Transition

by Iain M. Banks

  “I am well, madam,” Kliment said, sounding very Russian. “You are well too, I hope.”

  “Very. This is Mrs Mulverhill, my employer,” she told him.

  “An honour, madam.”

  “And this is Adrian. He’s from London.”

  “Adrian. Welcome. I love London,” he said.

  “Smashing,” I said.

  “This is Kliment’s club,” Connie told me.

  I looked round. The sounds were getting loud and the light level dropping as we entered a big space with slowly flashing lights on the ceiling. A flunky came up, bowed to Kliment and took Mrs M’s coat and Connie’s jacket as well as my own to a coat-check counter staffed by two astoundingly beautiful girls, all high cheekbones, long black hair and sultry, unimpressed looks. The thudding music and faster flashing lights were coming from a big fluted archway ahead. “Tasty,” I said, smiling at Kliment. He nodded appreciatively, I think.

  “Please,” he said. “We have your table.”

  Vodka and champagne, caviar and blinis. We proceeded to get very drunk in our semicircular table facing a giant multi-level dance floor. I danced with Connie, then with Mrs M, who had a weird all-over-the-place way of dancing. In her black-bandages outfit and veil – yep, still with the veil – she got a lot of looks. Appreciative ones, too, and I could see why. She danced like she could move bits that other women didn’t even have. Connie was a lively bopper too. The two of them kept turning away bottles of bubbly from distant tables.

  Connie leant over as they were opening our third bottle of Salon. “Come to the toilets. We’ll do some coke, yeah?”

  By this time I’d drunk enough for this to seem like a good idea, and for the prospect of some white stuff to have taken on a sort of sensible, even medicinal quality, i.e. if I took some it’d sober me up a bit. Not to mention the fact that both Connie and Mrs M had only got even better-looking and more devastatingly attractive as the evening had gone on, and here was one of them inviting me to the loos. Well, why not? I looked from the gorgeous, blondely shining Connie to the shadowy Mrs M. Connie grinned and shook her head.

  Mrs Mulverhill must have overheard, or guessed. She waved one hand. “Enjoy,” she said, watching the mass of people pulse and surge around the dance floor.

  No eyelids were batted when we entered an extremely posh Ladies and commandeered a cubicle. We took turns snorting from a handily placed glass ledge. Good gear, almost uncut.

  We stood up, grinning from ear to ear at each other. “Another dance?” Connie suggested.

  I leant back against the wall, gave her a long look up and down. “We in a hurry?”

  She laughed, shook her head. “Too sordid. Let’s away.”

  I thought she might have meant Let’s away to somewhere quieter, but she just meant back to the dance floor and then the booth and the table where Mrs M was knocking back another deep-chilled vodka and looking as sober as when we’d walked in. She nodded at me. “We dance now,” she told me, rising.

  “Can I catch my breath?” I asked.

  She shook her head and took my hand.

  It was quite a sexy dance. There were slow bits in the tune and she moved round me, curling and uncurling and rising and falling, circling about me like she was caressing my personal space. I’m not a bad dancer – many compliments received, know what I mean? But Mrs M was something else. Maybe it was the booze and toot, but I seriously felt I was in the presence of bopping royalty.

  She sidled up, pressing herself against me. I felt the heat of her body through her black-bandage outfit and my own clothes. She was half a head shorter than me. She put her veiled lips close to my ear as I leant down to her. “Adrian,” she said loudly, just audible over the music, “I want to take you somewhere. Will you come with me?”

  I pulled back, showed some amused, pleased surprise and then bent to her ear. “Really?”

  “Really,” she said. Then added, “Yes, that’s a way of putting it.” Which seemed unnecessary. “Follow me.”

  “To the ends of the Earth, Mrs M,” I said as she took me by the hand. She laughed. Strange noise, almost like a bark. Her hand was very warm but perfectly dry. We slunk through the press of dancing people. She let go of my hand once we were clear of the dance floor and were heading for some cordoned-off steps. Not the loos again, then. Another pair of bouncers, nodded to. Down some wide, spiralling steps.

