Death Match

3

As sometimes happened, she didn’t see her parents again until the next day — her mother routinely left for work well before Catie needed to leave for school, and her father was either sleeping in after a long night’s work or possibly hadn’t stopped at all. Catie had paused by the studio door and listened, just before leaving for school, but hadn’t heard anything, and the fact itself meant nothing. He could be either sitting and contemplating his work, or snoozing on the beat-up couch before getting up to take another run at the canvas.

It was Friday, and she only had a half day at Bradford Academy today. Catie had finished most of her finals and had only one or two more classes to deal with — mostly administrative stuff, the grading of the second-semester projects for her advanced arts class, and a final session of prep for the eleventh-grade organic chemistry final, which she was not too concerned about. For some bizarre reason, she had found organic chemistry easier to handle than the regular kind. By one o’clock she was out of class and heading down the tree-shaded street toward home.

Her brother, wearing a Banana Slugs slick-over and (bizarrely) an overall apron, was clanging around in the kitchen when Catie came in. Pots and pans were everywhere, scattered all over the counters. This was something that had been happening with increasing frequency lately. Catie’s mom had insisted that both her kids should be at least good enough in the kitchen to make dinner for themselves and their dad if she was late at the library, and her brother had always been a competent cook, if not an enthusiastic one. Lately, though, Hal had been in here a lot, much more than usual. Now he was frantically stirring what looked to Catie like a pot of nothing but near-boiling water, while feeling sideways for an egg he had already cracked onto a plate.

Catie looked curiously into the pan. “What’re you making?”

“Eggs Benedict. Don’t distract me, this is for school.”

Catie blinked at that. He had finished his home arts course last year. “Which class?”

“Chemistry.” He stirred faster and dumped the egg off the plate into the pan. “Don’t bug me now, Catie, this is important!”

“Eggs Benedict? For chemistry?” But her brother didn’t say anything, just stopped stirring and watched the egg slip down to the bottom of the vortex he had created and, whirling there, begin to poach.

Catie shook her head, wondering what on earth they’d done to the tenth-grade chemistry syllabus since she’d taken it, and turned away to dump her bookbag on the table. As she turned she saw that her father was leaning his tall rangy self against one side of the kitchen doorway, scrubbing thoughtfully at his hands with a turp-soaked rag while he watched Hal’s performance. He was, as usual, dressed in work clothes — jeans that had already been old and tired early in the century and were now washed and faded nearly to white, and on top an ancient and faded T-shirt featuring a stripe-beaked toucan standing on stenciled letters that read GUINNESS. Also as usual, like his work, her father and his clothes were all colors of the rainbow, an abstract pseudo-Impressionist study in smears and smudges. Warren Murray had won much critical acclaim over his career for his “luminous and inventive use of color.” At the moment, though, the inventiveness seemed mostly to consist of getting it into his dark thinning hair in ways only nervously contemplated by other, lesser artists. Catie looked at her dad and shook her head, knowing what her mother was going to say about the laundry in a day or two, not to mention the carmine streak radiating jaggedly back from his parted hair on the right side.

“Daddy,” she said, “why don’t you at least change over to acrylics?”

He looked up at Catie and smiled slightly, a tired look on that long face of his, but a satisfied one. “They just don’t get the same color saturation as oils, honey, you know that….”

“Did you even sleep last night?”

“Eventually, yeah.” But she could see that he hadn’t actually stopped work, since he was only now cleaning up. “I crashed out on the studio couch. I knew I was almost done, and there wasn’t any point in cleaning up. Finished now, though.”

Catie went into the fridge for the ever-present pitcher of iced tea, and also brought out a bottle of Duvel for her dad. When he finished a piece of work, he routinely allowed himself a beer to celebrate. “You really should use electrons instead of paint,” she said, handing him the little wire-stoppered bottle and turning to get the specially shaped Duvel glass and a tumbler for her iced tea out of the cupboard over the sink. “It wouldn’t get all over the couch.”

“It’s all electrons when you come down to it,” her father said. “It’s just that some of them are wetter than others.” He started to push back the one lock of forehead hair that always got in his way, and then paused, looking at the blue and green paint that was still all over the back of that hand. He started scrubbing at it with the rag, then pushed the rag into his pocket and turned his attention to getting the Duvel bottle open.

“What were you doing?”

Hal, peering into the pot he had been stirring, now began to speak in some language that certainly wasn’t English, and from the sound of it didn’t involve concepts that Catie was eager to have translated. Apparently something had gone wrong in the pan. Her father raised his eyebrows and said, “Come on down and see. We can get out of Escoffier’s way.”

Catie followed him down the hall past the bedrooms and into the studio. Its door was open, and the smell of oil paint and linseed oil was still strong, though she could hear the air purifier working all-out to get rid of it. This time of day the north light that came in through the back windows and the skylight was at its best, the sun having swung around the other side of the house. In the middle of the room, well away from the Net access box and the implant chair, under the spots and within range of the digital rendering camera, a canvas stood on an easel blotched with every conceivable color of paint.

It was a piece of background work, one on which text would be superimposed during a virtcast, a swirl and rush of blues and greens…but there was more to it than that. “Dry yet?” Catie said.

“You kidding? We can put a colony on the moon, but we can’t develop a drying agent for oils that works faster than twenty-four hours….”

“This is the one for CNNSI?”

“Yeah, for the FINA swimming championships next year.” They stood back together and regarded the canvas. On first glance, an unsuspecting viewer might have called the work an abstract. But then, as your glance sank into the greens and blues and viridians of it, you began to perceive the flashes of hotter, brighter color half-submerged in the glassy hues, streaks and submerged ripples of red and gold, and you got a sense of splashing strength, shapes cutting the water or plunging into it, all going somewhere at speed. The effect was subtle, and yet the longer you looked at it, the more you saw swimmers and divers, moving — even in so static a medium.

“They’ll want me to animate it, of course,” her father said, and raised his eyebrows in an expression that said, clearly enough, The idiots! “Probably they’ll want it to ripple like water. If they had the brains God gave bluepoint oysters, they’d notice that if you just sit still and look at it for more than five seconds, your brain’ll begin producing that effect itself.” He gave Catie a wry sidelong look. “But getting even the art director to sit still that long, these days, is a challenge. Not to mention the virtual audience, who are going to have to view the work nearly completely covered with flashing crawling text, in a window that they may keep sized down to the size of a postage stamp in the virtual ‘field of view,’ half the time…so the art director is going to insist that there be something about it that moves, to remind the viewers that it’s there.” Her dad turned to look at the canvas again. “If I’m unlucky, the thing is going to wind up looking like an ad for toilet bowl cleaner by the time they’re through. If I’m lucky…” He sighed, and shrugged.

Catie stepped closer to look at the way her father had layered the paint over the flash of color that was meant to represent a swimmer. The palette knife had been involved, which was probably the scraping Hal had heard last night. “You’ll get some ‘print’ sales, though….”

“Oh, yeah,” her dad said, taking a long drink of the Duvel, and smiling slightly. “The collectors will notice it when it airs. And anyway, there are always people who suddenly notice a nice graphic for the first time and want a copy for their workspace. We’ll do okay from that.”

Catie looked at the work for a moment. There was more speed inherent in it than just that of swimmers and divers. “You were in a hurry on this one….” she said.

Her father started to push his hair back again, and stopped himself, laughed, and had another drink of beer. “Yes. It’s not due yet, but I want to get the stuff in before deadline…so I can get well ahead on the next commission, and have plenty of time to sort everything out and clean up in here before the builders arrive.” His expression showed that he was already dreading the incursion.

Catie shook her head. “You should do what Mom suggested, and reschedule the builders for later. Then we could all go away somewhere for a week, while the place is all torn up. Up to the Jersey Shore, maybe…or over to Assateague…”

Her father looked thoughtful. Then he shook his head. “Nope. The sooner it’s done, the sooner I can get back to work.”

Catie smiled slightly. It was easy to forget sometimes how much her father loved what he did, when most of her classmates could talk about nothing but how their folks disliked their jobs and couldn’t wait to get away on vacation. If she was lucky, some day she would be in the same position, when she got a job at Net Force. She refused to think of it in terms of if.

And that reminded her. “Oh,” Catie said, “I was going to tell you last night, but you were busy. Hal’s friend the spatball player from South Florida Spat is going to be in town tomorrow…we’re going into Georgetown to see him at lunch.”

“Hey, that’s great for you. You need a ride?”

She shook her head. “We’ll go public…between the Metro and the tram, it’s not a problem.”

“This is their big star, huh?”

“So I hear. A lot of people are interested in South Florida all of a sudden…I assume that’s why he’s coming up here in the first place.”

He nodded, having another drink of his beer and looking at the painting. “…Why do you think they’re so popular just now?”

Catie looked at her father quizzically. “You getting interested in sports all of a sudden?” she said. It was an unusual concept, for though he might render sports themes in the course of his work, he wasn’t particularly a fan of any of them. In fact, her dad routinely claimed that his introduction to commercial art was when he learned to forge his parents’ signatures on “notes from home” asking that he be excused from gym; and later, until he was caught, he had run a small but lucrative business forging other kids’ parents’ signatures at five bucks a shot.

“Me? Sports? Not a chance,” Catie’s father said. “But the psychology of this particular situation…maybe.”

Catie thought about that. “I don’t know for sure,” she said. “It could just be the underdog thing, I guess. People enjoy seeing an unlikely winner taking on the ‘big guys.’”

Her father nodded, pulled out the turpentine rag again, and sat down on the poor beat-up, paint-spattered couch, where he started scrubbing once more at the back of his left hand, where it was still blue and green. “Maybe. I guess I’m not clear on how they managed it in the first place, though.”

“If I understand it right,” Catie said, leaning against the tube-and bottle-cluttered desk near the studio door, “somebody in the first organizing body of the sport actually had the brains to set themselves up as a licensing body as well, to make sure they kept control over it. I don’t understand most of the legal stuff, but I think Hal told me they had to do that in order to get permission to keep using cubic on the International Space Station for those first few tournaments. He said the first organizers wanted to make sure the sport didn’t lose the amateur feel, even when it started to get professionalized — they were smart enough to see that coming over the horizon, eventually — and when the league structure started to be set up, they wrote it specifically into the structure document that Spat International would not allow strictly professional leagues. They could call themselves something else if they went professional, but they couldn’t call it ‘spatball.’”

Her father nodded slowly. “You’re telling me they decided to license the brand, as much as the game itself.” He chucked the rag into the little self-sealing ceramic garbage can nearby where his flammable disposables went, and picked up his beer glass again. “Possibly a very smart move.”

“Seems that way,” Catie said. “Hal says the big teams have tried a couple different ways to break the license or weasel around it, and every time they try, they get blown out of the water in one jurisdiction or another. Apparently the player who drew up the structure document as part of the original license was also a lawyer with a specialty in international trademark and patent law, and he really knew what he was doing.”

“Huh,” her father said, having another drink of Duvel.

“But this is still kind of unusual, I take it.”

“Oh, yeah,” Catie said. “The structure of the yearly spat schedule usually seems to shake out all but the very best teams early on, and mostly the ones who’re left are the professional teams. Partly it’s because the professionals have lots of money to recruit the most talented players from the semipro and amateur teams. Seems like the semis and amateurs have been complaining about that for a long time. In the normal course of the competitions, most of the amateur teams usually fall by the wayside by the mid-season break. But not this one….”

Her father finished his beer, got up, and picked up the rag can, glancing one last time at the painting. “Well,” he said, “it’s going to be interesting to see how the rest of the season unfolds for South Florida. I would imagine the pressure on them is increasing to levels they wouldn’t normally experience as a purely amateur team.”

