Catie was still sitting there about half an hour later, finishing her tea, now cold, and thinking about what George had said to her after "I shouldn't be telling you this." Not "Don't tell anyone else," not "I can trust you not to mention this to anyone," but simply "I trust you." Her conscience had been troubling her a little about the prospect of passing the information on, even though it had been freely volunteered. The feeling of discomfort had kept her from sending off the message to Winters last night, after she had gone online again and composed it. But once again Catie got the feeling that George was asking for help without actually saying so in the clear. Maybe he's just being supercautious about the possibility he's being eavesdropped on. It's possible, I guess.

  She decided to set her concerns aside and send the message to Winters when she got back online. Meanwhile she had to get back to that horrible pile of code and finish looking over the imagery issues, no matter how she wished she could avoid it. She had slept badly, her dreams buzzing and writhing with lines of light that tripped and choked her, spheres and oblate spheres and ellipsoids and discs that dropped out of the tree of light onto her head and made it ache worse than ever. Yet at the same time she couldn't get rid of the idea that she might nonetheless be on the edge of finding out something useful.

  Catie finished the cold tea, rinsed the cup out in the sink, went back into the family room, and got back online. In her space she saw that there had been another move in the chess notation window. BxN...bishop takes knight, she thought. Yes, he's in the mood for shin-kicking too, now. Well, it'll have to wait a little while.

  Catie reached down to the floor beside her Comfy Chair and came up with the "key" again. "Space?" she said.

  "You mean the authorities haven't come for you yet?"

  Catie laughed. I'm going to have to have a look at the management code myself, she thought, and see exactly how Mark programmed in all these rude responses. "No," she said, "though the recycling people may be coming for you shortly. I'm sure you'll make somebody a terrific boat anchor. Meanwhile, just open my gateway to the server again."

  The doorway appeared before her, outlined in light in the middle of the Great Hall. "Do you want your calls forwarded?" her space manager said.

  "No, just flag me as unavailable unless it's my mom or dad or Mark."

  Catie slipped through the doorway to stand once more on that wide, dark virtual plain, and paused there, letting her mind rest for a moment in the lines running to infinity in all directions, taking a moment to work out what she should do. She was still nervous, but as far as she could tell there was no one in here. This was another of the times that Mark had denoted as an "empty" period, and well out of hours for the server's staff, who after all out were on the West Coast somewhere. A little early for them to be up, Catie thought. Then again, it's early for me to be up. So let's get on with this....

  "Server management," she said. "Unlock the imagery from my previous visit."

  "Voiceprint ID confirmed," said the server. "Representing structural model."

  It appeared before her as it had the last time, that same massive structure of lines and curves and sections of geometric solids, all piled up in a single towering construct and here and there spilling over in what looked to her like disorganized heaps: a haystack in which the needle she was searching for might or might not be hidden.

  "What a mess," Catie said softly.

  Nothing's as complicated as it looks at first glance, she heard her father saying, some time back, while they had been working on her geometry together. Give it a moment, stand back, take it apart a piece at a time, and don't go to your fears for advice while you work. Use your brains. You've got plenty.

  And when brains run out, she heard her mother remark from somewhere nearby, you can always fall back on stubborn. Sometimes it works nearly as well.

  Catie wasn't sure what there was left for her to "take apart"...at least, that she understood. Still, there were a couple of things she hadn't looked over in regard to the imagery--specifically the "insertions," the place where imaging instructions and calls interfaced with the actual structure of the server program. If you were going to tamper...that would be a good place to do it.

  Not that the Net Force people wouldn't have thought of that, too.... Still, the stubborn was beginning to kickin, and Catie sighed and got on with it.

  An hour or so later she was standing in the "air" about halfway up the structure of the program, and even in virtuality her eyes were beginning to get tired from tracing one connection after another, picking it up, looking to see how it interfaced with the next one along in the "chain." Each time she picked up one of the shining ropes that symbolized a command instruction, she had to pinch it in the place that would reveal its content, and then the actual text of the command would reveal itself in a text window nearby, and she would have to read it carefully, parsing it to see if it made sense in conjunction with the commands immediately preceding it or following it in the chain. The syntaxes were beginning to blur together, the terms had begun to reach that magic point where she didn't understand any of them anymore, the way you can stop understanding your own name if you say it three hundred times in a row.

  Not too much more to do, thank heaven, Catie thought, vanishing one more text window and pausing to rub her eyes.

  She picked up another command strand, a line of rose-colored light, and pinched it.

  The lottery...It was some hours away yet, and she couldn't get her mind off it. The funny thing was that George hadn't seemed too concerned about which team South Florida actually wound up playing first. "In cold analysis, we're all pretty well matched," he'd said, "in terms of general strength. Sure, different teams have different specific strong areas. But we're so good as 'all rounders' that one team, really, is pretty much the same as another as far as I'm concerned." He'd smiled slightly when he'd said it. "We have one thing going for us that none of the others have. We all like each other. We're doing this for fun, because we enjoy playing together. None of the other teams can genuinely make that claim, since all their players are 'bought in,' one way or another."

