“Because you are a bright, perceptive girl.”
The caravan to Olympic Bay took half an hour.
The floating islands were tethered in standard three-by-three resort formation. Each hosted a network of dormitories, gymnasiums, cafeterias, and entertainment facilities. They were fortified and fenced, protected on all sides: a temporary luxury community created to fill every Olympian need.
Olympic Bay glittered in the misty rain like a mythical mountain fortress, and Jillian felt her pulse race.
Ferry skimmers were coasting in on plumes of steaming foam. Helicopters and floatcars braved the wind to reach landing pads. And from every vehicle streamed Olympians and their coaches.
Jillian helped Abner onto the docking platform, hustled him to a two-passenger robot monotram. It surged forward the moment they were seated.
Abner’s thin fingers tapped against the glass, and he sighed audibly.
“What is it?” Jillian asked as they drew up to one of the condos. It rose up out of an artificial hillside on enormous aluminum stilts. An escalator rippled up the side of the hill to the main entrance. Rain was deflected by a silver awning.
“All the rest of it was just rehearsal, Jill. I can’t help you anymore.”
Was he asking permission to die? Abner seemed translucent, ephemeral.
“It may be I don’t need you,” she said in a voice she might have used with a child. “But I want you to see me win.”
His hands slid down into his lap, were still. “All right.”
She kissed his cheek as the tram stopped and the door slid open. “I’ll be in touch.”
“Please.”
A silver-garbed young man offered to carry Jillian’s luggage for her, and she declined. She shrugged the strap over her shoulder and straightened up, stepping onto the escalator.
The little monotram disappeared around a curve.
Holly waited for her at the top of the escalator. “Where’s Abner going?”
“A Medtech Intensive. He’s going to need lifesupport soon.” The wind whipped a spray of rain into her face. With the tip of her tongue she tasted it. Salt. “Real soon.”
“Is he septic?”
She shrugged. “It’s a miracle he’s hung on this long. He’ll make it another month. Bet on it.”
They stood and watched the crowd gather and thin on the dock, ebbing and surging as a tide. Holly chuckled, calculatedly changing the mood. “I’ve never seen so much healthy flesh in all my life. I wonder if the rumors are true.”
Curiosity nudged Jillian out of her pensive mood. “What rumors?”
“Ah, you know.” Holly leaned over, stagewhispered conspiratorially. “They say that the most intense sex in the known universe takes place in the Olympic villages.”
“I’ve heard that. Are you planning a little personal inquiry?”
“Certainly. A series of controlled experiments in the name of science.”
“Double-blind, I suppose.”
“I’ll keep one eye open.”
A pair of gorgeous young male attendants escorted them to their separate rooms. Jillian’s, a tall, darkly Mediterranean lad who looked usefully fit, offered to help Jillian unpack. He also offered to rub her feet, massage her lower back, or perform any other service that might be required. He was cute, but she declined.
When the door closed, she began to unpack. She placed shoes beneath her bed, tested the bed, hung pantsuits and dresses in the closet, squirreled toiletries away in the bathroom. She busied herself around and around the room, unaware that she was being watched until Holly cleared her throat from the doorway.
“You know,” the biologist said thoughtfully, “you are definitely not the same anxious little girl I met eight weeks ago.”
Jillian sat on the bed, unnaturally aware of the play of every muscle as it flexed and knotted. She felt like a bundle of live wires. “What’s the difference?”
“You — …” Holly closed her eyes, stared into the darkness for a few seconds before answering. “Your eyes don’t have any humor in them, but your mouth is smiling all the time. There’s just something a little distant about you. Detached.”
Jillian’s lips curled up, but there was no warmth in them. “Well, maybe I finally got the joke, Holly.”
Suddenly, Holly seemed very uncomfortable, found it difficult to meet Jillian’s gaze. “Uh-huh,” she said. “Well. Maybe so.”
Holly seemed in a hurry to leave, and Jillian did nothing to stop her.
Jillian stared down at her hands, felt the play of tendon and muscle in her forearms, closed her eyes to hear the slow thunder of her heartbeat.
The Boost was speeding up. She could feel the changes, feel her body growing and shifting. She wiggled her toes and could mentally isolate every tendon, muscle, and nerve fiber. Every breath reverberated hollowly in the cavern of her chest.
Where was Jillian Shomer? Here, on the edge of a bed in a strange room, in a strange place a world away from her beginnings?
And if not… then who was she?
She had wanted Abner to come with her, and was ashamed of the true reason. They spoke of companionship, of support, of coaching, directly of affection and obliquely of love. The truth was darker.
Abner was rotting inside. Impending death enshrouded him like a fetid cloak. Death was in his eyes, his movement, his precarious balance. It creaked in his voice.
Jillian Shomer, more vital than ever before, was morbidly fascinated. Abner was a living reminder of the hell which awaited her if she failed.
She felt as if she were falling through a black hole toward some ultimate encounter with a Jillian that had never been.
Jillian looked up at the wall clock, and jumped. Two hours had passed, time during which she sat motionless, listened to her body grow and change, felt the heat as her blood raced to remove toxins and rebuild tissue.
She shucked herself out of her clothes, lay back, told the ceiling light to shut down.
There were ways to deal with jet lag. Tension, too. Boost made it even easier.
She writhed in the dark, stretching and tensing each muscle in individual sequence. Back, side, belly… rolled out of bed, dressed, moved into the silent hallways. From far away, another floor perhaps, came sounds of merriment. She saw no one in the halls.
Outside the rain had stilled, leaving the silver trail of the escalator glistening with its memory. She took the escalator down two levels, and caught a submarine tram to the shore.
The little tube cars were nine parts entertainment excursion and one part practical transportation. Fish slipped in and out of the floodlamps. Jillian stared up through the transparent tram walls as they hissed along. The water turned black just a few yards beyond the lamps. Fish flashed to life, then vanished utterly. There might have been nothing below her or above her, or anything at all in the universe except this tiny capsule cruising through an endless sea.
A young woman in a silver blazer with an Olympic patch greeted her at a shoreside tram station. In heavily accented English she asked if Jillian would require a limousine, or an escort. Jillian demurred, and mounted the upward escalator alone.
What the night required was a walk. The mists of evening were cleansing, comforting. The stadia were less than a mile from the dock.
Electricians and cameramen, carpenters and painters were still busy, working like a colony of welldisciplined termites to prepare the stadia and surrounding environs. The main stadium rose like the Coliseum of old, a structure a quarter mile long and fifteen stories high, with seats for a hundred thousand spectators.
Just as Olympians had been arriving half the night, so had their audience. From all over the world they came, flooding the hotels in Athens, overflowing out to smaller artificial islands in the bay. Live spectator seating in three different arenas, holo feeds winging out to the world and beyond, the Olympiad would be watched by three billion people. Those who stayed home would have a better view.
They were a legion of three thousand, the new gladiators, joined in mortal combat with something infinitely
