Death Match

8

Despite Catie’s preferences, Thursday eventually came. The game was scheduled for nine P.M. Eastern time, and Catie went to her mom and dad to make sure that both the Net machines in the house were going to be available for her and Hal. But her mother and father already knew about the scheduling, and seemed surprised that she was bothering to ask.

“With all the coverage there’s been about this in the last couple of days, honey,” her mother said, “you know we wouldn’t deprive you!” She was unloading another pile of books onto the kitchen table, this batch, from the looks of it, was heavy on the classics again, but mostly sixteenth-and seventeenth-century French literature.

Catie sighed, picking up a copy of Gargantua and Pantagruel and paging through it. She hadn’t been looking at the spatball coverage. It made her heart ache to think of what was going to happen to South Florida tonight. Mostly she had been catching up on schoolwork and making the occasional chess move to match the two that George had made since she spoke to him last. But those were the only times she’d been online since then.

Her dad wandered through the kitchen then, holding a package. “Hon, what happened to my knife?”

“Your knife?”

“The one in the studio.”

Her mother went over to the dishwasher and pulled out a tired-looking plastic-handled steak knife, and handed it to her father. “I thought I would give it a scrub while its shape could still be made out somewhat under the paint,” she said.

“The dishwasher got it this clean?” her dad said, starting to work with the knife on the package he was carrying. “Amazing!”

“No, a hammer and chisel and elbow grease got the first inch of paint off it,” her mother said. “Hard work, not a miracle, paid off there. Catie, honey, did I tell you we talked to James Winters again?”

“Again?” Catie put the book down. “What did he want?”

“Just to thank us for letting you help,” her father said. “He thinks highly of you.”

Catie raised her eyebrows. “It’s nice to know,” she said.

Her father put the knife down on the table and started peeling open the package. “‘Nice to know’? Have you had a change of career goals all of a sudden?”

“Uh, no…I’m just tired.” She checked her watch.

“How long is that game, honey?” her mother said.

“About two hours or so, unless they go into overtime.”

“All right. As long as I can have one of the machines sometime before bed…”

“No problem.”

Nine o’clock came soon enough, and Catie took the machine in the family room. Hal took the one down the hall. In the Great Hall she paused to look over the chess-board for any new moves. There were none. “Space…”

“You know, you’re more beautiful every day.”

Catie looked up into the air with a cockeyed expression. “I think I liked it better when you were insulting me.”

“You’ll probably be sorry you said that in a few years. Was there something you wanted?”

“Friends-and-family space in the ISF spatball volume, please…”

A doorway appeared in the middle of the Great Hall. “Any messages waiting?” Catie said before she went through.

“Nothing, boss.”

“Okay. Flag me as busy for the next two hours.”

She slipped into the microgravity of the friends-and-family space and greeted some of the other team members’ relatives whom she knew slightly, then settled down among them. Hal popped in a few minutes later, bubbling over with excitement. “I can’t believe it’s finally happening,” he said. “I can’t believe it….”

“I can,” Catie said softly.

He turned to look at her. “Cates,” he said, “have you and George had a fight or something?”

“It’s not me-and-George,” Catie said, “and no, we haven’t had a fight.” Probably it would be simpler if we had….

“You sure?”

Catie gave Hal a don’t-push-your-luck look…then felt guilty and softened her expression. “Yeah, I’m sure. Why?”

“It’s just that if he said something that bothered you,” Hal said, “I was going to adjust his attitude.”

Catie had to laugh at that. “It’s nothing like that,” she said. “But look…thanks anyway.”

“Uh-oh,” Hal said. “Here we go…!”

The cheering was beginning as the players from both sides, Xamax in their green and white, South Florida in their yellow and black, were floating into the volume now, taking positions around the walls as the environment announcer read out their names and numbers to the usual wild cheers. The captains came last, as always. When George’s name was announced, the usual cry of “Parrot! Parrot!” went up from the South Florida fans all around. George looked over toward the F&F space and lifted a hand to wave. Every relative and friend in the place cheered and waved back, Catie included, but Catie knew whom he had been looking at, with a slighly somber gaze, and knew what the message was. We will not go quietly, I promise you!

