Thirty minutes of play reduced themselves to twenty, and twenty to ten, and ten to five, and the two teams were still hammering at each other as if the fate of civilizations rested on who won this game. Once South Florida almost scored, but somehow a Xamax player rocketed into the ball’s path from what seemed an impossible distance, blocking the ball away from a goal where the goalie was briefly absent; and at the same time, the goal precessed (it seemed to Catie) a lot sooner than it should have. The South Florida fans roared disappointment. That was the only time when the tears actually sprang to Catie’s eyes at the unfairness of it all — that people should play like this against malign and invisible forces, and have no real win to show at the end of it, nothing concrete to match the unquestionable moral victory. The moral victory’s going to have to do. But all the same, it’s just a shame—
Next to her, Hal was shaking with excitement. Catie glanced at the clock. Four minutes left. It was too much to hope for a miracle at this point, and anyway, there were forces operating behind the scenes to prevent any miracle from taking place. At three and a half minutes South Florida began lining up another play on the present Xamax goal, a long pass around the perimeter. Catie shook her head. She had seen too many of these fail in the last two halves, as goals seemed to precess out of sequence, the ball refused to go where it was supposed to—
“Catie!”
Not Hal…somebody on her right. Catie turned and saw that Mark Gridley was suddenly there. “Huh?” she said. “Where’d you come from?”
“Where you think.”
“I couldn’t stop him, boss,” her workspace manager whispered in her ear. “He overrode me to get your coordinates, the brute.”
Catie sighed and shook her head again. “How’s it going?”
“It’s not ‘going.’ It went.”
“You get cryptic at the most inconvenient times,” Catie said, turning her attention back to the spat volume. “Save it for later, Squirt. We’re at the end of a game here, they’re losing and you know why. Can’t you—”
“No, they’re not.”
She looked at him, confused. “But, the — Mark, the code — it’s, you know—”
“No, it’s not. It’s clean.”
And he started to laugh. “It’s clean, Catie! This is for real!”
“It’s — you mean they’re not—”
“It’s been clean since the start of the game. I was held up, we had to—”
“You mean they can—OH MY GOSH” They can actually win, oh, no, oh, my—
“Go, SLUGS!” Catie yelled at the top of her voice, the sheer volume of it nonetheless becoming almost lost in the sea of sound all around her. They have a chance to win. They actually have a chance!
And now it was as if the whole game had been different from the beginning…and now the ending mattered more than ever. The whole arena had become a generator of a single nonstop cheer which was now indistinguishable from white noise, a noise that was “white” the way the sun is white. Catie was as much part of it now as anyone else was. I’ll be hoarse tomorrow, she thought, and didn’t care in the slightest. That long pass that South Florida was setting up came apart as Villeneuve from Xamax snagged it behind a knee, between Daystrom and Marcus, and made off with it. In possession now, Xamax made it plain that they intended to stay that way until time ran out. But the Slugs had other plans. They bounced off the walls and off each other and off the Xamax players in ways that even George and Gracie’s kids had never thought of, and in the middle of them, receiving and passing, and receiving and passing again, there was Brickner, unstoppable, until the Xamax players tried informally to scrum him just to keep him out of the way.
Two minutes. There was no way it could continue at this level, but it continued. Somehow George was no longer at the center of that scrum. He found daylight, emerged into it with the ball in the crook of one elbow, flung the ball to his cocaptain. Mike caught it in a knee-bend, rolled like lightning in yaw axis, flung it away to Daystrom. She caught it elbow-wise, passed it, had it passed back to her. Lined up on the goal—
The goal precessed. The roar, impossibly, got louder. One minute. Daystrom pushed herself off an unfortunate Xamax blocker, spun in pitch axis, fired the ball away again. Someone else from Xamax snagged it, began again the game of keep-away, the only goal to keep South Florida from scoring. Pass, pass, pass, into a self-inflicted scrum and (theoretically) out the other side — except that somehow a South Florida team member, one of the flankers, Monahan, managed to work one arm into that scrum and somehow come out with the ball. The crowd’s noise got impossibly louder. Now the passing game started again, and the Xamax players got busy covering the goals. Thirty seconds. A few of them made attempts to get the ball away from the Slugs again, but their captain shouted them back to the goals again. If they were properly covered there was no danger, nothing to do but wait for time to run out. Twenty seconds.
The goals precessed another hex along. The pass came to Daystrom. She fired it like a bullet at George Brickner. George snagged it, spun, and if it came to him like a bullet, it left him like a laser beam, straight and almost impossible to see, fired right at one of the goals, at a patch of daylight between two of the Xamax guards.
One of them moved just enough to block it. It bounced into the center of the volume again, and George snagged it one more time, pushed off the nearby Daystrom, spun for impetus, and fired it back the way it had come.
The Xamax guard blocked it again. It bounced right back at George. He passed to Daystrom, pushing off her as he did so. She tumbled, came around, fired the ball at him one last time. He caught it, spinning, feinted at the Xamax blocker, threatening a third attempt — spun again, feinted as if to pass, spun—
The ball left him one last time, straight for the goal. The Xamax blocker had drifted just a little to one side….
The horn went.
The spatball impacted squarely in the center of the goal hex.
Amid the impossible roaring, Catie gasped for breath, and wondered when she had last had one.
The occupants of both F&F spaces were emptying into the spat volume now. Hal plunged past her, and Catie, wrung out, astonished, saddened but somehow still delighted, went after him. All the players were being mobbed, jerseys were being torn off and flung around, and the final result was flashing in the scoring hexes now: 3–2–0, Xamax.
Catie was out of practice in microgravity, but all the same she found a patch of daylight in one particular mob, and worked her way through it. There was George, still in possession of his jersey.
Catie threw her arms around him and hugged him hard.