Death match, p.6
Death Match, page 6
part #18 of Tom Clancy's Net Force Explorers Series
"Did you even sleep last night?"
"Eventually, yeah." But she could see that he hadn't actually stopped work, since he was only now cleaning up. "I crashed out on the studio couch. I knew I was almost done, and there wasn't any point in cleaning up. Finished now, though."
Catie went into the fridge for the ever-present pitcher of iced tea, and also brought out a bottle of Duvel for her dad. When he finished a piece of work, he routinely allowed himself a beer to celebrate. "You really should use electrons instead of paint," she said, handing him the little wire-stoppered bottle and turning to get the specially shaped Duvel glass and a tumbler for her iced tea out of the cupboard over the sink. "It wouldn't get all over the couch."
"It's all electrons when you come down to it," her father said. "It's just that some of them are wetter than others." He started to push back the one lock of forehead hair that always got in his way, and then paused, looking at the blue and green paint that was still all over the back of that hand. He started scrubbing at it with the rag, then pushed the rag into his pocket and turned his attention to getting the Duvel bottle open.
"What were you doing?"
Hal, peering into the pot he had been stirring, now began to speak in some language that certainly wasn't English, and from the sound of it didn't involve concepts that Catie was eager to have translated. Apparently something had gone wrong in the pan. Her father raised his eyebrows and said, "Come on down and see. We can get out of Escoffier's way."
Catie followed him down the hall past the bedrooms and into the studio. Its door was open, and the smell of oil paint and linseed oil was still strong, though she could hear the air purifier working all-out to get rid of it. This time of day the north light that came in through the back windows and the skylight was at its best, the sun having swung around the other side of the house. In the middle of the room, well away from the Net access box and the implant chair, under the spots and within range of the digital rendering camera, a canvas stood on an easel blotched with every conceivable color of paint.
It was a piece of background work, one on which text would be superimposed during a virtcast, a swirl and rush of blues and greens...but there was more to it than that. "Dry yet?" Catie said.
"You kidding? We can put a colony on the moon, but we can't develop a drying agent for oils that works faster than twenty-four hours...."
"This is the one for CNNSI?"
"Yeah, for the FINA swimming championships next year." They stood back together and regarded the canvas. On first glance, an unsuspecting viewer might have called the work an abstract. But then, as your glance sank into the greens and blues and viridians of it, you began to perceive the flashes of hotter, brighter color half-submerged in the glassy hues, streaks and submerged ripples of red and gold, and you got a sense of splashing strength, shapes cutting the water or plunging into it, all going somewhere at speed. The effect was subtle, and yet the longer you looked at it, the more you saw swimmers and divers, moving--even in so static a medium.
"They'll want me to animate it, of course," her father said, and raised his eyebrows in an expression that said, clearly enough, The idiots! "Probably they'll want it to ripple like water. If they had the brains God gave bluepoint oysters, they'd notice that if you just sit still and look at it for more than five seconds, your brain'll begin producing that effect itself." He gave Catie a wry sidelong look. "But getting even the art director to sit still that long, these days, is a challenge. Not to mention the virtual audience, who are going to have to view the work nearly completely covered with flashing crawling text, in a window that they may keep sized down to the size of a postage stamp in the virtual 'field of view,' half the time...so the art director is going to insist that there be something about it that moves, to remind the viewers that it's there." Her dad turned to look at the canvas again. "If I'm unlucky, the thing is going to wind up looking like an ad for toilet bowl cleaner by the time they're through. If I'm lucky..." He sighed, and shrugged.
Catie stepped closer to look at the way her father had layered the paint over the flash of color that was meant to represent a swimmer. The palette knife had been involved, which was probably the scraping Hal had heard last night. "You'll get some 'print' sales, though...."
"Oh, yeah," her dad said, taking a long drink of the Duvel, and smiling slightly. "The collectors will notice it when it airs. And anyway, there are always people who suddenly notice a nice graphic for the first time and want a copy for their workspace. We'll do okay from that."
