Transition

by Iain M. Banks

  We drank well. I was letting Mr N teach me about wine, and I did develop a taste for single malts, properly watered. So at least something good comes out of Scotland. We ate well, too. Not too much pheasant, thank God. The house was a sort of fake castle, a Victorian take on what they thought the Scots ought to have been building, with decent plumbing and no-nonsense central heating. I was definitely with the Victorians there.

  Once again I hadn’t brought Lysanne, the girl friend, along. She’d have hated it. All that rain and no shops. Dulcima, Barney’s girl, hated it too, but I think she just wanted to keep close to Barney. At the time I thought it was cos he might be having second thoughts about her and his eyes had started roving again but later I decided she just liked that he always had lots of drugs and never asked her to help pay for them.

  Dizzy bint even tried it on with me once in the back of a Land Rover coming back from a shoot, can you believe it? Hand on me tackle through me moleskin plus fours or whatever they’re called and whispered did I want her to come to my room that night after Barney had conked out, her wearing a pair of waders and nothing else?

  I mean, she’s a gorgeous girl, and I’d certainly had thoughts about her, and my cock definitely liked the idea – this was towards the end of the week and it was getting to know my palm like the back of my hand, know what I mean? But fuck me, really. Dangerous ground. Too dangerous. A complication I devoutly didn’t need. I told her I thought she was the most humpable thing I’d seen all year and if I wasn’t such a good friend of Barney’s… She took it pretty well, all told. Maybe just after a bit of reassurance that she was still lusciously fuckable. Some girls are like that.

  Long week, but worth it. We escaped eventually, back down the long long road to civilisation. I’d got on extremely well with Mr N. I’d dropped a hint that I was looking to take on a proper job, something serious, like what Mr N did. Nothing too obvious, but still a hint.

  Next time I saw Mr and Mrs Noyce I took Lysanne. We went up to his family’s place in Lincolnshire on the coast near Alford. The place was called Dunstley but they called it D’unstable because it was right on the edge of the sea, standing at the end of a road on a sort of sandy cliff above a wave-washed beach. They were on their third garden fence because the other two had disappeared into the North Sea during storms and the garden had shrunk by two-thirds – nearly ninety feet, according to Mr Noyce – in the last forty years.

  This time Barney and Dulcima weren’t there. Other things to do. So it looked like I’d made it to friend, not just friend of son. En route to protégé, with a bit of luck. Excuse my French.

  Mr N thought Lysanne was a laugh, which was a relief. I could see her weighing him up soon as we arrived and could almost spot the point at dinner on the first night when she looked from him to Mrs N and realised that there was no opening there for her to exploit. That was a relief, too. No play that a girl like her could have made for a guy like him could have lasted longer than a night, but she could have messed things up for me. Mrs N exchanged a look with me over coffee that made me think she’d had pretty much the same feeling re Lysanne as I’d had.

  The house was young compared to Spetley Hall; Edwardian, built at the turn of the last century. Whitewashed brick and painted wood compared with mossy stone and polished panel. Great big salt-streaked draughty windows instead of tiny little leaded draughty windows. Very light by comparison, full of morning sunshine coming in from the sea and sparkling.

  “It’s all about confidence,” Mr N told me. We were standing in the garden after dinner looking at the latest fence while the waves breaking on the beach below glowed in the last of the evening night. Lysanne and Mrs N were further down the garden. I could hear Lysanne shrieking with laughter at something Mrs N had said. Mr N was slurring his words just a little and at first I thought he’d said “conference” but actually it was “confidence.”

  “What, like a trick?” I asked.

