Death Match

during which none of the teams reacted as a whole, but only fragmentarily, shouting orders and suggestions at each other that were nearly lost in the clamor of the crowd. Darien for Chicago nabbed possession of the ball as it was being passed between two Spartak forwards, worked herself out of the tangle of bodies and passed to her fellow forward, Daystrom, who caught the ball in the crook of an elbow and spun in place, in roll axis, looking for the teammate to take the next pass. Most of the other Chicago players were still tangled up on the far side of the scrum, and Daystrom shouted himself hoarse at them to detach themselves and put some air between themselves and the “traffic jam” in the middle of the volume. One or two of them heard and pushed free, but the rest were trying to block either Spartak or South Florida players, and took a moment to respond to Daystrom. Daystrom glimpsed a face that looked ready, Ferguson’s, and flung the ball at him—

A leg thrust out of the scrum and kneed around the ball, capturing it. A moment later the body belonging to the ball worked its way out of the scrum and folded itself up double to spin. It was Spartak’s Yashenko. A great howl of delight went up from the Moscow fans and the scrum abruptly disintegrated, players scattering in all directions, looking to see where the ball was, locating it, targeting Yashenko and pushing off the volume walls or each other to get at him, to block or tackle.

The movement in the volume became frantic. Yashenko kept spinning, and one of his teammates, Talievna, was the first to reach him of the multiple “launches” that were heading his way. Within a meter of him she curled up to offer him inertial mass, and Yashenko pushed off against her and was halfway across the spat volume by the time the people who had been coming at him to tackle or block had arrived at his former position.

In an instant it became apparent that he was lining up for an attack on the Chicago goal, at right angles to the Spartak goal directly ahead of him. But there were too many of the Chi players on the wrong side of the volume to defend properly, now, and even the Chi goalie Bonner had been caught away from his post and was now trying to get at the wall for a push in the right direction. The crowd went up in a great howl of excitement as people reacted to the fragmentation among the teams and the prospect of the score, as Yashenko got ready to pass. But there was one place where confusion did not reign quite supreme. Among the bodies now swarming toward the Chicago goal, George Brickner curled himself down into cannonball — possibly inevitable in the confusion, but at least one player was ready for it — then Brickner pushed sideways off Chicago’s Daystrom and thus opened up a space between them with the equal-and-opposite reaction. There were shouts of confusion, some from his team-mates, but he had seen what they hadn’t, and Melendez had seen his glance. As Yashenko headered the ball at Galitsin for the goal, Melendez braced himself off Galitsin and pushed — and the ball flew with terrible speed past Galitsin, who reached for it but couldn’t stop it, and smacked squarely into the goal outlined in red, white, and blue before it could precess.

There was a roar of rage and disappointment from the Spartak fans as the computer held the ball in place and did a retrace of recent motions to see who picked up the point. But the referee had seen that perfectly well. “Own goal, Moscow,” the referee said over the roar, “credit to South Florida—!”

Another roar, but this time of joy, from the South Florida fans. The rest of the audience was waiting in breathless hope or anguish for the computer to finish the traceback and agree or disagree with the ref, but the digits on the scoreboard hexes embedded in the transparent walls of the spat volume burned briefly bright…and then changed from 2–1–1 to 2–2–1.

Play resumed, and if it had been fast before, it was furious now. Twenty-one men and women, angry or wildly excited or both, jostled for control of the ball as it was fired back into the volume. It vanished into a flying scrum of bodies wearing yellow and red about half and half, while the ones in red, white, and blue changed tactics, as was possibly understandable, and simply tried to keep either of the others from scoring. This was one of those situations in which spatball started to more closely resemble a particularly spiteful playground game of keep-away than anything else. Somehow, though, Chicago managed to get hold of the ball again, and another hand-around began as Hanrahan emerged from the scrum with the ball gripped desperately behind one bent knee. He did a 180-degree somersault in the pitch axis and flung the ball away again, revealing (to Moscow if no one else) that the pass he had been setting up was a feint, and that three of his teammates were lining up in great-circle on South Florida’s goal. But it was too late. The crowd was already counting down, and there was no injury time, and even as Jarvik took the pass from Hanrahan and fired it at Torrance, who in turn fired it at the goal, the South Florida goalie was there, out of nowhere, wrapping herself around the ball like an oyster around somebody’s escaped pearl.

