Edge (23 page)

    "Duly witnessed." Little pressed down. "Thank you. Your generosity is–"

    Josh stood up.

    He had seen too much to fantasise about might-havebeen. Too many dead soldiers who should have lived. Perhaps his eyes revealed his thoughts, because the lawyer's voice croaked into silence, and he pulled back, looking frightened.

    
Over.

    Pulsing with the need for violence, Josh stalked out of the pub, praying that someone would get in his way, knowing it would be disastrous. Then he was by his car, shaking, the sky a deepening turquoise touched with sunset gold, pure beauty, while down here a rat rustled beneath the bushes, on dark soil containing a seething biomass of warring beetles and desperate worms, insects eating the babies of other insects, billions of organisms dying every second, some beneath the fangs and mandibles of predators, others killed and then sucked dry by their own kind.

    It was a long time before he could get into the car and drive.

 

Josh pulled in to the car park of the Red Stiletto, found the last slot, and parked. The pub's sign had once been a scarlet shoe – in the days when strippers worked here – but now was a glistening, stained blade. Inside, its main attractions were massive wallscreens tuned to sports channels. But there was no need to go in; Suzanne was outside, standing with folded arms.

    "Hi," he said, failing to sound relaxed.

    Her voice was nearly as tight as his. "What did she do?"

    "Her and her fucking lawyer waiting for me, how about that? With a fast-track divorce, online and legal."

    "What did you do?"

    "Signed the agreement because… When it's over, it's over."

    Saying it, he relaxed a little, though he was still sweating as if after a workout.

    "My friend Miriam," murmured Suzanne, "went through something like that with her partner, and when it was over she said to herself: 'Now it's time to let it go, remember what was good and accept the rest.' And she also said: 'You kept hold of someone who lasted for years successfully, so you can do it again, and maybe next time do it better.'"

    Josh rubbed his face, and breathed out tension.

    "Well, good for her."

    Suzanne touched his arm.

    "Yes, she knew how to accept what you can't change, as the old saying goes."

    "Right." Josh gestured towards the pub. "You want another drink, or something to eat?"

    "Maybe at the motorway services."

    It was quite a drive to the Reading service area, but he assumed she knew that.

    "You want to start heading back?"

    "Let's do that. You're OK to drive, clearly."

    He held open the passenger door for her, then got in behind the steering wheel, inserted the key, slid his phone into its console slot, reached for the ignition button – then stopped.

    "I was pissed off," he said, "when I entered the car park. Now I'm not."

    "You look more relaxed."

    "Yeah… You're quite the witch, aren't you?"

    Suzanne's smile was enchanting. "Possibly my ancestors practiced voodoo."

    "Mine painted themselves with blue dye and mud, but you don't see me doing it."

    "Hmm… You know I can make you laugh, right?"

    Josh looked at her.

    "I'm feeling better, but not that m–"

    She touched his arm and he tipped his head back, laughter bubbling up inside him.

    "Jesus," he was able to say finally. "How did you do that?"

    "Like this."

    Another touch, and a paroxysm took hold, matched by Suzanne's laughter. Soon he was laughing so hard that the tears were coming. At last, she settled back in her seat, giving a final giggle.

    "That," said Josh, "was the weirdest thing I've ever experienced."

    "Voodoo."

    "With the greatest respect, bullshit. How did you do it?"

    "That spot I touched on your arm. That exact spot?"

    "I don't see–"

    But she merely stared at the spot, and he laughed. Her gaze went back to his face, releasing him.

    "Hypnotism?" he asked.

    "Simpler than that. In Petra and Yukiko's flat, I created an association between pressure on your arm exactly there and laughter, between the gesture and the mood. All I did was press that point when you were laughing at their jokes. You never noticed."

    "You're kidding me."

    "Maybe I'm joshing you."

    "Oh, please…"

    "Honestly, it's that easy." Her chestnut eyes seemed to deepen to chocolate. "But the timing has to be perfect, at the height of the mood. It's one-shot learning, and it's a physical skill to create the associative link."

    It seemed impossible; but his own reaction was compelling proof.

    "This stuff happens unconsciously?"

    "Very much so. Most of what happens inside our heads is below conscious awareness. There are sixty muscles in your arm, and you're not aware of orchestrating their movements when you put the car key in the slot."

    "Yes, but–"

    "What's three times three?" she asked.

    "Nine."

    "How do you know?"

    "Er…"

    Suzanne smiled. "Right then, you could have gone into trance – with a little encouragement – during that search for internal meaning we call a
duh
moment."

    "Bloody hell."

    "You can know an answer without knowing how you retrieve it. Every conscious decision you think you make, your brain started to create that thought three hundred milliseconds earlier. At least. End of lecture."

    "Jesus Christ."

    He went quiet, contemplating this. Then he sniffed in a breath.

    "Will you teach me how you do it?"

    "Maybe." Her smile looked surprised. "Maybe I will."

At the roundabout where he should have exited to join the motorway, he continued turning, into a second rotation.

    "I need to do something," he said.

    "Visiting hours must be over."

    It was scary how she understood what he intended.

    "I'll manage to get in."

    "Then let's do it."

    He took the Swindon road, and continued on to the hospital. Suzanne said nothing until he pulled in and parked the car. Outside, the night was darkening.

    "Do you want me to come in with you?"

    "No. Thanks."

    Reaching over to the glove compartment, he became sensitive to her warm proximity, and the fragrance she was wearing: airborne molecules propelled by the heat of her flawless creamy chocolatte skin. Swallowing, he extracted a dull silver ring from the compartment.

