There are moments in climbing when you must risk, when you must accept eight or twelve or twenty feet of continuous, bone-cracking stress to make it to the next resting place. She found a kind of rhythm in her pain, pushed up and up without concern for anything but the need for continual movement, taking herself to the absolute limit and then pushing beyond it.
Abner hovered over her shoulder, sliding up next to her, silent but vigilant.
She paused between slabs of rock, using breath and muscle expansion to wedge herself tight. She sipped from the cheek nipple, and let her gaze wander down. Below her and off to the distance was a maze of domes and dorms, the Rocky Mountain Sports Research Center. Purplish mountain shadows were creeping toward the red-gold buildings.
Thirty feet above her was flat ground. She could make every movement in these last feet long and slow, stretching her tired muscles. Then when she hit the tip, she would be ready to sprint.
This was a piece of cake. She could take gold. She could! And without modification.
Water swirled around Jillian’s legs. It was turbulent and a little foamy, warmed to a few degrees below her own skin temperature. It felt heavenly, or would have if she hadn’t been about to suffer.
She sat on a shallow metal seat in the tank, completely enmeshed in a thin exoskeleton, a mesh of wire and plastic braces which extended from her feet to the crown of her head. It was inactive now, completely unresistant as she slipped her face mask into place.
Abner helped her, adjusting her air line.
“Air flow?” Air from the recycler on her back was reassuringly cool.
“Now relax,” he said softly, and she slipped into the water.
She hung there in a cocoon of warmth, watching Abner at the side of the Plexiglas tank. The exoskeleton was completely self-contained, all of its servos linked in waterproof pods at elbows, knees, hips, and shoulders. She was neutrally buoyant, floating in the center of a three-thousand-gallon tank.
“We’ll begin the program now. I’ve integrated Beverly’s data into my own banks, so I know your strength curve on every muscle group. Your muscles should reach proper relaxation in another three minutes. Just breathe deeply.”
Jillian did as she was told, closed her eyes and thought of blackness. She searched for hidden nuggets of tension, failed to find them.
“Right side,” Abner said. “Spinal flexor, base. Relax, Jillian.”
Abner touched a button, and she felt the muscle relax as he electronically manipulated the nerve endings. A touch of bliss. Total surrender, she could have remained in that space forever. Then suddenly it ended, and she cursed to herself.
At least, she thought it had been to herself. “Not nice,” Abner said merrily. “Find the spot yourself. If you can’t learn to do it yourself, we’re wasting our time.”
She sank more deeply into her body, searching for tension. There the little bastard was, a tiny knot at the base of her spine. She consciously sent out waves of warmth and relaxation, and it calmed.
“All right. We’re going to begin now. Please resist all movement to the limits of your capacity.”
The exoskeleton began to twist Jillian’s right leg, began to twist, and she fought it with her quadriceps and abductors, fought the torquing of her upper torso with her obliques, the bending of her arm with her triceps.
In a thousand different combinations, guided by Abner’s wizardly hand, Jillian moved this way and that. He pumped air into foot bladders to spin her upside down and turn her sideways. He kept the flow of oxygen to her lungs steadiest of all, eyes alert for any sign of cardiac distress as he stimulated a muscle here, deinhibited a Golgi tendon organ there.
And when she was fatigued, he began to stretch her.
She was delighted that she had spent the last year studying hatha yoga so intensely. In the warm water, limbered by effort and exhaustion, Abner tested her body to the absolute maximum. He monitored her readings to determine optimum pain thresholds then again and again coaxed another inch of effort from her, another second of exertion. Another, greater degree of excellence.
And then he started over again…
“I want you to look at this,” Abner said a week later.
In the rust-colored sphere of the Sports Medicine building, sound and activity were at a roar. The vibrations of hundreds of feet and hands in strenuous exertion reverberated dully through the floors, and her muscles twitched in sympathetic effort.
Abner’s cubicle was just large enough for two people. It was lined with books and cube nooks and a vidchart that took up half the wall.
“This is the last sprint for the finish line.” Abner tented his fingers and sank back in his chair. “The corridor was lined with sensors, and I’ve run simulations based on seventeen common race-day scenarios. Performance stress, weather variances, changes in terrain, everything I could think of.”
“And?” She watched herself on the vidchart as it flickered to life, eating a hole in the wall. Her legs were a blur as she made her final drive to the finish line along a measured, red-carpeted track. She broke the beam, and it immediately replayed from above. Then again, her body a skeleton abstracted into a structural diagram. Then again, lungs and heart and big muscles in the thighs highlighted, accompanied by glowing bar and line charts, and a shifting column of figures.
“I’ve examined your proposal, Jillian. I want to give you the up side first: no doubt about it, you learn faster than anyone I’ve ever coached.”
She hugged his arm, feeling pleasantly woozy. Today had been rough-endless drills on the judo mat, with a heavy emphasis on explosive movement.
She felt stronger, fitter, more flexible than ever before in her life. Abner had been an ideal choice for coach.
“I was hoping,” she began. “You know, I was never convinced that Boost was necessary, if you could bring all of—”
He made a soft, ugly sound, and she shut up, dismayed by his expression.
“No, Jillian. I’ve got spies, hon. I’ve been able to analyze data from Communications, Zimbabwe, and Agricorp. You’d never make it.”
Her hand withdrew from his. Her skin felt damp and cold.
“Not a chance?”
“No,” he whispered. “And with the twenty percent advantage of Boosting, you still only have a fifty percent chance of silver. You waited too long, Jillian. You should have Boosted four weeks ago, if that was what you were going to do.”
Lights in the room seemed to darken, and the sound of her own breathing grew louder. Her vidscreen image swelled, and Jillian watched herself running and running, and running: now just a nervous system, now a shadow-map of muscular tensions, now a computer animation of another, idealized Jillian running on an endless track toward an impossibly far horizon.
And almost paralyzed with horror, she heard herself say: “That settles it then.”
“I know,” he said, as kindly as an executioner could. “I’ve always known.”
“How did you know?” Her voice was as lost and lonely as a child’s.
“Because you don’t give up,” he said.
Chapter 8
Muscles must be stimulated to contract. In the case of skeletal muscle, the muscle making up the formative body, stimulation is in the form of a chemical neurotransmitter released by nerve endings.
Diseases like myasthenia gravis which involve profound muscle weakness are often related to disturbances in neurotransmitter release, uptake, or clearance. As a result, only feeble muscle contractions can take place.
Governing the entire nervous system is a complex system of cells in the brain stem known as the reticular formation. Early anatomists postulated a diffuse net of neurons and fibres, a sort of neural excelsior, providing unspecified functions for the surrounding cranial nerve nuclei.