After the national anthems Catie sat through the first and second halves with little enthusiasm…or tried to. Around the middle of the second half, she found that the sheer élan with which South Florida was playing started to break her mood, which even the screaming and hollering of the fans gathered around the Slugs’ friends-and-family area hadn’t been able to do. Xamax was a good team, very good indeed. Over time they had carefully selected and recruited some of the best players in Europe. Then (for reasons Catie didn’t understand in the slightest) they had sent out for a famous English spatball coach who had been with Man United for a while, and who now shouted at his players from the outer shell in either a hilarious Midlands-accented form of Swiss German that made him sound like he had a throat disease, or a really barbarous French that sounded like someone gargling with Channel water. Whatever they thought of his accents, his players loved the man and played their hearts out for him.

But they didn’t play like the Slugs. Will it make a difference at this level? Catie had asked, and now she realized how dumb the question had been. The team’s friendship, their relationship, turned them into the closest thing to a bunch of spatball-playing telepaths that Catie had ever seen. They all seemed to know where they all were almost without looking. They passed and played, not like separate people, but like parts of the same organism. And they were not playing for a coach, however beloved, but for each other. It made a difference, all right.

The trouble was that, at the end of the third half, it still wasn’t going to matter. At the end of the second half the score was already 3–2–0, and Catie knew that this was just an early indicator of the way the game would end. Already she had seen two goals which seemed to happen faster than any she had ever seen, situations where the balls had seemed almost to swerve on their way through the volume, as if the law of gravity had suddenly shifted in the spatball’s neighborhood, and the Slugs, even playing at their best as they plainly were, couldn’t cope. It was a lost cause, made more poignant because they just would not give up, would not play as if it was anything but a championship game. George had been right. They were playing out of their skins, out of their hearts, going for broke.

He’s not the only hero out there, Catie thought as the horn went for the end of the second half.

“It’s not over yet,” Hal was saying as the teams went out of the volume for their final break. “Only one more goal to draw—”

Catie shook her head. “I know,” she said. She also knew that it wasn’t going to happen. But her mood was changing. Heroism was worth honoring, even if there wasn’t a win in prospect. Playing the game as if it mattered…that in itself, in a situation like this, was a win of sorts, though maybe not the kind that the world would recognize. Catie knew. George knew, too, and his team knew—

Where the next twenty minutes went, Catie had no idea. The teams came back into the spat volume at the end of break, the referee and the invigilator gave one another the thumbs-up, and the third half began. And if she thought she had seen committed, ferocious play before, Catie realized that she hadn’t seen any such thing. War broke out in the spat volume: a graceful, low-gravity war, in which there seemed to be an agreement not to kill or seriously injure anyone — but war nonetheless.

“Injuries” began to pile up. South Florida lost two players to injury-level wall impacts almost within the first ten minutes, and Xamax lost three, so that they had to send in a replacement forward, one of only two they had left. The play got a little more cautious after that, as Xamax had no desire whatsoever to fall below minimum number and reduce its lead to a draw — there was no forfeiting for below-minimum situations when only two teams were playing. But George continued to play his team as if there was a war on, and Catie knew why, if no one else in the “arena” did — South Florida had nothing to lose. The crowd was beginning to react to the sense of urgency that was radiating from the spat volume. From all around her, from fans of both stripes, the screaming never stopped. If Catie thought she had heard it get loud at a spatball game before, now she realized that she hadn’t heard anything — and indeed, if this hadn’t been a virtual experience, when she got out of it she wouldn’t have heard anything. Her ears would have been ringing for a good while.

Thirty minutes of play reduced themselves to twenty, and twenty to ten, and ten to five, and the two teams were still hammering at each other as if the fate of civilizations rested on who won this game. Once South Florida almost scored, but somehow a Xamax player rocketed into the ball’s path from what seemed an impossible distance, blocking the ball away from a goal where the goalie was briefly absent; and at the same time, the goal precessed (it seemed to Catie) a lot sooner than it should have. The South Florida fans roared disappointment. That was the only time when the tears actually sprang to Catie’s eyes at the unfairness of it all — that people should play like this against malign and invisible forces, and have no real win to show at the end of it, nothing concrete to match the unquestionable moral victory. The moral victory’s going to have to do. But all the same, it’s just a shame—

Next to her, Hal was shaking with excitement. Catie glanced at the clock. Four minutes left. It was too much to hope for a miracle at this point, and anyway, there were forces operating behind the scenes to prevent any miracle from taking place. At three and a half minutes South Florida began lining up another play on the present Xamax goal, a long pass around the perimeter. Catie shook her head. She had seen too many of these fail in the last two halves, as goals seemed to precess out of sequence, the ball refused to go where it was supposed to—

“Catie!”

