Achilles choice

by Larry Niven

  Some of the others strutted and posed for the crowds, flexing muscles, smiling broadly. Holly held up a briefcase containing her precious files, waving confidently to the cameras.

  Holly was ready. Her studies on the immune system were complete and broken down into display mode. If they didn’t win her the gold, they might still save her from the effects of Boost.

  Maybe. The world would change.

  “Quite a show, isn’t it?” Abner said as their car glided away through the crowd.

  The press of humanity actually thickened for the first hundred feet or so, then thinned out. Then they were on the road and heading out of the terminal.

  Jillian felt like hiding. “Why do I get the feeling that I haven’t seen anything yet?”

  “Because you are a bright, perceptive girl.”

  The caravan to Olympic Bay took half an hour.

  The floating islands were tethered in standard three-by-three resort formation. Each hosted a network of dormitories, gymnasiums, cafeterias, and entertainment facilities. They were fortified and fenced, protected on all sides: a temporary luxury community created to fill every Olympian need.

  Olympic Bay glittered in the misty rain like a mythical mountain fortress, and Jillian felt her pulse race.

  Ferry skimmers were coasting in on plumes of steaming foam. Helicopters and floatcars braved the wind to reach landing pads. And from every vehicle streamed Olympians and their coaches.

  Jillian helped Abner onto the docking platform, hustled him to a two-passenger robot monotram. It surged forward the moment they were seated.

  Abner’s thin fingers tapped against the glass, and he sighed audibly.

  “What is it?” Jillian asked as they drew up to one of the condos. It rose up out of an artificial hillside on enormous aluminum stilts. An escalator rippled up the side of the hill to the main entrance. Rain was deflected by a silver awning.

  “All the rest of it was just rehearsal, Jill. I can’t help you anymore.”

  Was he asking permission to die? Abner seemed translucent, ephemeral.

  “It may be I don’t need you,” she said in a voice she might have used with a child. “But I want you to see me win.”

  His hands slid down into his lap, were still. “All right.”

  She kissed his cheek as the tram stopped and the door slid open. “I’ll be in touch.”

  “Please.”

  A silver-garbed young man offered to carry Jillian’s luggage for her, and she declined. She shrugged the strap over her shoulder and straightened up, stepping onto the escalator.

  The little monotram disappeared around a curve.

  Holly waited for her at the top of the escalator. “Where’s Abner going?”

  “A Medtech Intensive. He’s going to need lifesupport soon.” The wind whipped a spray of rain into her face. With the tip of her tongue she tasted it. Salt. “Real soon.”

  “Is he septic?”

  She shrugged. “It’s a miracle he’s hung on this long. He’ll make it another month. Bet on it.”

  They stood and watched the crowd gather and thin on the dock, ebbing and surging as a tide. Holly chuckled, calculatedly changing the mood. “I’ve never seen so much healthy flesh in all my life. I wonder if the rumors are true.”

  Curiosity nudged Jillian out of her pensive mood. “What rumors?”

  “Ah, you know.” Holly leaned over, stagewhispered conspiratorially. “They say that the most intense sex in the known universe takes place in the Olympic villages.”

  “I’ve heard that. Are you planning a little personal inquiry?”

  “Certainly. A series of controlled experiments in the name of science.”

  “Double-blind, I suppose.”

  “I’ll keep one eye open.”

  A pair of gorgeous young male attendants escorted them to their separate rooms. Jillian’s, a tall, darkly Mediterranean lad who looked usefully fit, offered to help Jillian unpack. He also offered to rub her feet, massage her lower back, or perform any other service that might be required. He was cute, but she declined.

  When the door closed, she began to unpack. She placed shoes beneath her bed, tested the bed, hung pantsuits and dresses in the closet, squirreled toiletries away in the bathroom. She busied herself around and around the room, unaware that she was being watched until Holly cleared her throat from the doorway.

  “You know,” the biologist said thoughtfully, “you are definitely not the same anxious little girl I met eight weeks ago.”

