Catie's dad raised his eyebrows and gave her a look she couldn't quite decipher. "Is this opinion entirely motivated by the desire for justice and fair play," he said, "or does it have something to do with George?"

  Catie flushed. "Naturally it has something to do with him," she said, "but, Dad, it's not what I think you're thinking. If you are thinking that."

  "What," her father said, "that he's a little old for you?"

  Now she laughed at him. "Of course he's a little old for me. It's not that kind of interest, Dad. Maybe--" The sudden realization brought her up short. "Maybe it's that I feel a little sorry for him."

  "Huh...?" Her father looked surprised. "Why? When he's suddenly becoming a national celebrity, and he could be rich if he wanted to?...And probably will be, no matter what his intentions are," her father added. "They have a way of getting to you, the sponsors, the big money...if they want you. Time is on their side."

  Catie filed that thought away for consideration later. "It's more like that he's a little lonely," she said. "He has friends, there's no problem there...but I get a feeling that he doesn't discuss the stuff that's going on with the team with them all that much. If he suspects there's a problem, maybe he's afraid of involving them."

  "But not afraid of involving you," her father said, suddenly sounding a little fierce.

  "If I hadn't made it plain I was interested," Catie said, "he wouldn't have taken the issue much further. I'm sure of that."

  Her father sat there for a few more moments, turning the lens over in his hands. "Well," he said eventually, "your mom'll be home from the library in a couple of hours...she and I will have a talk then." He gave Catie another of those undecipherable looks. "Hold off on talking to George for the time being, okay?"

  "Okay," Catie said. "But we're playing chess. If a move comes through--"

  Her father allowed a slight smile to emerge. "All right," he said, "deal with that, obviously." He got up. "Mean-while I have to get on the Net and try to get some satisfaction out of Zeiss, who will doubtless tell me that I'm out of my mind, and why should they replace this optic again...." The smile turned into a very sour grin. "'Customer service'...another of the great implied oxymorons of our time. Go on, honey, scoot out of here."

  Catie scooted.

  She paused long enough to make herself a tuna sandwich, and while she was making it, considered her options. I might have to hold off on talking to George for the moment...but there's nothing to prevent me talking to Mark Gridley. Assuming I can find the little twerp.

  Catie finished the sandwich and had a Coke, then went off to the family room and sat down in the implant chair, and just vagued out for a moment or so. Her eye fell on the crack in the corner of the room, by the bookcase. Is that thing getting bigger? she thought. Really must mention it to Mom. Her father might do repairs and so forth around the house, but it was her mother who usually noticed such things needed to be done, and got them organized. She was, in most ways, the silent power in the family. Though Catie's dad might come down hard in one direction or another, he rarely did so without consulting her mother first, except as regarded small things. And how's she going to take this business with George? I wonder, Catie thought. Her mom could be unusually protective, sometimes. A little too much so, by Catie's way of thinking. But then, if as Dad says we're so much alike, it would seem that way to me, I guess....

  Catie sighed and lined up her implant with the Net box, activating it. A moment later she was standing in the Great Hall, looking at her beat-up comfy chair, along with piles of e-mails and art projects that she hadn't yet finished filing. It'll have to wait. "Space--" she said.

  "What, you again?"

  She smiled grimly. "Get me Mark Gridley."

  "Checking his space for you now."

  She stood there looking at the various pieces of completed and half-completed artwork lying on the floor in their "iconic" forms. When was the last time I sat down and actually did some art? Catie thought. She could think of about fifty things that needed to be done to the Appian Way piece, especially after the talk she'd had with Noreen the other day. She hadn't even had time to unshell the Luau lighting program--

  Her own space suddenly dissolved away to darkness. A second or so later that darkness began to lift again, like a slow dawn, but though the ground under her feet, a dusty, pockmarked surface, began to pale, the "sky" did not.

