Flying in the Heart of the Lafayette Escadrille (17 page)

Waldemar blinked. “You haven’t moved it. It’s there.” He pointed.

Euthlos grinned and said, “Are you sure?” He turned the fist over and opened it. Water dampened his palm, but the rock was gone. “See, sleight of hand.”

Euthlos glanced at his watch. “Come on. I’ve got an appointment.”

Waldemar put on his shoes and followed the long-legged runner back to the course. They ran for a few minutes, then Euthlos cut off the Duratrack again and led them to the edge of a small clearing. Pines towered around it sighing in the morning breeze.

“Stay here,” he said, and trotted on alone into the middle. From the shadows on the other side, something stirred. A young woman wearing camouflage pants and a tan jacket stepped into the sun, where the slanting light set her short blonde hair aglow, like a halo. She smiled. Euthlos covered the distance in three lengthy strides and embraced her.

For a long time they stood, wrapped in each other, until, embarrassed, Waldemar retreated up the trail to the Duratrack. Finally, Euthlos joined him, out of breath and happy.

“There’s lots of things Genotech doesn’t know about me,” he said, and they resumed the workout.

After a few minutes, Waldemar asked, “Who is she?”

“She’s pretty, don’t you think?”

“Yes, but who is she?”

“I started corresponding with her two years ago. She’s from Humans First.”

Waldemar sucked in a breath. “Ouch. They’re terrorists! They hate gene manipulation. This doesn’t seem like a match made in heaven.”

Euthlos laughed sardonically. “They don’t blame the enhanced for being enhanced. Some of Humans First are enhanced. Besides, it’s much more than hate. What makes you think
I’m
a gene-change patriot?”

They followed the track around a weathered mound of granite, and then climbed sharply for a quarter of a mile. Euthlos said, “Tell you what. Let’s try something different. I’ll take the right fork ahead, and you take the left. They both end at our pick up point, but my course is about a mile longer. You’ll have four miles left and I’ll have a little over five. First one to the copter buys the other one a beer.”

“They won’t let you have one.”

“Well, a spicy vegetable drink then.”

“You’re on.”

The trail forked. Waldemar blinked on his visor and picked up the pace. The orange readout showed his first mile at four-thirty, while Euthlos clocked a four-seventeen. If they held that average, Waldemar would beat him by more than eight seconds. Euthlos’ readouts flickered, then went blank. He was out of the visor’s range, and Waldemar concentrated too much on the curves in the path to pay attention any longer.

Soon, the visor’s weight on his nose bothered him, and he dragged it off his face to hang from his neck. Wind cooled his eyes and the trail wound on. Waldemar pumped his arms; his legs glowed beneath him, and at the end he could almost feel it: the stretch of unknown self that waited at the reach of his pace. But, as always, the finish came and he could give no more. The last two hundred yards hung before him, shimmering in an oxygen strained haze, and waiting by the copter stood Euthlos, not even panting.

Creighton picked the papers up again and glowered. His pen clicked angrily, twice. “And what about this?” he said. He touched something out of sight behind the desk, and the vid screen behind him lit up with an image of Euthlos and Waldemar on the Duratrack. “We have too much invested in him to have it all crumble in the last few weeks.”

The runners on the vid approached the part of the trail where the two of them had turned off. Waldemar held his breath. Euthlos said they wouldn’t be seen, but was he that good? Could he fool his keepers? The runners flowed smoothly past and the view panned to stay with them. Just before they jumped off the Duratrack, the vid image split; on the left, the two continued the workout, and with sinking heart Waldemar watched on the right as they turned into the woods.

Creighton said, “It’s a game we play. He thinks that he can pull fast ones with vid imagery, and we let him think so. The psych crew tells us that it’s a good release for him, and we should leave him alone. It wasn’t my recommendation, I can tell you that.”

The vid switched to a long shot of them sitting by the stream. Creighton drummed his fingers on the arm of his chair. Waldemar thought about the next place they had stopped and the young woman in the glen.

“He’s just a regular guy, you know,” said Waldemar. “You can’t expect him to behave like a puppet.”