Catie nodded as they walked back toward the kitchen. “That’s sort of why I want to meet their team captain,” she said.

Her father raised his eyebrows at her as they went into the kitchen and he kept going, toward the door that led to the garage, the side of the house, and the sealed disposal for the flammable garbage. “So you’re telling me that it really doesn’t have anything to do with the fact that People described this guy as having ‘the best physical aspects of a young god’?”

He was out the door before Catie could think of an appropriate response to that. Her brother was still stirring the same pot he had been stirring before, looking both intent and angry, and he was reaching for another eggon-a-dish.

“Chemistry?” Catie said, looking at him in complete bemusement.

“Blast yourself out of here,” Hal said, not looking up, “before I call whichever public agency is in charge of having a close relative’s body donated to science.”

Smiling slightly, Catie went on down the hall to her room to change out of her school clothes.

About a hundred and fifty miles away, in the top-floor lobby bar of the Marriott Hilton Parkway in Philadelphia, two men sat across a low bar table and looked down the length of Ben Franklin Parkway, toward the faux-Greek, painted portico of the art museum. Two long lines of trees stretched up the parkway toward Museum Circle, but not a breath of wind stirred them. Every leaf hung still and flat-looking in the heat and the odd light. In the west, thunderclouds were piling up in curdling heaps of white and livid blue, threatening one of those four o’clock thunderstorms to which Philly is prone in most summers. But it was some time from happening yet, and everything outside the big floor-to-ceiling windows of the bar lay in a breathless, panting stillness of heat and humidity, waiting for the storm to break.

The two men who sat there in the bar and looked down the parkway, rather than at one another, were both wearing dark clothes in cuts that were designed not to stand out in any particular way. They had taken off their sunglasses because wearing sunglasses inside was a good way to make you stand out, and they were both drinking nondescript drinks that might or might not have had alcohol in them, to the casual observer.

It was the first time the two men had met nonvirtually, and they had made the discovery about each other that so many people make in such circumstances — that the seeming each of them routinely wore was an almost exact opposite of his real appearance, and therefore could have been used to predict one another’s genuine appearance, if either one had been bothered to try. Darjan turned out to be a short fair man, a little on the bulky side, with hair surprisingly long for the styles that year; and Heming turned out to be tall and slim to the point of boniness, swarthy, and with very close-cropped dark hair. The revelation did not move either of them to like the other one anymore…and it would hardly have been possible for them to like one another less, especially since circumstances had forced them to meet nonvirtually, and thereby lose whatever cover their seemings had until now provided them.

“Anyway, we made contact with one of his people,” Heming was saying. “He was coming up here on business anyway. We’ll see him tomorrow afternoon.”

“Watch where he goes,” said Darjan.

Heming looked bemused at that. “Of course we would. But…you don’t think he’s intending to make contact with some other organization…do you?”

“If he’s smart he won’t,” said Darjan. “If he’s smart he’ll play ball strictly with us, on the one side…and leave everybody else strictly alone, on the other. But I’m sure he knows better than to go to anyone else, anyway. It’s not as if the offer he’s been made is a bad one.”

“Unless…” Heming looked suddenly concerned. “Unless he’s decided to jump into the arms of some law-enforcement organization or another….”

They both sat quite still for a moment. Then Darjan shook his head.

“He wouldn’t be so stupid. It would be suicidal. Anyway, he could tell them anything he liked, but there’d be no evidence to back the claim. We’ve been most careful to cover ourselves completely in all our dealings with him.” He lifted the frosty glass sitting on the table and sipped at it, put it down again. “No,” Darjan said at last. “I don’t see it as being a problem. Nonetheless…keep an eye on his whereabouts for the next few days, until we have a result that favors what our principals want, and things begin to settle down.”

They looked down the parkway. The leaves of the trees were starting to stir a little now. “How are the principals doing?” Heming said.

Darjan paused a good while before replying. “They’re twitching. What do you expect? Even in years when things go according to plan, they twitch. There are always factors they can’t control in the other sports they run. Weather, civil unrest, player injuries…But this is worse, in a way, because it could have been controlled further down the line, if anyone had thought it was necessary. No one did. Now…” Darjan trailed off. “Now it’s too late, and matters can’t just be allowed to take their course. Now people have to start getting involved to stop it. And the upper-ups hate having to do anything that looks like involvement. It’s too easy to leave a trace, a trail….”

The sky was darkening, going not so much gray as a weird kind of bruise-green, and slowly the wind continued to rise. “Well,” Heming said, “after tomorrow, when we lay down the law…and also the reward for doing what he’s told…you should be able to tell them to stop worrying. Between that, and what Chicago should do to them in a few days, a lot of people should be pretty relieved.”

“So the arrangements are in place for the tournament ‘cubic,’ then….”

Darjan stretched. “They’re just there for experiment’s sake at the moment. The intervention is expected to be minimal at best. We may not even need them. Shouldn’t, if Chicago delivers. If we do need to use them…” He shrugged. “We’ll use them judiciously enough that no one will suspect anything. It’s a test, as I said. For possible use elsewhere.”

They were both silent for the moment as the bar waiter came around by their table, making his rounds through the lounge space. “Anything, gentlemen?”

They shook their heads. The waiter went off to one of the few other tables that was presently occupied. It was one of the reasons the two of them were here — this place tended to be quiet in the afternoons. When he was well out of range, Darjan said, “The game is two o’clock Sunday. Without overtime and with the usual breaks between the halves, it’ll be over around four-thirty. I’ll be expecting to hear from you at five. And so will they.”

Heming nodded. He reached down and picked up his glass again, jingling the ice cubes in it a little. “Chicago,” he said.

Darjan nodded once and held up his glass as well, but didn’t clink it with Heming’s. Heming gave him a look, waiting. Finally he drank.

A wild electric flicker came from down the parkway in the direction of the art museum, followed by a long rumble of thunder that rolled up the parkway on a sudden, gusty bluster of wind; and behind it, pelting down diagonally, came the rain.

Heming shivered, and finished his drink.

The next morning Catie got up much earlier than she strictly had to on a Saturday. Partly it was to get some chores done, for over the last few days, she had somewhat slighted her attention to the chores roster that her mother had left written on the slick white LivePad faired into the refrigerator door. Specifically, the word lawn, which had been there by itself on the LivePad on Tuesday, had additionally been circled sometime on Wednesday, and on Thursday had had many flashing arrows in various colors drawn pointing to it. Then, some time last night, it had developed an alarming number of exclamation points which alternately flashed red and blue like some kind of warning from the local emergency services. Her mom might nag, Catie thought as she got the lawn mower out of the garage around nine, but at least she did it in a way that made you laugh rather than want to leave home.

The mower was a John Deere “Hunter,” powered by photovoltaic panels on the top, and normally mowing the lawn was just a matter of taking it out of the garage, putting the meter-square box-on-wheels out on the grass, and turning it loose. The border sensors and the onboard motor normally did the rest — though there was one spot near the corner of the front lawn where you had to watch the thing, especially if the lawn was fairly overgrown, as it was today. For some reason, under such conditions, the mower tended to roll out onto the sidewalk or the driveway, get itself confused, and then either run out into the street looking for more lawn, or make its way over to the next-door neighbor’s lawn and start mowing that. However, at eight in the morning, with the sun still low behind the trees, there wasn’t enough light yet to power the photovoltaics, so Catie had to fit the battery pack module to the mower body before she set it out on the lawn and hit the Go button on the remote.

The mower trundled off, its cutter buzzing, and Catie sat down on the front steps to keep an eye on it, at least until it was away from the spot where it liked to stage the Great Escape. She rubbed her eyes. Even after her shower, they felt a little grainy. She had spent a good while last night looking over various articles and vids about South Florida Spat in the sports press, and some excerpts from virtcasts which she had earlier instructed her workspace to find and save for her. Interest in the team was certainly building fast. One story suggested that the team, which hadn’t been able to secure any corporate sponsorship at all a year or two ago, was now being wooed by some of the biggest sportswear companies, and offered very lucrative support packages if only South Florida would include their logos on its virtual spat uniform…excluding all the other companies, of course. What seemed to be surprising the sports commentators, though, as much as the big companies themselves, was that South Florida had so far turned down all these offers. No one seemed to know what to make of this.

The mower came up to the low box hedge on the left side of the front lawn, turned left and left again, and began to mow a stripe parallel to the one it had just done, closest to the sidewalk. Catie watched it carefully. It’s almost as if they can’t understand any team that doesn’t behave exactly the way all the professional ones do, she thought. Like they find it impossible to believe that an amateur team wouldn’t automatically want to be professional, the first chance it got.

The mower came to the end of the strip it was mowing, and, sure enough, rolled out onto the sidewalk and started heading for the Kowalskis’ lawn next door. “Oh, no, you don’t!” Catie muttered, pointing the remote at it and hitting the right-arrow key for “turn.”

The mower kept going.

“Technology,” Catie said under her breath, disgusted, and went after the mower, hitting the Stop button on the remote as she did so. The mower ignored this, too, and she just managed to catch up with it and hit the master power button on the upper surface before it rolled up onto the Kowalskis’ grass. The mower’s motor buzzed down to silence, and Catie picked it up and took it back to her own lawn, trying to hold it a little away so she wouldn’t get grass clippings all over herself. “What’s the matter with you, you hunk of junk?” she said. “Is your code buggy somewhere, I wonder…?”

Catie put the mower back on the lawn, next to the stripe that it had completed and at the end of which it had escaped, then hit the power switch again and turned it loose once more. Off it went, and this time she stood and watched it while it trundled down the length of the lawn, across the flagstones that led to the front door, and down to the hedge, where it turned. The mower then came back, crossed the flagstones again, came to the driveway, and this time sensed it correctly — turned, and headed for the hedge again.

Catie sat back down on the steps and kept watching the mower. Her viewing last night of South Florida’s recent history and the professional reaction to it had left her with a feeling of pressure. The whole array of the “paid” part of the sport drawn up and looming over this single, strange, maverick, little splinter group, trying to force it into the shape that all the other parts of it had assumed — had perhaps been forced to assume? — over the past decade or so. She wondered how South Florida was going to react to this. For her own part, it seemed to Catie that there had to be a level on which there was still room for human beings to just do sports for the love of the sport itself. That was a concept that the commentators seemed to be having trouble with, though they claimed otherwise, and the professionals seemed to be trying to pretend that the money was somehow an accident that had happened to them — if a very nice one — and that anyone who tried to avoid that accident when it finally threatened to befall them was either crazy, or trying to make the professionals look bad, or trying to cheat their own team out of the recognition (Catie read this as code for “financial success”) that was somehow naturally their right by becoming good enough at what they did to compete with the pros. The whole business made Catie twitch, and she was getting more and more curious to see what George Brickner’s take on it was going to be.

A few more turns up and down the lawn finally saw the mower finished with its work. Catie stopped the mower with the remote, which worked this time, and got up to head into the garage again, pausing to check the top of the battery pack. Its LED gauge was still well up in the green. She went into the garage, got the grass basket, hooked it to the back of the mower, and sent it on its way again, this time set for “reverse pattern” and “vacuum.”

Catie had to empty the grass basket three times. My fault, she thought, lugging the basket to the “compost” garbage can the second time. I should have done this Tuesday, and not let the lawn get to the point where it looked like the Amazonian rain forest. Then she spent another fifteen minutes or so sweeping up the cuttings that had fallen in the driveway, and generally cleaning up after herself. As she was finishing, she turned and saw her brother standing in the open front door, barefoot, wearing black sweatpants and a Glo-Shirt apparently just out of the wash, for it had reverted to the default black background and the words YOUR MESSAGE HERE, which now marched their way around Hal’s upper body in white block letters. Hal was yawning. “I love work,” he said as Catie came up the steps. “I could watch you do it all day.”

