Death Match

“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.”