  Edward laughed. “Maybe. A little harsh, but maybe. Confidence is what keeps the whole show on the road. You need confidence – faith, even – to keep putting one foot in front of the other. Arguably, if you just stopped the whole edifice would collapse.” He glanced at me. “It’s also about value, but there’s the rub. What is value? Value is what people think it is. A thing is worth what somebody will pay for it. But then somebody pays what everybody thinks is an outrageous price for something, a price everybody ‘knows’ is idiotic, and yet if they can offload it for even more to somebody else then it really was worth at least what they paid for it, wasn’t it? The profit is the proof. Though of course if they get caught with it, when it becomes horribly clear that it wasn’t worth anything like what they paid, then they were wrong and everybody who ‘knew’ they were wrong gets proved right.” He sipped his whisky. “The difficult thing is to spot reliably who’s right and who’s wrong by buying in before a stock gets too expensive and get out before it becomes clear it’s actually like somebody in a cartoon who’s just walked over the edge of a cliff and only doesn’t fall because they haven’t realised yet. You know, like Tom and Jerry.”

  I’d been thinking Road Runner myself, but I knew what he meant. We both watched the waves for a moment. “Is that the Invisible Hand holding them up, then?” I asked.

  Mr N laughed again. “The Invisible Hand. Well, that’s just an article of faith. That’s another myth. Like we’re a twenty-four-hour society. No, we’re not; the markets aren’t. They close at teatime every day in whatever city they’re in, there’s nothing between New York and Sydney and they’re shut the whole of the weekend. And holidays. Just as well too or I’d never get any time off. What do you think of the whisky?”

  I shook my head, frowned. “I’m not sure. It’s quite sweet and a bit peaty. I sort of want to say an Islay but I don’t think it is. Could be a Talisker that I haven’t had before but I’m still thinking about it.” I shrugged and looked bashful. “Leave it with me?” Mr N grinned and nodded, looking almost proud of me. This uncertainty was all bollocks by the way. It was a Highland Park from the Orkney Islands. I knew cos even though Mr N had poured it while I wasn’t looking I’d spotted the bottle on the sideboard with the dribbly bits running back down the inside when he’d handed it to me, so I knew. But I needed to go through the charade to make it look good, didn’t I?

  “It is a confidence trick,” Edward said, staring out to sea again. “All banks are technically insolvent and all PLCs are one-way bets, or they bloody should be if you handle them right. If they work you keep the profits and if they don’t you close them down and the money they owe to other companies or other people is just left hanging. You don’t go bankrupt, not if you’ve arranged things right. Shareholder, director, MD. That’s what the Limited bit of Public Limited Company means, you see? Limited liability. Not the same as a partnership, or being a Name at Lloyd’s.” He waved his arm at the waves, spilling a little of the whisky. There had been quite a few G&Ts and bottles of wine before the whiskies.

  “Really?” I said. I wasn’t sure this sounded right. I guess I must have looked dubious.

  “There you are, you see?” Edward said. “A civilian, a very naive person, might think that if a group of people got together, borrowed a lot of money to start a business, ordered lots of plant and equipment and raw materials without paying for them and then made a complete mess of it and lost everything they would somehow still owe all that money, but they don’t. If what they started was a PLC then the company becomes a sort of honorary person, do you see? It owes the money, not them. If it goes under then it goes into administration and its assets are sold off and if those don’t cover what was owed then that’s too bad. As long as they stayed within the letter of the law throughout you can’t touch the directors or the shareholders. The money’s just gone. Of course, if it’s all a great success, then hurrah. All shall have prizes. See what I mean? One-way bet.”

  “Jesus, Edward, you’re starting to sound like a commie.”

  “Right-wing Marxist, Adrian,�
�� Mr N said briskly. He nodded once, still staring out to sea. “As a matter of fact I did flirt with Socialism, in my youth.”

  “That when you were at university, was it?”

  He smiled. “Yes. University. But then I saw how much more comfortable life could be as one of the exploiters rather than one of the exploited. Plus I decided that if the proles were so stupid as to let themselves be exploited, who was I to stand in their way?” He smiled at me, his sparse, sandy hair ruffled by the wind. “So I went over to the Dark Side. Cheers.” He drank.

  I laughed. “That must make Barney Luke Skywalker.”

  He shook his head. “I’m afraid I don’t know Star Trek well enough to say who he’d be. Not Doctor Spock, that’s for sure.”

  I almost didn’t correct him. But it was such an obvious one he might say it to somebody else who would and then I’d look like I was being what do you call it? Obsequious or something. So I said, “You’re getting your stars tangled” and explained.

