Achilles choice

by Larry Niven

  Could she risk it? Did she even have a chance to win, now that the Council disapproved of her line of questioning? If she Boosted, could the Council simply deny her the victory, guaranteeing her a slow death?

  Jillian was shivering as if she were ill. They. The Council? She’d known of the Council since grade school; what she knew might not be fully true, but it was a starting point. Was it the Council who had snatched Beverly away? or some single Council member? or a faceless “Old Bastard”?

  What was he, what were They, hiding about her mother?

  “I’m going to win,” she whispered. She would find out, beyond a doubt, if she could win in Athens without Boost. If she couldn’t, if she had to become a part of the Lie in order to expose it, in order to find the truth…

  In order to find Beverly again…

  Then so be it.

  Chapter 7

  “It’s actually a tougher grade than what you’ll face in Athens,” Abner said.

  Looking up at the mountainside, at a jumbled rise of boulders and concrete steps, of handholds and narrow jogging tracks carved at a thirty percent incline, Jillian found his words easy to believe. “At least my attention isn’t split.”

  She inhaled as Abner sealed a side edge of her feedback suit. Two layers of green and white nylon net sandwiched a thin layer of sensors. These would measure blood pressure, skin temperature, heartbeat, galvanic skin response, and other standard physiological indicators. In addition, Abner had arranged a full kinesthetic readout. By the time the day’s workout was over, they would know everything there was to know about her technique and physical fitness.

  The fellrun track was built into the foothills of the Colorado Rockies. Most of the obstacles were natural, but the terrain had been modified. As her vital signs were relayed to Abner’s computer, he would select routes of greater or lesser difficulty, depending on what he needed to discover. Beacons planted in the rocks would guide her.

  Abner flexed Jillian’s ankles, then her knees, then tested her hip flexors. Spine. Rotator cuffs. Wrists and fingers.

  The sun was a few minutes past its zenith, and the wind whistling through the Rockies was stimulating, would begin to cool in an hour or so. Jillian’s feedback suit would maintain thermal equilibrium, so her shivering was caused less by wind chill than adrenaline.

  Abner checked her every movement like a Grand Prix mechanic tuning the engine of a racing Ferrari.

  “Fluid?”

  She twisted her mouth a half an inch, found the nipple taped to the corner of her mouth. A slight pull got the flow going, pulling electrolyte fluid from the tube hugging her jawhine. Her slender backpack held power for the sensors and a minipump for three pints of solution.

  “Fine, Abner.”

  “This will be a two-hour trial,” he said.

  Abner’s single-seat sled hummed above its magnetic rail. The sled was built like a low-slung wheelchair with a blue fiberglass cowling to protect him from weather. His feet stretched out into the nose.

  He tested its balance almost unconsciously: lean too far to either side, and it slowed to a crawl. Ride it like a bicycle and the hovercraft could zip along the buried rail at forty miles an hour at the level, and ten miles an hour at a forty percent grade. Its rail wove up into the foothills, splitting and splitting again, weaving in a serpentine progression that allowed him to stay within sight of Jillian no matter what path she took.

  “Are you reading me?” He adjusted the sound on his transmitter. Jillian touched her ear, and then her throat mike. “Fine.”

  “All right, mark.”

  Jillian exhaled, and started up the incline. One part of her concentration was on the immediate physical work at hand, the other was listening for Abner’s voice.

  “Jillian-slow down. Feel your way into the terrain. Don’t just use your eyes. Feel it. What kind of dirt is under your feet? Will it sustain a sprint? What kind of tread will maximize traction? Brush the rocks when you pass them, get a feel for texture.”

  She had found a steady pace. Thirty yards ahead, the path split. She could try a cliff face, and shave minutes off (risking early exhaustion and possible injury), or she could go around through uncertain terrain.

  “Which is it going to be?” Abner said clearly. She searched the rocks, but his single-seater was nowhere in sight.

  “Don’t know… not sure.”

  “Trust your instinct.”

  “I say feel the territory out. Take the long way.”