Catie looked at the work for a moment. There was more speed inherent in it than just that of swimmers and divers. "You were in a hurry on this one...." she said.
Her father started to push his hair back again, and stopped himself, laughed, and had another drink of beer. "Yes. It's not due yet, but I want to get the stuff in before deadline...so I can get well ahead on the next commission, and have plenty of time to sort everything out and clean up in here before the builders arrive." His expression showed that he was already dreading the incursion.
Catie shook her head. "You should do what Mom suggested, and reschedule the builders for later. Then we could all go away somewhere for a week, while the place is all torn up. Up to the Jersey Shore, maybe...or over to Assateague..."
Her father looked thoughtful. Then he shook his head. "Nope. The sooner it's done, the sooner I can get back to work."
Catie smiled slightly. It was easy to forget sometimes how much her father loved what he did, when most of her classmates could talk about nothing but how their folks disliked their jobs and couldn't wait to get away on vacation. If she was lucky, some day she would be in the same position, when she got a job at Net Force. She refused to think of it in terms of if.
And that reminded her. "Oh," Catie said, "I was going to tell you last night, but you were busy. Hal's friend the spatball player from South Florida Spat is going to be in town tomorrow...we're going into Georgetown to see him at lunch."
"Hey, that's great for you. You need a ride?"
She shook her head. "We'll go public...between the Metro and the tram, it's not a problem."
"This is their big star, huh?"
"So I hear. A lot of people are interested in South Florida all of a sudden...I assume that's why he's coming up here in the first place."
He nodded, having another drink of his beer and looking at the painting. "...Why do you think they're so popular just now?"
Catie looked at her father quizzically. "You getting interested in sports all of a sudden?" she said. It was an unusual concept, for though he might render sports themes in the course of his work, he wasn't particularly a fan of any of them. In fact, her dad routinely claimed that his introduction to commercial art was when he learned to forge his parents' signatures on "notes from home" asking that he be excused from gym; and later, until he was caught, he had run a small but lucrative business forging other kids' parents' signatures at five bucks a shot.
"Me? Sports? Not a chance," Catie's father said. "But the psychology of this particular situation...maybe."
Catie thought about that. "I don't know for sure," she said. "It could just be the underdog thing, I guess. People enjoy seeing an unlikely winner taking on the 'big guys.'"
Her father nodded, pulled out the turpentine rag again, and sat down on the poor beat-up, paint-spattered couch, where he started scrubbing once more at the back of his left hand, where it was still blue and green. "Maybe. I guess I'm not clear on how they managed it in the first place, though."
"If I understand it right," Catie said, leaning against the tube-and bottle-cluttered desk near the studio door, "somebody in the first organizing body of the sport actually had the brains to set themselves up as a licensing body as well, to make sure they kept control over it. I don't understand most of the legal stuff, but I think Hal told me they had to do that in order to get permission to keep using cubic on the International Space Station for those first few tournaments. He said the first organizers wanted to make sure the sport didn't lose the amateur feel, even when it started to get professionalized--they were smart enough to see that coming over the horizon, eventually--and when the league structure started to be set up, they wrote it specifically into the structure document that Spat International would not allow strictly professional leagues. They could call themselves something else if they went professional, but they couldn't call it 'spatball.'"
Her father nodded slowly. "You're telling me they decided to license the brand, as much as the game itself." He chucked the rag into the little self-sealing ceramic garbage can nearby where his flammable disposables went, and picked up his beer glass again. "Possibly a very smart move."
"Seems that way," Catie said. "Hal says the big teams have tried a couple different ways to break the license or weasel around it, and every time they try, they get blown out of the water in one jurisdiction or another. Apparently the player who drew up the structure document as part of the original license was also a lawyer with a specialty in international trademark and patent law, and he really knew what he was doing."
"Huh," her father said, having another drink of Duvel.
"But this is still kind of unusual, I take it."