  Jillian sat on the bed, unnaturally aware of the play of every muscle as it flexed and knotted. She felt like a bundle of live wires. “What’s the difference?”

  “You — …” Holly closed her eyes, stared into the darkness for a few seconds before answering. “Your eyes don’t have any humor in them, but your mouth is smiling all the time. There’s just something a little distant about you. Detached.”

  Jillian’s lips curled up, but there was no warmth in them. “Well, maybe I finally got the joke, Holly.”

  Suddenly, Holly seemed very uncomfortable, found it difficult to meet Jillian’s gaze. “Uh-huh,” she said. “Well. Maybe so.”

  Holly seemed in a hurry to leave, and Jillian did nothing to stop her.

  Jillian stared down at her hands, felt the play of tendon and muscle in her forearms, closed her eyes to hear the slow thunder of her heartbeat.

  The Boost was speeding up. She could feel the changes, feel her body growing and shifting. She wiggled her toes and could mentally isolate every tendon, muscle, and nerve fiber. Every breath reverberated hollowly in the cavern of her chest.

  Where was Jillian Shomer? Here, on the edge of a bed in a strange room, in a strange place a world away from her beginnings?

  And if not… then who was she?

  She had wanted Abner to come with her, and was ashamed of the true reason. They spoke of companionship, of support, of coaching, directly of affection and obliquely of love. The truth was darker.

  Abner was rotting inside. Impending death enshrouded him like a fetid cloak. Death was in his eyes, his movement, his precarious balance. It creaked in his voice.

  Jillian Shomer, more vital than ever before, was morbidly fascinated. Abner was a living reminder of the hell which awaited her if she failed.

  She felt as if she were falling through a black hole toward some ultimate encounter with a Jillian that had never been.

  Jillian looked up at the wall clock, and jumped. Two hours had passed, time during which she sat motionless, listened to her body grow and change, felt the heat as her blood raced to remove toxins and rebuild tissue.

  She shucked herself out of her clothes, lay back, told the ceiling light to shut down.

  There were ways to deal with jet lag. Tension, too. Boost made it even easier.

  She writhed in the dark, stretching and tensing each muscle in individual sequence. Back, side, belly… rolled out of bed, dressed, moved into the silent hallways. From far away, another floor perhaps, came sounds of merriment. She saw no one in the halls.

  Outside the rain had stilled, leaving the silver trail of the escalator glistening with its memory. She took the escalator down two levels, and caught a submarine tram to the shore.

  The little tube cars were nine parts entertainment excursion and one part practical transportation. Fish slipped in and out of the floodlamps. Jillian stared up through the transparent tram walls as they hissed along. The water turned black just a few yards beyond the lamps. Fish flashed to life, then vanished utterly. There might have been nothing below her or above her, or anything at all in the universe except this tiny capsule cruising through an endless sea.

  A young woman in a silver blazer with an Olympic patch greeted her at a shoreside tram station. In heavily accented English she asked if Jillian would require a limousine, or an escort. Jillian demurred, and mounted the upward escalator alone.

  What the night required was a walk. The mists of evening were cleansing, comforting. The stadia were less
than a mile from the dock.

  Electricians and cameramen, carpenters and painters were still busy, working like a colony of welldisciplined termites to prepare the stadia and surrounding environs. The main stadium rose like the Coliseum of old, a structure a quarter mile long and fifteen stories high, with seats for a hundred thousand spectators.

  Just as Olympians had been arriving half the night, so had their audience. From all over the world they came, flooding the hotels in Athens, overflowing out to smaller artificial islands in the bay. Live spectator seating in three different arenas, holo feeds winging out to the world and beyond, the Olympiad would be watched by three billion people. Those who stayed home would have a better view.

  They were a legion of three thousand, the new gladiators, joined in mortal combat with something infinitely more terrible than lions.

  Jillian stood in the shadows, watching: someone else had had the inspiration for a late-night stroll.

