Transition

by Iain M. Banks

  Clearly, if left to their own devices such rampant egoists might misuse their skills and abilities to pursue their own agendas of self-glorification and self-aggrandisement. Such individuals need to be controlled, and to be controlled they need to be watched, and that is what trackers do: they spy on and help to police the transitioners. Trackers and transitionaries are as a result kept as far apart from each other as possible, to prevent them concocting their own little conspiracies or drawing up plans of benefit to them but not to l’Expédience and its aims.

  As a result, the general demeanour of the Transitionary Office, the University of Practical Talents, the Speditionary Faculty and the Concern itself – their own collective fragre, if you like – is one of some watchfulness, a degree of suspicion and outright paranoia, both unfounded and entirely justified. An entire Department – the Department of Shared Ideals – exists to attempt to ameliorate this unfortunate and – if only at a low level – debilitating effect and investigate further how it might be both treated and prevented.

  The Department’s success, however, might be fairly if sadly judged by the fact that the overwhelming preponderance of those it ventures to assist in the course of its duties are absolutely convinced that it is itself simply another part of the whole rigidly proscriptive controlling apparatus whose baleful influence it is supposedly there to mitigate.

  There is a smattering of other categories of skills, all of them essentially negative in their effects: blockers, who by their presence – usually they have to be touching – can prevent a transitioner from flitting; exorcisers, who can cast a transitioner out of their target mind; inhibitors, who can frustrate the abilities of the trackers; envisionaries, who can see – albeit indistinctly – into other realities without going there and randomisers, whose skills are almost too wayward to categorise fully but who can often adversely influence the abilities of other adepts around them. Randomisers are severely restricted in what they are allowed to do, where they are allowed to go and who they are permitted to meet – rumours exist to the effect that some of them are imprisoned for life or even disposed of.

  Transitioners, tandemisers, trackers, foreseers, blockers, exorcisers and the rest are in effect the front-line troops of l’Expédience (it does have proper troops too – the Speditionary Guard: rarely mobilised and never, in the thousand-year history of the Concern, yet used, thank Fate). They are outnumbered ten or more to one by the back-up grades of support staff who provide all the logistical and intelligence services they need and who plan, oversee, record and analyse their activities. Bureaucrats, basically, and as loved for their activities as bureaucrats everywhere.

  These days l’Expédience also has its own transitioneering research facilities – controversially as far as the UPT is concerned, its Speditionary Faculty believing that it ought to hold a monopoly regarding such matters. The Central Council has made noises about the wasteful duplication of effort involved but seems unwilling to act to resolve the issue, either because it believes the competition might be fruitful (plausible if unprovable), the redundancy a safety feature (safeguarding against what has never been made clear) or because it was Madame d’Ortolan’s idea in the first place and it provides her and the Central Council with the ability to pursue avenues of transitioneering research as they see fit without having to appeal to – and wait on the approval of – the notoriously staid and conservative Professors and other members of the Research Council Senate of the Speditionary Faculty itself.

  Adrian

  “Cubbish. Adrian Cubbish,” I told her. I grinned. “Call me AC.”

  “Why, are you cool?”

  I was impressed. Usually I have to make the AC/Air-Conditioning thing clear myself. This was a clever one. “Course I am, doll.”

  “Course you are,” she agreed, looking like she wasn’t sure she agreed, but still smiling. She was tall and blonde, though her face had a hint of Asian about it that made the tall blonde part look odd and meant it was hard to be sure how old she was. I’d have said about my age, but wouldn’t have wanted to swear to it. She wore a black suit and a pink blouse and carried herself like somebody who was even more of a stunner than she actually was, know what I mean? Confidence. I’ve always liked that.

  “So you’re Connie?”

  “Sequorin. Connie Sequorin. Pleased to meet you.”

  Sequorin sounded like Sequoia, which is those big trees in California, and she was tall. Or there was that CS gas they use in Northern Ireland. But I thought better of saying anything. Clever ones need careful handling and usually it’s better to say nothing and stay silent and mysterious than try to make jokes that probably won’t impress them. Probably heard it all before, anyway.

  “Good to meet you, Connie. Ed – Mr Noyce – said you wanted a word.”

  “Did he?” She looked a bit surprised. She glanced over to him. We were at the house-warming party for Ed’s new gaff, a loft conversion in Limehouse with views upriver. He’d sold the house on the coast in Lincolnshire after another bit of garden fell into the sea. Still got a tidy price from some Arab he vaguely knew who never even bothered to go and see it. Some sort of investment or tax dodge or whatever. The loft was tidy, all tall ceilings, white walls and black beams and timber walls on the outside like a yacht’s deck with stanchions and cables round the balconies. Small-fortune territory. The area was still getting gentrified, but you could smell the smart money moving in.

  This would have been mid-Nineties now, I suppose. I was working in Ed’s brokerage firm, which was a private company these days rather than a partnership. This made sound business sense according to the lawyers. The boy Barney had been living on a farm in Wales for the last year with some hippies or something but had recently turned up in Goa and was running a bar that his dad had helped him buy. Bit of a disappointment, really, but at least he’d tamed the coke habit, seemingly. I was almost clean myself, just took the occasional toot on special occasions and had stopped dealing entirely. Healthier.

