Achilles choice

by Larry Niven

  She sorted for Abner, and his records came up on the screen swiftly. His judo wins were famous, and she had studied them a thousand times. It was still startling to see him at the peak of his physical prowess, a wiry streak of quicksilver. He’d made a decent showing in fellrunning, a bronze, and in Arts his recital of original poetry had won an ovation, if not a gold.

  His last category had been abstract sociology, similar to her own. His paper had explored the emergence of a pseudomatriarchal leadership structure in the American prison systems.

  She scanned for Pushkin’s name.

  And found it, but his paper was on-the rebirth of Keynesian economics.

  Confused now, she called up the list of competitors and—

  Donny Crawford’s name jumped out at her. The subject of his paper?

  Classified.

  Donny had taken the gold, of course. Abner had lied. He’d given her a clue, then backed off when he realized she could get in trouble. Donny Crawford excelled at everything he touched. He had taken gold in one athletic event, and two academic categories. One of his papers had been implemented. One hidden.

  She doubled back to social theory, and scanned to be sure she had missed nothing. She hadn’t. Donny Crawford was the only choice.

  Jillian turned off the console, and stood.

  Well.

  She hadn’t wanted to go to the party, but maybe there was something for her to do there after all.

  The main ballroom of the Arts and Entertainments pavilion was thinning out. A few couples still swayed to live music, a few conversations still percolated around the refreshment tables.

  She attached herself to a group of revelers. They slapped her on the back, got her drinks, called her a hell of a good sport, and were too drunk to look carefully at her eyes, to notice that she wasn’t drinking at all.

  To see that her eyes rarely strayed far from Donny. He was still there, smiling and nodding and officially congenial. And Mary Ling was standing so close to him, taking every marginally discreet opportunity to rub against him, marking off her territory.

  Jillian gritted her teeth, searched the room, and found Holly dancing with a knot of pleasantly inebriated Olympians. All had placed, none had won gold or silver.

  They weren’t really dancing in partners. They were a group, moving in intense rhythm, tribal rhythm perhaps, trying to lose their emotional pain in a cocktail of endorphins and alcohol.

  Holly waved a glassy hello, and went into an even more violent gyration.

  Jillian joined them, keeping one eye on Donny and his vixen. She couldn’t really forget herself, couldn’t really lose the pain, but it helped, made the ache of waiting more endurable.

  Holly handed her a glass of spiked punch. Jillian hesitated, and then gulped it down greedily. Then another.

  Minutes passed, and songs changed. By the time Donny and Mary made their excuses and headed for the door, the room was spinning pleasantly.

  Jillian waited five minutes and then excused herself. She was almost to the door, when she felt the hand on her arm.

  Holly.

  Her friend gazed up at her, with narrowed eyes that showed not the slightest trace of intoxication. “Be sure, Jillian,” she said. “Be very careful.”

  “Being careful doesn’t make a whole lot of sense just now, Holly.”

  Holly’s calves bunched as she tiptoed up and kissed Jillian’s cheek. Then she returned to her friends.

  The back stairs were deserted, and Jillian raced down them, consumed now with an ugly curiosity. She slipped through the front door of dorm 7, then searched the registry until she found Mary’s name.

  Give them a little time. Let the sweet heavy intoxication of sex and alcohol, excitement and fatigue, work their savagely hypnotic magic.

  For twenty minutes she stared sightlessly into Olympic Boulevard, eyes observing but not tracking the occasional tram. Then she dictated the number.

  After a few seconds a drowsy, musically accented woman’s voice came on the line. “Hello?”

  “I have a message for your friend.”

  “Who is this?”

  “I don’t think names are important. Just give him the message.”

  A pause. Mary Ling’s voice became cautious. “Yes?”

  “The message is: the Denver Mountain Rescue committee would like to have a few words.”

  “Ah… I do not understand.”

  “That’s all right. He will.”

