Larry Niven - Achilles choice

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.

Jillian faced Osa across the mat.

She ignored the glare of the lights and the thirty pairs of eyes watching them. Her whole world was the stocky blond dynamo before her. They circled each other lightly, joined implacably in a combative minuet, wary and nervous as hungry cats.

Confidence and a barely leashed anger boiled within her. Discipline kept a lid on it: the confidence was misplaced. She hadn’t been Boosted long enough, hadn’t gained enough strength. On the other hand, she would put her timing against anyone in the world.

She had a hole card: Osa held her in contempt. Never Underestimate Your Enemy. Combat’s deadliest sin. Jillian could surprise the Swedish girl, get to her and take advantage of that contempt and uncertainty before the stronger woman had an opportunity to adjust.

A sudden shift of balance, a hula-movement with hips feinting one way, and shoulders the other. A moment of carefully judged clumsiness, swiftly compensated -

Oh, Osa. I Boosted too late. I’m angry and desperate. Come. Take me.

To a mathematician, judo is a matter of balance points and coefficients of friction, equations of mass and momentum and inertia.

Imagine a cone which must roll onto its edge in order to move, exchanging stability for mobility. It is this movement, in the service of aggression or defense, advance or retreat, that creates vulnerability.

Osa swooped to the attack. Her hands, seeking grips on Jillian’s gi, were as light as butterflies. Deceptively, hypnotically gentle. Jillian didn’t let them deceive her. Once they gained purchase, once Osa found the flaw in her balance, the butterflies would become rocs, talons which lifted and twisted and thundered Jillian down to the mat.

Jillian played fear, played passivity, retreat. She let her breathing catch raggedly, as if fatigued by apprehension. Three times in a minute, Jillian flinched into abortive attacks, barely countering Osa’s aggressive defense in time.

Osa’s lips pressed together in a pale line, the edges beginning to twitch upward as she gained confidence.

Jillian inhaled, relaxing. Then in the middle of the breath, exhaled explosively, attacking with a feral intensity that no human being could have anticipated or countered.

With timing perfect to the millisecond, Jillian swept Osa’s ankle at the instant when weight transferred from one leg to the other. It was as if the Swedish girl had trod on the proverbial banana peel. They crashed to the mat together, Jillian in control.

The rest happened in a single cycle of breath:

Moving in the eerie slowmotion world created by total focus, she trapped Osa’s forearm in her right armpit, swung her legs up in a body scissors. As they hit the mat she adjusted the scissors so that her ankles pinioned Osa’s throat.

Osa heaved once, titanically, twisted like a beached eel, tensed her throat and arm and drummed her heels on the mat seeking balance that Jillian refused to let her find.

Another spasm-but Jillian only bore down more viciously.

And then she slapped Jillian’s leg, choosing submission over unconsciousness or injury.

Osa coughed, then rolled away as Jillian released her, face dark with anger.

Jillian heaved for air, speckles of light dancing in her eyes, muscles shaking with the sudden intensity of the effort.

For ten seconds the two women stared at each other, motionless, twin ivory images carved with flame.

Then, slowly, Osa regained composure and forced herself to smile.

She stood as Jillian stood. Osa flicked imaginary dust from her gi, still eyeing her opponent with new respect.

Then slowly, and with immense solemnity, she bowed.

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.