Not Hal…somebody on her right. Catie turned and saw that Mark Gridley was suddenly there. “Huh?” she said. “Where’d you come from?”

“Where you think.”

“I couldn’t stop him, boss,” her workspace manager whispered in her ear. “He overrode me to get your coordinates, the brute.”

Catie sighed and shook her head again. “How’s it going?”

“It’s not ‘going.’ It went.”

“You get cryptic at the most inconvenient times,” Catie said, turning her attention back to the spat volume. “Save it for later, Squirt. We’re at the end of a game here, they’re losing and you know why. Can’t you—”

“No, they’re not.”

She looked at him, confused. “But, the — Mark, the code — it’s, you know—”

“No, it’s not. It’s clean.”

And he started to laugh. “It’s clean, Catie! This is for real!”

“It’s — you mean they’re not—”

“It’s been clean since the start of the game. I was held up, we had to—”

“You mean they can—OH MY GOSH” They can actually win, oh, no, oh, my—

“Go, SLUGS!” Catie yelled at the top of her voice, the sheer volume of it nonetheless becoming almost lost in the sea of sound all around her. They have a chance to win. They actually have a chance!

And now it was as if the whole game had been different from the beginning…and now the ending mattered more than ever. The whole arena had become a generator of a single nonstop cheer which was now indistinguishable from white noise, a noise that was “white” the way the sun is white. Catie was as much part of it now as anyone else was. I’ll be hoarse tomorrow, she thought, and didn’t care in the slightest. That long pass that South Florida was setting up came apart as Villeneuve from Xamax snagged it behind a knee, between Daystrom and Marcus, and made off with it. In possession now, Xamax made it plain that they intended to stay that way until time ran out. But the Slugs had other plans. They bounced off the walls and off each other and off the Xamax players in ways that even George and Gracie’s kids had never thought of, and in the middle of them, receiving and passing, and receiving and passing again, there was Brickner, unstoppable, until the Xamax players tried informally to scrum him just to keep him out of the way.

Two minutes. There was no way it could continue at this level, but it continued. Somehow George was no longer at the center of that scrum. He found daylight, emerged into it with the ball in the crook of one elbow, flung the ball to his cocaptain. Mike caught it in a knee-bend, rolled like lightning in yaw axis, flung it away to Daystrom. She caught it elbow-wise, passed it, had it passed back to her. Lined up on the goal—

The goal precessed. The roar, impossibly, got louder. One minute. Daystrom pushed herself off an unfortunate Xamax blocker, spun in pitch axis, fired the ball away again. Someone else from Xamax snagged it, began again the game of keep-away, the only goal to keep South Florida from scoring. Pass, pass, pass, into a self-inflicted scrum and (theoretically) out the other side — except that somehow a South Florida team member, one of the flankers, Monahan, managed to work one arm into that scrum and somehow come out with the ball. The crowd’s noise got impossibly louder. Now the passing game started again, and the Xamax players got busy covering the goals. Thirty seconds. A few of them made attempts to get the ball away from the Slugs again, but their captain shouted them back to the goals again. If they were properly covered there was no danger, nothing to do but wait for time to run out. Twenty seconds.

The goals precessed another hex along. The pass came to Daystrom. She fired it like a bullet at George Brickner. George snagged it, spun, and if it came to him like a bullet, it left him like a laser beam, straight and almost impossible to see, fired right at one of the goals, at a patch of daylight between two of the Xamax guards.

One of them moved just enough to block it. It bounced into the center of the volume again, and George snagged it one more time, pushed off the nearby Daystrom, spun for impetus, and fired it back the way it had come.

The Xamax guard blocked it again. It bounced right back at George. He passed to Daystrom, pushing off her as he did so. She tumbled, came around, fired the ball at him one last time. He caught it, spinning, feinted at the Xamax blocker, threatening a third attempt — spun again, feinted as if to pass, spun—

The ball left him one last time, straight for the goal. The Xamax blocker had drifted just a little to one side….

The horn went.

The spatball impacted squarely in the center of the goal hex.

Amid the impossible roaring, Catie gasped for breath, and wondered when she had last had one.

