Death Match (2003)

by Tom - Net Force Explorers 18 Clancy

  "Your meeting with George Brickner," said the monster. Outside, Catie thought she could faintly hear the sounds of peasants with pitchforks, somewhere out on the First Street side of the Library of Congress, and getting louder. "Saturday morning at eleven."

  "Space?" Catie said.

  "Awaiting your beck and call, O Mistress."

  Catie's eyebrows went up. "Don't you start learning bad habits from Hal's space now," she said. "Meanwhile, make a note of the Net address for the meeting."

  "Brace yourself for a shock," said her workspace, "but it's not a virtual address. Delano's, 445 P Street, Georgetown, phone--"

  "Hold the phone," Catie said. I wonder what's bringing this guy up all the way here from Florida? she thought. Some business to do with his team...? That had to be it. "What's Delano's? Some kind of restaurant?"

  "The Yellow Spaces listing says 'diner,'" said her workspace.

  "Huh," Catie said. "Maybe over by the university."

  "Near Poulton Hall," said her workspace.

  Catie nodded. "Okay, Boris," she said to the monster, "tell your 'master' that the message is received and understood." She waved bye-bye.

  The monster bowed a finishing-school bow, during which its toupee fell off, then it vanished. Catie stood there for a moment with a wry look on her face until the sound of the peasants with pitchforks faded away. Then she bent down to pick up the toupee, flung it into the air so that it caught fire and vanished, and then set about tidying up her workspace, beckoning some of the piles of files and sketches to float in the air around her for sorting. Now I can start finding out just why Mark Gridley was so interested in this guy, Catie thought. And as for whatever slight interest I might have myself...

  She grinned and started going through the papers in one hovering pile, idly humming "Slugs' Revenge."

  3

  As sometimes happened, she didn't see her parents again until the next day--her mother routinely left for work well before Catie needed to leave for school, and her father was either sleeping in after a long night's work or possibly hadn't stopped at all. Catie had paused by the studio door and listened, just before leaving for school, but hadn't heard anything, and the fact itself meant nothing. He could be either sitting and contemplating his work, or snoozing on the beat-up couch before getting up to take another run at the canvas.

  It was Friday, and she only had a half day at Bradford Academy today. Catie had finished most of her finals and had only one or two more classes to deal with--mostly administrative stuff, the grading of the second-semester projects for her advanced arts class, and a final session of prep for the eleventh-grade organic chemistry final, which she was not too concerned about. For some bizarre reason, she had found organic chemistry easier to handle than the regular kind. By one o'clock she was out of class and heading down the tree-shaded street toward home.

  Her brother, wearing a Banana Slugs slick-over and (bizarrely) an overall apron, was clanging around in the kitchen when Catie came in. Pots and pans were everywhere, scattered all over the counters. This was something that had been happening with increasing frequency lately. Catie's mom had insisted that both her kids should be at least good enough in the kitchen to make dinner for themselves and their dad if she was late at the library, and her brother had always been a competent cook, if not an enthusiastic one. Lately, though, Hal had been in here a lot, much more than usual. Now he was frantically stirring what looked to Catie like a pot of nothing but near-boiling water, while feeling sideways for an egg he had already cracked onto a plate.

  Catie looked curiously into the pan. "What're you making?"

  "Eggs Benedict. Don't distract me, this is for school."

  Catie blinked at that. He had finished his home arts course last year. "Which class?"

  "Chemistry." He stirred faster and dumped the egg off the plate into the pan. "Don't bug me now, Catie, this is important!"

  "Eggs Benedict? For chemistry?" But her brother didn't say anything, just stopped stirring and watched the egg slip down to the bottom of the vortex he had created and, whirling there, begin to poach.

