Osa’s lips pressed together in a pale line, the edges beginning to twitch upward as she gained confidence.
Jillian inhaled, relaxing. Then in the middle of the breath, exhaled explosively, attacking with a feral intensity that no human being could have anticipated or countered.
With timing perfect to the millisecond, Jillian swept Osa’s ankle at the instant when weight transferred from one leg to the other. It was as if the Swedish girl had trod on the proverbial banana peel. They crashed to the mat together, Jillian in control.
The rest happened in a single cycle of breath:
Moving in the eerie slowmotion world created by total focus, she trapped Osa’s forearm in her right armpit, swung her legs up in a body scissors. As they hit the mat she adjusted the scissors so that her ankles pinioned Osa’s throat.
Osa heaved once, titanically, twisted like a beached eel, tensed her throat and arm and drummed her heels on the mat seeking balance that Jillian refused to let her find.
Another spasm-but Jillian only bore down more viciously.
And then she slapped Jillian’s leg, choosing submission over unconsciousness or injury.
Osa coughed, then rolled away as Jillian released her, face dark with anger.
Jillian heaved for air, speckles of light dancing in her eyes, muscles shaking with the sudden intensity of the effort.
For ten seconds the two women stared at each other, motionless, twin ivory images carved with flame.
Then, slowly, Osa regained composure and forced herself to smile.
She stood as Jillian stood. Osa flicked imaginary dust from her gi, still eyeing her opponent with new respect.
Then slowly, and with immense solemnity, she bowed.
Chapter 11
The vacuum tube car was wall-to-wall Olympians, their coaches and luggage. They traveled at just under orbital speed, deep underground. There were no windows, but then again there was nothing to see.
In the forward car a classic flatfilm played, electronically modified so that one Olympian after another replaced Humphrey Bogart or Katherine Hepburn aboard the African Queen. When they tired of that, they replaced the two stars with other performers. After trying a half-dozen current male matinee idols, including a gibbon who performed in Asian, they settled on a fortyish Sean Connery. To fill Hepburn’s spinster role, they recruited the image of an Australian beauty queen named Brigitte Chan-Smythe. Chan-Smythe had recently scandalized Transportation with pornographic satires of their most recent advertising campaign. Dialogue and action were enthusiastically improvised.
Conversations ran sluggishly in the aft car. Maybe the occupants felt the close quarters, or the gigatons of earth and sea above, or the pull of vacuum and the dark.
But in the middle car they eschewed passive entertainment, retracted the seats and danced. At a quarter gravity all dances were slow, to music three centuries old. Eldren Cowan taught English Regency line dancing to tapes he had brought for his Spirit Event.
Jillian curtsied to Jeff Tompkins, solemnly linked arms with him, and revolved carefully. Too much enthusiasm in low gravity could send an Olympian caroming into a wall, to the vast amusement of all but Eldren.
Gravity returned: the track led up, the cars began to slow. Jillian excused herself and made her way to the movie car.
Connery and Chan-Smythe had just sunk the German warship, and were celebrating in a manner probably envisioned, but certainly never filmed, by John Huston. With a final roar of appreciation the film was terminated, and someone conjured up a map of the subway.
Jillian just glimpsed the world-girdling network as the scale began to zero in on the deep Atlantic tunnel. on the Aegean Sea… — on Greece… — It was like watching a computer program take the Mandelbrot Set to finer and finer scale. Major subway trunks ran across continents, coast to coast, under mountains and deserts and farmland. Bigger channels yet ran beneath the oceans. The view ran up from beneath the Atlantic, took a branch that ran beneath the Aegean, out of the sea to Greece, chose from hundreds of branches. the view zeroed in on Athens, on ghostly city streets, following the moving dot that was themselves.
Funny, she’d never noticed that the world’s subway system was designed as fractals.
The cars turned smoothly; they twitched as other cars matched or detached. Presently the doors opened on light and sound.
Athens Convention Center. Hundreds of anonymous human shapes milled near the terminals, held back by ropes and security forces as they waved placards and chanted welcome. Jillian returned to her seat.
There on the narrow cushions Abner stirred restlessly from his nap. He slept a great deal lately, husbanding his energy, perhaps, or seeking in unconsciousness a muting of the ceaseless pain.
His eyes opened, took a few seconds to focus. His face was more brutally weathered by the Boost now, and his breathing was more labored. Sometimes she listened to it at night as he slept. She dreaded its irregularity, imagined that she heard in it a cry for peace, a weariness of body that extended, finally, even to the spirit which animated the withered shell.
“We’re here,” he said. His lips lifted at the corners. “I promised myself I’d make it this far.”
“We’re not done here yet, Abner.” She gripped his hand as if by strength alone she could halt his deterioration. “You can’t leave me until I’ve won.”
The subway eased through a seal, and air hissed into the lock. The Olympians hooted, hustled up out of their seats, and began to unload their gear.
She waited. Abner shouldn’t even have been on a general passenger train. He could be hurt in the press.
The aisle began to empty toward the front, and she stood, snaked out past Abner, and helped him to his feet.
Like a granddaughter helping a beloved but doddering elder to cross the street, Jillian escorted Abner, took both of their bags in tow, helped him out into the terminal.
A Greek band oompah’d its way through a bizarre medley of “God Bless America” and Transportation’s corporate anthem, “Songs from the Sky.” A few Olympians automatically stiffened to attention. Jillian scanned the Olympians until she saw Holly. The biologist was fighting hard to swallow a sardonic grin.
As they flowed toward the line of waiting shuttles they were showered by confetti and streamers, cheered, given all of the fanfare that Jillian had craved on departure from Boston. Now it was too late. Now she didn’t really give a damn.
Rain swept down in curtains, wavering across the pavement like bed sheets blowing on a clothesline. The crowd eddied like ocean waves, frantic to see the arriving athletes. She could not see faces. Their faces were darkened, backlit ovals.
A pool of light: they were close enough now for her to make out a sign printed in Greek, Japanese, and English. The English read: STOP THE OLYMPICS. The protester was clearly visible for a moment, face no longer an indistinguishable smear, now a twisting, screaming mouth and a fringe of sopping hair. Then security men moved swiftly from the sides, and he vanished into the shadows.
Some of the others strutted and posed for the crowds, flexing muscles, smiling broadly. Holly held up a briefcase containing her precious files, waving confidently to the cameras.
Holly was ready. Her studies on the immune system were complete and broken down into display mode. If they didn’t win her the gold, they might still save her from the effects of Boost.
Maybe. The world would change.
“Quite a show, isn’t it?” Abner said as their car glided away through the crowd.
The press of humanity actually thickened for the first hundred feet or so, then thinned out. Then they were on the road and heading out of the terminal.
Jillian felt like hiding. “Why do I get the feeling that I haven’t seen anything yet?”
