Achilles choice

by Larry Niven

  Two minutes ago, Saturn had been involved in calculations involving a malfunctioning solar station. But a citizen had made inquiries that touched on a certain topic, and correlations had been made, and a moment later Jillian Shomer came to Saturn’s attention for the third time.

  Jillian was an interesting woman. They’d blocked her good, and she hadn’t stayed blocked. Of course she’d underestimated her opponents. Mining and Forestry would notice any second now: fish farming, North American southwest shelf, April 2049, Bingo.

  They’d notice the instant Saturn tampered with the data, too. What to do, what to do?

  He could… no, the coincidence would be noted too, if he acted now.

  He could wait and… not good enough.

  Retroactively?

  If nobody was looking. Wherever nobody was looking. Before the flags were set in place, four days ago.

  To think was to act:

  Ten days ago, an expose on failures in teleoperated equipment was on record as suppressed by Saturn himself.

  A novel about the battle between Agricorp and Mining and Forestry was ready for publication, as listed in the Pocket Books prospectus of last week. Saturn sequestered printing presses, trucks, bookstore space. Outlining, quotes, facts were the work of minutes. Writing it would take longer, but such a book needed his conscious attention. Otherwise the prose would come out flat.

  A joke during the Tonight show monologue, not caught in time, last night. Edit those tapes. The reference had reached only the Eastern time zone, North America, and that was why it hadn’t been flagged.

  Memo to Mining and Forestry, direct from Saturn. They weren’t used to that. It would shake them. “You fucked up, citizens. Remember that minor quarrel in which minor people died? Everybody wants to know more about it. Why don’t you forget the Shomer girl and try to figure out what went wrong? An Olympic contender’s likely to be too busy to write her memoirs, at least for a bit.” Leave out mention of the book; “discover” it later. The book was half written; the style needed improving; fiddle with the program…

  Nine days after the operation, Jillian began the first fledgling efforts to exercise, to reestablish contact with her body.

  She was made of spun glass, cobwebs, and rusty iron filaments, infinitely fragile.

  Suryanamaskar, hatha yoga’s Sun Salutation, is a series of ten movements linked together with precise breathing. It, and the ancient Chinese movements of T’ai Chi Ch’uan are probably the exercises most expedient for recovery from debilitating illness.

  Under Abner’s precise direction, she learned it: inhale, reaching high. Exhale, extending the trunk forward and down. Inhale. Exhale as the legs go back in push-up position. Inhale as she straightened her arms into a Cobralike position called Upward Facing Dog. Exhale and lift the hips high, making a pyramid of your body. Inhale as the feet come forward next to the hands. Exhale. Inhale as you return to standing position.

  Abner corrected her minutely at every bend and breath. His thin hands changed her posture, spinal alignment, depth of breath, checked her degree of muscle tone. And when he was satisfied, he made her do another one.

  She forced it. Sweat exploded from her brow and drooled into her eyes.

  The next day, she managed four repetitions. And the next, seven.

  Within five more days, her energy level approached normal, and most of her flexibility had returned. And there was something else: her balance had improved noticeably. And concentration. And that peculiar effect known as time dilation.

  She remembered Osa: the stocky Swede’s coordination had been off just a tick. Jillian had to find an exercise that would keep her speed synchronized with her body, so that coordination didn’t suffer.

  Physical effort, physical pain, and bouts of total exhaustion became her life. Anything to keep her mind off the labyrinth of lies that the Council and their world had suddenly become for her. There were answers, but she couldn’t get them-not right now.

  Even if the Olympiad hadn’t demanded her complete attention, Donny, her one certain lead, was unavailable. (According to a vidcast, he was in Jakarta, dedicating a bridge. His smile was a constellation.)

  To use Holly’s computer again would risk her friend’s life. As driven as Jillian was, she couldn’t bring herself to do that.

  And what was left was study, and planning, and training.

  At midnight, thirteen days after the operation, Jillian let herself into the main gymnasium and used her personal ID card to access the Grappler Twelve.