"Oh, yeah," Catie said. "The structure of the yearly spat schedule usually seems to shake out all but the very best teams early on, and mostly the ones who're left are the professional teams. Partly it's because the professionals have lots of money to recruit the most talented players from the semipro and amateur teams. Seems like the semis and amateurs have been complaining about that for a long time. In the normal course of the competitions, most of the amateur teams usually fall by the wayside by the mid-season break. But not this one...."
Her father finished his beer, got up, and picked up the rag can, glancing one last time at the painting. "Well," he said, "it's going to be interesting to see how the rest of the season unfolds for South Florida. I would imagine the pressure on them is increasing to levels they wouldn't normally experience as a purely amateur team."
Catie nodded as they walked back toward the kitchen. "That's sort of why I want to meet their team captain," she said.
Her father raised his eyebrows at her as they went into the kitchen and he kept going, toward the door that led to the garage, the side of the house, and the sealed disposal for the flammable garbage. "So you're telling me that it really doesn't have anything to do with the fact that People described this guy as having 'the best physical aspects of a young god'?"
He was out the door before Catie could think of an appropriate response to that. Her brother was still stirring the same pot he had been stirring before, looking both intent and angry, and he was reaching for another eggon-a-dish.
"Chemistry?" Catie said, looking at him in complete bemusement.
"Blast yourself out of here," Hal said, not looking up, "before I call whichever public agency is in charge of having a close relative's body donated to science."
Smiling slightly, Catie went on down the hall to her room to change out of her school clothes.
About a hundred and fifty miles away, in the top-floor lobby bar of the Marriott Hilton Parkway in Philadelphia, two men sat across a low bar table and looked down the length of Ben Franklin Parkway, toward the faux-Greek, painted portico of the art museum. Two long lines of trees stretched up the parkway toward Museum Circle, but not a breath of wind stirred them. Every leaf hung still and flat-looking in the heat and the odd light. In the west, thunderclouds were piling up in curdling heaps of white and livid blue, threatening one of those four o'clock thunderstorms to which Philly is prone in most summers. But it was some time from happening yet, and everything outside the big floor-to-ceiling windows of the bar lay in a breathless, panting stillness of heat and humidity, waiting for the storm to break.
The two men who sat there in the bar and looked down the parkway, rather than at one another, were both wearing dark clothes in cuts that were designed not to stand out in any particular way. They had taken off their sunglasses because wearing sunglasses inside was a good way to make you stand out, and they were both drinking nondescript drinks that might or might not have had alcohol in them, to the casual observer.
It was the first time the two men had met nonvirtually, and they had made the discovery about each other that so many people make in such circumstances--that the seeming each of them routinely wore was an almost exact opposite of his real appearance, and therefore could have been used to predict one another's genuine appearance, if either one had been bothered to try. Darjan turned out to be a short fair man, a little on the bulky side, with hair surprisingly long for the styles that year; and Heming turned out to be tall and slim to the point of boniness, swarthy, and with very close-cropped dark hair. The revelation did not move either of them to like the other one anymore...and it would hardly have been possible for them to like one another less, especially since circumstances had forced them to meet nonvirtually, and thereby lose whatever cover their seemings had until now provided them.
"Anyway, we made contact with one of his people," Heming was saying. "He was coming up here on business anyway. We'll see him tomorrow afternoon."
"Watch where he goes," said Darjan.
Heming looked bemused at that. "Of course we would. But...you don't think he's intending to make contact with some other organization...do you?"
"If he's smart he won't," said Darjan. "If he's smart he'll play ball strictly with us, on the one side...and leave everybody else strictly alone, on the other. But I'm sure he knows better than to go to anyone else, anyway. It's not as if the offer he's been made is a bad one."
"Unless..." Heming looked suddenly concerned. "Unless he's decided to jump into the arms of some law-enforcement organization or another...."
They both sat quite still for a moment. Then Darjan shook his head.
