Achilles choice

by Larry Niven

  Again, impressive. She presented her case clearly and creatively, and had obviously had access to classified data. She quoted none of it, but some of her conclusions would have been impossible, her lines of reasoning corrupted, unless she had seen… perhaps the 2046 RAND study.

  But she could not hope for gold, and without gold, Holly could not possibly Link.

  Too bad. Still, she had another four years. Then there were Saturn’s own priorities.

  Again he turned attention to the Arts and Entertainments auditorium, now emptying. One of the judges was a guest Counselor, Aziltov from Communications, who had given Jillian a 9.2. He seemed still fascinated by the empty stage. No doubt he was replaying the fractal art display in his mind, with the exactitude possible only to a Linked.

  And then he would probably do it again. And again. Aziltov had developed an unhealthy tendency to replay pleasurable moments. Or invent them.

  Aziltov was borderline Feral.

  The world was a fracturing dike to Saturn, and he was a little Dutch boy with a thousand busy wet fingers.

  Abner was conscious, but barely so. The machines breathed for him, filtered his blood, kept the pain at bay.

  Some pain remained. He dared not slip too deeply into narcosis. Blocking the nerves electrically left him in a disassociated state that unraveled sanity even more swiftly.

  He desperately wanted to see Jillian compete.

  She visited him daily, speaking to him of strategy, or trivial things, and he wondered if she knew how he had lied to her.

  A white lie, certainly. He’d made a mistake, mentioning the illiteracy paper. No Russian had written it. Her precious Donny had won gold with the damned thing.

  The paper had won gold, and then been buried, damn them all to hell.

  On the holoscreen, Jillian approached the mat, bowed to her second opponent.

  She closed, and the Boost-accelerated reflexes of both opponents made the action a blur. Ordinarily he would have slowed the images down, inspected them frame by frame. But he was so tired, and hurt so badly. Only one more thing now, and he could let go.

  His attention had wandered. Jillian was in a pretzel with her opponent, a straining tangle of arms and legs. The other girl’s shoulders were pinned to the mat.

  Jillian stood, victorious.

  Abner closed his eyes, smiling, as the screen went dark. The nurses had programmed it to turn on only when Jillian was competing, to allow him to save his strength. Abner slipped away into an uneasy sleep, a dim dream world, its horizon boiling black with locusts.

  A buzzing filled the room. He opened his eyes, managed to rub some of the gum out of them.

  Jillian. Osa. Competing for gold.

  “Oh, Jillian. Darn it all to heck.” He mentally repeated that last sentence, and gloomily decided that Jillian was a bad influence.

  He had hoped that the Scandinavian would have fouled out, or been beaten, or broken an arm. Anything to keep her away from Jillian.

  They went at each other like a pair of dervishes. Long phrases of careful circling, light touches, and then a blinding flurry of movement. Osa took her opponent dead seriously this time, used her phenomenal agility to keep Jillian from closing.

  Then… an opening. Jillian took Osa to the mat, slamming her down so brutally hard that Abner winced and grinned at the same time.

  Jillian went for the pin… was straining for the hold…

  And went limp. Abner cursed. Osa had shammed, let Jillian try to pin, and had worked herself into a choking position.

  The screen went black.

  Fellrunning was still a hope, but he was so tired.

  And the pain. He just couldn’t take the pain much longer. He would have to ask for drugs, and Blocking. And then he would slide down that final hole, and couldn’t be sure of ever coming up again.

  There was still something to say to Jillian, but he could no longer be sure of his ability to say it.

  Jillian had two chances at the athletic events. The judo which had so tested her body and spirit had yielded a respectable silver. The fractal art presentation had yielded silver, but her thesis on chaos theory and sociology had only earned a bronze. Not good enough. The fellrunning had become do-or-die.

  Traditionally, fellrunning is a European sport. Not until the third Olympiad had it become a truly international pastime. Competitors traverse a ten-kilometer obstacle course, facing natural and artificial barriers.

