Transition

by Iain M. Banks

  He was lying on his left side. His head was on the floor, his arms lay just so, his left side was taking most of his weight, his left leg lay here and his right ankle and foot lay on the floor too, the right knee lying supported by the left knee.

  He supposes he ought to get up. He needs to get up. The people who have applied or who might apply pressure to him might be here, might be in pursuit of him. He can’t remember why. Then, with a feeling of some astonishment, he realises that he does not know who he is.

  He is a person, a human, a man, a male, lying here on this cool floor – wood? – in darkness, with darkness beyond his eyelids. He tells his eyes to open, and they do, with what feels like reluctance.

  Still dark.

  But with some light. A soft grey light, off to one side. Bars of light, a sort of grating of light, canted across the floor some distance away.

  There is a faint breeze. I can feel it on my exposed skin. I realise that I am naked.

  I shift, rearranging my limbs. I am that he. He is me. I am the person who woke up but I am still not sure who he is and I am. I feel a sense of me-ness, all the same. I am confident and sure regarding my self now; it is simply my name I am unsure about. The same may be said for my history and memories, but that too is not that important. They will be there. They will come back, when they need to, when they have to.

  If the pressure is on this side, then applying increased pressure – reacting against that gravity, replying to it – should lift me up.

  I apply that pressure and lever myself up.

  Unsteady, trembling. Breathing hard. Breathing fast and shallow, heart thrashing, bringing on a feeling of panic and a sudden shiver. The feeling passes. I force myself to breathe more slowly and more deeply. My arm, supporting me, is still trembling. The floor beneath my hand feels wooden and cool. The grey light spills in from the far end of a long room.

  I turn my head as far as I can in both directions, then tip it up and down, then shake it. This hurts but is good. Nothing shiny to look at my reflection in. Languages: Mandarin, English, Hindustani, Spanish, Arabic, Russian and French. I know that I know these but right now I’m not sure I could muster a word in any of them. I have never had such a rough, disorienting transition, not even in training.

  The light seems to increase. The bars of grey laid across the floor in the distance shine. They turn to silver, then a pale gold. I cough. That hurts too.

  … This is a large room.

  And I feel I have been here before. Just looking at it I feel this, but the fragre of the place is familiar too. I know this room, this space, this place. I feel that of course I know it. I feel that my knowing it is precisely why I am here.

  I feel this, but I do not know why I feel this or what it is I am really feeling.

  Ballroom.

  Palace.

  A sudden rush of sensation as though dry conduits throughout my body are flooded with glittering water.

  The palace in Venezia, the unique city in so many worlds. And the ballroom, the great space, a map and a studied beguilement and the sudden flash of seamy violence, leading to interrogation, a chair and a certain Madame…

  I am in the Palazzo Chirezzia, overlooking the Grand Canal, in Venice. This is the ballroom: quiet, deserted, out of season (or decaying years later or decades later or centuries later or millennia for all I know). I came here from who knows where, as I was about to be tortured.

  Did I? Could I have?

  It’s the last thing I remember. I can still smell the antiseptic scent of his fingers…

  I shiver again, look around. A great rectangular space. Three enormous shapes like inverted teardrops hang from the high ceiling, covered in grey; wrapped ghosts of chandeliers. Little sign of any furniture, but what there is also appears to be wrapped in dust sheets. The draught is on my back and legs too now. I am quite naked. I touch my mouth and nose, look at my naked wrists. Unfettered.

  Using my tongue, I feel for the hole in my gum where a tooth used to be. There is an intact tooth instead. I prise open its hinged cap with one fingernail. It is empty.

  It is empty, but it is there. The tooth remains, as though it was never extracted in the first place. Something more than just my sense of self was carried over.

  What has happened to me? I raise my head and moan and then force myself slowly up from the floor, going briefly on all fours and then standing, staggering and swaying, unsteady.

  This cannot be, I think. I must still be there, still suffocating in that chair. This is an hallucination, a waking dream, or the self-deceiving fantasy of somebody deprived of oxygen because their mouth and nose have been taped up. This is not possible.

