Catie’s mouth immediately began to water. “Fifty-nine minutes, you said?”
“Why don’t I get that kind of response for my beef stew?” her mother said. “Ingrate! I take back everything I said about how well we’ve brought you up.” And, laughing, she vanished.
Catie spent about half that hour reviewing the copy of the Caldera online manual that she kept in her workspace. Some of the commands she knew well enough, since the imaging tools she used most often shared them. Some were completely unfamiliar, and now she kicked herself for having been so selective about her use of this particular resource…especially because there were aspects of Caldera so powerful that Catie started to get the feeling that she had been making herself work harder than she had to. Now she sat looking at lists of commands that she had very little time to master, and feeling dumber than usual.
When I go in there and start looking that program over, she thought, what’s to say that I won’t look right at the answer and not recognize it because I was too lazy or too unnerved to study this stuff thoroughly—
“Hello?” a male voice said.
Catie’s head jerked away from the manual “pages” that were hanging in the air all around her. The voice had not been that of her father or brother. “George?”
“Can I come in?”
“Sure, if you don’t mind a mess…”
George stepped in out of the empty air and looked around him with surprise, and then pleasure. “I would not call this a mess,” he said. “You built this?”
“I mocked it up,” Catie said.
“Nice job!”
“Uh, I was faking it,” Catie said, feeling that this assessment was more than usually true, while George did what just about every visitor to either the real Great Hall or Catie’s duplicate did — stood there craning his neck at the paintings and mosaics under the ceiling.
“If this is faking it,” George said, “I’d like to see what your real work looks like.”
“Um,” Catie said, biting back about five possible self-critical remarks that she could easily have made. It was the one way she took after her father. Catie preferred to run herself down so that anyone else intending to do so would find that the job had already been done by a resident expert. “Thanks.”
“I had a move,” George said, “but I thought I might bring it over, if you were available, instead of just mailing it in.”
“Sure, go for it.”
George stepped over to the chessboard and picked up a bishop which he had moved out earlier. Now he advanced it a little further along a different diagonal.
“Space?” Catie said.
“I’m so glad we’re on a first-name basis,” said the voice out of the air.
George laughed.
Catie raised her eyebrows. “Log that, will you please?”
The text window hanging in the air promptly added a line:
6
KB-KN3
–
Catie looked at the move, and also looked at the way George was regarding the chessboard: looking more or less at it, but now suddenly not seeing it, or much of anything else, from the concerned expression on his face.
“Can I offer you a chair?” Catie said.
“Uh, yeah.”
She made him one, a “comfy” one like hers, but not so beat-up, and had her space put it over by the chessboard. George sat down and stretched himself, and sighed a little.
“Did you have a practice today?” Catie said.
“Huh? Oh, yeah,” George said. “Some of the guys have been having their machines checked over by their service providers before the tournament, so we wanted to run them in and make sure everything was okay.”
“I guess that’s why you’re looking like you’re incredibly worried about something,” Catie said.
George looked at her with astonishment. “I wasn’t — was I–I mean, I—” Then he stopped, and smiled, a rather sad smile. “It shows that much, huh?”
“If you painted the words scared and upset on your forehead, it might just give me a clearer hint,” Catie said, “but only just. George, what’s the matter?”
He sighed.
“Pressure’s piling up, huh…?”
“Not just pressure.” George leaned back and looked at Catie and let out another breath. “More than that. Something worse.”
Catie sat and waited, and didn’t say anything.
“Well, I mentioned to you that we had an invigilator call up, didn’t I? That was Karen de Beer.”
“Yes?” Catie said.
“Well, she was invigilating a non-ISF server game. You can’t use the noncertified servers for tournament play, but a lot of teams have licensed the server software from the ISF for use in their informal or ‘fantasy’ play. Though the servers aren’t used for formal tournament play, the ISF sanctions their use in ‘fantasy’ tournaments and informal regionals. Karen went off to invigilate at a game between Denver and Flagstaff, and…” He trailed off.
“And what?”
George was looking even more uncomfortable. “Catie…I really shouldn’t be telling anyone this.”
She opened her mouth to say “Then don’t tell me,” and then closed it. Catie got up, went over to the chessboard for a moment, picked up one of her knights, and moved it to threaten one of George’s front-rank pawns.
For a long moment George sat there, saying nothing. Then he looked up at the dome of the Great Hall and said, “I trust you, Catie. And I don’t know who else to tell…. Some guy came to the door of Karen’s apartment this morning. He said he liked the way she’d handled the game at Denver…and he wanted to know, did she want to make some extra money.”
“Doing what?” Catie said, sitting down again.
He looked at her with an expression that seemed to say, Can’t you guess? “He said he represented some people who wanted Karen to invigilate spat games that they were going to be running out of another server, a private server that his people were going to be setting up. Now, this kind of thing happens…but never outside of the auspices of the ISF. The Federation publishes a list of non-tournament servers that have been inspected by them and passed for use by ISF member teams and team-candidates, spatball groups that are still serving their qualification period. Federation members don’t do invigilation work outside of the ‘passed’ servers; at least, not if they want to stay in the Federation.”
George got up and walked around the chessboard, looking at it. “It’s tricky business, invigilating a spat space,” he said, not looking at Catie. “Besides consulting with the referee before and during the game, you have to make sure that all the parameters for temperature and air density and rotation and friction and elastic collisions and so forth are set correctly in the software, and that they stay that way — that play, or hardware or code errors, which turn up sometimes, don’t alter them, so that play stays fair. There are about fifty sets of parameters that have to be managed during the course of a match, and you have to watch them all, all the time, and be ready to alter them if the computer messes them up. It’s real easy to handle a space incorrectly, get things wrong, if you don’t have enough experience. More…if you are experienced…it would be easy enough to set the parameters wrong on purpose. Or to let other people see how it could be done.”
“And Karen thought they wanted her to do something like that.”
“That, or something similar.” George breathed out, went around to his king’s knight and picked it up, walked out onto the board and set it down. The notation window flickered and said K-KB3. “The guy named a figure…said Karen could start any time.”
“What did she say?”
“She said she’d think about it. She told me yesterday that she was still thinking about it. She works in a convenience store, Catie. The figure was about three times her year’s salary. And she’s by herself, don’t forget, and she has a little girl to support.”