She raised her eyebrows. "Matter of fact, I have. There was a mention of them in an article in one of the psychiatric journals last month."
"Did the article say anything about what might have caused them?"
His mother thought for a moment. "Nothing concrete," she said. "The authors talked briefly about the details of the people who had suicided, but the article didn't go into a lot of depth. Mostly it was investigating the possibility that this was an `artefactual suicide cluster,' a situation in which there are an unusually high number of suicides in a given area or set of circumstances, but none of the deaths exhibit any affiliation to the others any identifiable common cause. A statistical fluke, in other words."
"You mean the article couldn't find any linkage among the suicides, except for the fact that they had all been in Deathworld."
"That's right." His mother shifted in her chair. "But bear in mind, honey, that this was just a short article, and it was thin on detail."
Charlie thought about that for a moment. "Okay," he said. "Then tell me something else. Have you ever heard of someone committing suicide because of some kind of implanted suggestion?"
She looked thoughtfully at him for several seconds before replying. "While such things can be done," his mom said, "they take a lot of doing. A whole lot. The human mind is committed to keeping itself going, at any cost, even under what looks like intolerable pressure to the outside world. Sometimes it copes by going crazy. Even though that may not seem like a particularly wonderful option to you or me, it satisfies the mind's basic need-to keep on going. It takes a considerable intervention, a very noticeable level of interference, to subvert a mind sufficiently to make it completely give up that commitment to survive."
"Like they used to say that you couldn't be hypnotized into doing something you wouldn't normally do."
"Nothing important, no." His mother leaned back in the chair again. "Let's put it this way. Your whole life is a series of conditioning experiences. Your early life, for example, is about teaching you how to behave in human society, everything from 'Thou shalt not put thy feet up on the furniture' to 'Thou shalt not kill.' " Charlie hurriedly took his feet off the chair nearest to him. His mother smiled. "And your training, the conditioning you get from your parents, your teachers, your friends, slowly slots everything more or less into 'order of importance' in your unconscious, your ID, whatever you want to call the part of your brain that reacts before you really have time to think about it. You learn, ideally, which instructions are really important and which ones aren't. So someone who hypnotized you might not have too much trouble getting you to put your feet up on a chair. On the scale of 'important,' that's pretty low. But if they tried to tell you to kill yourself?" She shook her head. "You wouldn't do it. Not unless you had been conditioned all your life to believe your own survival wasn't particularly important… or unless you were deranged already."
"What about subliminal stuff, then?"
She stretched. "That has some effect, yes… but they've been arguing about it for a century now, and no one's sure how much. Again, the question has to be taken case by case. Some people are more susceptible to subliminals than others… and not necessarily people who are stressed or have psychiatric problems, either. Some environments are more conducive to the administration of subliminals than others, and suggestions which produce strong results in one format or medium will fail completely in another." She shrugged. "Use of subliminals in public communications is illegal, of course. Not to say there's not ongoing suspicion that they're occasionally used. But as for making someone kill themselves?" She shook her head. "I very much doubt it."
"What if someone found a new way to do it… more strongly, or in some way that couldn't be detected?"
"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.