The occupants of both F&F spaces were emptying into the spat volume now. Hal plunged past her, and Catie, wrung out, astonished, saddened but somehow still delighted, went after him. All the players were being mobbed, jerseys were being torn off and flung around, and the final result was flashing in the scoring hexes now: 3–2–0, Xamax.

Catie was out of practice in microgravity, but all the same she found a patch of daylight in one particular mob, and worked her way through it. There was George, still in possession of his jersey.

Catie threw her arms around him and hugged him hard.

He held her away, and grinned at her. It was not an expression of perfect joy by any means. There was pain there. But there was also profound satisfaction…and a touch of mischief.

“You knew,” she said. “You knew!”

“Gotcha,” said George.

Catie began to pummel him as unmercifully as if he’d been her brother. But it didn’t last. His teammates and their families and other hangers-on seized George and propelled him toward the suddenly open side of the spat volume, chanting “Parrot! Parrot! Parrot!”—making for the locker room in triumph, as if South Florida had won.

But then, Catie thought, as she went along with them, in every way that counts most it has…

Much later, in the locker room, when all possible interviews had been given, and everybody from the media had been evicted, well soaked with virtual champagne, and when the space had been sealed and the outer shell of the virtual environment encrypted, they came face-to-face again.

“You knew,” Catie said again.

“Of course I knew,” George said. “But I couldn’t tell you.”

“There wasn’t time,” Mark Gridley said, appearing from one side, “and my dad made him agree not to tell. I wanted to tell you, but my dad—”

“Threatened his life,” said a voice that Catie didn’t recognize. “Occasionally it has an effect.”

Catie turned around and saw a handsome man of Thai ancestry, in casual clothes: a man with an unsurprising resemblance to Mark. Jay Gridley, the director of Net Force, came over to George Brickner and stuck his hand out. “That was one hell of a game,” he said.

“Thanks,” George said, and shook Gridley’s hand. “Champagne?”

“Inside, not outside, please. Not that it takes more than an eyeblink’s time to change clothes on the virtual side of things, but I have a lot of work left to do tonight, and once I’ve been drenched in any kind of champagne, real or unreal, it seems to remove my administrative edge.”

Someone found Jay a glass. He lifted it in an informal toast to George and his team, and drank.

Catie, meanwhile, had turned to Mark. “If you don’t tell me what you guys did,” Catie said, “I’m going to do a lot more more than threaten your life.”

“The players’ own machines were the easy part,” Mark said. “Net Force teams got at them all quietly over the past few days and put in ‘transparent’ routers to other Net boxes, circumventing the local sabotage. But there was still the ISF server to deal with. Since time was so limited, the best course of action seemed to be to set up another spat server, a substitute, using the ISF’s own licensed software. Then we completely duplicated the tampered ISF server to it. After that, we debugged the code in the original server. We were up all night.” Not that there was any way to tell this by looking at Mark. He was flushed with triumph, a triumph that had a wicked edge to it. “We finished about two and a half hours ago. But there was still more to do, then. The ISF had convened its server certification people in secret. They came in and checked the duplicate server over, and certified it. Finished up twenty minutes before the game, while the pregame show was still running.”

“Geez,” Catie said. “But how did they—? The certification procedures — I thought you had to—”

“Check every line of code by human oversight? No machines? Yeah. It was close. There was not a single Net Force geek who slept last night, anywhere on the planet.” Mark grinned. “There are a lot of spatball fans on the Force….”

Catie considered all this. “So the bad guys, the people who had installed the false variables in the usual server…”

“…Thought they were operating on the usual server, where gameplay was taking place,” Jay Gridley said. “But they were actually operating on the dupe…into which we simply mirrored the genuine gameplay. By the time they realized their mistake, it was too late for them. We had a complete set of tracer routines installed in the mirror. There were three different people handling the switching variables, one in Portland, one in Beijing, and one in Auckland. All representatives of the major illegal betting syndicates…all of them now helping us with our inquiries.”

“It was a variation of their own trick,” Catie said softly. “You just turned it around and used it against them!”

“‘Own goal,’” Mark said. “They did it to themselves…with a vengeance.” He grinned.

“Ah, the conquering heroes,” said another voice. James Winters had slipped in and found himself a glass of the virtual champagne. Now he strolled over to them.

“Heroes, yes,” George said, looking around at his team-mates. “Conquering?”

