She wanted to tell Abner. The Council has blocked my research, they’ve kidnaped my favorite computer program, I’m only doing this because— Some instinct held her back. Some ancient paranoia buried deep in her brain stem, ineradicable— Why had she Boosted? Was it to probe some dirty mystery behind her mother’s death, or the greater mystery of chaos in the human condition? Or to be the best fellrunner in all history? Or only to beat Osa?
Abner said, “There are more questions than answers, Jillian. Why do the doctors perform the operation? What happened to the Hippocratic oath? Why does the Council want the best and the brightest doing this to themselves?”
“I don’t know,” she said, never taking her eyes off the bodies as they leapt and twisted, spinning around the track. Brown and white bodies, muscles knotting and coiling tirelessly.
Abner talked on. “People at the top want to stay at the top. Whatever purpose they have in letting some of us move a little bit closer has nothing to do with anything that we want. I know.” That curious intensity was even more severe now. “The Olympic thesis, the performances, do you know how new that is? It used to be strictly athletics. Now they’re generating knowledge.”
“Boost doesn’t help anyone there. We think faster, but maybe we’d learn more by taking longer—”
“Nobel Prize winners tend to pick up ideas from the Olympic theses.”
“If I could inspire… I’d rather take a piece out of violent crimes than run any kind of race. I’ve always known that.” And just as definitely, with the visceral certainty of someone treading on a snake, she knew she’d made a horrible mistake.
Oh God. I’m going to die.
She breathed to the pit of her stomach, regaining control. She still had her goals to consider, and she clung to those with both hands and her teeth. “Abner. You said… there was a gold winner who had an approach to crime control.”
“Nothing about fractals, love. Isn’t that what you’re—”
“He beat you. Literacy. Raise the literacy rate and the crime rate drops enough to pay for it.”
“Yeah, I remember. What was his name, now?”
Her head was full of fog. “Wrestler, you said. One of the nations… ah, Soviet? Puss…”
Abner was nodding. Head lowered, eyes hidden in shadow. “Pushkin. Big as a redwood, you wouldn’t have thought there was a brain in there, and he lost to a Brazilian the same year I did. Nicolai Pushkin! His paper is classified, but…” A long pause. “I think I can find a copy. I got one before they slapped a seal on it.”
She felt dubious. If the paper had been any good, the Council would have used it… but she would have been grateful for anything he tried to do for her. She took his hand, squeezed it with what little strength she had, and said, “Thank you, Abner.”
Chapter 9
I/O error 1154.
The wafer containing Beverly’s personality slid back out of the processor. It had just arrived this morning from Massachusetts. Jillian’s hand shook.
They still wouldn’t let her load Beverly into the main processor.
Be a good little girl. Play along, and maybe, just maybe, you’ll see Beverly again.
Jillian slid her finger down the precious golden Simulacrum module. Without the slightest trace of selfconsciousness, she raised the wafer and touched her lips to its cool surface.
“Sleep well, Bev,” she whispered.
She’d be good.
A good little robot she was, and They knew where the buttons were. It would be most savagely satisfying to shake their predictions… but in fact their predictions were working out fine. Jillian Shomer had given up prying into secret corners, had accepted the Boost treatment, had abandoned the topic of her mother’s death. And hadn’t given up on Beverly; she kept trying to activate the program, knowing it wouldn’t work and trying, trying… telling herself she was only misdirecting Them.
Were they wrong?
High time, it was, for any act that would let Jillian show herself that she wasn’t a good little robot. But all she could think of was to work on her thesis and wait to heal.
Abner watched her from a shadowed corner of the gymnasium. Jillian was already stretching and balancing her body, moving from yoga Plow into Cobra and then out into the full split of the Tortoise pose with a gymnast’s grace. He waited until she’d levered her legs out to a hundred and eighty degrees, rolled stomach then chest and chin down to the mat, before he extended a sheaf of papers with a hand-lettered cover.
“Pushkin’s paper,” he said. “I had some trouble finding it.”
She opened her eyes, peeped up at him. “Gimme.” She sighed into her long thigh muscles, ordering them to stop quivering, and hiked herself up to her elbows. She started reading.
The approach wasn’t like her own, but Pushkin’s ideas were fresh, and vital, and impressively presented. He had deserved that gold.
And there was something familiar about the paper, something about the way Pushkin phrased his thoughts. “Was this delivered in Russian?”
“Sure. Straighten your back.”
“Sorry. Who translated? The phrasing seems familiar.”
He took it back, thumbed it a bit. “… Doesn’t say. I don’t know.”
As she browsed it, she was jolted again and again by the careful, logical juxtaposing of ideas. But there was nothing she could use, in fact at this late date it was almost distracting. She handed it up to him.
“Fascinating. Save this for me, for after the competition, would you? Pushkin seems to have been a first-class mind.”
Abner was watching one of the judo team tussle with the Grappler. “They must have found flaws. He wasn’t well rounded. Overall, he barely took a bronze.”
“Flaws? Then why classify it? Why not let everybody look at it, and judge for themselves? The idea is to reduce the level of violent crimes.”
Abner looked weary. “Is it?”
She didn’t answer. Abner left her to her rigors.
The Council’s motives were not her own. Council, or Inner Circle, or Old Bastard: if crime control was secondary to Them, then what did they consider important?
She shouldn’t have read Pushkin’s paper. It had been classified. Abner had put himself at risk to give it to her, and she was in trouble enough already.
She couldn’t discuss it with Abner. Abner was ill. Soon enough he would be raving in pain or babbling helplessly as his brain was electrostimulated into morpheme overload. What Jillian discussed with Abner would not remain private. If he spoke of the paper, it would be too late for anyone to punish him, and she could deny knowledge of its restricted status. They couldn’t squash people for every little infraction.
They? Or Donny’s Olympic “Old Bastard”?
Jillian found she was building a mental image of him. Mirroring her emotional state, the first image was an octopus with a human face. She laughed at herself, but the laughter was darkly fringed.
Octopus? Big, oversized head, brain, intellect. Tentacles branched and branched again, in the fashion of fractals. An infinity of tentacles, a tentacle in every aspect of human culture. Augmented intelligence too high for meaningful measurement. Insanely ambitious. A strength of ego that only longevity and invulnerability-immortality-could create or support. Awesomely intuitive, pathologically ruthless, and possessed of a genius for organization.
Seventy years ago, he’d already been powerful enough to see his path to the top of the Council. He may have created the Council.
A programmer? An engineer? Likely to have those talents, among others. He must have mastered cybernetic technology early. The technology that made it possible for the Council to govern the world. The Old Bastard might have built the Council, and the technology, too!
When she thought of all that such a person would have to have done, and all that he had to be, it was difficult not to admire him. And for that admiration to shift from the general to the specific, from an intellectual position to a disturbingly emotional one, to a physical warmth— Shut it down, Jillian. At the core of all of that organization and intellect there lurks the very essence of chaos.