Death Match

Catie laughed. “With a name like The Banana Slugs, I guess they’d have to be.”

Her brother gave her a look. “It’s just a nickname. Anyway, it’s not half as stupid as some of the team names these days.”

He had a point there. “Still,” Catie said, “they’re really good. Better than I thought they would be.”

“Why shouldn’t they be?” Hal said, getting himself another glass of water, and pausing to drink it right down. “It’s not like this is a game where you have to have a lot of money to be good at it, or have corporate sponsorship patches plastered all over you. Skill and speed and brains are everything. Doesn’t matter whether you’re big or small. If you’re quick and smart, and fairly well coordinated…that should be enough. But there’s more to it than just that.”

“A certain elegance of execution,” Catie said. “One that looks like telepathy sometimes.”

Her brother looked at her with some surprise.

“Didn’t think I could appreciate the higher aspects of the game?” Catie said mildly. “Well, that’s okay. It’s healthy for you to underestimate me.”

He poked her in the ribs…or started to. Abruptly Catie wasn’t there anymore, having neatly sidestepped him as soon as he moved. A moment later she was sitting at the kitchen table, giving him an amused look. Her own skill at soccer had not left her entirely without abilities useful for dealing with a rogue brother…. Not that Hal needed a lot of dealing with, thank heaven. Their relationship was amiable enough, generally. And the resemblance between them was strong. They could have been twins. They should have been twins, Catie sometimes thought, except that Hal was always late, and had apparently managed this stunt even as regarded his birth, turning up a year after a proper twin would have. Regardless of the delay, Hal had come out about the same height as Catie, about the same weight, blonde and blue-eyed like her; and their general build and carriage were like enough that sometimes people mistook them for one another from a distance, especially in the winter when they were bundled up. This could have been a pain, except that Catie was continually amused at being mistakenly hailed as “Hallie” by her brother’s would-be girlfriends…and it gave Catie endless ammunition to use on him later, while doing her best to make sure that he never had the chance to do the same to her. The situation was entirely satisfactory, as far as she was concerned.

“How am I supposed to discipline you if you won’t stand still?” Hal said, getting one more glass of water.

“You’re not,” Catie said. “Learn to live with your sorry fate and like it.”

Her brother made a face eloquent of his opinion of such a philosophy. “You should see yourself,” Catie said. “If only you could get stuck that way, Dad could frame you and hang you as a fake Picasso.”

“Yeah, right. So, do you want to come watch the post-game show?”

“Can’t,” Catie said. “Got a Net Force Explorers meeting tonight.”

Her brother looked at her incredulously. “You sure that’s more important?”

“Yeah. And isn’t the postgame show on right now, anyway?”

Hal rolled his eyes. “What planet have you been living on? We get twenty minutes of commercials first. But they’re interviewing Brickner. I thought you’d want to see that.”

That made Catie pause for a moment. Insight into another athlete’s head was always welcome, especially after a game like that. But after a second’s thought she shook her head. “Naah,” Catie said. “Look, save it for me, okay? Just read it over to my Net space when you’re done.”

“I can’t get into your space.”

She smiled sweetly. “Which just proves you’ve been trying to again. Without asking.”

Hal gave her a rather cheesy but completely unrepentant grin.

“One of these days,” Catie said, “you’re gonna do something on the up-and-up and then be shocked to find that it worked better than making convoluted plans and plots and sneaking around.” Then Catie grinned. “But when that happens I’ll probably expire of shock, so don’t rush, okay? Just ask the space to let you in…it’ll make an exception for once.”

“Okay.”

He sounded unusually meek. Catie started wondering what he was up to. She went over to the sink, rinsed her glass out, and opened the dishwasher.

“I’m clean! I’m clean!” the dishwasher shrilled.

“That’s more than I can say,” Catie muttered, realizing afresh how sweaty even a virtual game of spatball had left her. Her T-shirt was sticking to her. She shut the dishwasher and put the glass aside on the counter. “I thought you were supposed to empty this thing all this week.”

“I was busy—”

“Get on with it,” Catie said. “If you hurry, I won’t have to tell Mom about it when she gets back.”

“And if you hurry, I won’t have to tell her you didn’t clean up the family room.”

Catie rolled her eyes. “Blackmail,” she said. “Empty threats. I need a shower. And then I’m going to go do adult things.”

“I’ll get you your cane, O superannuated one.”

Catie smiled a crooked smile and went out, rubbing her neck, then caught herself massaging the sports injury she didn’t have, and smiled more crookedly still as she went down the hall to the bathroom.

Somewhere else entirely a meeting was taking place in a bar. It was a virtual bar, and the drink was virtual, and the customers were all wearing seemings, which well suited their purpose, in most cases, since most of them were intent on keeping their business to themselves.

Under a ceiling of blue glass, a tall, blunt-featured man with hair cut very, very short was sitting at one of the tables nearest the big central fountain, a bowl of tan, blue-veined marble. The man was dressed in an ultrablack single-all of extremely conservative cut, with a white silk jabot at the throat, and he was turning a martini glass around and around on the matte white marble of the tabletop. His face was very still, giving no indication of the turmoil of thought presently going on inside it. His mouth twitched once or twice, an expression that could have been taken for a smile, but that impression would have been very incorrect.

Outside the bar it was afternoon, or pretending to be. The light lay long and low and golden over the pedestrianized street outside, as people strolled up and down it with shopping bags and small children in tow. Something came between the afternoon light pouring through the windows and the man sitting by the fountain, blocking away the golden glint of the afternoon light on the martini glass. The man in the ultrablack single-all looked up and squinted slightly at the second man standing there.

The newcomer sat down casually enough in the other chair. The first man looked at him for a few moments. The second man was small, broad-shouldered but thick around the waist, and dressed in slikjeans and a dark blazer with a white T-shirt underneath, a look that suggested the wearer was caught among several different eras and trying to fulfil fashion imperatives from all of them. Scattered, thought the first man. Don’t know why I’m bothering—

“Thanks for coming, Darjan,” said the second man, and looked the first one casually in the face, then glanced away again.

“Don’t thank me, Heming,” said Darjan. “We have a problem.”

“Yeah, I heard the results,” Heming said.

“A big problem,” said Darjan. “We started hearing from the syndicate’s backers within about ten minutes of the win.”

“They’re just nervous, I can understand wh—”

“You can’t understand what they understand,” Darjan said, “which is that the pools projections never indicated anything like this happening, and a lot of people are going to be out a lot of money unless something’s done.”

“It’s luck,” said Heming, shrugging. “The kind of thing you can’t predict.”

Darjan laughed harshly. “With the computers you people have, with probability experts who can even get the weather right, nowadays, five days out of six, you’re telling me this kind of ‘luck’ couldn’t be predicted? You people were so sure that your prognostication algorithms were foolproof. Well, we’re about to be the fools. And the booby prize has more zeroes after it than you’re ever going to want to see. Something has to be done!”

“Look,” said Heming, starting to look alarmed for the first time, “it really is just a run of luck. It can’t last. If