Larry Niven - Achilles choice

“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.