  Catie shook her head, wondering what on earth they'd done to the tenth-grade chemistry syllabus since she'd taken it, and turned away to dump her bookbag on the table. As she turned she saw that her father was leaning his tall rangy self against one side of the kitchen doorway, scrubbing thoughtfully at his hands with a turp-soaked rag while he watched Hal's performance. He was, as usual, dressed in work clothes--jeans that had already been old and tired early in the century and were now washed and faded nearly to white, and on top an ancient and faded T-shirt featuring a stripe-beaked toucan standing on stenciled letters that read GUINNESS. Also as usual, like his work, her father and his clothes were all colors of the rainbow, an abstract pseudo-Impressionist study in smears and smudges. Warren Murray had won much critical acclaim over his career for his "luminous and inventive use of color." At the moment, though, the inventiveness seemed mostly to consist of getting it into his dark thinning hair in ways only nervously contemplated by other, lesser artists. Catie looked at her dad and shook her head, knowing what her mother was going to say about the laundry in a day or two, not to mention the carmine streak radiating jaggedly back from his parted hair on the right side.

  "Daddy," she said, "why don't you at least change over to acrylics?"

  He looked up at Catie and smiled slightly, a tired look on that long face of his, but a satisfied one. "They just don't get the same color saturation as oils, honey, you know that...."

  "Did you even sleep last night?"

  "Eventually, yeah." But she could see that he hadn't actually stopped work, since he was only now cleaning up. "I crashed out on the studio couch. I knew I was almost done, and there wasn't any point in cleaning up. Finished now, though."

  Catie went into the fridge for the ever-present pitcher of iced tea, and also brought out a bottle of Duvel for her dad. When he finished a piece of work, he routinely allowed himself a beer to celebrate. "You really should use electrons instead of paint," she said, handing him the little wire-stoppered bottle and turning to get the specially shaped Duvel glass and a tumbler for her iced tea out of the cupboard over the sink. "It wouldn't get all over the couch."

  "It's all electrons when you come down to it," her father said. "It's just that some of them are wetter than others." He started to push back the one lock of forehead hair that always got in his way, and then paused, looking at the blue and green paint that was still all over the back of that hand. He started scrubbing at it with the rag, then pushed the rag into his pocket and turned his attention to getting the Duvel bottle open.

  "What were you doing?"

  Hal, peering into the pot he had been stirring, now began to speak in some language that certainly wasn't English, and from the sound of it didn't involve concepts that Catie was eager to have translated. Apparently something had gone wrong in the pan. Her father raised his eyebrows and said, "Come on down and see. We can get out of Escoffier's way."

  Catie followed him down the hall past the bedrooms and into the studio. Its door was open, and the smell of oil paint and linseed oil was still strong, though she could hear the air purifier working all-out to get rid of it. This time of day the north light that came in through the back windows and the skylight was at its best, the sun having swung around the other side of the house. In the middle of the room, well away from the Net access box and the implant chair, under the spots and within range of the digital rendering camera, a canvas stood on an easel blotched with every conceivable color of paint.

  It was a piece of background work, one on which text would be superimposed during a virtcast, a swirl and rush of blues and greens...but there was more to it than that. "Dry yet?" Catie said.

  "You kidding? We can put a colony on the moon, but we can't develop a drying agent for oils that works faster than twenty-four hours...."

  "This is the one for CNNSI?"

  "Yeah, for the FINA swimming championships next yea
r." They stood back together and regarded the canvas. On first glance, an unsuspecting viewer might have called the work an abstract. But then, as your glance sank into the greens and blues and viridians of it, you began to perceive the flashes of hotter, brighter color half-submerged in the glassy hues, streaks and submerged ripples of red and gold, and you got a sense of splashing strength, shapes cutting the water or plunging into it, all going somewhere at speed. The effect was subtle, and yet the longer you looked at it, the more you saw swimmers and divers, moving--even in so static a medium.

  "They'll want me to animate it, of course," her father said, and raised his eyebrows in an expression that said, clearly enough, The idiots! "Probably they'll want it to ripple like water. If they had the brains God gave bluepoint oysters, they'd notice that if you just sit still and look at it for more than five seconds, your brain'll begin producing that effect itself." He gave Catie a wry sidelong look. "But getting even the art director to sit still that long, these days, is a challenge. Not to mention the virtual audience, who are going to have to view the work nearly completely covered with flashing crawling text, in a window that they may keep sized down to the size of a postage stamp in the virtual 'field of view,' half the time...so the art director is going to insist that there be something about it that moves, to remind the viewers that it's there." Her dad turned to look at the canvas again. "If I'm unlucky, the thing is going to wind up looking like an ad for toilet bowl cleaner by the time they're through. If I'm lucky..." He sighed, and shrugged.