Catie didn’t say anything, since this sentiment too clearly matched her own assessment of her brother, and she didn’t want to pick a fight with him right now as much as she wanted her breakfast. “This diner or whatever it is we’re going to,” she said, “how’s the food?”

Hal followed her into the kitchen. “If it’s the same as it was when I went there last, a few months ago, it’s just the usual deli stuff. They had pretty good ‘smoked meat’ sandwiches — they get the meat from some chain in Montreal.”

“Okay.” Catie went to the freezer and pulled out a packaged pair of MicroCroissants, stuck them in the microwave, started zapping them, and then got herself down a mug and a teabag. It was just something light to hold her until closer to lunchtime. “Better get yourself into the shower, then. It’s pushing ten already, and if we’re going to get down there in time—”

“Nag, nag, nag,” Hal said. “You’re as bad as Mom.” He headed out of the kitchen, down toward the bathroom.

Catie smiled slightly, unclipped the stylus from beside the LivePad on the fridge, and neatly crossed out the word lawn on the chores list. The LivePad played a small triumphant trumpet voluntary and said in her mom’s voice, “Thank you, sweetie!” The word!!! dishwasher!!! underneath it, still untouched, then immediately developed many small red, yellow, and blue arrows pointing at it, and the word Hal!!! appeared nearby.

Catie just smiled and went off to make her tea.

An hour later they were at Delano’s in Georgetown, a very standard Formica-and-stainless-steel — type diner, and as they came in the front door, there he was, standing by the PLEASE WAIT TO BE SEATED sign just inside the door — George Brickner. Catie was surprised to find that the man was not smaller than he seemed in virtuality, which was usually the case, but that he was taller. Five eleven easily, maybe a hundred and eighty pounds, broad-shouldered and narrow-waisted, but not so much so that he looked overmuscled, he stood there in neodenims and one of the big floppy semitrans shirts that were popular for hot-weather wear at the moment, looking pleasant, accessible, and absolutely ordinary. Hal and Catie introduced themselves, and George shook their hands and said, “Look, I’m starving, I missed my breakfast, and I couldn’t eat what they were serving on the plane. It looked like a byproduct of a biowar attack. Would it seem incredibly rude to you if we just sat right down and ordered something?”

“No problem at all,” Hal said. “But where’s Mike?”

“Late, probably,” George said. “He’s been late for everything ever since I’ve known him. He’ll probably be late for his own funeral, if I know Mike. Let’s just sit down. It’s crazy to stand here hoping he’ll turn up in the next few minutes. We’ll be chewing our own elbows off by the time he gets here, if we wait for him.”

The waitress came along and brought them to a booth by a window, nearly walking into things a couple of times as she tried to both go forward and at the same time talk to George while he followed her. Catie saw the heads of people seated on either side turn as the three of them passed, their eyes resting first on Brickner and then on her and Hal with an expression that seemed to read, “The first guy, we recognize. Are these two somebody important, too?” It was an odd sensation, and after the first twinge of amusement and excitement, she wasn’t sure she liked it.

The three of them sat down with their menus and exchanged a few words while they looked them over. Hal did most of the talking at this point, and Catie was glad to let him do so. Until she got a feeling for what Brickner was interested in talking about and could participate in the conversation intelligently, she didn’t want to sound like she was just along to see what he looked like…and that would be the immediate assumption, certainly of her brother, if not of George himself. For the moment, while they looked at the menus, Hal and George seemed content to tell each other stories about Mike being late for things; and after a few minutes of this, the waitress came around to take their orders. Catie asked for one of the smoked-meat sandwiches and a Coke. Hal ordered iced tea and eggs Benedict, and once again Catie wondered what on earth the dish had to do with his chemistry class.

“And for you, Mr. Brickner?” said the waitress, and positively fluttered her eyelashes at him.

Catie had a hard time keeping herself from simply laughing out loud.

“A BLT, please,” George said, “and an iced tea.”

“Right,” the waitress said. “Thanks. Oh, and we’re all big fans of yours here….”

“Thanks, miss, uh”—he peered at her nametag—“thanks, Wendy. It’s always good to know people are rooting for the team.”

The waitress smiled and hurried off. “Looks like the service’s gonna be good,” Hal said, sounding dry, as she went away.

George waggled his eyebrows in a resigned way. “It’s good everywhere,” he said. “I just wish I knew when it was really because of the team, instead of that dratted feature in People.”

This had been somewhat on Catie’s mind as well, for now, sitting across from the man, she was coming to the conclusion that the People virtzine feature might actually have had a point about George’s looks. He really was a fabulous-looking guy, close up. Yet it wasn’t something that sprang out at you when you saw him play. What was it about putting this man into a uniform, Catie thought, that so completely changed him? In street clothes he could pass for a model. But it was strange how that quality of sheer male beauty somehow didn’t come through while watching him playing spat. It was as if the energy spent on being handsome — if one could actually be considered to “spend” personal energy on such a thing — was completely channeled into the game while George was playing, leaving him merely good-looking in a cool and uninvolved kind of way. Once he was out of the cubic, that energy seemed to be released for other purposes. Catie could now understand the annoyance of some of George’s fans that he was eligible but seemingly uninterested in dating right now. For her own part, she simply amused herself with enjoying George’s handsomeness as if he were some kind of walking art installation, and tried as hard as she could to remind herself that she didn’t intend to get seriously involved with men at all until after she graduated from college. Unfortunately it was at times like this that the resolve seemed dumbest.

Catie blinked and came back to the moment as their drinks arrived. Whoa, she thought, not like you to phase out just because of a pretty face, kid. Sharpen up!

“Wasn’t there going to be someone else here with you?” Hal was saying.

“Oh, yeah, my team cocaptain, Rick Menendez. But he’s off seeing his sister in Rockville. She had a baby last week, her first, and it’s his first chance to see his nephew in the flesh, instead of in a virtmail. Hilarious…the grimmest guy you ever saw, most of the time. He’s gone all gooey.” George grinned, and the flash of it made Catie smile, too, just at the sight of it. “But the whole team is up here at the moment…those who’re going to be playing tomorrow, anyway. We’re short a couple of bodies. Two nights ago we lost one of our second-string players to an invigilation call-up, would you believe? And another one has a dual qualification as an umpire, and has to go umpire a Western Division game at the same time we’ll be playing Chicago and Moscow Spartak tomorrow — there’s a shortage of officials right now.” He shrugged. “Bad luck, I guess, but we’ll cope.”

“I don’t think you must be very happy about having to travel the day before a game,” Catie said. “Especially one this important for the team.”

“Yes, well,” George said, making a slightly sour face, “this is also the time at which we’re running ‘hottest’ in terms of publicity…and therefore this is the time to go strike the sponsorship deal we’ve been waiting for. We have to go up to AirDyne’s corporate headquarters in Bethesda this afternoon and do a big press conference performance…. It’ll be all over the evening news. This kind of thing makes the ISF happy, even if it isn’t our favorite thing. It’ll push the ‘gate’ up for the game tomorrow. But we’re going to be up late practicing tonight….”

“I thought you didn’t want a sponsorship deal,” Hal said. “You’ve been turning them all down.”

“Well,” George said, “we do actually start to need sponsorship, to play at this level. The team is pretty much agreed on this. But we’ve also agreed that we don’t want any sponsorship agreement to be exclusive…at least, not by the sponsor’s choice. At our level, it probably will be, because we don’t need that much sponsorship. One big company is plenty. And besides, there are teams that really go overboard in that regard. They get the idea that if a little money is a good idea, then more is better…and as a result, some of their team jerseys are so cluttered with logos you can hardly make out a color underneath them.” George took a pull on his iced tea. “But more to the point, none of us on the team likes the implication — the companies don’t come right out and say it, of course, though it’s there — that the sponsor starts to own you, somehow, that it’s okay for them to start dictating to you about tactics and play, once you’ve signed on the dotted line.”

George sighed then. “So finally we found a sponsor that wouldn’t insist on exclusivity, and which agreed to stay out of our way on managerial issues, which was terrific. It’s not like the team can’t use the money. Our yearly contribution to the ISF isn’t peanuts, by any means. But the Federation has to keep the Net servers where we play our games up and running somehow, and that takes hardware hosting and software maintenance and a hundred other things that all cost money. The only alternative, play in reality, is beyond any of us at the moment, even the biggest and best funded of the professional teams. Real cubic in space is just too limited and too expensive right now. It’s kind of sad. It would be nice if there was at least someplace where the sport could be played as it was originally conceived, in genuine microgravity. But without that option, virtual’s as close as we can get…and it’s going to be that way for a long while, until the cost of nonindustrial volume in space comes down. Maybe when the L5-1 gets built, there’ll be spat cubic in there. It would seem to make sense, since even in a rotating L5 there’s going to be plenty of micrograv volume, especially for the big manufacturers. But that option’s twenty years away, easily, and right now we have right-now problems to solve….”

“Like Chicago,” Hal muttered.

“Chicago,” said George, “we’ll solve the old-fashioned way. We’ll beat them. They have tactical weaknesses that we can exploit, and besides, O’Mahony got herself her third yellow card in that last game. Careless of her. Bad coaching, as much as anything else. Her coach lets her lose her temper and get away with it. One more foul like that, and we won’t have her to worry about anymore….”

Their food arrived. Catie found herself looking with faint dismay at one of the biggest sandwiches she had ever seen in her life. The thing was nearly nine inches tall, and she had never seen such a forlorn and pitiful statement as the single toothpick pushed into the top of it, pretending to hold it all together. There was easily what looked like half a cow’s worth of smoked meat in there. She sighed, picked up half of it, pushed out some of the meat, reassembled it, then squashed it into some thickness she hoped she could at least get a bite out of and went to work.

George’s sandwich was cast in much the same mold, and for a few minutes quiet mostly prevailed as he and Catie jointly tried to get their lunches under control, while Hal tucked into his eggs Benedict. “You’re mostly a new fan, I take it,” George said to Catie after a while, taking a break from his sandwich.

Catie nodded. “Yeah. Until now I’ve been playing soccer, mostly,” she said.

“Real or virtual?”

“Real. Local-league level.”

George flashed that brilliant smile at her again. “A rugged individualist, in this day and age, to play out on the grass under the sun, and get yourself burned and banged up.”

Catie shook her head. “It’s just reaction to the rest of my life. The soccer’s a good way to stay in touch with physical reality. I do so much virtual stuff: schoolwork of course, and a lot of imaging, and Net Force Explorers…and some F.I.C.E.-sponsored chess, in the winter, when you’d have to be crazy to play anything outdoors.”

That got another smile out of George, an impressed one. “Really? Plane or 3-D?”

“Plane. I prefer the classic approach.”

“What level?”

“Three. Nothing to brag about.”

“I made three once,” George said, “when I was in my teens. But I didn’t have what it took for tournament play. Physical stuff turned out to be more my forte. I did some track and field…then I found spat. Or it found me—”

“You couldn’t have waited, could you?” said a voice from down the aisle of the restaurant. They all looked up. A stocky fair-haired guy about Hal’s height but about twice his width, and maybe twenty years old, was standing by their table and looking over their meals with a critical eye.

“Late as always,” George said, glancing at him and picking up his sandwich again. “Nothing for you. We ate yours.”

“Oh, yeah, Bird,” said Mike, completely unconcerned, sitting down next to George as George pushed over to make room for him. “Hey, Hal, how’s it going? How’d that test go?”

