Achilles choice

Overwhelmed, Jillian took her bow, keeping her eyes on the scoreboards as the officials rendered their judgment.

9.1

9.2

8.7

A respectable score. Saturn thought that the Shomer woman could take a silver with that.

Interesting mind.

She was capable, and creative, and intelligent enough. And… unpredictable. Driven by motivations he didn’t quite understand. She bore further examination.

As did her associate Holly Lakein.

Saturn scanned all of the inputs from the Olympiad, as he did inputs from around the Earth and to the outer reaches of the solar system.

Lakein’s performance on the balance beam had been stunning, a gold. Her modern dance display was less impressive-all force and altitude, technique masquerading as emotion.

But her chess… ah.

A mind that can think thousands of moves ahead can take no pleasure in the winning or losing of such a game. But there was beauty in the patterns of her play.

Her five matches tested her to the limit. Her second opponent was Catherine St. Clair. Saturn recognized motifs developed by Botvinnik in the Netherlands, Alekhine in Zurich, Korchnoi in Leningrad.

Lakein was experimental, bold, and innovative. St.

Clair played a straightforward pressure game, grinding attrition which could well have crippled a lesser player. Ultimately St. Clair had taken a pawn sacrifice which developed into a forked check. Five moves later she retired, congratulating an exhausted Holly on a brilliant coup.

It was Holly Lakein’s finest moment. Overall, she bronzed, and Saturn knew that she had only one more hope: her molecular biology presentation.

Saturn effortlessly broke through Lakein’s security codes, decrypted her files, and scanned her paper on alternative avenues for Boost control.

Again, impressive. She presented her case clearly and creatively, and had obviously had access to classified data. She quoted none of it, but some of her conclusions would have been impossible, her lines of reasoning corrupted, unless she had seen… perhaps the 2046 RAND study.

But she could not hope for gold, and without gold, Holly could not possibly Link.

Too bad. Still, she had another four years. Then there were Saturn’s own priorities.

Again he turned attention to the Arts and Entertainments auditorium, now emptying. One of the judges was a guest Counselor, Aziltov from Communications, who had given Jillian a 9.2. He seemed still fascinated by the empty stage. No doubt he was replaying the fractal art display in his mind, with the exactitude possible only to a Linked.

And then he would probably do it again. And again. Aziltov had developed an unhealthy tendency to replay pleasurable moments. Or invent them.

Aziltov was borderline Feral.

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 pret zel with her opponent, a straining tangle of arms and legs. The other girl’s shoulders were pinned to the mat.

Jihlian stood, victorious.

Abner closed his eyes, smiling, as the screen went dark. The nurses had programmed it to turn on only when Jilian 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 Jihhian.

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.