"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.

  Chapter 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:

  Chapter 1.

  P-K4

  -

  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:

  Chapter 1.

  P-K4

  Chapter 2.

  P-K4

  "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..."

 

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