Achilles choice

by Larry Niven

  Finally, his circuitous palm-pressing route brought him to Jillian.

  His smile was beneficent. “Jillian Shomer. I’ve wanted to meet you.”

  “Yes,” she said clumsily, instantly embarrassed. The only other reply that flashed into her mind was, We’d make beautiful babies.

  “Well, I think you’re going to show us something special.”

  It was an act of physical control to keep her reply out of the realm of the suggestive. “I’m in fellrunning. Intervals, broken-ground, obstacles, and so on.”

  His eyes crackled with secret amusement. “Yes, I know.”

  Wasn’t there any place they could be alone? “I hear that you mix some free-climbing into your workouts.”

  “I’m looking forward to the Rockies,” he said, breathing deeply. “The air is thin, and very clean-should be a good burn.”

  She lunged into what she hoped was an opening. “Is there any chance that we could get together?”

  “No, I’m afraid not. There’s really no time.”

  She nodded. Gods cannot sport with mere mortals.

  The Greek gods did!

  And mortals suffered for it.

  Donny moved on. As if an envelope of intimacy had ruptured, suddenly she heard other conversations around her, saw other faces. Her cheeks flushed red.

  To heck with the rules. Come what may, she had to see more of him.

  The sun hadn’t risen yet.

  Jillian had been awake since three-thirty. She lay on a tarp, watching the guest dorms through a pair of infrared binoculars borrowed from Holly.

  She knew from vidzine articles that Donny Crawford got in his first workout of the day before dawn.

  The binoculars put a misty red haze over everything, but through that haze, outlines were amazingly sharp. She wore a thermal warm-up suit to protect her from the cold. Still, she stretched and wiggled continuously to keep the juices flowing.

  A creaking sound, a brief glimmer of light against the back of the building, and he emerged.

  Donny stretched each leg briefly, twice, as though he had one of those infuriating bodies that never needed warming up. She kept the binoculars on him, let him get almost out of sight, and then began to follow.

  So smoothly did he run that his feet barely seemed to skim the ground. He was the best of the best. Even though this was a light maintenance run at an unaccustomed altitude, it was all Jillian could do to keep him in sight.

  He headed up into the mountain, up a narrow trail until the path slanted so steeply that it was almost impossible for her to stay hidden.

  He had all but disappeared into the vertical face of the mountain when the true miracle began. As he warmed up, he began to hop from one rock to another, with an uncanny, spring-steel leap reminiscent of a giant flea.

  Back and forth, with absolute balance, limitless endurance, and explosiveness that would have broken long-jump records with contemptuous ease, Donny Crawford worked into the true heart of his morning routine.

  She’d never seen movement like that before, wasn’t sure that anyone outside the Linked had ever seen it.

  His true workout was not a fellrun at all. It was a devastating gymnastic display a thousand feet above the ground. He bounced from rock to rock in a dizzying succession of handstands and cartwheels. He spun and leapt, twisted and somersaulted like a circus aerialist gone berserk.

  She caught her breath, and lowered the binoculars. And was blind. It was too dark! Was he mad…

  How could he dare to do something like this?

  This, then, this range of physical capacities that bordered on the superhuman, was an aspect of Linking that no one knew. Her head spun.

  She put the binoculars back to her eyes, marveling again.

  Why didn’t they tell people about this?

  It all changed in an instant.

  Donny’s hands seemed to give way. He slipped, scrambled to catch himself, twisted madly for balance. He hit the rock heavily and collapsed.

  For a moment she thought that it was just another move, the horseplay of an insanely overconfident acrobatic clown. Then she focused in on him. Donny was curled into a fetal ball, gripping his head with both hands, inches from a sixty-foot drop. In the still of the morning she could hear him moan.

  Or was it only the wind? But he was thrashing like an infant, in directionless panic. Something had gone terribly wrong. He couldn’t get down off the rock.

  She moved up toward him, choosing her steps carefully. She couldn’t move as quickly as he had, but she still scrambled with panic speed, as if her own life were in danger, or as if she were running for gold.

