Death Match nfe-18 Read online

  “One point five…”

  “That was the last estimate.” Darjan looked up from under those thick dark brows at Heming. “What the hell are those people doing playing at this level? They’re a local team, for God’s sake. They’re a bunch of housewives and appliance repairmen; they’re the damned Kiwanis!”

  “They’re good,” said Heming, rather helplessly.

  “They’re too good,” Darjan said, frowning. “And some-thing’s gonna be done about it, one way or another. Too much rides on things going the way they were planned to go at the beginning of the season. The spreads, even the casual betting spreads, are going to be disturbed. We can’t have it, Heming. The investors are going to turn their backs on us, and some of them we spent too much time and money getting hold of in the first place to lose now. So you better tell me what you have in mind…otherwise ‘overt’ is going to be the order of the day, whether you like it or not.”

  Heming shook his head. “You wouldn’t want to—”

  “Don’t tell me what I want. Instead tell me how you’re going to fix it. Nonovertly.”

  Heming thought for a moment. “Well, some of it would be an outgrowth of how we would keep things running normally outside of the playoffs.”

  Darjan considered this for a moment. “You’re going to have to ‘oil’ different people,” he said. “Higher up. The kind who’d be more likely to blow the whistle.”

  “Not if the incentives are correctly applied,” said Heming, “and if they’re big enough. Everybody has their price. Just a matter of seeing how high you have to go…. And after that, because of the increased price…they’re that much more eager to keep quiet. Because if word ever gets out…” He smiled. “Scandal. Bad publicity. Lawsuits, public prosecutions, jail terms…All very messy.”

  “And you can hold that over them, of course.”

  “Of course. The leaks would seem to come from somewhere else, somewhere ‘respectable,’ when they came.”

  The first man nodded slowly. “All right. We can try it your way first. Do you have some targets in mind?”

  “Several.”

  “Get on it, then. Do what you have to. But hurry up! This was the last of the preliminary bouts. The serious betting always starts at the eighth-final level. It’s started already. The whole structure of the ‘pools’ betting will start to be affected soon, if you don’t get them out of the running.”

  Heming looked thoughtful for a moment. “Obviously we won’t get results until the first eighth-final game,” he said.

  “That’s Monday,” Darjan said. “South Florida versus Chicago versus Toronto, if I remember correctly. Chicago was scheduled to win, when the third was going to be New Orleans.” His face set grim, and he glanced up. “Certain people,” he said, “were—are—very committed to Chicago. Believe me, you wouldn’t like to have to explain to them how their team got knocked out at the eighth-final stage by a bunch of landscape gardeners and sanitation engineers. Amateurs—”

  “It won’t happen,” said Heming.

  “Pray that it doesn’t,” said Darjan. “Get on it. Get in touch with me tomorrow and tell me what progress you’ve made.”

  Heming went out hurriedly through the open French doors to the square, where the afternoon light was beginning to tarnish. Darjan looked after him, once more reaching around to the martini glass and beginning to turn it around and around on the white marble. Then his hand clenched slowly around the stem. A moment later there was a sharp crack as the stem of the Dartington crystal, tough as it was, gave way. This being virtual experience, there was no blood.

  Elsewhere, however, Darjan thought, in reality, unless Heming gets busy, things will be very different….

  2

  The monthly regional Net Force Explorers meetings could turn into a real mob scene sometimes, so Catie liked to get to them early when she could. But that evening she was almost foiled in this intention by her mother, who, just as Catie was heading back down to the family room, came edging in through the kicked-open front door with her arms full of shopping bags, and also with several canvas bags full of books hanging from her, so that she looked like some very overworked beast of burden. “Oh, honey, help!” her mom said. “The groceries—!”

  Catie hurried down the front hall to her and did her best to relieve her mom of the two heaviest bags, which were just about to fall out of her mother’s arms. “Mom, why can’t you leave stuff in the car and just make another trip?”