“Aced it.”

“Good for you…we’ll get you into Brown yet. This your sister?”

“Yup. Catie, this is Mike Manning.”

“Hi, Catie, nice to meet you. Is there a menu?” Mike started looking around him, and a second later Wendy the waitress had materialized at the table, smiling, and was handing him one. Mike asked for a lemonade fizz; she went off to get it like she’d been waiting for the request her whole life.

While Mike was looking over the menu, Catie glanced over at George. “There’s a question I’d like to ask you….”

Mike hooted with laughter and elbowed George.

George raised his eyebrows. “No,” he said, with the slightest smile, “I’m not married, I’m not dating, I’m not gay, and I have no plans.”

Catie grinned, but she couldn’t stop herself from blushing, regardless. “Not that one,” she said. “Why, exactly, do they call you ‘The Parrot’?”

“Oh,” George said, and threw Mike a look. “See that? There’s your one in a hundred. You owe me a nickel.”

Mike flipped over the menu to look at the other side. “I’ll have it transferred to your account,” he said, grinning.

George turned back to Catie with a chuckle. “You can guess how often I hear a different question. Never mind. The name’s a compliment.”

“Oh?” Catie said. She was now completely bemused.

“It’s an in-joke,” George said. “You know how it was when they finally got the International Space Station built, or the first phase of it anyway, before the private finance came in to double the thing’s cubic? Very official, very military and shipshape. Well, they’d brought some animals up for testing on and off, but there was a ‘no pets’ policy for a long time. Understandable, I guess. At that point they didn’t have the recycling system in, or that much space for spare food and water; and besides, with animals there were some elimination problems in micro-gravity….” He smiled a little. “Then the Selective Spin module was added on for the crystal-growth and metallurgical research and the manufacturing pilot project; and people started playing spat in the main sphere before it was populated. While that was happening, one of the project biologists set up this convoluted research project that had to do with magnetic field orientation in birds, and it called for birds to be brought up to the station and reared in microgravity to see how it affected their flight characteristics and directional sense and so on.” George gave Catie an amused look. “And he made a big case that the birds brought up for this should be highly intelligent, and used to confinement. So what do you think the experiment wound up using?”

“Uh…Parakeets.”

“Close. Parrots. But more to the point, gray parrots…and most specifically, a pair of breeding parrots that belonged to the biologist. George and Gracie, they were called. African greys, very intelligent, very long-lived, everyone agreed with that…but they were also his pets.”

Catie snickered. At that point Wendy arrived again to take Mike’s order, for a minute steak and fries, and paused to bat her eyelashes at George before going off again. Mike watched her go, impressed. “I’ve never seen that technique outside of old cartoons,” he said. “A new one for the collection.”

“Yeah,” George said. “Well…anyway…the parrots. There was some noise about them, but the project had been approved by some NASA suits who didn’t know they were being scammed, and the project managers for the station had the choice of either letting the project go through, or giving the money back. And no one on the station wanted to do that. It was hard enough to get sponsorship for any kind of research at all at that point, unless it was specifically commercial. And giving research money back unused is always a bad move. It makes the people who gave it to you think maybe they should routinely give you less. So…anyway…the parrots came up on the shuttle and lived there for about five years, and they did fine. They bred, too, which was a good thing, otherwise the project biologist would have been in a lot of trouble. But what was really terrific was how the young parrots took to life in space. All the little Georges and Gracies evolved a whole new way of flying. Spatball players still study the films that Harry — that was the biologist — made of his birds and their offspring. So do astronauts. The chicks found out things about maneuvering in microgravity within their first few weeks of life that even trained astronauts took a lot longer to work out for themselves. And obviously the parents learned, too…but their learning curve was a lot like the human astronauts’; they made the same kind of mistakes at the same kind of speed.”

George leaned back and took a drag of his iced tea. “Now the moral of the story,” he said, “is that among the other things Harry the biologist used to do, was play spat-ball. In fact, he was a member of one of the very first ‘real space’ teams that formed to play in the Selective Spin cubic before it was populated and the game had to go virtual. And his birds played with them. George and Gracie in particular liked to get into the games and follow their boss around…George even more than Gracie. So that, these days, if you’re any good as a spatball player, and you’re named George, you are pretty much condemned to be referred to as ‘The Parrot.’” He raised his eyebrows, producing a resigned expression. “It’s hardly anything new. But since we hit the news, suddenly it’s a big deal.”

Catie shook her head. She was unable to stop thinking about some of the side effects of having pet birds, at least one of which had repeatedly occurred to her when as a youngster she’d gotten stuck with cage-cleaning for a pair of parakeets that her brother had lost interest in. “I can see where it would happen. But, George, what about…”

“…the stuff parrots usually leave on the bottom of their cages, getting all over a space station?” George laughed. “It didn’t. They just housebroke the parrots.”

“You’re kidding.”

“No, seriously. It’s apparently not that hard to do. It’s partly a matter of controlling when they eat and what they eat, and partly reinforcing good behavior. See, I know a lot about this because of the nickname, because everybody—everybody! — asks that question as soon as they can.”

Catie laughed. “Okay,” she said. “So now I’ve done at least one thing that was expected of me.”

“Thank heaven. Now we can get on with life.”

“Which means the next game,” Hal said.

George picked up the second half of his sandwich. “There is more to life,” said George mildly, “than the next game. Though you wouldn’t think that CNNSI believed it. Or any of the other news services that’ve been camped out around my apartment lately, or the Miami area in general…especially the sports news services. They seem to think it’s bizarre beyond belief that I do my own shopping. Like, now that we’re in the championships, suddenly a personal shopper should descend from the heavens and start taking care of me.” He laughed, but it had a slightly despairing sound to it. “I caught the guy from AB/CBS going through my garbage the other day. For what? Clues about my training diet? To see what junk mail I throw out? He wouldn’t tell me! I told him he wasn’t allowed to do that unless he’d actually carried the stuff out of the house himself. And he volunteered. He volunteered to carry my garbage! Do you believe that?”

“This is what everybody thinks they want a piece of,” said Hal, a little somberly. “Fame…”

“It’s overrated,” George said. “It means you can’t go to a convenience store and let someone see you buy a six-pack of beer. If you do, they either declare you a closet alcoholic, or else the next morning some guy from the beer company turns up on your doorstep asking you to appear in commercials.”

“Or both,” Mike said.

George looked wry. “Don’t laugh. I could be rich about six times over, just now, just out of what I’ve been offered for endorsements. But I don’t want to do that! We’re an amateur organization, for one thing. Spat for me is about getting together with my friends, having a good workout, playing together skillfully, and being social afterward…. But the problem’s a lot worse than that. If I ever get stinking rich, I want it to be from something I made, something I did. Not something they did to me, or for me, as an accidental outgrowth of a pastime, a game, yes, a game! — which by itself isn’t worth that kind of money. But they don’t understand that,” said George. “And frankly, neither do my family, or my friends, a lot of them…They think I’m crazy. And the trouble is, I’m beginning to understand why.”

He let out a long breath and had some more iced tea. Catie looked at the glass, and looked at the window, wondering whether George’s choice of beverage had anything to do with a possible fear of distant cameras, trained on him, just waiting to see him do something that someone somewhere might consider inappropriate.

“But enough of my troubles,” George said at last, and put the glass down. “How about the game?”

“It was super,” her brother said. And that was about the last chance Catie would have had to get a word in edgewise for the better part of three quarters of an hour, for the ensuing torrent of spatball jargon took nearly that long to die out, as play after play was taken apart, turned inside out and upside down, analyzed, criticized, and dropped for the consideration of the next one. Mike was an eager participant in this, and Hal gave him a run for his money, while Catie listened with somewhat pained interest to terminology that kept getting tangled up in chords and lunes and great circles and geodesic slams and incidence relations. She sighed at those, for Catie had finished the usual run-in with solid geometry in school last year, and had come away from it successfully, but only just. Afterward, for her, the phrase “Through point A draw a line B” would normally have made a good start for a horrorcast.

But the game itself had been won against an opponent that had widely been expected to dump South Florida unceremoniously out of the tournament. That was the main thing. Now the publicity was heating up, and Hal and Mike amused themselves briefly with reciting some of the more specious and empty-headed rationalizations they had heard in the media for the Banana Slugs’ win, everything from plain dumb luck to sunspots. George mostly kept quiet during this, attempting to do something about the second half of his sandwich. Catie had already decided to take hers home in a doggie bag and have another run at it around dinnertime. And possibly a third attempt at breakfast tomorrow…

“Your team’s been attracting a whole lot more attention than you ever thought you would, I bet,” Catie said.

“Yes,” George said, putting the sandwich down again with a sigh. “We have. Not all of it friendly.”

There was something about the way he said this that made her look at him closely. George was looking out the window again, and his expression was very much that of a man who was sure that someone was watching him.

He glanced back at her. “We’re absolutely not supposed to be here, you know,” George said after a moment. “It’s surprising how easily people get upset when somehow a long-established status quo shifts. Not that publicity won’t do the team good in the long run. No matter what happens in these play-offs, our organizational life will be a little easier in the long run. You know — a few less cake sales, a little more time to actually play. But the hostility and confusion surrounding us at the moment are a little sad to see. There are plainly people who genuinely see us as a disruptive influence to the sport, or an embarrassing accident that the sport is going to have to recover from, or a way to make the rest of the sport look bad while we still get a whole lot of money and hold the ‘moral high ground’…wherever that is for spatball.” George let out a long breath that bespoke a fair amount of frustration and anger, all shut down to its lowest possible level for the moment. “It’s like they can’t understand our right to do what our group formed itself to do: play spat competitively, but never lose sight of the basic pleasures of it just for the sake of the win, or what comes with the win. Flight…” Fora moment there was a spark of delight in his eyes, and everything was all just that simple. “We’re every kid who ever jumped off the couch with a towel tied around his neck, pretending to be a superhero, or boinged along the ground pretending to be Neil Armstrong, or John Glenn, mostly free of gravity, but still free to be human, and to play.” He grinned, just briefly. “To play hard, but play fair, too, and be friends again afterward…”

Catie nodded quietly for a moment. That kind of feeling was the reason she played soccer, and why she had stayed with the same team of kids from Bradford Academy and the general D.C. area, even when she had opportunity to move to a better team. Sportsmanship, and companionship, expressed through the sport itself and the aftermath, mattered. She raised her eyebrows, then. “Somehow,” Catie said, “I don’t think that aspect of it is something you’ve said a whole lot about to the media lately.”

“I tried once or twice,” said George. “One guy asked me who wrote my speech. Another of the interviewers wanted to know, was I thinking about running for office?” The flicker in George’s eyes this time was not a happy one. “I don’t talk that way to reporters anymore. Competitiveness, ruthless competitiveness, that they understand. But joy…?” He trailed off, shaking his head.

Catie made a wry face. “Trying to teach a pig to read,” she said, “wastes your time, and only annoys the pig.”

George burst out laughing, and Mike and Hal both looked at him.

“What was that punch line again?” Mike said. “I missed it.”

“Nothing,” George and Catie said, more or less in unison.

Catie was immensely relieved when Wendy arrived to ask who wanted dessert. Hal, as always, was game. Catie often wondered where he put all the calories he ingested in a day, and how he always failed to show any sign of them afterward. For herself, she passed, content to finish her soda, and George and Mike asked for coffee.

“What time’s the press conference?” said Mike, making the writing-on-a-notepad gesture to Wendy when she came with their coffees.