  He rocked back and forth, crooning to himself, his mindless, agonized writhing bringing him too close to the rim of the ledge.

  When she reached him he was trembling, his body almost off as she pulled him back by his ankle and held him. He was cold and wet, his entire body quivering as with a terrible fever.

  “McFairlaine’s goddamned two points,” he wailed. His eyes were wide and feverish; his voice was a wavering high-pitched song. “Bastards. Bastards. Kill me for McFairlaine’s two points…”

  She slipped her arm around him, and he clung to her like a drowning man.

  The sun was just cresting the horizon, but there was enough light for them to pick their way back down. Her shoulder and back burned with the strain. Twice she almost turned her ankle, and once they slid half a dozen feet before she caught her balance.

  The tendons in his neck bulged and twitched. His face was a patchwork of strained muscle, a flowing horrific mask. He stared at her, still not knowing who she was or where they were. He sounded like an angry child. “Couldn’t be a war if he did something, old bastard. McFairlaine wouldn’t have pushed Energy if he’d come down from fucking Olympus and… just…”

  His voice faded as he finally seemed to grasp his situation. His eyes cleared, his face straightened:

  Donny was back.

  He gripped her shoulders, and swung her around. There were no thanks in his look, only panic. Too much panic to remember niceties. “What did I say?”

  She rested, panting. “I wasn’t really listening. I was too busy—”

  “Listen to me now. Don’t tell anyone what happened. And forget anything that you heard.”

  “Aren’t you sick?”

  “No. Don’t tell anyone.” His grip tightened. His fingers clamped her arm like steel prods.

  “Are you worried what people might think?”

  “It’s not for me,” he said. “It’s for you. If they think you know…” Something terribly urgent gleamed in his eyes. “Just don’t. You shouldn’t have been there. This has nothing to do with you.”

  “You mean, you were expecting it?”

  “Just… forget what you saw. What you heard.” He breathed deeply. “I’ll go back to the dorm alone. Don’t let anyone see you, all right?”

  He seemed to have recovered. He set off down the trail, even making a jaunty imitation of his former confident stride.

  “Hey,” she called after him. “You’re welcome.”

  There was no reply.

  Shomer again. Saturn’s lips curled in a smile. Courage and foolhardiness have much in common. In fact, the difference may be nothing but perspective. Donny Crawford had great intelligence, great athletic gifts, and no courage at all. He’d only Boosted after coldblooded calculation revealed an eighty-seven percent chance of winning triple gold.

  Her emotional attachment to Crawford implied vulnerability, lack of control, and unpredictability. Any of which, in the right situation, could be of use.

  Besides, she amused him.

  The old bastard?

  If she only knew.

  For .24 seconds he considered her, and Crawford, and the idiot McFairlaine and the implications of Energy’s actions. They had been predictable, and within context even reasonable, but McFairlaine needed perspective.

  Could McFairlaine be Feral? Sometimes one of the Linked, drunken with power, might
step across an invisible line. To be Linked meant not only power in the external world, but growing control over your every mental process and sensation. Easy to sink into catatonic indolence or solipsistic power fantasies. To go Feral.

  Saturn had to consider possibilities: an embolism for McFairlaine, or perhaps a lethal power surge. The extreme irony of that approach appealed to Saturn.

  Not yet. Monitor McFairlaine. Give him his chance for a while.

  Chapter 5

  “In Matthew 26:11 Jesus said that the poor will always be among us,” Jillian said. Her words appeared as white strokes upon a blue visual field. They floated in the air like crisply perfect skywriting.

  “And in that sense, he may have been the first theorist in the social applications of fractal geometry.

  “The concepts of cognitive dissonance and the inevitable breakdown of communication therefrom have been understood for centuries. However, the unavoidable disintegration of systems as those systems become more complex and unwieldy has rarely been considered within a sociological lattice.”