  “I thought I could manage it,” her mother gasped as they staggered together into the kitchen and dumped everything on the table. Catie shook her head as they straightened up and dusted themselves off. “Supermom,” Catie said in a chiding tone.

  “Oh, sweetie, I just hate making two trips, you know how it is….”

  “Inefficient,” they said in unison. Catie smiled a slightly rueful smile. Her mother worked at the Library of Congress as an acquisitions librarian, and had spent the first two years of her employment trying to work a reorganization of the basic stacks system through the library’s monolithic bureaucracy. Now, six years later, having been promoted to senior acquisitions librarian in charge of classical literature, she was still at it — for while efficiency was not precisely one of Colleen Murray’s gods, it was at least a minor idol before which she bowed at regular intervals, in the name of making the world in general work better. This being the case, Catie knew she was something of a cross for her mother to bear, for Catie felt in her soul that it was wrong to have a house, or a life, look from minute to minute as if you were expecting to have Architectural Digest come in to do a photo shoot. A little randomness around the edges, a little easygoing clutter here and there, in Catie’s opinion, made things look less artificial, more natural and human. And since they get that way anyhow, in the normal course of things, your nerves don’t get shredded trying to prevent the unavoidable….

  Now the table looked more than random enough even for Catie. Books and foodstuffs shared it about evenly, and Catie started divvying them up, paying more attention to the books, with an eye to keeping them safely away from the food. The first few volumes she picked up seemed to be printed in Greek, and another was in a lettering she didn’t recognize. “What’s this?” she said. Its title seemed to say RhOIQEA AFOI–ITUW, except that some of the letters looked wrong: the L was backward, the F had an extra stroke underneath the short one, and the h was hitched up between the P and O like some kind of punctuation mark with delusions of letterhood.

  Catie’s mother was loading a couple of gallons of milk into the fridge. She paused to peer around the door. “Oh. That’s the King James Bible translated into Tataviam.”

  Catie gave her a look. “Didn’t know you were into science fiction, Mom. Which series are the Tataviam from? Galactic Patrol?”

  Her mother laughed as she shut the refrigerator door. “It’s not a created language, honey. It’s native to the Los Angeles area. The Native Americans there had about a hundred languages and dialects. Highest density of languages per square mile in the world, supposedly.”

  Catie shook her head and put the book down. She had been about to ask her mother why she’d brought this particular book home, but it occurred to her that listening to the whole answer would probably wind up making her late. Her mom picked up a pile of cans of beans and vegetables from the table, stacking them up carefully in her arms, and took them over to unload them into one of the undercounter cabinets, while Catie went through the other books — mostly works of Greek and Latin classicists like Pliny and Strabo and Martial.

  Her mother meanwhile finished with the cans, got herself a glass of water, drank it in a few gulps, and pulled the dishwasher door open. “I’m empty!” said the dishwasher in a tone of ill-disguised triumph.

  “Isn’t that super,” Catie’s mother said, putting the glass in and closing the dishwasher again. “Your brother’s finally beginning to get the idea. Perhaps my life has not been in vain.”

  Catie smiled gently and said nothing.
“Mom,” she said, “anything important you need to tell me before I make myself socially unavailable?”

  Her mother looked thoughtful. “Nothing leaps right out at me. What is it tonight? Net Force Explorers meeting?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Have fun. I’ll take care of the rest of this.” Catie smiled again, a little more broadly. She knew her mother preferred to take care of the groceries herself, so that she wouldn’t have to accuse her daughter of “misshelving.” “Where’s your dad?”

  “Incommunicado. In the studio.”

  “Painting?”

  “That, or plastering,” Catie said. “Hal reported faint scraping noises. But it’s probably just painting, since I forgot the spackle on the way home, and so did Hal.”

  Her mother sighed. “Okay. Where’s Hal taken himself, by the way?”

  “He may still be on the Net with his post-spatball game show. I didn’t check.”

