Achilles choice

by Larry Niven

  “Yes.”

  “I believe you know Miss Osa Grevstad.”

  “Of course.”

  “There was a… diplomatic problem. The papers which allowed her to compete on North American Agricorp were never completely validated. She has lost her position. Considering the fact that your loss to her in judo cost you five points, you are now in position for the gold as opposed to the silver.”

  Jillian was frozen, couldn’t even react when he extended his hand. Just like that. Could it really be that simple? Could they…

  Oh God. Osa? The ultraconfident, brutally skilled strangler had just been given the death sentence. Because of Jillian.

  She couldn’t take the gold. And yet…

  If she didn’t, and the judgment on Osa’s status had already been announced, what good would she have done?

  Jillian extended a trembling hand.

  “Congratulations,” he said.

  Chapter 15

  It took nearly forty-five minutes to push through the reporters and the crowds at Kennedy Airport. It was all a smiling, churning mob.

  In twos and threes, the Olympians were hustled into cars. She caught sight of Donny talking to a phalanx of reporters. His smile seemed just as warm and sincere as ever. His gaze slid across her without stopping to focus.

  She was ushered into a car with the Bulgarian Gilbert and Sullivan devotee. They waved at the crowd like newlyweds.

  Once the car started moving, she closed her eyes and leaned back into her seat. The long-postponed fatigue came crashing down on her. Or else it was emotional whiplash from the changes in her life… or jet lag… or the beginning of the death that comes with Boost.

  In a few days there would be another operation. She would be one of the Linked then, part machine, and death would no longer be inevitable. Death would come when she lost a dominance game… whose rules she had better learn quickly.

  The Bulgarian put his hand on Jillian’s arm. “Your name is Jillian?”

  She turned.

  “I am Jorge.”

  His square face was too close; his elbows and knees occupied too much of the space. He was one of the runners, tall and attenuated. Folding him into the car had been awkward. Any second now he’d go Sproing! and pop through both doors.

  He grew tired of waiting for a response. “We don’t know each other, but we will both be Linked now. Special people we are.” He grinned infectiously, and she thought of Sean, lost love, left a world away. “Perhaps we could spend some time…”

  Her smile was broken from overuse. She said, “I think we both need rest.”

  It sounded stupid; small wonder if he didn’t take the hint. “Soon. We are both staying at the MGM Grand Hotel?”

  The car had stopped for a traffic light. Jillian opened the car door and stepped out. To the astonished Bulgarian she said, “Later. Sorry.”

  She just couldn’t face any more faces.

  The traffic was moving again. She wove her way to the curb in a blare of horns, stepping on bumpers, vaulting over hoods, swinging across an overhead rail. She was too tired to word-dance with a man on the make; but not too tired for fellrunning in traffic.

  Did she have to go to the MGM Grand? Her luggage would be going there, and she’d need a phone to get a reservation elsewhere. She would regret her rudeness later. Send him flowers? Ask him to dinner and apologize? She might need Jorge as an ally. She looked about her for a subway entrance.

  The old concrete had taken on a thousand different shades. Time and travelers had worn ruts in the floor. The shops, gates, ticket dispensers, and barber booths varied from sparkling new through venerable to decrepit. The lighting was uneven; one could imagine muggers in the shadows.

  Parts of H. P. Lovecraft’s “Dream Quest” had been filmed in these ancient tunnels, ten years before Jillian was born. Those were the scenes where Carter lived among the ghouls.

  Jillian used her credit disk to summon food from a noodle dispenser. She ate while she unraveled the maps on the walls. These days she seemed to be hungry all the time.

  She wanted platform 28, an L car. Just get her luggage, find another hotel, and go.

  It was deep in the bowels of the earth, down an escalator that seemed to run all the way to Hell. New York’s subways had a bad old reputation. Charles Bronson and Bernhard Goetz no longer sprinted up and down the escalators — … but their prey, the muggers, were gone too, and Jillian Shomer could break any ancient mugger in four pieces without working up a hunger.

