Death Match

BluePeriod are hard to configure properly if you’ve got a lot of textures, the way you have in here.”

Catie breathed out again. “I tried lighting out of One Ear, SuperPalette, and Effuse, but none of them made much difference.”

“Hmm. Not Luau?”

“Uh, no, I don’t have Luau.”

“I’ll lend you their lighting ‘bundle’—it’s transferrable for test purposes. If you like it, register it with them, but at least you can see if it works first—”

“Catie?”

They both looked up, Catie with a look of amused annoyance. It was her brother’s voice, more or less, but there was something odd about it, a lower timbre than usual. “Yeah?”

“Message for Catie Murray…Come in, Catie…”

She threw a glance at Noreen and got up, reaching into the editing window to kill her own composition’s display, then snapping it up like a rollerblind to shut it. “I’d better go deal with him,” Catie said, “before he follows me in here and starts messing with things. Look, I’ll give you a yell tomorrow evening, huh? After I try the Luau routines out. And thanks for the help.”

“Sure thing, Cates. I’ll have my space send the program over.”

Catie waved at Noreen and stepped back through the frame of her drawing of her friend. On the other side, back in her own space, she turned and peeled the “drawing” out of the air, then turned toward her chair…and did a doubletake, standing there with the drawing-gateway in her hand. Sitting in Catie’s chair was a Frankenstein monster, lanky, big-foreheaded, and slightly green, but, rather unusually for Frankenstein monsters, he was dressed in white tie and tails. He looked rather uncomfortable.

“Uh. Hi, there,” Catie said.

The monster got carefully to its feet, revealing a red cummerbund and, of all things, red socks under the patent-leather shoes. “My master says to tell you that it’s on,” said the monster, more or less in her brother’s voice.

“Your master,” Catie said, grinning. Hal’s sense of humor occasionally broke out in strange forms. In this case, it was his own workspace management program speaking to her in this unusual shape. “What’s on, exactly?”

“Your meeting with George Brickner,” said the monster. Outside, Catie thought she could faintly hear the sounds of peasants with pitchforks, somewhere out on the First Street side of the Library of Congress, and getting louder. “Saturday morning at eleven.”

“Space?” Catie said.

“Awaiting your beck and call, O Mistress.”

Catie’s eyebrows went up. “Don’t you start learning bad habits from Hal’s space now,” she said. “Meanwhile, make a note of the Net address for the meeting.”

“Brace yourself for a shock,” said her workspace, “but it’s not a virtual address. Delano’s, 445 P Street, Georgetown, phone—”

“Hold the phone,” Catie said. I wonder what’s bringing this guy up all the way here from Florida? she thought. Some business to do with his team…? That had to be it. “What’s Delano’s? Some kind of restaurant?”

“The Yellow Spaces listing says ‘diner,’” said her workspace.

“Huh,” Catie said. “Maybe over by the university.”

“Near Poulton Hall,” said her workspace.

Catie nodded. “Okay, Boris,” she said to the monster, “tell your ‘master’ that the message is received and understood.” She waved bye-bye.

The monster bowed a finishing-school bow, during which its toupee fell off, then it vanished. Catie stood there for a moment with a wry look on her face until the sound of the peasants with pitchforks faded away. Then she bent down to pick up the toupee, flung it into the air so that it caught fire and vanished, and then set about tidying up her workspace, beckoning some of the piles of files and sketches to float in the air around her for sorting. Now I can start finding out just why Mark Gridley was so interested in this guy, Catie thought. And as for whatever slight interest I might have myself…

She grinned and started going through the papers in one hovering pile, idly humming “Slugs’ Revenge.”

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?”