  Catie stepped closer to look at the way her father had layered the paint over the flash of color that was meant to represent a swimmer. The palette knife had been involved, which was probably the scraping Hal had heard last night. "You'll get some 'print' sales, though...."

  "Oh, yeah," her dad said, taking a long drink of the Duvel, and smiling slightly. "The collectors will notice it when it airs. And anyway, there are always people who suddenly notice a nice graphic for the first time and want a copy for their workspace. We'll do okay from that."

  Catie looked at the work for a moment. There was more speed inherent in it than just that of swimmers and divers. "You were in a hurry on this one...." she said.

  Her father started to push his hair back again, and stopped himself, laughed, and had another drink of beer. "Yes. It's not due yet, but I want to get the stuff in before deadline...so I can get well ahead on the next commission, and have plenty of time to sort everything out and clean up in here before the builders arrive." His expression showed that he was already dreading the incursion.

  Catie shook her head. "You should do what Mom suggested, and reschedule the builders for later. Then we could all go away somewhere for a week, while the place is all torn up. Up to the Jersey Shore, maybe...or over to Assateague..."

  Her father looked thoughtful. Then he shook his head. "Nope. The sooner it's done, the sooner I can get back to work."

  Catie smiled slightly. It was easy to forget sometimes how much her father loved what he did, when most of her classmates could talk about nothing but how their folks disliked their jobs and couldn't wait to get away on vacation. If she was lucky, some day she would be in the same position, when she got a job at Net Force. She refused to think of it in terms of if.

  And that reminded her. "Oh," Catie said, "I was going to tell you last night, but you were busy. Hal's friend the spatball player from South Florida Spat is going to be in town tomorrow...we're going into Georgetown to see him at lunch."

  "Hey, that's great for you. You need a ride?"

  She shook her head. "We'll go public...between the Metro and the tram, it's not a problem."

  "This is their big star, huh?"

  "So I hear. A lot of people are interested in South Florida all of a sudden...I assume that's why he's coming up here in the first place."

  He nodded, having another drink of his beer and looking at the painting. "...Why do you think they're so popular just now?"

  Catie looked at her father quizzically. "You getting interested in sports all of a sudden?" she said. It was an unusual concept, for though he might render sports themes in the course of his work, he wasn't particularly a fan of any of them. In fact, her dad routinely claimed that his introduction to commercial art was when he learned to forge his parents' signatures on "notes from home" asking that he be excused from gym; and later, until he was caught, he had run a small but lucrative business forging other kids' parents' signatures at five bucks a shot.

  "Me? Sports? Not a chance," Catie's father said. "But the psychology of this particular situation...maybe."

  Catie thought about that. "I don't know for sure," she said. "It could just be the underdog thing, I guess. People enjoy seeing an unlikely winner taking on the 'big guys.'"

  Her father nodded, pulled out the turpentine rag again, and sat down on the poor beat-up, paint-spattered couch, where he started scrubbing once more at the back of his left hand, where it was still blue and green. "Maybe. I guess I'm not clear on how they managed it in the first place, though."

  "If I understand it right," Catie said, leaning against the tube-and bottle-cluttered desk near the studio door, "somebody in the first organizing body of the sport actually had the brains to set themselves up as a licensing body as well, to make sure they kept control over it. I don't understand most of the legal stuff, but I think Hal told me they had to do that in order to get permission to keep using cubic on the International Space Station for those first few tournaments. He said the first organizers wanted to make sure the sport didn't lose the amateur feel, even when it started to get professionalized--they were smart enough to see that coming over the horizon, eventually--and when the league structure started to be set up, they wrote it specifically into the structure document that Spat International would not allow strictly professional leagues. They could call themselves something else if they went professional, but they couldn't call it 'spatball.'"