  “This is called the Black Room, apparently,” she said as a large door was opened for us by another wide-shouldered gent, this one in dark glasses. Fair enough, it was nearly black inside. From what I saw as we walked through it was a fuck club. Lot of humping and humping-watching going on in/around/on/over tables and big comfy seats. Warm, it was.

  We walked on through to the far wall and another door. Yet another bouncer. Lady, this time. She was much bigger and wider than me. She handed Mrs M a key. We entered what looked like a dark hotel corridor. Mrs M let us into a dimly lit bedroom and closed the door behind her.

  “People come here to have sex, Adrian,” Mrs Mulverhill said.

  “You don’t say,” I said. From the way she’d said what she just had I was already starting to guess that wasn’t why we were here. I felt some disappointment, and just a tiny bit of nervousness. Still, I’ve always had, right from the first days when I started dealing, a completely reliable alarm system in my head for situations that might be about to turn genuinely nasty and threatening, know what I mean? And so far the alarm bells hadn’t gone off.

  “I do say. But you and I are not here to have sex. I hope you are not disappointed if that was what you were expecting.”

  “Devastated, Mrs M.”

  “You are, I think, joking.”

  “Not entirely.”

  From somewhere in those bizarre clothes Mrs M produced two little pills. Smaller than any E pills I’d ever seen; nearer to sweeteners or something. She popped one herself, held the other out to me. “Please, take this.”

  “What is it?”

  “It is a form of lifebelt.”

  “Well, that’s a new one.” I shrugged, popped it.

  She watched my neck to see me swallow. Again, just a little worrying. She reached up and put her veil up at last. The light wasn’t great but I could see a little more of her face. A very beautiful, strong, semi-Asiatic, semi-I-couldn’t-tell-what face, with big, wide eyes. And with catlike slits for pupils, not round ones. Ah-ha. I’d heard you could have contacts like that and a few weirdos had even had eye surgery to get the same effect. Music thudded very distantly. She looked into my eyes and said quietly, “Nothing should go wrong, Adrian, but if we become separated I want you to think yourself back to here, to this room.” She waved one hand. “Take a good look round.”

  I looked around the place, humouring her.

  “Do it for real, Adrian,” she said, as though guessing I was only pretending to. “Look at it, remember its visual details, remember the smell and the sound of this place. Will you be able to envisage it accurately again?”

  The light in the room was amber, like sunset, subdued. The bed was queen- or king-size, with black satin sheets. There was a black couch, one ornate chair of red and gold, a mirror on the ceiling, a TV set into the wall and in one corner a black cube with the one word MINIBAR on it in blue neon. There was one other door, presumably leading to a bathroom. The bed had those unnecessary bedposts that are handy for tying people to with furry handcuffs or whatever.

  “I guess,” I said. Separated? What was she talking about? Still no actual alarm bells, but I was starting to think that I needed a second set to go off to tell me when the first lot had mysteriously stopped working.

  Now Mrs M produced what looked like a tiny cigarette lighter.

  “I shall apply this to myself first, then to you. It must happen in rapid succession,” she said, bringing the device up to her neck and putting her free hand behind my head, fingers spread over my sweaty hair like some giant spider. “Please try not to flinch when I apply it to you. Then I will hug
you tightly. Do you understand?”

  “Got you.” Must confess, my mouth was dry. The music stopped briefly, its thud-thudding gone, leaving only my heart.

  “Then here we go.”

  She stepped up to me, her body tight against mine. I could feel her small, firm breasts pressing into my chest and smell a scent somewhere between antiseptic and a musky perfume. She pushed the lighter up into her lower jaw and it clicked. A hiss. Her hand swooped from under her chin and came up to my neck. Pressure, another click and a hiss and a cold sensation in my neck and jaw like an infusion of ice. She wrapped her arms tight around my back, then wrapped her legs around mine too, rising a little on her feet and pressing her head side to side against mine. I put my arms around her. She felt good. There were stirrings down below. I was getting wood. I wondered if she could feel it. She would soon if she hadn’t already. Then, very suddenly, it felt like my head turned itself inside out.

