Transition

by Iain M. Banks

  I let my head drop so that I am looking at my bloodstained thighs. “Ah, the infinite cowardice of the torturer,” I mutter.

  “What?” he says. I did mutter very quietly.

  I raise my head again. I try to sound tired and world-weary. “How easy it is to be so confident and to sound so in charge when the person you’re talking to is tied down, utterly helpless and at your mercy. None of that annoying freedom of action for the other party that might let a person fight back, or just leave, or speak as they want to speak rather than as they hope – in their desperation and terror – you want them to speak. Does all that make you feel good? Does it give you that sensation of power people always denied you in normal life, so unfairly? Does it give you what you always missed when you were growing up? Did the other children bully you? Did your father abuse you? Overly strict potty training? Really, I’d love to know: what’s your excuse? What aspect of your upbringing fucked you up to the point that doing this seemed like such a promising career? Do tell.”

  I didn’t really expect to get to the end of this speech. I thought he’d appear out of the shadows and start laying into me. That he’s done no such thing may be a very good sign or a very bad one. I have no idea. I’ve somewhat gone off-piste here.

  “Oh, Temudjin, you must have made that bit up yourself,” he says, sounding amused. My heart sinks. “Are you trying to get beaten to a pulp?” He gives a snorting laugh. “What in your past made you such a masochist?”

  It may be time for a change of tack. I sigh, nod. “Hmm. I see your point. Serves me right for extemporising.”

  “That’s another thing we’re going to be asking you about.”

  “Extemporising?”

  “Yes.”

  “Ah ha.”

  I have not been entirely open with you, I suppose. There should be a way out of this. A way that they don’t know about, a way that this faceless, unseen interrogator doesn’t know about. But I think it might have been taken from me. I have hardly dared to make sure until now, and it has not been as immediately obvious as it would have been had I not been punched so hard in the face. I put my head down again and move my tongue around in my mouth, probing.

  There is a hole in my lower left jaw where a tooth has been removed. It feels gaping, and very fresh. That would be my last hope of escaping with a single bound, gone.

  “Yes,” the man says. I suppose he saw some movement about my mouth or jaw. “We took that too. Thought we didn’t know about it, didn’t you?”

  “So did you know about it?”

  “We might have,” he says. “Or maybe we just found it.”

  It was a partially hollowed-out tooth, the space within concealed beneath a tiny hinged ceramic crown. I kept one of my little transitioning pills in there; an emergency dose of septus in case I ever miscounted and ran out of them, or had the little ormolu box stolen, or it failed to make a transition with me. Or I found myself in a situation like this.

  Well, so much for that.

  I lift my head up. “Okay. So, what do you want to know?”

  * * *

  I had been here before, in a minor key. I hadn’t been tied to the chair with wire, and the light hadn’t been in my eyes but there had been a chair and a man asking me questions, something had certainly gone wrong and there had been at least one death.

  “Didn’t you suspect?”

  “Suspect what? That she might be one of us?”

  “Yes.”

  “It crossed my mind. I thought—”

  “When did it cross your mind?”

  “When we were standing in front of a map of the world in the Doge’s Palace. She said something about it being just the one world, and that being limiting.”

  “What did you think then?”

  “I thought she was one of the guests staying here, somebody from the Concern I just hadn’t happened to bump into; late arrival, maybe.” We were back in the Palazzo Chirezzia, the black and white palace overlooking the Grand Canal.

  “You didn’t think to ask her this outright?”

  “I could have been wrong. I might have misheard or misunderstood. Trying to discover whether she was Aware or not by just asking her would have been an unnecessary risk, don’t you think?”

  “You were not intrigued?”

  “I was very intrigued. Masked ball, mystery woman, the back alleys of Venice. I’m not sure how much more intriguing something can get.”

  “Why did you leave the ball with her?”

  I laughed. “Because I thought she might want to fuck me, of course.”

  “There is no need for coarse language, Mr… Cavan.”

