Transition

by Iain M. Banks

  Quite. I had no intention of telling her how much I had missed her throughout all these years, or that I had felt, at the time, as though my heart had been broken, or that I became a different person thereafter, and became so specifically because of that abrupt abandonment, turning from a prospective career in academia or research to the training required to become a transitionary, an operative, an agent; eventually, an assassin. It would only have sounded maudlin, and what good would it have done?

  “I think,” she continued, “Theodora mistook my fascination with the theoretical side of the research for outright zeal, a shared passion.” She glanced at me and a smile, soon gone, flickered across her face. She stared at the chip on the table again. It was scraped away too and she replaced it with another.

  “It was during that year, after the people who’d just been there for the vacation had gone back to their studies, that we started to make real progress. Just the hard core were left. We had our own septus techs on the staff, seconded from wherever they actually formulate the stuff; experts in its manufacture, use and side effects. That was a privilege in itself; you never get to meet these people. Did you know there are trace elements put into septus to make transitioners easier to track?” She glanced at me, long enough to see my eyes widen. “Trackers would have a much more difficult job if those trace elements weren’t present. They would have to rely on something like pure instinct. As it is, with the elements there in every standard dose of septus, it’s as though they see a puff of smoke left behind where somebody has just transitioned, and can follow a faint line of that discharge to the next embodiment.”

  “Seriously?” I asked.

  “Absolutely seriously.” Mrs Mulverhill nodded slowly, still staring at the gaming table. “And Madame d’Ortolan was absolutely serious about what we were doing, too. She spent a lot of time at the facility, directing our research, guiding our enquiries, even helping to refine some of the abstract, speculative stuff. I spent a few evenings doing nothing but talk with her about transitioning theory. She has quite a fine mind, for a psychopath. At the time, I didn’t know that was possible. However, she was… overenthusiastic. Wanting what she did so much, she took risks, cut corners, overextended herself. She let transitioners and trackers and septus chemists get together properly for the first time in centuries, and some of us learned things we were never supposed to know.”

  “Like the trace-elements thing.”

  “Like the trace-elements thing.” She nodded again. “I think she assumed my hunger to know was directed solely at the problem in hand: finding out what the randomisers were really capable of and grasping after septus-free flitting. I don’t think it occurred to her that I might just have a general urge to find out all I could about everything, especially whatever was being kept purposefully hidden.”

  More of our chips had disappeared. Some people left the table, to be replaced by others. Mrs M put another chip on the same square. I placed mine on the square next to hers. “The randomisers were troublesome. Socially inept, highly neurotic, riddled with problems and often medically challenged. Continence seemed to be a particular problem. It was possible to grow to despise them, certainly to dismiss them, to forget their humanity. One began to feel that they kept their secrets locked away inside them deliberately, just to spite us. We were encouraged never to fraternise, to treat them as experimental subjects, in the name of objectivity. They were broken, mostly useless people; a threat to themselves as well as society. We were doing them a favour, almost ennobling them, by containing their awkward, undisciplined powers and giving them a purpose, making them a part of a programme which would benefit everybody.

  “We began to stress them. It was quite easy to do. They were like uncooperative children: wilful, perverse, often knowingly obstructive, sometimes aggressive. Stressing them – severely rationing their food and water, depriving them of sleep, giving them impossible puzzles while they were forced to listen to painfully intense noise – felt like a necessary discipline, like a sort of small collateral punishment they had already asked for, yet at the same time it seemed perfectly excusable because it was for research, for science, for progress and the good of all, and we weren’t enjoying it; in fact we suffered maybe as much as they did because we knew more fully what we were doing. They were something like brutes while we were properly functioning human beings: educated, cultured, sensitive. Only the best could be asked to do the worst, as Madame d’Ortolan liked to say.

  “When I went to Theodora with some misgivings, after watching what was basically a torture session when a man strapped to a bed was injected with a mixture of psychotropic drugs and corrosive chemicals, she told me about the menace we were all facing. She’d convinced herself that the Concern and every world it could reach was under some terrible threat from outside, that there was some diabolic force forever pressing at its boundaries – wherever they were supposed to be – and we had to prepare ourselves for onslaught. I pressed as much as I thought I could get away with to get her to be more specific, but whether she was talking about a sort of anti-Concern, some equally worlds-spanning shadow organisation opposed to everything we tried to do, or was hinting at space aliens or supernatural demons from unglimpsed dimensions it was impossible to tell. All that mattered was that it – they – posed an unmitigated and existential threat to the Concern. In that cause, nothing was too great a sacrifice and no action was inexcusable. Our inescapable duty and solemn obligation was to explore without stint absolutely everything that might help us prevail when our time of testing came, entirely regardless of any petty and irrelevant qualms we might feel. We could not afford to indulge our own squeamishness; we had to be brave.

