Achilles choice

Chapter 11

The vacuum tube car was wall-to-wall Olympians, their coaches and luggage. They traveled at just under orbital speed, deep underground. There were no windows, but then again there was nothing to see.

In the forward car a classic flatfilm played, electronically modified so that one Olympian after another replaced Humphrey Bogart or Katherine Hepburn aboard the African Queen. When they tired of that, they replaced the two stars with other performers. After trying a half-dozen current male matinee idols, including a gibbon who performed in Asian, they settled on a fortyish Sean Connery. To fill Hepburn’s spinster role, they recruited the image of an Australian beauty queen named Brigitte Chan-Smythe. Chan-Smythe had recently scandalized Transportation with pornographic satires of their most recent advertising campaign. Dialogue and action were enthusiastically improvised.

Conversations ran sluggishly in the aft car. Maybe the occupants felt the close quarters, or the gigatons of earth and sea above, or the pull of vacuum and the dark.

But in the middle car they eschewed passive entertainment, retracted the seats and danced. At a quarter gravity all dances were slow, to music three centuries old. Eldren Cowan taught English Regency line dancing to tapes he had brought for his Spirit Event.

Jillian curtsied to Jeff Tompkins, solemnly linked arms with him, and revolved carefully. Too much enthusiasm in low gravity could send an Olympian caroming into a wall, to the vast amusement of all but Eldren.

Gravity returned: the track led up, the cars began to slow. Jillian excused herself and made her way to the movie car.

Connery and Chan-Smythe had just sunk the German warship, and were celebrating in a manner probably envisioned, but certainly never filmed, by John Huston. With a final roar of appreciation the film was terminated, and someone conjured up a map of the subway.

Jillian just glimpsed the world-girdling network as the scale began to zero in on the deep Atlantic tunnel. on the Aegean Sea… — on Greece… — It was like watching a computer program take the Mandelbrot Set to finer and finer scale. Major subway trunks ran across continents, coast to coast, under mountains and deserts and farmland. Bigger channels yet ran beneath the oceans. The view ran up from beneath the Atlantic, took a branch that ran beneath the Aegean, out of the sea to Greece, chose from hundreds of branches. the view zeroed in on Athens, on ghostly city streets, following the moving dot that was themselves.

Funny, she’d never noticed that the world’s subway system was designed as fractals.

The cars turned smoothly; they twitched as other cars matched or detached. Presently the doors opened on light and sound.

Athens Convention Center. Hundreds of anonymous human shapes milled near the terminals, held back by ropes and security forces as they waved placards and chanted welcome. Jillian returned to her seat.

There on the narrow cushions Abner stirred restlessly from his nap. He slept a great deal lately, husbanding his energy, perhaps, or seeking in unconsciousness a muting of the ceaseless pain.

His eyes opened, took a few seconds to focus. His face was more brutally weathered by the Boost now, and his breathing was more labored. Sometimes she listened to it at night as he slept. She dreaded its irregularity, imagined that she heard in it a cry for peace, a weariness of body that extended, finally, even to the spirit which animated the withered shell.

“We’re here,” he said. His lips lifted at the corners. “I promised myself I’d make it this far.”

“We’re not done here yet, Abner.” She gripped his hand as if by strength alone she could halt his deterioration. “You can’t leave me until I’ve won.”

The subway eased through a seal, and air hissed into the lock. The Olympians hooted, hustled up out of their seats, and began to unload their gear.

She waited. Abner shouldn’t even have been on a general passenger train. He could be hurt in the press.

The aisle began to empty toward the front, and she stood, snaked out past Abner, and helped him to his feet.

Like a granddaughter helping a beloved but doddering elder to cross the street, Jillian escorted Abner, took both of their bags in tow, helped him out into the terminal.

A Greek band oompah’d its way through a bizarre medley of “God Bless America” and Transportation’s corporate anthem, “Songs from the Sky.” A few Olympians automatically stiffened to attention. Jillian scanned the Olympians until she saw Holly. The biologist was fighting hard to swallow a sardonic grin.