Creighton rotated his chair around, facing Waldemar squarely, his face flaring red. “Oh, I can’t? I can’t? What rights do you think
he
has in this? What rights at all? We own him from the DNA up. We own his patents. His technology is proprietary. There is no part of him that we don’t own. He can’t clip his fingernails that we don’t own it. He can’t get a hair cut, that we don’t sweep up his leaving. He goes to the bathroom, and it’s ours. You’d better understand, he’s not human, like you or me. He’s product. He’s a laboratory demonstration. He will never be ‘just a regular guy.’ So don’t tell me we can’t make him jump our way.”

On the vid, the runners put on their shoes and ran back up the trail. Waldemar watched silently. The story unfolded, jumping from view point to view point as they passed each vid-eye. Creighton raged on about Waldemar’s job with Euthlos, about the importance of the work, about loyalty and professionalism. The runners approached the second detour. What would Genotech do about the young romance? Had they already picked up the woman? Did Euthlos know? Waldemar swallowed dryly. Then, the runners reached the detour; Waldemar could see the rough trail faintly in the underbrush, but they passed it. The vid-eye panned and the two athletes continued on the Duratrack course. Amazed, Waldemar saw them reach the fork where they had split up.

Befuddled now, Waldemar watched. How could Creighton see through one set of false images, but not the other? Who is playing games with whom here? thought Waldemar.

“I’ll give you credit for this,” said Creighton. “That was a good idea to race him to the copter.” The contest unfolded on the vid screens. Waldemar’s image ripped the visor from his eyes and pounded through the last mile. Although he’d studied the old films of the great runners, Frank Shorter, Joan Benoit, Hwang Young-Cho, and his own name sake, Waldemar Cierpinski, and even watched himself occasionally, he’d never seen himself run like this, thin legs flashing, head slightly tilted, his eyes locked on some unseen thing forever in front of him. Waldemar nodded. Good form. Very economical. Training two weeks with Euthlos had affected him. He didn’t think Euthlos ran any better for having trained with him, but Waldemar thought he certainly looked faster for the time he’d spent running next to Euthlos.

On the other side of the vid, Euthlos opened up his stride. Waldemar shifted his attention. The young man stretched into a pace that Waldemar could barely imagine. A small readout at the bottom of the screen tracked the enhanced runner’s speed. Four-zero-one, three-fifty-four, three-fifty, and then a mind staggering last mile in three minutes and twenty-eight seconds. Waldemar’s jaw dropped. Euthlos had beat him to the copter by over a minute and a half.

“Now that last couple of miles was pretty good. Best we’ve seen, really,” said Creighton. “But I don’t want it to be too little, too late.”

Later, after a solitary dinner and a session with the athletic trainer to replenish his electrolyte levels and wash the lactic acids out of his system (he’d never recovered from efforts like today’s as quickly before he’d come here), Waldemar rested on his bed, thinking. If Creighton had record of their first detour off the trail, but not the second, that meant Euthlos
wanted
Creighton to know about the first. What was the young man’s purpose in that? It also meant Euthlos knew they knew he could manipulate their surveillance equipment. So, what was going on here? Did any of it have anything to do with the woman in the woods and Humans First? Was she using Euthlos to get at Genotech?

Wheels within wheels. It made him dizzy.

Corporate sponsorship of the Olympics led to corporate control of its rules, but even before the first enhanced games, the ideals of amateur athletics had long since vanished. The first genetically enhanced marathoner, Zatopec 1, running for Transubishi, won the classic distance in one hour, fifty-seven minutes and fifty-nine seconds for an average pace of four minutes and thirty seconds per mile. The first unenhanced runner finished twenty-second. For two Olympics there was an unenhanced division; then the division itself was dropped.

During their morning run the next day, an easy, flat seven miler that paralleled the old highway, Euthlos seemed preoccupied. “Did you ever see my predecessor, Euthlos 3?” he finally asked.

Euthlos 3’s win at the last Enhanced Olympics, in Alberta, was legendary. Six runners from the Indonesia-Pac Industries broke away from the main group at mile nine, holding a blistering four-ten pace for five miles, opening up what looked like an insurmountable two minute lead. The Indonesia-Pac design involved enhanced energy consumption and slippery joints in the ankles, knees and hips. For two Olympics in a row, however, the I.P. models looked good early in the race, then dropped out because of dislocations or heat exhaustion. This time, though, it looked as if they’d licked the problem. At mile fifteen, Euthlos 3 staged a lone charge from the trailing group. Each mile, by himself, for the next ten miles he ate into their lead, picking them off one by one. He passed the last two in the Olympic stadium itself, breaking the tape a scant half-stride in front of the second place runner.

