Her dad wandered through the kitchen then, holding a package. “Hon, what happened to my knife?”
“Your knife?”
“The one in the studio.”
Her mother went over to the dishwasher and pulled out a tired-looking plastic-handled steak knife, and handed it to her father. “I thought I would give it a scrub while its shape could still be made out somewhat under the paint,” she said.
“The dishwasher got it this clean?” her dad said, starting to work with the knife on the package he was carrying. “Amazing!”
“No, a hammer and chisel and elbow grease got the first inch of paint off it,” her mother said. “Hard work, not a miracle, paid off there. Catie, honey, did I tell you we talked to James Winters again?”
“Again?” Catie put the book down. “What did he want?”
“Just to thank us for letting you help,” her father said. “He thinks highly of you.”
Catie raised her eyebrows. “It’s nice to know,” she said.
Her father put the knife down on the table and started peeling open the package. “‘Nice to know’? Have you had a change of career goals all of a sudden?”
“Uh, no…I’m just tired.” She checked her watch.
“How long is that game, honey?” her mother said.
“About two hours or so, unless they go into overtime.”
“All right. As long as I can have one of the machines sometime before bed…”
“No problem.”
Nine o’clock came soon enough, and Catie took the machine in the family room. Hal took the one down the hall. In the Great Hall she paused to look over the chess-board for any new moves. There were none. “Space…”
“You know, you’re more beautiful every day.”
Catie looked up into the air with a cockeyed expression. “I think I liked it better when you were insulting me.”
“You’ll probably be sorry you said that in a few years. Was there something you wanted?”
“Friends-and-family space in the ISF spatball volume, please…”
A doorway appeared in the middle of the Great Hall. “Any messages waiting?” Catie said before she went through.
“Nothing, boss.”
“Okay. Flag me as busy for the next two hours.”
She slipped into the microgravity of the friends-and-family space and greeted some of the other team members’ relatives whom she knew slightly, then settled down among them. Hal popped in a few minutes later, bubbling over with excitement. “I can’t believe it’s finally happening,” he said. “I can’t believe it….”
“I can,” Catie said softly.
He turned to look at her. “Cates,” he said, “have you and George had a fight or something?”
“It’s not me-and-George,” Catie said, “and no, we haven’t had a fight.” Probably it would be simpler if we had….
“You sure?”
Catie gave Hal a don’t-push-your-luck look…then felt guilty and softened her expression. “Yeah, I’m sure. Why?”
“It’s just that if he said something that bothered you,” Hal said, “I was going to adjust his attitude.”
Catie had to laugh at that. “It’s nothing like that,” she said. “But look…thanks anyway.”
“Uh-oh,” Hal said. “Here we go…!”
The cheering was beginning as the players from both sides, Xamax in their green and white, South Florida in their yellow and black, were floating into the volume now, taking positions around the walls as the environment announcer read out their names and numbers to the usual wild cheers. The captains came last, as always. When George’s name was announced, the usual cry of “Parrot! Parrot!” went up from the South Florida fans all around. George looked over toward the F&F space and lifted a hand to wave. Every relative and friend in the place cheered and waved back, Catie included, but Catie knew whom he had been looking at, with a slighly somber gaze, and knew what the message was. We will not go quietly, I promise you!
After the national anthems Catie sat through the first and second halves with little enthusiasm…or tried to. Around the middle of the second half, she found that the sheer élan with which South Florida was playing started to break her mood, which even the screaming and hollering of the fans gathered around the Slugs’ friends-and-family area hadn’t been able to do. Xamax was a good team, very good indeed. Over time they had carefully selected and recruited some of the best players in Europe. Then (for reasons Catie didn’t understand in the slightest) they had sent out for a famous English spatball coach who had been with Man United for a while, and who now shouted at his players from the outer shell in either a hilarious Midlands-accented form of Swiss German that made him sound like he had a throat disease, or a really barbarous French that sounded like someone gargling with Channel water. Whatever they thought of his accents, his players loved the man and played their hearts out for him.
But they didn’t play like the Slugs. Will it make a difference at this level? Catie had asked, and now she realized how dumb the question had been. The team’s friendship, their relationship, turned them into the closest thing to a bunch of spatball-playing telepaths that Catie had ever seen. They all seemed to know where they all were almost without looking. They passed and played, not like separate people, but like parts of the same organism. And they were not playing for a coach, however beloved, but for each other. It made a difference, all right.
The trouble was that, at the end of the third half, it still wasn’t going to matter. At the end of the second half the score was already 3–2–0, and Catie knew that this was just an early indicator of the way the game would end. Already she had seen two goals which seemed to happen faster than any she had ever seen, situations where the balls had seemed almost to swerve on their way through the volume, as if the law of gravity had suddenly shifted in the spatball’s neighborhood, and the Slugs, even playing at their best as they plainly were, couldn’t cope. It was a lost cause, made more poignant because they just would not give up, would not play as if it was anything but a championship game. George had been right. They were playing out of their skins, out of their hearts, going for broke.
He’s not the only hero out there, Catie thought as the horn went for the end of the second half.
“It’s not over yet,” Hal was saying as the teams went out of the volume for their final break. “Only one more goal to draw—”
Catie shook her head. “I know,” she said. She also knew that it wasn’t going to happen. But her mood was changing. Heroism was worth honoring, even if there wasn’t a win in prospect. Playing the game as if it mattered…that in itself, in a situation like this, was a win of sorts, though maybe not the kind that the world would recognize. Catie knew. George knew, too, and his team knew—
Where the next twenty minutes went, Catie had no idea. The teams came back into the spat volume at the end of break, the referee and the invigilator gave one another the thumbs-up, and the third half began. And if she thought she had seen committed, ferocious play before, Catie realized that she hadn’t seen any such thing. War broke out in the spat volume: a graceful, low-gravity war, in which there seemed to be an agreement not to kill or seriously injure anyone — but war nonetheless.
“Injuries” began to pile up. South Florida lost two players to injury-level wall impacts almost within the first ten minutes, and Xamax lost three, so that they had to send in a replacement forward, one of only two they had left. The play got a little more cautious after that, as Xamax had no desire whatsoever to fall below minimum number and reduce its lead to a draw — there was no forfeiting for below-minimum situations when only two teams were playing. But George continued to play his team as if there was a war on, and Catie knew why, if no one else in the “arena” did — South Florida had nothing to lose. The crowd was beginning to react to the sense of urgency that was radiating from the spat volume. From all around her, from fans of both stripes, the screaming never stopped. If Catie thought she had heard it get loud at a spatball game before, now she realized that she hadn’t heard anything — and indeed, if this hadn’t been a virtual experience, when she got out of it she wouldn’t have heard anything. Her ears would have been ringing for a good while.