Death Match - Diane Duane [40]
The air over the board shimmered, and Catie found herself looking at a pattern of glowing footsteps hanging there, with various curves and arrows hanging between them.
“Not dance notation, you idiot lump of silicon!” Catie yelled. “Chess notation!”
The window in the air changed to show:
1
P-K4
2
P-K4
“Thank you so much,” Catie muttered. “Virtmail George that move, please, and alert me if I’m online when one comes in from him.”
“No problem. Do you want out-of-Net paging for moves?”
“No, it’s all right. Has Mark Gridley come back in yet?”
“His system still has him flagged as unavailable.”
Great, Catie thought. Well…it can keep a day, I suppose. He was the one who was so urgent about wanting to hear about George Brickner. If he’s not onsite when I’ve finally managed it, well, tough.
But that felt so cold. She sat there wondering. “He said he might run into me at the play-offs,” Catie mused. “Space, check the ISF server and find out if Mark has a seat booked for the game this afternoon.”
“That information is not available because of privacy issues,” her workspace said.
It wouldn’t be, would it…. She sighed.
At that point a huge voice came echoing into the Great Hall. “Catie!”
She sighed again. “Hal,” she said, “lose the visiting wizard act and tell me what you want.”
A large image of her brother’s head appeared in the air, surrounded by billows of flame that swirled and brightened around him when he spoke. “I don’t know, I kinda like it.”
“It’d look even better if you were bald,” Catie said, “but I guess I have to wait a few decades for that. What is it, runt?”
“Pregame show’s starting.”
“Yeah, I know. I was going to experience it from the friends-and-family space.”
“Oh. Yeah, that’s a thought, isn’t it! Okay, let’s—”
“Not until you empty the dishwasher, young man,” said another voice from the outside world, not sounding at all like an apparition from Oz, and not needing to. “And then there’s the small matter of the laundry piling up in your room.”
“But, Dad—!”
Catie tried to keep herself from grinning, and simply couldn’t.
“Sorry, Son, you blew it. You’ve had two days to clean up in there, and knowing you, you’ll plead homework tomorrow if we let it go on that long.”
“But, Dad, the game—!”
“The sooner you finish this stuff that’s been staring at you since four P.M. on Friday, the sooner you’ll see what the Slugs do. Get on it.”
And silence fell.
“Space, honey,” Catie said.
“She wants a favor, I can tell.”
Catie was so amused that she didn’t much care what her workspace said. “Open a gateway to the friends-and-family space on the ISF server,” she said. “And run the usual leave-a-message message if anyone calls for me. I won’t be back for a few hours.”
“The Great Programmer be praised,” said her workspace, “I can finally get some reading done.” A doorway opened in the air of her space, and through it, faintly, Catie could hear the roar of the crowd. She stepped through and waved the doorway closed behind her.
Two hours later she could hardly breathe. The roar, which had been like the distant sea earlier, had hardly stopped for the whole time she’d been in here, even between the halves. Now the clock was running down toward the end of the third half, there was nothing but a tangle of bodies showing in the middle of the volume, and amid shrieks of excitement and outrage from the crowd, the goal hexes had just shifted again, for the third time in no more than five minutes. It was a standard increased-rotation simulation, for such things had happened often enough during the “classic” games played in real microgravity, when the needs of some experiment in the outer ring for increased gravity had caused the whole sphere to be rotated faster. Nominally the computer had charge of such events, inflicting them randomly on the players. But at times like this, when there were three teams at full strength in the cubic, all trying to get control of the ball, they produced the maximum possible confusion. The ball wouldn