A likeness of the finish became a part of the Genotech logo in stylized black and red lines.

“Sure. Who hasn’t?” said Waldemar.

“Have you ever spoken to him?”

They reached halfway and began the loop back. This morning, Waldemar knew, Euthlos was scheduled for a session in the Race Imaging Egg. Waldemar had a meeting with Creighton; then he thought he’d go down to the pool and relax.

“No, I haven’t. I saw him on a panel discussion last year on trends in heredity engineering. He didn’t talk. I think he was there for his symbolic value.”

Euthlos said, “He never spoke much—not after the race, anyway. He was pretty friendly before that. I only saw him once afterwards. He acted like he didn’t know me, and we’d done a lot of training together. I thought of him as a big brother in some ways.”

“That’s too bad. Why did you ask?”

Euthlos shrugged his shoulders, an odd movement in his eerily rock steady running motion. “He died last week. I just found out.”

Waldemar staggered a little bit, then caught himself. “God, no. I’m sorry to hear that.”

“You know what’s funny? I can’t find anything about his physiology after the Olympics.”

“So?”

“That’s all they do here it seems, at Genotech, is take recordings of physiology. They’re measuring me when I get up, when I eat, when I run. Always, just about. My records would fill a library if they printed them out. So would his, except for the day of the race and the ten days after.”

“What do you think it means?”

“I’m not sure, but I think they did something special for race day. I’ve looked at his training records. He was a maniac on the trails. He didn’t train like I do; they haven’t seen my best since I was twelve. One-hundred percent from him whenever they called for it. I know what he was capable of, and he couldn’t have done what he did on race day.”

“They drugged him? What would that do?”

“Not drugs. Something else. Something special they developed, but I think it killed him. I think it killed part of his brain, and it took his body nearly four years to figure out he was dead.”

“I can’t believe . . .” Waldemar stopped himself. He remembered something Creighton had said during his introductory tour: “One way or another, he’s got to be fast enough on race day.”

They topped the last gentle rise and the Genotech complex splayed out before them. The Housing and Training center’s glass pyramid glittered between the nondescript gray of the Med building and Research and Development. In the background, the hulking bulk of Genotech’s Administration offices blocked the view of the road and the never ending protestors. Euthlos trotted part way down the trail leading to Housing and Training.

“They’re pacing me for a sub hour-forty marathon in the egg,” he said. “Creighton thinks I have one in me. If I win, I lose. If I lose, I lose.”

The young man stood on the trail facing Waldemar, his improbably long legs locked at the knees, his little boy face looking sad and abandoned.

Waldemar choked back a word of comfort. What could he say? What was there to say? Creighton was right. The Olympics would be in six weeks, and Euthlos would run, whether he wanted to or not.

Finally he said, “You’re better than they’ll ever know.”

Euthlos lifted his hand, as if to wave, but he turned suddenly and trotted toward his appointment in the egg.

In Creighton’s office, looking over the last twenty-four hours of training results, Waldemar couldn’t concentrate. Creighton clicked his pen rhythmically. Waldemar wanted to slap it to the floor.

“He’s faster than this. I know it!” said Creighton.

He was opening another folder of records when a dull whump shook the office.

“What the hell was that?” said Creighton. Another thud rumbled through the floor, rattling the pictures on the wall. In the hallway, an alarm shrieked, and a clatter of footsteps ran by their door.

Creighton punched a button and a voice said, “It’s an explosion, sir, in the Training Center.”

Waldemar sat up straight. “Where?” he said. “Where is it?”

Creighton flicked the vid screen on and pulled up the Training Center view. A dull orange light glowed through its glass side, and smoke poured from a huge hole near its doors. A handful of people ran from the building.

“No, no, no!” squeaked Creighton, and he kept saying it under his breath as he watched the fire spread.

Waldemar stood, his hand covering his mouth, staring at the vid screen. He took a step back, then sprung to the door. In one motion, he pulled it open and would have dashed into the hall, but a security guard blocked his way.