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.
Later research demonstrated conclusively the importance of this area in the control of critical body functions such as respiration and circulation. It controls the entire spectrum of awareness, everything from total alert down to deep coma.
In fact, the brain stem reticular core is the only intracranial neural structure without which life is impossible.
It is here that the Boosters perform their delicate magic, creating, in a sense, a “disease” which forces the body to function at greater than ordinary levels, at enormous cost to nervous system, skeletal muscles, and finally, sanity itself.
Bursts of color flooded Jillian’s mind as the neurosurgeons carefully probed. The computers modeled her brain. Human surgeons operated on the model, the moves recorded in time-delay. Was the stroke perfect? Did it violate any part of that fifty ounces of jellied miracle? Every kiss of steel or thread of light could be edited to a millimeter or a microsecond, practiced in the machine, and only when the surgical team agreed, played back through the robotic arms.
Perfection.
They probed a nerve here, retreated, asked a gentle question there.
What color, Jillian? What sound? What smell? Which finger? What taste?
Rehooking nerves, investigating cautiously, carefully. -
At times she was allowed to slide into total unconsciousness. At other times she was completely awake, staring at a glaringly white tiled ceiling in a stainlesssteel room. Flatscreens and vidscreens pulsed with slow fire, unraveling her brain and nervous system, converting her most intimate, secret self into colorcoded displays. Coiled machinery hissed and beeped around her. And everywhere, cameras watched.
She never felt pain. Occasionally she sensed a feather of liquid pressure along her spine. Then she slid down a tunnel lined with the finest, smoothest, darkest black silk.
And was gone.
Voices. Light. Several times, Jillian swam up out of the cavern hole toward the light. It was warming, but the darkness seduced her back to unconsciousness, and she submitted to its embrace without resistance.
Safe in the darkness, Jillian completed the process of healing, and began the process of growth.
On Jillian’s second full day of wakefulness, Abner appeared at her door. A wheelchair followed him like a good dog.
His face was thinner, his eyes more sunken, his cheekbones more cruelly pronounced.
He should have seemed fatigued. Instead, there was almost a missionary gleam in his eyes, as if the fire consuming his flesh also transformed him. As if he stood on the threshold of a terrible new world. “You’ve done it.” His eyes burned through her.
She met his gaze for a few seconds, then had to turn away. She lay on her side, peering out through the window.