  I sat back and put my hand over my eyes. “Oh for fuck’s sake,” I breathed.

  I was talking to the man who had shot and killed my little pirate captain. He was called Ingrez and did not appear to have forgiven me for getting the better of him in the bar an hour or so earlier. He wore a neat bandage over his right wrist, where I’d punctured it with the pirate captain’s sword. He was no longer in the workman’s clothes. He’d changed into a black suit and grey polo neck. He certainly didn’t carry himself like a workman now. He looked like somebody used to giving rather than taking orders. He also had to be something of a specialist transitioner, a real adept, if he was able to take something as substantial as a gun between worlds with him; few of us could do that. I could, just, but it took a lot of effort. It was his effort, doing just that, that had been responsible for the hit of slew I’d experienced a second or two before he’d shot the girl. He had a broad, tanned, open-looking face with a lot of laughter lines that looked possessed, haunted by something much darker and without humour.

  After I’d withdrawn the sword from his wrist and helped him to his feet there had barely been time for any explanations before two of Professore Loscelles’s larger servants had burst through the door of the bar, their right hands rather ostentatiously inside their jackets. They had looked like they were spoiling for a fight and seemed disappointed that they had arrived too late, having instead to act as nurses to the two injured members of the team. Ingrez got one of them to walk us to the canal a minute away where the launch that had brought them sat idling, its engine loud in the narrow spaces between the darkened buildings. It sat lightless, its driver wearing what looked like a pair of binoculars strapped to his head. It brought Ingrez and me back to the Palazzo Chirezzia, then sped away again. It kept its light on while it was on the Grand Canal.

  I was asked to wait in a second-floor bedroom. There was a stout black grille over the window and the door was locked. No telephone. So that when I was escorted here, to the Professore’s study, I was still wearing my priestly fancy dress.

  Ingrez cleared his throat. “Were there any other points at which you thought she might be Aware?” he asked.

  “Just before you arrived,” I told him, “when she said something about not travelling, about me being off duty.”

  “Any other points?”

  “No,” I said. “She mentioned the word ‘emprise.’ Said it means a dangerous undertaking. Does that mean anything to you?”

  “I know the word,” Ingrez admitted, after the tiniest of hesitations. “What does it mean to you?”

  “I’d never heard it before. Now I’m not sure what it should mean. Is it important?”

  “I couldn’t say. But she did not try to recruit you?”

  “Into what?” I asked, mystified.

  “She made you no offers?”

  “Not even the one I was hoping she might make, Mr Ingrez.” I tried a regretful smile. I might have spared myself the effort.

  “What offer would that have been?”

  I sighed. “The one involving she and I having sex,” I said quietly, as one might explain something obvious to an idiot. I paused. “For fornication’s sake,” I added. Ingrez just sat looking blankly at me. “How did you know about all this?” I asked him. “Who was she? What was she doing? Why did she want to contact me in the first place? Why were you trying t
o stop her, or catch her or… what?”

  He looked at me for a while longer. “I am unable to answer any of those questions at this moment in time,” he told me. It didn’t even sound like he was trying to keep the tone of satisfaction out of his voice.

  Madame d’Ortolan and I walked amongst the tombs and tall cypresses crowding the walled cemetery isle of San Michele, in the Venetian lagoon. The bright blue sky was strewn with ragged clouds, in the south-west already turning pale red in the late-afternoon sunset.

  “Her name is Mrs Mulverhill,” she told me.

  I sensed her turning her head to look at me as she told me this. I kept my eyes on the path ahead between the rows of marble tombs and dark metal grilles. “She was one of my tutors,” I said. I tried to say it as matter-of-factly as I could. Inside, I was thinking, It was her! Something sang within me.

  “Indeed,” Madame d’Ortolan said, pausing to pick a lily from a small vase attached to the wall of one of the tombs. She handed the flower to me. I was about to say something grateful but she said, “Remove the stamina, would you?” I looked at her, puzzled. She pointed into the heart of the flower. “The stamens. Those bits with the orange pollen. Would you pinch those out for me? Please? I’d do it myself but this body’s fingers are so… chubby.”

