Achilles choice

Chapter 12

In the Arts and Entertainments auditorium eighteen thousand people sat in their patient rows.

Jillian Shomer scanned their faces, striving to read their minds, their hearts. If each of them were deepscanned, so that she could read their heart rates and blood pressures, skin temperatures and EEGs. would it help her to talk to them?

The question, the doubt, the yearning to touch the faceless audience, had plagued artists since the beginning of time. Technology had changed nothing.

“Ladies and gentlemen, Miss Jillian Shomer.

Division: Spirit. Presentation: Fractal Art.”

Picture: glaciers, advancing from different directions, meeting in a central fissure in the earth, grinding the countryside into gravel and splinters.

As the holographic images materialized in the dome of the main theater, Jillian distanced herself from reality, allowed herself to pretend that she had not created these images through countless hours of programming. She became instead a spectator, a student attending a phantasmal geology lecture.

The ice was spectacularly varicolored. Where two moving cliff faces struck one another, clouds of steam boiled forth. The image expanded swiftly. The camera POV glided into the steam; the curls and wisps and patterns of light became clear. The images revealed were not confined to curlicues and arcs: networks of edge and angle emerged. As they pushed deeper into the scene, the image paradoxically reverted to the macro image.

Here again was the ocean of crawling ice… but a hole seemed to have been torn in the bottom of the world. The floes crunched and swirled in a slowmotion whirlpool. The grinding scream of a million million tons of ice filled the auditorium. Darkness congealed into a dense strip of jumbled cubes and triangles that pulsed with the roar like an optical sound track.

The sound itself was a repeating pattern.

Geometric pulses shone so bright, loomed so large that they stunned the senses. Chunks of angle broke free, coalesced into glaciers once again. The glaciers crashed, gouged mountains from their path, and tore simplified redwoods up by their roots.

The image expanded once again, pushed into the trees themselves. The pattern of the leaves was a repeating pattern, its angles and cool green geometries fading to outline to produce crystals, ice crystals which were once again glaciers.

And again two walls of ice met screaming. The computer simulation expanded the scene, took the judges and audience to some new aspect of that primal scape. With color, depth, shape, sound, and movement Jillian conjured up the infinite variations of pattern within pattern, until the repetitions became a musical movement, the entire ebb and flow of change the heartbeat of an enormous creature from ages past, the living fire of its breath a dance of creation and destruction.

She’d found the core of this while exploring something nearly outside her field: the torpid formation and flow of plasma between the core and rim of a spiral galaxy: the laws that govern a transgalactic lightning bolt. Her very simple equation might not describe such a process in all detail, but as the basis for a visual display… In Jillian’s humble opinion, it made the Mandelbrot Set look like a six-year-old’s first attempt at needlepoint.

The sequence ended. The lights came up full.

Nervous at the lack of response, Jillian stood, looking out at the thousands of spectators, perhaps twelve thousand who had come to witness her presentation.

Finally, someone near the judges’ box began to applaud, and the clapping became infectious, until the entire auditorium rocked with applause.

Overwhelmed, Jillian took her bow, keeping her eyes on the scoreboards as the officials rendered their judgment.

9.1

9.2

8.7

A respectable score. Saturn thought that the Shomer woman could take a silver with that.

Interesting mind.

She was capable, and creative, and intelligent enough. And… unpredictable. Driven by motivations he didn’t quite understand. She bore further examination.

As did her associate Holly Lakein.

Saturn scanned all of the inputs from the Olympiad, as he did inputs from around the Earth and to the outer reaches of the solar system.

Lakein’s performance on the balance beam had been stunning, a gold. Her modern dance display was less impressive-all force and altitude, technique masquerading as emotion.

But her chess… ah.

A mind that can think thousands of moves ahead can take no pleasure in the winning or losing of such a game. But there was beauty in the patterns of her play.

Her five matches tested her to the limit. Her second opponent was Catherine St. Clair. Saturn recognized motifs developed by Botvinnik in the Netherlands, Alekhine in Zurich, Korchnoi in Leningrad.

Lakein was experimental, bold, and innovative. St. Clair played a straightforward pressure game, grinding attrition which could well have crippled a lesser player. Ultimately St. Clair had taken a pawn sacrifice which developed into a forked check. Five moves later she retired, congratulating an exhausted Holly on a brilliant coup.

It was Holly Lakein’s finest moment. Overall, she bronzed, and Saturn knew that she had only one more hope: her molecular biology presentation.

Saturn effortlessly broke through Lakein’s security codes, decrypted her files, and scanned her paper on alternative avenues for Boost control.