  A moment later Catie saw why. The sky was black, and full of stars that burned, unwinking, unhampered by any breath of atmosphere. The dusty, pale ground was more than just pockmarked. It was scattered with little chunks of rock, something porous and light-looking, like pumice, and the pockmarks weren't just potholes, they were craters. The nearby ones were small, but there were bigger, walled ones further off--ancient impact craters, their insides impossible to see from where Catie stood, though here and there a "splash peak" from some ancient gout of lava caught in the act of recoalescing with its crater's briefly molten bottom still stood up above the rim.

  She looked around her, very impressed. Off to her left, nearly new, there was the Earth, a bright, blue-burning crescent, and ever so faintly its dark side, North America and the Pacific mostly, was lit by moonlight, the old Earth in the new Earth's arms. Catie smiled slightly, and finished her turn.

  There, off to one side, in the bottom of a crater about the size of a football field, stood a half-circle of white columns, in the fluted Doric style--Catie had done more than enough columns in her Appian Way piece, and knew Doric from Ionian when she saw it. Some of the columns were broken at their tops, and their capitals had fallen here and there. Other columns which should have completed the circle lay higgledy-piggledy on the ground like felled trees, shattered in their fall. In the middle of the circle, where the fluted remains of several columns lay across one another and left a little space, Mark Gridley was sitting on one column, as if on a bench, and leaning back against another. In the empty space before him a display window hung, and he was watching a football game.

  Catie strolled over to him, raising dust, and stood by him for a moment, looking at the image. "Is this preseason," she said, "or post?"

  Mark snorted. "Who can tell anymore?" He looked over his shoulder at her. "Sorry I've been hard to find lately."

  "Don't sweat it, Squirt, I've been busy, too."

  "So I hear." He waved at the viewing window, and it went blank. "James Winters said you needed to talk to me about some things."

  "Yeah." She sat down on another of the columns, making herself as comfortable as she could on the ridges. "At the moment, I need to know just what makes a 'sealed' server sealed."

  He grinned at her, an entirely happy look. "Want to break into one and find out firsthand?"

  Catie had to sigh. "Mark, has anyone ever investigated whether you might possibly have some piracy in your background somewhere?"

  "Might be, on the Thai side," Mark said cheerfully. "There were some funny things going on in the Malay Straits late last century...."

  "Don't tell me. I don't want to know."

  "And my mom told me once that she was related to Grainne O'Malley...."

  Who? But Catie refused to ask him if this relationship was a good thing. Once you got Mark started on some subjects, there was no stopping him.

  "I'd prefer not to break in anywhere we're not wanted," Catie said. "Life is complicated enough at the moment. But I also need to talk to you about some structural issues."

  "That's what Winters said," said Mark. "So, shoot."

  "Well, first, the spatball servers. 'Sealed' how, exactly?"

  "Triple-redundancy controls on access to the code," Mark said. "And safe-deposit type security on the physical servers themselves--three-key access, with the highest officials in the organization holding the keys. It's sort of like the way they used to handle missile launches last century. However," Mark said, and smiled a completely unnerving smile, "any security that human beings devise, human beings can defeat. With time, and care, and enough brains."

  "Fishing for compliments, Mark?"

  He didn't deign to answer that. "As regards the ISF servers, though," Mark said, "I can save you some time and worry. Net Force has already been through those with a fine-tooth comb."

  "Meaning you, I take it."

  "I went along for the ride," Mark said. "Nothing showed up."

  "Did the software people who normally maintain the code know that you were coming?"

  "No. Well, yes," Mark said after a moment. "Upper management knew, since we were doing a physical-equipment assessment as well. In fact, the ISF asked us to come in as soon as Net Force contacted them."

  "Then we can assume that 'lower' management knew about the inspection, too," Catie said. "Wouldn't you say?"

  "Seems likely enough. Assuming 'worst case,' anyway."

  "I think you may as well assume it. I suspect your dad would have, anyway." Catie thought for a moment. "Okay...so they'll have had time to hide things from you, if anybody on the 'inside' wanted to.... Even though you've already been in there, I'd like a quick look around in that server. Can you finesse it?"