  “Good girl. Time enough for heroics later.” The sled came gliding around a corner, coasting up a vertical rock face for a moment, and then dipped back down along the rail. Looked like fun.

  “Concentrate, dear.”

  “Changed my mind,” she said suddenly. “I recognize this formation from the aerials. All right, I’m going over.”

  Jillian hit the incline, dug her toes into the fractured gray rock, and began to climb. She felt as loose and light as a monkey.

  “Too much tension in the left shoulder, Jill. Slow down. Work for it.”

  She looked around, glaring, saw Abner hovering just behind her, sled buzzing at the rail. As she braced herself and began to climb, he shadowed her, never more than ten meters away, scanning his readouts, fixedly studying her form.

  The grade escalated to a sheet of granite at an eighty percent grade which rose almost a hundred feet. She skirted around the bottom until it met another wall, braced herself, and began to climb. Her fingers sought crevices and cracks. When the opportunity came she wormed her way into a narrow defile, getting her back and stomach into the effort. She winced as stone spurs pushed at her spine through the nylon suit. It was press, push, and release, rest for a moment, press, push…

  There are moments in climbing when you must risk, when you must accept eight or twelve or twenty feet of continuous, bone-cracking stress to make it to the next resting place. She found a kind of rhythm in her pain, pushed up and up without concern for anything but the need for continual movement, taking herself to the absolute limit and then pushing beyond it.

  Abner hovered over her shoulder, sliding up next to her, silent but vigilant.

  She paused between slabs of rock, using breath and muscle expansion to wedge herself tight. She sipped from the cheek nipple, and let her gaze wander down. Below her and off to the distance was a maze of domes and dorms, the Rocky Mountain Sports Research Center. Purplish mountain shadows were creeping toward the red-gold buildings.

  Thirty feet above her was flat ground. She could make every movement in these last feet long and slow, stretching her tired muscles. Then when she hit the tip, she would be ready to sprint.

  This was a piece of cake. She could take gold. She could! And without modification.

  Water swirled around Jillian’s legs. It was turbulent and a little foamy, warmed to a few degrees below her own skin temperature. It felt heavenly, or would have if she hadn’t been about to suffer.

  She sat on a shallow metal seat in the tank, completely enmeshed in a thin exoskeleton, a mesh of wire and plastic braces which extended from her feet to the crown of her head. It was inactive now, completely unresistant as she slipped her face mask into place.

  Abner helped her, adjusting her air line.

  “Air flow?” Air from the recycler on her back was reassuringly cool.

  “Now relax,” he said softly, and she slipped into the water.

  She hung there in a cocoon of warmth, watching Abner at the side of the Plexiglas tank. The exoskeleton was completely self-contained, all of its servos linked in waterproof pods at elbows, knees, hips, and shoulders. She was neutrally buoyant, floating in the center of a three-thousand-gallon tank.

  “We’ll begin the program now. I’ve integrated Beverly’s data into my own banks, so I know your strength curve on every muscle group. Your muscles should reach proper relaxation in another three minutes. Just breathe deeply.”

  Jillian did as she was told, closed her eyes and thought of blackness. She searched for hidde
n nuggets of tension, failed to find them.

  “Right side,” Abner said. “Spinal flexor, base. Relax, Jillian.”

  Abner touched a button, and she felt the muscle relax as he electronically manipulated the nerve endings. A touch of bliss. Total surrender, she could have remained in that space forever. Then suddenly it ended, and she cursed to herself.

  At least, she thought it had been to herself. “Not nice,” Abner said merrily. “Find the spot yourself. If you can’t learn to do it yourself, we’re wasting our time.”

  She sank more deeply into her body, searching for tension. There the little bastard was, a tiny knot at the base of her spine. She consciously sent out waves of warmth and relaxation, and it calmed.

  “All right. We’re going to begin now. Please resist all movement to the limits of your capacity.”

  The exoskeleton began to twist Jillian’s right leg, began to twist, and she fought it with her quadriceps and abductors, fought the torquing of her upper torso with her obliques, the bending of her arm with her triceps.

