Free The Mind-Riders by Brian Stableford

picked up her habits of speech in the wrong kind of company. She wasn’t exactly a charmer.
    â€œI’m just a fighter,” I said. “Your grandfather’s the one with angelic pretensions.”
    There was a brief pause while she chewed and swallowed. Obviously she didn’t talk with her mouth full. There’s something to be said for everybody if you look hard enough.
    â€œI quite liked Ray,” she said. “But I guess he won’t be back. He’ll have gone where all the failed angels go.”
    â€œHell?” I suggested.
    â€œThe city,” she replied. It wasn’t original, but Curman smiled briefly, interrupting his silent contemplation of the infinite.
    â€œI guess there’s a regular cycle,” I said. “A kind of system. The boys appear, go through the works, and then go. A complete processing—from hopeful to failure in seven stages. And poor you wakes up every ninety-ninth morning to find a new face at breakfast and another dream in ruins in the trashcan. The old wheel of fortune just keeps on rolling, and there’s nothing new under the sun.”
    â€œVery poetic,” she said, grinning faintly to herself. “Very boring.”
    I decided that diplomacy could go wherever the failed angels went.
    â€œDo you care?” I asked. “Does the nobility of the quest to avenge your father help your little world go round?”
    She liked that. I could tell.
    â€œNo,” she said.
    â€œBut your granddaddy loves you anyway?”
    â€œFuck off,” she said. I think I strayed over the limit.
    She seemed to lose interest then, and devoted her attention to her food.
    Curman nudged me, and stood up. “Let’s go,” he said.
    I tried to catch her eye as we went out, to semaphore an apology with my eyebrows, but she wasn’t allowing it to be caught. It didn’t matter. I knew it wasn’t goodbye, and there’d be plenty of time to heal the breach if it needed to be healed.
    I went with Curman out behind the house into the grounds. About a hundred yards away from the house and its satellite buildings there was a small, squat edifice with no windows. This was where the action was.
    It housed a holo unit with a twice-life-size image capacity, a number of E-link receiver sets and a couple of simcontrol units. Even Valerian didn’t own a computer with the capacity to stage a fully-comprehensive situation-simulation, but he had a private hook-up to a machine which had—not one of Network’s machines but one owned by an Industrial Research Corporation which used it for experimental purposes. Valerian probably owned more than half the company, and if research was slowed down because he requisitioned too much computer time, that was mainly his loss.
    Waiting for us with Valerian was an assorted company. Apart from the technical staff there were two men and a woman. I was introduced to them one by one.
    The first and least important was Ira Manuel, a fighter. I tagged him immediately—he was small and pale, with a grim look about his face, the kind of guy who, thanks to an accident of birth, got handed out a body which didn’t fit his character, and who used the sim to try and correct nature’s mistake.
    The second man was Carl Wolff—a man I knew slightly from way back. He was a trainer. He was one of the handful of men who’d been recruited to sim sport from the old-style real version in the very beginning. He had a real interest in the new medium and he had a substantial contribution to make in helping adapt the knowledge and experience of the old game to the new circumstances. Most trainers are hard men who drive their fighters but Wolff was mostly remarkable for his softness. He didn’t hand out orders, just told you what you were doing wrong. He knew everything about boxing and nothing about anything else. He was a man completely without character, just someone who was necessary, who had to