'New things are happening all the time, honey,' Charlie's mother said. 'But what can't be changed is the principle on which such a technique would have to operate. To be subliminal, a command has to affect a mind without that mind noticing… and a healthy mind tends to notice when something tries to tell it to stop its own function.'
Charlie sighed. 'Okay.'
'Now are you going to tell me what this is about?' she said. 'Somehow I don't think this is for some report for school. Are you concerned about one of your friends?'
He hesitated. 'Yeah,' he said. 'But, Mom, I can't tell you any more about it yet. I'm not sure I'm not completely off course.'
She gave him a long, considering look. 'Funny,' she said. 'Part of me wants to jump on the table and demand that you tell me everything right now. But part of me reminds that other part that if you're being careful about your conclusions, that's probably something you picked up from your dad and me over time.' She smiled, and the expression was rather rueful.
Charlie's mother put the iced-tea glass down. 'Okay,' she said. 'You tell me when you're ready. But, Charlie, if this starts to look like real trouble with your friend, whether you're ready or not, I want you to tell me then. Right?'
'Right,' he said.
She got up and took her glass over to the sink, rinsed it out, and stuck it in the dishwasher. Charlie got up and stretched, too. 'I feel silly,' he said.
'Why, honey?'
'I feel like I should have known all this stuff. When it's explained, it sounds like common sense.'
His mother chuckled. 'Your father said the same kind of thing,' she said, 'when he and I first started talking about the human mind, all those years ago. No matter how medical schools swear they're going to pay more attention to the psych side of things, it never really happens. So I married your dad to make sure we would both have plenty of time for me to educate him.'
Then she grinned. 'Of course,' she added, 'he thinks the same about me. So I suppose we're even.' Her smile got more wicked. 'But then, doctors always do think they can teach nurses things. Far be it from us to dissuade them. Speaking of which, let me get changed out of this uniform before he gets home… '
She headed out of the kitchen.
Charlie looked at his notes, then gathered them together and went up the stairs to go back online.
He spent the next three hours or so in his workspace, pulling off the Net every reference to the suicides that he could find. Shortly his space was full of scraps of virtual paper floating in the air, both those copied from his original notes and those sourced elsewhere on the Net. He had little windows screening video clips of police statements, too, and local Net and live-media reporters, and scraps of text burning in the air by themselves; stories chained together by little associational lines of light, and here and there a virtual report or reporter, with a genuine piece of landscape, or a person or persons talking. It was very crowded in Charlie's workspace, more so even than the time he called in Sir Isaac Newton and the whole Royal Academy to find out why it took them so long to get the Longitude Problem straightened out.
The images of the suicides were, by and large, not much use to him, and the stories routinely gave him information on everything except what he wanted to know. What caused them…? No one seemed to have the slightest idea.
About how they happened, there was more information. One suicide had been in the kid's own bedroom, another had been in the living room of a kid's house while the parents were away. The third had been like the most recent one, in a hotel room not so far from the suicide's home. A fourth had been in a park. A fifth had been in a car in a public parking garage. Maine, New York City, the D. C. area, a suburb of Atlanta… All East Coast, Charlie thought, except this one, in the garage. Colorado. Fort Collins-a college town.
All of them, actually, were in or near college towns, even the suicide in Maine, in a suburb of Bangor. But that would be Deathworld's target age, anyway, Charlie thought. Eighteen to twenty-five… And the age spread of the victims varied: nineteen, several eighteen-year-olds, a twenty-one-year-old, another who was sixteen.
But that matches the stats, Charlie thought. After talking to his mother, one of the first things he had done online was to pull up stuff on suicide. The age spread of all these suicides generally matched the stats, too. There seemed to be a tendency toward suicide-proneness in the late teens and early twenties, for reasons that none of the authorities seemed able to agree on.
Charlie walked among the scraps of information hanging in the air around him, peering at them, trying to find a pattern. None was obvious, except for one or two mentions of how the suicides had happened. And maybe there really isn't a pattern, no matter what I'd like to believe, Charlie thought. The cops must have looked at all this stuff and decided there was no connection.
But for whatever reason, Charlie couldn't bring himself to believe this. There was something about all these deaths that bothered him.
Partly it had to do with what had been said in the two news accounts which were even slightly specific about methods… and what they implied matched uncomfortably to something Nick had mentioned. 'Strung out…' From what Charlie could find out from random mentions in the chat groups dedicated to Bane and the Banies, there was a lot of this kind of hanging symbolism in the 'lower circles.' Mostly it was seen there as a good way to punish criminals, especially murderers.
Charlie turned to look at one of the displays, a virtual 'snap' taken with a digital handheld sampler-a tabloid picture, obviously taken from a distance, against the law enforcement agency's wishes, using a heat-assisted imager and looking through a window that had carelessly been left open for a moment. It still raised the small hairs on the back of Charlie's neck. It looked, at first glance, like someone hadn't really thought things through. You wouldn't normally think that trying to do yourself in from a coat hook would be all that effective. But in this case it had worked entirely too well. And the face…
Charlie was not willing to spend too much time looking at it. The face told him very little. But the awkwardly splayed-out body troubled him more. The sight of it made him gulp, and then he was ashamed of himself, embarrassed, even though there was no one to know about his reaction. But it was going to take a long time to get rid of that initial wash of nervousness at seeing someone lying in that position… because when he had been tiny, he remembered seeing people like that in his first home, the home he preferred not to think about anymore. When those scenes surfaced from memory later in his life, when he was old enough to understand, Charlie had realized that those people had all either been stoned, or dead.
He gulped again. He was going to have to come to terms with the worst of those memories eventually, he knew. But it was hard.
For the moment Charlie went back to studying the news story that went with the image. It told him little about the cause of death that he didn't already know. Hanging, obviously. But nothing about the details surrounding the death. No autopsy information. None of the follow-up stories had given anything like that, especially not this virtual tabloid. It was the horror of the death itself that the tab was interested in selling.
I wonder, though. Are the police purposely having the news services withhold information? Charlie thought. It made sense. They might be waiting for someone to reveal information about the crime that only they knew, that they didn't want the general public to have access to.
Good for them. But it doesn't help me any. And he kept flashing on Nick saying, with glee, 'Strung out-'
Charlie shook his head and looked back at the 'window' in which he had the salient details of the deaths set out. There was something that had briefly attracted his attention earlier, and to which he now returned: the dates. The first suicides were in May and July of the year before last. The third and fourth had been in May and October of 2024… and now here were the' fifth and sixth, both in May as well. He remembered Winters's caution about the accidental aspects of this kind of thing. But at the same time-could May mean something in particular to Deathworld people? 'What's Joey Bane's birthday?' he said to the computer.
'August 8, 1996.'
Charlie sighed. 'So much for that theory,' he muttered. 'Have we got the Encyclopedia Retica capsule on Bane?' 'Displaying it now.'
It spilled out in front of Charlie in two different windows: the text version, with a discography of the man's music and various analyses of his style by various critics-most of them surprisingly supportive. Clearly Bane was thought by his peers to genuinely be a talent, even if Charlie wasn't impressed. The other window had a sound-
