The roars were making it impossible to hear anything, and when the ball impacted just inside the goal hex, there was no hearing even the usual earsplitting hoot of the scoring alert. It seemed only a few seconds more before the injury-time clock expired, and there was another howl of alarm meant to signify the end of the game, but it was completely lost in the collective howl of the crowd, frustration on two sides, absolute triumph in the third. Suddenly the volume was occupied by a scrum of another kind, one in which George Brickner was completely buried, and deafened by his own hollers of delight and those of his teammates. The world dissolved in yellow.
Catie took a deep breath and brought the menu back, selecting GENERAL and ANNOUNCER. The familiar dulcet voice of the Flyers’ home-game announcer was saying, “…astonishing comeback from three hexes down, just one more in a series of hairsbreadth saves for South Florida Spat, but a sad moment for San Diego fans, and also for the Seattle High Flyers, after a season that began with such promise but seemed to go rapidly downhill due to injuries and player-contract issues. Again the score, the San Diego Pumas three, the Seattle High Flyers three, and the new interregional title six champions, the South Florida Spatball Association, the ‘Banana Slugs,’ five—”
Catie blinked to kill her implant. Everything went white, but before she was allowed to shut the feed down completely, a sweet female voice said, “The preceeding expericast is copyright 2025 by the World Spatball Federation. All rights reserved. Any reexperience, pipelining, or other use of this material is restricted to personal use only by international law, and unauthorized transfer of content is strictly prohibited. This is the WSF Net.”
The whiteness went away, leaving Catie looking at the far wall of the family room — the bookshelves, her dad’s easy chair, the Net computer in its low case, and the place over to one side of the last bookshelf to the right, near the corner of the room, where a crack running down from the ceiling had become apparent in the plaster last week. Her mom had been complaining about the increase in heavy traffic down the street that ran parallel to theirs. It seemed there might be something in what she’d been saying.
“Time?” she said to the clock on the wall.
“Eight fourteen P.M.”
“Oh, good,” Catie said, glancing out the window at the backyard. The sun was nearly down behind the fruit trees that mostly hid the back wall. Dimming yellow light danced and glittered through their leaves. It had been a nice day, but she hadn’t done what she’d first been tempted to, go out and have a few goals with her “casual” soccer team. Instead she had elected to stay home and get the homework done, so that she would have tomorrow and Sunday free. And then Hal had shanghaied her into watching “The Game” with him.
She got out of the implant chair and stretched, and was grateful she didn’t have the muscle strain right now that poor Brickner did. If he was smart, his team trainer was putting him into a hot whirlpool bath right about now. Catie stretched again, trying to get rid of a crick in her back that wasn’t really there, and glanced around. She had promised her mom that she’d clean up a little in here this evening, but Hal had sidetracked her into watching this game, and now the serious cleaning was going to have to wait until considerably later.
Catie sighed and spent a minute or so moving around the family room, making a desultory attempt to pick up some of the books and magazines and dataflips that had been left lying around. When her little brother caught an interest, he caught it completely. He ate and slept and breathed it…until something more interesting came along. Right now it was spatball, and his enthusiasm had been sufficiently contagious, today, to pull her in, too.
For her own part, Catie had to admit that there was something there worth being interested in. Her own acquaintance with the game had been strictly theoretical until the last couple of weeks. Now she knew more about it than she had ever really intended to. And yet at the same time, there was no pretending that the sport wasn’t intriguing. Hybrid descendant of soccer in a spacesuit it might be, but—
“Wow, huh?”
The non sequitur had come from Hal, who was standing there now in the doorway of the family room. He apparently hadn’t bothered with the postgame show. He was breathing hard, too, which hardly came as a surprise to Catie.
“Wow, yeah,” she said. “I didn’t think they were going to make it.”
“Yeah, it was intense. But the Slugs are go for the eighth-finals!”
Catie chuckled as she watched him wipe the sweat off his forehead. “Were you ‘being’ George Brickner, too?”
“Who else?”
“There were five other people. That cute brunette you were blathering about last week, for example.”
“Oh, her.” The tone of voice was dismissive. “Day-strom. She’s okay, but she’s not as sharp as Brickner is….”
Catie raised her eyebrows at that. “A captain can’t be a team all by himself,” she said. “Isn’t that what you were saying the other day?” She grinned at him as she slipped past him, dropping into his hands some of the books and flips she had been picking up, the ones that were his. “I think it’s just a case of hero worship.”
“Not a chance!”
She went out into the hall and glanced up and down. “Mom get back from the mall yet?”
“If she did, I didn’t hear her.”
“I don’t think either of us would have heard much if she came in during the last few minutes of that,” Catie said, “whether she used the ‘outside-in’ circuit or not. That crowd was pretty worked up. Where’s Dad?”
“No idea.”
“Mmf. Probably in the studio.”
“Better leave him alone, then.”
“Absolutely.”
Catie made her way down to the kitchen. It was small for the house, but then, compared to the other houses in their little suburb of D.C., the whole house was small. This was something which Catie’s father had of late been complaining about more or less continually. He worked at home, and had been muttering about building another extension onto the house for the past year or so, since he had extended his studio two years ago and then found that what seemed like ample square footage on the plans had turned out too small. Catie turned on the cold water in the sink and let it run for a while, looking around her and wondering how they would all cope when the renovations finally started and left them with no back to the house for a couple of weeks (an image which her mother had been repeatedly invoking in an attempt to get the project put off for a few more months).
She got a tumbler down out of the cabinet and filled it, and drank thirstily. Even though Catie hadn’t actually been playing, the mind was still able to fool the body into feeling thirsty sometimes…and this was one of those times. Hal came in from the hall and got himself a glass, too, filled it. “He’s in the studio,” Hal said. “I can hear him scraping on the canvas.” Their father was a professional artist, and a quirky one — as talented with old-fashioned media, like paint, as he was with computer-“generated” art and Net-based installations, and sometimes showing what seemed an odd preference for the more archaic media simply on account of their age.
“Right,” Catie said. Her dad hadn’t been in there yet when she came home, which meant he was good for at least a few hours in there now. She would have time to get a little more of the cleaning-up done before her mom got back and before she had to “go out” herself.
“So let me get this straight,” she said, leaning back against the sink and looking out the window of the kitchen at the backyard again. The sun had now gone down behind the wall. “Brickner is the friend you’ve been telling me about? ‘The Parrot’?”
“No, Mike’s the friend — I met him on that research project for school last year, the geology thing — he was a research assistant at the Smithsonian for the summer. The Parrot is
“From the sound of it, I wouldn’t be surprised if that team doesn’t have much time for casual meetings in the next couple of weeks,” Catie said, eyeing her brother. “They’re going to have the media all over them, I bet. They’re pretty hot. They play like, I don’t know, like a bunch of astronauts.”
Hal laughed. “Yeah, they do…. Though I bet if the astronauts had known what kind of salary people would start making from this kind of thing, ten years ago, they all would have quit NASA and gone right into the majors.”
“The majors don’t seem to be the only way to go,” Catie said, “if your pet team is anything to go by.”
“No,” Hal said, “they’re kind of a special case.”
