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 they came out for the eleventh, I found myself praying that something might yet happen—that the dispelled doubt might be the signal for a change in the wind. It wasn’t reason or experience that was urging me, but desire. I still wanted to see Herrera beaten. I always had. Sometimes, you just can’t help yourself flying in the face of what you know to be inevitable.
I cared. I knew I was going to be disappointed.
In a hypocritical moment, I could tell myself that I wanted Herrera to lose because I disapproved of what he did for the vamps. I could tell myself that I was disgusted by the way they fed on him. And maybe that was true. The thought of countless emotional voyeurs enjoying orgasms every time Herrera threw a K.O. punch was pretty sickening. But in slightly less self-congratulatory moments I had to admit that there was more to it than that. I bore Paul Herrera a grudge.
And in the beginning of the eleventh, I was charging up—not, like the vamps, on the fighters’ emotion, but on my own. I was getting excited, getting involved. Curled up on the edge of the bed I was tensing my muscles in sympathy. I had my fists clenched and held rigid. I wasn’t waving them or pushing them, just holding them. But if Angeli had landed a good punch I would be able to feel it in one of those fists. I would get the tingling in the nerves as he hit Herrera hard.
Only he didn’t.
Under my breath, I was urging Angeli on.
But he was going to pieces.
Herrera, with a burst of sheer power, came through Angeli’s guard like a knife and landed a superb combination—left to the temple, right just above the heart.
Angeli went reeling. His arms went wild, and a third punch, which only glanced off him, put him down. He came up at seven, backed on to the ropes, tried to shield himself and pull Herrera into a clinch. He didn’t make it, and went down to one knee to take eight, still wanting to come back and mix it.
Back he came, but without all the things which had made him into a contender, kept him going for so long. He couldn’t keep the champ out, couldn’t put together his own punches.
The bell came, and Angeli went to his corner to be brought back to life, but it was all over. The tally counter no longer mattered, and the link meter was swinging.
Angeli had held his thirty right to the bitter end, but they were gone now. No one believed in him any more, and most weren’t going to take what Angeli was going to take when he went back to be slaughtered in the twelfth. They were running—flopping back into their chairs in a blind, black drunk, overcharged and ready to let themselves sink. Only the real gluttons would switch to Herrera so late.
When the twelfth began, Angeli was holding just six percent, and even that seemed high. Old ladies hoping for miracles and groovers who lapped up suffering as well as—or instead of—exultation.
While Herrera took him apart, knocking him down for a full count half a minute before the end, I trudged down from the sorry heights of forlorn hope. I didn’t want to watch what was left—I wanted to think about something else, but you can’t switch off your eyes and somehow I couldn’t move towards the controls. I saw it all happen.
There was no real backlash. After it was over, I knew it had always been the same way. I didn’t feel disturbed. I was calm. My unclenched fists were resting easy on the blanket. I just shrugged off the sad adrenalin draining through my bloodstream, and instructed myself not to care.
Herrera had won again. So what.
I finally switched off the holo. Herrera would stay with his sim awhile yet so that the vamps could gorge themselves on his triumph a little time longer. It would slide away from its peak very slowly, ebbing away gently rather than plunging down. The connoisseurs reckoned that a better charge than the best of erotic spasms. Chacun à son goût.
I went to sort through some cassettes, looking for something to take my mind away. Somehow, everything I looked at struck me as being insipid. I found it difficult to choose one.
Then I tested the cut on my little finger, to see if it still hurt.
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