Death Match (2003)

by Tom - Net Force Explorers 18 Clancy

  "I don't think you must be very happy about having to travel the day before a game," Catie said. "Especially one this important for the team."

  "Yes, well," George said, making a slightly sour face, "this is also the time at which we're running 'hottest' in terms of publicity...and therefore this is the time to go strike the sponsorship deal we've been waiting for. We have to go up to AirDyne's corporate headquarters in Bethesda this afternoon and do a big press conference performance.... It'll be all over the evening news. This kind of thing makes the ISF happy, even if it isn't our favorite thing. It'll push the 'gate' up for the game tomorrow. But we're going to be up late practicing tonight...."

  "I thought you didn't want a sponsorship deal," Hal said. "You've been turning them all down."

  "Well," George said, "we do actually start to need sponsorship, to play at this level. The team is pretty much agreed on this. But we've also agreed that we don't want any sponsorship agreement to be exclusive...at least, not by the sponsor's choice. At our level, it probably will be, because we don't need that much sponsorship. One big company is plenty. And besides, there are teams that really go overboard in that regard. They get the idea that if a little money is a good idea, then more is better...and as a result, some of their team jerseys are so cluttered with logos you can hardly make out a color underneath them." George took a pull on his iced tea. "But more to the point, none of us on the team likes the implication--the companies don't come right out and say it, of course, though it's there--that the sponsor starts to own you, somehow, that it's okay for them to start dictating to you about tactics and play, once you've signed on the dotted line."

  George sighed then. "So finally we found a sponsor that wouldn't insist on exclusivity, and which agreed to stay out of our way on managerial issues, which was terrific. It's not like the team can't use the money. Our yearly contribution to the ISF isn't peanuts, by any means. But the Federation has to keep the Net servers where we play our games up and running somehow, and that takes hardware hosting and software maintenance and a hundred other things that all cost money. The only alternative, play in reality, is beyond any of us at the moment, even the biggest and best funded of the professional teams. Real cubic in space is just too limited and too expensive right now. It's kind of sad. It would be nice if there was at least someplace where the sport could be played as it was originally conceived, in genuine microgravity. But without that option, virtual's as close as we can get...and it's going to be that way for a long while, until the cost of nonindustrial volume in space comes down. Maybe when the L5-1 gets built, there'll be spat cubic in there. It would seem to make sense, since even in a rotating L5 there's going to be plenty of micrograv volume, especially for the big manufacturers. But that option's twenty years away, easily, and right now we have right-now problems to solve...."

  "Like Chicago," Hal muttered.

  "Chicago," said George, "we'll solve the old-fashioned way. We'll beat them. They have tactical weaknesses that we can exploit, and besides, O'Mahony got herself her third yellow card in that last game. Careless of her. Bad coaching, as much as anything else. Her coach lets her lose her temper and get away with it. One more foul like that, and we won't have her to worry about anymore...."

  Their food arrived. Catie found herself looking with faint dismay at one of the biggest sandwiches she had ever seen in her life. The thing was nearly nine inches tall, and she had never seen such a forlorn and pitiful statement as the single toothpick pushed into the top of it, pretending to hold it all together. There was easily what looked like half a cow's worth of smoked meat in there. She sighed, picked up half of it, pushed out some of the meat, reassembled it, then squashed it into some thickness she hoped she could at least get a bite out of and went to work.

  George's sandwich was cast in much the same mold, and for a few minutes quiet mostly prevailed as he and Catie jointly tried to get their lunches under control, while Hal tucked into his eggs Benedict. "You're mostly a new fan, I take it," George said to Catie after a while, taking a break from his sandwich.

  Catie nodded. "Yeah. Until now I've been playing soccer, mostly," she said.

  "Real or virtual?"

  "Real. Local-league level."

  George flashed that brilliant smile at her again. "A rugged individualist, in this day and age, to play out on the grass under the sun, and get yourself burned and banged up."

  Catie shook her head. "It's just reaction to the rest of my life. The soccer's a good way to stay in touch with physical reality. I do so much virtual stuff: schoolwork of course, and a lot of imaging, and Net Force Explorers...and some F.I.C.E.-sponsored chess, in the winter, when you'd have to be crazy to play anything outdoors."

  That got another smile out of George, an impressed one. "Really? Plane or 3-D?"

  "Plane. I prefer the classic approach."

  "What level?"

  "Three. Nothing to brag about."

  "I made three once," George said, "when I was in my teens. But I didn't have what it took for tournament play. Physical stuff turned out to be more my forte. I did some track and field...then I found spat. Or it found me--"

  "You couldn't have waited, could you?" said a voice from down the aisle of the restaurant. They all looked up. A stocky fair-haired guy about Hal's height but about twice his width, and maybe twenty years old, was standing by their table and looking over their meals with a critical eye.

  "Late as always," George said, glancing at him and picking up his sandwich again. "Nothing for you. We ate yours."

  "Oh, yeah, Bird," said Mike, completely unconcerned, sitting down next to George as George pushed over to make room for him. "Hey, Hal, how's it going? How'd that test go?"