  Her body felt completely oiled and powerful, as if she had never violated its envelope of protection. The Grappler waited for her on the mat, a cone of light surrounding it. Its tripod balance arm seemed a saunan tail to her, as if it were a small and friendly dinosaur.

  “Program?” the computer requested politely.

  “Coordination. Increase speed until ten percent error level, then decrease thirty percent, and replay cycle.”

  “Program accepted.”

  She and the Grappler began to dance. It was a formal, noncompetitive exercise, the Grappler’s mechanical legs expanding and contracting, its balance shifting every moment as it sought to upend her, to sweep her feet from beneath her, to fling her to the mat.

  But at every touch of its padded legs she moved lightly away, delighting in the smoothness and assurance of her own movement. She and the robot flowed together, striving flesh and egoless steel, gleaming with sweat and oil in the single overhead light, for long minutes. The minutes stretched to an hour before Jillian’s strength suddenly left her.

  She collapsed onto hands and knees, panting, grinning. She watched the sweat drizzle from her face, puddling onto the mat before her. A well of spontaneous, crazed laughter boiled up. She fell over onto her side, whooping.

  Then she heard other laughter join hers, followed by the sound of applause. Abner strode out of the shadows. In that moment he didn’t seem sick at all, just thin. If he walked like an old man, it was a strong old man, a patriarch, proud and renewed as a man watching the first steps of his grandchild. His eyes were fever-bright.

  He beamed down at her. “You understand,” he said. “By God. Osa could never let anyone beat her, let alone a machine. She couldn’t do what you just did, Jillian.” His eyes glowed with admiration.

  He stretched out a bony hand to her, and she took it, and drew him down until he was kneeling.

  “How much time do you have, Abner?”

  Pause. Grim acceptance muted the joy in his face. “A few months. Maybe. The drugs aren’t working as well anymore. But I’ll make it to.—”

  “No.” She hushed him with her finger. “Abner. We’ve both given up everything. We’re both so alone. You’ve been there for me, and there’s nothing I have to give you, no way I have to show you what it’s meant. So I’ll just ask you. Don’t be my coach for a little while, okay? Don’t be my teacher.”

  “What then?” Their faces were very close.

  “My friend,” she said. “God, I need a friend.”

  Abner put his arms around her. She burrowed her face into the notch between cheek and shoulder, and they stayed that way for a time.

  Ultimately the gentleness turned into something else, something fiercer and more joyous, with the Grappler as solitary witness.

  The Grappler had no ears to hear, or mouth to offer judgment as two lonely human beings found, for a short time at least, a haven from the storm.

  But it did have eyes.

  Saturn had seen sex in all its many forms, many times. Over the decades embarrassment had given way to titillation, to amusement, and finally to boredom.

  But this one… — Jillian Shomer interested him. By an athlete’s esthetics, her body was perfect. She was coupling with a wasted skeleton of a man. Within a week or so, the sexual function might well have been beyond Abner Collifax completely. One might safely rule out animal lust.

  The mating urge? Would she consider him to be good genetic material? He had lost at both the ninth and
tenth Olympiads. Surely Jillian Shomer could do better than that.

  Pity? Respect? Love perhaps?

  Or nothing so noble: the urge to bond an ally? Could Abner be of use to her? Had he information? Skills? Connections that she could access no other way?

  Here was meat for the mind. The oddities of human behavior still engaged a jaded intellect after almost a hundred and fifty years.

  Another sobering possibility presented itself. Perhaps he was approaching the problem with the wrong tool. Could he have become so used to analytical dissection to resolve problems that he had lost contact with that part of him that felt? Could a being who had lost desire for sexual contact understand the urge? For that matter, could the urge, and all of its manifestations, be understood if approached from a purely mechanistic Newtonian basis? Was understanding even possible, in any absolute sense?

  His mental smile was a child’s, alight with the simple joy of self-discovery.

  The Shomer woman was… intriguing.

  Chapter 10

  Jillian faced Osa across the mat.