  Mark looked at her for a few moments, a very speculative expression. "Catie, I'm not sure this is strictly the kind of help James Winters had in mind when he brought you on board."

  Catie swallowed. "I can't help that," she said. "There are things I need to look at before I can figure out what questions to ask George Brickner. It's no use wasting his time and mine running down one blind alley after another. And anyway, if I don't understand the inside of the server technology well enough to know what to listen for, I'm going to be wasting my own time, too...not to mention that I won't be able to help your friends at Net Force in what they're trying to achieve."

  Mark thought about that for a moment. Then his face cleared. "All right," he said. "I know you can be trusted. And there's no time like the present. Come on!"

  He jumped up and led Catie off to one side, away from the fallen pillars. "Yo, cousin," Mark said to his workspace management program.

  "Working."

  "Access doorway. Crapshoot."

  "Opening access now, and logging." A blue outline appeared in the empty "vacuum" before them, and filled itself with darkness.

  "Logging to my storage only," Mark said hastily.

  "Logging limited," his workspace management program said, and the blackness in the doorway shimmered. A different quality of darkness, with a vague bloom of light in the background, was all that Catie could see through it at the moment.

  "That's so my dad won't find out about this immediately," Mark said. "But, Catie, he's going to have to know sooner or later. So don't do anything that's going to make Net Force look stupid later on."

  "As if I would," Catie said.

  "I know. But I have to say it anyway." The look he gave her was surprisingly fierce, and it amused Catie a little to find that he was so territorial...and pleased her as well. She knew some of the older Net Force Explorers who were friends with him had an idea that Mark might be slightly uncontrollable, even unprincipled, but plainly there were things that mattered to him...and for Catie, this was a source of some relief.

  They stepped through together. Inside the doorway was a wide dark plane, all ruled with green parallel lines crossing one another and stretching to infinity in all directions: a naked Cartesian grid, unfeatured, like a space that hadn't even been configured yet, and with only two dimensions detailed.

  "This is kind of minimalist, isn't it?" Catie said, looking around.

  Mark nodded. "The ISF's senior programmers seem to like it that way. No obvious cues."

  "I'll say," Catie said.

  "However," Mark said, "I am not one of their senior programmers. I prefer my programming a little more objectified. And between you and me, so do their more junior programmers...as you'll see."

  He reached into the darkness, and then in one gesture flipped a panel of the empty air up as if it were a little door. Under the panel, hidden in the same way that a car's gas cap might be hidden under the fueling flap, was a square of light, and in the square, Catie saw a big obvious keyhole.

  "No use in having a back-door key," he said, "if you can't use it occasionally." He reached into his pocket and pulled out an unusually large key, apparently made of some metal that was green in the same way gold was gold-colored. Mark pushed the key into the keyhole, and turned.

  The whole Cartesian "landscape" shimmered, wavered...and vanished. For a moment the two of them stood alone in total darkness. Then slowly starlight began to fade in around them, and from off to one side, a great bloom of cool blue light became apparent.

  Catie looked that way and took a deep, sharp breath. Under them, in darkness, the Earth was turning. They were standing in emptiness about five thousand miles out, on the "dark side" at the moment. The spatters of light that were the great cities of the North American continent were glowing beneath them. In the Pacific they could see another faint glow of light, silvery and diffuse, and Catie looked over her shoulder to see the full moon looking down at its own reflection, setting, as away over at the other side of the world, another light grew.

  Slowly the sun began to climb in growing glory through the atmosphere, the light of it burning red at first as it shone through the air's greatest thickness, then burning paler, orange, golden, white, and then utterly blinding as it came up over the terminator, and the fire and light of day swept across the Atlantic toward New York.

  "Catie?"

  "Yeah?" she said, not much wanting to be distracted from this gorgeous view. Whether it was based on real-time imaging or was someone's reconstruction, it was beautiful.

  "Catie!"

  "Yeah, what?"

  "Duck!"