  The platform was occupied. A little girl held her mother’s hand. The girl was maybe eight years old and small for her age, all in pleated cotton print. She had long red hair that might never have been cut at all, falling past her shoulders in a scarlet cascade. She looked at Jillian for three minutes, while a score more of passengers gathered and avoided each other’s eyes. Finally the little girl screwed up her courage.

  “‘Scuse me,” she said politely. “Aren’t you Jill Shomer?”

  Jillian smiled, and gave a small nod. The girl’s mother glanced sideways a little, gave a quick, nervous smile, and stared straight ahead.

  A gleaming silver tube six cars long emerged from the tunnel with a silent puff of air. Four cars were marked as L’s.

  The little redhead’s eyes never moved from Jillian’s. “I saw you on the vid,” she said worshipfully. “When I grow up, I’m going to be an Olympian! I want to be just like you.”

  Jillian’s smile drooped.

  The cars opened. The girl’s mother dragged her toward a front car. The redhead waved frantically. Jillian turned to find a less crowded car, and locked eyes with a tall, wiry man with square-cut brown hair and a florid complexion.

  Sean!

  Sean Vorhaus gaped. Then he waved, pointed, and half ran for the last car—

  Jillian followed, already becoming irritated. He could have waited! These cars came through every fifteen minutes. How did he know they both wanted a local? And what was he doing here, and why hadn’t he told her? Oh, maybe there was a message waiting for her at the blasted MGM Grand—

  There were six people in the car, with seats for at least twenty. Weird. A moment ago it was as crowded as the others. Sean must be at the back. She’d thought he was at the back—

  The doors had closed.

  These little airtight cylinders were in use worldwide. They ran on independent motors and switched back and forth from train to train, from locals to gravity-assisted cross-continental vacuum tubes to tunnels that ran beneath the oceans-and they were too small to hide in. Where was Sean?

  She’d missed him somehow, and the other six passengers were staring at her. She sat down next to an old Hispanic woman. Now only a chubby late-teen in loose creased pants, white shirt, and a vest sweater was still looking at her. She waited for the 38th Street platform.

  The train hummed along in near silence. The dim light fluttered a little when the car reached its first switch point. The train slowed. The cars decoupled, and rearranged with cars from other lines, clicking back together and heading down new lines.

  There was an odd bulge in the boy’s sweater, like a small left breast. The kid was soft, undermuscled, overpadded. His eyes flicked toward her every few moments. Wearily she thought, Again?

  The car dropped. Jillian stifled a scream of surprise. There was a soft pop. They’d passed a seal, into vacuum. The car was still falling, still accelerating. But this was a local line! They shouldn’t have—

  Alarmed, she glanced at the other passengers.

  They were taking it very well, suspiciously well. None of them had moved. In fact… — they were fewer.

  They were disappearing whenever she turned her head!

  Now only the kid in the sweater was left.

  The car was still falling through the Earth.

  Jillian made herself relax as Abner had taught her. If They wanted to kill her, there were a thousand easier ways… and her fear of death, she discovered, was gone. Clean gone.

  She asked, �
�Are you a hologram, too?” He had to be. She was getting her first good look. Wrinkles in his pants. Buttons, zippers, glasses— He must be as old as the subways.

  The kid smiled back at her. “I’m the Old Bastard,” he said.

  Chapter i6

  She asked, “What’s that on your chest?”

  Of the myriad questions whirling through her head, she’d found one to surprise him. His smile flickered. Then he pulled his sweater over his head. There was a pocket in his rumpled shirt, and a clear plastic envelope in the pocket, and a dozen colored sticks in that.

  “Shirt protector.”

  “What’s in it?”

  “Things for writing and drawing. These days I’d have a wrist link, or just use the neural net. Ever see one of these?” He pulled, from a pants pocket that couldn’t have been deep enough, a flat wooden stick painted white with fine black markings. “My father had one. Slide rule.”

