Achilles choice

The compassion went; so did the impatience. Easy arrogance now. The breeze shifted, and she caught a whiff of body oils, of Mary Ling’s pungency. She was disgusted and utterly turned on at the same instant, and ashamed of her reaction. He watched her coolly. He said, “I wonder if you know what you’re playing with.”

“A little. I did some research. What’s really going on here, Donny? Do a dying woman a favor.”

Donny stopped, seemed to be listening to the wind. Finally, he sighed.

“I’ll meet you up on the roof in ten minutes. Take the back stairs.”

Jillian’s ID card got her through the back door of dorm 7, and she climbed up the back stairs with legs and lungs and arms working together like gears churning in an implacable machine.

A chill wind whipped across the roof, but Jillian didn’t feel it. She looked out across to the city lights.

Donny showed up fifteen minutes later.

He rubbed a wristband nervously. A weapon? More probably just a specialized comlink, something not patched directly into the neural net.

“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?”