Death Match - Diane Duane [59]
“Actually,” Catie said, “no. Thanks, Mom…” She slipped one arm around her and gave her a quick hug.
Her mother chuckled and hugged her back. “I know that tone of voice,” she said. “I used to sound that way myself when I was your age and I would think, ‘Wow, my mother’s so much less dumb than she was when I was younger.’”
Catie burst out laughing.
“The only condition is that I want you to keep me posted with whatever’s going on,” her mom said. “Don’t hesitate to call me at work if you need me.”
“Do I ever?”
“No comment. But if there’s trouble, I want to be the first to hear about it, unless your dad’s in the house. No sitting on little fires until they’re infernos before you call for help, understand?”
“Okay.”
“Good. So get yourself out of here in an hour or so…dinner’ll be ready then.”
“What’re you making?”
“Hey, it’s not my night to cook,” her mother said. “I have some reading to do. Your dad’s making lasagna.”
Catie’s mouth immediately began to water. “Fifty-nine minutes, you said?”
“Why don’t I get that kind of response for my beef stew?” her mother said. “Ingrate! I take back everything I said about how well we’ve brought you up.” And, laughing, she vanished.
Catie spent about half that hour reviewing the copy of the Caldera online manual that she kept in her workspace. Some of the commands she knew well enough, since the imaging tools she used most often shared them. Some were completely unfamiliar, and now she kicked herself for having been so selective about her use of this particular resource…especially because there were aspects of Caldera so powerful that Catie started to get the feeling that she had been making herself work harder than she had to. Now she sat looking at lists of commands that she had very little time to master, and feeling dumber than usual.
When I go in there and start looking that program over, she thought, what’s to say that I won’t look right at the answer and not recognize it because I was too lazy or too unnerved to study this stuff thoroughly—
“Hello?” a male voice said.
Catie’s head jerked away from the manual “pages” that were hanging in the air all around her. The voice had not been that of her father or brother. “George?”
“Can I come in?”
“Sure, if you don’t mind a mess…”
George stepped in out of the empty air and looked around him with surprise, and then pleasure. “I would not call this a mess,” he said. “You built this?”
“I mocked it up,” Catie said.
“Nice job!”
“Uh, I was faking it,” Catie said, feeling that this assessment was more than usually true, while George did what just about every visitor to either the real Great Hall or Catie’s duplicate did—stood there craning his neck at the paintings and mosaics under the ceiling.
“If this is faking it,” George said, “I’d like to see what your real work looks like.”
“Um,” Catie said, biting back about five possible self-critical remarks that she could easily have made. It was the one way she took after her father. Catie preferred to run herself down so that anyone else intending to do so would find that the job had already been done by a resident expert. “Thanks.”
“I had a move,” George said, “but I thought I might bring it over, if you were available, instead of just mailing it in.”
“Sure, go for it.”
George stepped over to the chessboard and picked up a bishop which he had moved out earlier. Now he advanced it a little further along a different diagonal.
“Space?” Catie said.
“I’m so glad we’re on a first-name basis,” said the voice out of the air.
George laughed.
Catie raised her eyebrows. “Log that, will you please?”
The text window hanging