Death Match - Diane Duane [58]
“It does,” Mark said. “It also makes the bearer operationally invisible. Even if the invigilators came into the server while you were working, and you had that with you, they shouldn’t be able to tell a thing.” He looked rather pleased.
“And your dad knows about this?”
“Um—as I said—”
“Right,” Catie said, and sighed. “I’ll keep my incursions to an absolute minimum, and I won’t meddle with anything I do find. But if as you say no one’s going to be running a game on the server until Thursday, I should have at least a little time….”
“Let me know if you find anything at all,” Mark said. “Here, lend me that for a moment.”
She handed him the key. Mark pushed it once more into his little flap in space. A moment later they were standing once more on the moon, with the crescent Earth back in the sky again, among the fallen columns.
Mark handed Catie back the key, and she slipped it into her kilt pocket, glancing around her. “I have just one question for you,” she said.
“Yeah?”
She waved one hand at the columns. “What’re all these about?”
“Uh…” Mark looked suddenly shy, an expression that sat very oddly on him. “I’m rebuilding it.”
Catie blinked, for she had begun to recognize the worn and pitted look of these columns. “You’re going to rebuild the temple of Apollo at Corinth?”
“Uh, yeah,” Mark said. “It’s to go with that.”
He pointed. Catie looked in the direction Mark was indicating…and saw, off in the distance, a twin of the Vehicle Assembly Building at Cape Canaveral, towering up against the hard, jagged black horizon like a giant child’s block dropped there and forgotten.
Catie had to smile.
“Right,” she said, and declined to tease him…for the moment. It was always adorable to find that someone you thought of as utterly practical was in fact a romantic, in love with that first great venture off the planet. “Mark, are you going to be working at this for a while more?”
“Yeah,” he said. “The key you have is a copy.”
“Okay,” she said. “I may be in touch later.”
“Right.” As she turned away, Mark added, “Good hunting.”
I sure hope so, she thought, and stepped through the doorway back into her space.
Catie took only a moment to glance at the chessboard to see if there had been any change there, or whether there was a text window with a new move waiting for her. There was neither, but she heard a soft sound from not far away inside her space, and turned to see what it was.
Her mother was standing at the back of the Great Hall, on the reading room side, looking at something in a glass case. Catie wandered over there to look over her mother’s shoulder. The case contained one of the library’s great treasures, a Gutenberg Bible; each day it was turned to a different page, not just to show off the engravings, but because (as her mother had told her often enough) a book’s purpose is to be opened, and looked at, not kept locked in a vault somewhere…and the rarer the book, the more this was true.
“You home from work, Mom?”
Her mother was leaning in close to the glass to examine an elaborate letter M, printed in a block of red up against the left-hand margin of the left-hand page. “Half an hour or so ago,” she said. “Your dad bent my ear briefly about your friend George. And Net Force.”
“Uh-huh,” Catie said.
Her mother turned away from the book. “You were telling him that James Winters said this wasn’t going to be dangerous for you.”
“That’s what he said. He also said you should call him if you have any questions.”
“I’ll be doing that shortly.” She looked across the Great Hall to where Catie’s chair sat, with the simulacra of canvases and piles of paper all around it. “But not with questions, really. I trust you to have accurately described what’s going on, and on the basis of that, your dad and I think you should go ahead.”
“Uh, okay.” Catie blinked. It hadn’t occurred to her that matters were going to work out this simply.
“I mean,” her mother said, “if we’ve managed to raise you so that you’re