She waited a few seconds.
“Now, you stand up, and walk back to the elevator.
“Good. You push the call button. The doors open right away and you step inside. Push the button for the twentieth floor. The numbers start to light up, starting with one, then two… three… four. As the elevator rises, you still feel calm and relaxed, but more refreshed now, as if you have just had ten hours of sleep.
“You pass five… six… seven… but there’s no hurry.
“The lights blink, the elevator chimes softly as you pass each floor.
“You watch the numbers flash by. When the elevator gets to the twentieth floor, it stops. You take a deep breath and let it out. As the door opens, you open your eyes—”
He blinked at her.
She smiled.
“That’s it? I ride an elevator down, you tell me to relax, I ride it up?”
“Yep. How do you feel?”
“Well, I feel fine. Great.” He raised a skeptical eyebrow at her. “That’s what being hypnotized is? There’s nothing to it.”
“What, did you think you were going to turn into Frankenstein’s monster? Cluck like a chicken? Not be able to remember anything?”
“Well, yeah, okay, kinda.”
“It’s not like that. It’s a state of heightened concentration. If you do this little exercise a few more times, it will be reinforced. It’s not magic — it just allows you to focus your thoughts better. You can get pretty much the same thing by meditation or prayer.”
“And this will work?”
“Try it, next time you get tense.”
“Okay. I will. But right now, I have something else in mind.”
She laughed. “Why am I not surprised…?”
Later, when Guru had gotten home with the baby and they were all getting ready to go out for dinner at the new Mexican place, Michaels thought about the workout and hypnosis thing. That short and long knife business could be taken as a metaphor for his life. Getting in close had consequences, it was more dangerous in some ways. He had a new family, and compared to his first one, it was… different.
Toni was much more a part of his reason to get up every day than Megan, his first wife, had been. Maybe it was Toni; maybe it was only because he was older and a little wiser and able to appreciate what he had now more than he had been able to appreciate it then. He didn’t love his daughter Susie any less than he did Alex, but he certainly hadn’t been there for her in the same way. Something he’d always regret.
Whatever. But lately, work just hadn’t been calling to him the way family did. If he won the lottery tomorrow, would he still get up and go to work every day? Ten years ago, five years ago, even a year ago, he would have said yes, no question.
Now? Now, he wasn’t sure about that at all. Maybe he would take a few months off.
Maybe he would take off permanently.
It could be that part of it was because he was at the top of the mountain at Net Force. Anything higher in government was going to be some kind of political appointment, and not likely to happen. He didn’t slot neatly into either party. Most of the time, he voted Independent, sometimes one way, sometimes another, and there were times when he couldn’t bring himself to vote for anybody running. He liked to think of himself as fiscally conservative but a personal liberal. Could support a right wing Democrat or left wing Republican, but wasn’t really either. Pretty much smack in the middle of the silent majority’s road. So unless he opted for the private sector, he’d peaked out in his biz.
Being commander of Net Force was as good as it was going to get.
Or maybe it was a midlife crisis. He had been face-to-face with death a few times in the last couple of years, and that made a man stop and think about the meaning of it all, something he had never done much before. Being introspective wasn’t part of what he’d learned at home. When your number was up, it was up, game over, and if the old saw was true that nobody on his death bed ever said, “I wish I’d spent more time at the office,” then what exactly did you look back and wish you’d done better when you knew you were about to shuffle off?
Michaels realized for him, it was gonna be family first, and then work. It didn’t used to be that way, but that’s how it was now. He hadn’t noticed when that had happened, that shift, but it had.
He could understand a whole lot better now why John Howard had taken a leave and had thought seriously about retiring.
Just when he thought he had a handle on life, it went and changed on him.
Damn.
19
Jay crept through the thick woods along a deer trail with as much stealth as he could manage. This mixed evergreen and hardwood forest was disputed territory, and dangerous. On the Indian side, technically at least, this area still belonged to the Iroquois-speaking Six Nations — the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, Seneca, and Tuscarora — but there was a Chippewa camp not far away, parties of Delaware passing through now and then, even some Ottawa in the area, supposedly. A white man clad in buckskins prowling in any of their territories uninvited might be viewed with a certain amount of hostility; better that nobody saw him.
The deer trail wound serpentinely through the forest, wide enough for a man to traverse, but a bit low in spots, causing Jay to duck overhanging tree branches. The smell of fir was strong, and his own sweat added a sour note to it. He carried a long rifle, a flintlock as tall as he was, a powder horn, lead balls and patches, a single shot pistol of a matching caliber, a sheath knife, and a tomahawk, much as any frontiersman of the era might. No coonskin cap, though — the idea of a dead raccoon on his head seemed ghoulish, even in VR. Instead, he wore a plain leather cap. Maybe there wasn’t any real difference between cowhide and small furry animal skin, but everybody drew the line somewhere.
The mosquitoes were bad, but as long as he kept moving they didn’t settle too thickly on his exposed face and hands; they couldn’t penetrate the thick buckskin shirt and pants, nor what he wore under them. A few big wood spiders had spun card-table-sized webs here and there, and he avoided those when he saw them.
A bird called out ahead of him, a cheerful whistle he didn’t recognize. A man couldn’t know everything.
He came to a small clearing in the forest, a place where a couple of huge old-growth conifers had fallen and flattened a dozen smaller trees. The big trunks had mostly rotted away under sun and wind and rain, turning to reddish brown, pulpy food for termites, and fertilizer for the new growth that wiggled and broke through their corpses. There were also sedge grasses here, many of which had been nibbled short by the deer. It was maybe thirty meters across, the clearing, and the sun shined down upon it through the rent in the forest’s thick canopy.
He waited a few seconds, listening, looking, sniffing the air. Everything seemed okay.
He started across the clearing. Halfway to the other side, he heard something behind him. A startled animal, perhaps?
He looked over his shoulder in time to see a Native American warrior step out of the brush. The man had an iron-tipped lance, and from his dress Jay realized he was a Shawnee. He had forgotten about them — they were a Johnny-come-lately tribe in Pennsylvania, having arrived here only around the end of the 1600s.
Another warrior stepped into view, also armed with a long lance. A third slipped from the brush, and he had a rifle much like Jay’s, though the stock of his was decorated with a pattern of brass nail heads. They weren’t wearing feathers or war paint, but they weren’t smiling at him, either.