  Almost exactly a minute later, Donny came on line. “Is this who I think it is?” His voice was more guarded than Mary’s.

  “Yes.”

  “Ah… — listen. I’m sorry about the bad break that you got.”

  Go to hell. “Come and talk to me. I need five minutes.”

  He was down in four, wearing a robe that clung like wet silk. It was such a sight that she almost forgot what she came to say. She saw nervous impatience, but also a kind of arrogant compassion.

  He said, “Listen, sorry about the way it went.” His massive shoulders rippled the robe with his shrug. “There’s nothing I can do about it.”

  “I know. I also know that it wouldn’t be a good idea if anyone found out about your collapse on the mountainside.”

  The compassion went; so did the impatience. Easy arrogance now. The breeze shifted, and she caught a whiff of body oils, of Mary Ling’s pungency. She was disgusted and utterly turned on at the same instant, and ashamed of her reaction. He watched her coolly. He said, “I wonder if you know what you’re playing with.”

  “A little. I did some research. What’s really going on here, Donny? Do a dying woman a favor.”

  Donny stopped, seemed to be listening to the wind. Finally, he sighed.

  “I’ll meet you up on the roof in ten minutes. Take the back stairs.”

  Jillian’s ID card got her through the back door of dorm 7, and she climbed up the back stairs with legs and lungs and arms working together like gears churning in an implacable machine.

  A chill wind whipped across the roof, but Jillian didn’t feel it. She looked out across to the city lights.

  Donny showed up fifteen minutes later.

  He rubbed a wristband nervously. A weapon? More probably just a specialized comlink, something not patched directly into the neural net.

  “So what do you want from me?”

  “I want their motives. Is the Council at war with itself? Crime and plagues and civil disobedience and industrial accidents — I’ve seen work that could have stopped all that. They’re not just accidents and happenstance and unavoidable turmoil.”

  “You’re way out of your depth.”

  “I went through the public records. You’ve been representing Transportation, and Trans has been angling for a twelve percent increase in its rates shipping oil for Energy and Pan-Latin Industrial. Two days after the disruption of your nervous system, they settled for six and a half percent.”

  “I don’t see—”

  She was so tired of lies. The cityscape blurred in her vision. She closed her eyes, and the lights danced on her eyelids. “Sure you do, Donny. Within ten hours of your little problem, there were several ‘events’ involving your section leaders. A thrombosis in Bangkok. A myocardial infarction in Vienna. I counted twelve apparently unconnected events.”

  “Just where is this leading you, Jillian?”

  “The Council is lying. They can’t deliver on their promises. I’m not even sure they want to.”

  He turned up the collar on his robe. His face was hard. “I don’t have anything to say to you. Your time is up.”

  “Donny—”

  “Publish and be damned.”

  “No, no.” She half laughed. “They’d never let me do that anyway, but Donny, I know about your illiteracy paper! It would have worked. We could have cut crime, human misery, violence. They chose not to. Why? And why did you let them buy you off?”

  He stared at her, silent. He tried to twist away when she reached out to grasp his wrist, but her fingers
dug in and held.

  “The man who wrote that paper had compassion,” she said urgently. “Insight. He cared, Donny. Look at yourself now. You don’t believe in anything anymore. Did you know that your little bedmate killed Catherine St. Clair with a rock? Do you care?” It might have been her imagination, but Donny seemed to shiver. “What will you bet that nothing will be done about it? It isn’t justice they’re after, Donny. They want the best and the brightest to kill each other scrabbling to the top. They swallow our data whole, and use it or don’t use it, but us they throw away. When they let someone like you through, you’re a damned pet puppy.

  “Tell me the truth, Donny. Make a dying woman happy.”

  A floatcar spun up into its flight pattern, the headlamps flashing across Donny. His handsome face was a mask of pain, of anger, of misery. After a long pause, he spoke.

  “All right. The truth. But it won’t make you happy, Jillian.