  She ignored the glare of the lights and the thirty pairs of eyes watching them. Her whole world was the stocky blond dynamo before her. They circled each other lightly, joined implacably in a combative minuet, wary and nervous as hungry cats.

  Confidence and a barely leashed anger boiled within her. Discipline kept a lid on it: the confidence was misplaced. She hadn’t been Boosted long enough, hadn’t gained enough strength. On the other hand, she would put her timing against anyone in the world.

  She had a hole card: Osa held her in contempt. Never Underestimate Your Enemy. Combat’s deadliest sin. Jillian could surprise the Swedish girl, get to her and take advantage of that contempt and uncertainty before the stronger woman had an opportunity to adjust.

  A sudden shift of balance, a hula-movement with hips feinting one way, and shoulders the other. A moment of carefully judged clumsiness, swiftly compensated -

  Oh, Osa. I Boosted too late. I’m angry and desperate. Come. Take me.

  To a mathematician, judo is a matter of balance points and coefficients of friction, equations of mass and momentum and inertia.

  Imagine a cone which must roll onto its edge in order to move, exchanging stability for mobility. It is this movement, in the service of aggression or defense, advance or retreat, that creates vulnerability.

  Osa swooped to the attack. Her hands, seeking grips on Jillian’s gi, were as light as butterflies. Deceptively, hypnotically gentle. Jillian didn’t let them deceive her. Once they gained purchase, once Osa found the flaw in her balance, the butterflies would become rocs, talons which lifted and twisted and thundered Jillian down to the mat.

  Jillian played fear, played passivity, retreat. She let her breathing catch raggedly, as if fatigued by apprehension. Three times in a minute, Jillian flinched into abortive attacks, barely countering Osa’s aggressive defense in time.

  Osa’s lips pressed together in a pale line, the edges beginning to twitch upward as she gained confidence.

  Jillian inhaled, relaxing. Then in the middle of the breath, exhaled explosively, attacking with a feral intensity that no human being could have anticipated or countered.

  With timing perfect to the millisecond, Jillian swept Osa’s ankle at the instant when weight transferred from one leg to the other. It was as if the Swedish girl had trod on the proverbial banana peel. They crashed to the mat together, Jillian in control.

  The rest happened in a single cycle of breath:

  Moving in the eerie slowmotion world created by total focus, she trapped Osa’s forearm in her right armpit, swung her legs up in a body scissors. As they hit the mat she adjusted the scissors so that her ankles pinioned Osa’s throat.

  Osa heaved once, titanically, twisted like a beached eel, tensed her throat and arm and drummed her heels on the mat seeking balance that Jillian refused to let her find.

  Another spasm-but Jillian only bore down more viciously.

  And then she slapped Jillian’s leg, choosing submission over unconsciousness or injury.

  Osa coughed, then rolled away as Jillian released her, face dark with anger.

  Jillian heaved for air, speckles of light dancing in her eyes, muscles shaking with the sudden intensity of the effort.

  For ten seconds the two women stared at each other, motionless, twin ivory images carved with flame.

  Then, slowly, Osa regained composure and forced herself to smile.

  She stood as Jillian stood. Osa flicked imaginary dust from her gi, still eyeing her opponent with new respect.

  Then slowly, and with immense solemnity, she bowed.

  Chapter 11

  The vacuum tube car was wall-to-wall Olympians, their coaches and luggage. They traveled at just under orbital speed, deep underground. There were no windows, but then again there was nothing to see.

  In the forward car a classic flatfilm played, electronically modified so that one Olympian after another replaced Humphrey Bogart or Katherine Hepburn aboard the African Queen. When they tired of that, they replaced the two stars with other performers. After trying a half-dozen current male matinee idols, including a gibbon who performed in Asian, they settled on a fortyish Sean Connery. To fill Hepburn’s spinster role, they recruited the image of an Australian beauty queen named Brigitte Chan-Smythe. Chan-Smythe had recently scandalized Transportation with pornographic satires of their most recent advertising campaign. Dialogue and action were enthusiastically improvised.