  Madame d’Ortolan was inhabiting the body of a middle-aged lady with bright auburn hair and a tall, powerful body. She wore a two-piece suit of pink with purple edging and a white silk blouse. Her fingers did look a little thick. I reached into the bell of the flower, trying to avoid the pollen-laden ends. Madame d’Ortolan leant in, watching this intently. “Careful,” she said, almost whispering.

  I removed the stamens. Two of my fingertips were turned orange by the operation. I presented her with the flower. She snipped the stem with two long fingernails and inserted the bloom into a buttonhole in her jacket.

  “Mrs Mulverhill has been many things in the Concern,” she told me. “An unAware enabler, an arrangements officer, a theatre-logistics supervisor, a transitionary, a lecturer – as you have pointed out – a transitioneering theorist in the Speditionary Faculty itself and now, suddenly, a traitor.”

  No, I thought, she was always a traitor.

  “What is it that you think we do, Temudjin?” she asked me quietly, stroking my belly with one slow and gentle hand.

  “My God,” I breathed, “is this a heavily disguised tutorial?”

  She pulled at one of the light brown hairs that grew in a fluted line beneath my belly button. I drew a breath in through my teeth, smacked at her hand. “Yes,” she said, raising one dark eyebrow. “Do answer the question.”

  “Okay, then,” I said, and stroked the stroking hand. “We are fixers.” I was talking very quietly. The room was bathed in shadows, lit only by the embers of a near-dead fire and a single candle, still burning. The only sounds were our voices and the soft susurration of rain on a window slanted into the ceiling. “We fix what is broken,” I said, trying to paraphrase, trying not to repeat what she had told me, told us, told all her students. “Or stop things about to break from breaking in the first place.”

  “But why?” She tried to smooth down the hairs on my belly.

  “Why not?”

  “Yes, but why? Why do this?” She slicked her palm with saliva and attempted to make the hairs stay flat like that.

  “Because it’s worth doing,” I said. “Because we feel it’s worth doing and we can act on that feeling.”

  “But, all else aside, why is it worth doing when we are only so many and there is an infinitude of worlds?” She rubbed my belly as though it was a puppy and then gently smacked it.

  “Because there might be an infinitude of people like us too, an infinite number of Concerns; we just haven’t met them yet.”

  “Though the further we expand without encountering anybody else like us, the less likely the chances of that being true become.”

  “Well, that’s infinity for you.”

  “Good,” she said drily, and traced a circle round my belly button with one finger. “Though you skipped a bit. Before that, you are supposed to say that it is still worth doing some good rather than choosing to do none simply because it seems of so little significance.”

  “‘Futility is self-imposed.’”

  “Ah, so you weren’t asleep after all.” She cupped my balls. Very gently, she began to knead them, working her hand round them in a soft, continuous, curling motion.

  “Ma’am, you always had my full attention.” It had been an enjoyable if strenuous few hours, here in her dacha. I’d thought we were finished for the evening, and I’d have guessed so did she, but maybe not; under her hand’s caress, I began to feel the first stirrings, once again.

  “There is a grain to the fabric of space – time,” she said. “A scale on which there is no further divisible smoothness, only individual, irreducible quanta where reality itself seethes with a continual effervescence of sub-microscopic creation and destruction. I believe there to be a similarly irreducible texture to morality, a scale beyond which it is senseless to proceed. Infinity goes in only one direction; outward, into more inhabited worlds, more shared realities. In the other direction, on a reducing scale, once you reach the level of an individual consciousness – for all practical purposes, a single human being – you can usefully reduce no further. It is at that level that significance lies. If you do something to benefit one person, that is an absolute gain, and its relative insignificance in the wider scheme is irrelevant. Benefit two people without concomitant harm to others – or a village, tribe, city, class, nation, society or civilisation – and the benefits are scalable, arithmetic. There is no excuse beyond fatalistic self-indulgence and sheer laziness for doing nothing.”

