neither fighter had really worked up a simulated sweat. The tally flashed the score, the round going to Herrera, but that didn’t matter a lot.
At this stage of a fight, everyone is winning. Both fighters fancy themselves, are in to win. That’s what the game is all about, from Network’s point of view. First the contest, then the kill. It all pulls in the consumers.
In the second, the pattern of the fight began to develop clearly. There was a lot of movement as Herrera used the width of the ring to try and harass Angeli. Herrera moved faster and covered a lot more canvas. Angeli was more economical with his movements, more graceful. He refused to be reached and he didn’t let Herrera steal space. The champion jabbed a lot, landing most of the punches but making no real impact. If only Angeli had been able to beat his opponent’s guard he could have done some good, but style is ninety percent show—Angeli’s brand of style, at any rate.
A couple of times Herrera seemed to be over-reaching, and Angeli went in with long looping rights, but Herrera ran round the blows with almost contemptuous ease. He was barely touched.
At this stage, both fighters were waiting—looking interested but scoring very little. Against a man of Herrera’s proven stamina that seemed like a dangerous way for the challenger to play, especially with Herrera taking points in the early minutes that would have to be won back the hard way. But Angeli wasn’t wearing himself out. He was looking easy.
In the third, though—with the second having obviously gone to Herrera—Angeli began looking to put in a greater quantity of punches rather than sparing himself to put one in that could hurt. For awhile, they looked to trade blow for blow, and for the first time Angeli’s class began to show. He landed a couple of rights, cutting through Herrera largely by aggression, although he got solid raps in exchange. Herrera was content to go backwards instead of sideways for awhile, though his left was always licking round Angeli’s face. In the last half-minute, Herrera was forced into defense while Angeli tested him, but he made no attempt to clinch and slow down. The round went to the challenger by a shade.
The meter showing the B-link balance was as steady as a rock. The vamps were cruising, the excitement carrying them along just nicely. Whichever boxer they were hooked into they were getting their money’s worth, for now. It was all good clean fun. So far.
I was out of it, and glad to be. I even had the commentaries switched off, so that only the sim sound effects were coming through. I was watching the fight, not pretending to live it. I was detached, uninvolved, rational. Clarity of mind is a valuable 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,