  “Fine. You go do your thing, Catie. I have to look these over and see if we need to order copies for the department.”

  “Mom, they shouldn’t make you take your work home,” Catie said, frowning.

  Her mother chortled at her. “Honey, it’s not that they make me, it’s that they can’t stop me. You know that. Go on, get out of my hair.”

  Catie went down to the family room and shut the door, then settled into the implant chair again, lined up her implant with it, and clenched her jaw to activate it.

  Instantly the room vanished, and Catie was sitting in an identical chair surrounded by the spectacular polished pillars, shining staircases, murals and mosaics which filled the gold-brown-and-white “front hall” of the Library of Congress. Her mother used a similar entry to her workspace, as a lot of her colleagues did. They felt a natural pride in having as part of their “turf” one of the most spectacular and ornate buildings in the entire Capitol District, a gem of the Beaux-Arts tradition, more like a palace than a library. Catie, though, simply liked the palatial aspect of it, and the sense of everything in it having been made by people’s hands, not by fabricating machines or computer programs.

  She got out of the chair and started up the grand staircase to the gallery that overlooked the main reading room. “Hey, Space!” Catie said as she climbed.

  “Good evening, Catie,” said her workspace in a cultured male voice.

  “Any mail for me?”

  “Nothing since you last checked in.”

  “Nothing? In three whole hours?” That was mildly unusual.

  “Would I lie to you?”

  “Not if you wanted to keep your job,” Catie said, while knowing perfectly well that her workspace management program was about as likely to lie to her as her brother was to unload the dishwasher without being reminded.

  “I live in fear of firing,” the management program said, dry-voiced.

  Catie raised an eyebrow. She had asked one of her Net Force buddies to tinker with the program’s responsiveness modes some weeks back, and very slowly since then she had started to notice that it was developing what appeared to be a distinct strain of sarcasm. “Good,” she said as she came to the top of the stairs, “you do that.”

  At the head of the stairs she stood in the big doorway there and looked through it and down. At this spot, in the real library, there was a gallery along the back wall of the main reading room, with a glass baffle to keep the readers from being disturbed by the sound of the never-ending stream of tourists. But in Catie’s version of the library there was no glass, only a doorway leading down into whatever other virtual space she should elect to visit. For the moment the door was filled with a swirling, glowing opalescent smoke effect, something Catie had designed for her mother as a “visual soother,” a distraction pattern for when she had to put someone on hold at the office.

  “What’s your pleasure?” the management program said to her.

  “Net Force Explorers meeting,” Catie said. “The usual address.”

  “Net Force,” said her management program, and the smoke began to clear away. “I don’t think they suspect anything yet, so don’t blow it.”

  I definitely need to talk to the guilty party about this, Catie thought. She stepped through the doorway, pausing on the landing of another stairway which formed to let her down into the big, echoing, empty space on the other side.

  It wasn’t precisely empty. There were probably about fifty other kids there already, milling around and chatting, while above them hung suspended in space, glowing, a giant Net Force logo. It was ostensibly just as a courtesy that Net Force had set aside virtual “meeting space” on its own servers for these meetings. But Catie sometimes wondered whether there was some more clandestine agenda involved, some obscure security issue…or just a desire to “keep an eye on the kids.” For her own part, she didn’t much mind. There’s always the possibility that there are some of the “grown-ups” in here strolling around in disguise, listening to the conversations of the junior auxiliary and noting down which of us seem promising…. A moment later Catie put the thought aside as slightly paranoid. Yet, thinking about it, she decided it wouldn’t particularly bother her if that were happening. Catie firmly intended to wind up working for Net Force one day, doing image processing and analysis, or visuals-management work of one kind or another. If the cutting edge, in terms of excellence, opportunity, and potential excitement, was to be found anywhere, it was there. If someone from the adult side of Net Force wanted to look her over with that sort of work in mind, it was fine by her. The sooner the better, in fact….

