It was her own argument, twisted into a horrible shape that she had never imagined, and it stunned Catie into silence. George was quiet for a few moments, too.
“You think I don’t know what you’re thinking?” George said. “Believe me, I feel the same way. It would have been great to get in there and have a chance at winning this tournament, to do a thing that would make spat-ball history. Even a chance of making it to the semifinals — that would have been something to tell our grandchildren about. But if we don’t stop what’s happening to spat, stop it right now, there’ll be no sport to tell our grandchildren about…. Not one worth playing, anyway.” He swallowed. “Sports is about making sacrifices, sometimes. This is one of those times. The team agrees with me.”
“Do they know…?”
He looked at her. “They know enough,” George said. “The Net Force people have been in to check their machines. They’ve been sabotaged, Catie. We can’t touch that, either. We can’t change anything. If we do, the people behind the sabotage will know, and they’ll go to ground somewhere. And who knows, maybe we’ll win…but the sport will lose. And all the people like us who play it for joy, they’ll lose, too.”
Catie looked at George with an ache in her middle that she couldn’t have described in any words. “It’s bad enough that you’re so good-looking,” Catie said after a while, maybe more bitterly than she intended, “but do you have to be a hero, too? It’s just not fair.”
“Things aren’t usually,” George said. “But there’s no harm in trying to make them fair for the next guy along.”
Catie could think of no reply to that.
“It’s not going to be so bad,” George said.
“Yes, it is,” said Catie.
George’s face twisted into a pained shape Catie didn’t particularly like to see on it. “All right,” he said, “yes! It is! But we can’t let that stop us. We’re going to give them a fight like they’ve never seen before. We’re going to show the people who put the fix in that the only way to stop us is to fix the game in ways that have never been seen before…and even if we lose, we’re going to play like no one’s ever seen a spat team play before. We’re going to play so well that everyone who sees the game we’re about to lose will shake their heads and wonder what the heck went wrong. Then when they see Chicago play at the weekend, those same people are going to shake their heads and say, ‘They should never have made it this far. Someone must have been cheating the system somehow.’ And that’s the best way for us to respond, the only way that also helps Net Force do what it needs to do about this situation. I don’t like it much. It’s not at all the ending for this season that I dreamed of. The team doesn’t like it much, either. It doesn’t match their dreams. But we’re not going to go quietly. I promise you that!”
They both sat quiet for a few moments, looking in different directions. Then George looked over at the chess-board. “I see you’ve got me in a knight fork,” he said.
“I’ve had you there for three moves,” Catie said.
“You gonna do anything about it?”
“I’ve started doing something about it,” Catie said. “Your bishop.”
“I’m not worried about that,” George said, and gave her a superior look. “Not after the way you threw that last knight away. Anyway, I’m going to take your queen in three moves.”
“No, you’re not,” Catie said.
“Yes, I am,” George said.
“You can’t. There’s no way—” Catie got up and stalked over to the chessboard, glad of an excuse not to have to look at George. She was upset; upset at the unfairness of life, which was about to cheat this guy and his friends of a victory that they deserved. And she hated to have people see her when she was upset.
“There,” she said, and picked up one of her bishops and moved it. The window hanging in the air with the notation of the game changed itself to reflect the move.
George got up and wandered over to the chessboard, looking over Catie’s shoulder at the board’s center area. “Getting messy in there,” he said.
“Not nearly as messy as some places,” Catie said, heart-sore. In her mind all she could see was that great piled-up tangle of code in the ISF server, intricate, complex, and rotten at its core.
George was silent for a moment. “Catie,” he said. “You did the best you could. It’s out of our hands now — your hands and mine. All we can do now is play the game through to the end, and try to do it with some dignity. And in the meantime…I appreciate that you were trying to help. I really do.”
Catie nodded. “Do you have a move?” she said.
He looked at the board one more time. “Not tonight,” he said. “I’ll have a couple for you tomorrow, before we go off to practice. And then one more later.”
“All right,” she said.
George went back to his doorway, went through it, vanished. Catie didn’t turn to watch him go, just looked at the bishop she had moved, and found herself suddenly wishing that the game she had so much been looking forward to would never happen at all.
The last contact between them before the game, on Wednesday night, was made over a voice-only line. They would not now speak again until after the game on Thursday.
“…The neighbors said she left early to pick up her daughter at school,” Darjan said, “and she didn’t come back. She went off to hide somewhere, apparently. She hasn’t come back yet.”
“You going to let her get away with that?”
Darjan laughed. “It’s not vital. There are four other people being worked on in other cities. We’ve got other fish to fry, anyway. When they changed the schedule, everybody had to scurry to make sure that the mirror was working right. There’ll be some people pleased, anyway. The Slugs’ll be out of the running that much faster. How about your end of things? All the South Florida players’ servers taken care of?”
“All handled now.”
“Fine. Let’s go over all the other arrangements one last time.”
Heming laughed. “Always the perfectionist, huh, Armin?”
“Always,” Darjan said. “Just call me fond of keeping my skin in one piece.”
“They don’t pay you enough for the amount you worry,” Heming said.
“No,” said Darjan, “they don’t. Let’s start at the top….”
8
Despite Catie’s preferences, Thursday eventually came. The game was scheduled for nine P.M. Eastern time, and Catie went to her mom and dad to make sure that both the Net machines in the house were going to be available for her and Hal. But her mother and father already knew about the scheduling, and seemed surprised that she was bothering to ask.
“With all the coverage there’s been about this in the last couple of days, honey,” her mother said, “you know we wouldn’t deprive you!” She was unloading another pile of books onto the kitchen table, this batch, from the looks of it, was heavy on the classics again, but mostly sixteenth-and seventeenth-century French literature.
Catie sighed, picking up a copy of Gargantua and Pantagruel and paging through it. She hadn’t been looking at the spatball coverage. It made her heart ache to think of what was going to happen to South Florida tonight. Mostly she had been catching up on schoolwork and making the occasional chess move to match the two that George had made since she spoke to him last. But those were the only times she’d been online since then.