As they flowed toward the line of waiting shuttles they were showered by confetti and streamers, cheered, given all of the fanfare that Jillian had craved on departure from Boston. Now it was too late. Now she didn’t really give a damn.

Rain swept down in curtains, wavering across the pavement like bed sheets blowing on a clothesline. The crowd eddied like ocean waves, frantic to see the arriving athletes. She could not see faces. Their faces were darkened, backlit ovals.

A pool of light: they were close enough now for her to make out a sign printed in Greek, Japanese, and English. The English read: STOP THE OLYMPICS. The protester was clearly visible for a moment, face no longer an indistinguishable smear, now a twisting, screaming mouth and a fringe of sopping hair. Then security men moved swiftly from the sides, and he vanished into the shadows.

Some of the others strutted and posed for the crowds, flexing muscles, smiling broadly. Holly held up a briefcase containing her precious files, waving confidently to the cameras.

Holly was ready. Her studies on the immune system were complete and broken down into display mode. If they didn’t win her the gold, they might still save her from the effects of Boost.

Maybe. The world would change.

“Quite a show, isn’t it?” Abner said as their car glided away through the crowd.

The press of humanity actually thickened for the first hundred feet or so, then thinned out. Then they were on the road and heading out of the terminal.

Jillian felt like hiding. “Why do I get the feeling that I haven’t seen anything yet?”

“Because you are a bright, perceptive girl.”

The caravan to Olympic Bay took half an hour.

The floating islands were tethered in standard three-by-three resort formation. Each hosted a network of dormitories, gymnasiums, cafeterias, and entertainment facilities. They were fortified and fenced, protected on all sides: a temporary luxury community created to fill every Olympian need.

Olympic Bay glittered in the misty rain like a mythical mountain fortress, and Jillian felt her pulse race.

Ferry skimmers were coasting in on plumes of steaming foam. Helicopters and floatcars braved the wind to reach landing pads. And from every vehicle streamed Olympians and their coaches.

Jillian helped Abner onto the docking platform, hustled him to a two-passenger robot monotram. It surged forward the moment they were seated.

Abner’s thin fingers tapped against the glass, and he sighed audibly.

“What is it?” Jillian asked as they drew up to one of the condos. It rose up out of an artificial hillside on enormous aluminum stilts. An escalator rippled up the side of the hill to the main entrance. Rain was deflected by a silver awning.

“All the rest of it was just rehearsal, Jill. I can’t help you anymore.”

Was he asking permission to die? Abner seemed translucent, ephemeral.

“It may be I don’t need you,” she said in a voice she might have used with a child. “But I want you to see me win.”

His hands slid down into his lap, were still. “All right.”

She kissed his cheek as the tram stopped and the door slid open. “I’ll be in touch.”

“Please.”

A silver-garbed young man offered to carry Jillian’s luggage for her, and she declined. She shrugged the strap over her shoulder and straightened up, stepping onto the escalator.

The little monotram disappeared around a curve.

Holly waited for her at the top of the escalator. “Where’s Abner going?”

“A Medtech Intensive. He’s going to need lifesupport soon.” The wind whipped a spray of rain into her face. With the tip of her tongue she tasted it. Salt. “Real soon.”

“Is he septic?”

She shrugged. “It’s a miracle he’s hung on this long. He’ll make it another month. Bet on it.”

They stood and watched the crowd gather and thin on the dock, ebbing and surging as a tide. Holly chuckled, calculatedly changing the mood. “I’ve never seen so much healthy flesh in all my life. I wonder if the rumors are true.”

Curiosity nudged Jillian out of her pensive mood. “What rumors?”

“Ah, you know.” Holly leaned over, stagewhispered conspiratorially. “They say that the most intense sex in the known universe takes place in the Olympic villages.”