  A slender man in a silver windbreaker was running laps on the track. He was singing as he ran. His voice was beautifully cultured, and barely seemed affected by the rigors of a pace that accelerated to something near sprinting. As he circled the track and came closer she could make out the words he sang:

  He’s never, ever sick at sea!

  What, never?

  No, never…

  Well, hardly ever…

  As he passed her she saw the Bulgarian flag on the back of his jacket, beneath Agricorp’s crossed stalks of wheat. She recognized him from a Newsweek loop on the transport in from Denver.

  He slowed to a jog and ran out of the stadium, trailing song behind.

  Jillian walked out to the middle of the field, sat cross-legged in the wet grass. Uncounted tons of concrete, tens of thousands of foam-steel girders, millions of man-hours had gone into building this stadium.

  Here, track-and-field events would take place.

  A roofed oval to the north was reserved for swimming and gymnastics, weight lifting and judo, fencing and archery and the other indoor events.

  A third location, also domed, would house the academic and esthetic events. Chess, flight simulation, computer art, oral interpretation, all of the skills that would mean success for some and disaster for others.

  In these three stadia, and in a selected location in the mountains to the north, Jillian would display her gifts and talents. Here she would stretch her body and mind and heart to the maximum. She prayed that it would be enough.

  She noticed something. For the first time in her life, as she prayed, there was no sense of praying to something outside herself. Her prayer was directed to a new Jillian, the creature growing inside a chrysalis composed of the old Jillian’s hair and eyes and hopes and fears. Splitting away now. Another creature. Stronger. Fiercer.

  It heard her prayer, and hissed its savage reply.

  The noon sun gleamed down on them. Row after glittering row they came, the Olympians. They carried, according to their allegiances, corporate or national banners. Three thousand strong, every human color, from every corner of the planet they came.

  Jillian stood shoulder to shoulder with strangers. She stole a glance back through the pack. Holly was back there, somewhere. They couldn’t stand together: Holly owed allegiance to Medtech, as Osa did to Agricorp.

  She peered around, caught sight of Mary Ling, the tiny Taiwanese girl said to be one of the toughest competitors in the fellrunning division.

  But Ling wasn’t as formidable as Catherine St. Clair, the English Medtech chemist who was not only a top fellrunner, but had worked on the five-man British Academy of Science team which garnered last year’s Nobel Prize in medicine. St. Clair was a strong chess player and a stunning redhead to boot. Jillian gritted her teeth.

  So they marched in their pockets and rows, carrying their banners and singing their songs, saluting the crowd that overflowed the stands and spread out across the world. They were best of the best, three thousand of the finest minds and bodies that had ever strode the planet.

  Within seven years, ninety-eight percent of them would be dead. There were just fifty open slots among the Linked.

  As the anthems of two dozen nations and sixteen corporations played, they marched. Speeches were made. Fireworks were ignited, and a gigantic OneWorld hologram, the Council’s ultimate emblem, rotated overhead.

  From the north corner of the stadium, a lone figure ran with the grace of a gazelle, carrying on high a torch which smoked and flickered in the still air.

  The stadium fell into a hush, and every eye watched as a thin, pale man entered the stands and sprinted up a carpeted stair to touch the flame to the official Olympic torch.

  The crowd relaxed into a collective sigh, and then exploded into applause.

  The Olympics had begun.

  Chapter 12

  In the Arts and Entertainments auditorium eighteen thousand people sat in their patient rows.

  Jillian Shomer scanned their faces, striving to read their minds, their hearts. If each of them were deepscanned, so that she could read their heart rates and blood pressures, skin temperatures and EEGs. would it help her to talk to them?

  The question, the doubt, the yearning to touch the faceless audience, had plagued artists since the beginning of time. Technology had changed nothing.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, Miss Jillian Shomer.

  Division: Spirit. Presentation: Fractal Art.”

  Picture: glaciers, advancing from different directions, meeting in a central fissure in the earth, grinding the countryside into gravel and splinters.

