Death Match

“Nothing, boss.”

“Okay. Flag me as busy for the next two hours.”

She slipped into the microgravity of the friends-and-family space and greeted some of the other team members’ relatives whom she knew slightly, then settled down among them. Hal popped in a few minutes later, bubbling over with excitement. “I can’t believe it’s finally happening,” he said. “I can’t believe it….”

“I can,” Catie said softly.

He turned to look at her. “Cates,” he said, “have you and George had a fight or something?”

“It’s not me-and-George,” Catie said, “and no, we haven’t had a fight.” Probably it would be simpler if we had….

“You sure?”

Catie gave Hal a don’t-push-your-luck look…then felt guilty and softened her expression. “Yeah, I’m sure. Why?”

“It’s just that if he said something that bothered you,” Hal said, “I was going to adjust his attitude.”

Catie had to laugh at that. “It’s nothing like that,” she said. “But look…thanks anyway.”

“Uh-oh,” Hal said. “Here we go…!”

The cheering was beginning as the players from both sides, Xamax in their green and white, South Florida in their yellow and black, were floating into the volume now, taking positions around the walls as the environment announcer read out their names and numbers to the usual wild cheers. The captains came last, as always. When George’s name was announced, the usual cry of “Parrot! Parrot!” went up from the South Florida fans all around. George looked over toward the F&F space and lifted a hand to wave. Every relative and friend in the place cheered and waved back, Catie included, but Catie knew whom he had been looking at, with a slighly somber gaze, and knew what the message was. We will not go quietly, I promise you!

After the national anthems Catie sat through the first and second halves with little enthusiasm…or tried to. Around the middle of the second half, she found that the sheer elan with which South Florida was playing started to break her mood, which even the screaming and hollering of the fans gathered around the Slugs’ friends-and-family area hadn’t been able to do. Xamax was a good team, very good indeed. Over time they had carefully selected and recruited some of the best players in Europe. Then (for reasons Catie didn’t understand in the slightest) they had sent out for a famous English spatball coach who had been with Man United for a while, and who now shouted at his players from the outer shell in either a hilarious Midlands-accented form of Swiss German that made him sound like he had a throat disease, or a really barbarous French that sounded like someone gargling with Channel water. Whatever they thought of his accents, his players loved the man and played their hearts out for him.

But they didn’t play like the Slugs. Will it make a difference at this level? Catie had asked, and now she realized how dumb the question had been. The team’s friendship, their relationship, turned them into the closest thing to a bunch of spatball-playing telepaths that Catie had ever seen. They all seemed to know where they all were almost without looking. They passed and played, not like separate people, but like parts of the same organism. And they were not playing for a coach, however beloved, but for each other. It made a difference, all right.

The trouble was that, at the end of the third half, it still wasn’t going to matter. At the end of the second half the score was already 3–2–0, and Catie knew that this was just an early indicator of the way the game would end. Already she had seen two goals which seemed to happen faster than any she had ever seen, situations where the balls had seemed almost to swerve on their way through the volume, as if the law of gravity had suddenly shifted in the spatball’s neighborhood, and the Slugs, even playing at their best as they plainly were, couldn’t cope. It was a lost cause, made more poignant because they just would not give up, would not play as if it was anything but a championship game. George had been right. They were playing out of their skins, out of their hearts, going for broke.

He’s not the only hero out there, Catie thought as the horn went for the end of the second half.

“It’s not over yet,” Hal was saying as the teams went out of the volume for their final break. “Only one more goal to draw—”

Catie shook her head. “I know,” she said. She also knew that it wasn’t going to happen. But her mood was changing. Heroism was worth honoring, even if there wasn’t a win in prospect. Playing the game as if it mattered… that in itself, in a situation like this, was a win of sorts, though maybe not the kind that the world would recognize. Catie knew. George knew, too, and his team knew—

Where the next twenty minutes went, Catie had no idea. The teams came back into the spat volume at the end of break, the referee and the invigilator gave one another the thumbs-up, and the third half began. And if she thought she had seen committed, ferocious play before, Catie realized that she hadn’t seen any such thing. War broke out in the spat volume: a graceful, low-gravity war, in which there seemed to be an agreement not to kill or seriously injure anyone — but war nonetheless.

“Injuries” began to pile up. South Florida lost two players to injury-level wall impacts almost within the first ten minutes, and Xamax lost three, so that they had to send in a replacement forward, one of only two they had left. The play got a little more cautious after that, as Xamax had no desire whatsoever to fall below minimum number and reduce its lead to a draw — there was no forfeiting for below-minimum situations when only two teams were playing. But George continued to play his team as if there was a war on, and Catie knew why, if no one else in the “arena” did — South Florida had nothing to lose. The crowd was beginning to react to the sense of urgency that was radiating from the spat volume. From all around her, from fans of both stripes, the screaming never stopped. If Catie thought she had heard it get loud at a spatball game before, now she realized that she hadn’t heard anything — and indeed, if this hadn’t been a virtual experience, when she got out of it she wouldn’t have heard anything. Her ears would have been ringing for a good while.

Thirty minutes of play reduced themselves to twenty, and twenty to ten, and ten to five, and the two teams were still hammering at each other as if the fate of civilizations rested on who won this game. Once South Florida almost scored, but somehow a Xamax player rocketed into the ball’s path from what seemed an impossible distance, blocking the ball away from a goal where the goalie was briefly absent; and at the same time, the goal precessed (it seemed to Catie) a lot sooner than it should have. The South Florida fans roared disappointment. That was the only time when the tears actually sprang to Catie’s eyes at the unfairness of it all — that people should play like this against malign and invisible forces, and have no real win to show at the end of it, nothing concrete to match the unquestionable moral victory. The moral victory’s going to have to do. But all the same, it’s just a shame—

Next to her, Hal was shaking with excitement. Catie glanced at the clock. Four minutes left. It was too much to hope for a miracle at this point, and anyway, there were forces operating behind the scenes to prevent any miracle from taking place. At three and a half minutes South Florida began lining up another play on the present Xamax goal, a long pass around the perimeter. Catie shook her head. She had seen too many of these fail in the last two halves, as goals seemed to precess out of sequence, the ball refused to go where it was supposed to—

“Catie!”

Not Hal…somebody on her right. Catie turned and saw that Mark Gridley was suddenly there. “Huh?” she said. “Where’d you come from?”

“Where you think.”

“I couldn’t stop him, boss,” her workspace manager whispered in her ear. “He overrode me to get your coordinates, the brute.”

Catie sighed and shook her head again. “How’s it going?”

“It’s not ‘going.’ It went.”

“You get cryptic at the most inconvenient times,” Catie said, turning her attention back to the spat volume. “Save it for later, Squirt. We’re at the end of a game here, they’re losing and you know why. Can’t you—”

“No, they’re not.”

She looked at him, confused. “But, the — Mark, the code — it’s, you know—”

“No, it’s not. It’s clean.”

And he started to laugh. “It’s clean, Catie! This is for real!”

“It’s — you mean they’re not—”

“It’s been clean since the start of the game. I was held up, we had to—”