Achilles choice Read online

  “But you still dream, don’t you, Saturn? You still desire? You think you should be free of the flesh, of all this, and you’re not, and you don’t know what to make of it.”

  The tube car was silent, save for a distant hiss of air through the ventilation system. “I have access to all the information in the world,” he said. “And I can’t answer that question.”

  “Where do I come in? Do I? Is it that you want to be told that you have a soul?”

  He waved it away. “You can’t answer that question. This isn’t about me, Jillian—”

  “Isn’t it? Has it ever been about anything else?”

  “It’s about saving humanity—”

  “Which you are a part of, like it or not.”

  He glared at her. “I deal in what is quantifiable, Jillian. I never wonder how many angels can dance on the head of a pin-that question being, incidentally, an exercise in quantum mechanics—”

  “I’m not interested in a lecture,” she said flatly.

  “Jillian, shall I turn up the heat?”

  “Please.” Quite suddenly, she was freezing. And he’d known before she did!

  “Done. I wonder,” he said, “if you realize how many ways there are to be human. Maoris, Nazis, Mormons, abos in the Australian outback, slaves and slavers, drug cultures in the United States in the sixties and then the eighties, don’t even start to cover it. There are all the dead cultures, too. The French and Soviet reigns of terror. Ancient half-humans who ate shellfish and each other. Mental hospitals. Christian sects wherein the men castrated themselves. Rosicrucians. The Velvet Underground.

  “You could take most of the aliens in science fiction and match their lifestyles to somebody. I remember a critic who thought Bram Stoker’s Dracula was about syphilis. Or take Ursula Le Guin’s—”

  “I haven’t—”

  “You did, too. Third year of high school, English Lit. You wrote a paper, ‘Vampirism as a Venereal Metaphor.’ It was quite explicit, and led to what you described to your diary as an ‘affair of incandescent intensity, sufficient to set the moon ablaze’ with your Lit tutor.” He grinned happily, an innocent voyeur. “You read Le Guin, too.”

  Her face was burning. “How dare you! Do you think peeping into the emotions of real human beings makes you more alive? You’re a ghoul, Saturn. You don’t even have the courage to lie down and die.” She felt violated. Saturn had pried into Beverly! He must know everything, every hope and prayer, every childhood memory. How could he?

  “Are we done? Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness. Le Guin’s aliens are a branch of the human race, but they’re neuter most of the time, and when they develop a gender you can’t guess which one She remembered then, and he saw it. “Okay. Good science fiction, but do you think I can’t find people like that in Oakland?

  “But the other side is, whenever I wonder about something, it starts a subprogram. I’ve got access to most of human knowledge.

  “Twenty-six years ago I wondered if I was human. I had an answer with ninety-one percent confidence in just under two minutes. In ten minutes I had four nines of confidence. Every known human culture had been explored. Le Guin’s aliens were human, Dracula was human, but by any reasonable standard, I’m not.”

  “Imagine my surprise,” Jillian said bitterly.

  “Rise above it, Jillian. More is at stake here than your feelings.”

  “They’re what make me human!”

  “Having them, or wallowing in them? I thought you prized discipline. Strength. Achievement. Emotional control makes it possible. Do you see the implications of what I said? Maybe the Council’s not human, either?”

  “So you keep replacing them. Your children. Saturn.”

  “You got it.”

  “How long? Until you get it right?”

  “I’m getting closer. The younger Linked are staying human longer. I need to keep them under control, too. You spoke of motives. I don’t trust theirs. Mine you must have guessed— No? All right, Jillian, what would you do if you were me?”

  She felt bone-weary. It was all too much, too quick. Her head was reeling, and she yawned mightily. “Sleep for a week.”

  “Coffee under the seat. Jillian, I can’t do this twice. The Council can see patterns. I won’t make you a target, Jillian. This conversation ends at Denver.”

  Fair enough.

  Under the seat was a wrinkled plastic bag. It held a small thermos and a Bullocks sales slip and a package of oat bran cookies with several missing. My God, he’s thorough. The coffee was black and sweet, not too hot. She could feel it pulling her awake.

  She said, “Kill them all and then suicide.” She surprised herself that time: there wasn’t any bitterness in that suggestion.

  Again Saturn answered instantly. “What about the equipment? Software, computers, never-linked sensing devices, tailored medical procedures like Boost, everything that made us what we are: what about that? If the capability is there, there will be more Linked.”

  “That… that’s why the new stuff stopped appearing in the shops!”

  “Yes, that was me.”

  “Mph. You could destroy… How far back would we have to go to be safe? Nineteen fifty?”

  “Destroy the information?” Saturn shrugged. “Making transistors disappear may be beyond me. No, that’s not the way to go. I want a human being who can use everything that was and is available to me, and still remain human. What do I have to do to accomplish that?”

  “You’d have to… a training program? You son of a bird. You changed the Olympics.”

  “Yes. To help me find people like you, or shape them. Mind and body and spirit. I had to make some compromises, but that won’t last. One day a majority of the Council will be Olympic winners. They won’t put up with the current death rate. Will you?”

