Death Match

and went on down to her room and just sat there for a while, with the door shut, feeling terrible. I can’t believe how completely I’ve screwed everything up! Yet as a little time passed, and she started to recover from the shock of what had just happened, Catie was forced to admit to herself that the screw up hadn’t been total. Winters had actually been slightly pleased with her…which, frankly, was a better outcome than she had hoped for. It wasn’t that the bouquet he’d handed her hadn’t mostly been thorns, but they were ones that she deserved, and the two or three rather shredded blossoms concealed among them were, Catie supposed, worth it in the end.

She came out of hiding after three-quarters of an hour or so, to find her brother still using the Net machine in the family room. Catie knew she was going to have to talk to George Brickner shortly, but she wasn’t in any hurry about it. She wanted to make sure her composure was back in place. She rooted around in the fridge briefly, came up with a couple of chicken breasts, and made herself a fast meal that was a favorite of her mother’s: the chicken breasts sauteed with butter and a chopped-up onion, and the whole business “deglazed” with balsamic vinegar. In the middle of her cooking, Hal came out of the family room looking slightly glazed himself.

“You seen the news lately?” he said.

Catie shook her head. “I’ve been busy.”

“You’d better go have a look at it.”

“Huh? Why?”

“The sports news. Take my word for it.”

“What?”

Hal just shook his head. “I’ll watch this for you. Go take a look.”

She blinked at that, for it was usually hard to stop Hal from giving you a nearly word-by-word narration of whatever news he’d heard recently, whether you wanted to hear it or not. Catie handed Hal the spatula with which she had been stirring the sauce around while it boiled down, and went in to sit down in the implant chair again.

Once into the Great Hall, she said, “Space?”

“I told him everything,” her workspace manager said. “If you leave now, you may still have time to get out of the country before they seal the borders.”

“Thanks loads. CNNSI, please. Sports headlines, rolling. Latest.”

A moment later the effusive young guy with the wild hairstyle who was doing afternoon and evening news on CNNSI lately was standing behind a desk in front of Catie. “—In an unusual move apparently made for operational reasons, the International Spatball Federation has changed its scheduling for this year’s spatball play-offs.” Behind the anchor, the “background” showed an impressive-looking lineup of implant chairs and very high-end Net boxes and terminals. “The management of Manchester United High announced today that software trouble at their newly installed, multimillion-pound Professional Play Center at Anfield has made it impossible for them to meet the originally scheduled play date of this Thursday. Since the ISF was informed within the mandated twelve-hour emergency notification limit, the team will not forfeit its match with the Chicago Fire. That match has been rescheduled to Saturday, and the Saturday match between the South Florida Spat Association and Xamax Zurich has been moved to Thursday evening by agreement with those two teams.”

“Oh, no,” Catie said softly. They’ll never be ready in time.

Worse. The server will never be debugged in time!

The game is going to have to go ahead…and the people who wanted to ruin the Banana Slugs’ chances to win are going to do just that—

She came back to herself to hear the sportscaster saying, “—this is the third major software failure in two months to assail the new installation at Anfield, which has been dogged from inception to installation by cost overruns and then by hardware glitches, as well as by problems with the new MaximumVolume software and operating system which was developed for Manchester. The first two failures of the system, late in the ‘scheduled’ season, caused one forfeit and one loss due to the failure of center forward Alan Bellingham’s custom player suite during the third half of United’s crucial preplay-off game with Tokyo Juuban and Ottawa. Manchester United shareholders have once again called for an independent inquiry into the team’s dealings with sports-simming software giant Camond, the president of the shareholders’ association once again asserting that—”

Catie sat there in unbelieving dismay, her dinner forgotten. “Space…”

“I was only following orders.”

“Yeah, right. Is George Brickner available?”

“Trying his space for you now.”

There was a brief pause. “Who’s there?”

“It’s Catie.”

“Oh.” Another pause. “Just a minute.”

It was more like a couple of minutes. She waited. When he walked into her space, George took one look at the shocked expression on her face, and paused, and then he just nodded. “You heard.”

“Yeah.”

He sat down in the chair which had been left there for James Winters. She plopped down in the Comfy Chair, but for once it brought her little comfort. “You talked to James Winters….”

“Among various other people,” George said, rubbing his face, “yes.” He looked very tired.

Catie knew how he felt, all of a sudden. “George, why did you do it?”

“Agree to change the schedule, you mean? Because the ISF asked us to. And we didn’t have a good reason to say no.”

“But you did! If you—”

“Catie,” George said, “if we refused to allow the change in schedule — and it was a perfectly reasonable request on the ISF’s part — you know what would happen. People would have started asking questions. Why were we so reluctant? What was going on? And soon enough, someone would have found out. Or else one of the people involved with what was done to the ISF spat-volume server would have started to suspect something…and they would all have folded their little operation up and gone into hiding. After all this trouble, nothing would be solved.”

It was her own argument, twisted into a horrible shape that she had never imagined, and it stunned Catie into silence. George was quiet for a few moments, too.

“You think I don’t know what you’re thinking?” George said. “Believe me, I feel the same way. It would have been great to get in there and have a chance at winning this tournament, to do a thing that would make spat-ball history. Even a chance of making it to the semifinals — that would have been something to tell our grandchildren about. But if we don’t stop what’s happening to spat, stop it right now, there’ll be no sport to tell our grandchildren about…. Not one worth playing, anyway.” He swallowed. “Sports is about making sacrifices, sometimes. This is one of those times. The team agrees with me.”

“Do they know…?”

He looked at her. “They know enough,” George said. “The Net Force people have been in to check their machines. They’ve been sabotaged, Catie. We can’t touch that, either. We can’t change anything. If we do, the people behind the sabotage will know, and they’ll go to ground somewhere. And who knows, maybe we’ll win…but the sport will lose. And all the people like us who play it for joy, they’ll lose, too.”

Catie looked at George with an ache in her middle that she couldn’t have described in any words. “It’s bad enough that you’re so good-looking,” Catie said after a while, maybe more bitterly than she intended, “but do you have to be a hero, too? It’s just not fair.”

“Things aren’t usually,” George said. “But there’s no harm in trying to make them fair for the next guy along.”

Catie could think of no reply to that.

“It’s not going to be so bad,” George said.

“Yes, it is,” said Catie.

George’s face twisted into a pained shape Catie didn’t particularly like to see on it. “All right,” he said, “yes! It is! But we can’t let that stop us. We’re going to give them a fight like they’ve never seen before. We’re going to show the people who put the fix in that the only way to stop