  She looked at Mark and wondered what his problem was...then, at the very edge of her peripheral vision, caught something, another bloom of light from behind them, the wrong direction. Something was falling at her, fast. Out of reflex, she ducked, turning--

  Blazing in the new sun, silent as a feather falling through air, it came plunging at them seemingly right above their heads, immense, unstoppable, massive, but still graceful in its motion: a space station, a nonexistent one--for no one had ever actually built a space station along the "traditional" lines that were first mooted in the middle of the last century, a wagon wheel with spars out-reaching from a central hub. The silvery-white-skinned bulk of it passed so close over their heads that it seemed impossible to Catie that it wouldn't stir up wind and ruffle their hair. But they were in "vacuum," and there was no wind, and no sound, just the vast mass of the station passing over, passing by, gone--silhouetted now against the steady, unbearable fire of the sun, and receding from them as it plunged on past at thousands of miles per hour, rotating gracefully around its hub as it went.

  "Nice, huh?" Mark said, getting up and dusting himself off.

  "Yeah, nice," Catie said, getting up, too. "You might have warned me a little sooner."

  "What, and spoil the effect? Someone here went to a lot of trouble to write that routine. It's the server-maintenance people's intro to the space...I thought you might like to see it."

  There was no question that it had been worth seeing, but Catie wasn't going to admit that to Mark right this minute. She looked after the space station as it receded, noting the structure of the hub. Rather than having a docking facility there, it was just a blind sphere. "Is that spat volume?" she said.

  "Yup," Mark said. "It's the external 'restatement' of the shell that holds the rules for the behavior of the internal volume. The volume's been instructed to act like the 'classic venue,' the original Selective Spin module that they hooked up to the International Space Station. But the designers prefer this for the outside. It's prettier, and doesn't look like it was built by a committee."

  There was no arguing that. "How do we get in?" Catie said.

  Once more Mark reached into his tame "flap" of empty space and fiddled with a control. Some hundreds of miles from them, the space station froze in place, and the sun stopped rising, then the space station seemed to rush toward them again, at an even higher speed than it had originally swept by. Catie felt like ducking again, but she stood her ground. The station plunged right at them, and then swept through them in a blur of cutaway views too swift to grasp. A moment later she and Mark were standing in the middle of the spat volume at the heart of the station, not even its goal hexes showing at the moment, only a dim silvery light illuminating the cubic while it was in standby mode. The space was anechoic, empty, and just on the borderline of cold.

  "This is 'where' it happens," Mark said. "The visual aspect of it, anyway."

  "Maybe we should look at the nonvisual aspect," she said.

  "The code? Sure. It's mostly written in Caldera, except for the imaging calls."

  "Oh, joy," Catie said. She had been working for some time to learn Caldera, one of the main languages that simulation builders and the designers of virtual environments used, because she had to. It was the "framework" on which imagery was hung. But the language was not proving easy for her to master. To get your imagery to move and act as if it were real, the image you constructed had to exchange its motion "calls," the instructions you built into it, with the program underneath. The two sets of programming had to work flexibly together--but at the moment Catie knew the imaging program, the "muscles" and "skin" of any given environment, a lot better than she knew the underlying structural code, the "bones." In her earliest virtual work, this had been a matter of preference, and she had worked as she pleased, with what languages and utilities she pleased, ignoring the "hard parts." However, now that she was beginning to approach professional levels of work, she could no longer allow herself the luxury of such preferences, at the risk of marginalizing herself and limiting the kinds of artwork she could do. Catie was having to come to terms with those underlying "bones," and with the concept that an environment sometimes had to be built from the inside out. She was beginning to work out how to handle this new way of constructing images and simulations--she had no choice--but she knew that for a good while now it was going to make her brain hurt. Catie eagerly awaited the "paradigm shift" when it would all, suddenly, make sense, and the two ways of constructing virtual imagery would unite and knit themselves into a seamless whole...but she had no hope of having this happen to her in time to do her any good in this particular situation. I'm just going to have to muddle through the best I can....