Geometric pulses shone so bright, loomed so large that they stunned the senses. Chunks of angle broke free, coalesced into glaciers once again. The glaciers crashed, gouged mountains from their path, and tore simplified redwoods up by their roots.
The image expanded once again, pushed into the trees themselves. The pattern of the leaves was a repeating pattern, its angles and cool green geometries fading to outline to produce crystals, ice crystals which were once again glaciers.
And again two walls of ice met screaming. The computer simulation expanded the scene, took the judges and audience to some new aspect of that primal scape. With color, depth, shape, sound, and movement Jillian conjured up the infinite variations of pattern within pattern, until the repetitions became a musical movement, the entire ebb and flow of change the heartbeat of an enormous creature from ages past, the living fire of its breath a dance of creation and destruction.
She’d found the core of this while exploring something nearly outside her field: the torpid formation and flow of plasma between the core and rim of a spiral galaxy: the laws that govern a transgalactic lightning bolt. Her very simple equation might not describe such a process in all detail, but as the basis for a visual display… In Jillian’s humble opinion, it made the Mandelbrot Set look like a six-year-old’s first attempt at needlepoint.
The sequence ended. The lights came up full.
Nervous at the lack of response, Jillian stood, looking out at the thousands of spectators, perhaps twelve thousand who had come to witness her presentation.
Finally, someone near the judges’ box began to applaud, and the clapping became infectious, until the entire auditorium rocked with applause.
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 pretzel with her opponent, a straining tangle of arms and legs. The other girl’s shoulders were pinned to the mat.
Jillian stood, victorious.
Abner closed his eyes, smiling, as the screen went dark. The nurses had programmed it to turn on only when Jillian 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 Jillian.
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.
Jillian went for the pin… was straining for the hold…
And went limp. Abner cursed. Osa had shammed, let Jillian try to pin, and had worked herself into a choking position.
The screen went black.
Fellrunning was still a hope, but he was so tired.
And the pain. He just couldn’t take the pain much longer. He would have to ask for drugs, and Blocking. And then he would slide down that final hole, and couldn’t be sure of ever coming up again.
There was still something to say to Jillian, but he could no longer be sure of his ability to say it.
Jillian had two chances at the athletic events. The judo which had so tested her body and spirit had yielded a respectable silver. The fractal art presentation had yielded silver, but her thesis on chaos theory and sociology had only earned a bronze. Not good enough. The fellrunning had become do-or-die.
Traditionally, fellrunning is a European sport. Not until the third Olympiad had it become a truly international pastime. Competitors traverse a ten-kilometer obstacle course, facing natural and artificial barriers.