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my
God!
    I remember the
day I leapt out of bed and said “Enough! Get out before everyone
else starts flailing around.” I offloaded the lot over two months
without anyone noticing, I believe. Three months later, the
Internet bubble starting blowing air through its anus, stinking out
the financial world as it shrivelled away.
    And I have all
that money in the bank, and bonds, and precious metals, anything
other than shares. It is all sitting there. I can do almost
anything I want.
    With the
voices of the world in my ear, I am almost godlike. Is it time for
hubris to lengthen its shadow over me?
    So let me talk
about Mary Knightly, the first person I ever heard of in Hanburgh.
The woman my mother hated with a passion.
    My mother
warned me many times about people like Mary Knightly, with whom she
spent some of her childhood in Hanburgh. “You must believe in
people,” my mother would counsel me. “Most people are good, even
when they are behaving badly. They are willing to help, and to
share, and to enjoy others' enjoyment alongside their own. It is
foolish to be cynical about people because you are afraid.” Then
she would take hold of my hands and kneed them with gentle strokes.
“On the other hand, there is another type of person. They are
usually deeply unhappy people. They absolutely must be feared, and
preferably avoided. They will introduce you to hell, and they will
never stop. They will never get better, and there is no strategy
for dealing with them. They are destructive, out and
out.”
    “ And how
would I recognise them?” I would ask.
    My mother
leant forward and whispered. “You cannot hear them.”
    “ Not at
all?”
    “ When they
are being silent. In the spaces between their words.”
    “ You cannot
hear anyone when they are silent.”
    “ You can if
you are listening carefully.”
    “ You can hear
them when they are saying nothing?”
    “ Yes.”
    “ Mummy, you
are losing it.”
    Now I know
differently. I can both hear and see what people are saying, and I
know that my mother was more right than she can even have been
aware of. She was guessing. I know.
    I misuse my
powers, I am afraid. I have a little stratagem that I try out from
time to time. It is a miraculous sleight of thought. I synch into
your thoughts and travel alongside them. I can make comments that
astonish you by how much we believe in the same things. I have
heard you exclaim “Extraordinary! That is what I think too.” I
normally blushed modestly, and said something like “Well, yes, we
do seem to be of like mind, Inspector.” Then when we were running
down the same track, I would insinuate a deviant suggestion,
encouraging you into a direction that you would not normally have
entertained. You cavilled for a second, and then you chose to
re-align with me. That like-mindedness was just too cosy to
abandon. I built on this disorientation of the psyche to push you
further. Within minutes, you were flat out with me, whatever I
said.
    I am sorry to
have treated you like a laboratory rat, but it was just so
wonderful to watch, to have this power over you, over
everyone.
    However, it
does not work on people like Mary Knightly. They have some sort of
disruptive technology that resists empathy. If you lock in on what
they say, you find that they have dodged elsewhere. Unlike everyone
else, they are not interested in whether you agree with them or
not. They are only interested in whether you do what they want you
to do, which is inevitably unreasonable. They insist on being
unreasonable. If they were being reasonable when you complied with
their suggestion, then you may have obeyed them merely because what
you thought they wanted was the right and proper course of action.
That is no test of their power over you. However, if they are
totally unreasonable, and you still follow their wishes, the only
possible cause is because they have power over you. You are their
creature. So, all the time they test whether you are still enslaved
to