  There should have been eleven women on line with Jillian. Nine were there. Two were Boosted veterans who had no chance of linking, who had been quietly removed from the Olympiad in the name of security.

  Four of the women, including St. Clair, were of purely European extraction. Three held varying degrees of African blood in their veins. One was the sinewy Taiwanese, Mary Ling.

  Jillian settled down into a comfortable crouch, heel against the block, and waited.

  The changes within her body had peaked-she hoped. She felt all whipcord and whalebone, every nerve fiber aflame. She glared at the other women on the line, and their eyes held no warmer welcome.

  She wouldn’t just beat them. She would crush them. The gun sounded. Jillian exploded out of the blocks. Fellrunning is conducted over savage, broken terrain: rocks, boulders, ravines. There was no clearly marked path, and it was up to each participant to make her way through the course to a predetermined finish line in a minimum of time.

  She could go around, stay to level ground, and add miles to her run. She could go directly over, using pitons, or she could “cut the edges,” free climbing, trusting her agility and strength to deal with the obstacles as they came.

  Jillian paused, consulting her compass. She was heading northwest. It was eleven in the morning, and the sun would begin its descent soon. She fixed its arc in her mind, swore to herself that she wouldn’t consult the compass again, and began to climb.

  Thirty yards to her left, Mary Ling was ascending a pile of boulders with the confidence of a spider monkey.

  Jillian herself had screwed her concentration down to a narrow beam. “Black dot” focus, she called it. She was aware of the rest of the world, even if concentrating on the next rock, the next step, the next moment.

  “White dot” focus would build an attention so extreme that the rest of the world seemed to disappear. Fine for playing chess. Dangerous for a fellrunner.

  She had reached the top of a cairn of rock, pulling herself up into shadow, breathing deeply and evenly. One more toehold would bring her to safety.

  She sensed more than saw the rock as it fell. Jillian released her left hand’s grip, swung out to the right as the rock whistled past.

  Her reflexive swing back to the left took her into the path of a second rock. It glanced off the cliff face next to her arm, and struck her shoulder.

  Jillian’s left side went numb. She skidded, lost her purchase and found it again. Gasping, she stared down the column of rock. If she had fallen, it would have meant a fractured leg, at the least.

  And hadn’t there been a flicker of a human shadow up above her? And hadn’t she heard something very like retreating footsteps?

  She hung there, distant from the pain in her shoulder, gasping. She began to climb again, more slowly now. Her mind burned with anger, and that anger pushed aside all fatigue, all fear, leaving only the climb.

  She reached the level, and glanced around swiftly, crouching. Nothing. A floatcar whirred up behind her, its camera doubtless recording her intrepid efforts.

  She ran now, picking her way through the rocks as quickly as she could. The anger seethed in her, fueled by suspicion, and the urge to find her tormenter.

  Exhaustion clawed at her. She ignored it, buried it under a layer of discipline so deep that she would die rather than yield.

  The sun beat down on her, glaring off the rocks as she crossed the mesa, and she stole another glimpse at her compass, making a slight correction.

  She had cut as much distance as she dared from her time. Now it was— A scr
eam. It was short, and despairing, and abruptly cut off by the dull, heavy sound of a human body impacting a shelf of rock.

  Jillian put on a burst of speed. The sound had come from in front of her. Someone ahead of her had—

  At the edge of the mesa was a decline, steeper than the ascent but with better hand and foot holds. And a hundred feet below her, a rag doll crushed by an angry child, was Catherine St. Chair.

  Halfway down the face was Mary Ling. The Taiwanese paused, glared up at Jillian, face tight with challenge.

  Or concentration.

  It could have been an accident.

  Jillian’s own concentration was shot now. As she climbed down the cliff she had to pass within five feet of the woman’s body. She tried to confine her thoughts to her breathing, to the smooth flow of muscles in shoulders and hips. But then St. Clair, shattered on the rocks, suddenly moved. Her body arched, and her mouth made a wet keening sound.