  As the holographic images materialized in the dome of the main theater, Jillian distanced herself from reality, allowed herself to pretend that she had not created these images through countless hours of programming. She became instead a spectator, a student attending a phantasmal geology lecture.

  The ice was spectacularly varicolored. Where two moving cliff faces struck one another, clouds of steam boiled forth. The image expanded swiftly. The camera POV glided into the steam; the curls and wisps and patterns of light became clear. The images revealed were not confined to curlicues and arcs: networks of edge and angle emerged. As they pushed deeper into the scene, the image paradoxically reverted to the macro image.

  Here again was the ocean of crawling ice… but a hole seemed to have been torn in the bottom of the world. The floes crunched and swirled in a slowmotion whirlpool. The grinding scream of a million million tons of ice filled the auditorium. Darkness congealed into a dense strip of jumbled cubes and triangles that pulsed with the roar like an optical sound track.

  The sound itself was a repeating pattern.

  Geometric pulses shone so bright, loomed so large that they stunned the senses. Chunks of angle broke free, coalesced into glaciers once again. The glaciers crashed, gouged mountains from their path, and tore simplified redwoods up by their roots.

  The image expanded once again, pushed into the trees themselves. The pattern of the leaves was a repeating pattern, its angles and cool green geometries fading to outline to produce crystals, ice crystals which were once again glaciers.

  And again two walls of ice met screaming. The computer simulation expanded the scene, took the judges and audience to some new aspect of that primal scape. With color, depth, shape, sound, and movement Jillian conjured up the infinite variations of pattern within pattern, until the repetitions became a musical movement, the entire ebb and flow of change the heartbeat of an enormous creature from ages past, the living fire of its breath a dance of creation and destruction.

  She’d found the core of this while exploring something nearly outside her field: the torpid formation and flow of plasma between the core and rim of a spiral galaxy: the laws that govern a transgalactic lightning bolt. Her very simple equation might not describe such a process in all detail, but as the basis for a visual display… In Jillian’s humble opinion, it made the Mandelbrot Set look like a six-year-old’s first attempt at needlepoint.

  The sequence ended. The lights c
ame up full.

  Nervous at the lack of response, Jillian stood, looking out at the thousands of spectators, perhaps twelve thousand who had come to witness her presentation.

  Finally, someone near the judges’ box began to applaud, and the clapping became infectious, until the entire auditorium rocked with applause.

  Overwhelmed, Jillian took her bow, keeping her eyes on the scoreboards as the officials rendered their judgment.

  9.1

  9.2

  8.7

  A respectable score. Saturn thought that the Shomer woman could take a silver with that.

  Interesting mind.

  She was capable, and creative, and intelligent enough. And… unpredictable. Driven by motivations he didn’t quite understand. She bore further examination.

  As did her associate Holly Lakein.

  Saturn scanned all of the inputs from the Olympiad, as he did inputs from around the Earth and to the outer reaches of the solar system.

  Lakein’s performance on the balance beam had been stunning, a gold. Her modern dance display was less impressive-all force and altitude, technique masquerading as emotion.

  But her chess… ah.

  A mind that can think thousands of moves ahead can take no pleasure in the winning or losing of such a game. But there was beauty in the patterns of her play.

  Her five matches tested her to the limit. Her second opponent was Catherine St. Clair. Saturn recognized motifs developed by Botvinnik in the Netherlands, Alekhine in Zurich, Korchnoi in Leningrad.

  Lakein was experimental, bold, and innovative. St. Clair played a straightforward pressure game, grinding attrition which could well have crippled a lesser player. Ultimately St. Clair had taken a pawn sacrifice which developed into a forked check. Five moves later she retired, congratulating an exhausted Holly on a brilliant coup.

  It was Holly Lakein’s finest moment. Overall, she bronzed, and Saturn knew that she had only one more hope: her molecular biology presentation.

  Saturn effortlessly broke through Lakein’s security codes, decrypted her files, and scanned her paper on alternative avenues for Boost control.