Death Match - Diane Duane [60]
6
KB-KN3
–
Catie looked at the move, and also looked at the way George was regarding the chessboard: looking more or less at it, but now suddenly not seeing it, or much of anything else, from the concerned expression on his face.
“Can I offer you a chair?” Catie said.
“Uh, yeah.”
She made him one, a “comfy” one like hers, but not so beat-up, and had her space put it over by the chessboard. George sat down and stretched himself, and sighed a little.
“Did you have a practice today?” Catie said.
“Huh? Oh, yeah,” George said. “Some of the guys have been having their machines checked over by their service providers before the tournament, so we wanted to run them in and make sure everything was okay.”
“I guess that’s why you’re looking like you’re incredibly worried about something,” Catie said.
George looked at her with astonishment. “I wasn’t—was I—I mean, I—” Then he stopped, and smiled, a rather sad smile. “It shows that much, huh?”
“If you painted the words scared and upset on your forehead, it might just give me a clearer hint,” Catie said, “but only just. George, what’s the matter?”
He sighed.
“Pressure’s piling up, huh…?”
“Not just pressure.” George leaned back and looked at Catie and let out another breath. “More than that. Something worse.”
Catie sat and waited, and didn’t say anything.
“Well, I mentioned to you that we had an invigilator call up, didn’t I? That was Karen de Beer.”
“Yes?” Catie said.
“Well, she was invigilating a non-ISF server game. You can’t use the noncertified servers for tournament play, but a lot of teams have licensed the server software from the ISF for use in their informal or ‘fantasy’ play. Though the servers aren’t used for formal tournament play, the ISF sanctions their use in ‘fantasy’ tournaments and informal regionals. Karen went off to invigilate at a game between Denver and Flagstaff, and…” He trailed off.
“And what?”
George was looking even more uncomfortable. “Catie…I really shouldn’t be telling anyone this.”
She opened her mouth to say “Then don’t tell me,” and then closed it. Catie got up, went over to the chessboard for a moment, picked up one of her knights, and moved it to threaten one of George’s front-rank pawns.
For a long moment George sat there, saying nothing. Then he looked up at the dome of the Great Hall and said, “I trust you, Catie. And I don’t know who else to tell…. Some guy came to the door of Karen’s apartment this morning. He said he liked the way she’d handled the game at Denver…and he wanted to know, did she want to make some extra money.”
“Doing what?” Catie said, sitting down again.
He looked at her with an expression that seemed to say, Can’t you guess? “He said he represented some people who wanted Karen to invigilate spat games that they were going to be running out of another server, a private server that his people were going to be setting up. Now, this kind of thing happens…but never outside of the auspices of the ISF. The Federation publishes a list of non-tournament servers that have been inspected by them and passed for use by ISF member teams and team-candidates, spatball groups that are still serving their qualification period. Federation members don’t do invigilation work outside of the ‘passed’ servers; at least, not if they want to stay in the Federation.”
George got up and walked around the chessboard, looking at it. “It’s tricky business, invigilating a spat space,” he said, not looking at Catie. “Besides consulting with the referee before and during the game, you have to make sure that all the parameters for temperature and air density and rotation and friction and elastic collisions and so forth are set correctly in the software, and that they stay that way—that play, or hardware or code errors, which turn up sometimes, don’t alter them, so that play stays fair. There are about fifty sets of parameters that have to be managed during the course of a match, and you have to watch them all, all the time, and be ready to alter them if the computer messes them up. It’s real easy to handle