"He wouldn't be so stupid. It would be suicidal. Anyway, he could tell them anything he liked, but there'd be no evidence to back the claim. We've been most careful to cover ourselves completely in all our dealings with him." He lifted the frosty glass sitting on the table and sipped at it, put it down again. "No," Darjan said at last. "I don't see it as being a problem. Nonetheless...keep an eye on his whereabouts for the next few days, until we have a result that favors what our principals want, and things begin to settle down."
They looked down the parkway. The leaves of the trees were starting to stir a little now. "How are the principals doing?" Heming said.
Darjan paused a good while before replying. "They're twitching. What do you expect? Even in years when things go according to plan, they twitch. There are always factors they can't control in the other sports they run. Weather, civil unrest, player injuries...But this is worse, in a way, because it could have been controlled further down the line, if anyone had thought it was necessary. No one did. Now..." Darjan trailed off. "Now it's too late, and matters can't just be allowed to take their course. Now people have to start getting involved to stop it. And the upper-ups hate having to do anything that looks like involvement. It's too easy to leave a trace, a trail...."
The sky was darkening, going not so much gray as a weird kind of bruise-green, and slowly the wind continued to rise. "Well," Heming said, "after tomorrow, when we lay down the law...and also the reward for doing what he's told...you should be able to tell them to stop worrying. Between that, and what Chicago should do to them in a few days, a lot of people should be pretty relieved."
"So the arrangements are in place for the tournament 'cubic,' then...."
Darjan stretched. "They're just there for experiment's sake at the moment. The intervention is expected to be minimal at best. We may not even need them. Shouldn't, if Chicago delivers. If we do need to use them..." He shrugged. "We'll use them judiciously enough that no one will suspect anything. It's a test, as I said. For possible use elsewhere."
They were both silent for the moment as the bar waiter came around by their table, making his rounds through the lounge space. "Anything, gentlemen?"
They shook their heads. The waiter went off to one of the few other tables that was presently occupied. It was one of the reasons the two of them were here--this place tended to be quiet in the afternoons. When he was well out of range, Darjan said, "The game is two o'clock Sunday. Without overtime and with the usual breaks between the halves, it'll be over around four-thirty. I'll be expecting to hear from you at five. And so will they."
Heming nodded. He reached down and picked up his glass again, jingling the ice cubes in it a little. "Chicago," he said.
Darjan nodded once and held up his glass as well, but didn't clink it with Heming's. Heming gave him a look, waiting. Finally he drank.
A wild electric flicker came from down the parkway in the direction of the art museum, followed by a long rumble of thunder that rolled up the parkway on a sudden, gusty bluster of wind; and behind it, pelting down diagonally, came the rain.
Heming shivered, and finished his drink.
The next morning Catie got up much earlier than she strictly had to on a Saturday. Partly it was to get some chores done, for over the last few days, she had somewhat slighted her attention to the chores roster that her mother had left written on the slick white LivePad faired into the refrigerator door. Specifically, the word lawn, which had been there by itself on the LivePad on Tuesday, had additionally been circled sometime on Wednesday, and on Thursday had had many flashing arrows in various colors drawn pointing to it. Then, some time last night, it had developed an alarming number of exclamation points which alternately flashed red and blue like some kind of warning from the local emergency services. Her mom might nag, Catie thought as she got the lawn mower out of the garage around nine, but at least she did it in a way that made you laugh rather than want to leave home.
The mower was a John Deere "Hunter," powered by photovoltaic panels on the top, and normally mowing the lawn was just a matter of taking it out of the garage, putting the meter-square box-on-wheels out on the grass, and turning it loose. The border sensors and the onboard motor normally did the rest--though there was one spot near the corner of the front lawn where you had to watch the thing, especially if the lawn was fairly overgrown, as it was today. For some reason, under such conditions, the mower tended to roll out onto the sidewalk or the driveway, get itself confused, and then either run out into the street looking for more lawn, or make its way over to the next-door neighbor's lawn and start mowing that. However, at eight in the morning, with the sun still low behind the trees, there wasn't enough light yet to power the photovoltaics, so Catie had to fit the battery pack module to the mower body before she set it out on the lawn and hit the Go button on the remote.