  "But will that matter at the championship level?" Catie had said.

  "It'll sure matter if we lose," George had said, and laughed. "But we won't wind up hating each other. We can't. We shop for each other, we baby-sit each other's kids and help them with their homework, we go out for dinner together--did I tell you about the Dinner Brigade? A bunch of us are working our way through all the restaurants in the Miami Yellow Spaces. We're into the D's now. A loss at this level will be real public, sure...but we're still going to be friends afterward. And spat is a basis for our friendships, but not the basis."

  He'd leaned back and stretched again. "And on the other side of the equation," George had said, "the friendship might just help us win. We have a level of communication that the other teams don't always seem to have--or else theirs is an artificial thing, imposed, rather than something that grew naturally among the players. Is that enough of an edge? I don't know. The other teams have the advantage that they're professionals--they don't have to have day jobs, they can spend the kind of time practicing that we can only dream about. At the same time...do they spend that kind of time practicing? Maybe not. Like in parenting, there's a question of quality time versus quantity time. We may actually have an edge there. It's a job for them, not fun, the way it is for us...."

  Catie sighed, finished with that particular line of light, picked up another and read the command line in it, the name of the image file to which it attached, the programming instruction to which it interfaced at its far end.

  I just hope he's right. It would be awful if the stress turned out to be too much for them, if their friendships or their personal lives started to come apart because of all the media attention. Like George saying that he couldn't even go to a convenience store without being followed. If I were in his position, I'd grab the first reporter I caught doing that and I'd--

  Then Catie stopped, in complete shock, and stared at the thing she had been running idly through her hands. It was not a line of light after all. It was a text string. She had read it, she had understood it, she had finished with it, and had been about to put it back and pick up another, all without having to go through any laborious translation of the content--

  And suddenly she realized what was happening. It was the paradigm shift, just a flicker of it. It had to be--though it wasn't even slightly as she'd imagined it would be if she ever achieved it. All this exposure to the raw code, which she hated--all the time Catie had been forcing herself to read it directly, something which she had always avoided--had started to force the change, and Catie was finally starting to think in Caldera. It was a revelation, like the day in her sophomore year when, without warning, after two years of classes and fairly uninvolving study simply designed to get her through her language courses with a passing grade, she had suddenly started to think in French. It was as if everything had been turned ninety degrees, somehow, and was being viewed from a different angle, one which had never been available to her before.

  Wow, she thought. I've got to get it back! How can I get it back? Everything was clear, there, just for a moment--

  Catie swept the key through the space in front of her, like a swordsman saluting an opponent, and reduced the huge structure before her to a gigantic tangle of bare code. Mark had been right. Objectifying the code just obscured the issue, concealing the instructions themselves. She needed to deal with them all at the component level.

  Dad was right, she thought, in a different paradigm. It is all just electrons. But if you understand the most basic building blocks of your medium, it doesn't matter whether you're working with "wet" ones or "dry" ones, or how many of them are strung together, or on what kind of framework--

  The code structure of the sealed server's operating programs stood before her now simply as text, hundreds and thousands and millions of lines of it. There was a temptation to panic at the sight of it all, but Catie restrained herself. The nature of programming being what it was, not all these instructions could possibly be unique. A lot of them would be copies of one another. Many of them would also be calling routines from outside the program itself, complex variables or constants that were defined in the Caldera language itself and lived on the master Caldera servers. Given the connectivity of the Net and the hundred-layer redundancy cushion that a "fundamental language" source like Caldera would maintain as part of its server infrastructure, there was no need for an end-user like the ISF ever to worry that Caldera's reference-variable resources would go down, and therefore there would be no need to waste space by keeping those variables and constants in ISF server space.

  "Verbal input," she said to the ISF server manager.

  "Accepted," said a woman's voice, dulcet and calm.

  "Fade down all nonunique instructions," Catie said. "Highlight unique instructions, image calls, variable and constant calls to outside servers, and comments."

  The structure shimmered like a cityscape with cloud sweeping over it, parts of it going vague, others burning bright in various colors. The unique instructions Catie ignored for the moment. She wanted first to look at the simple things again, the image calls and variables. There were fewer of them, and once she'd gone over them and gotten rid of them all, she could get on with examining the unique code and trying to understand it. Which is going to take me until after the play-offs, probably...