“Houdini!” the South Florida fans screamed at the goalie in tribute, but Zermann paid no attention to them — opening herself up again, glancing around her for no more than a second, and fisting the ball away sideways like a bolt of orange lightning at Brickner, who caught it in his elbow and tightened in for spin—

And the horn went. Catie jumped up and flung her arms around Zermann’s brother Kerry, who had been sitting beside her rigid as a statue for the last fifteen minutes, but now was jumping up and down and screaming “Slugs! Slugs!” like everyone else within the twenty-meter diameter that circumscribed the Slugs friends-and-family area. From behind her, Hal caromed into Catie, and she dropped Kerry Zermann and pounded her brother’s head in sisterly delight. All around them the crowd of sixty thousand was in bedlam, and in the spat volume team members of all kinds were hugging each another and jerseys were being pulled off and sent sailing across the volume to other players, who slipped them on and came across to shake hands, some cheerfully, some with scowls. The announcer was shouting into the main sound link, “—and South Florida and Chicago tie, two-two, with Moscow Spartak falling by the wayside with an own goal and only one score during the whole of an incredible game, one that’ll go down in the record books for sheer unpredictability and brilliant play — the umpire congratulating both sides now as the Slugs and the Fire progress to the quarter-final stage, both teams going into the positional lottery along with New York, Los Angeles, the Grasshoppers of Xamax Zurich, Manchester United High, Rio de Janeiro, and Sydney Gold Stripe. A game that will go down in spat history for possibly the latest…”

Catie found herself wondering later, The latest what? — for when things quieted down again enough for her to notice things, she was in the “locker room” with the Slugs, their entourage, and about fifty other people, mostly from the sports networks. The locker room wasn’t any such thing, of course, any more than it had to be in any other virtual sport. The players’ actual bodies were mostly in their own homes, and if they needed showers, or someplace to change their clothes, such things were only steps away from their own implant chairs. But the need for a place to celebrate after a won game, and to deal with the press, still existed, and so here they all were, the Slugs laughing, shouting, jubilant even after only achieving a draw. At first Catie tried to keep herself calm in the midst of all this, but it was just silly. So much excitement, so tightly concentrated, simply overwhelmed your senses — the reporters running around sticking virtual mikes (representative of link-out programs to their own broadcasters’ servers) into people’s faces, the champagne being squirted around with total abandon — for when the session finally broke up, no one would actually be sticky, and no money for the bubbly stuff would actually have been wasted — the hoots and shouts of victory, the jokes and jibes, and the big stuffed banana slug being paraded around the locker room, with some team members and hangers-on bowing to it ceremoniously, and others following it around in an impromptu conga line — Catie couldn’t help but laugh, especially when George’s co-captain, Mark, left one interview with the CNNSI reporter and came up to her with what looked like a very big peanut butter jar wrapped in prismatic gift paper. He was holding the lid on, and he said to Catie, in a mysterious voice, “Want a look?”

“Sure,” Catie said.

He opened the lid. She peered in. Then she raised her eyebrows and said, “I thought they were bigger.”

“Aww,” Mark said, sounding disappointed. Plainly he had been expecting a more emphatic response. “And you looked like such a sweet, innocent little thing, too.”

Catie grinned. “Guilty on one count, maybe. But when you’ve had as many weird things put down your back by your little brother as I have over the last seventeen years, one slug more or less doesn’t matter much. Besides, I think that one’s asleep.”

“Asleep? How can you tell?” Mark stared into the jar. “Listen, seriously, how can you—?” But at that point one of the reporters from AB/NBC came up to Mark with a “mike” and started asking him questions about Chicago’s “front five,” and Catie slipped away, grinning. That response had paralyzed her brother, too, a few years ago, and had won her at least an hour of peace somewhere along the line.

Very slowly the locker room began to clear out, and as it did, George Brickner drifted over toward Catie, glancing around him with an expression that overtly looked like satisfaction. But there was still something else going on too, that uncertain quality in his gaze that Catie had noticed before and had not been able to put a name