbed in over the action. I can move a sim as well as anyone, but body language is important—a feeler needs a lot of help from his handler, lest the vamp-appeal and the ratings should ever-so-slightly decline. My movements don’t talk feeler language, so I generally get the villain or the mug to hustle around. I don’t mind. Who wants to be a plastic hero?
“You’re good,” said Jimmy, tentatively.
“How d’you know?” I asked. Handlers don’t get their names on the credit reels.
“I know some of the stuff you did,” he said. “I looked it up in records. Some of the shows I used to like best when I was—” This time he gave up, maybe figuring that I could complete the sentence on my own.
“Why?” I asked. “You want to find out who was living across the way?” I tried not to sound sour about it.
He nodded, knowing somehow that the words just weren’t going to come for a moment or two. I let silence settle.
My eyes lingered on Jimmy’s face for just a few seconds before being driven away by embarrassment. It looked like a curious kind of mask. It was the face of a small child blown up to size and pasted on to an adult frame. Jimmy wasn’t tall but he was stocky and solidly built—not the kind of guy an anemic mugger would single out as a natural victim. His wide eyes and his little nose and his all-around cuteness looked slightly grotesque on a body built for wielding a sledgehammer.
I let my gaze lurch drunkenly to the window, passing over the dull, vacuous creatures who filled the carriage with a faintly offensive aroma of acrylic plastic and cheap deodorant. They wore with absent-minded unanimity the expression of utter boredom, of transit between phases in their lives. They were in the process of translation from context A (work) to context B (home) and they had no script to govern the intermission. It had never occurred to them that these were minutes like any other minutes, to be lived. To them, it was a time to be endured, a time to be waited out with all senses switched off. They sat in suspended animation, their eyes—like mine—extending to stare at the blurred world dragged across the window-frames at two hundred KPH. I couldn’t figure out what made me any different, but I always had the idea haunting me that I ought to be.
At that kind of speed, there’s nothing solid outside the train. Everything beyond the traveling microcosm becomes liquid, unable to linger long enough on-the retina to form a hard image. At two hundred KPH the world is ultra-soft, dissolving into chaos. The sun flashes from a billion windows, and there seems to be a glittering sea outside, immune from action and change.
Time, someone used to say, is for spending, not for saving. Or for killing. But today’s people are mean with their time. They can’t pile it up in banks or nursery-rhyme counting-houses but they can staunch its flow, forcing it to clot before they pick the scab and let it go again.
Sometimes I wonder how the hell they think they’re ever going to collect the interest on their savings.
“Who do you think will win the fight?” said Jimmy, finding his voice and cutting into my thoughts with it.
I froze slightly. It was a bad question. But he wasn’t to know that.
“Herrera,” I said, clipping the syllables.
“They say Angeli is hot,” he said, rejoicing in the way he was getting his sentences out and failing to pick up the hint.
“Herrera will win,” I said.
He must have caught the inflection that time. He knew he’d somehow hit a nerve.
“You going to watch the—fight?” A fatuous question, hardly worth the agony of the stammer.
“Aren’t we all?” I replied.
“Plugged into Herrera?” he said, not stopping himself in time. It was an indelicate question. Not the kind of thing you ask in mixed company. He realized, too late, and I could almost see him asking where the hell his vocal censor had got to. Stammers have no loyalty. I made no move to answer, thinking that maybe to him it was a natural question. Maybe to his generation there was nothing to keep hidden, nothing essentially private and personal about B-linking. He’d grown up with it, had been plugging into the sims ever since he could see and feel on his own account. It wasn’t something that had stolen into his life like some kind of succubus or social disease. And he wasn’t what you might call socially sensitive.
What can you expect from a novice feeler?
But to me—and I don’t deny that I’m way behind the times—B-linking was still a vice. It was still something that happened behind closed doors. So far as I was concerned, there was still virtue in not doing it.
Because he looked confused, and slightly bewildered by the way I’d clammed up, I finally said, “I don’t use the link.”
“Not for fights?”
“Not for anything.”
He suddenly looked away. Perhaps he was angry. After all, the B-link was his career. It was his reason for living. And I’d just dissociated myself from his way of life as if it was something dirty. I wondered how to repair what I’d said.
Then, unexpectedly, he laughed. For once in his life he’d discovered a crazy thought. He laughed.
Then he said, “It’s a—good thing there aren’t more of you or I’d be—out a job.”
“So you would,” I muttered, looking over his head at a wasp circling someone else’s face. The threatened individual was maintaining a sturdy dignity, but a girl with silver eyelids sitting next to him was tensing her jaw and praying hard the insect wouldn’t drift her way.
Nobody dared swat the thing. They didn’t want to get involved.
“But hell,” he said, persisting in spite of it all, because he wanted to get it straight in his head, “fights are real.”
“So’s the murder rate in the suburbs,” I retorted, irrelevantly.
We braked hard, long before the station, and everyone leaned into the deceleration patiently, as if we were all part of a well-rehearsed dance routine. It almost gives you a sense of belonging to know that inertia takes you all the same way at the same time. No one can buy immunity. That’s equality for you.
In the station there was a flurry of violent action as those barging their way out squeezed through the gaps between those barging their way in. It was like a clumsy riffle-shuffle where the cards get redistributed fairly comprehensively but suffer agonies in the process. The overall situation didn’t change, and though my wrist was aching I didn’t bother to try for a seat.
After the nauseating process of getting under way again was over, I dragged up enough breath to say something else.
“Anyway,” I said, “it’s not real.”
He didn’t get the point. How could he?
“Well,” he said, “the—fight’s a sim. But the link’s real. It’s not a—feeler. It’s live.” Then he realized again that he was spilling out the obvious, and went red.
I shrugged, finally getting rid of the whole sorry question with a meaningless gesture. Sure, the charge that came over the E-link was straight from source. When you hooked into Herrera it was pure Herrera that resonated inside your brain. It was his pleasure, his desperation, his glory. Not a feeler hired to identify with the situation but a real live broadcast of real live emotion. The ultimate triumph of MiMaC. The big kick—what the vampires really lusted for. Real? Well, okay, it was real—that way. But it wasn’t any the less a Network product than Jimmy’s beer commercial. It was a thin, carefully dissected slice of reality. A slice that was saleable. And it was processed and packaged just like anything else Network invested in.
I