  I’d clocked that the real currency involved in making money out of money is knowledge, info. The more people you knew involved in a business, and the more you knew of what they knew, the better informed you were and the better the judgements you could make about when to buy and when to sell. That was all there was to it, really, though that’s a bit like saying all there is to maths is numbers. Still enough complications involved to be going on with, thanks.

  “Mr Noyce speaks very highly of you,” Connie told me. Something about the way she said this made me think she wasn’t my age at all, but a lot older. Confusing.

  “Does he? That’s nice.” I moved round her a bit as though making room for somebody passing nearby, but really getting her to turn more fully into the light. No, she really did look quite young. “What do you do yourself, Connie?”

  “I’m a recruitment consultant.”

  I laughed. “You’re a headhunter?” I glanced over at Ed.

  “If you like.” She looked over at Mr N too. “Oh, I’m not trying to entice you away from Mr Noyce’s firm.”

  “You’re not?” I said. “That’s a pity, isn’t it?”

  “It is?” she asked. “You’re not happy there?” She had an accent that was hard to pin down. Maybe Middle European, but spent some time in the States.

  “Perfectly happy, Connie. Though Mr N and me think the same way.” I glanced over at him again. “He knows if I got a much better offer from somebody else I’d be a fool not to take it.” I looked back at her. I did that glance thing, where you sort of flick your gaze over a woman, certainly as far as their tits if not their waist. Too quick to really take in anything you haven’t already seen through peripheral vision, but enough to let them know you’re, what’s the best way of putting it, alive to their charms, shall we say, without actually ogling them like a classless wanker, know what I mean? “No, I just meant we could all do with a bit of enticement now and again, don’t you think, Connie?”

  I should explain that Lysanne was history by now. The ba
rmy Scouse bint had stormed out once too often and I’d changed the locks on her. She was back in Liverpool running a tanning salon. I was playing the field, as they say, which meant I was seeing a few girls at a time on my terms. Plenty of sex, no commitments. Fucking Holy Grail, isn’t it?

  She smiled. “Well then, maybe I can entice you to meet a client of mine.” She handed me a card.

  “What’s it in connection with?”

  “They would have to explain that themselves.” She glanced at her watch. “I have to go.” She reached out and touched my arm. “It was good to meet you, Adrian. Call me.”

  And off she fucked.

  I asked Mr N.

  “Some people that I know, Adrian,” he told me. He was standing under a really bright light, his white-sand hair shining like a halo. “They’ve been helpful to me in the past. I’m on a consultancy for them. I hold myself ready to help them if and when they need it. They rarely do, apart from some very trivial matters. Frankly, so far I’ve been able to hand everything over to my secretary to deal with.” He smiled.

  I frowned. “What sort of people, Ed?”

  “People it’s very useful and lucrative to know, Adrian,” he said patiently.

  “They Italian?” I asked. “Or American? Or Italian-American?” I was already thinking Mafia or CIA or something.

  He laughed lightly. “Oh, I don’t think so.”

  “Do you know so?”

  “I know they’ve been very helpful and generous and have asked for next to nothing in return. I’m quite certain they’re not criminals or a threat to the state or anything. Have they asked you to talk to them?”

  “I’ve to call Connie.”

  “Well, perhaps you should.” There was a minor fuss at the door. Ed glanced over. “Ah, the minister, fresh off Channel Four News. Excuse me, Adrian.” He went over to greet him.

  I think I was supposed to think about it but I called her moby right then.

  “Hello?”

  “Connie, Adrian. We were just talking.”

  “Of course.”

  “All right, I’ll see your client. When’s good?”

  “Well, possibly this Saturday, if that’s good for you.”

  “Yeah, all right.”

  There was a slight hesitation. “You have the whole day free?”

  “Could do. Would I need it?”

  “Pretty much, yes. And your passport.”

  I thought about this. I had a date on Saturday night with a girl who owned a lingerie shop in deepest Chelsea. A proper Sloan. And a lingerie shop. I mean, fuck. I watched Mr N glad-handing the Minister for Transport. “Yeah, why not?” I said. “Okay.”

  “Let me call you back.”

  Which was how I found myself at a cold, rainy Retford airport in Essex two days later on the Saturday morning and then in a proper executive jet heading out across the Channel, pointing due east as far as I could tell. Connie had met me at the airport, dressed the same apart from a purple blouse, but she wasn’t saying where we were heading. She had a bundle of newspapers with her and seemed determined to read them all, even the foreign-language ones, and didn’t want to talk. After I stopped checking out the luxury fittings I started to get bored so I had to read too.

  I’d dozed off. I only woke when we touched down, the plane slowing along a bumpy runway with a lot of weeds at the edges. Flat country with lots of bare trees which looked like they were ready for winter a bit early. I checked my watch. Four hours in the air. Where the fuck were we?