  I must have closed my eyes. I swayed and staggered as I opened them again. There was a grey light all around us and the air was suddenly chill and fresh. Mrs M was releasing me from her grip but holding one of my hands so I didn’t fall over and saying over and over, “It’s all right, Adrian, it’s all right, it’s all right…”

  But it wasn’t all right, because not only was there was no dark, amber-lit room around us, there was no fucking building around us.

  The Novy Pravda was gone and here we were in the grey light of a dawn that was hours too early on a low hill surrounded by marshes with a big river coiled across the landscape in the direction of the still-cloud-obscured rising sun. Great. Not just the room, not just the Novy Pravda. The whole of fucking Moscow had gone.

  Scattered all about, stretching to the horizon, lay ruins.

  I felt like I was going to keel over and we did a bizarre dance for a few seconds as Mrs M still held my hand and tried to stop me falling onto my bum and I sort of staggered and revolved around her, trying to get my balance back and gasping as my shoes slipped on the tussocky grass on the cold hilltop. Finally I got my legs spread far enough apart to stop gyrating and Mrs M pulled me to a stop, taking me by both shoulders while I bent, breathing hard and fast and not believing what I was seeing whenever I took a look out across this deserted landscape of grey marshes and black ruins.

  “I’m okay,” I said. “I’m okay.”

  I straightened up. She kept one hand on my elbow.

  I took a few deep breaths, holding them a handful of seconds each. I looked around. Couldn’t see another soul. There was a dot on the distant river under the light patch of sky where the dawn was. It might have been a boat. The ruins spread in every direction. A few were on the horizon, darkly jagged. Towers and bits of domes; bitten, slumped-looking squared things that might once have been tower blocks or big office buildings.

  There were some dressed stones sitting half-overgrown by longer grass a few steps away down the slope towards the nearest marsh.

  “Let’s sit,” Mrs M said. She sat me down on the cold hard stones.

  “Where the fuck is this?” I asked when I had my breathing back to something like normal.

  “Another Earth, another Moscow,” she said. She sat beside me, half turned to me. The veil was down again, had been ever since we got here.

  I rubbed my neck. “Was that the pill did this, or—?”

  “This did this,” she said, showing me the little lighter gadget. “The pill was for if something went wrong. You had to visualise the room we left from, remember?” I nodded. “That was your way back. You shouldn’t need it now, though. We can go back together. The first transition is always the most problematic. We’re well attuned.” She smiled, patted my arm reassuringly.

  “Fuck,” I said, shaking my head and standing up again and looking desperately around. I found a fist-sized lump of stone and threw it as hard as I could towards the still-rising spread of light where the dawn was. It disappeared into the grass downhill with a barely audible thud. I turned back to Mrs M. “No, just give me a minute, okay?”

  “I’ll stay here,” she said, smiling behind the veil and clasping her hands over one raised knee.

  I ran down the slope, skidding in places, jumping over a few more of the piles of dark brown stones lying in heaps within the grass. When the slope levelled out the marsh began and I squelched into muddy water. I put my hand down, brought up some grey-brown mud, stared at it then stared out over the grey landscape and let the mud dribble back through my fingers. A bird made a lonely mewling cry in the distance and another answered from even further away.

  It all looked and felt and smelled real as fuck. The surface of dark water pooling between my shoes – black slip-ons! What happened to my Converse? – was going still. Looking at my face reflected in it, I didn’t even look like myself. My trousers felt coarser, and were more like very dark brown than black. No Nokia; nothing in the pockets at all. No Rolex on my wrist, either. I studied my hands. They looked a bit different too. They had freckles. I didn’t have freckles, did I? Suddenly I wasn’t sure any more. Fuck me, it turned out that I didn’t even know the back of my hand like the back of my hand. I turned and saw the small black figure of Mrs Mulverhill sitting where I’d left her. I trudged back up.