  “It’s not a war. A domination game, maybe. A few people die. Check the numbers on a single major battle in World War Two and tell me we’re not better off.

  “Everybody’s better off—”

  “And the babies who die in poverty? Donny, if you can reduce crime and human misery by improving the schools, you can increase it by reducing the standard of education. How many little nudges has the Council used to weaken governments, destroy the faith of the voters, strengthen the corporations?”

  “Jillian—”

  “How much have you kept yourself from seeing, Donny? How about— Oh, my God.”

  “Conspiracy theories are old stuff. They can even be fun if you…” He saw her shock. “What?”

  “Jesus Christ, I just saw it, just now. It’s so blasted obvious once you think of it. Don’t you see how the Council has been at war with the nations? They control the Olympiad. How many papers besides yours have been classified, Donny? For at least forty years the Council has had the best minds on the planet helping them undermine participatory government.”

  “Shit.”

  Jillian waited, but that was all Donny had to say. He believed her. It was real.

  She asked, “Who’s the Old Bastard, Donny?”

  “I don’t know,” he said dully. “I’ve never seen him.”

  “It’s a him? Not a her or a them?”

  Donny shrugged. “The rumor is about an old man. The Council is waiting for him to die. He can’t last much longer, they say. He’s behind all of this. You want to blame someone, find him.” He pulled his robe tight, and turned away from her. “Leave me alone, Shomer. I don’t want to know about any of this. I don’t care what happens to you. Just… leave me to hell alone.”

  “You were the dream,” she said contemptuously, stepping back away from him.

  “I have to tell them we talked, dear heart. They’ll know already, or they might. If they’ve been listening, you’re dead. They don’t need you, and if you’re right about the nations… you’re just dead.” He shivered. “Goddamn you for telling me that.”

  “Donny Crawford.” She spoke the name almost reverently. “I guess everyone dies in the Olympiad, huh, Donny?” She turned away abruptly.

  “Goddamn you!”

  But she was already dropping down the staircase, quick but quiet, in a fellrunner’s controlled descent.

  Chapter 14

  Her body flamed with tension. Her instinct was to work it off.

  She walked for half an hour, wanting to run but not wanting to be conspicuous, until chance brought her to the gymnasts’ stadium.

  The guards didn’t stop her. The few workmen ignored her. She tried running, sprinting over and over around the indoor track until her legs and lungs burned and she was dizzy and nauseous with fatigue. From there she went to yoga, feeling the twists and turns clicking her spine into position effortlessly, handstanding, and bending herself into knots. She found a set of parallel bars, kipped up and spun into a series of free-form exercises that would have won a perfect ten only forty years ago. She was laughing, and crying.

  Her body was perfect.

  Her body was dying.

  She was sweat-soaked and steaming when she left. An orange dawn caught her by surprise.

  She was ravenous.

  She found a restaurant just as it was opening. The waiter was smitten; she enjoyed that. She was the only customer. She ordered like an army battalion, and watched the waiter’s jaw sag.

  For all of this time she was wondering how she would die.

  The Council would know of her conversation with Donny. They might know now… or not; they couldn’t monitor every conversation on planet Earth. But because they might know, Donny would tell them.

  They couldn’t afford to allow her to live.

  Someone would come for her. Or a car would crash. Or botulism would develop in her food. My God, have I really eaten that much? She was pleasantly full, with just room for more coffee. And she might as well enjoy herself, because it seemed she was out of answers.

  If she could tell the people…

  But They controlled the media. No message would get out.

  Beverly’s last message. It is theoretically possible for a single human being to control fifty-four percent of world economic activity, fortyeight percent of political activity…

  But Beverly had been talking about the Old Bastard. Any Council member would control much less.

  The media could not be perfectly controlled.

  Close enough, though, probably. (They hadn’t used the botulism yet. She felt wonderful. She was even getting used to Greek coffee.) What would she have to do to get a message out? Hijack a video station?

  A family of six drifted in. Could these… no. The four boys were suspiciously well behaved, but still too young to be professional assassins.