“Two-thirty,” George said. “We’ll all stand around in the lobby of their headquarters, trying to look like we really want to be there. They’ll have ‘real’ jerseys there for us to wear, to illustrate what the virtual ones are going to look like.” He gave Catie an amused look. “Whether they’ll fit anything like as well as the virtual ones is another question. And then there’ll be another grilling from the media people, under those hot lights…and then we’ll have to go virtual and do it again. A couple of hours’ worth of interviews, at least, when we should all be in the cubic, practicing. And then back on the plane and home again….”

“But can’t you just play the game from up here?” Hal said, surprised. “The sponsor must have Net facilities you can use!”

“They probably have a lot better ones than anything the team has,” George said, nabbing the bill from the newly returned Wendy before anyone else had a chance at it, “but I don’t care about that, and neither does the team. When we’re playing, we all prefer our own Net setups at home. It takes valuable time to get used to someone else’s rig, and you never feel quite comfortable…and what happens if something goes wrong with it in mid-game? If your own Net machine malfunctions, that’s one thing, and maybe you’ll know what to do about it. Get up and kick it, or jiggle the phone cable, or whatever. But play a tournament-level game in a strange building, using a strange new machine? No, thanks. I’ll admit the extra travel time is a nuisance, but if it gets us home before midnight, that’s going to be good enough for me and the rest of the team. We’ll manage.”

Catie thought she could see his point. George fished around in his pockets and came up with an ElectroWallet card, handed it to Wendy. “Please take ten,” he said, and she went away smiling even harder than she had been, which Catie would have thought impossible.

George looked over at Hal. “So have you got your ‘seats’ sorted out for the game tomorrow?” he said.

“Yup…took care of it yesterday.”

“Not a bad idea,” George said. “The reservations computers have been having trouble with last-minute bookings, the last game or so, they tell me. But do you want to swap your seats for positions in friends-and-family space, down close to the heart of things? We’ve got room.”

Hal was delighted. “Can we really?”

George glanced at Catie. “No problem. Suit you?”

“Suits me fine,” she said. “I always like a close look at a winning team.”

“Then it’s settled. When you’re online this evening, check the team server and give it your seat locations. It’ll make the swap. Look, I’m sorry we have to go, but the new sponsor would get pretty cranky if the captain was late for the big press push. And if I know these guys, they’re going to want some time privately with us before the public part of the proceedings.” George got up.

They all headed for the door, where George was handed his ElectroWallet by Wendy. There was a little crowd of the diner staff all waiting there with her by the door to shake George’s hand, and as they went out to the street, Hal muttered to Catie, “We ought to come back here later in the week and see if the service is still this good.”

She smiled slightly as Mike said his good-byes and headed for his car. He would be driving George to the press conference.

“Listen,” said George, shaking Hal’s hand, “it’s been good meeting you.” To Catie, as he shook her hand, he said, “I really enjoyed this. Stay in touch.”

“Sure.” She smiled politely enough, while at the same time thinking, I bet you say that to all the—

“I mean it,” George said, and once more there was something about the way he said it that brought Catie up short. It was not exactly urgency in his voice — but at the same time, she couldn’t get a handle on just what it was.

“Look, wait a second,” George was saying. He fumbled around in his pocket and came up with a business card, one of the kind with a Net-readable chip embedded in it: you dropped it onto your Net machine’s reading pad, if your machine had one, and it read the embedded address automatically. Or you could always simply read it into your machine off the card.

“Here’s my Net address,” George said. “It’s always nice to run into someone who likes the sport for itself, and isn’t blinded by the surrounding hype. If you have time, I wouldn’t mind chatting with you occasionally. Or alternately, having the occasional game of chess. I don’t have time for tournament play, heck, I don’t have time now for proper meals, most days…but move-by-move would be fun.”

Catie looked at his card, looked at him. “Sure,” she said. “Any time.”

George waved a little salute at them and headed off toward Mike’s car, got in. The two of them drove off. Catie and Hal walked in the other direction, toward the GWU tram station, and found the tram that would head toward home waiting there on layover. They climbed on, and Catie sat down, feeling strangely weary, and yet aware of something at the back of her mind that was poking her for attention, trying to find a way to explain itself and not yet succeeding.

Hal, though, was shaking his head, looking astonished. “Am I completely out of my mind,” he said as the tram started up, turning out of the layover loop and into traffic, “or was he making a dive at you?”

Catie reached into her pocket, took out George’s card again, glanced at it. “I don’t think so,” she said after a moment. “I think something else may be going on. He might just want someone to talk to who doesn’t automatically see him as a spatball player, or a media figure…”

“Or a serious hunk.”

“I don’t know,” Catie said.

What she did know, though, was that as soon as she finished up whatever else her mom wanted her to take care of around the house, she was going to go have a talk with Mark Gridley.

4

Why, when you needed to talk to somebody, was it always so hard to find him? Mark was online so much of the time Catie sometimes wondered how he got enough sleep and sufficient calories for fuel. But when Catie got online that evening and sent a call to Mark’s space, all she got was an image of Mark standing by himself, spotlit in the darkness, saying, “I’m either not online right now, or I can’t talk…so leave me a message, okay?”

And so she did. But the other thing she found, around noon on Sunday — for she got involved in a long debrief with some of her soccer buddies over the game they had played on Saturday afternoon, after the “celebrity lunch”—was in her workspace, in the middle of Catie’s mock-up of the Great Hall of the Library of Congress, when she went in to tidy things up before going off to watch the South Florida — Chicago — Moscow Spartak game. It was a simple text message in a window, just hanging there and glowing in the early afternoon light, and it read:

Catie just stood there, smiling slightly, when she saw it. Pawn to King Four. It was the first move of a chess game — the traditional first move, unless you were feeling iconoclastic. She regarded it for a moment. Hal’s question came back to her: Is he taking a dive at you, or what?

Catie didn’t think so. It didn’t feel that way, somehow. Granted, it tickled her a little that she was being paid the kind of attention by George Brickner that (if the People virtfeature was anything to go by) a significant portion of the girls her age on the continent wished he would pay to them. But at the same time she couldn’t get rid of the feeling that something else was going on.

I’m going to enjoy finding out what it is, she thought. But in the meantime…

“Space,” she said.

“Have we been introduced?” said her workspace manager.

Mark, Catie thought for about the thirtieth time that week, we are definitely going to have words about this. Yet at the same time, she had to admit that there was nothing wrong with the way her manager was functioning. Was it even responding a little faster, a little more flexibly, than it had done before Mark had worked on it? “Just a little heuresis,” he had said. If he’d actually improved the way the machine handled input, making it act more intelligently, maybe the tradeoff in smart remarks was worth it, in the long run.

“I sure hope we have, because I want to redecorate a little,” Catie said.

“About time,” said her workspace in a fussy voice. “Dusting this place just eats up my days.”

Catie rolled her eyes. “Never mind that. I want a chess-board in the middle of the floor here.”

A regulation tournament-size chessboard with the standard Staunton pieces arrayed on it duly appeared at her feet.

Catie looked up into the empty air of the Great Hall, toward the “place” where she routinely conceived of the workspace management program as “living.” Did I say it was being more flexible? “That’s not what I meant.”

“Then you should say what you mean, O Mighty Mistress.”

Well, precision was everything, in art and programming both. The miserable program had a point there, though she wasn’t going to admit as much out loud.

“Right,” Catie said. “Overlay a mosaic representing a chessboard on the mosaics already here. Inset it into the existing floor. I don’t want it sticking up over the present design. The size of the chessboard should be three meters by three meters. Make the squares brown and cream to match the colors of the marble in the pillars. And make me some giant pieces to go with it.”

The mosaic under her feet obediently wiped itself clean. The chessboard, worked in matching mosaic tiles and the colors she had specified, appeared beneath her feet. And then Catie was completely surrounded by chess pieces twenty feet tall, so that she couldn’t stir to right or left, hemmed in as she was by chocolate-brown rooks and knights and bishops.

“Not THAT giant!” she hollered.

“You didn’t say,” the workspace manager replied calmly.

“I’m going to trade you in for a pocket calculator with a liquid-crystal display,” Catie said, “and then I’m going to reprogram that with a rock. Make the queen two feet high, and scale all the rest of the pieces accordingly, and hurry up!”

“To hear is to obey, O Sovereign of the Age,” said the management program. A blink later all the pieces were of a size to fit the chessboard on the floor.

Catie went over to pick up the brown queen and a few other pieces.

“Don’t you want me to set them up for you?” the workspace manager said sweetly.

“No. You just go dust something.”

There was quiet for the next few minutes while Catie set up the pieces, both white and brown. Then she moved white’s pawn out four spaces in front of his king, and stepped off to one side to look at the board and decide how to respond. She could get flashy and try something like the Ruy Lopez opening, or she could just plod along in her own style, without trying to show off. Finally she decided on the second course of action. George would find out soon enough what Catie was made of without her having to drag any dead chess masters into it.

“I want you to record the moves in the usual notation,” Catie said as she picked up her own pawn and moved it out to K4, head-to-head with George’s.

The air over the board shimmered, and Catie found herself looking at a pattern of glowing footsteps hanging there, with various curves and arrows hanging between them.

“Not dance notation, you idiot lump of silicon!” Catie yelled. “Chess notation!”

The window in the air changed to show:

“Thank you so much,” Catie muttered. “Virtmail George that move, please, and alert me if I’m online when one comes in from him.”

“No problem. Do you want out-of-Net paging for moves?”

“No, it’s all right. Has Mark Gridley come back in yet?”

“His system still has him flagged as unavailable.”

Great, Catie thought. Well…it can keep a day, I suppose. He was the one who was so urgent about wanting to hear about George Brickner. If he’s not onsite when I’ve finally managed it, well, tough.

But that felt so cold. She sat there wondering. “He said he might run into me at the play-offs,” Catie mused. “Space, check the ISF server and find out if Mark has a seat booked for the game this afternoon.”

“That information is not available because of privacy issues,” her workspace said.

It wouldn’t be, would it…. She sighed.

At that point a huge voice came echoing into the Great Hall. “Catie!”

She sighed again. “Hal,” she said, “lose the visiting wizard act and tell me what you want.”

A large image of her brother’s head appeared in the air, surrounded by billows of flame that swirled and brightened around him when he spoke. “I don’t know, I kinda like it.”

“It’d look even better if you were bald,” Catie said, “but I guess I have to wait a few decades for that. What is it, runt?”

“Pregame show’s starting.”

“Yeah, I know. I was going to experience it from the friends-and-family space.”

“Oh. Yeah, that’s a thought, isn’t it! Okay, let’s—”

“Not until you empty the dishwasher, young man,” said another voice from the outside world, not sounding at all like an apparition from Oz, and not needing to. “And then there’s the small matter of the laundry piling up in your room.”

“But, Dad—!”

Catie tried to keep herself from grinning, and simply couldn’t.

“Sorry, Son, you blew it. You’ve had two days to clean up in there, and knowing you, you’ll plead homework tomorrow if we let it go on that long.”

“But, Dad, the game—!”

“The sooner you finish this stuff that’s been staring at you since four P.M. on Friday, the sooner you’ll see what the Slugs do. Get on it.”

And silence fell.

“Space, honey,” Catie said.

“She wants a favor, I can tell.”

Catie was so amused that she didn’t much care what her workspace said. “Open a gateway to the friends-and-family space on the ISF server,” she said. “And run the usual leave-a-message message if anyone calls for me. I won’t be back for a few hours.”

“The Great Programmer be praised,” said her workspace, “I can finally get some reading done.” A doorway opened in the air of her space, and through it, faintly, Catie could hear the roar of the crowd. She stepped through and waved the doorway closed behind her.