  "Aced it."

  "Good for you...we'll get you into Brown yet. This your sister?"

  "Yup. Catie, this is Mike Manning."

  "Hi, Catie, nice to meet you. Is there a menu?" Mike started looking around him, and a second later Wendy the waitress had materialized at the table, smiling, and was handing him one. Mike asked for a lemonade fizz; she went off to get it like she'd been waiting for the request her whole life.

  While Mike was looking over the menu, Catie glanced over at George. "There's a question I'd like to ask you...."

  Mike hooted with laughter and elbowed George.

  George raised his eyebrows. "No," he said, with the slightest smile, "I'm not married, I'm not dating, I'm not gay, and I have no plans."

  Catie grinned, but she couldn't stop herself from blushing, regardless. "Not that one," she said. "Why, exactly, do they call you 'The Parrot'?"

  "Oh," George said, and threw Mike a look. "See that? There's your one in a hundred. You owe me a nickel."

  Mike flipped over the menu to look at the other side. "I'll have it transferred to your account," he said, grinning.

  George turned back to Catie with a chuckle. "You can guess how often I hear a different question. Never mind. The name's a compliment."

  "Oh?" Catie said. She was now completely bemused.

  "It's an in-joke," George said. "You know how it was when they finally got the International Space Station built, or the first phase of it anyway, before the private finance came in to double the thing's cubic? Very official, very military and shipshape. Well, they'd brought some animals up for testing on and off, but there was a 'no pets' policy for a long time. Understandable, I guess. At that point they didn't have the recycling system in, or that much space for spare food and water; and besides, with animals there were some elimination problems in micro-gravity...." He smiled a little. "Then the Selective Spin module was added on for the crystal-growth and metallurgical research and the manufacturing pilot project; and people started playing spat in the main sphere before it was populated. While that was happening, one of the project biologists set up this convoluted research project that had to do with magnetic field orientation in birds, and it called for birds to be brought up to the station and reared in microgravity to see how it affected their flight charac
teristics and directional sense and so on." George gave Catie an amused look. "And he made a big case that the birds brought up for this should be highly intelligent, and used to confinement. So what do you think the experiment wound up using?"

  "Uh...Parakeets."

  "Close. Parrots. But more to the point, gray parrots...and most specifically, a pair of breeding parrots that belonged to the biologist. George and Gracie, they were called. African greys, very intelligent, very long-lived, everyone agreed with that...but they were also his pets."

  Catie snickered. At that point Wendy arrived again to take Mike's order, for a minute steak and fries, and paused to bat her eyelashes at George before going off again. Mike watched her go, impressed. "I've never seen that technique outside of old cartoons," he said. "A new one for the collection."

  "Yeah," George said. "Well...anyway...the parrots. There was some noise about them, but the project had been approved by some NASA suits who didn't know they were being scammed, and the project managers for the station had the choice of either letting the project go through, or giving the money back. And no one on the station wanted to do that. It was hard enough to get sponsorship for any kind of research at all at that point, unless it was specifically commercial. And giving research money back unused is always a bad move. It makes the people who gave it to you think maybe they should routinely give you less. So...anyway...the parrots came up on the shuttle and lived there for about five years, and they did fine. They bred, too, which was a good thing, otherwise the project biologist would have been in a lot of trouble. But what was really terrific was how the young parrots took to life in space. All the little Georges and Gracies evolved a whole new way of flying. Spatball players still study the films that Harry--that was the biologist--made of his birds and their offspring. So do astronauts. The chicks found out things about maneuvering in microgravity within their first few weeks of life that even trained astronauts took a lot longer to work out for themselves. And obviously the parents learned, too...but their learning curve was a lot like the human astronauts'; they made the same kind of mistakes at the same kind of speed."

  George leaned back and took a drag of his iced tea. "Now the moral of the story," he said, "is that among the other things Harry the biologist used to do, was play spat-ball. In fact, he was a member of one of the very first 'real space' teams that formed to play in the Selective Spin cubic before it was populated and the game had to go virtual. And his birds played with them. George and Gracie in particular liked to get into the games and follow their boss around...George even more than Gracie. So that, these days, if you're any good as a spatball player, and you're named George, you are pretty much condemned to be referred to as 'The Parrot.'" He raised his eyebrows, producing a resigned expression. "It's hardly anything new. But since we hit the news, suddenly it's a big deal."

  Catie shook her head. She was unable to stop thinking about some of the side effects of having pet birds, at least one of which had repeatedly occurred to her when as a youngster she'd gotten stuck with cage-cleaning for a pair of parakeets that her brother had lost interest in. "I can see where it would happen. But, George, what about..."

  "...the stuff parrots usually leave on the bottom of their cages, getting all over a space station?" George laughed. "It didn't. They just housebroke the parrots."

  "You're kidding."

  "No, seriously. It's apparently not that hard to do. It's partly a matter of controlling when they eat and what they eat, and partly reinforcing good behavior. See, I know a lot about this because of the nickname, because everybody--everybody!--asks that question as soon as they can."