  Conversations ran sluggishly in the aft car. Maybe the occupants felt the close quarters, or the gigatons of earth and sea above, or the pull of vacuum and the dark.

  But in the middle car they eschewed passive entertainment, retracted the seats and danced. At a quarter gravity all dances were slow, to music three centuries old. Eldren Cowan taught English Regency line dancing to tapes he had brought for his Spirit Event.

  Jillian curtsied to Jeff Tompkins, solemnly linked arms with him, and revolved carefully. Too much enthusiasm in low gravity could send an Olympian caroming into a wall, to the vast amusement of all but Eldren.

  Gravity returned: the track led up, the cars began to slow. Jillian excused herself and made her way to the movie car.

  Connery and Chan-Smythe had just sunk the German warship, and were celebrating in a manner probably envisioned, but certainly never filmed, by John Huston. With a final roar of appreciation the film was terminated, and someone conjured up a map of the subway.

  Jillian just glimpsed the world-girdling network as the scale began to zero in on the deep Atlantic tunnel. on the Aegean Sea… — on Greece… — It was like watching a computer program take the Mandelbrot Set to finer and finer scale. Major subway trunks ran across continents, coast to coast, under mountains and deserts and farmland. Bigger channels yet ran beneath the oceans. The view ran up from beneath the Atlantic, took a branch that ran beneath the Aegean, out of the sea to Greece, chose from hundreds of branches. the view zeroed in on Athens, on ghostly city streets, following the moving dot that was themselves.

  Funny, she’d never noticed that the world’s subway system was designed as fractals.

  The cars turned smoothly; they twitched as other cars matched or detached. Presently the doors opened on light and sound.

  Athens Convention Center. Hundreds of anonymous human shapes milled near the terminals, held back by ropes and security forces as they waved placards and chanted welcome. Jillian returned to her seat.

  There on the narrow cushions Abner stirred restlessly from his nap. He slept a great deal lately, husbanding his energy, perhaps, or seeking in unconsciousness a muting of the ceaseless pain.

  His eyes opened, took a few seconds to focus. His face was more brutally weathered by the Boost now, and his breathing was more labored. Sometimes she listened to it at night as he slept. She dreaded its irregularity, imagined that she heard in it a cry for peace, a weariness of body that extended, finally, even to the spirit which animated the withered shell.
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  “We’re here,” he said. His lips lifted at the corners. “I promised myself I’d make it this far.”

  “We’re not done here yet, Abner.” She gripped his hand as if by strength alone she could halt his deterioration. “You can’t leave me until I’ve won.”

  The subway eased through a seal, and air hissed into the lock. The Olympians hooted, hustled up out of their seats, and began to unload their gear.

  She waited. Abner shouldn’t even have been on a general passenger train. He could be hurt in the press.

  The aisle began to empty toward the front, and she stood, snaked out past Abner, and helped him to his feet.

  Like a granddaughter helping a beloved but doddering elder to cross the street, Jillian escorted Abner, took both of their bags in tow, helped him out into the terminal.

  A Greek band oompah’d its way through a bizarre medley of “God Bless America” and Transportation’s corporate anthem, “Songs from the Sky.” A few Olympians automatically stiffened to attention. Jillian scanned the Olympians until she saw Holly. The biologist was fighting hard to swallow a sardonic grin.

  As they flowed toward the line of waiting shuttles they were showered by confetti and streamers, cheered, given all of the fanfare that Jillian had craved on departure from Boston. Now it was too late. Now she didn’t really give a damn.

  Rain swept down in curtains, wavering across the pavement like bed sheets blowing on a clothesline. The crowd eddied like ocean waves, frantic to see the arriving athletes. She could not see faces. Their faces were darkened, backlit ovals.

  A pool of light: they were close enough now for her to make out a sign printed in Greek, Japanese, and English. The English read: STOP THE OLYMPICS. The protester was clearly visible for a moment, face no longer an indistinguishable smear, now a twisting, screaming mouth and a fringe of sopping hair. Then security men moved swiftly from the sides, and he vanished into the shadows.