Larry Niven - Achilles choice

“So what do you want from me?”

“I want their motives. Is the Council at war with itself? Crime and plagues and civil disobedience and industrial accidents — I’ve seen work that could have stopped all that. They’re not just accidents and happenstance and unavoidable turmoil.”

“You’re way out of your depth.”

“I went through the public records. You’ve been representing Transportation, and Trans has been angling for a twelve percent increase in its rates shipping oil for Energy and Pan-Latin Industrial. Two days after the disruption of your nervous system, they settled for six and a half percent.”

“I don’t see—”

She was so tired of lies. The cityscape blurred in her vision. She closed her eyes, and the lights danced on her eyelids. “Sure you do, Donny. Within ten hours of your little problem, there were several ‘events’ involving your section leaders. A thrombosis in Bangkok. A myocardial infarction in Vienna. I counted twelve apparently unconnected events.”

“Just where is this leading you, Jillian?”

“The Council is lying. They can’t deliver on their promises. I’m not even sure they want to.”

He turned up the collar on his robe. His face was hard. “I don’t have anything to say to you. Your time is up.”

“Donny—”

“Publish and be damned.”

“No, no.” She half laughed. “They’d never let me do that anyway, but Donny, I know about your illiteracy paper! It would have worked. We could have cut crime, human misery, violence. They chose not to. Why? And why did you let them buy you off?”

He stared at her, silent. He tried to twist away when she reached out to grasp his wrist, but her fingers dug in and held.

“The man who wrote that paper had compassion,” she said urgently. “Insight. He cared, Donny. Look at yourself now. You don’t believe in anything anymore. Did you know that your little bedmate killed Catherine St. Clair with a rock? Do you care?” It might have been her imagination, but Donny seemed to shiver. “What will you bet that nothing will be done about it? It isn’t justice they’re after, Donny. They want the best and the brightest to kill each other scrabbling to the top. They swallow our data whole, and use it or don’t use it, but us they throw away. When they let someone like you through, you’re a damned pet puppy.

“Tell me the truth, Donny. Make a dying woman happy.”

A floatcar spun up into its flight pattern, the headlamps flashing across Donny. His handsome face was a mask of pain, of anger, of misery. After a long pause, he spoke.

“All right. The truth. But it won’t make you happy, Jillian.

“It’s not a war. A domination game, maybe. A few people die. Check the numbers on a single major battle in World War Two and tell me we’re not better off.

“Everybody’s better off—”

“And the babies who die in poverty? Donny, if you can reduce crime and human misery by improving the schools, you can increase it by reducing the standard of education. How many little nudges has the Council used to weaken governments, destroy the faith of the voters, strengthen the corporations?”

“Jillian—”

“How much have you kept yourself from seeing, Donny? How about— Oh, my God.”

“Conspiracy theories are old stuff. They can even be fun if you…” He saw her shock. “What?”

“Jesus Christ, I just saw it, just now. It’s so blasted obvious once you think of it. Don’t you see how the Council has been at war with the nations? They control the Olympiad. How many papers besides yours have been classified, Donny? For at least forty years the Council has had the best minds on the planet helping them undermine participatory government.”

“Shit.”

Jillian waited, but that was all Donny had to say. He believed her. It was real.

She asked, “Who’s the Old Bastard, Donny?”

“I don’t know,” he said dully. “I’ve never seen him.”

“It’s a him? Not a her or a them?”

Donny shrugged. “The rumor is about an old man. The Council is waiting for him to die. He can’t last much longer, they say. He’s behind all of this. You want to blame someone, find him.” He pulled his robe tight, and turned away from her. “Leave me alone, Shomer. I don’t want to know about any of this. I don’t care what happens to you. Just… leave me to hell alone.”

“You were the dream,” she said contemptuously, stepping back away from him.

“I have to tell them we talked, dear heart. They’ll know already, or they might. If they’ve been listening, you’re dead. They don’t need you, and if you’re right about the nations… you’re just dead.” He shivered. “Goddamn you for telling me that.”

“Donny Crawford.” She spoke the name almost reverently. “I guess everyone dies in the Olympiad, huh, Donny?” She turned away abruptly.

“Goddamn you!”

But she was already dropping down the staircase, quick but quiet, in a fellrunner’s controlled descent.

Her body flamed with tension. Her instinct was to work it off.

She walked for half an hour, wanting to run but not wanting to be conspicuous, until chance brought her to the gymnasts’ stadium.

The guards didn’t stop her. The few workmen ignored her. She tried running, sprinting over and over around the indoor track until her legs and lungs burned and she was dizzy and nauseous with fatigue. From there she went to yoga, feeling the twists and turns clicking her spine into position effortlessly, handstanding, and bending herself into knots. She found a set of parallel bars, kipped up and spun into a series of free-form exercises that would have won a perfect ten only forty years ago. She was laughing, and crying.

Her body was perfect.

Her body was dying.

She was sweat-soaked and steaming when she left. An orange dawn caught her by surprise.

She was ravenous.

She found a restaurant just as it was opening. The waiter was smitten; she enjoyed that. She was the only customer. She ordered like an army battalion, and watched the waiter’s jaw sag.

For all of this time she was wondering how she would die.

The Council would know of her conversation with Donny. They might know now… or not; they couldn’t monitor every conversation on planet Earth. But because they might know, Donny would tell them.

They couldn’t afford to allow her to live.

Someone would come for her. Or a car would crash. Or botulism would develop in her food. My God, have I really eaten that much? She was pleasantly full, with just room for more coffee. And she might as well enjoy herself, because it seemed she was out of answers.

If she could tell the people…

But They controlled the media. No message would get out.

Beverly’s last message. It is theoretically possible for a single human being to control fifty-four percent of world economic activity, fortyeight percent of political activity…

But Beverly had been talking about the Old Bastard. Any Council member would control much less.

The media could not be perfectly controlled.

Close enough, though, probably. (They hadn’t used the botulism yet. She felt wonderful. She was even getting used to Greek coffee.) What would she have to do to get a message out? Hijack a video station?

A family of six drifted in. Could these… no. The four boys were suspiciously well behaved, but still too young to be professional assassins.

— Hijack a spacecraft. She could use it to control a relay satellite and really blanket the world with her story.

The restaurant wasn’t hers anymore, so she left. She ran two miles along the strand, on wet sand, sprinting backward, passing other runners as if they were jogging through quicksand.