  She stopped for a moment, thinking and sipping cocoa. Sunlight filtered through the dorm window at an oblique angle. Despite the intensity of her concentration, the external world intruded. The air reverberated with the grunts and heavy footfalls of Olympians training outside.

  Jillian had taken the day off from her grueling athletic schedule, protesting a sore hip.

  It wasn’t her hip that was sore, it was her head. The headache had been a continuous thing, sometimes hovering in the background, sometimes thundering into her mind like a crazed animal, destroying calm and thought and sleep. And every pulse was Donny Crawford. Donny falling, Donny sick and weak on the ledge. Beautiful, perfect, confident Donny whimpering into the morning darkness.

  Jillian was afraid. But worse than that, she was confused.

  “Even surrounded by the greatest wealth and comfort, a human being will experience a measure of irritation. Confined in the most squalid and demeaning circumstances, he will find some small thing to take pleasure in.

  “This trait, and others, make it impossible to eradicate the final bit of chaos from our minds, as well as our social systems. The powers which govern… one might even say oppress…”

  Oppress?

  Did the Council want a certain amount of suffering? More than the absolute irreducible minimum?

  “Couldn’t be a war if he did something, old bastard.”

  Leave it for the moment.

  “A stable society functions much like an organism, with communications between the organ systems, the organs, the tissue structures, the cells, and the organelles. As instructions flow from one level to another, and the inevitable distortions in communication accumulate, what happens?

  “At the top, a plan may be shaped to provide the greatest good for the greatest number. But no plan conceived at one end of the spectrum can take into account all of the individuals at the other end. It simply is not possible-there is too much breakdown in communication along the way. Conversely, any system which is modular enough to deal intimately with those at the bottom is too unwieldy to be governed from the top.”

  She stopped, rubbing her temples fiercely.

  “Fortunately for those who govern, the appearance of fair play is more important than the reality. At least that’s what Machiavelli thought.”

  She looked at the words she had dictated, and knew what the headache had been about, and knew what she was about to ask Beverly to do.

  God help her.

  Carefully, with somber formality, she drew a mesh headset of wires, microphones, and black oval pads from a sandalwood box on her desk.

  She prepared the apparatus: plastic electrode pads which clung snugly to her temples. Earphones. A combination throat mike and sensor. Dark eyecups like lightweight goggles.

  “Void, Beverly.”

  Anyone Linking into the Void must create her own kinesthetic analogy. For one it might be the Library of Congress, crammed to the skylight with talking books. For another, being seated in a vast lecture hall surrounded by experts who had the precise answers to all questions. Jillian’s programming teacher had taken her own image from literature: Gormenghast, an immense, sprawling castle-city of a million infinitely varied rooms.

  The adult mind was too rigid, its worldview too set, to build such an analogy. It must be created in childhood; but after that, it grew.

  Jillian closed her eyes and breathed deeply ten times, with each breath sinking into a world of total relaxation, a specialized trance leading to the Void state.

  The earphones hummed gently. Breathing. Heartbeat sounds, slowing. The purr of breakers against a shore. Synthesized into and among those sounds was a chorus of voices too distant to be consciously perceived. Lights flashed in her goggles, so dimly and quickly that she could never focus upon them. At her temples, tickles of pressure and electricity buzzed and caressed her skin, eased her into a state combining deep relaxation and total awareness.

  Gradually the speckles of light congealed into searchlights playing through a fog. Then smoky swirls of color, and she was in her Void, in a mental ocean of layered oils, a phantasmagoria of sensation created by the union of an exquisitely conditioned mind and a dozen seamlessly orchestrated channels of sensory input.

  The water cleared. Only a few varicolored fish, dazzlingly bright, betrayed the chaos beneath the tranquil structure of her illusion.

  She sank through the depths until she felt sand and shells beneath her feet. A dolphin playfully nosed against her, and then scooted away into the murk.

  She walked along the ocean floor toward a ring of shattered coral reefs. This was her place. In the reef was set an ancient and barnacle-encrusted door, the entrance Beverly had created for her fifteen years ago.