Two hours later she could hardly breathe. The roar, which had been like the distant sea earlier, had hardly stopped for the whole time she’d been in here, even between the halves. Now the clock was running down toward the end of the third half, there was nothing but a tangle of bodies showing in the middle of the volume, and amid shrieks of excitement and outrage from the crowd, the goal hexes had just shifted again, for the third time in no more than five minutes. It was a standard increased-rotation simulation, for such things had happened often enough during the “classic” games played in real microgravity, when the needs of some experiment in the outer ring for increased gravity had caused the whole sphere to be rotated faster. Nominally the computer had charge of such events, inflicting them randomly on the players. But at times like this, when there were three teams at full strength in the cubic, all trying to get control of the ball, they produced the maximum possible confusion. The ball wouldn’t go where the players wanted it to. None of them seemed to be able to get that vital, instinctive “extra jump ahead” of the program—

The volume was a mob scene, a whirl of three sets of colors — the yellow and black of South Florida, the red of Chicago, the blue, red, and white of Spartak Moscow. Spartak had possession, its forwards passing the ball down a great-circle curve around the perimeter of the other teams’ people; but the crowded center-volume configuration of the last few seconds was already breaking, Melendez and Dawson for South Florida arrowing along toward the live goal that was nearest the end of the great-circle pass corridor that Moscow was using. Spartak had given up on subtlety and was trying for speed, but the belated decision was doing it no good. Chicago, one goal behind South Florida at the moment, was at the same time not beyond simply making sure that it not only scored against South Florida, but kept Spartak from scoring against anybody else under any circumstances — a three-way draw would mean a decrease in its overall “points” total for the tournament, and regardless of the number of games won or drawn, even one point too few could make the difference between winning or losing the tournament if the final games were still tied at the end of penalty or injury time. An extra point in another team’s plus column could mean that your own team won on goals but lost on points…and at the end of the day, it was the points that would matter. Chicago might get no more points itself today, but it was going to make sure at all costs that Spartak didn’t, either.

The goals now precessed one hex along, and everything changed, the previous scrum dissolving into a new one, oriented in a slightly different direction, as the teams reacted to the shift. As usual there were a few seconds during which none of the teams reacted as a whole, but only fragmentarily, shouting orders and suggestions at each other that were nearly lost in the clamor of the crowd. Darien for Chicago nabbed possession of the ball as it was being passed between two Spartak forwards, worked herself out of the tangle of bodies and passed to her fellow forward, Daystrom, who caught the ball in the crook of an elbow and spun in place, in roll axis, looking for the teammate to take the next pass. Most of the other Chicago players were still tangled up on the far side of the scrum, and Daystrom shouted himself hoarse at them to detach themselves and put some air between themselves and the “traffic jam” in the middle of the volume. One or two of them heard and pushed free, but the rest were trying to block either Spartak or South Florida players, and took a moment to respond to Daystrom. Daystrom glimpsed a face that looked ready, Ferguson’s, and flung the ball at him—

A leg thrust out of the scrum and kneed around the ball, capturing it. A moment later the body belonging to the ball worked its way out of the scrum and folded itself up double to spin. It was Spartak’s Yashenko. A great howl of delight went up from the Moscow fans and the scrum abruptly disintegrated, players scattering in all directions, looking to see where the ball was, locating it, targeting Yashenko and pushing off the volume walls or each other to get at him, to block or tackle.

The movement in the volume became frantic. Yashenko kept spinning, and one of his teammates, Talievna, was the first to reach him of the multiple “launches” that were heading his way. Within a meter of him she curled up to offer him inertial mass, and Yashenko pushed off against her and was halfway across the spat volume by the time the people who had been coming at him to tackle or block had arrived at his former position.

In an instant it became apparent that he was lining up for an attack on the Chicago goal, at right angles to the Spartak goal directly ahead of him. But there were too many of the Chi players on the wrong side of the volume to defend properly, now, and even the Chi goalie Bonner had been caught away from his post and was now trying to get at the wall for a push in the right direction. The crowd went up in a great howl of excitement as people reacted to the fragmentation among the teams and the prospect of the score, as Yashenko got ready to pass. But there was one place where confusion did not reign quite supreme. Among the bodies now swarming toward the Chicago goal, George Brickner curled himself down into cannonball — possibly inevitable in the confusion, but at least one player was ready for it — then Brickner pushed sideways off Chicago’s Daystrom and thus opened up a space between them with the equal-and-opposite reaction. There were shouts of confusion, some from his team-mates, but he had seen what they hadn’t, and Melendez had seen his glance. As Yashenko headered the ball at Galitsin for the goal, Melendez braced himself off Galitsin and pushed — and the ball flew with terrible speed past Galitsin, who reached for it but couldn’t stop it, and smacked squarely into the goal outlined in red, white, and blue before it could precess.

There was a roar of rage and disappointment from the Spartak fans as the computer held the ball in place and did a retrace of recent motions to see who picked up the point. But the referee had seen that perfectly well. “Own goal, Moscow,” the referee said over the roar, “credit to South Florida—!”

Another roar, but this time of joy, from the South Florida fans. The rest of the audience was waiting in breathless hope or anguish for the computer to finish the traceback and agree or disagree with the ref, but the digits on the scoreboard hexes embedded in the transparent walls of the spat volume burned briefly bright…and then changed from 2–1–1 to 2–2–1.

Play resumed, and if it had been fast before, it was furious now. Twenty-one men and women, angry or wildly excited or both, jostled for control of the ball as it was fired back into the volume. It vanished into a flying scrum of bodies wearing yellow and red about half and half, while the ones in red, white, and blue changed tactics, as was possibly understandable, and simply tried to keep either of the others from scoring. This was one of those situations in which spatball started to more closely resemble a particularly spiteful playground game of keep-away than anything else. Somehow, though, Chicago managed to get hold of the ball again, and another hand-around began as Hanrahan emerged from the scrum with the ball gripped desperately behind one bent knee. He did a 180-degree somersault in the pitch axis and flung the ball away again, revealing (to Moscow if no one else) that the pass he had been setting up was a feint, and that three of his teammates were lining up in great-circle on South Florida’s goal. But it was too late. The crowd was already counting down, and there was no injury time, and even as Jarvik took the pass from Hanrahan and fired it at Torrance, who in turn fired it at the goal, the South Florida goalie was there, out of nowhere, wrapping herself around the ball like an oyster around somebody’s escaped pearl.

“Houdini!” the South Florida fans screamed at the goalie in tribute, but Zermann paid no attention to them — opening herself up again, glancing around her for no more than a second, and fisting the ball away sideways like a bolt of orange lightning at Brickner, who caught it in his elbow and tightened in for spin—

And the horn went. Catie jumped up and flung her arms around Zermann’s brother Kerry, who had been sitting beside her rigid as a statue for the last fifteen minutes, but now was jumping up and down and screaming “Slugs! Slugs!” like everyone else within the twenty-meter diameter that circumscribed the Slugs friends-and-family area. From behind her, Hal caromed into Catie, and she dropped Kerry Zermann and pounded her brother’s head in sisterly delight. All around them the crowd of sixty thousand was in bedlam, and in the spat volume team members of all kinds were hugging each another and jerseys were being pulled off and sent sailing across the volume to other players, who slipped them on and came across to shake hands, some cheerfully, some with scowls. The announcer was shouting into the main sound link, “—and South Florida and Chicago tie, two-two, with Moscow Spartak falling by the wayside with an own goal and only one score during the whole of an incredible game, one that’ll go down in the record books for sheer unpredictability and brilliant play — the umpire congratulating both sides now as the Slugs and the Fire progress to the quarter-final stage, both teams going into the positional lottery along with New York, Los Angeles, the Grasshoppers of Xamax Zurich, Manchester United High, Rio de Janeiro, and Sydney Gold Stripe. A game that will go down in spat history for possibly the latest…”

Catie found herself wondering later, The latest what? — for when things quieted down again enough for her to notice things, she was in the “locker room” with the Slugs, their entourage, and about fifty other people, mostly from the sports networks. The locker room wasn’t any such thing, of course, any more than it had to be in any other virtual sport. The players’ actual bodies were mostly in their own homes, and if they needed showers, or someplace to change their clothes, such things were only steps away from their own implant chairs. But the need for a place to celebrate after a won game, and to deal with the press, still existed, and so here they all were, the Slugs laughing, shouting, jubilant even after only achieving a draw. At first Catie tried to keep herself calm in the midst of all this, but it was just silly. So much excitement, so tightly concentrated, simply overwhelmed your senses — the reporters running around sticking virtual mikes (representative of link-out programs to their own broadcasters’ servers) into people’s faces, the champagne being squirted around with total abandon — for when the session finally broke up, no one would actually be sticky, and no money for the bubbly stuff would actually have been wasted — the hoots and shouts of victory, the jokes and jibes, and the big stuffed banana slug being paraded around the locker room, with some team members and hangers-on bowing to it ceremoniously, and others following it around in an impromptu conga line — Catie couldn’t help but laugh, especially when George’s co-captain, Mark, left one interview with the CNNSI reporter and came up to her with what looked like a very big peanut butter jar wrapped in prismatic gift paper. He was holding the lid on, and he said to Catie, in a mysterious voice, “Want a look?”

“Sure,” Catie said.

He opened the lid. She peered in. Then she raised her eyebrows and said, “I thought they were bigger.”

“Aww,” Mark said, sounding disappointed. Plainly he had been expecting a more emphatic response. “And you looked like such a sweet, innocent little thing, too.”

Catie grinned. “Guilty on one count, maybe. But when you’ve had as many weird things put down your back by your little brother as I have over the last seventeen years, one slug more or less doesn’t matter much. Besides, I think that one’s asleep.”

“Asleep? How can you tell?” Mark stared into the jar. “Listen, seriously, how can you—?” But at that point one of the reporters from AB/NBC came up to Mark with a “mike” and started asking him questions about Chicago’s “front five,” and Catie slipped away, grinning. That response had paralyzed her brother, too, a few years ago, and had won her at least an hour of peace somewhere along the line.

Very slowly the locker room began to clear out, and as it did, George Brickner drifted over toward Catie, glancing around him with an expression that overtly looked like satisfaction. But there was still something else going on too, that uncertain quality in his gaze that Catie had noticed before and had not been able to put a name to. Seeing it again now, it began to bother her more than ever. If there was a form of art she preferred above all others, it was portraiture, and after a lot of studying of faces, over time, she was beginning to get a sense of whether the face in question was (for lack of a better phrase) comfortable with itself. George’s face was not, and Catie kept wondering why.

“Well,” he said, watching one last reporter getting into Melendez’s face again, “at least that’s over. Now we start getting ready to go into the lottery.”

Catie raised her eyebrows at that. “You’re going to have to coach me here a little, George…I’m still new to this game. Though I think I heard some of the reporters going on about this earlier.”

“Oh. Well, at the quarterfinal level, the teams that have ‘survived’ that long go into a lottery to determine who plays who in what order. Originally, it was a way of avoiding accusations that one team or another was using undue influence to have first crack at the spat volume on the Space Station.” He waved away one of his teammates who was coming at him and Catie with one more champagne bottle. “Pete, why don’t you drink some of the stuff? Nice vintage, no calories!”

The answer was a rude noise, after which Dalton departed to squirt someone else. “…Anyway, later they kept the same routine to make sure that time slots in the dedicated ‘sealed’ server were distributed fairly, since the security protocols in the single server only allow one game to be played at a time. A spat tournament isn’t something you can stage over multiple venues, like a real-world sport. At least it couldn’t be done so far. That may change now. With money pouring into the sport the way it has been, they’ll be able to afford to set up and maintain at least one more dedicated server, maybe two. One of the good things that’ll come of all this sponsorship, I hope, eventually.”