  In a thousand different combinations, guided by Abner’s wizardly hand, Jillian moved this way and that. He pumped air into foot bladders to spin her upside down and turn her sideways. He kept the flow of oxygen to her lungs steadiest of all, eyes alert for any sign of cardiac distress as he stimulated a muscle here, deinhibited a Golgi tendon organ there.

  And when she was fatigued, he began to stretch her.

  She was delighted that she had spent the last year studying hatha yoga so intensely. In the warm water, limbered by effort and exhaustion, Abner tested her body to the absolute maximum. He monitored her readings to determine optimum pain thresholds then again and again coaxed another inch of effort from her, another second of exertion. Another, greater degree of excellence.

  And then he started over again…

  “I want you to look at this,” Abner said a week later.

  In the rust-colored sphere of the Sports Medicine building, sound and activity were at a roar. The vibrations of hundreds of feet and hands in strenuous exertion reverberated dully through the floors, and her muscles twitched in sympathetic effort.

  Abner’s cubicle was just large enough for two people. It was lined with books and cube nooks and a vidchart that took up half the wall.

  “This is the last sprint for the finish line.” Abner tented his fingers and sank back in his chair. “The corridor was lined with sensors, and I’ve run simulations based on seventeen common race-day scenarios. Performance stress, weather variances, changes in terrain, everything I could think of.”

  “And?” She watched herself on the vidchart as it flickered to life, eating a hole in the wall. Her legs were a blur as she made her final drive to the finish line along a measured, red-carpeted track. She broke the beam, and it immediately replayed from above. Then again, her body a skeleton abstracted into a structural diagram. Then again, lungs and heart and big muscles in the thighs highlighted, accompanied by glowing bar and line charts, and a shifting column of figures.

  “I’ve examined your proposal, Jillian. I want to give you the up side first: no doubt about it, you learn faster than anyone I’ve ever coached.”

  She hugged his arm, feeling pleasantly woozy. Today had been rough-endless drills on the judo mat, with a heavy emphasis on explosive movement.

  She felt stronger, fitter, more flexible than ever before in her life. Abner had been an ideal choice for coach.

  “I was hoping,” she began. “You know, I was never convinced that Boost was necessary, if you could bring all of—”

  He made a soft, ugly sound, and she shut up, dismayed by his expression.

  “No, Jillian. I’ve got spies, hon. I’ve been able to analyze data from Communications, Zimbabwe, and Agricorp. You’d never make it.”

  Her hand withdrew from his. Her skin felt damp and cold.

  “Not a chance?”

  “No,” he whispered. “And with the twenty percent advantage of Boosting, you still only have a fifty percent chance of silver. You waited too long, Jillian. You should have Boosted four weeks ago, if that was what you were going to do.”

  Lights in the room seemed to darken, and the sound of her own breathing grew louder. Her vidscreen image swelled, and Jillian watched herself running and running, and running: now just a nervous system, now a shadow-map of muscular tensions, now a computer animation of another, idealized Jillian running on an endless track toward an impossibly far horizon.

  And almost paralyzed with horror, she heard herself say: “That settles it then.”

  “I know,” he said, as kindly as an executioner could. “I’ve always known.”

  “How did you know?” Her voice was as lost and lonely as a child’s.

  “Because you don’t give up,” he said.

  Chapter 8

  Muscles must be stimulated to contract. In the case of skeletal muscle, the muscle making up the formative body, stimulation is in the form of a chemical neurotransmitter released by nerve endings.

  Diseases like myasthenia gravis which involve profound muscle weakness are often related to disturbances in neurotransmitter release, uptake, or clearance. As a result, only feeble muscle contractions can take place.

  Governing the entire nervous system is a complex system of cells in the brain stem known as the reticular formation. Early anatomists postulated a diffuse net of neurons and fibres, a sort of neural excelsior, providing unspecified functions for the surrounding cranial nerve nuclei.

