Larry Niven - Achilles choice

She hugged his arm, feeling pleasantly woozy. Today had been rough-endless drills on the judo mat, with a heavy emphasis on explosive movement.

She felt stronger, fitter, more flexible than ever before in her life. Abner had been an ideal choice for coach.

“I was hoping,” she began. “You know, I was never convinced that Boost was necessary, if you could bring all of—”

He made a soft, ugly sound, and she shut up, dismayed by his expression.

“No, Jillian. I’ve got spies, hon. I’ve been able to analyze data from Communications, Zimbabwe, and Agricorp. You’d never make it.”

Her hand withdrew from his. Her skin felt damp and cold.

“Not a chance?”

“No,” he whispered. “And with the twenty percent advantage of Boosting, you still only have a fifty percent chance of silver. You waited too long, Jillian. You should have Boosted four weeks ago, if that was what you were going to do.”

Lights in the room seemed to darken, and the sound of her own breathing grew louder. Her vidscreen image swelled, and Jillian watched herself running and running, and running: now just a nervous system, now a shadow-map of muscular tensions, now a computer animation of another, idealized Jillian running on an endless track toward an impossibly far horizon.

And almost paralyzed with horror, she heard herself say: “That settles it then.”

“I know,” he said, as kindly as an executioner could. “I’ve always known.”

“How did you know?” Her voice was as lost and lonely as a child’s.

“Because you don’t give up,” he said.

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.