“I’ve heard that. Are you planning a little personal inquiry?”

“Certainly. A series of controlled experiments in the name of science.”

“Double-blind, I suppose.”

“I’ll keep one eye open.”

A pair of gorgeous young male attendants escorted them to their separate rooms. Jillian’s, a tall, darkly Mediterranean lad who looked usefully fit, offered to help Jillian unpack. He also offered to rub her feet, massage her lower back, or perform any other service that might be required. He was cute, but she declined.

When the door closed, she began to unpack. She placed shoes beneath her bed, tested the bed, hung pantsuits and dresses in the closet, squirreled toiletries away in the bathroom. She busied herself around and around the room, unaware that she was being watched until Holly cleared her throat from the doorway.

“You know,” the biologist said thoughtfully, “you are definitely not the same anxious little girl I met eight weeks ago.”

Jillian sat on the bed, unnaturally aware of the play of every muscle as it flexed and knotted. She felt like a bundle of live wires. “What’s the difference?”

“You — …” Holly closed her eyes, stared into the darkness for a few seconds before answering. “Your eyes don’t have any humor in them, but your mouth is smiling all the time. There’s just something a little distant about you. Detached.”

Jillian’s lips curled up, but there was no warmth in them. “Well, maybe I finally got the joke, Holly.”

Suddenly, Holly seemed very uncomfortable, found it difficult to meet Jillian’s gaze. “Uh-huh,” she said. “Well. Maybe so.”

Holly seemed in a hurry to leave, and Jillian did nothing to stop her.

Jillian stared down at her hands, felt the play of tendon and muscle in her forearms, closed her eyes to hear the slow thunder of her heartbeat.

The Boost was speeding up. She could feel the changes, feel her body growing and shifting. She wiggled her toes and could mentally isolate every tendon, muscle, and nerve fiber. Every breath reverberated hollowly in the cavern of her chest.

Where was Jillian Shomer? Here, on the edge of a bed in a strange room, in a strange place a world away from her beginnings?

And if not… then who was she?

She had wanted Abner to come with her, and was ashamed of the true reason. They spoke of companionship, of support, of coaching, directly of affection and obliquely of love. The truth was darker.

Abner was rotting inside. Impending death enshrouded him like a fetid cloak. Death was in his eyes, his movement, his precarious balance. It creaked in his voice.

Jillian Shomer, more vital than ever before, was morbidly fascinated. Abner was a living reminder of the hell which awaited her if she failed.

She felt as if she were falling through a black hole toward some ultimate encounter with a Jillian that had never been.

Jillian looked up at the wall clock, and jumped. Two hours had passed, time during which she sat motionless, listened to her body grow and change, felt the heat as her blood raced to remove toxins and rebuild tissue.

She shucked herself out of her clothes, lay back, told the ceiling light to shut down.

There were ways to deal with jet lag. Tension, too. Boost made it even easier.

She writhed in the dark, stretching and tensing each muscle in individual sequence. Back, side, belly… rolled out of bed, dressed, moved into the silent hallways. From far away, another floor perhaps, came sounds of merriment. She saw no one in the halls.

Outside the rain had stilled, leaving the silver trail of the escalator glistening with its memory. She took the escalator down two levels, and caught a submarine tram to the shore.

The little tube cars were nine parts entertainment excursion and one part practical transportation. Fish slipped in and out of the floodlamps. Jillian stared up through the transparent tram walls as they hissed along. The water turned black just a few yards beyond the lamps. Fish flashed to life, then vanished utterly. There might have been nothing below her or above her, or anything at all in the universe except this tiny capsule cruising through an endless sea.

A young woman in a silver blazer with an Olympic patch greeted her at a shoreside tram station. In heavily accented English she asked if Jillian would require a limousine, or an escort. Jillian demurred, and mounted the upward escalator alone.

What the night required was a walk. The mists of evening were cleansing, comforting. The stadia were less than a mile from the dock.