  Later research demonstrated conclusively the importance of this area in the control of critical body functions such as respiration and circulation. It controls the entire spectrum of awareness, everything from total alert down to deep coma.

  In fact, the brain stem reticular core is the only intracranial neural structure without which life is impossible.

  It is here that the Boosters perform their delicate magic, creating, in a sense, a “disease” which forces the body to function at greater than ordinary levels, at enormous cost to nervous system, skeletal muscles, and finally, sanity itself.

  Bursts of color flooded Jillian’s mind as the neurosurgeons carefully probed. The computers modeled her brain. Human surgeons operated on the model, the moves recorded in time-delay. Was the stroke perfect? Did it violate any part of that fifty ounces of jellied miracle? Every kiss of steel or thread of light could be edited to a millimeter or a microsecond, practiced in the machine, and only when the surgical team agreed, played back through the robotic arms.

  Perfection.

  They probed a nerve here, retreated, asked a gentle question there.

  What color, Jillian? What sound? What smell? Which finger? What taste?

  Rehooking nerves, investigating cautiously, carefully. -

  At times she was allowed to slide into total unconsciousness. At other times she was completely awake, staring at a glaringly white tiled ceiling in a stainlesssteel room. Flatscreens and vidscreens pulsed with slow fire, unraveling her brain and nervous system, converting her most intimate, secret self into colorcoded displays. Coiled machinery hissed and beeped around her. And everywhere, cameras watched.

  She never felt pain. Occasionally she sensed a feather of liquid pressure along her spine. Then she slid down a tunnel lined with the finest, smoothest, darkest black silk.

  And was gone.

  Voices. Light. Several times, Jillian swam up out of the cavern hole toward the light. It was warming, but the darkness seduced her back to unconsciousness, and she submitted to its embrace without resistance.

  Safe in the darkness, Jillian completed the process of healing, and began the process of growth.

  On Jillian’s second full day of wakefulness, Abner appeared at her door. A wheelchair followed him like a good dog.

  His face was thinner, his eyes more sunken, his cheekbones more cruelly pronounced.

  He should have seemed fatigued. Instead, there was almost a missionary gleam in his eyes, as if the fire consuming his flesh also transforme
d him. As if he stood on the threshold of a terrible new world. “You’ve done it.” His eyes burned through her.

  She met his gaze for a few seconds, then had to turn away. She lay on her side, peering out through the window.

  The sunlight looked the same. The grass outside had become speckled with tiny pink flowers, but was otherwise unchanged. The voices of those who strove in training rang with the same emotions and intensities.

  If there was a difference, it lay within her. Unmistakably, irrevocably, Jillian Shomer was the new center of an alien universe.

  She considered the operation itself, with its dreadful intimacy, its tender rape of the clot of pinkish jelly wherein all that was Jillian Shomer resided. That would be enough to cause such an oddness, such a feeling of separation from her own essence.

  “You’ll be back on your feet in three days.” Abner touched her shoulder. “Training again in a week.”

  “How long will it take?”

  “It?”

  “How long before it begins?”

  Gripping her shoulders, his hands were cool and thin and enormous. “You’ll begin to feel it within a week. Ten days at the most. We’ve got seven weeks of training left. Most drastic reactions will start happening after the fifth week. Coordination will start increasing after the third week. New dendrites are forming now.”

  Jillian felt as if his words were a cool wind lifting her, carrying her. She was floating above the bed sheets. She was suspended in a pool of lukewarm oil. The world was far away, and with each passing moment she ballooned further into an empty sky. “Did I do the right thing?”

  His eyes were still bright, but cool. The fierceness had fled. Perhaps it had never been there at all. “Only you can answer that question. If you win, you won everything… not just life, but power. You’ll be one of the few who actually run the world. If you lose, at least you did the best you could. Nobody can ask for more than that.”

  As he spoke the last words, a mild tremor shook his body. His eyelids fluttered. She caught a sudden whiff of sour perspiration, as if he’d had three hours of sleep and thirty cups of coffee.