  From somewhere behind her came the burring whistle of a Medtech aircar coming in for a pickup. It was still seconds away. Catherine St. Clair tried to move, tried to turn. Her eyes stared at Jillian without focusing. Jillian was frozen to the rock face, unmoving, until the woman from Kenya descended past her.

  She snapped out of her trance then, and started to move, but the Englishwoman stretched out her hand and tried to say something like “Help me…” except that the words came out as an indecipherable groan, all vowels and wet consonants.

  Where was the Medtech vehicle? She couldn’t leave.

  St. Chair’s eyes locked with hers, and Jillian saw her die, saw the lights go out, the body collapse into lifelessness.

  Shaking now, Jillian completed her descent.

  Her control was shattered. She was already breathing hard, her ankle felt swollen, and her shoulder had little strength.

  It was a straight run now to the finish line, and she was in third place, with Mary Ling twenty feet ahead of her.

  Jillian bore down, willed her legs to pump faster and faster, ignored the pain. Ignored everything but that final sprint to the finish line, to the reward that awaited her if she could only overcome the fatigue built up over the week of competition.

  Her entire body was aflame now, but she couldn’t and wouldn’t stop. She had cut the distance between herself and the Taiwanese to perhaps ten feet, still gaining, five feet now, three feet— Then, from some unimaginable well of hidden resources, Mary Ling seemed to go into another gear, and simply pulled away from her, crossing the finish line a full eight feet ahead of Jillian Shomer.

  The shock of it almost drove Jillian off her feet. Her entire body began to shake, as if every strand of connective tissue were suddenly unraveling. She lurched the last few feet, collapsed across the finish line.

  She tasted dust, and defeat, and death.

  Chapter 13

  A mile away, in the central stadium, the crowds were cheering.

  Jillian watched as speeches were made. The winners paraded proudly alongside those losers who had, in Donny’s fevered phrasing, “the strength of character, the wisdom and depth of commitment to share in the true spirit of the games, to rejoice in the uplifting of the human race without the hunger for personal gain.” And she watched him present the gold medal to that little Taiwanese slut.

  Abner had been awash in pain medication by the time she got to his room. He mumbled words that might have been comforting if they had been comprehensible. His eyes were closed-she’d thought he’d gone to sleep-when he said clearly: “Check the records. Check my records.”

  “Records? Abner, which records?”

  “O… lym… piad.”

  He had slipped further and further away from her, into delirium. His words and thoughts became ever more garbled. Jillian sat beside him in a darkening room, feeling her bruises and scrapes, watching Abner Warren Collifax slide into the same pit which would, in five or six years, yawn to welcome her.

  For twenty hours she sat there, a statue of flesh, watching him wither before her eyes. With all of her strength she willed him to speak, to breathe, to live.

  In vain. After twenty hours he died.

  Numb, Jillian tucked the sheet around his neck, kissed his forehead, and left quietly, almost on tiptoe, as if he were merely asleep.

  More loss:

  Walking back to the dorm along the edge of the island. A warm Mediterranean evening, falling swiftly. A sweet heavy breeze swayed in from the south.

  Activity over next to one of the low sea walls. A half-dozen silver blazers, the sudden appearance of a Medtech tram.

  Something wet and limp was hauled up from the ocean. Jillian caught a momentary image of flaccid, heavy muscle, dripping water. Vulnerable nakedness. Wet black hair, shadow-dappled by dying sunlight.

  An easy death. Anesthetized by the cold, put to sleep by oxygen starvation— What was that, in the shadows off to the right? Broken, shattered: something in the darkness. Jillian stepped quietly to it, bent, watching her fingers tremble as she reached.

  Half of Jeff Tompkins’s palace was still perfect, a study in ivory. Half was stove in as if by a sudden, terrible effort, one of those moments of madness which, once done, cannot be undone.

  Even partly crushed, the model was exquisite, a monument to his persistence and skill. But it hadn’t been good enough. In the end, Jeff’s castle had been not of ivory, but of sand.

  A silver girl took the model from her hands and waved a wordless Jillian away from the scene.

