Achilles choice

Chapter 8

Muscles must be stimulated to contract. In the case of skeletal muscle, the muscle making up the formative body, stimulation is in the form of a chemical neurotransmitter released by nerve endings.

Diseases like myasthenia gravis which involve profound muscle weakness are often related to disturbances in neurotransmitter release, uptake, or clearance. As a result, only feeble muscle contractions can take place.

Governing the entire nervous system is a complex system of cells in the brain stem known as the reticular formation. Early anatomists postulated a diffuse net of neurons and fibres, a sort of neural excelsior, providing unspecified functions for the surrounding cranial nerve nuclei.

Later research demonstrated conclusively the importance of this area in the control of critical body functions such as respiration and circulation. It controls the entire spectrum of awareness, everything from total alert down to deep coma.

In fact, the brain stem reticular core is the only intracranial neural structure without which life is impossible.

It is here that the Boosters perform their delicate magic, creating, in a sense, a “disease” which forces the body to function at greater than ordinary levels, at enormous cost to nervous system, skeletal muscles, and finally, sanity itself.

Bursts of color flooded Jillian’s mind as the neurosurgeons carefully probed. The computers modeled her brain. Human surgeons operated on the model, the moves recorded in time-delay. Was the stroke perfect? Did it violate any part of that fifty ounces of jellied miracle? Every kiss of steel or thread of light could be edited to a millimeter or a microsecond, practiced in the machine, and only when the surgical team agreed, played back through the robotic arms.

Perfection.

They probed a nerve here, retreated, asked a gentle question there.

What color, Jillian? What sound? What smell? Which finger? What taste?

Rehooking nerves, investigating cautiously, carefully. -

At times she was allowed to slide into total unconsciousness. At other times she was completely awake, staring at a glaringly white tiled ceiling in a stainlesssteel room. Flatscreens and vidscreens pulsed with slow fire, unraveling her brain and nervous system, converting her most intimate, secret self into colorcoded displays. Coiled machinery hissed and beeped around her. And everywhere, cameras watched.

She never felt pain. Occasionally she sensed a feather of liquid pressure along her spine. Then she slid down a tunnel lined with the finest, smoothest, darkest black silk.

And was gone.

Voices. Light. Several times, Jillian swam up out of the cavern hole toward the light. It was warming, but the darkness seduced her back to unconsciousness, and she submitted to its embrace without resistance.

Safe in the darkness, Jillian completed the process of healing, and began the process of growth.

On Jillian’s second full day of wakefulness, Abner appeared at her door. A wheelchair followed him like a good dog.

His face was thinner, his eyes more sunken, his cheekbones more cruelly pronounced.

He should have seemed fatigued. Instead, there was almost a missionary gleam in his eyes, as if the fire consuming his flesh also transformed him. As if he stood on the threshold of a terrible new world. “You’ve done it.” His eyes burned through her.

She met his gaze for a few seconds, then had to turn away. She lay on her side, peering out through the window.

The sunlight looked the same. The grass outside had become speckled with tiny pink flowers, but was otherwise unchanged. The voices of those who strove in training rang with the same emotions and intensities.

If there was a difference, it lay within her. Unmistakably, irrevocably, Jillian Shomer was the new center of an alien universe.

She considered the operation itself, with its dreadful intimacy, its tender rape of the clot of pinkish jelly wherein all that was Jillian Shomer resided. That would be enough to cause such an oddness, such a feeling of separation from her own essence.

“You’ll be back on your feet in three days.” Abner touched her shoulder. “Training again in a week.”

“How long will it take?”

“It?”

“How long before it begins?”

Gripping her shoulders, his hands were cool and thin and enormous. “You’ll begin to feel it within a week. Ten days at the most. We’ve got seven weeks of training left. Most drastic reactions will start happening after the fifth week. Coordination will start increasing after the third week. New dendrites are forming now.”

Jillian felt as if his words were a cool wind lifting her, carrying her. She was floating above the bed sheets. She was suspended in a pool of lukewarm oil. The world was far away, and with each passing moment she ballooned further into an empty sky. “Did I do the right thing?”

His eyes were still bright, but cool. The fierceness had fled. Perhaps it had never been there at all. “Only you can answer that question. If you win, you won everything… not just life, but power. You’ll be one of the few who actually run the world. If you lose, at least you did the best you could. Nobody can ask for more than that.”

As he spoke the last words, a mild tremor shook his body. His eyelids fluttered. She caught a sudden whiff of sour perspiration, as if he’d had three hours of sleep and thirty cups of coffee.

“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.”