  “Yes, well,” he said airily, waving his glass again. He turned to me. “And which side are you on, Adrian?”

  “I’m on me own side, Mr N. Always have been, always will be.”

  He looked like he was studying me for a moment. “Best side to be on.” He nodded, and drained his glass.

  (Ensemble)

  1It began with Dr Seolas Plyte. The good doctor was asleep in the withdrawing room off his study in the Speditionary Faculty of the University of Practical Talents in Aspherje when it happened. His favourite mistress, still lying on top of him on the chaise longue in a haze of post-coital torpor, jerked once, exactly as she might have had she too been in the act of falling asleep. She reached down, took him purposefully in her arms and before he could properly wake they were both gone.

  Ms Pum Jésusdottir was hiking in the Himalayan Hills when they came for her. A long-laggard world this one, where the Indian subcontinent had barely begun its slow crash into Asia. Here, the highest point in the Himalayas was tree-covered and less than thirteen hundred metres above sea level. She was walking alone along a recently blazed trail beneath tall plane trees dripping from a recent shower, stepping from side to side of the track to avoid the stream of water that it carried, reflecting that if you made a path in an environment of high precipitation without also making ditches then really you just made a stream bed, when she saw the girl sitting – hunched, hugging her knees, staring ahead – a short way up the path.

  She couldn’t have been more than thirteen or fourteen; one of the native tribal girls, dressed conservatively ankle to neck in a black caftanne, her hair gathered in a net, fingers glittering with rings. The girl didn’t look at the older woman as she approached. She just sat staring straight ahead, across the path. From a few metres away, Jésusdottir could see that the girl was shaking, and had been crying.

  “Hello?” she said. The girl looked at her, sniffing, but did not reply. Ms Jésusdottir tried Hindic. The girl’s expression changed. She rose, standing, unfolding herself, and smiled at the older woman, who only then felt the first pang of fear in her gut. “Oh, Ms Jésusdottir, I have some bad news.”

  Brashley Krijk disappeared from his yacht while cruising in the Eastern Middlearthean, off Chandax, on the isle of Girit.

  Der Graf Heurtzloft-Beiderkern heard somebody come into the opera box behind him. He assumed it was one of his sons returning; they had both left earlier to indulge their cigar habit in the corridor outside and to flirt with any young ladies they happened to encounter. Whoever it was, they slipped in while the coloratura soprano was just launching into her final and most heart-rending solo. But for that, he might have looked round.

  Commandante Odil Obliq, peril of the Orient as an admiring enemy had once described her, was dancing with her new lover, the admiral of her ekranoplan assault squadron, in the moonlit ruins of New Quezon while a blindfolded orchestra did their best to out-voice the Howler Orangs that were ululating from the tumbled stones and twisted metal frames of the most recently destroyed buildings. Across the plaza, from which the wreckage had been cleared by chain gangs of defeated Royalists, came a waiter carrying a tray with their champagne and cocaine.

  They stopped dancing, both smiling at the fat old eunuch waddling towards them with the tray.

  “Commandante,” he wheezed. “Admiral.”

  “Thank you,” Obliq said. She picked the silver straw from the tray. At the ends of her long ebony fingers, her nails were painted in swirling green camouflage, as a joke. She handed the straw to the admiral. “After you.”

  “We shall never sleep,” the admiral sighed, bending slightly to the tray and the first two lines of powder, glowing white in the moonlight.

  She handed the straw to the commandante, who had taken the opportunity to sip some of the champagne. Then the admiral’s expression changed. She gripped Obliq’s hand and said, “There’s something wrong…”

  Obliq stiffened, her hand dropping the silver straw and going to her holstered pistol.

  Her earpiece crackled. “Commandante!” her ADC radioed, his voice desperate.

  The eunuch waiter hissed, twisted his hand under the tray so that it began to fall, taking the champagne flutes and the rest of the cocaine with it while the pistol revealed underneath pointed straight at the commandante. Obliq had already started to drop, going limp in the admiral’s arms and falling as though in a faint, but it meant only that the chest shot the eunuch had aimed at her became a head shot. The admiral stared on blankly as the first shot was followed by two more before the nearest guards finally woke up and started shooting.

