Larry Niven - Achilles choice

He leaned back into his seat. The clownish grin disappeared. “Would I have your skill? Your basic talent?”

“Better still. You could have yours.”

“This old man blesses you.”

“Stop stalling. Would you take the Boost?”

He grinned crookedly. “In a hot second.” And the car cruised away.

Jillian lugged her belongings into the building, up the stairs. A tickle of perspiration had wormed its way down her back by the time she reached the second level. Her footsteps echoed emptily in the deserted hallway. She heard distant shouts and thumps of exertion.

She leaned her forehead against one of the windows, and looked out over an outdoor track.

A battery of scanning devices were posted at sixteenth marks on a half-mile oval. Lithe figures jogged, sprinted, leapt. Her heart trip-hammered.

The fifty-foot ribbed dome to the east would be the sports medicine facility. There, her mind and body would be taxed to the maximum.

And over there… a converted dormitory, given now to…

“That’s the academic center,” a male voice said behind her. She spun to face a young man of perhaps twenty-five years. His massively muscular body strained at a gold-trim warm-up jacket. A soft, round face, with bright green eyes framed by extremely black hair. He was pushing a small covered cart.

“What?”

“That’s the academic center,” he said almost apologetically. “I figured that you were looking at it, and maybe wondering.” He wiped huge hands on his red, white, and blue nylon sweat pants, and offered one to Jillian. “Hi. Jeff Tompkins.”

“Jillian Shomer. I saw you at the last Olympiad. You went bronze, didn’t you?”

His answering smile was shy, a little nervous. “Yeah. This is my last chance.” He bit back some other comment, and muscles along the base of his jaw leapt.

“Ah-what’s in the cart?” Jillian asked. That twitch at his jaw was fascinating. Now that she noticed it, it seemed to pulse regularly, like a little lizard running around under his skin.

He smiled sheepishly again, and lifted the lid.

Jillian sucked in her breath. “You did this?”

He nodded.

The marvel was perhaps seventeen inches along the base. Jeff Tompkins had carved an ivory model of a palatial estate, complete with towers and gardens and arches and miniature fountains, pillars and statues and even a tiny horse-drawn carriage at a miniature main gate.

“What in the world?”

“Oh,” he said vaguely. “It’s the palace built by Le Vau and Mansart for Louis XIV. At Versailles, of course.” He pointed, his thick fingers so much larger than the miniature work that Jillian could hardly believe her eyes. “See here? The Cour d’Honneur, with little statues of Richelieu, and Du Guesclin, and Louis of course…” His voice grew absent. “The Cour Royale, and behind that the Cour de Marbre… the palace Chapelle was started by Mansart in 1699, but Robert de Cotte finished it… I need to touch it up. I was worried about how it would travel.”

“My God. It’s boggling. How long…?”

He shrugged. “Four years. I started right after last Athens. I figured, you know, better go for it.”

She touched it gingerly. “Elephant ivory…?”

“Of course not. Mammoth. Part of the ‘17 Siberian excavation.” A faint smile curled his thin lips. “Well, better go. Welcome to the club, Jillian. I sure wish you the best of luck.” He turned and headed down the hall, pushing his cart with its precious cargo.

Jillian watched Jeff until he disappeared around the corner, and then took her rucksack down to room 303. She nudged the door open with her foot.

A short black woman sat at a computer table. She wore cutoffs that exposed corded calves and thighs and a powerful upper body. Her tightly curled hair was cropped very short. When Jillian entered the room, the woman rose and spun with that liquid grace which implies perfect coordination. The shorter woman appraised her for a moment, and then grinned hugely.

“You must be Jillian Shomer. Fractals and judo?”

“And fellrunning.”

A dark hand was extended to her. It was strong, and hard with callus. “I’m Holly Lakein. Molecular biology and the balance beam. Chess. Do you play?”

“Not really.”

“Oh.” She grinned, and waved a hand at the computer table. A visual field projected a chess set composed of simple geometric shapes. When Holly’s finger brushed a bishop, it skittered across the board to the next square. “Just reexamining Anderssen-Dufresne, 1852. Berlin. What they call the ‘Evergreen’ game. I think I’ve found a new response to the Queen Sacrifice that won the game.”

Jillian smiled politely. “That must be very exciting.”

“Yeah… well…” Holly shrugged. “Hell with it.” She motioned toward a frame bunk on the far side of the room. “That one okay?”

“Sure.” Jillian tossed her rucksack down on the bed, and watched under her arm as Holly floated to a closet, pulled down sheets and blankets, and tossed them to Jillian with a flip of her wrists.

Holly’s economical perfection of movement was captivating, even applied to so mundane a task. Every joint seemed to be an oiled ball bearing; every exquisitely toned muscle moved in perfect sequence.

“When did you have it done?”

Holly grinned again. “Forty days ago. The Boost is peaking now, and will plane for the next month. Then we’ll crank it up again. Hoping to hit Everest just about Athens.”

“Aren’t you scared?”

“Of course,” Holly said. “But then again, my research is on the reversal or stabilization of the process itself.”

“You mean… without Linking? I didn’t think that was possible.”

“Ask Abner.”

The room was arched loftily. The light seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere, filtering down from the ceiling like a spray of moondust. Through the wall-wide windows Jillian could see the Rocky Mountains, their reality less vivid than a train station mural.

An irritatingly thin voice brought her attention back to the front of the room. The voice belonged to a tanned, slender woman whose sad eyes and pouchy cheeks reminded Jillian of a shaved housecat. “For those of you who don’t know, I’m Dr. Andrea Kelly, your liaison with the Rocky Mountain Sports Medicine Facility. I would like to welcome all of you to the North American corporate and national training camp for the Eleventh Olympiad.”

There was a polite smattering of applause. Jillian looked out over competitors nearest her, recognizing few of them. Most were faces without names. A few were faces and events.

There, sitting in a cluster on the left side of the room, was the track squad. Powerful but lean, they seemed as nervously alert as antelope in dry season. She tried to guess their modifications: artificial knee joints? Synthetic hemoglobin?

Near them were the power lifters, recognizable from their gigantic deltoids and the enormous sweep of the lats. The other Olympians avoided them. These monsters were Boosted, and on them the Boost had worked its most extreme miracle. Muscle and bone had thickened to a simian density. Their hands knotted and unknotted compulsively, and a palpable air of leashed aggression hung in the air about them.

From pictures in various scientific magazines she recognized faces: a discus thrower who specialized in underwater telecommunications. The article said his spine had been prosthetically restructured to allow greater torque. A regional lightweight women’s power lifting champion with microprocessors implanted in the motor end plates of muscles in thighs and back. Her doctoral thesis had been immediately classified by World Security.

All looked to be between eighteen and thirty-two.

Andrea Kelly was still speaking. Her high, reedy voice barely needed amplification. “Everyone here understands the stakes. You have made serious decisions, sacrifices, lost jobs and friends, separated yourselves from family for the sake of our quest.” She paused.