The Mind-Riders by Brian Stableford Read Free Book Online Page A

‘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.”
    â€œBut 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.
    â€œI used to.” I said. “A long time ago.”
    â€œNot any more?” he said, challenging the implication.
    â€œNot 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.

    â€œDo you see me?” he said, harshly.
    I mustered my reserves of cruelty. “Should I care?” I said. “We all got troubles.”
    â€œMy heart,” he said, in a measured monotone, “has plastic valves and an electric motor. I plug in to my kidneys.”
    â€œYou’re a lucky man,” I said. “Some people have to do without.”
    â€œI’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.
    â€œYou 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.
    â€œThat’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 .”
    â€œIt has to be,” he said.
    â€œNo,” I told him.
    â€œYou have an alternative?”
    â€œSure,” 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