Achilles choice

She had a hole card: Osa held her in contempt. Never Underestimate Your Enemy. Combat’s deadliest sin. Jillian could surprise the Swedish girl, get to her and take advantage of that contempt and uncertainty before the stronger woman had an opportunity to adjust.

A sudden shift of balance, a hula-movement with hips feinting one way, and shoulders the other. A moment of carefully judged clumsiness, swiftly compensated -

Oh, Osa. I Boosted too late. I’m angry and desperate. Come. Take me.

To a mathematician, judo is a matter of balance points and coefficients of friction, equations of mass and momentum and inertia.

Imagine a cone which must roll onto its edge in order to move, exchanging stability for mobility. It is this movement, in the service of aggression or defense, advance or retreat, that creates vulnerability.

Osa swooped to the attack. Her hands, seeking grips on Jillian’s gi, were as light as butterflies. Deceptively, hypnotically gentle. Jillian didn’t let them deceive her. Once they gained purchase, once Osa found the flaw in her balance, the butterflies would become rocs, talons which lifted and twisted and thundered Jihian down to the mat.

Jillian played fear, played passivity, retreat. She let her breathing catch raggedly, as if fatigued by apprehension. Three times in a minute, Jillian flinched into abortive attacks, barely countering Osa’s aggressive defense in time.

Osa’s lips pressed together in a pale line, the edges beginning to twitch upward as she gained confidence.

Jillian inhaled, relaxing Then in the middle of the breath, exhaled explosively, attacking with a Feral intensity that no human being could have anticipated or countered.

With timing perfect to the millisecond, Jillian swept Osa’s ankle at the instant when weight transferred from one leg to the other. It was as if the Swedish girl had trod on the proverbial banana peel. They crashed to the mat together, Jillian in control.

The rest happened in a single cycle of breath:

Moving in the eerie slowmotion world created by total focus, she trapped Osa’s forearm in her right armpit, swung her legs up in a body scissors. As they hit the mat she adjusted the scissors so that her ankles pinioned Osa’s throat.

Osa heaved once, titanically, twisted like a beached eel, tensed her throat and arm and drummed her heels on the mat seeking balance that Jillian refused to let her find.

Another spasm-but Jihlian only bore down more viciously.

And then She slapped Jillian’s leg, choosing submission over unconsciousness or injury.

Osa coughed, then rolled away as Jillian released her, face dark with anger.

Jillian heaved for air, speckles of light dancing in her eyes, muscles shaking with the sudden intensity of the effort.

For ten seconds the two women stared at each other, motionless, twin ivory images carved with flame.

Then, slowly, Osa regained composure and forced herself to smile.

She stood as Jillian stood. Osa flicked imaginary dust from her gi, still eyeing her opponent with new respect.

Then slowly, and with immense solemnity, she bowed.

Chapter 11

The vacuum tube car was wall-to-wall Olympians, their coaches and luggage. They traveled at just under orbital speed, deep underground. There were no windows, but then again there was nothing to see.

In the forward car a classic flatfilm played, electronically modified so that one Olympian after another replaced Humphrey Bogart or Katherine Hepburn aboard the African Queen. When they tired of that, they replaced the two stars with other performers. After trying a half-dozen current male matinee idols, including a gibbon who performed in Asian, they settled on a fortyish Sean Connery. To fill Hepburn’s spinster role, they recruited the image of an Australian beauty queen named Brigitte Chan-Smythe. Chan-Smythe had recently scandalized Transportation with pornographic satires of their most recent advertising campaign. Dialogue and action were enthusiastically improvised.

Conversations ran sluggishly in the aft car. Maybe the occupants felt the close quarters, or the gigatons of earth and sea above, or the pull of vacuum and the dark.

But in the middle car they eschewed passive entertainment, retracted the seats and danced. At a quarter gravity all dances were slow, to music three centuries old. Eldren Cowan taught English Regency line dancing to tapes he had brought for his Spirit Event.

Jillian curtsied to Jeff Tompkins, solemnly linked arms with him, and revolved carefully. Too much enthusiasm in low gravity could send an Olympian caroming into a wall, to the vast amusement of all but Eldren.

Gravity returned: the track led up, the cars began to slow. Jillian excused herself and made her way to the movie car.

Connery and Chan-Smythe had just sunk the German warship, and were celebrating in a manner probably envisioned, but certainly never filmed, by John Huston. With a final roar of appreciation the film was terminated, and someone conjured up a map of the subway.