Achilles choice

by Larry Niven

  “Abner? Are you all right?”

  He reached out and laced fingers with her. His skin was cool. With the room lights above and behind him, he seemed somehow translucent.

  “I’ve got time,” he said with conviction. “I’ll see you in Athens, Jill. I’ll see you take the gold. You’ve got more natural talent, you’re smarter and you train harder than any of them.”

  She watched his face, searching for deceit or manipulation, and found only that curious intensity. How much could she tell Abner? Here, they might be overheard; but later?

  He stretched his lips into a smile. “Do you feel up to a little sunshine?” As if he’d guessed her thoughts.

  “I’d like that.”

  Abner still had enough strength to help her into the wheelchair. He belted her in, and said “main track” to its guidance system. It purred out of the door, down along a panel-lit corridor and out to a ramped landing.

  From there, it was a few smooth feet to the sunshine. He followed her along the concrete and then onto the grass, heading out toward the gravel-covered oval of the track.

  In all it was less than a quarter mile, but Abner was already red-faced and slightly winded. They stayed there for a few minutes, watching the dozens of athletes in training. Jeff Tompkins was throwing the hammer, the corded wedge of his body contracting and expanding explosively, whirling, releasing the haft with perfect timing. His body glistened in its exertions.

  She remembered the model of Versailles.

  “So,” said Abner. “Second thoughts?”

  “Oh, yes.”

  The sun warmed Jillian’s face deliciously, the slow whisper of the wind its own strange poetry.

  She said, “All my life I’ve watched the Olympics. All my life I’ve wanted to be one of those. But, Abner, we’re taught not to die. Don’t Do Drugs. Walk lights. Seat belts and air bags. The Boost, it’s…”

  “Risky.”

  “Risky, yeah. But I’ve spent… six years training with people who take it for granted! For a gold in the Olympics, sure they’d Boost. You Boosted. But does it really make sense?”

  “Matter of priorities. You don’t need an excuse to want to be the best… Jillian, the truth is that I never knew I could lose. I knew it, but I didn’t know it.” He touched his forehead, and then his chest. “Maybe I’m lying to myself. Maybe achievers are people who select death over life.”

  “That’s crazy. They’re more alive than anyone else.”

  His mouth tightened, and his eyes were alight again. “This may sound odd, Jillian. I know that I only have a few months to live, but I’ve never felt more alive. Maybe we’re all dying, all the time, but the winners know it, and use it, and aren’t afraid of facing it.”

  “I’m… afraid.”

  “I didn’t say you shouldn’t be. I said you shouldn’t be afraid to face the fact of death. There’s a difference.”

  “I’m not sure why I did it…” The wave of uncertainty hit her with a roar, overwhelming. She had had reasons and excuses, and all of them crumbled into nothing before the stark enormity of what she had done.

  She was weak beyond words, helpless for the first time since the Marianas flu six years ago.

  She wanted to tell Abner. The Council has blocked my research, they’ve kidnaped my favorite computer program, I’m only doing this because— Some instinct held her back. Some ancient paranoia buried deep in her brain stem, ineradicable— Why had she Boosted? Was it to probe some dirty mystery behind her mother’s death, or the greater mystery of chaos in the human condition? Or to be the best fellrunner in all history? Or only to beat Osa?

  Abner said, “There are more questions than answers, Jillian. Why do the doctors perform the operation? What happened to the Hippocratic oath? Why does the Council want the best and the brightest doing this to themselves?”

  “I don’t know,” she said, never taking her eyes off the bodies as they leapt and twisted, spinning around the track. Brown and white bodies, muscles knotting and coiling tirelessly.

  Abner talked on. “People at the top want to stay at the top. Whatever purpose they have in letting some of us move a little bit closer has nothing to do with anything that we want. I know.” That curious intensity was even more severe now. “The Olympic thesis, the performances, do you know how new that is? It used to be strictly athletics. Now they’re generating knowledge.”

  “Boost doesn’t help anyone there. We think faster, but maybe we’d learn more by taking longer—”

  “Nobel Prize winners tend to pick up ideas from the Olympic theses.”

