Death Match - Diane Duane [76]
He looked at Catie keenly. “But a question for you before I go. Identify the famous graphic artist responsible for this quote: ‘There is hope in honest error…none in the icy perfection of the mere stylist.’”
“Uh,” Catie said, and then closed her mouth again, becoming suddenly aware that this was not intended merely as a quote.
Winters held up his index finger. “One honest error,” he said. “All my people know I’ll allow them that much. Twice, and you get really yelled at. Make a note.”
“Noted,” Catie said, in a somewhat strangled voice.
“Thanks, Catie,” James Winters said, turned, went hurriedly through the door that opened for him in the middle of the Great Hall, and vanished.
Catie got out of her space, and out of virtuality, and let Hal have the machine without even arguing about it, and went on down to her room and just sat there for a while, with the door shut, feeling terrible. I can’t believe how completely I’ve screwed everything up! Yet as a little time passed, and she started to recover from the shock of what had just happened, Catie was forced to admit to herself that the screw up hadn’t been total. Winters had actually been slightly pleased with her…which, frankly, was a better outcome than she had hoped for. It wasn’t that the bouquet he’d handed her hadn’t mostly been thorns, but they were ones that she deserved, and the two or three rather shredded blossoms concealed among them were, Catie supposed, worth it in the end.
She came out of hiding after three-quarters of an hour or so, to find her brother still using the Net machine in the family room. Catie knew she was going to have to talk to George Brickner shortly, but she wasn’t in any hurry about it. She wanted to make sure her composure was back in place. She rooted around in the fridge briefly, came up with a couple of chicken breasts, and made herself a fast meal that was a favorite of her mother’s: the chicken breasts sauteed with butter and a chopped-up onion, and the whole business “deglazed” with balsamic vinegar. In the middle of her cooking, Hal came out of the family room looking slightly glazed himself.
“You seen the news lately?” he said.
Catie shook her head. “I’ve been busy.”
“You’d better go have a look at it.”
“Huh? Why?”
“The sports news. Take my word for it.”
“What?”
Hal just shook his head. “I’ll watch this for you. Go take a look.”
She blinked at that, for it was usually hard to stop Hal from giving you a nearly word-by-word narration of whatever news he’d heard recently, whether you wanted to hear it or not. Catie handed Hal the spatula with which she had been stirring the sauce around while it boiled down, and went in to sit down in the implant chair again.
Once into the Great Hall, she said, “Space?”
“I told him everything,” her workspace manager said. “If you leave now, you may still have time to get out of the country before they seal the borders.”
“Thanks loads. CNNSI, please. Sports headlines, rolling. Latest.”
A moment later the effusive young guy with the wild hairstyle who was doing afternoon and evening news on CNNSI lately was standing behind a desk in front of Catie. “—In an unusual move apparently made for operational reasons, the International Spatball Federation has changed its scheduling for this year’s spatball play-offs.” Behind the anchor, the “background” showed an impressive-looking lineup of implant chairs and very high-end Net boxes and terminals. “The management of Manchester United High announced today that software trouble at their newly installed, multimillion-pound Professional Play Center at Anfield has made it impossible for them to meet the originally scheduled play date of this Thursday. Since the ISF was informed within the mandated twelve-hour emergency notification limit,