Again, impressive. She presented her case clearly and creatively, and had obviously had access to classified data. She quoted none of it, but some of her conclusions would have been impossible, her lines of reasoning corrupted, unless she had seen… perhaps the 2046 RAND study.

But she could not hope for gold, and without gold, Holly could not possibly Link.

Too bad. Still, she had another four years. Then there were Saturn’s own priorities.

Again he turned attention to the Arts and Entertainments auditorium, now emptying. One of the judges was a guest Counselor, Aziltov from Communications, who had given Jillian a 9.2. He seemed still fascinated by the empty stage. No doubt he was replaying the fractal art display in his mind, with the exactitude possible only to a Linked.

And then he would probably do it again. And again. Aziltov had developed an unhealthy tendency to replay pleasurable moments. Or invent them.

Aziltov was borderline Feral.

The world was a fracturing dike to Saturn, and he was a little Dutch boy with a thousand busy wet fingers.

Abner was conscious, but barely so. The machines breathed for him, filtered his blood, kept the pain at bay.

Some pain remained. He dared not slip too deeply into narcosis. Blocking the nerves electrically left him in a disassociated state that unraveled sanity even more swiftly.

He desperately wanted to see Jillian compete.

She visited him daily, speaking to him of strategy, or trivial things, and he wondered if she knew how he had lied to her.

A white lie, certainly. He’d made a mistake, mentioning the illiteracy paper. No Russian had written it. Her precious Donny had won gold with the damned thing.

The paper had won gold, and then been buried, damn them all to hell.

On the holoscreen, Jillian approached the mat, bowed to her second opponent.

She closed, and the Boost-accelerated reflexes of both opponents made the action a blur. Ordinarily he would have slowed the images down, inspected them frame by frame. But he was so tired, and hurt so badly. Only one more thing now, and he could let go.

His attention had wandered. Jillian was in a pretzel with her opponent, a straining tangle of arms and legs. The other girl’s shoulders were pinned to the mat.

Jillian stood, victorious.

Abner closed his eyes, smiling, as the screen went dark. The nurses had programmed it to turn on only when Jillian was competing, to allow him to save his strength. Abner slipped away into an uneasy sleep, a dim dream world, its horizon boiling black with locusts.

A buzzing filled the room. He opened his eyes, managed to rub some of the gum out of them.

Jillian. Osa. Competing for gold.

“Oh, Jillian. Darn it all to heck.” He mentally repeated that last sentence, and gloomily decided that Jillian was a bad influence.

He had hoped that the Scandinavian would have fouled out, or been beaten, or broken an arm. Anything to keep her away from Jillian.

They went at each other like a pair of dervishes. Long phrases of careful circling, light touches, and then a blinding flurry of movement. Osa took her opponent dead seriously this time, used her phenomenal agility to keep Jillian from closing.

Then… an opening. Jillian took Osa to the mat, slamming her down so brutally hard that Abner winced and grinned at the same time.

Jillian went for the pin… was straining for the hold…

And went limp. Abner cursed. Osa had shammed, let Jillian try to pin, and had worked herself into a choking position.

The screen went black.

Fellrunning was still a hope, but he was so tired.

And the pain. He just couldn’t take the pain much longer. He would have to ask for drugs, and Blocking. And then he would slide down that final hole, and couldn’t be sure of ever coming up again.

There was still something to say to Jillian, but he could no longer be sure of his ability to say it.

Jillian had two chances at the athletic events. The judo which had so tested her body and spirit had yielded a respectable silver. The fractal art presentation had yielded silver, but her thesis on chaos theory and sociology had only earned a bronze. Not good enough. The fellrunning had become do-or-die.

Traditionally, fellrunning is a European sport. Not until the third Olympiad had it become a truly international pastime. Competitors traverse a ten-kilometer obstacle course, facing natural and artificial barriers.

There should have been eleven women on line with Jillian. Nine were there. Two were Boosted veterans who had no chance of linking, who had been quietly removed from the Olympiad in the name of security.

Four of the women, including St. Clair, were of purely European extraction. Three held varying degrees of African blood in their veins. One was the sinewy Taiwanese, Mary Ling.

Jillian settled down into a comfortable crouch, heel against the block, and waited.

The changes within her body had peaked-she hoped. She felt all whipcord and whalebone, every nerve fiber aflame. She glared at the other women on the line, and their eyes held no warmer welcome.

She wouldn’t just beat them. She would crush them. The gun sounded. Jillian exploded out of the blocks. Fellrunning is conducted over savage, broken terrain: rocks, boulders, ravines. There was no clearly marked path, and it was up to each participant to make her way through the course to a predetermined finish line in a minimum of time.

