Achilles choice

Chapter 9

I/O error 1154.

The wafer containing Beverly’s personality slid back out of the processor. It had just arrived this morning from Massachusetts. Jillian’s hand shook.

They still wouldn’t let her load Beverly into the main processor.

Be a good little girl. Play along, and maybe, just maybe, you’ll see Beverly again.

Jillian slid her finger down the precious golden Simulacrum module. Without the slightest trace of selfconsciousness, she raised the wafer and touched her lips to its cool surface.

“Sleep well, Bev,” she whispered.

She’d be good.

A good little robot she was, and They knew where the buttons were. It would be most savagely satisfying to shake their predictions… but in fact their predictions were working out fine. Jillian Shomer had given up prying into secret corners, had accepted the Boost treatment, had abandoned the topic of her mother’s death. And hadn’t given up on Beverly; she kept trying to activate the program, knowing it wouldn’t work and trying, trying… telling herself she was only misdirecting Them.

Were they wrong?

High time, it was, for any act that would let Jillian show herself that she wasn’t a good little robot. But all she could think of was to work on her thesis and wait to heal.

Abner watched her from a shadowed corner of the gymnasium. Jillian was already stretching and balancing her body, moving from yoga Plow into Cobra and then out into the full split of the Tortoise pose with a gymnast’s grace. He waited until she’d levered her legs out to a hundred and eighty degrees, rolled stomach then chest and chin down to the mat, before he extended a sheaf of papers with a hand-lettered cover.

“Pushkin’s paper,” he said. “I had some trouble finding it.”

She opened her eyes, peeped up at him. “Gimme.” She sighed into her long thigh muscles, ordering them to stop quivering, and hiked herself up to her elbows. She started reading.

The approach wasn’t like her own, but Pushkin’s ideas were fresh, and vital, and impressively presented. He had deserved that gold.

And there was something familiar about the paper, something about the way Pushkin phrased his thoughts. “Was this delivered in Russian?”

“Sure. Straighten your back.”

“Sorry. Who translated? The phrasing seems familiar.”

He took it back, thumbed it a bit. “… Doesn’t say. I don’t know.”

As she browsed it, she was jolted again and again by the careful, logical juxtaposing of ideas. But there was nothing she could use, in fact at this late date it was almost distracting. She handed it up to him.

“Fascinating. Save this for me, for after the competition, would you? Pushkin seems to have been a first-class mind.”

Abner was watching one of the judo team tussle with the Grappler. “They must have found flaws. He wasn’t well rounded. Overall, he barely took a bronze.”

“Flaws? Then why classify it? Why not let everybody look at it, and judge for themselves? The idea is to reduce the level of violent crimes.”

Abner looked weary. “Is it?”

She didn’t answer. Abner left her to her rigors.

The Council’s motives were not her own. Council, or Inner Circle, or Old Bastard: if crime control was secondary to Them, then what did they consider important?

She shouldn’t have read Pushkin’s paper. It had been classified. Abner had put himself at risk to give it to her, and she was in trouble enough already.

She couldn’t discuss it with Abner. Abner was ill. Soon enough he would be raving in pain or babbling helplessly as his brain was electrostimulated into morpheme overload. What Jillian discussed with Abner would not remain private. If he spoke of the paper, it would be too late for anyone to punish him, and she could deny knowledge of its restricted status. They couldn’t squash people for every little infraction.

They? Or Donny’s Olympic “Old Bastard”?

Jillian found she was building a mental image of him. Mirroring her emotional state, the first image was an octopus with a human face. She laughed at herself, but the laughter was darkly fringed.

Octopus? Big, oversized head, brain, intellect. Tentacles branched and branched again, in the fashion of fractals. An infinity of tentacles, a tentacle in every aspect of human culture. Augmented intelligence too high for meaningful measurement. Insanely ambitious. A strength of ego that only longevity and invulnerability-immortality-could create or support. Awesomely intuitive, pathologically ruthless, and possessed of a genius for organization.

Seventy years ago, he’d already been powerful enough to see his path to the top of the Council. He may have created the Council.

A programmer? An engineer? Likely to have those talents, among others. He must have mastered cybernetic technology early. The technology that made it possible for the Council to govern the world. The Old Bastard might have built the Council, and the technology, too!

When she thought of all that such a person would have to have done, and all that he had to be, it was difficult not to admire him. And for that admiration to shift from the general to the specific, from an intellectual position to a disturbingly emotional one, to a physical warmth— Shut it down, Jillian. At the core of all of that organization and intellect there lurks the very essence of chaos.

Beverly would have said, All right, Miss Hot Pants. Could we by God get back to business?

But Beverly was being held for ransom. Jillian could still work, but being forced to use generic programming was like being blinded or deafened.

There had to be a better way. There had to.

“Holly?”

“Jillian. How you doing?” Holly looked up. She had been staring at her screen, her hands folded in her lap.

“Not ready to fight Osa yet. I thought I could work on my thesis while I heal, but… hell. I need a new direction. How are you doing? Can we take the death out of Boost?”

“I don’t have a short answer—”

“I was wondering if… Holly, you know I’m working with chaos theory?”

“Sure.”

“Some problems are unsolvable because they’re very sensitive to initial conditions. What if I were to do a fractal analysis of Boost, using your data?”

