Achilles choice

Her body felt completely oiled and powerful, as if she had never violated its envelope of protection. The Grappler waited for her on the mat, a cone of light surrounding it. Its tripod balance arm seemed a saunan tail to her, as if it were a small and friendly dinosaur.

“Program?” the computer requested politely.

“Coordination. Increase speed until ten percent error level, then decrease thirty percent, and replay cycle.”

“Program accepted.”

She and the Grappler began to dance. It was a formal, noncompetitive exercise, the Grappler’s mechanical legs expanding and contracting, its balance shifting every moment as it sought to upend her, to sweep her feet from beneath her, to fling her to the mat.

But at every touch of its padded legs she moved lightly away, delighting in the smoothness and assurance of her own movement. She and the robot flowed together, striving flesh and egoless steel, gleaming with sweat and oil in the single overhead light, for long minutes. The minutes stretched to an hour before Jilhan’s strength suddenly left her.

She collapsed onto hands and knees, panting, grinning. She watched the sweat drizzle from her face, puddling onto the mat before her. A well of spontaneous, crazed laughter boiled up. She fell over onto her side, whooping.

Then she heard other laughter join hers, followed by the sound of applause. Abner strode out of the shadows. In that moment he didn’t seem sick at all, just thin. If he walked like an old man, it was a strong old man, a patriarch, proud and renewed as a man watching the first steps of his grandchild. His eyes were fever-bright.

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.

Chapter 10

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.