  “She talked to me for a long time. During that hour or so I calmed down, I relaxed a little and I realised that I no longer felt quite so distressed. I accepted a handkerchief from her and dried my tears, I took a few deep breaths, I nodded at what she said, I clutched at her hand when she offered it to me and I hugged her when that seemed like the right thing to do. I thanked her for listening and for suggesting that I take the rest of the day off, which I did. I did all this and I felt relieved in that way because I’d realised she was mad and that soon this would all be over, or at least my part in it would soon be over, because I had to get away from that place for my own sanity, my own peace of mind, and if, as I suspected, Madame d’Ortolan would rather have had me imprisoned or even killed than let me go from there while I might be harbouring any doubts about what was being done, then at least making the attempt would bring an end to it one way or the other. It hadn’t occurred to me that she was more likely to turn me from one of the investigating to one of the investigated. If she’d caught me I’d have been the one in the padded cell or the strap-down bed. I heard that happened to a couple of other dissenters, later.”

  Our chips were removed. Mrs M leant forward to replace hers with another, almost colliding with the retreating rake removing the previous one. She hesitated, then she nodded at our two piles of chips. “Shall we put them together?”

  “You have more to lose,” I pointed out.

  “Even so.”

  “Then, certainly.” I used my hand as a blade, pushing my small pile into hers. She took all our remaining chips and stacked them onto the square she had been favouring.

  “Theodora had miscalculated,” she continued. “I knew people. I’d made friends with some of the trackers and the septus chemists, taken a few as lovers. Some of them had misgivings too. Some just needed somebody to talk to. Some only wanted sex. When I left, very suddenly and without warning – despite the fact that Theodora was having me watched by a team of spotters and trackers brought in specially, immediately after our talk – it was without a trace, without the traditional puff of smoke, and with a plastic drum the size of my head containing a supply of untraceable septus in micropill form that will last me into my dotage, or until Theodora finally captures me or has me killed. I even have enough to share around, Tem,” she told me, glancing at me. “I
am a bandit queen with a following these days. I have my own small band of outlaws. Care to join?”

  I sat back, took a deep breath, put a hand to my bald head and smoothed my hand over my naked scalp. “What would I be supposed to do?”

  “Nothing direct yet. Just keep what I’ve said in mind. Keep your eyes and ears open and, when you’re asked to jump, jump the right way.”

  “Is that all? You could have sent a note.”

  “You’ll remember tonight, Tem,” she said, with a wintry smile. “I’ve risked a lot to come and see you like this. That… emprise is a signifier of both my seriousness and that of the situation.”

  “And why me, anyway?”

  “You’re Theodora’s golden boy, aren’t you?”

  “Am I?”

  “Have you had to fuck her yet?”

  “No, I haven’t.”

  “Astonishing. She must actually like you.”

  “So why do you think I would act against her?”

  “Because I know that she’s an evil old fuck and I hope that you’re not.”

  “What if you’re wrong?”

  “And you’re an evil old fuck too?”

  “I meant about her; but either.”

  “Then we are lost. Because I am not wrong about her.”

  “Hmm?” I said in response to somebody nudging my elbow. I looked round and saw a substantial pile of chips being pushed up the table towards us like an untidily clacking wave of gleaming plastic.

  “Isn’t that just the way?” she breathed, and swung herself onto my lap, draped herself over my paunch, threw her arms around me and in the midst of a deep kiss, with her legs wrapping around mine under the table, we transitioned back to the dark bedroom of my house just in time for her to slip off me and me out of her.

  She placed a single straight finger across my lips and then rose, dressed and left.

  She had left two tiny pills on my bedside cabinet. They were exactly like septus micropills except that each had an almost invisibly small red dot, rather than the standard blue one, centred on the top surface.

  The Philosopher

  I met GF in the doctor’s surgery. GF were her initials as well as being what she was. She was one year below me in school. I had seen her a few times in town, at bus stops and in the library. She was tall and skinny and had thin brown hair. She always walked with her head down and shoulders hunched as though she felt she was too tall or was always looking for something on the ground. She wore braces and cheap glasses and always dressed in long dark dresses and long-sleeved tops even on hot days. Often she wore a sort of shapeless hat which looked like it had been pulled down hard over her ears. Her face and nose were both elongated. Her eyes looked quite big until she took her glasses off.

  I had left school that spring and was in a training college. Even though I was now a young man I didn’t know how to approach girls so I followed her home from the surgery and got up very early the next morning so that I could be waiting at her bus stop when she got the school bus. When she arrived at the bus stop I said hello and left it at that, burying my face in my newspaper. I had intended to engage her in conversation but decided that it would be better to take things more gradually. Two other girls in school uniform turned up but they didn’t talk to her. The bus came and they got on. I couldn’t, of course, because it was a school bus and I wasn’t in school any more.

  The next two days were the weekend and I hung around places in town where I’d seen her before but she didn’t show up. At the start of the next week I went back to her bus stop. This time I smiled and said hello and attempted to engage her in conversation but she was very quiet and looked embarrassed. When the other two girls appeared she stopped talking altogether and stood at the far end of the bus shelter. The other two girls looked at me strangely. I took the next ordinary bus that came along even though it wasn’t the one I needed.

