Death Match - Diane Duane [22]
“I thought you said the Romans liked their marble shiny.”
“They did, and I’d like to have this look the way the Romans really saw it. But when I turn the reflective index up that high, it looks fake. Take a look at this—”
They spent some minutes talking about the problem, while Catie pulled down an editing window from midair to change the reflectivity on some parts of the city’s stone, turning it up and down, and once or twice moving the sun around to show Noreen what the problem was. Normally Catie would have been shy about debugging a project in front of someone else like this, even a friend. She preferred to exhibit perfection, or as close to it as she could get. But on the other hand, this problem had been driving Catie crazy for days. Part of the difficulty was that she preferred portraiture and detailed studies of single objects. But landscape was one of the things an imaging specialist simply had to handle well, since so much of virtual experience involved landscape design of one kind or another, and if Catie was going to become accomplished enough at this art to eventually be hired by Net Force as an imaging expert, it was just something she was going to have to master.
“I see what you mean,” Noreen said after a while, sitting back on the worn stone of a little bench which had replaced the pine needles they had been sitting on. She sounded dubious. “I wish I had something to suggest. Other than—have you thought of patching in a lighting routine from a different program? Some of the routines in BluePeriod are hard to configure properly if you’ve got a lot of textures, the way you have in here.”
Catie breathed out again. “I tried lighting out of One Ear, SuperPalette, and Effuse, but none of them made much difference.”
“Hmm. Not Luau?”
“Uh, no, I don’t have Luau.”
“I’ll lend you their lighting ‘bundle’—it’s transferrable for test purposes. If you like it, register it with them, but at least you can see if it works first—”
“Catie?”
They both looked up, Catie with a look of amused annoyance. It was her brother’s voice, more or less, but there was something odd about it, a lower timbre than usual. “Yeah?”
“Message for Catie Murray…Come in, Catie…”
She threw a glance at Noreen and got up, reaching into the editing window to kill her own composition’s display, then snapping it up like a rollerblind to shut it. “I’d better go deal with him,” Catie said, “before he follows me in here and starts messing with things. Look, I’ll give you a yell tomorrow evening, huh? After I try the Luau routines out. And thanks for the help.”
“Sure thing, Cates. I’ll have my space send the program over.”
Catie waved at Noreen and stepped back through the frame of her drawing of her friend. On the other side, back in her own space, she turned and peeled the “drawing” out of the air, then turned toward her chair…and did a doubletake, standing there with the drawing-gateway in her hand. Sitting in Catie’s chair was a Frankenstein monster, lanky, big-foreheaded, and slightly green, but, rather unusually for Frankenstein monsters, he was dressed in white tie and tails. He looked rather uncomfortable.
“Uh. Hi, there,” Catie said.
The monster got carefully to its feet, revealing a red cummerbund and, of all things, red socks under the patent-leather shoes. “My master says to tell you that it’s on,” said the monster, more or less in her brother’s voice.
“Your master,” Catie said, grinning. Hal’s sense of humor occasionally broke out in strange forms. In this case, it was his own workspace management program speaking to her in this unusual shape. “What’s on, exactly?”
“Your meeting with George Brickner,” said the monster. Outside, Catie thought she could faintly hear the sounds of peasants with pitchforks, somewhere out on the First Street side of the Library of Congress, and getting louder. “Saturday morning at eleven.”
“Space?” Catie said.
“Awaiting your beck and call, O Mistress.”
Catie’s eyebrows went up. “Don’t you start learning bad habits from Hal’s space now,” she said. “Meanwhile, make a