    "Fake ID?" asked Suzanne.

    "A dummy, to make me look genuine." Josh extracted his phone from the console. "This is what will get me past the scanners."

    He walked to the main entrance, nodding to the security guard beyond the glass doors, then held his ring close to the door, and faced the cameras. What should happen was a three-way check among data stored on the ring (including fractally compressed facial images), the camera scan, and the staff database; what actually occurred was fast intrusion from his malware, a false recognition code, and the clicking open of magnetic locks.

    "Hi," he said to the guard.

    "Evening, doctor."

    Beyond reception, he walked corridors now half in shadow, conserving energy and helping patients sleep. The wall signs glowed, but he did not need them to find his way. At the nurses' station outside the coma unit, he stopped, opening up his senses while remaining still inside. From the sounds and other subliminal cues, he understood there were two nurses inside the open office, drinking lemon tea – he could smell it. Their chairs creaked as they rotated them, one leaning close to murmur something to the other; and as they naturally faced away from the doorway for a moment, Josh slipped past.

    Inside Sophie's room, machines sucked and hissed, susurrating as they worked her small lungs. Medicinal smells were strong. Monitors glowed and beeped, tracking her physiology and rendering a clear message in steady coloured graphs: no change.

    Sophie's face was delicate, luminescent grey in the half light. He brushed a curl, fine and wispy, away from her forehead. Then he took her fingers in his, remembering her as a baby, grasping a single finger, smiling her heart-splitting smile.

    
My little girl.

    For a long time he held still; then he leaned over, kissed her forehead, and stepped away.

    "Good–"

    
I can't say it.

    A complete farewell was impossible.

His exit route was irrational, perhaps from the need for physical action. He raised the window of Sophie's room – he was three floors up – went through, pulled the window shut – the automatic lock clicked home – then spidered his way down in the dark. Brickwork was hard and gritty against his palms. His shoe soles made scraping noises as he descended. Then there was ground beneath his feet: an anticlimax that came too soon.

    Everything people do is for unconscious reasons. Wasn't that what Suzanne had been trying to tell him? He knew symbolic logic, could design software in Evolutionary Z, but it seemed to have little to do with the way his mind worked, or the way Sophie's image remained in his mind no matter what he was doing.

    When he opened the car door, Suzanne flinched.

    "Where did you come from? I was watching the entranceway."

    "Sorry."

    He slid in and closed the door. And sat there.

    "What happened, Josh?"

    "I… I tried to say goodbye."

    "What stopped you?"

    He closed his stinging eyes as his mouth turned down. Then he blinked a few times.

    "It's too late, because she's gone. It was too late the moment the car hit her."

    Suzanne's hand was on his forearm. No psych trick, just a human gesture.

    "That's not Sophie," he went on. "It's a remnant, like a fingernail or a – a lock of hair."

    "I'm so sorry."

    He nodded.

    Time passed. Epochs or minutes, he could no longer tell the difference. Then he slid his phone back into the console, and turned on the engine.

    "Let's get you home."

Once they were on the motorway and cruising, Suzanne told him how things had gone with the Brezhinski family.

    "The parents are less stressed, and young Marek will be practicing healing visualisation."

    On the battlefield, Josh had seen men who gave up and died from survivable wounds, while others fought, living against horrific odds. The worse the physical injury, the more vital was the mind controlling the immune system. Many soldiers developed a form of autohypnosis to cope with small combat wounds.

    "Good." He forced his attention outward, onto the dark motorway, for the sake of Suzanne's safety as he drove. "You calmed them down."

    "Actually, I got one of them sputtering with confusion as I tied them up in verbal knots, showing the contradictions in their behaviour. Sometimes you need to be outrageous and almost aggressive." She smiled. "Rapport can be overrated."

    "So no hypnosis."

    "Well, maybe a little."

    "But you can't hypnotise someone against their will."

    "Uh-uh. Look, pay attention to the road right now, but in the past, have you ever drifted off while driving… then come to your senses, and wondered who the hell was in charge for the past fifty miles?"

    "Oh. So it's not just me."

    "Everyone who's been lost in a good movie was in a trance, because that's all it is, an altered state. We drift through dozens of different mental states every day."

    "Mind control," he said. "Tell me about the mind control."

    "Bad metaphor. People want to learn how to hypnotise others but not go into trance themselves. Wrong, wrong, wrong. It's more like a dance, leading someone into a state where they're more resourceful than usual. The fastest way to induce a trance is to go there first."

    "You're joking."

    "I go into a different state from theirs, because my eyes are open, my attention on the client while they go inside themselves. But I'm still in a kind of trance. The fMRI proves it."

    Josh was not sure whether he was impressed or disappointed.

    "You say it's like a dance. There are links between martial arts and dance, you know."

    "What I use is not a weapon."

    "Oh."

    Clearly she could read his mind.

 

    "What's that?" asked Suzanne.

    "High-probability sightings of Richard Broomhall." He tapped for a map-pane, which he dimmed. "London, south of the river. We can check the video footage when we stop."

    "How far to the services?"

    "Ten minutes. Perhaps we should go on. I've had to control my bladder before."

    "Do you like watching waterfalls? All the water splashing down, splish-splash."

    "Jesus, you
are
a witch."

    "No, I'm not telling you to think about a flowing tap, the ripples of running water down a channel that–"

    "All right, I'll stop."