  I returned the next day, undaunted. I spoke to her again. She wore sunglasses even though it was a dull day. I thought perhaps she imagined that I would not recognise her, though this was wrong. The other two girls huddled together and glanced at her and giggled and sniggered. One of them asked if she had walked into a door and she ran away in the direction of her home and appeared to be crying. She missed the school bus, which the two girls boarded.

  She had left her school bag behind. I looked in it and found school books, pencils and pens and a girl’s magazine as well as some sweets. Something rattled inside her pencil sharpener, which was of the type that comes contained in its own cylindrical waste-shavings bin. I unscrewed it and discovered four spare blades for the sharpener, though no small screwdriver with which to facilitate the replacement of one blade by another. Two of the spare blades had what looked like dried blood on them. I kept one and replaced everything else as it had been, save for a Sugar Cherry, which I ate.

  I remained, awaiting my own bus, and she reappeared. I said hello again and handed her the school bag and asked if she was all right. She muttered something and nodded. She got on the same bus as me but sat elsewhere.

  The next day she still wore the dark glasses. She stood in the bus stop and stared at me, though she ignored my attempts at polite conversation. When the two other girls appeared – to be joined later by another – she ignored them too. When the school bus came she ignored that also. The driver shrugged and drove off. When my bus came she got on it with me and asked to sit beside me. I of course said yes, and was happy at this unexpected turn of events. I was beside the window, she was by the aisle.

  When the bus was moving she turned to me and hissed, “Where’s my other blade? What have you done with it? Where is it?”

  I was sitting so close to her and the light fell in such a way that I could see that behind the dark glasses she had bruises around her eyes and the top of her nose.

  I had meant to study the blade that I had removed from the pencil sharpener, perhaps using an old microscope I knew I still had at the back of a cupboard. However, there had hardly been time. It had been a busy day at the college yesterday. I had forgotten about an exam – which was not like me – and I had been involved in a fist fight with another boy. This was also not a common occurrence, certainly not since mum had left and I’d renounced her idiotic sect and taken up the True Faith. The tiny blade had slipped my mind until that morning. I’d looked at it while walking to the bus stop but this had revealed nothing.

  Initially I denied all knowledge of what she was talking about, but she was adamant that the blade had been present before she had left the house the morning before, and she knew that I must have looked in the bag when she had left it behind and removed the blade. She accused me of stealing a Sugar Cherry, too. I remember that I started to panic, realising that she did indeed know what had happened and that I was guilty, but then a strange calmness seemed to descend on me and I thought about what I could say that would be convincing and yet leave me relatively blameless in her eyes. I told her that now I remembered; the two girls had looked inside her bag and had been messing around with the stuff inside for a while and one of them must have removed it then. They had found a dead mouse in the bus shelter and put it in her bag but when they had gone on their bus I had taken the dead mouse out again, though I hadn’t wanted to say anything because I felt bad about looking inside her bag even if it was just to search for the mouse and remove it. The girls must have taken the sweet, too; I didn’t even like Sugar Cherries.

  She frowned, and the bruised skin above her nose trembled. I knew then that I had convinced her, and I felt a sense of great relief and victory. I was especially pleased with the bit about the mouse.

  “It was one of them?” she asked, still sounding suspicious.

  I nodded.

  “Which one?”

  I said I didn’t know. I hadn’t actually seen either of the girls take anything from her bag, but nobody else had touched it so it had to be them. She appeared to accept this.

  I introduced myself. She told me her name too. Her initials
were GF. I pointed out that if she was somebody’s girlfriend then she had the right initials, and she seemed amused at this, though she did not actually laugh. When she smiled she would always put her hand to her mouth to hide her braces and teeth.

  I threw the tiny sharpener blade down a drain outside the college.

  I started to meet her after school, at a café. I told her jokes and amusing things that had happened at the college. She talked of pop stars and other celebrities and sometimes we listened to the music she liked, sharing one earphone each. She had no brothers or sisters and her mother was dead so she lived alone with her father. I told her she was lucky to have no annoying siblings but she did not seem to share this view. It was very hard to get her to talk about her father or her life at home at all.

  GF first let me kiss her at a bus stop while she waited for a bus back home. Her braces proved less of an encumbrance than I’d anticipated, though it still felt odd. We went to a dance for young people at the town Youth Club and danced very close throughout the closing songs of the evening. I think she could feel my erection through our clothes but far from holding back, as I’d feared, she pressed herself amorously against me. Later, in a shop doorway, we kissed very passionately, and I was allowed to put my hand up her blouse to feel her bra and breasts.

  One day on a weekend she came to my house when my family were away visiting a dying relation. I had been expected to go as well but I’d claimed I was supposed to go on Work Experience that day. She brought a quarter-bottle of spirits with her and we got a little drunk. She had also brought some of her music and so we danced in my parents’ lounge, which felt odd. This time when we danced and kissed she let me undo her bra inside her blouse and put my hands on her behind through her long skirt, allowing me to cup her buttocks and tease them apart and slide my hands as deeply into the space between her legs as the skirt would allow. Her fingers dug into my back through my shirt and she made a cage of her fingers and clutched at my head, ramming my mouth against hers.