  Catie laughed. "Okay," she said. "So now I've done at least one thing that was expected of me."

  "Thank heaven. Now we can get on with life."

  "Which means the next game," Hal said.

  George picked up the second half of his sandwich. "There is more to life," said George mildly, "than the next game. Though you wouldn't think that CNNSI believed it. Or any of the other news services that've been camped out around my apartment lately, or the Miami area in general...especially the sports news services. They seem to think it's bizarre beyond belief that I do my own shopping. Like, now that we're in the championships, suddenly a personal shopper should descend from the heavens and start taking care of me." He laughed, but it had a slightly despairing sound to it. "I caught the guy from AB/CBS going through my garbage the other day. For what? Clues about my training diet? To see what junk mail I throw out? He wouldn't tell me! I told him he wasn't allowed to do that unless he'd actually carried the stuff out of the house himself. And he volunteered. He volunteered to carry my garbage! Do you believe that?"

  "This is what everybody thinks they want a piece of," said Hal, a little somberly. "Fame..."

  "It's overrated," George said. "It means you can't go to a convenience store and let someone see you buy a six-pack of beer. If you do, they either declare you a closet alcoholic, or else the next morning some guy from the beer company turns up on your doorstep asking you to appear in commercials."

  "Or both," Mike said.

  George looked wry. "Don't laugh. I could be rich about six times over, just now, just out of what I've been offered for endorsements. But I don't want to do that! We're an amateur organization, for one thing. Spat for me is about getting together with my friends, having a good workout, playing together skillfully, and being social afterward.... But the problem's a lot worse than that. If I ever get stinking rich, I want it to be from something I made, something I did. Not something they did to me, or for me, as an accidental outgrowth of a pastime, a game, yes, a game!--which by itself isn't worth that kind of money. But they don't understand that," said George. "And frankly, neither do my family, or my friends, a lot of them...They think I'm crazy. And the trouble is, I'm beginning to understand why."

  He let out a long breath and had some more iced tea. Catie looked at the glass, and looked at the window, wondering whether George's choice of beverage had anything to do with a possible fear of distant cameras, trained on him, just waiting to see him do something that someone somewhere might consider inappropriate.

  "But enough of my troubles," George said at last, and put the glass down. "How about the game?"

  "It was super," her brother said. And that was about the last chance Catie would have had to get a word in edgewise for the better part of three quarters of an hour, for the ensuing torrent of spatball jargon took nearly that long to die out, as play after play was taken apart, turned inside out and upside down, analyzed, criticized, and dropped for the consideration of the next one. Mike was an eager participant in this, and Hal gave him a run for his money, while Catie listened with somewhat pained interest to terminology that kept getting tangled up in chords and lunes and great circles and geodesic slams and incidence relations. She sighed at those, for Catie had finished the usual run-in with solid geometry in school last year, and had come away from it successfully, but only just. Afterward, for her, the phrase "Through point A draw a line B" would normally have made a good start for a horrorcast.

  But the game itself had been won against an opponent that had widely been expected to dump South Florida unceremoniously out of the tournament. That was the main thing. Now the publicity was heating up, and Hal and Mike amused themselves briefly with reciting some of the more specious and empty-headed rationalizations they had heard in the media for the Banana Slugs' win, everything from plain dumb luck to sunspots. George mostly kept quiet during this, attempting to do something about the second half of his sandwich. Catie had already decided to take hers home in a doggie bag and have another run at it around dinnertime. And possibly a third attempt at breakfast tomorrow...

  "Your team's been attracting a whole lot more attention than you ever thought you would, I bet," Catie said.

  "Yes," George said, putting the sandwich down again with a sigh. "We have. Not all of it friendly."

  There was something about the way he said this that made her look at him cl
osely. George was looking out the window again, and his expression was very much that of a man who was sure that someone was watching him.

  He glanced back at her. "We're absolutely not supposed to be here, you know," George said after a moment. "It's surprising how easily people get upset when somehow a long-established status quo shifts. Not that publicity won't do the team good in the long run. No matter what happens in these play-offs, our organizational life will be a little easier in the long run. You know--a few less cake sales, a little more time to actually play. But the hostility and confusion surrounding us at the moment are a little sad to see. There are plainly people who genuinely see us as a disruptive influence to the sport, or an embarrassing accident that the sport is going to have to recover from, or a way to make the rest of the sport look bad while we still get a whole lot of money and hold the 'moral high ground'...wherever that is for spatball." George let out a long breath that bespoke a fair amount of frustration and anger, all shut down to its lowest possible level for the moment. "It's like they can't understand our right to do what our group formed itself to do: play spat competitively, but never lose sight of the basic pleasures of it just for the sake of the win, or what comes with the win. Flight..." Fora moment there was a spark of delight in his eyes, and everything was all just that simple. "We're every kid who ever jumped off the couch with a towel tied around his neck, pretending to be a superhero, or boinged along the ground pretending to be Neil Armstrong, or John Glenn, mostly free of gravity, but still free to be human, and to play." He grinned, just briefly. "To play hard, but play fair, too, and be friends again afterward..."