  She remembered: a slide rule came somewhere between an abacus and a pocket calculator. “That must be worth a fortune.”

  Almost unconsciously, her hand had drifted out toward it. Her “ghost” snatched it out of reach in a gesture reminiscent of a ten-year-old protecting a sheaf of trading chits. A sheepish smile. “Let’s save some time, Jillian. The Council doesn’t know about this interview and never will. The car is headed for Denver. So’s your luggage. The records will show you arranged it all yourself. Half the passengers in another car are listed as traveling on this car. So we’ve got plenty of time to solve any little mysteries that are still bothering you, but let’s not abuse it, okay? I need some of my attention for the rest of the planet.”

  Jillian examined the Old Bastard, seeing too much weakness. The thin shoulders, the baggy body, the eager, friendly eyes. This was the monster who controlled the Council? She felt disorientation, savage disappointment, and an almost morbid distaste.

  She said, “You arranged for my gold, didn’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’ve killed Osa.”

  “Osa bribed her way in. Not likely to pass her genes on, either. She’ll try again in four years.”

  “And Abner.”

  “Because of our research, Abner lived long enough to coach you.”

  She paused. “And my mother?”

  “She was in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

  “Accident?”

  “Jillian, it’s the kind of accident that happens when things aren’t running right. Mining and Agricorp were dancing. Certain machines didn’t get serviced. A program picked up some noise. A waldo claw picked up just the top of a habitat when… sorry.” The boy flickered and was in a different position, palms raised in supplication. “Calm down, Jillian. Maybe I’m giving you this too fast—”

  Her voice trembled, rose to a half-scream. “Just tell me why.”

  “I can’t do that short.”

  “Long, then.”

  He nodded once. “It’s been an even century since I looked like this. Computer nerds, they called us. We didn’t get along well with people, but we got along fine with computers.

  “Computers don’t deal in nuances. If I type, ‘Is there no friend to rid me of this pestilential priest?’ my computer doesn’t kill Thomas a Becket for me. It says, ‘Bad command or file name’ and waits for me to say what I mean. Sanskrit was one of the few spoken languages with no ambiguity. Using it produced a useful clarity of thought, and birthed a body of philosophy. Computer programmers speak a language of mathematics. When that language became integrated into our natural thought patterns, it was the beginning of an entirely new human culture, Jillian.”

  “Capable of mastering the world?”

  “Capable, with the eventual development of Linkage, of mastering our own nervous systems.”

  Jillian wanted to laugh. “It doesn’t seem to have helped Donny. You still have wars.”

  He brushed it off. “I’ll get to that. You still listening?”

  He waited for her nod.

  “We learned computers,” he said. “We made computers and programs. Some of us used computer power to keep track of the stock market He saw her eyebrows arch. “It tracked the worldwide flow of wealth. Often you can move wealth to where it’s worth more. Some of us got rich. Some played politics. Around nine hundred of us took major risks, played with our brains and bodies, linked ourselves directly to infrared and UV sensors, satellite broadcasts, digital telescopes and microscopes, computer memory, data sources like the stock exchange and traffic monitors and police bands, and of course we developed our own.”

  “And you turn geniuses into weaklings. You kill innocent people.”

  This time he ignored her. “Some died. Some went Feral. Eighty of us had control of most of the world’s wealth before we came into serious conflict. Eleven of us are left, and another eighteen who came later, and we constitute the Council. But as for war, it’s more like a quarrel at a bridge club—”

  “You must have killed thousands of people by now!”

  “You’re misusing the word, but it’s not your fault. We’ve altered the records.” For an instant he looked haggard. “After you’re Linked, spend an hour reading about war. You’ll have access to the reality. The death rate could be millions.”

  She didn’t want to think about that at all. She said, “You don’t really call yourself the Old Bastard.”

  “I call myself Saturn. You could hunt up my original name, but it wouldn’t tell you much.”

  Saturn? Leave it. “What do you look like now?”