  I stumble to the nearest tall window and scrabble ineffectually for a while before seeing and feeling how to open the shutters. I barely crack them, just enough to see out.

  The Grand Canal stares brightly back at me, grey and cool beneath what looks like an early-morning summer’s sky. A water taxi passes, a work-boat laden with bagged garbage creases down the waves in the opposite direction and is narrowly avoided by a clattering vaporetto crossing from one side of the canal to the other, running lights still greasily bright in the half-dawn, a few sleepy commuters sitting hunched on seats inside.

  I bite on a knuckle until I make myself cry out with the pain of it, but I do not wake up. I shake my bitten hand and stare out at a place where I have no right to be.

  And yet I am here.

  Adrian

  Bint was wearing a veil. Not a Muslim-type burka veil, I mean an old-fashioned sort of black-lace-with-spots-on-it thing hanging from a tiny little hat. Actually, the hat looked like an afterthought, only there to support the veil. The office was as big as the reception area, lined in very fancy-looking wood panelling that had silver or some other metal inlaid into it. I’d never seen anything like it. She sat behind a big desk. Some sort of computer screen was just sort of flattening itself out of the way and becoming part of the surface of the desk as I went in. She stood up and said hello but didn’t offer to shake hands.

  She waved me to a seat on the far side of the desk. She wore a sort of weird-looking suit thing, like she’d been wrapped in black bandages. Actually looked quite tasty, especially with the veil for some reason, but still like she’d just paced off a catwalk rather than being in a converted warehouse or whatever in the middle of one of the most poisoned places on the planet. I wondered if this was some sort of radiation-proof suit or something, though it seemed unlikely.

  “You’re Adrian?”

  “Adrian Cubbish. Pleased to meet you.”

  “I’m Mrs Mulverhill. I am glad to meet you, Adrian.”

  Another confusing accent. I supposed it was from somewhere round here, Ukraine, Russia, Eastern Europe, whatever. Hints of US English, too. We both sat down.

  She opened her mouth to speak but I started first. “Well, Mrs Mulverhill, I really hope you’re going to tell me why I’m here, cos otherwise this is just going to be a big waste of my time, and frankly my time is quite precious to me. Plus I don’t appreciate being brought into this place – what do they call it? The Zone? No one said anything about this, know what I mean? I mean technically I’m not here against my will cos I got on that plane of my own free will, didn’t I? But if I’d been told where we were coming then maybe I wouldn’t have, so legally you could be on dodgy ground. If I start growing a second head any time in the next few years there will be lawyers, I’m telling you now.”

  She looked surprised at first, then smiled. The face behind the veil looked Asian, I thought. Maybe Chinese, though less flat than Chinese faces usually are. Sort of triangular. Eyes too big to be Chinese, too. Cheekbones too high as well. Actually, maybe not Asian at all. You’d need more light, or just that veil off, to tell for sure.

  “You should be safe,” she told me. “The car’s air is filtered and the atmosphere in here is healthier than it would be in a hospital operating theatre. Any dust on your clothes and shoes was removed before you entered here.�
��

  I nodded. “Consider me mollified for the moment. Now, about the why bit of me being here in the first place.”

  “Perhaps Mr Noyce has given you some idea of what we offer and what we might require.”

  “He said you paid well and didn’t ask for much. Not normally, anyway.”

  “That would be accurate, I’d say.”

  “Okay. Keep going.”

  “Let me set out the basics, Adrian—”

  “Shouldn’t you be calling me Mr Cubbish,” I said, “seeing as I’ve got to call you Mrs Mulverhill? Or would you like to tell me your first name?” So far this was all still too much on her terms, frankly, and I wanted to unsettle or even annoy her. How sensible this was is another matter, of course, as, when you think about it, I was in the middle of a fenced-off nowhere where nobody with any brains wanted to be anyway, a thousand or two thousand miles away from home, having got on a plane and as good as disappeared as far as anybody back in the UK was concerned, with no forwarding address or destination or nothing and with no reception on my moby.