George sighed then. “At least the hardware upgrades will be good if the software is improved…the stuff we have is already getting kind of clunky. In particular, there are problems handling the larger ‘crowds.’ That’s an increasingly thorny issue, and it’s going to get worse as the virtual ‘gate’ gets bigger and more and more people are attracted to the sport.”

“Don’t tell me that you’re longing for the good old days when spat was smaller, and only a few aficionados would turn up….” This was something that Catie had heard from at least one of the commentators over the past couple of weeks.

George laughed at her. “Are you kidding? This time, right now, is going to be looked back on in twenty years as spat’s golden age. I like it the way it is.” Then his face clouded. “I’d like it better still, though, if we’d won today. We should have.”

“But you didn’t.”

George looked at her sharply. “You don’t understand me,” George said. “I wasn’t saying, ‘I wish we’d won.’ I was saying, ‘We should have won.’” He looked at Catie to see if she was getting what he was saying, and he lowered his voice. “Especially in the second half. The force we applied to the ball, the way we were handling it, should have produced a certain given result then…and it didn’t. Something was wrong in there. I felt it again in the third half…which was why I was insisting on so much contact, and only shooting at goal from up close.”

Catie understood him, and what he was saying unnerved her. “You’re saying that the feel of the virtual spat space, the way it was behaving, had been interfered with somehow.”

He nodded.

Catie shook her head. “I know there are games where that happens on purpose. The way a golf greenskeeper can alter the ‘lie’ of the greens to make a hole harder to play…or the groomers at a bowling alley can varnish or wax the alleys to make the ball behave one way or another. It even happens in baseball…the guys who mow the lawn do the infield to favor their team’s hitting tendencies.”

“That’s legal, within limits, and for those games. But in spat the server is maintained by a central authority, not by the individual teams, and the spat volume’s behavior is supposed to be neutral.”

“So to change the way the scoring surface was acting…it would mean that someone had to tamper with the server,” Catie said, also keeping her voice low. “But that’s supposed to be impossible. The servers are sealed, aren’t they?”

“They’re supposed to be,” said George. “But exactly what that means in operational terms, I haven’t the slightest idea. Do you?”

Catie didn’t, but she resolved to find out, and she knew someone who could make the issue as clear to her as it needed to be. “No,” she said. “Not at the moment.”

George nodded. Catie looked at him and got the clear sense that he knew more about what she was up to than he was letting on, but he was being cagey about it. Maybe he was wise…for there was always the possibility, in any virtual encounter, that one was being listened to. Even encryption was not always everything it was cracked up to be. For some of the more routine forms of encryption, the “soft” ones, various law enforcement organizations held back-door keys…and not even law enforcement, Catie knew, was immune to occasionally being compromised. When you came right down to it, even law enforcement officers were just people, and people, however regrettably, had weaknesses that could occasionally be exploited by those with the inclination to do so.

“Tell me how it felt to you,” Catie said after a moment.

“Like the ball was bouncing wrong,” George said. “As if the virtual ‘rotation speed’ of the spat space had been altered without warning. Not a whole lot. But when you work in microgravity for long enough, you get to know the feel. We’ve had astronauts in to check it for ‘reality,’ and they’ve always said it was right on.”

Catie nodded again. “Meanwhile,” she said, “did you get my move?”

“Just pregame.” George gave her an amused look. “Conservative.”

“If you can tell that much about me from just one move,” Catie said, “you’re pretty good.”

“That’s what they tell me,” George said, and gave her a superior look, which he couldn’t hold — a moment later he was laughing.

“When’s the lottery?” Catie said.

“Tuesday evening,” George said. “Usually it’s not a big deal…but I hear it’s going prime time this year.” He was still smiling, but once again that expression of guarded concern was in his eyes.

Catie looked across the room at Hal, who had recovered quite nicely from his late arrival at the game, and was now gazing down into Mark’s jar with interest. A second later he took it from Mark and headed in Catie’s direction. Time to put on her game face…. “When you send your next move along,” she said, “I’ll get in touch, and we can have a little chat.”

George nodded. “I’ll look forward to that.”

“Cates,” Hal was saying, “how can you tell it’s asleep?”

Catie smiled.

Elsewhere, in a virtual bar far away, it was no longer afternoon, but night; and two shadowy forms sat on either side of a marble table, under the blue-tinged mood lighting, and eyed one another coolly.

“Lucky for you they drew,” Darjan said.

Heming kept himself still, and didn’t gulp…though he felt like it. Chicago’s draw had been entirely too tight a thing. “I can’t understand why they didn’t win,” he said.

Darjan gave him a dry look. “Maybe our principals’ enthusiasm is misplaced,” he said. “The team was given the equivalent of nearly half an hour’s worth of free goals. They weren’t able to make any decent use of the time. Whatever that may suggest to us, it’s suggesting other things to the people who’re most interested in what they do next. We’re going to have to look at more robust forms of intervention.”

“Still, they got into the play-off pool anyway,” said Heming after a moment. “The draw is Tuesday. The odds of them being matched off against South Florida again are minuscule.”

“Forty-four to one is not minuscule,” Darjan said quietly. “Two point six billion to one, like a respectable lottery, the same chance you have to be hit by a meteorite, now that’s minuscule. Forty-four to one is too damn good. And no matter who South Florida plays, their odds are still too damn good. This has got to be sorted out, Heming. Fast. What are you doing about it?”

Heming didn’t quite squirm, though he wanted to. “Some people are going to go have a look at the South Florida team members’ Net machines,” he said. “‘Routine maintenance.’”

Darjan sat quiet for a moment. “That sounds like a thought,” he said finally. “As long as you’re not planning anything so infantile as having the machines fail in the middle of a game.”

Heming looked briefly horrified. “Uh, of course not. Little changes, though, in the programming of each. Installation of conditionals.”

Darjan was silent for a moment. “That might work,” he said. “As long as deinstallation procedures are included as well. Be a shame if someone went looking at their Net machines’ routines, after the fact, and found something out of the ordinary there.”

“Of course deinstalls will be put in at the same time,” Heming said. “There are ways to do such things that won’t alarm the usual antiviral and system-scan diagnostics. It’s all taken care of.”

“Then get on with it,” Darjan growled. “The first game is Thursday…and it had better go the way our principals want, if South Florida is involved…or they’re going to start taking your intervention, or lack of it, personally.”

This time Heming did gulp, whether he wanted to or not.

Monday afternoon Catie got in from school and went online again to clean up her virtmail, and to make another attempt to get in touch with Mark. It wasn’t like him to be incommunicado for so long, except for his actual school time. He seemed to practically live online, and Catie thought that the only reason he didn’t get in trouble over this was probably that his parents had to spend so much of their time online as well. She stood there in the Great Hall of her workspace and said, “Still nothing from him?”

“Nothing. Should we call the media and tell them the engagement’s off, boss?”

“Fff,” Catie said, a soft sound of annoyance, but it wasn’t serious — she had other things on her mind. I wonder if he’s had to go away suddenly with his dad or something. They do travel a lot—

She plopped down into her beat-up comfy chair and brooded for a few moments. Well, no point in worrying about this any more until I hear from him, she thought. If I—

“Incoming call,” said her workspace manager. “Requesting entry into the space, if you’re available.”

“Who is it?”

“James Winters.”

Catie’s mouth fell open, and she stood up hurriedly. Every member of the Net Force Explorers knew James Winters by sight. He was the group’s liaison to Net Force as a whole, and theoretically on call to anyone in the Explorers if they had some problem. That was the theory, anyway. Every Explorer also knew perfectly well that Winters had other work in Net Force which was far more important than his liaison work, and that it would be stupid to bother him with things that weren’t genuinely crucial. More than stupid: suicidal, at least to your employment prospects at Net Force, if you seriously intended ever to work there…for James Winters was unquestionably going to be one of the committee that decided whether you got hired, and if you had ever wasted his time on purpose, he would certainly remember.

When he came looking for you, however…all bets were off. “Let him right in,” Catie said.

A doorway formed in the air, dark at first, then revealing a rather standard-looking government office with afternoon sunlight coming into it through the stripe-shadows of Venetian blinds, and through the door stepped James Winters. About six feet tall, broad-shouldered, with a Marine brush cut and a thoughtful, chiseled face, Winters stood there in conservative street clothes — cream short-sleeved shirt, dark trousers — and looked up and around him with recognition and (Catie thought) some pleasure. “Afternoon, Catie,” he said.

“Good afternoon!” she said, trying not to sound too strangled as she said it.

He turned around to look at the frescoed ceilings of the Great Hall, and the carved marble pillars. “Nice job. Did you do this from scratch?”

“Uh, yes,” Catie said. “It’s taken a while…but I see a lot of the real building.”

“Yes, your mother works there, doesn’t she,” Winters said, continuing to look upward.

“That’s right. Can I offer you a seat?” Catie said.

“Thanks, yes.”

“Space?”

“One chair coming up,” said her workspace management program, and produced an executive-style swivel chair off to one side of the “giant” chessboard. Winters went to it and sat down, glancing at the game as he did so. “I hope I’m not interrupting anything.”

“Not at all.”

“Good. Let me start out by saying that this has nothing to do with the Net Force Explorers, as such.”

“Oh,” Catie said. Boy, that sounded intelligent.

Winters smiled, a dry expression. “All right,” he said. “Catie, I see that you had a meeting with George Brickner the other day.”

Catie blinked at that. “Uh, yes. He was in town with his team before the Chicago game.” And Net Force is watching him. How interesting…

“Your brother set that up, I take it.”

“Yes, he’s buddies with one of George’s friends.”

“Do you mind if I ask you a question or two about that lunch?”

“No,” Catie said carefully. “But I hope you’ll tell me why.”

Winters gave her a hard, thoughtful look. It wasn’t an unfriendly one. “Before we get into detail on that,” Winters said, “tell me if I’m up to speed on something. You’ve been working in imagery sciences, haven’t you? Fine arts mostly, but a fair amount of emphasis on techniques for manipulating virtual spaces.”

“That’s right,” Catie said. “Staying at patina-level isn’t much good if you’re going to get seriously involved in sampling and analyzing virtual content. You have to go down to structure-level as well. I may not be a code wizard as yet, but I can recognize from an image what’s been done to it to make it look the way it does, and what else has to be done to change that, or to restore it if there’s been a change.”

Winters nodded. One part of Catie’s brain was shrieking at her, Are you out of your mind, you’re only seventeen, how can you possibly be making claims like this so calmly to this man? while another, perfectly at ease, was saying in response, But they’re true. “False modesty,” her father was always telling her, “is potentially more fatal to your career than a bullet in the brain. If you know how to do something, say so. You don’t have to brag, but you do have to tell yourself the truth about what you know how to do; otherwise you can’t make those talents available to others…and if you can’t do that, what good are those talents to you or anybody else?”…Now, Catie thought, she would find out whether her dad was right.

“All right,” Winters said. “That particular aspect of your studies is fortuitous at the moment. Let me backtrack a little. You’ve started following spatball?”

“Yes,” Catie said. “My brother got me into it.”

“He’s been interested for a while?”

“I wouldn’t say a long while,” Catie said, caution overcoming her for the moment. “Some weeks, anyway.”

“Ah, I see…. So here’s what this is about,” Winters said. “Net Force has some concerns about the conduct of the upcoming spatball play-offs. Not just because of the presence of South Florida in them. But the Banana Slugs—” He stopped, and grinned. “I’m sorry. It makes me want to laugh every time I use the name. Have you ever seen a banana slug?”

“Just yesterday,” Catie said. “Several times. At close range.”