  “I am able to tandem,” she explained as we sat side by side on the stones. A hint of pale yellow-orange sun had peeked out between two layers of cloud to the east. “Some people can. A tandemiser can take one other person with them when they transition. Usually just one. Most people can’t transition at all, but of those who can, few can take anything other than themselves from world to world.”

  “Transition?”

  “From one world to another.”

  “Uh-huh. And you need a pill or something?”

  “There is a substance called septus, both in the pill you took and in the spray in here.” She brandished the little lighter thing, then secreted it away in the black bandages again somewhere under her ribcage.

  I closed my eyes, rubbed my face. When I looked out again, everything was just as it had been. Grey skies, rising sun gleaming all watery, wide marshes, distant black ruins. “So is this like another dimension or something?” I asked. Fuck, I was struggling. I almost wished I’d paid attention in physics lessons.

  The whole total bizarre weirdness of this was still affecting me in waves of dizziness, unless it was the drugs I’d swallowed or been injected with. Had there really been no blackout phase? We seemed to have come here from the Novy Pravda between heartbeats, with only that rush of head-turning-inside-out to lead up to it, and that had felt like part of the experience itself rather than something properly separate from it. But had there really been no time to get me properly drugged and able to be shipped out to wherever we were now? It didn’t feel like it, but it still had to be more likely, I mean logically, than what Mrs M was telling me.

  She shrugged. “This is one of the many worlds,” she said. “There are infinities of them. The people I represent travel between them. Sometimes they might need help. Transitioning – travelling between worlds – is not a perfected process. We would like to employ you to be there to help any travellers blown off-course into your world, as it were, or who would otherwise need help in it. Minor help. Would you do that for us?”

  “What exactly do you do? Why are you doing all this travelling, anyway?”

  Mrs M made a clicking noise with her mouth. “Nothing that bad, but nothing I can tell you about, either. Nothing that we are doing ought to get you into any legal trouble with your authorities, in the highly unlikely event that they ever find out. You must have heard of the idea of need-to-know?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, you don’t need to know, so it’s best for you not to.” A pause while she looked out over the chilly landscape before turning back to me. “Though I suppose I should say that it’s not unknown for people to start out doing what we’re asking you to do and them then going on to become more actively and operationally involved and even eventually becoming transi
tioners themselves.” That smile behind the lace and dots again. “Not unknown. But one thing at a time, eh? What do you say? Do you think you might accept our offer?”

  I stared at her. “I was going to need time to think anyway,” I said. “Now, I… I think, I mean… This has given me…” I thought she looked disappointed behind the veil. I sighed. “Oh fuck, who am I trying to kid? Sure. Yes, of course. Either I’ve gone fucking nuts or you’ve got the keys to the universe in a pill. Or now in a handy spray version.”

  “Well, the keys to different versions of Earth,” she said.

  “No other planets?”

  “Not as such, yet,” she said. “No true time travel, either.”

  “What about untrue time travel?”

  “There is an apparent phenomenon called lag – though I suppose it could equally justly be called lead – where otherwise near-identical worlds differ only in one being ahead or behind the other, by any interval up to several million years, but it’s not a real phenomenon, any more than a celestial constellation is. They remain intrinsically separate and nothing occurring in one directly affects the other.”

  “Sorry I asked. No aliens?”

  “We’re still looking.”

  I paused. “You look a bit alien yourself, Mrs M. No offence.”

  “None taken. You ready to go back?”

  “I think so.”

  “You may still feel a little disoriented.”

  “You reckon?”

  “You will be finding out something about yourself over the next few days, weeks and months, Adrian.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  “What I said about the pill you took was true, but its other purpose is to give you an excuse to dismiss this as some sort of drug-induced hallucination.”

  I must have looked sceptical.

  Mrs M spread her arms. “Right now you know that this is real and all this has definitely happened. But when you’re back in your own body and back in your own world and country and house and job and so on, with life going on as usual, you will start to doubt that any of it was real at all. You may well determine that it did not happen, in which case that is probably what you need to believe to protect your sanity. Or you may accept that it did. Either way this will tell you something about yourself.”