  Didn’t care. I really was annoyed at them bringing me here, even if it was eventually going to be in my own interests. Who did these people think they were? Anyway; hence the remark about her calling me Mr Cubbish or telling me her first name.

  “No,” she said, sounding not in the least insulted. “I wouldn’t like to tell you my first name. Mrs Mulverhill is what I answer to. If you’re uncomfortable with me calling you Adrian, I’ll happily call you Mr Cubbish.”

  I shrugged. “Adrian is fine. You were saying?”

  “That we will pay you a retainer, monthly, plus an extra annual payment, for your services as a consultant and for other services we may occasionally require. You would be free to terminate this arrangement at any time, without notice.”

  “Consultant? Me?”

  “Yes.”

  “Consulting on what?”

  “General cultural, economic and political matters.”

  I laughed. “Oh yeah?”

  “Yes,” she said. The veil made it hard to see what was going on with her expression.

  “Mrs M,” I said, “I’m a trader. I trade stocks. I know a lot about that. Though probably not as much as Mr Noyce. Also I know about some computer games. Oh, and snowboarding, though I’m what they call an enthusiastic amateur, not an expert, know what I mean? I’m not the person to consult on cultural and political matters.”

  “Tell me what you think about the political parties in your own country.”

  “Tories are toast. Labour are going to get back in at the next election and people like me may have to leave the country. I should point out that Mr N doesn’t think they’re going to be so bad – Labour, he means. He’s met this Blair geezer and reckons they’ll leave us alone to make money, but I’m not convinced.”

  “There you are,” the lady purred. “You’ve started work for us already.”

  “Course I have, Mrs Mulverhill. What were the other services you were thinking of?”

  “Liaison with individuals. Helping them out if they need help.”

  “What sort of help?”

  “Getting them on their feet. Obtaining funds, documents, the ear of officialdom. That sort of thing.”

  Now, it so happened that I could help with some of that stuff, through contacts I had, some got through dealing and some through trading. But I hadn’t thought that Mr N would know much about that, and it must have been him who recommended me to whoever this Mulverhill woman worked for.

  “These would be serious, capable people, Adrian, but they would be starting out with very little when they make themselves known to you. Once they have a start they’ll rapidly make their own way, but they need that initial boost, do you see?”

  “Are you smuggling immigrants?” I asked. “You people-trafficking – is that it?”

  “Not in the manner you mean, I suspect. These people would not be foreign nationals as your government would understand it, were they to come to its attention. Which they almost certainly never would. It is quite possible, though, that all you’d ever be asked to do would be to provide guarantees for bank accounts, references, letters of recommendation, that sort of thing. All expenses would be repaid to you and any loans reimbursed expeditiously.”

  “Expeditiously?” I pretended to be impressed.

  “Expeditiously.” She pretended she hadn’t noticed.

  “So,” I said, “is this what Mr Noyce does already?”

  “That’s a good question. Fortunately Mr Noyce has already pre-cleared me answering it honestly. The answer is yes.” I could see the smile through the black veil.

  “So if it’s good enough for him it should be good enough for me, is that the idea?”

  “Yes, it is.”

  “And of course he’ll be retiring in a few years, I should think.”

  “I should think so too.” Mrs M tipped her head to one side. “More to the point, so does he.”

  “And what sort of sums would we be talking about here, for this, um, consultancy and services unspecified?”

  “The same as Mr Noyce receives. Eight and one half thousand United States of America dollars per calendar month, paid into a bank account in your name in the Cayman Islands. The extra annual payment would be twice that monthly amount, payable at the commencement of the last month of the year.”

  “And I can quit any time without notice?”

  “Yes.”

  “And without penalty?”

  “Yes. The monies will stop being paid, that’s all.”

  “Call it ten K a month and I’ll think about it.”

  “That is more than Mr Noyce receives.”

