Death Match - Diane Duane [43]
Catie found herself wondering later, The latest what?—for when things quieted down again enough for her to notice things, she was in the “locker room” with the Slugs, their entourage, and about fifty other people, mostly from the sports networks. The locker room wasn’t any such thing, of course, any more than it had to be in any other virtual sport. The players’ actual bodies were mostly in their own homes, and if they needed showers, or someplace to change their clothes, such things were only steps away from their own implant chairs. But the need for a place to celebrate after a won game, and to deal with the press, still existed, and so here they all were, the Slugs laughing, shouting, jubilant even after only achieving a draw. At first Catie tried to keep herself calm in the midst of all this, but it was just silly. So much excitement, so tightly concentrated, simply overwhelmed your senses—the reporters running around sticking virtual mikes (representative of link-out programs to their own broadcasters’ servers) into people’s faces, the champagne being squirted around with total abandon—for when the session finally broke up, no one would actually be sticky, and no money for the bubbly stuff would actually have been wasted—the hoots and shouts of victory, the jokes and jibes, and the big stuffed banana slug being paraded around the locker room, with some team members and hangers-on bowing to it ceremoniously, and others following it around in an impromptu conga line—Catie couldn’t help but laugh, especially when George’s co-captain, Mark, left one interview with the CNNSI reporter and came up to her with what looked like a very big peanut butter jar wrapped in prismatic gift paper. He was holding the lid on, and he said to Catie, in a mysterious voice, “Want a look?”
“Sure,” Catie said.
He opened the lid. She peered in. Then she raised her eyebrows and said, “I thought they were bigger.”
“Aww,” Mark said, sounding disappointed. Plainly he had been expecting a more emphatic response. “And you looked like such a sweet, innocent little thing, too.”
Catie grinned. “Guilty on one count, maybe. But when you’ve had as many weird things put down your back by your little brother as I have over the last seventeen years, one slug more or less doesn’t matter much. Besides, I think that one’s asleep.”
“Asleep? How can you tell?” Mark stared into the jar. “Listen, seriously, how can you—?” But at that point one of the reporters from AB/NBC came up to Mark with a “mike” and started asking him questions about Chicago’s “front five,” and Catie slipped away, grinning. That response had paralyzed her brother, too, a few years ago, and had won her at least an hour of peace somewhere along the line.
Very slowly the locker room began to clear out, and as it did, George Brickner drifted over toward Catie, glancing around him with an expression that overtly looked like satisfaction. But there was still something else going on too, that uncertain quality in his gaze that Catie had noticed before and had not been able to put a name to. Seeing it again now, it began to bother her more than ever. If there was a form of art she preferred above all others, it was portraiture, and after a lot of studying of faces, over time, she was beginning to get a sense of whether the face in question was (for lack of a better phrase) comfortable with itself. George’s face was not, and Catie kept wondering why.
“Well,” he said, watching one last