Death Match

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:

1

P-K4

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