  “Well, if you don’t tell him, neither will I,” I said. She was silent for a few moments. I spread my arms. “That’s my price, Mrs Mulverhill.”

  “Very well. The first payment will be delivered forthwith. We’ll mail you the account details.”

  “Like I say, I’ll think about it.” I wanted to talk to Mr N some more. This was too weird to just jump in on, given what I knew so far.

  “Of course. Decide in your own time.”

  “Is that it?” I asked. This had all been too easy. I strongly suspected I’d underpriced myself.

  “That’s it,” she said. She just sat there, didn’t go to shake my hand or produce a contract or a letter of agreement to sign or anything.

  “Our agreement to be reviewed annually,” I said.

  “If you like.”

  “Uh-huh.” I nodded for a bit. Still just sitting there. I sat forward in my seat. “So, Mrs M.”

  “Adrian.”

  “Tell me who you work for.”

  “The Concern,” she said smoothly. “You can call us the Concern, Adrian.”

  “And who are you really?”

  “We’re travellers.”

  “What, like gypsies?” I said, with a fake smile.

  “I don’t think so. Well, maybe a little.”

  “Russian?”

  “No.”

  “No?”

  “Definitely. No.”

  “CIA?”

  “No.”

  “Some other American… organisation?”

  “No.”

  I took a breath. This time she jumped in on me before I could speak. “Don’t bother, Adrian. You’ll never guess.”

  “You reckon?”

  “Oh, I’m pretty certain.” She flashed the veiled smile again. “We should celebrate,” she said, “that you’re thinking of joining with us. Would you like that? Where shall we go?”

  “I can’t imagine there’s much happening in this Pripyat place.”

  “It is a little quiet,” she agreed. “Shall we go to Moscow? The plane will have been refuelled by now. Yes? I want to show you something.”

  Seemingly my watch had to go forward yet another hour, though I still left the Rolex alone.

  “Adrian,” Mrs M said as we settled into the jet’s plush seats, “Connie and I have much to talk ab
out. Can you amuse yourself?”

  “Certainly. No, wait a minute.”

  “What?” Connie asked.

  “What if you keep me up past my bedtime?” I smiled.

  Connie looked at me. “I understand there are hotels in Moscow.”

  “What a relief,” I said.

  They started talking some language I couldn’t even begin to unscramble. I left them to it and watched the ground slide by beneath. I’d hoped to see Chernobyl itself – from a safe height, obviously – but didn’t. It was only another hour’s flight but by the time we arrived in Moscow it was almost dark. Outside, on the tarmac of the airport, the wind felt cold enough for snow and smelled of jet fuel. A big black Merc was waiting. This time the driver had a cap and tie and everything. We went straight to a tall wire gate with a small guardhouse. A uniformed Customs/Immigration guy took the briefest look at our passports, exchanged a few words with Connie S. and waved us through to join chaotic traffic on a packed four-lane road.

  My moby was happy again, reconnected to civilisation. I texted a couple of pals back in the big smoke to say where I was, and felt happier too.

  The Novy Pravda was a club housed in a new-build block within sight of what I guessed was the Red River or whatever big river it is that runs through Moscow. Frankly I had no idea where we were. In something called the Central Administrative Okrug, which was not a vast amount of help. If we hadn’t driven through what was obviously Red Square with the big Disney church and stuff I’d only have had Mrs M’s word for it that we were even in Moscow.

  The club was in a big black cube of a building. Lots of UV and dark purple lights on the outside, outlining it. The air shook with muffled music. Valet parking. Front of the line, two big bouncers with armpit bulges. Straight in, greeted by some guy in a very flash suit who took Mrs M’s long fur coat, fake-kissed Connie on both sides and gave me a small bow. I was in what I’d been wearing since I’d got up: black Converse, black 509s, a purple Prada shirt and a peach-soft thin black leather jacket. I felt underdressed for the first time that day.

  “Kliment, how are you?” Connie said as the guy kept pace with us down a broad corridor lined with mirrors and what looked like blobs of mercury running down bronze mazes behind plates of glass.