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-andmotion record consisting of snippets of various concert performances and interviews.
One of these, which appeared in the capsule only as a soundbyte over some stills-Bane's voice saying, "My goal is to get Hell to pay me royalties"-caught Charlie's attention, if only because it was a quote he had heard several times recently, in the brief flow of news following the most recent double suicide, and never in context. He got up, went over to the window, and poked the still then showing with his finger. The computer said, "Holding. What would you like me to do?"
"Expand that audio clip. Is there imagery to go with it?"
"Yes. Expanding-"
Shortly Charlie found himself looking at a full-virtual version of the infamous Josh Billings interview on CCNet. There Joey Bane sat, at ease and dressed all in black, in the well-known and instantly recognizable minimalist set, looking relaxed and amused as the famous interviewer tried, unsuccessfully, to get him to say something self-incriminating. Charlie stood a few feet away, his arms folded, and watched it.
"Look," Bane was saying to Billings's shocked face, "you should stop being so hypocritical about it. There's not a being on this planet who hasn't reflected on the cruelty and pain of life, the unfairness of it. Some of the greatest literature of every age has dwelt on the problem. But nowadays, if we give any consideration to it at all, we're so terrified of confronting the issue directly that we do it in secret. There's no consensus that it's all right to think these kind of thoughts anymore. In fact, nowadays if you talk about death or pain, people almost immediately start to think you're morbid, and if you talk about it frequently, they're likely to try to have you hospitalized. Is that fair? Is that sensible? These days we raise our kids on fairy tales from two centuries ago, for pity's sake, and suggest to them during the most impressionable part of their lives that the most they're going to have to worry about in life is wolves trying to steal their picnic baskets. When they come to you with their real concerns-that people suffer and die unfairly, and that the whole world is essentially cruel and unfair, and living in its hurts, we try to pretend it isn't so, we get uncomfortable, we turn away and do anything we can to avoid the subject. We don't have answers. Neither do our kids. If they're lucky they'll grow up and find some answers that we haven't seen… but not telling them the truth about the world, the Bad News, in my opinion predisposes them to the kind of despair that causes people to check out early. In my site, at least, kids get told the truth. Yes, the world stinks! What you do about it, that's your business. But at least there's a place for them to express their anger, which is a luxury a lot of them don't have anymore in our increasingly nicey-nice culture, where expressing an antisocial idea 'inappropriately,' or in front of the wrong people, can get you taken away from your parents indefinitely by some meddling social worker. In my place kids can see the truth, see the pain, and also see what happens to those who don't handle that anger right, who seal it over until it breaks out. You think I condone violence or crime or hatred? No way. But there's a lot of all those things out there, and pretending they're not isn't going to make them go away. I think we help kids by at least preparing them for the idea that the world stinks, so that when their folks finally let them out of the overprotected hothouse environment that the modern home has become, they're ready for what they're going to see when they're on their own when Mommy and Daddy aren't holding their hands anymore. And that's where a lot of the resistance to our site is coming from, from outraged mommies and daddies who're ticked because we're telling their little darlings the truth they never had the nerve or the brains to tell them themselves… "