Holly’s eyes were not hostile, but wary. “And what if I’ve been trying to trisect the angle?”

“If you could prove it was impossible, you’d get gold.” Holly stared. “No fertilizer, Holly, it can be very important to prove something’s impossible.”

“No fertilizer?”

Jillian flushed and shrugged.

Holly grinned happily at Jillian’s embarrassment. “Repeat after me. Shhh—come on, the whole world won’t stare in horror if you use the S word.”

Jillian wagged her head, but giggled. “I just can’t.”

“Girl, I don’t know what we’re going to do with you. All right. What do you need?”

“Well, when they learned that about weather control, it started a whole new science. You can’t predict weather more than three, four days ahead. Could that be true of a Boosted athlete’s body chemistry?”

“What is it you want?”

“Let’s play a little. If we find something, you’ll still have to finish the work yourself. You’d have to invest a few months learning fractal geometry. If we find nothing but blind alleys, you invest nothing. See? And maybe I can come at something from a different angle.”

For the next couple of days they worked at Holly’s computer, with Holly on the keyboard.

That was justifiable. It was Holly’s equipment, and she was familiar with it. Jillian had not told Holly how bad it could be if They caught Jillian using Holly’s systems.

So Jillian watched Holly at work, and speculated aloud, and asked questions.

“How expensive would it be to just Link everybody? Every Boosted Olympic contender. That’s the price we’re trying to undercut.”

Holly laughed. She had a number already in file… a ballpark guess. A good deal of what made the Linked what they were, was proprietary. But it was an outrageous sum.

“Sonofagun—”

“Gun? Come on, will you. Try again. Rhymes with witch—”

“Holly!”

“Oh, all right.”

“Now, let’s see. We shouldn’t have trouble beating that. How about prosthetics?”

“Haven’t you noticed Abner’s prosthetics? The trouble is, when your nerves go, they don’t reach the prosthetics.”

“Mmm. Waldos? Teleoperated limbs. Transmitter in the brain. Send signals directly to the limbs.”

“Losing your limbs isn’t the biggest problem, Jillian. Deterioration goes on. I’m trying to… Well, one thing at a time. Waldos?”

“Yeah. What’s the state-of-the-art with waldos? Why don’t they see more use? I used to wonder why the old Rockwell Shuttle didn’t have a waldo hand in the cargo bay. Do they cost too much? How dependable are they?”

They probed.

Your basic waldo was a hand-shaped machine that moved the way your hand moved. It could be any size; it could be inhumanly strong or inhumanly delicate. Waldos were generally used in the most alien environments: the Moon, asteroids, underseas, the ground receptors for orbiting solar collectors (patches of desert running at 360 degrees Fahrenheit), the interiors of fusion plants.

The tractor-mounted waldos used undersea seemed the best model. Those would not be subject to lightspeed delays or deterioration due to radiation. They weren’t cheap, as it turned out. Still… arms and legs moved by transmitters in the brain should cost factor-of-fifty less than continually monitoring a Donny Crawford from orbit.

“But waldos aren’t that dependable, either,” Holly pointed out.

“Let’s get some figures on that.”

“What kind?”

“Holly, if my waldo sometimes spills the coffee, that’s okay. I might accept low reliability there, even if a bigger waldo would be spilling molten metal all over a foundry.”

“Well, darn. See what you mean.” Holly went after industrial accident reports, current.

“How fast is this technology improving?”

Holly summoned older records. Industrial accidents seemed to come in spurts. Holly said, “Graphs of chaotic events tend to have spikes in them, don’t they?”

“Yeah. Say you’re inoculating against AIDS or cancer. All of a sudden people are getting sick again, and you can’t figure why. It’s just the way of things. Let’s print these out, shall we?” The graphs didn’t look quite right.

Chaos tends to come in double parallel curves; look closer and they double again, and again. These didn’t. You could find the usual doubling pairs, but Jillian could see other lines.

During the past twenty years there had been waves of accidents, six tall spikes, with not much between. Lilith Shomer had died right at the peak of one of those spikes.

Jillian didn’t have to watch the old tapes again. She’d memorized them long ago.

Lilith Shomer, marine biologist for Agricorp, had died in an undersea mining accident due to the failure of a waldo. A pillow lava hill had crumbled, the signal to a waldo had been interrupted, the waldo arm hadn’t shut off. Huge steel fingers had ripped a dome open and spilled its air.

It was an accident. Sure it was. But a great many accidents had happened in the shellfish ranches offshore from the California coast, in April of 2049.

Beyond that Jillian would be guessing. From the way things were reported, you’d think intercorporate conflict was dissolved with a wave of the Counselor wand. But enough government and civilian craft, services, and products had been involved to leave traces.

Holly asked, “You getting anything?”

“I’ve gotten us way off the subject, is what. We need Link technology to make waldo limbs work. And that’s classified.”

She was pretty good, Saturn thought. Holly Lakein’s thesis, Holly’s equipment, Holly’s tappity-tap style… her “fist,” an old-time telegraph operator would have said. But certain topics had been flagged by Mining and Forestry (which was what Saturn noticed first) and Holly and Jillian Shomer were Olympic contenders living in the same dorm.

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.