Death Match - Diane Duane [67]
Not too much more to do, thank heaven, Catie thought, vanishing one more text window and pausing to rub her eyes.
She picked up another command strand, a line of rose-colored light, and pinched it.
The lottery…It was some hours away yet, and she couldn’t get her mind off it. The funny thing was that George hadn’t seemed too concerned about which team South Florida actually wound up playing first. “In cold analysis, we’re all pretty well matched,” he’d said, “in terms of general strength. Sure, different teams have different specific strong areas. But we’re so good as ‘all rounders’ that one team, really, is pretty much the same as another as far as I’m concerned.” He’d smiled slightly when he’d said it. “We have one thing going for us that none of the others have. We all like each other. We’re doing this for fun, because we enjoy playing together. None of the other teams can genuinely make that claim, since all their players are ‘bought in,’ one way or another.”
“But will that matter at the championship level?” Catie had said.
“It’ll sure matter if we lose,” George had said, and laughed. “But we won’t wind up hating each other. We can’t. We shop for each other, we baby-sit each other’s kids and help them with their homework, we go out for dinner together—did I tell you about the Dinner Brigade? A bunch of us are working our way through all the restaurants in the Miami Yellow Spaces. We’re into the D’s now. A loss at this level will be real public, sure…but we’re still going to be friends afterward. And spat is a basis for our friendships, but not the basis.”
He’d leaned back and stretched again. “And on the other side of the equation,” George had said, “the friendship might just help us win. We have a level of communication that the other teams don’t always seem to have—or else theirs is an artificial thing, imposed, rather than something that grew naturally among the players. Is that enough of an edge? I don’t know. The other teams have the advantage that they’re professionals—they don’t have to have day jobs, they can spend the kind of time practicing that we can only dream about. At the same time…do they spend that kind of time practicing? Maybe not. Like in parenting, there’s a question of quality time versus quantity time. We may actually have an edge there. It’s a job for them, not fun, the way it is for us….”
Catie sighed, finished with that particular line of light, picked up another and read the command line in it, the name of the image file to which it attached, the programming instruction to which it interfaced at its far end.
I just hope he’s right. It would be awful if the stress turned out to be too much for them, if their friendships or their personal lives started to come apart because of all the media attention. Like George saying that he couldn’t even go to a convenience store without being followed. If I were in his position, I’d grab the first reporter I caught doing that and I’d—
Then Catie stopped, in complete shock, and stared at the thing she had been running idly through her hands. It was not a line of light after all. It was a text string. She had read it, she had understood it, she had finished with it, and had been about to put it back and pick up another, all without having to go through any laborious translation of the content—
And suddenly she realized what was happening. It was the paradigm shift, just a flicker of it. It had to be—though it wasn’t even slightly as she’d imagined it would be if she ever achieved it. All this exposure to the raw code, which she hated—all the time Catie had been forcing herself to read it directly, something which she had always avoided—had started to force the change, and Catie was finally starting to think in Caldera. It was a revelation, like the day in her sophomore year when, without warning, after two years of classes and fairly