Transition

by Iain M. Banks

  They found the woman sitting against a tree just off the hill path. She was humming and making little chains of flowers. Three of them held her while the fourth garrotted her. She offered no resistance and they knew something was wrong. There followed some debate regarding how much they ought to tell the people who had hired them.

  The body washed up on the beach near Chandax was patently still smiling, despite having been nibbled by various aquatic fauna. A small crowd was gathering on the morning-cool sand. A man standing at the back looked at the expression on the body and frowned. He’d known it had been too easy, on the yacht, the night before. He thought about lying to his superiors.

  The woman who’d sunk a razor-chisel between two of the Graf’s vertebrae conscientiously reported that her target had stopped humming along with the aria a moment or two before she’d struck, though she was adamant that she had been so silent – and so mindful as she’d entered the box of give-away drafts, not to mention careful of where her shadow might fall and her reflections might lie – that he could not possibly have realised she was there.

  It was agreed that the admiral had been staring ahead rather blankly in the instant before she was shot, despite the fact her lover had just been cruelly cut down in front of her. Under pressure, the team agreed that perhaps the admiral had been transitioned just before her death. Under further pressure, they agreed to consider the possibility that so had the Commandante.

  The assassination teams still could find no trace of Mrs Mulverhill.

  The Transitionary

  I set some chips down on a green square, changed my mind and pushed them over to blue. I sat back as the last few gamblers placed their own bets and the croupier looked expectantly, impatiently around. He announced “No more bets” and spun the wheel. It whirled, glittering, forever if banally like a Ferris wheel from a funfair.

  Through its whirring gilt spokes I saw the woman approaching the table. The ball inside the wheel clacked and rattled around the vertical spinning cage of spokes, battering off the blurred edges like a fly trapped in a bottle. The woman – girl? – moved with an easy, swinging step, almost like a dance. She was very tall and slim, dressed in flowing grey, and wore a small hat with an attached grey veil. I thought of Mrs Mulverhill immediately, though the woman was too tall and seemed to move differently. Not that that meant anything at all, of course. Veils were just about still common enough at the time for her not to look out of place wearing one, though she still attracted some looks.

  It was spring here in the southern hemisphere of Calbefraques. Perhaps five years had passed since that night in Venice when my little pirate captain had tried to talk to me and had died for it. I had been asked – perhaps twice a year at first, later once a year or so – by my Concern superiors if any other attempt had been made to recruit me to whatever paranoid cause Mrs Mulverhill espoused. I had been able to answer honestly that no, neither she nor anybody else had tried to do so.

  I had by now become a trusted agent of the Concern, spending a slim majority of my time in other worlds, doing whatever was asked of me. It was mostly the very banal stuff: the delivering of objects, the couriering of people (not that I was especially good at that), the pointed conversations, the leaving of pamphlets or computer files, the tiny, usually mundane interventions made in a hundred different lives.

  I had since made only one other intervention as dramatically salvationary as the one with the young doctor in the street, when the building fell down; I was sent to one of the topmost floors of a tall building in a Manhattan, to buttonhole a young man who was about to step into a lift. He was a physicist and the world was a fairly laggard reality so engaging him in a conversation featuring an idea or two that he – and anybody else there, for that matter – had never heard of was not difficult. This stopped him from entering the lift, which promptly plunged twenty storeys and killed everyone aboard.

  There were two other occasions when I was asked to take rather more violent action, once in a sword fight in a sort of unevenly early Victorian Greater Indonesian reality (leaping in to defend a great poet and hack off the limbs of a couple of his attackers) and once when I transitioned straight into the mind of a very brilliant, very handsome but very headstrong young chemist who had made powerful enemies in a Zimbabwean United Africa. I became him for just the few seconds required to turn, aim and fire his duelling pistol – blowing his much more experienced opponent’s brains out – before exiting again.