“I see you’re overcome with the excitement. Well, anyway…The team’s presence in the play-offs is serving to crystallize out various concerns we’ve had about the conduct of spatball, and some other virtual sports, for a while now. Concerns about the integrity of their gaming environments, for one thing.”

That made Catie stop very still for a moment, thinking of what George had said to her…and the larger implications of his words. When a sport was played entirely in the virtual realm, it became unusually vulnerable to being disrupted by people with a vested interest in one outcome or another. Normally, as in the case of spatball, there were special committees and organizations set up by the governing bodies of such sports, which assigned officials whose jobs were specifically to keep the virtual sports arenas “clean.” The officials made sure that servers remained untampered with, that scoring and monitoring software was working properly and was properly manned and operated during games, things of that sort.

But who watches the watchers? Catie thought. If your officials are crooked, how are the players, or anyone else, ever going to find out?

“Environment integrity has been a problem of sorts ever since this branch of sports got started,” Winters said. “All the umpires, referees, and invigilators for the various sports routinely undergo random testing. Lie-detector tests, drug testing, all the usual routines. It’s not a perfect solution by any means, from the civil rights point of view as well as many others, but it’s worked well enough, by and large. However, it’s never safe to assume that a system like this is working well enough so that it doesn’t need periodic reassessment. When something has become status quo…that’s the time that people start looking for ways to subvert it without the subversion showing. And we have some evidence that that might be happening now.”

He leaned back in his chair. “I don’t want to get into too much detail right this moment,” Winters said. “Among other reasons, I don’t want to take a chance of prejudicing your own ideas, or pushing your judgment in one direction or another. But the indications of interference with spatball have been mounting up over recent months…and now South Florida is going to cause some of the forces involved in that interference to start showing their hands. We’ve been waiting for this for a while.”

“I want to get something clear here. You mean,” Catie said, “that these ‘forces’ are involved in actively fixing games.”

Winters nodded. “There are always people who gamble,” he said. “And the other side of that coin is that there are always people who want to control the gambling, or try to, to make a profit from it. In some cases, like casino gambling, the control is fairly benign. You go in to play mathematical games of chance, with easily predictable odds. Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose, and the house rakes off its ten percent as part of the normal state of affairs. But when gambling starts to try to affect less mathematically predictable games, and affect them a lot more robustly — games with a lot of variables…”

“Like sports,” Catie said.

“Like sports — then matters can get out of hand. Now, people will always bet. It just seems to be part of human nature, something that can’t be wiped out…which is why most governments around the world have legitimized at least certain kinds of sports gambling. From the government’s point of view, if you can’t stamp something out, tax it and attempt to regulate it. But there are always elements that chafe at that control, and who feel that what the government is taxing, they should have a piece of, too. They lay their own bets — sometimes through big syndicates, as a means of spreading the profit around so that it’s not too obvious — and then they influence the sports they’re betting on in any way they dare, to get as close as they can to the results they want.”

“I suppose,” Catie said, “that it would annoy these syndicates if there were sports they couldn’t influence….”

“That’s part of what’s going on in this particular case, we think,” Winters said. “They see it as lost revenue. But also, when they get used to running a racket or a betting pattern in a specific way, and something comes in to upset that pattern, that can annoy the syndicates, too…and occasionally they get annoyed enough to stand up on their hind legs and try to do something about it.”

Winters got up and began to pace. “At the moment, there are at least two syndicates that we suspect have been interfering, or trying to interfere, with spatball over the last couple of years. They’ve kept their interventions small-scale, until now. Co-opting a few players, trying to get them to throw games, or to get their teammates to help them do it…that kind of thing. It wasn’t that successful, as far as we can tell. But even when this didn’t work, the syndicates were making enough money from betting on spatball that it wasn’t worth making a big stink when things went wrong.”

“But then South Florida came along,” Catie said, “and changed the pattern.”

“That’s right. Now, by and large, the syndicates aren’t going to go broke just because of South Florida. They don’t bet on just one team to win. They use the normal bookmakers’ ‘spread’ to cover their losses. But South Florida is disturbing the syndicates’ old established pattern. The syndicates we’re watching — well, these particular gamblers are very conservative. They hate to have to develop new plans when the old ones have been working just fine. For the sake of getting rid of this new factor in the odds, we think one or the other of the main betting syndicates is moving to try something — we think they may actually try to tamper with the virtual environment itself.”

He sat down again, hunched forward a little, his hands folded. “Normally they’d shy away from this,” Winters said, “for fear of detection. But if they do this now, and manage to pull it off successfully, then they’ll try it again, in other sports…and the effects down the road could be very bad. Everything from the various ‘fantasy leagues’ that play casually around the world to the ‘real’ leagues that play under virtual conditions could be affected, if we don’t get a handle on this and stop it now. We want to catch the perpetrators with their hands in the cookie jar, conclusively. And the rest of the intervention must be complete, leaving no doubt in anyone’s mind that we are completely on top of this problem before it really gets going.”

Catie sat there quietly thinking for a moment. “So,” she said, “it would be good if Net Force actually was completely on top of it.”

Winters gave Catie a long, level look, and she abruptly broke out in a sweat, wondering if she had gone a little too far. Then the Net Force Explorers liaison cracked a small and appropriately wintry smile, no more than a couple of millimeters’ worth and only on one side of his mouth, but enough to relieve Catie of the impression that she was in trouble.

“It takes time to put an operation together,” Winters said, “and there are times you concentrate on one aspect of it to the detriment of others. We’re trying to remedy that problem right now.”

“That’s why Mark was asking about meeting George Brickner, wasn’t it.”

Winters sighed. “Whatever else we might seek to accuse Mark Gridley of in the real world,” he said, “subtlety wouldn’t be on the list. Well, never mind, he makes up for it elsewhere. Catie, one of our concerns is whether this attempt to fix the ISF play-offs might extend into the personnel of the teams themselves. ‘Big sports’ are already vulnerable for any number of reasons, and we’re looking into all the professional teams involved in the spatball play-offs as a matter of course. Rio, in particular, and Chicago, have some potentially unsavory connections, which have been sliding around just under the surface. But a nonprofessional team like the Banana Slugs is vulnerable in all kinds of other ways. South Florida, as you know, is composed of fairly ordinary people with fairly ordinary jobs — the most exciting employment any of them holds down is probably the K-9 work that the center forward does for the U.S. Customs office at the Port of Miami — and in such a situation, the prospect of a big payoff for doing something that you would almost certainly never get caught at would tempt most anybody.” He sighed. “Heck, it would even tempt me at the pay my grade pulls, except that I’m widely known to be incorruptible, and besides, I’m sure there’s someone taking a look at my bank account now and then.”

“I’m not sure I’d believe that any of the people on that team would be involved in throwing games,” Catie said. “But I’ve only known them for a couple of days….” Then she glanced up. “One thing you should know, though. When we were having lunch, George Brickner heard me say that I was in the Net Force Explorers. I wouldn’t say the conversation changed tack after that…but I caught a couple of odd looks from him.”

“Odd, how?”

“It’s hard to say,” Catie said. Indeed, she was still trying to analyze them to her own satisfaction.

“Did he look suspicious of you in some way?”

Catie thought about that. “No,” she said. “Whatever was on his mind, I don’t think it was that. I’m still not sure what he wants, but he’s definitely more attracted than repelled.”

“Hmm…” Winters brooded for a moment. “Well,” he said, “let’s get to why I came to see you. Obviously, I’d like your help in this operation, if your parents will sanction you assisting Net Force as we investigate. I have to add that normally I’m chary of allowing Net Force Explorers to become involved in open cases in any official way. But your access to George Brickner, in a way that would stand up to any outside scrutiny, is a gift in this situation, a gift I’m afraid that I am hoping to utilize. That aside, however, I would judge the threat to be minimal in this case at this point…and, besides, we already have another Net Force Explorer involved.”

Catie grinned. Winters, seeing the grin, rolled his eyes.

“Yes, well,” he said. “Normally we do our best to resist the urge to use Mark as a stalking horse. It’s all too easy to get in the habit of relying on a talent so close to home, and it would be exploitative. Mark has a right to a normal childhood, one that doesn’t involve being the tool, willing or otherwise, of a law enforcement agency.” He raised his eyebrows, a resigned look. “But since Mark seems to routinely and consciously sabotage all attempts by his parents to provide him with a normal childhood, we’re all aware that mostly this is a losing battle. And anyway, there are occasions when it becomes briefly appropriate to temporarily set our scruples aside.”

Catie got up and started to pace a little herself.

“Anyway,” Winters said, “will you think about it?”

“I have been thinking about it,” she said. “For my own part, the answer’s yes. And for George’s part…I have this idea that he may be asking for help, somehow. Maybe he suspects what’s going on. Either way, it sounds like you’d be in a position to help him out.”

“…Yes,” said Winters, and he was looking at her thoughtfully. “And so would you. You and he seem to have struck it off pretty positively…and he seems willing to talk to you about what’s going on.”

“Not just willing,” said Catie, “but positively eager.” That was, in fact, something that had made her wonder a little.

Winters sat quiet for a few moments at that. “All right,” he said. “Catie, as the play-offs progress, would you be willing to be a good listener for a while?”

“To find out whether anything illegal is going on inside the club?”

“That would be part of it.”

Catie held still for a moment, thinking. She wasn’t wild about the idea of being some kind of informer. Yet she thought back to what George himself had been saying about the difficulties of spatball in general, and South Florida in particular.

“I don’t want you to be uncomfortable about this,” Winter said. “If you feel you can’t in good conscience be involved in an operation of this kind, even tangentially, I’ll understand. Yet at the same time it’s a unique opportunity to make sure that the forces we suspect are moving in on spatball don’t get a chance to consolidate a choke-hold on the sport at large. The money coming into spat means that all the levels of play, especially the more amateur ones, can funnel their share of the funds into the community projects they love…and keep their sport clean and alive in its present form. But a loss to the organized crime people moving in on them now will suggest that the rest of the sport is weak as well, and can be covertly suborned by illegal payments and shady influence….”

Catie stood silent for a few moments. “Mr. Winters,” she said. “George is a friend. I’m not going to lead him on. But what he tells me freely—”

“That’s all we’d want to hear about,” Winters said. “I wouldn’t think of asking you to betray any confidences. But any indication that George was uneasy about what was going on inside his team would definitely help us work out how best to keep the damage that we suspect is about to happen, from happening at all….”

He stood up, too. “Obviously you’re going to need to talk to your parents about this, and so am I. But there wasn’t any point in talking to them until I’d spoken to you first. This isn’t likely to be a dangerous business, which is one of the reasons I’m willing to involve you. At the same time, you’re going to need to keep your eyes open. We are going to be sniffing around people who are intent on making sure no one finds out what they’re doing…and when they begin to suspect that that’s happening anyway, things are likely to get uncomfortable. That’s the point at which you’re going to excuse yourself and let the Net Force operatives handle things.”

She nodded. “That’s fine with me. I’m a quiet type at heart.”

He didn’t quite snort. “Then what you’re doing asking Mark Gridley to do maintenance work on your computer is beyond me,” he said. “But we’ll leave that aside for the moment. Anyway, when I find out where Mark is, I’ll ask him to come talk to you about the ‘sealed’ game servers, so that you know what kind of things to listen for when you talk to George Brickner. Meanwhile, please talk to your folks soon, Catie. And let me know when you have. I’ll be in touch with them shortly thereafter to answer any questions.”

“I will, Mr. Winters.”

He gave her a wave, then headed back through the door into his office, which sealed behind him.

Catie stood there gazing down at the chessboard and trying to decide what to do next.