  “If I could inspire… I’d rather take a piece out of violent crimes than run any kind of race. I’ve always known that.” And just as definitely, with the visceral certainty of someone treading on a snake, she knew she’d made a horrible mistake.

  Oh God. I’m going to die.

  She breathed to the pit of her stomach, regaining control. She still had her goals to consider, and she clung to those with both hands and her teeth. “Abner. You said… there was a gold winner who had an approach to crime control.”

  “Nothing about fractals, love. Isn’t that what you’re—”

  “He beat you. Literacy. Raise the literacy rate and the crime rate drops enough to pay for it.”

  “Yeah, I remember. What was his name, now?”

  Her head was full of fog. “Wrestler, you said. One of the nations… ah, Soviet? Puss…”

  Abner was nodding. Head lowered, eyes hidden in shadow. “Pushkin. Big as a redwood, you wouldn’t have thought there was a brain in there, and he lost to a Brazilian the same year I did. Nicolai Pushkin! His paper is classified, but…” A long pause. “I think I can find a copy. I got one before they slapped a seal on it.”

  She felt dubious. If the paper had been any good, the Council would have used it… but she would have been grateful for anything he tried to do for her. She took his hand, squeezed it with what little strength she had, and said, “Thank you, Abner.”

  Chapter 9

  I/O error 1154.

  The wafer containing Beverly’s personality slid back out of the processor. It had just arrived this morning from Massachusetts. Jillian’s hand shook.

  They still wouldn’t let her load Beverly into the main processor.

  Be a good little girl. Play along, and maybe, just maybe, you’ll see Beverly again.

  Jillian slid her finger down the precious golden Simulacrum module. Without the slightest trace of selfconsciousness, she raised the wafer and touched her lips to its cool surface.

  “Sleep well, Bev,” she whispered.

  She’d be good.

  A good little robot she was, and They knew where the buttons were. It would be most savagely satisfying to shake their predictions… but in fact their predictions were working out fine. Jillian Shomer had given up prying into secret corners, had accepted the Boost treatment, had abandoned the topic of her mother’s death. And hadn’t given up on Beverly; she kept trying to activate the program, knowing it wouldn’t work and trying, trying… telling herself she was only misdirecting Them.

  Were they wrong?

  High time, it was, for any act that would let Jillian show herself that she wasn’t a good little robot. But all she could think of was to work on her thesis and wait to heal.

  Abner watched her from a shadowed corner of the gymnasium. Jillian was already stretching and balancing her body, moving from yoga Plow into Cobra and then out into the full split of the Tortoise pose with a gymnast’s grace. He waited until she’d levered her legs out to a hundred and eighty degrees, rolled stomach then chest and chin down to the mat, before he extended a sheaf of papers with a hand-lettered cover.

  “Pushkin’s paper,” he said. “I had some trouble finding it.”

  She opened her eyes, peeped up at him. “Gimme.” She sighed into her long thigh muscles, ordering them to stop quivering, and hiked herself up to her elbows. She started reading.

  The approach wasn’t like her own, but Pushkin�
�s ideas were fresh, and vital, and impressively presented. He had deserved that gold.

  And there was something familiar about the paper, something about the way Pushkin phrased his thoughts. “Was this delivered in Russian?”

  “Sure. Straighten your back.”

  “Sorry. Who translated? The phrasing seems familiar.”

  He took it back, thumbed it a bit. “… Doesn’t say. I don’t know.”

  As she browsed it, she was jolted again and again by the careful, logical juxtaposing of ideas. But there was nothing she could use, in fact at this late date it was almost distracting. She handed it up to him.

  “Fascinating. Save this for me, for after the competition, would you? Pushkin seems to have been a first-class mind.”

  Abner was watching one of the judo team tussle with the Grappler. “They must have found flaws. He wasn’t well rounded. Overall, he barely took a bronze.”

  “Flaws? Then why classify it? Why not let everybody look at it, and judge for themselves? The idea is to reduce the level of violent crimes.”