  The door yielded to her touch. In the middle of the ring stood a chair, and a wooden grade-school desk. Carved names and slogans had been added over the years; otherwise the desk hadn’t changed since Jillian’s seventh birthday.

  Seated in it, awaiting her, was Beverly.

  Beverly wore a frilly white sundress, barely ruffled by the tide. Her high cheekbones were those of Lilith Shomer, Jillian’s mother. Her heavy brows and strong mouth were mapped from Gregory Shomer, Jillian’s father. Her hair was blond with a gleam of fine copper threads. Her eyes were a deep and tranquil brown.

  Beverly smiled. “Jillian, darling. What do we need today?” Her voice was honeyed with a Carolina lilt.

  Jillian’s accessing of Beverly took the external form of a conversation, a conversation that existed out of ordinary time. Her talks with Beverly seemed to last for hours or days, but upon emerging from trance she invariably learned that only minutes had passed, minutes during which a vastness of information had entered her long-term memory.

  Jillian sat down opposite. Emblazoned on the desk was a fifteen-year-old carving. It read: JILLIAN LOVES. Jillian kept changing the name following “loves.” She’d finally left it open.

  She was home. She relaxed to a degree inaccessible in her waking state.

  Where to start? “I need to know about Donny Crawford.”

  Beverly smiled tolerantly. “The same Donny Crawford you’ve been mooning over for four years?”

  “The same. We finally met. He went through some kind of fit this morning during his exercise up on the mountain. He said strange things, babbled about ‘war.’ He cautioned me not to tell anyone. My first guess is that his Link with the satellite broke.”

  Beverly’s eyes dropped to her desk. A moment later she said, “Satellites EE23 and EEO8 both went off line at five fifty-two local. Energy is blaming both events on random meteoric debris. EE23 will have to be replaced.”

  “Is Donny that dependent on satellite Links?” It was something she’d suspected; it was one argument against Boost. Donny had won. Even if Jillian won gold, she’d be a hybrid, a cyborg, magnificent but fragile.

  Beverly’s mouth opened to speak, then closed. Jillian felt something like a vast
, compulsive yawn rack her body, and Jillian stood before an ancient and barnacle-encrusted reef. In front of her was the door, the entrance Beverly had created for her fifteen years before. What?

  A power outage? An industrial accident?

  Something serious, if Beverly had been forced to reboot. Jillian blinked twice, calmed herself, and stepped through the doorway.

  Beverly smiled at her, “Hello, sugar. What can I do for you?” Her voice sounded hollow, as if she were speaking from the bottom of a well.

  Jillian felt something that she had never before experienced when in the Void. Sleepy. Headachy. She straightened herself with an effort.

  Beverly leaned forward, concern sparkling in her bottomless dark eyes. “I think you could use a little nap, darling.”

  “I want information. Why would Donny Crawford need to conceal a satellite interrupt?”

  Beverly’s mouth opened, and her lips moved soundlessly. The water shifted and blurred. Beverly’s face became indistinct, and started to fade— And Jillian woke up.

  Chapter 6

  She was sweating. What in the hell was going on? Jillian tore the tabs away from her eyes and temples, and stared at them. That had never happened before.

  A superstitious person might set such things down to bad luck, and quit.

  Jillian couldn’t quit. She reattached the headset and closed her eyes.

  Jillian walked along the ocean floor toward a ring of shattered coral reefs. There was motion around her: blurs of pastel color instead of fish. In the middle of the ring of blurred wreckage stood a chair and a desk. The door still stood, unsupported… featureless, a cartoon. Beverly sat at a cartoon desk.

  This… place, this environment: it was a collaboration worked out over the fifteen years in which she and Beverly had been programming each other. It was a visual/auditory/kinesthetic feedback loop, Jillian and Beverly taking cues from each other so quickly that the illusion of continuity and depth were almost flawless. But it lived in Beverly’s mind; it was Beverly’s landscape. Had Beverly altered it? Or had her memory been damaged?