  Then she jumped. There was a great oval bed in the car with them; its far edge was beyond where the tramcar’s wall should have been. Its surface rolled in slow shallow waves, a sluggish ocean, as if the bed were more alive than the patient. Machinery hovered above the bed, fading above the tramcar’s roof, extending thick umbilicals that bifurcated repeatedly to cover the patient in a fur of silver spiderweb.

  That impossibly ancient figure seemed to be part man, part machine. Just as she decided that the thing must be dead, its head popped up and slurred, “Did you ever see a movie called Two-Thousand-One? Eh, eh,” and fell back.

  The kid said earnestly, “That’s me. Barely. It’s the pattern that’s important, and the pattern is in the bubbles… recorded in bubble memory,” he amplified before she could say, Huh?

  “So why not kill the thing?”

  The old man’s head lifted again. It spoke with mushy difficulty. “Here I have senses I don’t have elsewhere. Smell. Memory. Shtuff that’s hard to retrieve, but imposh-impossible to copy over. I don’t mean I can’t make it work. I mean, impossible.”

  “Saturn. Are you still human?”

  The ancient smiled; the boy spoke. “Very good, Jillian. But leave it for a moment, okay?” Again he’d answered instantly. He never stopped to think.

  His holographic appearance was older than she had originally thought. Twenty-five? His posture: he was not awkward, not diffident, not watching a desirable woman and praying she wouldn’t notice. He leaned forward, looking directly into her eyes, challenging, good smile lines at the corners of his mouth.

  Jillian said, “Okay. There are problems the Council doesn’t solve. Crime. Disaster control. Safety designs. We could make Paradise, and I’m not the only Olympic contender who’s proved it. Saturn, what’s wrong with Paradise?”

  “Wrong problem.”

  “Then why did Lilith Shomer die?”

  He said, “A small group of people can control an entire world. Can evaluate a trillion bytes of data without a moment’s personal experience. Can reduce people, animals, plants, whole populations and ecologies to integers to be manipulated. The Council does that.”

  “Nobody cared enough?”

  “That’s part of it. Jillian, it is very tempting.”

  “Why aren’t you tempted?”

  For the first time, Saturn broke eye contact with her. “If you look at a human being as a machine,” he said softly, “as a stimulus-response loop, what happens when every u
rge can be met with a trickle of electricity? When fantasies are as powerful as reality? The world… your world is no more real than what’s in the bubbles… what happens in my own mind. Megalomania and catatonia are very real companions to the Link. That’s the rest of the problem, Jillian. Citizens die when we go Feral.”

  Oh.

  “I give Donny five years.”

  “And the rest of humanity?”

  “That’s up to you, Jillian.”

  Now it was Jillian’s turn to be silent.

  “Why me?” she asked finally. “What is this all about? And what makes you any different?”

  “I created the game. And when I Linked, and lived more in the machine than in my body, and could create or reexperience every sensation imaginable, I thought I would be happy.”

  “And you weren’t?”

  “No, and it frightened me. If you have everything, and the hunger still exists, then the hunger has nothing to do with stimulus and response. The answer doesn’t lie in the realm of objective reality or subjective experience. It has to do with the function of the observing mind in the creation of its world. Jillian, who is the ‘I’ that sees and desires?”

  “That. -.,” she said carefully, “is a very old question.”

  “And a very new one. Am I really in the bubbles? We need an answer. For the first time in human history, we can have literally anything that we want, including immortality… and the Linked are proving that it’s not enough. We wage petty power-game wars. Homicidal intrigue. We totter into insanity. It’s the furthest reach of human technology and experience, and it might be a dead end.”

  Perhaps for dramatic effect, the light had shifted to highlight Saturn. She noticed that the bed was gone, patient, machinery and all. Saturn was a sensitive host.

  Jillian said, “You thought you were a machine, didn’t you?”

  Saturn nodded quietly.

  “That’s why you buried yourself in a world of mathematics. In retrospect, it makes sense that the whole thing is coming apart.”

  Again, the almost imperceptible dip of the chin.