  Abner looked weary. “Is it?”

  She didn’t answer. Abner left her to her rigors.

  The Council’s motives were not her own. Council, or Inner Circle, or Old Bastard: if crime control was secondary to Them, then what did they consider important?

  She shouldn’t have read Pushkin’s paper. It had been classified. Abner had put himself at risk to give it to her, and she was in trouble enough already.

  She couldn’t discuss it with Abner. Abner was ill. Soon enough he would be raving in pain or babbling helplessly as his brain was electrostimulated into morpheme overload. What Jillian discussed with Abner would not remain private. If he spoke of the paper, it would be too late for anyone to punish him, and she could deny knowledge of its restricted status. They couldn’t squash people for every little infraction.

  They? Or Donny’s Olympic “Old Bastard”?

  Jillian found she was building a mental image of him. Mirroring her emotional state, the first image was an octopus with a human face. She laughed at herself, but the laughter was darkly fringed.

  Octopus? Big, oversized head, brain, intellect. Tentacles branched and branched again, in the fashion of fractals. An infinity of tentacles, a tentacle in every aspect of human culture. Augmented intelligence too high for meaningful measurement. Insanely ambitious. A strength of ego that only longevity and invulnerability-immortality-could create or support. Awesomely intuitive, pathologically ruthless, and possessed of a genius for organization.

  Seventy years ago, he’d already been powerful enough to see his path to the top of the Council. He may have created the Council.

  A programmer? An engineer? Likely to have those talents, among others. He must have mastered cybernetic technology early. The technology that made it possible for the Council to govern the world. The Old Bastard might have built the Council, and the technology, too!

  When she thought of all that such a person would have to have done, and all that he had to be, it was difficult not to admire him. And for that admiration to shift from the general to the specific, from an intellectual position to a disturbingly emotional one, to a physical warmth— Shut it down, Jillian. At the core of all of that organization and intellect there lurks the very essence of chaos.

  Beverly would have said, All right, Miss Hot Pants. Could we by God get back to business?

  But Beverly was being held for ransom. Jillian could still work, but being forced to use generic programming was like being blinded or deafened.

  There had to be a better way. There had to.

  “Holly?”

  “Jillian. How you doing?” Holly looked up. She had been staring at her screen, her hands folded in her lap.

  “Not ready to fight Osa yet. I thought I could work on my thesis while I heal, but… hell. I need a new direction. How are you doing? Can we take the death out of Boost?”

  “I don’t have a short answer—”

  “I was wondering if… Holly, you know I’m working with chaos theory?”

  “Sure.”

  “Some problems are unsolvable because they’re very sensitive to initial conditions. What if I were to do a fractal analysis of Boost, using your data?”

  Holly’s eyes were not hostile, but wary. “And what if I’ve been trying to trisect the angle?”

  “If you could prove it was impossible, you’d get gold.” Holly stared. “No fertilizer, Holly, it can be very important to prove something’s impossible.”

  “No fertilizer?”

  Jillian flushed and shrugged.

  Holly grinned happily at Jillian’s embarrassment. “Repeat after me. Shhh—come on, the whole world won’t stare in horror if you use the S word.”

  Jillian wagged her head, but giggled. “I just can’t.”

  “Girl, I don’t know what we’re going to do with you. All right. What do you need?”

  “Well, when they learned that about weather control, it started a whole new science. You can’t predict weather more than three, four days ahead. Could that be true of a Boosted athlete’s body chemistry?”

  “What is it you want?”

  “Let’s play a little. If we find something, you’ll still have to finish the work yourself. You’d have to invest a few months learning fractal geometry. If we find nothing but blind alleys, you invest nothing. See? And maybe I can come at something from a different angle.”

  For the next couple of days they worked at Holly’s computer, with Holly on the keyboard.

  That was justifiable. It was Holly’s equipment, and she was familiar with it. Jillian had not told Holly how bad it could be if They caught Jillian using Holly’s systems.

  So Jillian watched Holly at work, and speculated aloud, and asked questions.

