Death Match

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