  Her father nodded slowly. "You're telling me they decided to license the brand, as much as the game itself." He chucked the rag into the little self-sealing ceramic garbage can nearby where his flammable disposables went, and picked up his beer glass again. "Possibly a very smart move."

  "Seems that way," Catie said. "Hal says the big teams have tried a couple different ways to break the license or weasel around it, and every time they try, they get blown out of the water in one jurisdiction or another. Apparently the player who drew up the structure document as part of the original license was also a lawyer with a specialty in international trademark and patent law, and he really knew what he was doing."

  "Huh," her father said, having another drink of Duvel.

  "But this is still kind of unusual, I take it."

  "Oh, yeah," Catie said. "The structure of the yearly spat schedule usually seems to shake out all but the very best teams early on, and mostly the ones who're left are the professional teams. Partly it's because the professionals have lots of money to recruit the most talented players from the semipro and amateur teams. Seems like the semis and amateurs have been complaining about that for a long time. In the normal course of the competitions, most of the amateur teams usually fall by the wayside by the mid-season break. But not this one...."

  Her father finished his beer, got up, and picked up the rag can, glancing one last time at the painting. "Well," he said, "it's going to be interesting to see how the rest of the season unfolds for South Florida. I would imagine the pressure on them is increasing to levels they wouldn't normally experience as a purely amateur team."

  Catie nodded as they walked back toward the kitchen. "That's sort of why I want to meet their team captain," she said.

  Her father raised his eyebrows at her as they went into the kitchen and he kept going, toward the door that led to the garage, the side of the house, and the sealed disposal for the flammable garbage. "So you're telling me that it really doesn't have anything to do with the fact that People described this guy as having 'the best physical aspects of a young god'?"


  He was out the door before Catie could think of an appropriate response to that. Her brother was still stirring the same pot he had been stirring before, looking both intent and angry, and he was reaching for another eggon-a-dish.

  "Chemistry?" Catie said, looking at him in complete bemusement.

  "Blast yourself out of here," Hal said, not looking up, "before I call whichever public agency is in charge of having a close relative's body donated to science."

  Smiling slightly, Catie went on down the hall to her room to change out of her school clothes.

  About a hundred and fifty miles away, in the top-floor lobby bar of the Marriott Hilton Parkway in Philadelphia, two men sat across a low bar table and looked down the length of Ben Franklin Parkway, toward the faux-Greek, painted portico of the art museum. Two long lines of trees stretched up the parkway toward Museum Circle, but not a breath of wind stirred them. Every leaf hung still and flat-looking in the heat and the odd light. In the west, thunderclouds were piling up in curdling heaps of white and livid blue, threatening one of those four o'clock thunderstorms to which Philly is prone in most summers. But it was some time from happening yet, and everything outside the big floor-to-ceiling windows of the bar lay in a breathless, panting stillness of heat and humidity, waiting for the storm to break.

  The two men who sat there in the bar and looked down the parkway, rather than at one another, were both wearing dark clothes in cuts that were designed not to stand out in any particular way. They had taken off their sunglasses because wearing sunglasses inside was a good way to make you stand out, and they were both drinking nondescript drinks that might or might not have had alcohol in them, to the casual observer.

  It was the first time the two men had met nonvirtually, and they had made the discovery about each other that so many people make in such circumstances--that the seeming each of them routinely wore was an almost exact opposite of his real appearance, and therefore could have been used to predict one another's genuine appearance, if either one had been bothered to try. Darjan turned out to be a short fair man, a little on the bulky side, with hair surprisingly long for the styles that year; and Heming turned out to be tall and slim to the point of boniness, swarthy, and with very close-cropped dark hair. The revelation did not move either of them to like the other one anymore...and it would hardly have been possible for them to like one another less, especially since circumstances had forced them to meet nonvirtually, and thereby lose whatever cover their seemings had until now provided them.