The Mind-Riders. Brian Stableford
thing, and I rate it too valuable to risk inside an B-link headdress. The kind of willful damage you can inflict upon your state of mind with drink or cigarettes or psychotropics is something to be very careful of. I saw no pleasure in strategic self-distortion. I tried to keep my interest in the fight an objective one, and tried to concentrate on the art of boxing rather than the guts.
Maybe, I thought, as I tried to fill the empty moments between rounds, my attitude toward height and my distaste for the B-link are related. I felt, somehow, as if I were above the vamps, on a loftier plane—spectating while they clustered round to drink the emotional substance from the orgy of conflict which they had created out of what was once, perhaps, a sport.
Perhaps, I guess, was the operative word.
Angeli took the fourth, again by a shade, and looked pretty good doing it. But we were by no means back to square one. Angeli knew now what he had only half-known before—that Herrera wasn’t slowing down, wasn’t easing up, wasn’t impressed. Angeli was beginning to feel that the sim he was riding needed pushing along, dragging about the ring. The hammered flesh was beginning to weigh on him a little. But not on Herrera. The champ was still making the pace even if Angeli was edging the punches. If the challenger was going to do something real he was going to have to pull out more and keep pulling it out. Herrera still had reserves untapped, and always seemed to have. No one knew how much more Angeli might pull out—he had never been extended to his limit.
The fifth was dead even and even the computer declined to give a decision. The tally counter split the round two ways. Any difference there was in that round was between the minds of the fighters—the way they were taking their punches psychologically. Herrera, I knew, would be soaking it up, just feeding it back to his own gathering fury. Every time you hurt Herrera you made him that little bit better. I couldn’t believe that the same was true of Angeli.
In a sense, Herrera was almost a vamp himself. He fed on emotion like his devoted fans. Where he got it from doesn’t matter—it all welled up inside him, whether he sucked it from the air or his opponents or even his audience. Somewhere in Herrera there was a powerhouse where need was created, in defiance of the law of conservation of energy. They claim that the only kind of telepathy that exists is the bastard kind that exists courtesy of MiMaC, but any really top class performer, of whatever kind, will doubt that. When you’re winning, you can prey on your victim’s mind. You can absorb the flood-tide of feeling that’s somehow always there. Herrera was sucking up Angeli and feeding on him, somehow. He knew he was winning, believed in himself, and he didn’t need the machines to make his mind resonate.
Herrera took the sixth, and for a moment or two as the bell went and the gloves dropped the sim showed Angeli’s face, and found within the eyes just a hint of defeat. Angeli felt he was pulling out the last of his stops, and the champ wasn’t giving. Not an inch.
I could understand something of the doubt that was creeping into Angeli’s soul. The vamps would be too high on his feelings to know or care about what he was thinking—and in any case that’s something MiMaC can’t do, because thoughts are transient, tentative, evanescent, and can’t be captured. But I knew, because I’d been there.
What Angeli was thinking was this:
Herrera is moving faster and further than I am. He’s burning up more energy. But he’s not tiring. He’s hitting just as hard. He doesn’t get hurt. What do I have to do? What has to be done to break through? When and how does that facade ever waver, ever begin to fail.
And Angeli had one thought to fight against.
Eighteen years.
Like everyone else, Angeli knew there had to be a way to crack Herrera. That was a matter of faith, and a logical certainty. Paul Herrera was human, and had human limits. But where were they? And how did you have to go about pushing him beyond them. Angeli was thinking hard, and finding no answers. He’d find a hundred, in time—after the fight—and he’d be able to write off his defeat and carry on. But for now, he was going under. Slowly.
That eighteen years was one hell of a powerful testament to Herrera’s invincibility. It was one hell of a fact to have rebounding in your mind—a thought to destroy your composure, to undermine your confidence.
Ray Angeli had been six years old when Herrera first took the title. He was too young to remember, but he was old enough to know. He knew that Herrera had started winning and never stopped, and that once upon a time he had hurt a man so badly that he had died of shame. That’s hard knowledge to carry around, especially when you come to it so long after it’s happened and become meaningful. It did no good at all for Herrera’s opponents to know that he fought so hard that he had killed a man—not with punches but with sheer humiliation. Herrera was a man who could do damage—psychological damage—to his opponents.
Angeli wasn’t scared. But he knew. And that has to make a difference.
It wasn’t Herrera’s fault, of course. It never had been. He only did what he was supposed to do. He just gave the mind-riders their big kicks. He was a feeler in a million. Maybe he loved winning more than any other man alive. He loved carving people into pieces. He gloried in the way he hurt them. If the vamps are addicts, what does that make Herrera? I don’t know, but it still wasn’t his fault that a man had died after facing him in the ring.
In an earlier age, Paul Herrera would have been a misfit, a crazy man. With his own body he could never have found an outlet for the things inside his mind. But in this age he had become an idol and an institution. He was the champ. That’s the way the cards fall. And that was the way Ray Angeli had to look at them spread out all over his mind.
When they came out for the seventh I expected to see Herrera begin to tee up his man for the hammer. But Angeli was still tough, and he didn’t let go of his style. He hung on in, taking on the champion and preserving the margin narrowly.
Through the seventh and the eighth and the ninth the fight ran on, as if frozen into a fixed regime, with change in abeyance, content to wait in the wings. Herrera was better, but he wasn’t so much better that he could swing things entirely his way. Punches were going both ways—good punches—and it had all the makings of a really tough fight, hard on both men. The sim skins were showing the signs of hurt. Angeli’s white body was staining red, and one eye was looking bad, seeping blood. But the black face was beginning to inflate as the flesh took punishment. Herrera looked uglier by the minute. But nothing dramatic happened in all three rounds. If Angeli couldn’t reach Herrera, he was damned sure he wasn’t letting Herrera get to him.
I knew it had to break some time. I knew there had to come some elusive moment in the dimension of time in which some tiny event, of little intrinsic significance, would finally tip the scales and send them swinging out of true. Once the balance was gone the whole structure of the fight would tumble. It would turn into a massacre.
But in the meantime, Angeli held his vamps. He shored up his own hopes. He stayed on the tightrope, and stayed, and stayed.
The tally counter showed Herrera still ahead at the end of the ninth. Not by much, but enough to hang on to if he wanted to go the distance and take the fight on points. But that seemed unlikely. It wasn’t his style.
Angeli won the tenth—one might almost say a shade luckily, if one accepted that there was any such thing as luck in a sim fight. When the sim zeroed in to show the world his face as he turned for his corner at the end of it that shadow of doubt—the thin lattice of thought that had foreshadowed his eventual defeat—was gone.
I wasn’t fooled. There was nothing happening to rekindle my faint hopes that Herrera was booked for a fall.
By this time, both fighters would be in top gear and coming to the end of their emotional resources. The cruising had gone on long enough, and from the vamps’ point of view it was time to climax. They’d had their ride, now they wanted their crash. By now, Angeli would have stopped thinking. His mind would be frozen over, feeling still, but not doing much else. Thanks to the miracle of MiMaC, however, the resonance link would still be strong—sweetness pouring out of the strong like a hive of bees, into the minds of the weak.
As