She could go around, stay to level ground, and add miles to her run. She could go directly over, using pitons, or she could “cut the edges,” free climbing, trusting her agility and strength to deal with the obstacles as they came.

Jillian paused, consulting her compass. She was heading northwest. It was eleven in the morning, and the sun would begin its descent soon. She fixed its arc in her mind, swore to herself that she wouldn’t consult the compass again, and began to climb.

Thirty yards to her left, Mary Ling was ascending a pile of boulders with the confidence of a spider monkey.

Jillian herself had screwed her concentration down to a narrow beam. “Black dot” focus, she called it. She was aware of the rest of the world, even if concentrating on the next rock, the next step, the next moment.

“White dot” focus would build an attention so extreme that the rest of the world seemed to disappear. Fine for playing chess. Dangerous for a fellrunner.

She had reached the top of a cairn of rock, pulling herself up into shadow, breathing deeply and evenly. One more toehold would bring her to safety.

She sensed more than saw the rock as it fell. Jillian released her left hand’s grip, swung out to the right as the rock whistled past.

Her reflexive swing back to the left took her into the path of a second rock. It glanced off the cliff face next to her arm, and struck her shoulder.

Jillian’s left side went numb. She skidded, lost her purchase and found it again. Gasping, she stared down the column of rock. If she had fallen, it would have meant a fractured leg, at the least.

And hadn’t there been a flicker of a human shadow up above her? And hadn’t she heard something very like retreating footsteps?

She hung there, distant from the pain in her shoulder, gasping. She began to climb again, more slowly now. Her mind burned with anger, and that anger pushed aside all fatigue, all fear, leaving only the climb.

She reached the level, and glanced around swiftly, crouching. Nothing. A floatcar whirred up behind her, its camera doubtless recording her intrepid efforts.

She ran now, picking her way through the rocks as quickly as she could. The anger seethed in her, fueled by suspicion, and the urge to find her tormenter.

Exhaustion clawed at her. She ignored it, buried it under a layer of discipline so deep that she would die rather than yield.

The sun beat down on her, glaring off the rocks as she crossed the mesa, and she stole another glimpse at her compass, making a slight correction.

She had cut as much distance as she dared from her time. Now it was— A scream. It was short, and despairing, and abruptly cut off by the dull, heavy sound of a human body impacting a shelf of rock.

Jillian put on a burst of speed. The sound had come from in front of her. Someone ahead of her had—

At the edge of the mesa was a decline, steeper than the ascent but with better hand and foot holds. And a hundred feet below her, a rag doll crushed by an angry child, was Catherine St. Chair.

Halfway down the face was Mary Ling. The Taiwanese paused, glared up at Jillian, face tight with challenge.

Or concentration.

It could have been an accident.

Jillian’s own concentration was shot now. As she climbed down the cliff she had to pass within five feet of the woman’s body. She tried to confine her thoughts to her breathing, to the smooth flow of muscles in shoulders and hips. But then St. Clair, shattered on the rocks, suddenly moved. Her body arched, and her mouth made a wet keening sound.

From somewhere behind her came the burring whistle of a Medtech aircar coming in for a pickup. It was still seconds away. Catherine St. Clair tried to move, tried to turn. Her eyes stared at Jillian without focusing. Jillian was frozen to the rock face, unmoving, until the woman from Kenya descended past her.

She snapped out of her trance then, and started to move, but the Englishwoman stretched out her hand and tried to say something like “Help me…” except that the words came out as an indecipherable groan, all vowels and wet consonants.

Where was the Medtech vehicle? She couldn’t leave.

St. Chair’s eyes locked with hers, and Jillian saw her die, saw the lights go out, the body collapse into lifelessness.

Shaking now, Jillian completed her descent.

Her control was shattered. She was already breathing hard, her ankle felt swollen, and her shoulder had little strength.

It was a straight run now to the finish line, and she was in third place, with Mary Ling twenty feet ahead of her.

Jillian bore down, willed her legs to pump faster and faster, ignored the pain. Ignored everything but that final sprint to the finish line, to the reward that awaited her if she could only overcome the fatigue built up over the week of competition.

Her entire body was aflame now, but she couldn’t and wouldn’t stop. She had cut the distance between herself and the Taiwanese to perhaps ten feet, still gaining, five feet now, three feet— Then, from some unimaginable well of hidden resources, Mary Ling seemed to go into another gear, and simply pulled away from her, crossing the finish line a full eight feet ahead of Jillian Shomer.

The shock of it almost drove Jillian off her feet. Her entire body began to shake, as if every strand of connective tissue were suddenly unraveling. She lurched the last few feet, collapsed across the finish line.

She tasted dust, and defeat, and death.