  “Absolutely. Let me do this.” I reached over the golden scoop of her back and slid my hand down between her legs. She shifted, bringing herself a little closer so that I didn’t have to stretch. She opened her legs a little, scissoring across the crumpled bedclothes. My thumb pressed lightly on the tiny dry flower of her anus while my fingers caressed her sex, already half lost in its moistness and heat.

  “There you are,” she said, sounding amused. “I am experiencing some benefit already.” She became quiet for a while, moving her backside rhythmically up and down a little and pressing back against my exploring hand. She brushed some hair from her face, shifted up the bed to kiss me, fully, luxuriantly, one hand behind my head, cupping, then settled back again, her head down, hair veiling her face as I worked my fingers further into her. Her other hand closed round my cock, thumb stroking its glans, side to side.

  “The question,” she said, a little breathless now, “is who determines what is done, and to whom, on whose behalf, and precisely why; to what end?”

  “Perhaps,” I suggested, “we are working up to some sort of climax, a consummation.”

  Her body trembled, in what might have been a silent laugh. Or not. “Perhaps we are,” she said, then caught her breath. “Ah. Yes, do keep doing that.”

  “That was my intention.”

  “Who benefits?” she murmured.

  “Perhaps more than one group does,” I suggested. “Perhaps those producing the benefit for those most in need also benefit. Why should it not be mutual?”

  “That is one view,” she said. She brought the hand not supporting her upper body, the one that had been stroking me, up to my mouth, half cupped. “Spit,” she said through her dark fringe of hair. I drew more saliva into my mouth, raised my head and let it dribble into her palm. She brought the hand carefully down to her own mouth and did the same, worked the fingers into the glistening fluid on her skin – just seeing that made me harder still, when I’d have thought I couldn’t be – then she set her hand around my cock once more, gripping it more firmly, moving her hand more forcefully now. I did the same, watching the sweet mounds of her buttocks shake as my fingers moved in and out of her.

  “There is another view?” I asked.

  “There might be,�
� she said, each breath a gasp now. I was impressed that she could still concentrate on speaking at all. “With sufficient knowledge, if we were able to delve deeper into matters.”

  “One should,” I said, swallowing, “always explore as thoroughly as possible.” I cleared my throat. “You taught me that.”

  “I did,” she agreed. Through her hanging fringe of hair, I could just make out that her eyes were tightly closed. “We do some good,” she said, her voice raw now, her words clipped, bitten off, “but do we do as much as we might? Is not some of any good we do merely… collateral benefit created as we follow – unwittingly at our level, perhaps… perhaps quite deliberately by those in possession of more knowledge and power – some other and greater… greater… greater agenda?”

  “Such as?”

  “Who knows?” she said. “The point is… that by now we might be blind to such subterfuge. We trust our own forecasting techniques so fully that those in the field charged with doing the… doing the dirty work… blindly obey orders without a second thought, even though there is no obvious immediate or even medium-term benefit to be observed, because they have come to trust that genuine good will always accrue in the fullness of time; that’s what’s always happened and that’s what they’ve been taught to expect, so it’s what they accept and what they believe. Thus they do less than they think but more than they know. It is, if I am right, an astonishing trick; to conjure the symptoms of zealotry from those who believe they are being merely pragmatic, even utilitarian.”

  (When I first saw her, she was half sitting on a stone parapet, one slim trousered leg extended in front of her, the other drawn up beneath her rear, her face and body turned to one side as she talked to one of a group of men all but surrounding her. She held a glass in one hand and was in the act of laughing as she raised her other palm towards the chest of the tall man standing, also laughing, by her side. She was slim, compact and still seemed – even sitting, seemingly cornered, her back to the drop beyond the terrace edge – to dominate the company with a confident ease.