Larry Niven - Achilles choice

The world was a fracturing dike to Saturn, and he was a little Dutch boy with a thousand busy wet fingers.

Abner was conscious, but barely so. The machines breathed for him, filtered his blood, kept the pain at bay.

Some pain remained. He dared not slip too deeply into narcosis. Blocking the nerves electrically left him in a disassociated state that unraveled sanity even more swiftly.

He desperately wanted to see Jillian compete.

She visited him daily, speaking to him of strategy, or trivial things, and he wondered if she knew how he had lied to her.

A white lie, certainly. He’d made a mistake, mentioning the illiteracy paper. No Russian had written it. Her precious Donny had won gold with the damned thing.

The paper had won gold, and then been buried, damn them all to hell.

On the holoscreen, Jillian approached the mat, bowed to her second opponent.

She closed, and the Boost-accelerated reflexes of both opponents made the action a blur. Ordinarily he would have slowed the images down, inspected them frame by frame. But he was so tired, and hurt so badly. Only one more thing now, and he could let go.

His attention had wandered. Jillian was in a pretzel with her opponent, a straining tangle of arms and legs. The other girl’s shoulders were pinned to the mat.

Jillian stood, victorious.

Abner closed his eyes, smiling, as the screen went dark. The nurses had programmed it to turn on only when Jillian was competing, to allow him to save his strength. Abner slipped away into an uneasy sleep, a dim dream world, its horizon boiling black with locusts.

A buzzing filled the room. He opened his eyes, managed to rub some of the gum out of them.

Jillian. Osa. Competing for gold.

“Oh, Jillian. Darn it all to heck.” He mentally repeated that last sentence, and gloomily decided that Jillian was a bad influence.

He had hoped that the Scandinavian would have fouled out, or been beaten, or broken an arm. Anything to keep her away from Jillian.

They went at each other like a pair of dervishes. Long phrases of careful circling, light touches, and then a blinding flurry of movement. Osa took her opponent dead seriously this time, used her phenomenal agility to keep Jillian from closing.

Then… an opening. Jillian took Osa to the mat, slamming her down so brutally hard that Abner winced and grinned at the same time.

Jillian went for the pin… was straining for the hold…

And went limp. Abner cursed. Osa had shammed, let Jillian try to pin, and had worked herself into a choking position.

The screen went black.

Fellrunning was still a hope, but he was so tired.

And the pain. He just couldn’t take the pain much longer. He would have to ask for drugs, and Blocking. And then he would slide down that final hole, and couldn’t be sure of ever coming up again.

There was still something to say to Jillian, but he could no longer be sure of his ability to say it.

Jillian had two chances at the athletic events. The judo which had so tested her body and spirit had yielded a respectable silver. The fractal art presentation had yielded silver, but her thesis on chaos theory and sociology had only earned a bronze. Not good enough. The fellrunning had become do-or-die.

Traditionally, fellrunning is a European sport. Not until the third Olympiad had it become a truly international pastime. Competitors traverse a ten-kilometer obstacle course, facing natural and artificial barriers.

There should have been eleven women on line with Jillian. Nine were there. Two were Boosted veterans who had no chance of linking, who had been quietly removed from the Olympiad in the name of security.

Four of the women, including St. Clair, were of purely European extraction. Three held varying degrees of African blood in their veins. One was the sinewy Taiwanese, Mary Ling.

Jillian settled down into a comfortable crouch, heel against the block, and waited.

The changes within her body had peaked-she hoped. She felt all whipcord and whalebone, every nerve fiber aflame. She glared at the other women on the line, and their eyes held no warmer welcome.

She wouldn’t just beat them. She would crush them. The gun sounded. Jillian exploded out of the blocks. Fellrunning is conducted over savage, broken terrain: rocks, boulders, ravines. There was no clearly marked path, and it was up to each participant to make her way through the course to a predetermined finish line in a minimum of time.

She could go around, stay to level ground, and add miles to her run. She could go directly over, using pitons, or she could “cut the edges,” free climbing, trusting her agility and strength to deal with the obstacles as they came.

Jillian paused, consulting her compass. She was heading northwest. It was eleven in the morning, and the sun would begin its descent soon. She fixed its arc in her mind, swore to herself that she wouldn’t consult the compass again, and began to climb.

Thirty yards to her left, Mary Ling was ascending a pile of boulders with the confidence of a spider monkey.

Jillian herself had screwed her concentration down to a narrow beam. “Black dot” focus, she called it. She was aware of the rest of the world, even if concentrating on the next rock, the next step, the next moment.

“White dot” focus would build an attention so extreme that the rest of the world seemed to disappear. Fine for playing chess. Dangerous for a fellrunner.

She had reached the top of a cairn of rock, pulling herself up into shadow, breathing deeply and evenly. One more toehold would bring her to safety.

She sensed more than saw the rock as it fell. Jillian released her left hand’s grip, swung out to the right as the rock whistled past.

Her reflexive swing back to the left took her into the path of a second rock. It glanced off the cliff face next to her arm, and struck her shoulder.

Jillian’s left side went numb. She skidded, lost her purchase and found it again. Gasping, she stared down the column of rock. If she had fallen, it would have meant a fractured leg, at the least.

And hadn’t there been a flicker of a human shadow up above her? And hadn’t she heard something very like retreating footsteps?

She hung there, distant from the pain in her shoulder, gasping. She began to climb again, more slowly now. Her mind burned with anger, and that anger pushed aside all fatigue, all fear, leaving only the climb.

She reached the level, and glanced around swiftly, crouching. Nothing. A floatcar whirred up behind her, its camera doubtless recording her intrepid efforts.

She ran now, picking her way through the rocks as quickly as she could. The anger seethed in her, fueled by suspicion, and the urge to find her tormenter.

Exhaustion clawed at her. She ignored it, buried it under a layer of discipline so deep that she would die rather than yield.

The sun beat down on her, glaring off the rocks as she crossed the mesa, and she stole another glimpse at her compass, making a slight correction.

She had cut as much distance as she dared from her time. Now it was— A scream. It was short, and despairing, and abruptly cut off by the dull, heavy sound of a human body impacting a shelf of rock.

Jillian put on a burst of speed. The sound had come from in front of her. Someone ahead of her had—

At the edge of the mesa was a decline, steeper than the ascent but with better hand and foot holds. And a hundred feet below her, a rag doll crushed by an angry child, was Catherine St. Chair.

Halfway down the face was Mary Ling. The Taiwanese paused, glared up at Jillian, face tight with challenge.

Or concentration.

It could have been an accident.

Jillian’s own concentration was shot now. As she climbed down the cliff she had to pass within five feet of the woman’s body. She tried to confine her thoughts to her breathing, to the smooth flow of muscles in shoulders and hips. But then St. Clair, shattered on the rocks, suddenly moved. Her body arched, and her mouth made a wet keening sound.