  Back in her room she watched the Olympics closing down. She was too heavy and limp to move. From beyond her window machine noises ebbed and flowed as helicopters, boats, and skimmers arrived to take the losers away.

  A nebula of fireworks exploded above the coliseum. Jillian heard their distant thunder, could see the brief bright promise of their flame wavering through a sheen of tears.

  For hours she sat there, until the fireworks died and the stadium emptied, and the spectators began their long exodus. The room was illuminated only by yellow-orange streetlights and the distant glow of the Athens cityscape. Intermittently, limos cruised or floatcars drifted past her window, their headlights piercing her shadows.

  She flexed her hands in the darkness.

  The door swung open, and Holly stood there, hipshot and gently mocking, resplendent in frilly pink chiffon that plunged and gathered and teased, and contrasted beautifully with her dark skin.

  She pirouetted, and the dark waters of Jillian’s grief grew shallow. “Poetry,” Jillian croaked, and managed a smile.

  Holly took Jillian in her arms, comforting, and finally Jillian let go in great whooping sobs. Holly stroked the back of her head.

  “Do you want me to stay here with you?” Holly whispered. “All you have to do is say the word—”

  “How do you do it?” Jillian’s voice was low and hoarse. “You lost, and you act like you won.”

  “I’ve got four years to try again, and I’ve got insurance,” Holly answered, as kindly as she could. “I believe in myself.”

  “You may be the smartest person here.” Jillian sniffed. “You go to that party tonight. Whoop it up for both of us.”

  “A promise.” Holly smiled. “And another one: if I make it, we’ll both make it, lady. Remember that.”

  Jillian started to protest, to say something about honor, and chances taken, and perhaps something trite about dice rolling as they may. Holly hushed her.

  “Trust me, Jillian. And listen: you’re not Linked, but you’ve earned more Comnet time. We can help each other, Jillian. We’re going to help each other, understand?”

  “All right. Now, get out of here, go to the party. Enjoy yourself.”

  They hugged again, more fiercely this time, and then Holly left.

  The city was settling down to sleep, gradually deflating after two weeks of media gluttony. Reflected in the glass was a woman Jillian didn’t know, a woman who had abandoned everything familiar, and had nowhere left to turn.

  For the thousandth time, she inserte
d the plastic chip into its slot, saw the error message appear, and knew just how big a fool she had been.

  Took the card out, tenderly tucking it back into her purse.

  It was seven steps to the bathroom. She had measured them. Eventually she would need to know the distance to the medicine cabinet.

  There were pain tabs and sleeping tabs in there. Just peel back the protective strip and press the adhesive edge onto a pulse point. One was enough to ensure a sound night’s sleep. Ultimately she would increase the dosage until even Abner’s deep, devouring pain floated away from her, leaving her in soothing oblivion.

  She felt the play of webbed muscles in her forearms, sensed the strength and inhuman precision of her every motion. Being human hadn’t been enough. Today she was stronger, faster, better than she had ever been in her life. It still hadn’t been enough. God damn it, it hadn’t been enough.

  She’d be twenty-seven by the next Olympiad. How could she take a gold in judo? Or even place as highly as she had this time? She was over the hill for competition. She was walking around, dead.

  She pushed against the window, felt its slight bend, guessed at its thickness.

  There. She felt the exact angle to push. She could rip it right out of its track. Could shatter it. She and the shards of glass could go tumbling down to the pavement below, down into the night place where Beverly waited.

  It would be sin. And she shouldn’t have blasphemed.

  Jillian offered a quick prayer for forgiveness, then slammed her palm against the glass plate.

  There were questions left unanswered.

  Abner had left a hint.

  She didn’t need anything elaborate to access public files. She used the building’s computer. What was it that Abner had said? Check the records?

  The 2044 Olympiad?

  Nothing classified there.

  She quickly found herself skimming through fouryear-old images, stopping whenever something interesting occurred. There was the usual scattering of “Classified” notices. She wished she could have borrowed Holly’s Void. From a Void, she might have figured out ways past the security blocks, and any information she got would be absorbed much faster. But this would get her there.