Death Match - Diane Duane [80]
“I can,” Catie said softly.
He turned to look at her. “Cates,” he said, “have you and George had a fight or something?”
“It’s not me-and-George,” Catie said, “and no, we haven’t had a fight.” Probably it would be simpler if we had….
“You sure?”
Catie gave Hal a don’t-push-your-luck look…then felt guilty and softened her expression. “Yeah, I’m sure. Why?”
“It’s just that if he said something that bothered you,” Hal said, “I was going to adjust his attitude.”
Catie had to laugh at that. “It’s nothing like that,” she said. “But look…thanks anyway.”
“Uh-oh,” Hal said. “Here we go…!”
The cheering was beginning as the players from both sides, Xamax in their green and white, South Florida in their yellow and black, were floating into the volume now, taking positions around the walls as the environment announcer read out their names and numbers to the usual wild cheers. The captains came last, as always. When George’s name was announced, the usual cry of “Parrot! Parrot!” went up from the South Florida fans all around. George looked over toward the F&F space and lifted a hand to wave. Every relative and friend in the place cheered and waved back, Catie included, but Catie knew whom he had been looking at, with a slighly somber gaze, and knew what the message was. We will not go quietly, I promise you!
After the national anthems Catie sat through the first and second halves with little enthusiasm…or tried to. Around the middle of the second half, she found that the sheer élan with which South Florida was playing started to break her mood, which even the screaming and hollering of the fans gathered around the Slugs’ friends-and-family area hadn’t been able to do. Xamax was a good team, very good indeed. Over time they had carefully selected and recruited some of the best players in Europe. Then (for reasons Catie didn’t understand in the slightest) they had sent out for a famous English spatball coach who had been with Man United for a while, and who now shouted at his players from the outer shell in either a hilarious Midlands-accented form of Swiss German that made him sound like he had a throat disease, or a really barbarous French that sounded like someone gargling with Channel water. Whatever they thought of his accents, his players loved the man and played their hearts out for him.
But they didn’t play like the Slugs. Will it make a difference at this level? Catie had asked, and now she realized how dumb the question had been. The team’s friendship, their relationship, turned them into the closest thing to a bunch of spatball-playing telepaths that Catie had ever seen. They all seemed to know where they all were almost without looking. They passed and played, not like separate people, but like parts of the same organism. And they were not playing for a coach, however beloved, but for each other. It made a difference, all right.
The trouble was that, at the end of the third half, it still wasn’t going to matter. At the end of the second half the score was already 3–2–0, and Catie knew that this was just an early indicator of the way the game would end. Already she had seen two goals which seemed to happen faster than any she had ever seen, situations where the balls had seemed almost to swerve on their way through the volume, as if the law of gravity had suddenly shifted in the spatball’s neighborhood, and the Slugs, even playing at their best as they plainly were, couldn’t cope. It was a lost cause, made more poignant because they just would not give up, would not play as if it was anything but a championship game. George had been right. They were playing out of their skins, out of their hearts, going for broke.
He’s not the only hero out there, Catie thought as the horn went for the end of the second half.
“It’s not over yet,” Hal was saying as the teams went out of the volume for their final break. “Only one more goal to draw—”
Catie shook her head.