The Mind-Riders Read Free

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 didn’t want to talk about the fight. I didn’t want to hear about it. I didn’t even want to watch it, but there’d be no way I could keep myself away. A snake maybe feels the same way about snake-charmers.
    I searched for something to say to sidetrack the conversation, but I couldn’t find a thing. A blank mind. Jimmy Schell was so remote, in that moment, that he might have been one of those goddam knights-in-armor I’d been puppeting around for days—something that once existed but was no longer comprehensible, a figure carved out of matter but with no relativity. Like the girl in his commercial—a visual cue, a fiction of the holovisual image, pure simulation.
    But he turned the conversation on his own, perhaps in search of a topic where we could establish some kind of rapport. He needed to feel comfortable. He was sensitive to mood and he knew he’d put me in a bad one. He wanted to soothe it over. That, I guess, is what Network calls talent.
    â€œYou lived in the stack for long?” he asked.
    â€œNearly twenty years,” I told him.
    â€œYou must’ve had a—lot of neighbors.”
    â€œThey come and they go.”
    Caps are like cells in a honeycomb. For solitaries. Most people don’t stay solitary for long—not in a world where we all practice neurotic togetherness. People come to caps before, after and in between marriages. There are probably only ten or fifteen long-termers in a stack which houses six or eight hundred. I knew one or two in mine, but they were six or eight floors down, and we had nothing in common except staying power. The temps suited me—I had no use for anything enduring and permanent in the way of friendships.
    â€œâ€” Maybe you don’t generally make— friends ,” he said—a weird sentence that could be anything from an indictment to an apology. The fact that he didn’t know what he was getting at himself was signaled by the double hitch.
    I just shrugged.
    The train came in to our station, braking hard all the way. We joined in the squirming contest. I got out easily, but he got stuck. That’s one of the penalties of being short and wide. Human bodies ought to be built for maneuverability in crowds. Evolution has no foresight. I waited for him, and then we flashed our cards and took the elevator down to the Street together.
    Down below it was dim and dingy, though the sky was still dull gray and brown. Twilight comes early at ground level and lingers a hell of a long time. The real day only lasts as long as it takes the noonday sun to cross the gap between the highest ledges. We live in cliff faces, canyons and caves, men of the third Stone Age. But twilight lasts a long time, and we reckon we have durability.
    â€œHow long have you worked at— Net work?” he wanted to know.
    â€œThe same twenty years,” I told him, exaggerating slightly. “Or damn near. Spares and stunts. Master of a million puppets.” Old troupers never die—they just fade out to violins. I let myself go on, to pass the time while we walked. Time was slower now and the world was hard and steady again.