Doesn't mean anything's really wrong.
But Charlie was finding that hard to believe.
And what if the problem's actually at my end? Charlie thought, as the tram swung around the corner toward the little plaza that was nearest his house. It wasn't a pleasant idea. Could it be that I just don't know my best friend as well as I thought I did?
Charlie got off the tram at his stop and plodded down the street, for once completely unmoved by the scents drifting out of the neighborhood pizzeria, and turned the corner into his street. And maybe I'm overreacting. Maybe it's nothing. He's been stressed. I've been real busy…
But that sudden look of depression that had taken possession of Nick's face was like nothing Charlie had seen before. He couldn't get it out of his head, nor could he stop thinking about the way it had come and gone like something turned on and off with a switch. As Charlie went up the front steps and let himself in, he realized he was more worried now than he had been before he talked to Winters.
His folks were out, as he'd known they would be. His mom was going to be coming in later than usual because of her in-service, and his dad was still at the slipped-disk seminar. Charlie rooted around in the freezer for a burrito, put it in the oven, waited thirty seconds for the "ding," put the thing on a plate, and ingested it at high speed, thinking. You need to get a handle on this, he told himself sternly. You need to put Nick aside and concentrate on your research.
Yeah, sure.
Nonetheless, Charlie sat down at the table, where the "newspaper" still sat, and pulled over a pencil and a scratchpad. "Whether you're going to crack someone's chest or paint a wall," his father always said-the last time, ruefully scraping the last teaspoonful out of a container of spackle-"always make a plan. It saves you time, it breeds more useful ideas, and it keeps you from looking stupid later."
Charlie scribbled on the pad for a few minutes. Having filled one page of it, Charlie paused, wondering one more time if all this was overreaction. Might be able to get through to him now-
He dropped his pencil and trotted upstairs to the den, sat down in the implant chair, lined up his implant with the server, and closed his eyes. A little shiver down the nerves, like a shiver of cold, but without having anything to do with temperature, and Charlie was standing in his workspace. Gaslights were lit around the walls of the oval room, producing the usual faint smoky/chemical smell. It was ten in the evening in London, and outside he could hear people making their way to the opera through the crowded eighteenth-century streets.
Charlie stood there looking around him. There were e-mails hanging there in the air over the worktable, bobbing gently up and down, but none of them were vibrating or bouncing around in the way Charlie had programmed his system to use when a message was urgent. He went over to the worktable, touched one of the e-mails. The air lit with its transmission information and source. TAAJ GREEN-Nice to hear from her, but it could wait. He touched another of the little spheres floating there, and it lit from within with a blue glow. Next to it a man appeared, saying, "Tired of fast food? Looking for something better in regional cuisine? Come to Georgetown's newest-"
Charlie grimaced, grabbed the spammy little mail-sphere out of the air, dropped it on the floor, and stepped on it. It vanished with a satisfying crunch, and the man vanished as well, making a digitally strangled noise.
He sighed, looked around him. "Nick?" Charlie said.
"Making that connection for you now," Charlie's system said. "Access is open."
"All right-" He went over to the doorway that he used for access, and stuck his head through. But on the other side was nothing but the plain glowing whiteness he had seen before. There, sitting in the midst of it, was the Eames chair, and some mail-solids spinning unanswered in the air, but no sign of Nick.
He went back into his own space and said to his workspace, "Conditional instruction."
"Ready," the workspace maintenance program said. "State the conditions."
"If Nick Melchior calls, e-mails, or shouts for me," Charlie said, "call the house comms number until 2300 hours. Implement immediately."
"Conditional instruction saved. Implementing now." "Thanks." Charlie closed his eyes and told his link through the
implant to undo itself. With that slight shiver, he was back in afternoon light, in the den again.
With a frown, Charlie went downstairs, sat down at the table, and once more started making notes on the scratch-pad. Soon he'd filled a page, and then another. He was more worried about Nick than he had been on the way home. Afternoon was shading toward dusk when he looked up again at a sound from down the hall.
"Charlie?"
"Down here, Mom," he said, looking with surprise at the pages of notes. His mom-small and dark and petite in her "formal" whites, which she didn't normally wear at work when doing psych-came strolling in, dropped some textbooks and her computer/workpad on the table, and draped her pink sweater over the chair at the table's other end. "You have anything to eat, sweetheart?" she said.
"Uh, yeah."
She opened the fridge and rooted around for a moment, coming up with a jug of iced tea. "I wish," his mother said, sloshing it thoughtfully, "that someone would explain to me why this always goes cloudy in here."
He thought about that. "Microparticulate matter?" Charlie said. "Tea's not really an infusion when you make it out of tea bags. It's a suspension. The characteristics of the suspension change when you chill it."
His mom shut the fridge and went to the cupboard for a glass, then came back to get some ice out of the freezer. "Sounds good to me."
"It's a theory," Charlie said. "I'll ask my physics teacher tomorrow."
"Why? Sounds like you're on the right track." She sat down at the table on his right, glancing idly at the newspaper.
As she did, her eye fell on the headline about the two suicides. Charlie saw her look, and he sighed and pushed away the notes he was making. "Mom-" He glanced up, trying to find a way to begin to explain it all to her.
"Charlie," she said, "what is it? You look like you've lost your best friend."
"Uh, not quite." And he found himself wondering whether the phrase, as she was using it, was intended simply as a cliche. It could be a slightly unnerving experience, having a psychiatric nurse as a mother. Not that she could read your mind or anything-in fact, her normal disclaimer was "I don't have to read minds. Faces are more than enough." Maybe in my case, Charlie thought, it's more than usually true. She sees my face every day. "Suicide-" Charlie said.
"Hmm," she said. "Are we coming at this as a general subject, or for a specific reason?"
He swallowed. "I'm worried about somebody." "Who?"
Charlie shook his head. "Uh, I want to be clear about my facts first. How do you tell for sure if someone's going to kill themselves?"
"For sure?" his mother said, raising her eyebrows as she sat down. "You don't ever, for sure. I wish… Oh, there are various signs. Personality changes… changes in behavior, inability to concentrate or do business or schoolwork, for example… changes in the way someone sleeps or eats, feelings of worthlessness or hopelessness. Also, a lot of talk about suicide coming up suddenly can be significant. Or gestures like suddenly giving prized possessions away… " She turned her glass around on the table. "You have to look to see how many of these signs are there at once, how serious. they seem… and look hard to make sure that the person isn't doing these things for some other reason."
Charlie sat back in his chair. "Did you hear about these suicides in the Deathworld virtual environment?"