  Will I. “Not likely. What have you got in mind?”

  “Change the rules. Even so, the pattern I’m looking for includes courage. I get that through the Olympics. I’m trying other approaches too. Give computer equipment to primitives after they reach fifty. Gene carving—”

  “Only a monster of arrogance would decide what constitutes human.”

  “Give me a human and I’ll let him rewrite my specs! I don’t dare. Jillian, the Link techniques are too good. They must be used. The Linked will be the human race. They’re a wall across the future, even if they’re a blind alley. If they go Feral and rip up the Earth, that’s the future too. If they can stay human— I just need one.”

  “To be your… child?”

  “Partner. Successor. You’re too filled with doubt, Jillian. Power won’t turn you into a monster. It may kill you, tear you apart, but you’re no stranger to inner conflict. I think you’d say that was part of your birthright as a human being, wouldn’t you?”

  She was silent.

  “Wouldn’t you say it was a natural result of the soul’s attempt to achieve perfection in human form? Wouldn’t you tell me of Christ’s temptation in the desert, his despair on the cross?”

  “Shut up,” Jillian said flatly. “Just shut up. Don’t mock me, Saturn. If you don’t believe in the human soul, then you don’t know who I am, no matter how many facts you may have stored away.”

  “You have friends who aren’t Christian. You won’t demand that I convert.”

  Fair enough. But-“What do you want from me, Saturn?” -

  “Not much. I protected you when you were using Holly Lakein to get information. I’ve put you among the Linked. You’ll be one of the powers that rule the human race, on the Earth and off—”

  “You’ve made this speech before.”

  “To all who’d listen. To the others I’m the old one, the crazy one.”

  “You’re not offering much, either, are you?”

  “I don’t interfere with the dominance games, no. You’ll be on your own, and I’ll be watching, hoping you can become what I’m hoping to see. If you make it, then welcome to the human race. A small, select group.”

 
She stared at him. He waited… probably busy elsewhere, a hundred elsewheres, leaving a tendril of attention for the hologram in the subway car.

  She sipped coffee, and thought.

  She no longer feared death… she had finally accepted that she need not. What she feared now was that she would become Saturn.

  Presently she said, “Here it is, Saturn, like it or not. You could have gone to six decimal points, or twenty, and it wouldn’t make any difference. What it is to be human can’t be determined by what we were. Human evolution is too sensitive to initial conditions. My religion says that we bring something into this life which is beyond flesh, or mind, or emotion. I can’t prove it, you can’t disprove it. I choose to believe it. I think that you’re so totally human you scare yourself. You look at me and say, ‘Ah, she has the humanity I gave up,’ and it’s a crock. Your brain is alive. Your heart is asleep. Wake up, damn you. You may be the only chance we have.”

  She held her breath for a long beat. Saturn was motionless. Five seconds, perhaps. How many worlds of possibility did he spin through in that moment? Was he reviewing the entirety of his life? Or a thousand futures, projecting fractal probabilities to the nth power?

  Then he sighed, and smiled timidly. Saturn held out an ethereal hand to her.

  “God help me.”

  “Help us both,” Saturn said.

  Was he mocking her? She couldn’t tell. She must trust him until she learned more.

  She extended her hand. There was no sensation of touch or pressure, just a man’s hand melting into hers, sealing a bargain whose implications she was just beginning to consider. Then she was alone, falling beneath the earth at three miles per second.

  Chapter 17

  The cab dropped Jillian Shomer off at the main gate of the Rocky Mountain Sports Medicine Facility. She stood there surrounded by three bags of luggage. The air carried a strong chill, and she tugged her collar up.

  The gate slowly slid back, welcoming her. Once there was a woman named Lilith Shomer. Jillian hefted the bags in her hands and across her shoulders, over a hundred pounds total. She barely felt the weight. She began to walk toward the Medtech facility, a gleaming dome which flamed in the noonday sun.

  The new Comnet wristlink still felt odd. She preferred the earpieces: at least she could take them off. From this point onward, the Council would know where she was at every moment, who she was with, what they said, what they did.

  The price of immortality was privacy. How could it be otherwise? Her body must be monitored from outside; it could no longer run itself.

  She had a little girl named Jillian, and died, an innocent victim of a secret war.

  The external camp was deserted. Soon, perhaps within weeks, the first arrivals would begin anew. Training for a winter Olympics still three years distant. A new, young, hopeful multitude would begin to climb that fatal, irresistible peak once again.

  The little girl grew up to be a woman who lived a dream of honor and responsibility, and had that dream corrupted— She stopped, watching the rays of sunlight reflected from the dome. If she squinted just a bit, the lines of light seemed to fracture off into finer and finer lines.

  — so many choices, so many possible futures. And every new day closes a billion options and opens a billion more. Lives are sensitive to initial conditions.

  She set the luggage down, and removed an identification card from her pocket, waited for the door to ask her name, for her palm print, for her retinal scan.

  When it did, and opened to her, she carried her baggage in. A silver-vested attendant took it, gleaming a cap-toothed smile at her. “Room 110-A, Miss Shomer. They’ll be with you in a while. You’re early.”