  “How expensive would it be to just Link everybody? Every Boosted Olympic contender. That’s the price we’re trying to undercut.”

  Holly laughed. She had a number already in file… a ballpark guess. A good deal of what made the Linked what they were, was proprietary. But it was an outrageous sum.

  “Sonofagun—”

  “Gun? Come on, will you. Try again. Rhymes with witch—”

  “Holly!”

  “Oh, all right.”

  “Now, let’s see. We shouldn’t have trouble beating that. How about prosthetics?”

  “Haven’t you noticed Abner’s prosthetics? The trouble is, when your nerves go, they don’t reach the prosthetics.”

  “Mmm. Waldos? Teleoperated limbs. Transmitter in the brain. Send signals directly to the limbs.”

  “Losing your limbs isn’t the biggest problem, Jillian. Deterioration goes on. I’m trying to… Well, one thing at a time. Waldos?”

  “Yeah. What’s the state-of-the-art with waldos? Why don’t they see more use? I used to wonder why the old Rockwell Shuttle didn’t have a waldo hand in the cargo bay. Do they cost too much? How dependable are they?”

  They probed.

  Your basic waldo was a hand-shaped machine that moved the way your hand moved. It could be any size; it could be inhumanly strong or inhumanly delicate. Waldos were generally used in the most alien environments: the Moon, asteroids, underseas, the ground receptors for orbiting solar collectors (patches of desert running at 360 degrees Fahrenheit), the interiors of fusion plants.

  The tractor-mounted waldos used undersea seemed the best model. Those would not be subject to lightspeed delays or deterioration due to radiation. They weren’t cheap, as it turned out. Still… arms and legs moved by transmitters in the brain should cost factor-of-fifty less than continually monitoring a Donny Crawford from orbit.

  “But waldos aren’t that dependable, either,” Holly pointed out.

  “Let’s get some figures on that.”

  “What kind?”

  “Holly, if my waldo sometimes spills the coffee, that’s okay. I might accept low reliability there, even if a bigger waldo would be spilling molten metal all over a foundry.”

  �
��Well, darn. See what you mean.” Holly went after industrial accident reports, current.

  “How fast is this technology improving?”

  Holly summoned older records. Industrial accidents seemed to come in spurts. Holly said, “Graphs of chaotic events tend to have spikes in them, don’t they?”

  “Yeah. Say you’re inoculating against AIDS or cancer. All of a sudden people are getting sick again, and you can’t figure why. It’s just the way of things. Let’s print these out, shall we?” The graphs didn’t look quite right.

  Chaos tends to come in double parallel curves; look closer and they double again, and again. These didn’t. You could find the usual doubling pairs, but Jillian could see other lines.

  During the past twenty years there had been waves of accidents, six tall spikes, with not much between. Lilith Shomer had died right at the peak of one of those spikes.

  Jillian didn’t have to watch the old tapes again. She’d memorized them long ago.

  Lilith Shomer, marine biologist for Agricorp, had died in an undersea mining accident due to the failure of a waldo. A pillow lava hill had crumbled, the signal to a waldo had been interrupted, the waldo arm hadn’t shut off. Huge steel fingers had ripped a dome open and spilled its air.

  It was an accident. Sure it was. But a great many accidents had happened in the shellfish ranches offshore from the California coast, in April of 2049.

  Beyond that Jillian would be guessing. From the way things were reported, you’d think intercorporate conflict was dissolved with a wave of the Counselor wand. But enough government and civilian craft, services, and products had been involved to leave traces.

  Holly asked, “You getting anything?”

  “I’ve gotten us way off the subject, is what. We need Link technology to make waldo limbs work. And that’s classified.”

  She was pretty good, Saturn thought. Holly Lakein’s thesis, Holly’s equipment, Holly’s tappity-tap style… her “fist,” an old-time telegraph operator would have said. But certain topics had been flagged by Mining and Forestry (which was what Saturn noticed first) and Holly and Jillian Shomer were Olympic contenders living in the same dorm.