Death Match

card, handed it to Wendy. “Please take ten,” he said, and she went away smiling even harder than she had been, which Catie would have thought impossible.

George looked over at Hal. “So have you got your ‘seats’ sorted out for the game tomorrow?” he said.

“Yup…took care of it yesterday.”

“Not a bad idea,” George said. “The reservations computers have been having trouble with last-minute bookings, the last game or so, they tell me. But do you want to swap your seats for positions in friends-and-family space, down close to the heart of things? We’ve got room.”

Hal was delighted. “Can we really?”

George glanced at Catie. “No problem. Suit you?”

“Suits me fine,” she said. “I always like a close look at a winning team.”

“Then it’s settled. When you’re online this evening, check the team server and give it your seat locations. It’ll make the swap. Look, I’m sorry we have to go, but the new sponsor would get pretty cranky if the captain was late for the big press push. And if I know these guys, they’re going to want some time privately with us before the public part of the proceedings.” George got up.

They all headed for the door, where George was handed his ElectroWallet by Wendy. There was a little crowd of the diner staff all waiting there with her by the door to shake George’s hand, and as they went out to the street, Hal muttered to Catie, “We ought to come back here later in the week and see if the service is still this good.”

She smiled slightly as Mike said his good-byes and headed for his car. He would be driving George to the press conference.

“Listen,” said George, shaking Hal’s hand, “it’s been good meeting you.” To Catie, as he shook her hand, he said, “I really enjoyed this. Stay in touch.”

“Sure.” She smiled politely enough, while at the same time thinking, I bet you say that to all the—

“I mean it,” George said, and once more there was something about the way he said it that brought Catie up short. It was not exactly urgency in his voice — but at the same time, she couldn’t get a handle on just what it was.

“Look, wait a second,” George was saying. He fumbled around in his pocket and came up with a business card, one of the kind with a Net-readable chip embedded in it: you dropped it onto your Net machine’s reading pad, if your machine had one, and it read the embedded address automatically. Or you could always simply read it into your machine off the card.

“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.

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:

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.”