  * * *

  The assassination teams sent after Mrs Mulverhill could find no recent trace of her anywhere.

  The Transitionary

  When I wake, I am in some pain and tied to a chair. Altogether, this is not a satisfactory turn of events.

  I underwent some training to cover such situations, and know enough to wake slowly without, one would hope, giving any sign of having woken. This is the theory. In practice I have never been convinced that this is really possible. If you’re unconscious you’re unconscious – so by no means in full control of what your body is doing – and if you’re unconscious you’re probably unconscious for a good reason, like some gorilla in a suit smacking you so hard in the face that your nose seems to be broken, you cannot breathe normally, you have bled copiously down your naked chest, two of your front teeth feel loose and the whole forward portion of your face feels swollen and suffused with bruised blood.

  I am hanging forward in the seat as far as my bonds will allow, my chin nearly on my chest, my gaze falling naturally on my own lap. I’m naked. My thighs are bloodstained, brightly lit. I become more fully aware, wallowing my way to consciousness like a nearly waterlogged lump of wood rising slowly to the surface of a cold and sluggish stream. I have taken the most immediate and rudimentary stock of the situation and am just starting carefully – without giving any outward signs of movement – to flex the appropriate muscle groups to test precisely how tightly I am tied to the chair, when a male voice says, “Don’t bother, Temudjin, we can tell you’re awake. And don’t waste your time testing the wires and the chair, either. You’re not going anywhere. We know what you’re doing because it was us who taught you to do it.”

  I think briefly about this. My captors seem to know exactly how I am trained to react in such a situation, and they appear to be claiming that they are my own people, or at least that they helped to train me. The individual addressing me is probably not of first-rank education.

  I bring my head up, stare into the darkness between a pair of lights pointed at me from a couple of metres away and say, with all the fluency I can muster, “It was we who taught you to do it.”

  I’m expecting a “What?” or a “Huh?” but he just pauses and then says, “Whatever. The point is we’ll know what you’re trying to do at every stage. You’ll save us both a lot of time and yourself some pain if you drop the tradecraft stuff.”

  An ominous ph
rase. “At every stage of what?” is the obvious question. I can see nothing beyond the lights. As well as the two to each side of straight ahead there are two more I can see, one level with each shoulder, and from the shadows beneath my chair I guess there are another two behind me. I am encircled with brightness. The voice talking to me is male and I do not recognise it. It might be that of the wide-shouldered man who talked to me on the aircraft, but I don’t know. His voice is coming from directly behind me, I think. Listening to it, I get the impression that I am in a large room. I don’t seem to be able to smell anything, except my own blood: a sharp, metallic scent. The fragre of the place, the information from that extra sense that people like myself have, indicates a world I have not visited before, and a place which feels confused somehow, full of clashing, competing historical and cultural sensations. I check my languages. English. Nothing else.

  That is unprecedented. I do not have even the language of my home or my base reality in the house in the trees on the ridge looking out over the town with the casino, where my original self wanders round the place dead-eyed and monosyllabic.

  Now I feel fear.

  “At every stage of this interrogation,” the man’s voice says, as though in reply to my earlier thought.

  “Interrogation?” I repeat. Even to my own ears it sounds as though I have a heavy cold. I try to snort back some of the blood blocking my nose but succeed only in producing a sensation akin to somebody having just stuck a large metal spike in the centre of my face.

  “Interrogation,” the man confirms. “To determine what you know, or what you think you know. To discover who is controlling you, or who you think is controlling you. To find out what it is you think you’re doing—”

  “Or what I think I think I’m doing,” I offer. Silence. I shrug. “I was spotting the pattern,” I tell him.

  “Yes,” he says, sounding tired. “Be clever about it, give cheek, be defiant and even insult the intelligence of the interrogator, so that when you are put to the question your collapse will be all the more abject and your apparent degree of cooperation all the more complete. As I said, Temudjin, we did train you, so we know how you’ll respond.”