Electricians and cameramen, carpenters and painters were still busy, working like a colony of welldisciplined termites to prepare the stadia and surrounding environs. The main stadium rose like the Coliseum of old, a structure a quarter mile long and fifteen stories high, with seats for a hundred thousand spectators.

Just as Olympians had been arriving half the night, so had their audience. From all over the world they came, flooding the hotels in Athens, overflowing out to smaller artificial islands in the bay. Live spectator seating in three different arenas, holo feeds winging out to the world and beyond, the Olympiad would be watched by three billion people. Those who stayed home would have a better view.

They were a legion of three thousand, the new gladiators, joined in mortal combat with something infinitely more terrible than lions.

Jillian stood in the shadows, watching: someone else had had the inspiration for a late-night stroll.

A slender man in a silver windbreaker was running laps on the track. He was singing as he ran. His voice was beautifully cultured, and barely seemed affected by the rigors of a pace that accelerated to something near sprinting. As he circled the track and came closer she could make out the words he sang:

As he passed her she saw the Bulgarian flag on the back of his jacket, beneath Agricorp’s crossed stalks of wheat. She recognized him from a Newsweek loop on the transport in from Denver.

He slowed to a jog and ran out of the stadium, trailing song behind.

Jillian walked out to the middle of the field, sat cross-legged in the wet grass. Uncounted tons of concrete, tens of thousands of foam-steel girders, millions of man-hours had gone into building this stadium.

Here, track-and-field events would take place.

A roofed oval to the north was reserved for swimming and gymnastics, weight lifting and judo, fencing and archery and the other indoor events.

A third location, also domed, would house the academic and esthetic events. Chess, flight simulation, computer art, oral interpretation, all of the skills that would mean success for some and disaster for others.

In these three stadia, and in a selected location in the mountains to the north, Jillian would display her gifts and talents. Here she would stretch her body and mind and heart to the maximum. She prayed that it would be enough.

She noticed something. For the first time in her life, as she prayed, there was no sense of praying to something outside herself. Her prayer was directed to a new Jillian, the creature growing inside a chrysalis composed of the old Jillian’s hair and eyes and hopes and fears. Splitting away now. Another creature. Stronger. Fiercer.

It heard her prayer, and hissed its savage reply.

The noon sun gleamed down on them. Row after glittering row they came, the Olympians. They carried, according to their allegiances, corporate or national banners. Three thousand strong, every human color, from every corner of the planet they came.

Jillian stood shoulder to shoulder with strangers. She stole a glance back through the pack. Holly was back there, somewhere. They couldn’t stand together: Holly owed allegiance to Medtech, as Osa did to Agricorp.

She peered around, caught sight of Mary Ling, the tiny Taiwanese girl said to be one of the toughest competitors in the fellrunning division.

But Ling wasn’t as formidable as Catherine St. Clair, the English Medtech chemist who was not only a top fellrunner, but had worked on the five-man British Academy of Science team which garnered last year’s Nobel Prize in medicine. St. Clair was a strong chess player and a stunning redhead to boot. Jillian gritted her teeth.

So they marched in their pockets and rows, carrying their banners and singing their songs, saluting the crowd that overflowed the stands and spread out across the world. They were best of the best, three thousand of the finest minds and bodies that had ever strode the planet.

Within seven years, ninety-eight percent of them would be dead. There were just fifty open slots among the Linked.

As the anthems of two dozen nations and sixteen corporations played, they marched. Speeches were made. Fireworks were ignited, and a gigantic OneWorld hologram, the Council’s ultimate emblem, rotated overhead.

From the north corner of the stadium, a lone figure ran with the grace of a gazelle, carrying on high a torch which smoked and flickered in the still air.

The stadium fell into a hush, and every eye watched as a thin, pale man entered the stands and sprinted up a carpeted stair to touch the flame to the official Olympic torch.

The crowd relaxed into a collective sigh, and then exploded into applause.

The Olympics had begun.