“Eveything’s relative,” Winters said. “I think the epithet fits today. Meanwhile,” he said to Jay Gridley, “everything at the software and hardware end is handled; the original server, the contaminated routines, and the duplicates are all locked down. We can start getting the prosecuting team pulled together tomorrow. How about the other operation?”

“Handled,” Jay said, and looked over at George. “This is the other piece of news you need to hear. A gentleman named Darjan, Armin Darjan, got himself a flat tire in the middle of I-95 just outside Miami Tuesday afternoon. Seems he’d just been to see one of the South Florida team members, but he didn’t find her at home. The Miami police helped him get over to the hard shoulder, but while they were taking his particulars and helping him call a tow truck, one of them noticed something in his rental car that shouldn’t have been there. They brought him into the local police station to talk to him about it, and when he realized what the penalty is in Florida for carrying that particular weapon, especially without a concealed-carry permit, he became fairly talkative.”

George smiled slightly. “He seems to have a lot of friends in the computer-service business,” Gridley said. “Not to mention a lot of friends in financial circles, here and overseas. He talked to the police about all kinds of things, and when they got the gist of what was going on, they called us. We had a long talk with him, too, and took his prints and his passport from him, and called him a lawyer…and then we told him what he had to do over the next couple of days to make sure that the plea the lawyer was going to cut for him would stay in the same shape after this game as before. He was most cooperative.”

“Lucky he had that flat tire right then,” Catie said, feeling fairly daring to just come out and say what she was thinking to the head of Net Force.

“Heaven forbid I should complain,” Gridley said, his face perfectly straight. “It might make someone in local law enforcement think we were ungrateful.”

There were smiles all around at that. “So, ladies and gentlemen,” Gridley said to the South Florida team members gathered around, “thank you for your help. Some of you will be hearing from us in the very near future as we pursue this matter. Meanwhile, I’m sorry you didn’t win.”

“We’re not,” somebody said, and popped another bottle of champagne. “It means we can party now!”

This sentiment was met with much cheering. “Mean-while,” Jay Gridley said, turning to Catie, and grabbing his son in a friendly way behind the neck as he did so, “please tell me if there’s anything you feel you need removed from your workspace manager.”

“Uh, I’ll think about it and let you know,” Catie said. “The present configuration has a sort of strange amusement value.”

“Strange would be the word,” Gridley said. “Come on, Mark. Good night, Catie, and thanks again.”

The Gridleys vanished.

A little later Catie found her way back to George again. “One thing,” she said, “before I turn in. You knew that I was helping Net Force from the very start, didn’t you.”

“I suspected,” George said. “Very strongly. I mean, you practically had it painted on your forehead.”

Catie blushed. She thought she had been fairly circumspect.

“But I wasn’t going to say anything out loud,” George said. “I wasn’t sure how carefully the ‘eavesdroppers’ might have been listening to me…and I didn’t want to get anyone else in trouble.”

Catie nodded. “There’s just one more thing,” she said.

“Yes?”

“Even though the server was clean…you lost.”

George nodded, looking completely unconcerned. “They’re a good team,” he said. “They deserved to win. Anybody who could play us the way we were playing today, and win, is unquestionably championship material.” He smiled, a rather more reflective look. “And South Florida’s made a little history today. We’ve never gotten this far before. So, next year…”

“Next year,” Catie said. “By then you’ll be a professional. My prediction.”

“Interesting,” George said. “We’ll see.”

“And famous.”

“I’m famous now,” George said mildly. “For whatever that’s worth.” He looked around him. “But with people like this around me, to be famous with, it might be worth something. We’ll see.”

“All right. But about that chess game—”

“Give me a night off,” George said. “If only to recover. Not to mention to consider my next move.”

“Okay,” Catie said. She glanced over at Hal and made a let’s-go-home gesture. He nodded.

“Congratulations,” Catie said softly.

George nodded, somber. “Thanks.”

And Catie gathered up Hal and left.

The next morning, very early, Catie slipped into her version of the Great Hall of the Library of Congress, with the pink of dawn just coming in through the high windows at the top of the dome, and looked around at the canvases and paperwork lying around the Comfy Chair, still badly in need of sorting. She looked particularly at the e-mails, but there were no new ones.

So now that he’s famous, she thought, is he still talking tome…?

She turned around and looked at the chessboard, then glanced up at the text window above it, where a line of text was flashing. It read:

And then, out of the air, a voice said: “Gotcha.”

Very slowly, Catie smiled.