  My handlers were most impressed. I got the impression that ever since the affair in the Venetian bar they had had me marked out as a natural thug. I did ask not to have to do too much of that kind of blood-sport stuff in future, but I was also quietly proud to have acquitted myself so well. Still, every now and again I was asked, and I obliged.

  Meanwhile, I had been learning. I knew more about the history and organisation of the Concern now and had studied it the way it studied other worlds.

  Mrs Mulverhill, I’d learned – through rumour rather than any official channel – was the latest of the very small number of Concern officers who had gone bad, mad or native over the centuries. She had somehow evaded the network of spotters and trackers and foreseers who were supposed to guard against this sort of thing and might even have had her own supply of septus, the transitioning drug, though this probably just indicated that she had access to a stockpile she’d somehow built up while still in the fold, as it were, rather than a way of making it from scratch.

  She was regarded as a strange, remote, almost mythical figure, and – given her patent irrelevance and powerlessness – one to be pitied rather than reviled, though of course one was supposed to report immediately any contact with anybody who might be operating in a manner similar to that of l’Expédience but who was doing so outwith its control and oversight, and that would certainly cover her and her behaviour. I was, in any case, still not sure my little pirate captain really had been her.

  The woman in grey in the Flesse casino came up to the table and stood watching the play. The ball clicked and clacked inside the slowing wheel and settled into its trap when the wheel finally swung to a stop. Gold. I comforted myself that my first instinct – putting the chips on green – had been no more prescient than my later change of mind favouring blue.

  The game went on. She refused a seat when one came free. I tried to see her face but the grey veil hid it effectively. She turned and left ten minutes later, disappearing into the crowd.

  I lost fairly steadily, then won moderately and finished a fraction down over the evening.

  I tested the air in the outside bar, on the terrace under the trees by the side of the river, the town centre a buzz of music and traffic under the lights on the far side. It was warm enough under the hissing table heaters. I had met some people I knew and sat with them for a drink. The grey-veiled woman was standing by the stone wall a couple of tables away, looking out over the river.

  At one point, I was fairly sure, she turned and looked at me as I talked with my friends. Then she turned slowly away again.

  I excused myself and went up to her. “Excuse me,” I said.

  She looked at me. She put the veil up over the front of the little hat. It was a pleasant, unremarkable face. “Sir?”

  “Temudjin Oh,” I said. “Pleased to meet you.” I put out my hand. She took it in one grey-gloved hand.

  “And I am pleased to meet you.”

  I hesitated, waiting on a name, then said, “Would you care to join me and my friends?”

  She looked over at our table. “Thank you.”

  Much talk, all very congenial. She said her name was Joll and that she was a civilian, not part of the Concern, an architect making a submission to the local authorities in the town in a couple of days.

  The evening drifted on, people drifted away.

  Finally only we two were left. We had got on terribly well and shared a bottle of wine. I invited her to see the town from my house on the ridge and she accepted with a smile.

  S
he stood on the terrace of the house, gazing at the lights. I put my hand on the smooth grey surface covering the small of her back and she turned to me, setting her drink down on the balustrade and removing her hat and veil entirely.

  We repaired to bed, with the lights out at her request. We had fucked once and she was still holding me in her arms and inside her when she took me.

  Suddenly, I was sitting at the corner of another gaming table in a different casino. She was in the next chair, just round the corner of the table from me so that we could talk easily. The game was under way; the wheel in this version was horizontal, sunk into the table’s surface. It was spun by what looked like the top of a giant golden tap. The only colours on the table appeared to be red and black, though the baize was green.

  “Hmm,” I said. My companion was looking much more glamorous and more heavily made-up than she had been, though the face was not dissimilar. Better cheekbones, maybe. Her hair was blonde where she had been auburn. She wore a lot of jewellery. I appeared to be heavier than I was used to being. Nice black suit, though. I went to smooth my hair down and discovered I didn’t have any. There was a polished cigarette case lying by my ice-filled drinks glass, and an ashtray. That would account for the gurgling feeling in my chest when I breathed, and the slight but insistent craving for tobacco. I looked at myself in the reflective metal of the cigarette case. Not a prepossessing figure of a man. My languages were French, Arabic, English, German, Hindi, Portuguese and Latin. A smattering of Greek. “This is, ah, interesting,” I told her.