  — Hijack a spacecraft. She could use it to control a relay satellite and really blanket the world with her story.

  The restaurant wasn’t hers anymore, so she left. She ran two miles along the strand, on wet sand, sprinting backward, passing other runners as if they were jogging through quicksand.

  — Murder Mary Ling. That’d get media attention!

  Beginning to puff now, she passed a lean runner and grinned back at him. He took it as an invitation and chased her. He was good, she was beginning to tire, and she faced forward and put some effort into it. She led him into a subway entrance, where he gave up.

  She took the subway back to her hotel.

  She stretched out on the bed and wondered if she would sleep. Or wake up.

  — The vicious little rock-throwing bitch hadn’t trained as a fighter. Strangle her in public! Surrender immediately, then talk to anyone and everyone, tell every secret, announce always that the Council is bound to have Jillian Shomer murdered. When it finally happens, it’ll confirm everything.

  Actually, it might work.

  That was disturbing.

  Jillian had been raised Episcopal; her faith had never flagged. She had considered tracking and killing her mother’s murderer… but her mother had been killed by a social pattern. Vengeance required breaking the pattern. But not murder! Surely her conscience would never tempt her to so great a sin.

  Or to suicide; but last night she’d been close.

  So look again. The Council’s dominance games have brought death and misery to hundreds of thousands of people. Killing one innocent to break that pattern still cannot be justified; but Mary Ling is no innocent. Her public strangling would buy the attention Jillian needed. The media would be hot to watch a hair-pulling match between two Olympic contenders. Especially if they were supposed to be fighting over a man, over Donny Crawford.

  — Tell every secret: that was the flaw. They had cut her off from her data. Without Holly Lakein’s help she would have nothing. If she exposed Holly, Holly would die, too.

  Jillian was almost relieved.

  — Hold it. Let the media believe that she’d used her own data sources! Granted that the Council had silenced Beverly; but who would ever tell?

&n
bsp; The wall pulsed, and buzzed gently.

  This was actually getting to be fun; she didn’t appreciate the interruption. “Yes?” -

  A man’s face appeared on the wall. She had never seen it before, but he was young, and pleasant, and officious. “Good morning. I’m Stewart Kaporov at Olympiad Central. Would you please report to our offices? There has been a slight irregularity.”

  Too late. She’d never had a plan anyway.

  For an instant she considered fleeing; but her face was known everywhere on Earth. She considered going as she was. Instead she took a quick shower, rinsed a mealy taste out of her mouth, and tried to do something nice with her hair.

  Her whole body was beginning to cramp. She set out for the nearest subway entrance.

  The streets were curiously deserted now, wistfully so. A few young men and women in silver blazers hustled here and there, and workmen were disassembling platforms and collapsing temporary scaffolding.

  There was a nice, busy, alive sound in the air.

  The subway was crowded. It must have been unbelievable during the games; it was the reason none of the contenders had tried it. An elderly gentleman offered her his seat; she refused with a smile.

  The offices of Olympiad Central were in the Arts and Entertainments pavilion, and the guard at the front entrance recognized her and opened it at once, saying “Third floor, Miss Shomer.”

  She nodded without speaking, walking straight to the elevators, giving him a clean shot at her back.

  Nothing. She reached the elevator, and it bing’d and opened at once.

  Where is Mary Ling, she wondered, right now?

  The ride to the third floor was surprisingly uneventful. No cyanide, no sudden stall. No Ninjas dropping from the roof. A genuine smile curled her mouth at that image. She chuckled, a good sound.

  Kaparov’s secretary ushered Jillian into a spacious office. A wall-wide vidscreen showed waves rolling peacefully in from the Aegean.

  Kaporov entered, and stopped, and seemed to brace himself. He looked threatened, here in his own office. “Miss Shomer?”

  “So far.”

  “Ah — … yes. Well. We have a… difficult situation here.”