  But for the moment Catie put that self-defeating thought away and made herself busy with the image calls nearest her. One by one she started checking the instructions again, referring them back to the images they called. The syntax was straightforward enough--a "connect" command, the identifier for the command to which it interfaced, a "call" command, the name of an image file, the size of the file, a specification for the size of its "display" as related to the frame of reference of the person experiencing it virtually, and a list of other files which would display "adjacent" to the file in question, changing as the one in this particular command line changed. Slowly, in flickers, unpredictably but in fits and starts that got more frequent the longer she did it, the "whole vision" of each command strand began to reassert itself. She was seeing them as single constructs, whole commands, not needing to spell them out laboriously, piece by piece. It was like the difference between reading one word at a time and taking a sentence as a whole. Catie started to speed up, pushing herself faster. It's working. It's actually working--

  She finished going over the image calls in that region of the program in a fairly short time, and then stood there looking down from her height at all the rest of it, almost afraid to stop for fear that this new way of seeing the program might forsake her. But what else is there really for me to do here? I should get out. At least, though, now I can pass this problem back to Mark with confirmation that the image calls are clear. No one is going to blame me if I can't make much of the rest of this....

  Catie breathed out, feeling a kind of satisfaction even though she hadn't found anything really useful.

  But, still...

  Then, there alone in the darkness, she grinned. It wouldn't hurt to spend just a little more time, just to make sure the new perception wasn't a fluke.

  "Down one," Catie said to Tom Clancy's Net Force Death Match pseudo-surface she was standing on. It obediently sank down a layer.

  Catie grabbed another line of text, another image insertion call, she thought--then realized she had the wrong color of text: this one was a physical management command, one that handled the way people moved in this space. And a moment later, to her delight, she "got it" whole, without any real trouble--command, argument, force specifier, vector specifier, constant of mass, gravitational constant, constant of local light-speed in this medium, atmospheric density. Catie cracked the string of text like a whip, so that it burned briefly bright and dropped down all the additional notations and values for the constants, and she ran them through her fingers, pleased. She'd read this line as easily as the image calls, with all its dangling strings of digits and repeating decimals--

  Catie paused for a moment, gazing down at one of the strands of digits hanging down from her hand from a glowing capital G, slightly larger than the other letters in that strand: the symbol for the gravitational constant. Below it the digits swung and dangled like a glowing chain: 6.6734539023956342...e-11, with the units signature "N m/kg" hanging there, like a charm, at the end.

  ...Now what the heck's the matter with this? For it didn't look right somehow. She had had occasion to use the gravitational constant once or twice when building the Appian Way scenario, because otherwise you couldn't walk through it correctly...and even the birds that flew through the scene wouldn't fly correctly until G was correctly in place. The fleeting thought of the former "George the Parrot" and his Gracie, and their chicks, made Catie smile a little at this connection, for she'd looked up the videos George had mentioned, and had seen the initial problems the birds had had in microgravity.

  But Catie looked at that long decimal value of G now and couldn't understand the difference between the way it looked at the moment and the way it had appeared when she installed G into her simulation of ancient Rome, plugging it in via a live link from the "best current value" reference kept on the Public Ephemerides server that was jointly managed by the National Bureau of Standards and the Naval Observatory. She'd noticed a particular pattern to the fraction, a patch where the digits 3 and 9 repeated,...393939, three times, and the peculiarity of the pattern had amused her. But now it went...39023956. And there was an extra digit at the end of it. What's that, an exponent or something? But what would it be doing there? Anyway, the digit was below the main line of figures, not above it. A footnote? Since when do constants have footnotes?

  "Where is this constant plugged in from?" Catie said.

  "The constant is sourced locally," said the ISF server management program. "No remote link."

  That's weird. Why go to the trouble to store it in this server when reference sources outside have the "freshest" version of the value? "What does that digit refer to?" Catie said, putting her finger on it, so that it glowed.

  "Subsidiary instruction call," said the ISF server management program.

  "I've never seen anything like that before," Catie said.

  "Subscript digits are an optional command syntax expression in Caldera," said the server manager. "This is a 'legacy' expression common in earlier versions of the language and now routinely replaced in current command syntax by either the Boolean or expression or the ' ' symbol and angle brackets enclosing the referent line or zone number."

  Catie digested that for a moment. "Display the subsidiary instructions being called here," she said.

  A text window opened off to one side, displaying about thirty command lines, one after the other. Catie started to read them.

  They were all different versions of the gravitational constant. In some of them the numerical value varied just a little. In some, the variation was huge. What was even stranger was that many of them had an added string of data attached to them, vector specifications, as far as Catie could tell.

  She shook her head, perplexed. If I'm reading this right--these instructions, when they're called, would not only change the force of gravity in a space where they were brought into play, but change the direction in which it was pulling. Even the biggest of the numbers were relatively small. Catie wasn't sure whether the changes would much affect something as massive as, say, a human being.

  But a spatball--

  Catie swallowed. George said it. The ball didn't feel right. It didn't go where it was supposed to.

  And now she abruptly understood why. Because someone, at the right time, was invoking these changed values for the gravitational constant.

 

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