Chen gives him a sour look. “Great. The local talent wasn’t enough…” He turns to Janet. “How did you get Crowley to spill that particular bean?”
“In vino veritas,” she tells him. “The best way to get inside a suspect’s attic…” She taps her head. “… is through the basement. Bypass the intellect and appeal to the appetites. The most basic drives are digestion and reproduction. So if you want to put a suspect at ease, take him to bed or take him to dinner. Both of them loosen his lips, but restaurants and booze are cheaper and less likely to lead to complications.”
The two men laugh, but Chen stops short and glances at the sandwich in his hand. Janet smiles because, while she does employ such techniques (and others as well), she owes her success as a private investigator more to her ability to hear the thoughts of other minds.
It’s not quite telepathy. She cannot “get into” someone’s mind. She can only overhear active thoughts, which means her art consists of asking questions that get her target to think about the subject she is investigating. She “hears” no overtones, so she must take care to recognize irony, fantasy, hyperbole, and other figures. And while she sometimes sees images when she listens, she learned very early that they were superimposed by her own imagination. Every act of the intellect is accompanied by an act of the imagination, and since she overhears only the words, her own mind supplies the rest.
There are other difficulties. People can lie even to themselves. They are subject to flashes of anger, of lust, of greed on which they will never act. An unknown language remains unknown even when thought. People with eidetic memories are incredibly tedious. And the mentally deranged can babble nonsense silently as readily as aloud. Walking down a Manhattan street, she is awash in a stew of jealousies, sexual urges, hostile invective, commentary on traffic-skills, personal longings, shameful memories, insecurities, and every other human weakness. Her earliest skill was to learn to stick virtual fingers in her mental ears.
In a high density environment, like the cocktail party, when she must open her reception, her mind can fill with so many thoughts that she can lose track of which are her own. That had led to a fraught childhood and a temporary committal to a mental institution.
There, Dr. Amelia Ganz, the only other person in whom Janet has ever confided, determined that the voices in her head were neither hallucinations nor a split personality, but the actual thoughts of other people. And she explained her theory: how the koniocortex—nerve cells as fine as dust, detached from all sensory inputs—might serve as a sort of antenna.
And then Dr. Ganz performed a miracle. Not that she had counseled the girl, helped her through her terrors, led her to tame that strange metasensory channel, but that she had declined to publish the case, declined to put little Janet up as a performing monkey, declined to make herself famous on the back of a child. In the early twenty-first century, that was every bit as miraculous as water into wine.
Janet swings by the office to change into what she calls “evening wear”: dark coveralls, gimme cap, gloves, and canvas shoes with good grip. She asks Jon’tel, who is finishing his surveillance report, to have the car brought up and place a sandwich order at the Brass Monkey on Little West Twelfth. She will pick it up on the way to the Bergtholm stakeout.
“If the timing follows the pattern,” she tells him, “Passaic is about due to be burgled. Oh, and leave a note for Carlos for the morning. See what he can dig up about a man named Zendahl, probably military, possibly Ft. Meade.” At least, the commodore works out of Ft. Meade and he knows Zendahl.
The Brass Monkey sits on Little West Twelfth not too far from Janet’s offices near Bleecker and Bank and well-situated for a run straight up Tenth to the Lincoln Tunnel and out to Passaic. As she passes Gansevoort, Janet notes some activity around the burned apartment building and wonders if Crowley’s people are prepping for the demolition or Magruder’s people are sifting through the ashes.
She much prefers late night stakeouts because the mental buzz is quieter, but there is enough of a crowd in the Meatpacking District to provide a bit of stress and, even though she knows many scurrilous thoughts are passing fantasies, they lower her opinion of mankind. As she leaves the Monkey with a bag of sandwiches and some sodas, she breasts a flood of thought.
…report due on Friday or I’m toast…
…what if she says no? I’ll be embarrassed in front of the whole family and stuck with the ring…
…lookit that lovely ass. Ooh, I would love to plug into that…
…maybe add a dash of paprika…
…if Jasmine specks I been coming on to her man…
…How quaint. The sort of chivalrous idea that you pretend to despise. If you want to be an absolute king, my man, you have to learn how to act out of self-will! Break your word, just because you made it! ’ Til then, you’re nothing but a… a pig-man trying to copy his bitters. No, dammit, betters, betters. Oh, I’ll never be ready for opening curtain…
…dump me, will she. I could just strangle her…
Who could imagine such marvels so early as forty-eighth century?
Certainly not Janet Murchison, who did not expect to see the 48th century any time soon, let alone imagine its marvels. She focuses so as to screen out the rest of the buzz.
Not until third rescension of quarrelsome states are such things built… yet here stands great city when in true history this island full of bare-ass savages… great mystery but pondering futile once true history restored…
Then, with that abrupt discontinuity that characterizes the mind, the thinker jumps the track.
Remove woman Theodora before she marry emperor… but not risk time vortex by crossing self… must calculate with great care…
No, Janet supposes with a smile. We would not want to risk a time vortex, whatever that might be. She looks about, trying to pin down the source of the thought. Perhaps a science fiction writer mulling over a plot complication? This is confirmed by the next thought she overhears.
…giant multilegged creature… but from where… what does it want…
Much of this is underlain by some foreign language. Most people using a learned language will think in their own tongue first and then express it in English. But in this case, she hears both languages simultaneously. It makes the thoughts “noisy” and hard to read. From the underlying grammar, she suspects the native language to be Chinese. If he has not yet shaken the grammatical habits, then he has learned English only recently.
Ahead, she spots an Oriental man and knows satisfaction that her deductions are on the right track. Behind him, a woman struggles with grocery bags and when Janet turns her attentions to her she is startled to realize that it is the woman who rescued the baby at the fire, the one whose thoughts put her on the trail that eventually led to Jupiter Crowley. The media is going nuts trying to find her, and here she is walking about as blithe as you please.
Or not. The woman’s thoughts are less than blithe.
I hope no one recognizes me. To shun notoriety all these centuries only to stumble onto local fame… Nagkmur doesn’t seem to understand but maybe he’s always avoided the limelight… But now that there are two of us… These bags are awkward and heavy. Sidd really should help…
Janet Murchison had once famously characterized Manhattan as “the world’s largest, fully-equipped, open-air insane asylum,” and here is the evidence! All these centuries?