  The place looked deserted. There was a passenger terminal in the distance but it looked run-down and abandoned, concrete all stained. A couple of big dark hangars even further away, streaked with rust. The air here was a bit less chilly than in Essex and smelled of grass or trees or something. No Customs or other officials about, just a big military-looking tanker truck – which started refuelling the plane immediately – and a long black saloon. Both the vehicles looked Eastern European to me and the two guys dealing with the fuelling sounded Russian or something, not that I got much of a chance to listen to them as we were shown straight into the limo and it tore off across the runway and out through a half-collapsed boundary fence in a cloud of dust.

  “So, where are we, Connie?”

  “You have to guess,” she told me, not looking up from the newspaper she’d brought from the plane.

  “I give in. Where the hell are we?” I put just a little edge into my voice.

  “Set your watch forward two hours,” she told me.

  “Seriously,” I said.

  “Seriously,” she said, nodding at my wrist. “Two hours.”

  I gave her a look but she wasn’t paying attention. I left my watch alone. I checked my mobile. No reception. Not even emergency numbers. Fucking marvellous.

  There was a partition between us and the driver. He looked old. Worn-looking uniform, open shirt, no cap. Connie lifted up what looked like one of those very early mobile phones with a separate handset and looked at a dial on its top surface. Then she put it back on the floor of the limo and went back to the newspaper.

  We sped down this weedy highway. No other traffic at all. There was what looked like a big town or a small city off to one side. We turned towards it, hurtling along a four-lane road still with no other traffic. The buildings looked pale, blocky, very Fifties or Sixties and all the same. I caught a glimpse of what might have been a helicopter, low over the horizon.

  It was a bit stuffy in the car. There was a big chrome rocker switch by the window that looked like it might lower the glass. I tried pressing it. Didn’t work.

  “Don’t bother,” Connie said. She clicked another switch on her side and spoke to the driver via a grille I’d thought was for ventilation. Again, sounded like Russian. The driver’s voice crackled back at her and I could see him gesticulating as he looked at us in his rear-view mirror. The car wove from side to side a bit as he did this, which would have been even more alarming than it was if there had been anything else on the road.

  Connie shrugged. “The air-conditioning is not working,” she told me, and went back to her paper. “The filters are okay.”

  “Window on your side work?”

  “No,” she said, not looking up from her paper.

  I bent forward, studying the sun roof.

  “I wouldn’t bother,” she said.

  I looked out at the deserted city whistling past. Long tall lines of identical apartment blocks, all abandoned.

  “Connie, where are we?”

  She looked over the paper at me. She said nothing.

  “Is this fucking Chernobyl?” I asked her.

  “Pripyat,” she said, and started reading again.

  I reached over and pushed the front of her paper down. She glared at my hand holding the newspaper.

  “What-eh-at?”

  “Pripyat,” she said. She nodded. “The city near Chernobyl.”

  “What the fuck are you doing bringing me here?” I actually felt quite angry. No wonder we couldn’t open the windows to all that dusty air. The big mobile-phone whatsit would be a Geiger counter, I guessed.

  “It’s where my client would like to see you.”

  “Why?”

  “They have their reasons, I’m sure,” she said smoothly.

  “Is it one of these fucking oligarchs or something?”

  Connie appeared to think about this. “No,” she said.

  We came up to a big shed of a building that looked like it had been a supermarket once. A wide metal door rolled part-way up and the car drove straight in. We got out inside this brightly lit loading area that held a couple of other cars and a small military-looking truck with big wheels and lots of ground clearance. The air was cool. A couple of very large bald guys in shiny suits greeted us with nods and walked us up some steps, through a couple of those transparent plastic-curtain doorways. Between the two plastic curtains there was a bit with a big circular grating in the ceiling and another in the floor. A blast of air was roaring out of the over
head grating and down into the one beneath our feet. Then we went down a hushed, wood-panelled, soft-carpeted corridor to a door which opened with a sucking noise. There was a very big plush office inside, all bright lights and potted plants and desks and comfy leather sofas. One whole wall was a giant photo of a tropical beach with palm trees, shining sand and blue sky and ocean.

  A very pretty round-faced girl with a bit too much make-up smiled from behind a desk with a couple of computer monitors and said something in Russian or whatever. Connie fired something back and we sat down on two of the plush leather couches, facing each other across a glass table covered in the sort of magazines you only seem to see in posh hotel rooms.

  Before I had time to get bored there was a buzzing noise from the receptionist’s desk. She said something to Connie, who nodded at the wall of beach photo. There was a door in it that had been concealed until now. It was opening, all by itself.

  “Mrs Mulverhill will see you now,” she told me.

  (Ensemble)

  A man bursts into a book-lined room. On a chaise longue, there’s an old man lying underneath a younger woman. They both look groggy and confused, lying/kneeling on the chaise. The man who has just burst in hesitates because the old man looks like the person he is supposed to kill, but he seems vacant, like a husk or something, and when the old guy’s gaze meets his – the man who has just broken into his private study and caught him mostly naked in flagrante with his mistress – the old fellow doesn’t seem outraged, ashamed or embarrassed. He just stares up, blinking, at the younger man, and looks confused. The young woman straddling the older man is staring, fascinated but unconcerned, at the gun he is holding. The younger man remembers what he is supposed to be doing and shoots them both in the head, twice.