  “Best I could do,” she said.

  “You did say you were a civilian,” I reminded her, a little reproachfully.

  She flashed me a look. “So: a lie, then.”

  The last time somebody else had couriered me, taking me on a transition I was not controlling, had been back in UPT, when I was still being trained. That had been over ten years earlier. What she had just done was impolite at least, though I suspected this was beside the point.

  “Have we met before?” I asked. It was time to place bets. We had some plastic chips in front of us; she had more than me. We both chose nearby numbers.

  “Most recently, here,” she said quietly. “This world, or as good as. Venezia, Italia. Five years ago. We discussed restrictions on power and the penalties associated with trying to evade them.”

  “Ah. Yes. That didn’t end too well for you, really, did it?”

  “Have you been shot yet, Tem?”

  I looked at her. “Yet?”

  “Hurts,” she said. “The way the shock of it spreads through your body from the point of impact. Waves in a fluid. Fascinating.” Her eyes narrowed fractionally as she watched the horizontal wheel spin, its centre glittering. “But painful.”

  I looked round some more. The casino was gaudy, over-lit, expensively tasteless and full of mostly slim and beautiful women accompanying mostly fat and ugly men. The fragre was not so much of too much money as of too intense a degree of concentration of it in too few places. It’s not uncommon. I’d thought I’d recognised it.

  “Can you remember your very last words?” I asked. “From that earlier occasion?”

  “What?” she said, brows furrowing attractively. “You want to check it’s really me?”

  “Really who?”

  “I never said.”

  “So say now.”

  She leaned right in to me, as though sharing some intimacy. Her perfume was intense, musk-like. “Unless I’m much mistaken, I said, ‘Some other time, Tem.’ Or, ‘Another time, Tem’; something like that.”

  “You’re not sure?”

  She frowned. “I was in the process of dying in your arms at the time. Perhaps you didn’t notice? Anyway, hence I was a little distracted. However, the interception team might have heard me use those words. More to the point, before my violent but dashing end, I used the term ‘emprise.’ Only you heard that.”

  Which was true, I recalled, though I had told the debriefing team from the Questionary Office this fact as well, so that didn’t really prove anything either.

  “And so you are…?”

  “Mrs Mulverhill.” She nodded forward as we were asked to bet again. I hadn’t even noticed we’d lost the last gamble. “Good to see you again,” she added. “Had you guessed?”

  “Soon as I saw you coming.”

  “Really? How sweet.” She glanced at a thin, glittering watch on her honey-tanned wrist. “Anyway, we don’t have for ever. You must be wondering why I’m so keen to talk to you again.”

  “Not just the sex, then.”

  “Wonderful though it was, obviously.”

  “Uh-huh. Consider any latent male insecurity dealt with. Carry on.”

  “Briefly, Madame Theodora d’Ortolan is a threat to more than just the good name and reputation of the Concern. She, with her several accomplices on the Central Council of the Transitionary Office, will lead us all to disaster and ruin. She is a threat to the very existence of l’Expédience, or, even worse, if she is not, and instead represents all that it most truly stands for, proves beyond any doubt, reasonable or otherwise, by her past actions and present intentions that l’Expédience itself is a force for evil that must be resisted, contended with, brought down and, if it’s possible, replaced. But in any case reduced, entirely levelled, regardless of what may or may not come after it. In addition, there may well be a secret agenda known only to the Central Council, and perhaps not even to all on it, which we – or, at least, you and your colleagues, given that I am not one of you any longer – are unwittingly helping to carry out. This secret agenda has to stay secret because it is something that people would reject utterly, perhaps violently, if they knew about it.”

  I thought about this. “Is that all?”