  Meanwhile, she had other fish to fry. Or one fish, a small one. As she came down the stairs to floor level, she paused, glancing over the group beneath her. A few faces she knew, a lot she didn’t, not that that had ever bothered her. She always left one of these meetings with at the very least a bunch of new acquaintances—

  And there was the one she wanted to see. She finished coming down the stairs and walked around the edges of the small crowd, greeting a couple of people she knew as she passed — Megan O’Malley, Charlie Davis — and then walked over to her target from behind quietly, with the air of someone approaching a small and possibly dangerous animal without wanting to unduly frighten it.

  “Hey, there, Squirt!” Catie said with an edge to her voice.

  The figure actually jumped a little, and turned. A slight young boy, young especially when you considered that a lot of the other kids here were older by at least several years, tending toward their late teens. But Mark Gridley was no more than thirteen: dark-haired, dark-eyed, with Thai in his background and the devil in his eyes. “Ah,” Mark said. “Ah, Catie, hi, how are you…”

  “You’re here early,” Catie said.

  “Slumming,” Mark said idly.

  “Oh, yeah,” Catie said. Since she’d first met him at one of these meetings, she’d been aware that Mark was obsessed with the idea that somehow, somewhere, he might possibly be missing out on something interesting. Even being the son of Net Force’s director was just barely enough “interesting” to keep him going, so that Mark routinely went looking for more. He was always early to these meetings, though he went out of his way to make it look accidental.

  “How’s the artwork doing?” Mark said, with the air of someone who wanted to distract her from something. “Still fingerpainting?”

  Catie grinned a little, and flexed those fingers. “Hey, everybody in the plastic arts has to start somewhere,” she said. “It’s what you do with the medium, anyway, not what everybody else does with it. Besides, it never keeps me away from the image work long.” She knew perfectly well that Mark knew this was her forte. There were few Net-based effects, in the strictly visual and graphical sense, that Catie couldn’t pull off with time and care. No harm in him knowing, either. Who knew, he might mention it to his father, and his father might mention it to James Winters, the Net Force Explorers liaison, and after that anything might happen. Networking is everything, Catie thought. “And how about you?” she said then. “The French police
give up on you finally?”

  Mark scowled, and blushed. He had gotten in some slight trouble recently when traveling with his dad, and those of the Net Force Explorers who knew the details were still teasing Mark about the episode, half out of envy that Mark had time to get in trouble while staying somewhere as interesting as Paris, and half out of the sheer amusement of watching him squirm — for Mark was hypercompetent on the Net and hated to come out on the wrong side of anything. “It wasn’t a big deal,” he said. “But enough about my scrapes. You’re the one who’s always getting yourself scraped up.” He tilted his head back and pretended to be peering at Catie’s elbows and knees.

  She laughed at him. Catie had long been used to this kind of comment from her friends, both those at school and even those who were also Net Force Explorers. She had been in soccer leagues of one kind or another almost since she was old enough to walk, partly because of her dad’s interest in the sport, but partly because she liked it herself. Then, later on, as virtual life became more important to her, Catie began to discover its “flip side”—that reality had its own special and inimitable tang which even the utter freedom of virtuality couldn’t match. There was no switching off the implant and having everything be unchanged or “all better” afterward. Life was life, irrevocable, and the cuts and bruises you carried home from a soccer game were honestly earned and genuine, yours to keep. Some of her friends thought she was weird to take the “real” sports so seriously, but Catie didn’t mind.

  “To each his, her, or its own,” her father would say, chucking aside some rude review of one of his exhibitions, and picking up the brush again. Catie found this a useful approach with the virtuality snobs, who usually had what passed for their minds made up and tended not to be very open to new data.

  “Nope, nothing new to exhibit,” Catie said. “Except for a new interest. A slight one, anyway. Spatball.”

  “Huh,” said Mark, glancing around. The space was beginning to fill up fast now, a couple of hundred kids having come in over the space of just the last few minutes. “The last refuge of the space cadet, one of my cousins calls it.”