“Okay,” she said. “I may be in touch later.”
“Right.” As she turned away, Mark added, “Good hunting.”
Catie took only a moment to glance at the chessboard to see if there had been any change there, or whether there was a text window with a new move waiting for her. There was neither, but she heard a soft sound from not far away inside her space, and turned to see what it was.
Her mother was standing at the back of the Great Hall, on the reading room side, looking at something in a glass case. Catie wandered over there to look over her mother’s shoulder. The case contained one of the library’s great treasures, a Gutenberg Bible; each day it was turned to a different page, not just to show off the engravings, but because (as her mother had told her often enough) a book’s purpose is to be opened, and looked at, not kept locked in a vault somewhere…and the rarer the book, the more this was true.
“You home from work, Mom?”
Her mother was leaning in close to the glass to examine an elaborate letter
“Uh-huh,” Catie said.
Her mother turned away from the book. “You were telling him that James Winters said this wasn’t going to be dangerous for you.”
“That’s what he said. He also said you should call him if you have any questions.”
“I’ll be doing that shortly.” She looked across the Great Hall to where Catie’s chair sat, with the simulacra of canvases and piles of paper all around it. “But not with questions, really. I trust you to have accurately described what’s going on, and on the basis of that, your dad and I think you should go ahead.”
“Uh, okay.” Catie blinked. It hadn’t occurred to her that matters were going to work out this simply.
“I mean,” her mother said, “if we’ve managed to raise you so that you’re concerned enough, on discovering crooked dealings, to want to do something about them, to stop them — then maybe we shouldn’t be complaining too much about it. Much less trying to stop you, as long as what you’re doing isn’t going to endanger anyone. Especially yourself…” Her look was wry. “And besides, if things go the way you want them to go, after college, and you do wind up applying to enter Net Force — well, a little early involvement couldn’t hurt, could it?”
“Actually,” Catie said, “no. Thanks, Mom…” She slipped one arm around her and gave her a quick hug.
Her mother chuckled and hugged her back. “I know that tone of voice,” she said. “I used to sound that way myself when I was your age and I would think, ‘Wow, my mother’s so much less dumb than she was when I was younger.’”
Catie burst out laughing.
“The only condition is that I want you to keep me posted with whatever’s going on,” her mom said. “Don’t hesitate to call me at work if you need me.”
“Do I ever?”
“No comment. But if there’s trouble, I want to be the first to hear about it, unless your dad’s in the house. No sitting on little fires until they’re infernos before you call for help, understand?”
“Okay.”
“Good. So get yourself out of here in an hour or so…dinner’ll be ready then.”
“What’re you making?”
“Hey, it’s not my night to cook,” her mother said. “I have some reading to do. Your dad’s making lasagna.”
Catie’s mouth immediately began to water. “Fifty-nine minutes, you said?”
“Why don’t I get that kind of response for my beef stew?” her mother said. “Ingrate! I take back everything I said about how well we’ve brought you up.” And, laughing, she vanished.
Catie spent about half that hour reviewing the copy of the Caldera online manual that she kept in her workspace. Some of the commands she knew well enough, since the imaging tools she used most often shared them. Some were completely unfamiliar, and now she kicked herself for having been so selective about her use of this particular resource…especially because there were aspects of Caldera so powerful that Catie started to get the feeling that she had been making herself work harder than she had to. Now she sat looking at lists of commands that she had very little time to master, and feeling dumber than usual.
“Hello?” a male voice said.
Catie’s head jerked away from the manual “pages” that were hanging in the air all around her. The voice had not been that of her father or brother. “George?”
“Can I come in?”
“Sure, if you don’t mind a mess…”
George stepped in out of the empty air and looked around him with surprise, and then pleasure. “I would not call this a mess,” he said. “You built this?”
“I mocked it up,” Catie said.
“Nice job!”
“Uh, I was faking it,” Catie said, feeling that this assessment was more than usually true, while George did what just about every visitor to either the real Great Hall or Catie’s duplicate did — stood there craning his neck at the paintings and mosaics under the ceiling.
“If this is faking it,” George said, “I’d like to see what your real work looks like.”
“Um,” Catie said, biting back about five possible self-critical remarks that she could easily have made. It was the one way she took after her father. Catie preferred to run herself down so that anyone else intending to do so would find that the job had already been done by a resident expert. “Thanks.”
“I had a move,” George said, “but I thought I might bring it over, if you were available, instead of just mailing it in.”
“Sure, go for it.”
George stepped over to the chessboard and picked up a bishop which he had moved out earlier. Now he advanced it a little further along a different diagonal.
“Space?” Catie said.
“I’m so glad we’re on a first-name basis,” said the voice out of the air.
George laughed.
Catie raised her eyebrows. “Log that, will you please?”
The text window hanging in the air promptly added a line:
6
KB-KN3
–
Catie looked at the move, and also looked at the way George was regarding the chessboard: looking more or less at it, but now suddenly not seeing it, or much of anything else, from the concerned expression on his face.
“Can I offer you a chair?” Catie said.
“Uh, yeah.”
She made him one, a “comfy” one like hers, but not so beat-up, and had her space put it over by the chessboard. George sat down and stretched himself, and sighed a little.
“Did you have a practice today?” Catie said.
“Huh? Oh, yeah,” George said. “Some of the guys have been having their machines checked over by their service providers before the tournament, so we wanted to run them in and make sure everything was okay.”
“I guess that’s why you’re looking like you’re incredibly worried about something,” Catie said.
George looked at her with astonishment. “I wasn’t — was I–I mean, I—” Then he stopped, and smiled, a rather sad smile. “It shows that much, huh?”