  “It’s enough to be going on with, wouldn’t you say?”

  “I was being sarcastic.”

  “I know. I was seeing your sarcasm and raising you deadpan literalness.” She nodded forward. “Time to bet again.” We both placed more chips.

  “Have you any proof of any of this?”

  “None you’d accept. Nothing that would convince you empirically.”

  I turned to her. “And what was it that convinced you, Mrs M? One instant you’re a lecturer; bit truculent, bit misfit, but a star of common room and lecture hall and marked for greatness, according to the rumours; the next you’re some sort of bandit queen. An outlaw. Wanted everywhere.”

  “Wanted everywhere,” she agreed beneath a flexed brow. “Unwelcome throughout.”

  “So what happened?”

  She hesitated, gaze flicking restlessly across the table for a few moments. “You really want to know?”

  “Well, I thought I did. Why? Am I going to regret asking?”

  Another uncharacteristic hesitation. She sighed, tossed a chip to a nearby square on the table and sat back. I placed some chips on another part of the table. She kept looking at the table while she talked quietly. I had to sit closer to hear her, hunched over the giant ball that was my borrowed belly. “There is a facility at a place called Esemier,” she said. “I was never privileged with the exact world coordinates, I was always tandemed there by somebody with impeccable security clearance. It’s on a large island covered in trees on a big lake or inland freshwater sea. Wherever it is, it’s where Madame d’Ortolan used to carry out research and test some of her theories, especially on those transitioners with an abnormal twist to their talents. Both the official line and what you might call the top layer of rumour have it that it’s gone now, the remaining research decentralised, distributed, but Esemier is where the important programmes started. Maybe where they’re still going on. One day I might go back there, find out.”

  “I’ve never heard of it.”

  “That would please her.”

  “Go on.”

  “As you say, I was seen as promising; a future high-flyer. Madame d’Ortolan likes to have such people on her side, or at least brought before her so that she can test them; evaluate th
em while they think they’re the ones doing the evaluating. I was invited to take part in a programme investigating – amongst other things – the possibility of involuntary transitioning; the theoretical possibility that changes in the structure of an adept’s mind might let them flit without septus, or at least without a specific pre-enabling dose.”

  “I thought that was completely impossible.”

  “Well, quite, and if you ever ascend to the clearance levels that allow you access to the results of the research I’m talking about you’ll learn it was this programme that’s credited with determining that.”

  “And did it?”

  “After a fashion. It was more thorough and wide-ranging than just that, though. The full programme was aimed at establishing what randomisers were capable of, removing the myths and superstitions associated with their weird-shit powers and giving the field a proper scientific grounding, but septus-free transitioning was the pinnacle, the platinum-standard goal we were never likely to achieve but should never quite lose sight of, either.”

  “What did it involve?”

  “Torture,” she said, fixing her gaze on me for a moment. “In time, it involved torture.” She looked back at the gaming table as the chips we’d placed were raked away. She reached out, placed another on the same square. I placed some of mine nearby. “The randomisers ranged from the cretinous through the educationally subnormal and the socially awkward to the odd disturbed genius. Initially it was harmless. We were convinced we were helping these misfit people. And it was fascinating, enthralling; it was a privilege to be spending a vacation researching something that was almost certainly impossible but which would be simply astounding if it proved to be a viable technique, the sort of breakthrough that resounds across the many worlds and down the centuries, the kind of achievement that means your name is known for evermore. Even if it proved to be an entirely mythical talent – as we suspected – we were finding out lots of stuff. It was the single most exciting time of my life. When the autumn came and I was supposed to resume work at UPT, I volunteered to take a year’s special leave so that I could stay on at the facility and keep working on the problem. Madame d’O herself smoothed away any problems the faculty might have offered. For most people, that was when I disappeared.” She looked at me. “I’m sorry I never did say goodbye to you, not properly. I thought I would see you at the start of the new term, then… well, I’m sorry.” She looked away again.