  “Yes,” she said quietly.

  In an hour the doctors would be ready for her. They would begin preliminaries for the Linking operation. She had needed terribly to arrive early, to have time to think, and to hear her own thoughts in peace.

  And would they be Jillian’s thoughts at this time next week? Could one be a god, and human, too?

  Room 110-A opened to her touch. She sat in a small theater looking down on the operating room. A place of conference, perhaps. Of meditation and strengthening of resolve.

  In the white-tiled room beneath her, her skull would be opened once again, and new life breathed into her.

  She folded her hands around her face, biting her lip until pain rang in her head. She wouldn’t cry. She wouldn’t.

  What price privacy? Saturn certainly had ways of maintaining his privacy. Perhaps there was a way to write fiction into what her Comnet sent to the Council. She had better learn how.

  After a time, her wristlink buzzed. Jillian wearily touched it to an intercom on the seat in front of her, and a throat/earpiece popped out of a slot. She slid it into place. Fog washed across the seat in front of her, and then it was a window.

  The man in the window was crested like a bird, in silver. It was the first thing she noticed: a fatly curved metal ridge, three or four pounds from the look of it, ran from his forehead to halfway down the back of his head, to where tightly coiled white hair was still growing.

  “Jillian Shomer!” he said merrily.

  “Yes.” Too heavy for comfort. Could it be silvered plastic? Its proud obtrusiveness had to make him a Council member. He looked to be in his sixties, in good health given a sedentary lifestyle; and that would make him one of the second generation, after Saturn but previous to the altered Olympics.

  “I’m Carter McFairlaine. Transportation.”

  “Pleased to meet you.”

  “Well, well. I know that Arts and Entertainments is bidding for your services, but I wanted to have lunch with you next week to discuss the advantages of a Transportation contract.”

  After you Link, and you are ours.

  “I’d be His head turned for an instant, to something offstage, and back. She saw the socket at the back end of the crest. Her breath caught. She understood with her guts, then: He’s part machine!

  “—delighted,” she finished.

  “Fine.” That gleeful look: he’d caught her reaction. “I’ll put the appointment into your personal data system. Beverly, I think her name is?”

  “I… what?!”

  McFairlaine chuckled. “Welcome to the team.” And he faded out — and was replaced almost immediately by another face.

  The coppery strands were more pronounced in Beverly’s hair now. The cheekbones somehow softer, the mouth gentler. But it was Beverly, and Jillian’s first, frighteningly powerful urge was to say to hell with the Linking operation and just jump into her Void that moment.

  She dared not, not yet. Beverly had been edited.

  Jillian reached out to touch the holoscreen, her fingers disappearing into depth before brushing flat plastic. “Beverly.”

  “Who else, sugar?”

  “I was so worried…”

  “You’re getting to be a popular girl. I put through that last call, but starting next week, you’ve got appointments lined up from here to Memphis.” Beverly cocked her head slightly, gave Jillian a shrewdly appraising gaze. “Is there something I should know about, hon?”

  “You will, in time.”

  “I notice they’re piping me in over the priority network. Executives, rich folks, and Linked only Beverly stopped, and her mouth was an 0 of surprise. “Persons unknown have updated me, two seconds ago. I’ll be— You lost and then you won! Jillian, why can’t you do things like other people do?”

  “I don’t seem to be like other people.” Her fingers scratched against the plastic like a kitten pawing at a porch screen, trying to get into a warm house. “Please, Beverly. Don’t go on at me. I missed you so much.”

  “Missed me? I haven’t been anywhere. You don’t call, you don’t write, sometimes I think you just don’t love me anymore Beverly locked up for a moment, because Jillian was crying.

  She couldn’t help it now. Tears were spilling from her eyes and both palms were pressed against the holoscreen, buried in Beverl
y’s face.

  “I haven’t seen you cry for eleven years, darlin’,” Beverly said softly. “Shhh. I’m here with you. I’ll always be here. You’ve got to help me understand what you need, and I’ll be that for you. You know that.”

  There were sounds in the building around her. A three-man medical tech team entered the operating room below her, led by a thin, efficient-looking Chinese man who began to check the instruments with sober thoroughness.

  “Beverly. You Go look for the Old Bastard. Make contact with him. Partition off, and find out everything that you can…

  She couldn’t tell Beverly that. It would be suicide, until they could slip into a Void together. Honesty, like so many other things, would have to wait.

  The men down in the operating theater looked up at her, motioned her to come down. Talk. And then Preop. And then.

  “Beverly. I have to go now. I’ll be back.”

  “I’m sure you will.”

  “I have promises to keep.”

  “And miles to go before you sleep?”

  “Yes.” Jillian smiled. “Miles. Good night, Beverly.”

  “Good night, Jillian. Sweet dreams.”

  The screen winked off.

  Lives, Jillian thought, are like weather, are sensitive to initial conditions. And because of that, not Comnet, or the Old Bastard, or the Council…

  Especially the Council… could predict lives.

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