Transition

by Iain M. Banks

  “Can’t wait.” I paused. “Anyway, so long as the money’s real. Know what I mean?”

  She laughed. A high, tinkly kind of laugh this time. “We try to choose pragmatic, selfish people for such positions, Adrian.”

  “Selfish, am I?”

  “Of course. You know you are. It’s not high praise, Adrian, but it’s not criticism either. It’s just an acknowledgement. All our best people are highly self-centred. It’s the only thing that holds them together in the chaos.” She grinned. “Anyway. I think you will do very well. Time to go back.”

  We both stood up. A low breeze ruffled my hair and some of her black bandages. I took a last look round this landscape of watery ruins.

  “What happened here, anyway?” I asked.

  She looked round briefly. “I don’t know,” she said. “Something terrible, I should think.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I should think so too.” Even I knew enough history to think of Napoleon and Hitler, and what might have happened in a Third World War.

  “Oh,” she said, clicking her fingers. “I should warn you.”

  “What?”

  “The selves we left behind, back at the Novy Pravda.”

  I stared at her. “They’re still there?”

  “Oh yes. On standby, if you like. Our minds, our true selves are in these bodies, the ones that we happened to find here, but the husks remain where we left them.”

  I looked at my freckled hand again, then at her. “But you look just like you did.”

  She smiled behind the black veil. “Well, I am very good at this. And there are infinitudes of worlds to work with. There are even an infinite number where we are having exactly the same conversation as this right now, worlds differing only in one tiny detail – which might be an atom of uranium in a deposit deep underground in Venezuela decaying a microsecond earlier than it did here, or a photon in the University of Tasmania taking one slit, not the other, in another running of the two-slit experiment. There may even be an infinite number which are utterly indistinguishable from this one and which are taking place precisely contemporaneously, where the divergence has yet to occur. Though there may not. Partly it depends how you look at it.” She gave me a big smile. I’d been looking at her blankly, I guess. “Further research is required,” she said. “Anyway, about our other selves, the barely aware husks we left behind.”

  “Yeah?”

  “We may get back to find they are having sex.”

  I stared at her. “Seriously?”

  “When you leave two physically healthy adult humans of each other’s preferred gender alone in such close proximity, and they’re effectively morons, it tends to happen.”

  “How romantic.”

  “Yes. Though it depends. Was it something on your mind before we left?”

  “What, you and me having sex?”

  “Yes.”

  “The idea had crossed it.”

  She tipped her head to one side. “Well, you’re not my usual type, but I was finding you moderately attractive, possibly due to the disinhibiting effects of alcohol.”

  “Don’t you get carried away there now, know what I mean?”

  She shrugged. “There are couriers who can only take another person with them when they are penetratively conjoined. I have to embrace my fellow traveller. One or two can co-transition just by holding the other’s hand. Anyway. We’ll see. All I’m saying is, don’t be alarmed if we flit back and that’s what we’re doing.”

  “Okay,” I said. “I’ll try not to be alarmed.”

  She stepped up to me. “Now we embrace, yes?”

  My brain felt like it was turning inside out again. Or outside in this time. Whatever. But when we got back I was lying curled up on the floor of the amber-lit room and Mrs M was sitting cross-legged by my side, patting my shoulder and making sorrowful, comforting noises and I had tears in my eyes and a sick feeling in my gut, nursing what felt like a pair of badly bruised testicles, exactly as though somebody had kneed me in the balls a few minutes earlier.

  “Ah,” she said. “Sorry. Sometimes that happens, too.”

  9

  Patient 8262

  Infinities within infinities within infinities… The human brain quails when confronted with such proliferating vastness. We think we have a grasp of it, brandishing our numbers – natural, rational, complex, real, unreal – in the face of all that’s inestimable, but truthfully these resources are mere talismans, not practical tools. A comfort; no more.

  Nevertheless, the doorways into that inexhaustible wilderness of forever multiplying worlds had been opened to us, and we required the means to at least try to understand as much as we could of their hidden mechanisms and how they might be comprehended and navigated.

  Learning about the many worlds occurred, appropriately, in layers. One was history. In at least three categories.

  There was history that we knew we were allowed to know, history that we knew we were not allowed to know, and history that allegedly didn’t exist but that we – that is, the students of this effectively measureless subject – suspected did exist but was never talked about, not at our level and perhaps not even at the level of the people who taught us.

  We were aware from the beginning that the Concern had many more levels than were immediately visible from the lowly strata where we existed in its tortuously convoluted hierarchy, and it was hard even to guess at how far beyond us it extended, given both the irredeemably complex nature of the many worlds themselves and the seemingly quite deliberate opacity of the organisation’s structure.

  We knew there were various levels and classes of executives within l’Expédience with, at the apparent pinnacle of this structure, the Central Council itself, composed of people who knew all there was to know about the Concern’s provenance, internal configuration, extent, operational methods and aims, and some of us were of the opinion – always perverse, in mine – that there might be one central authority figure at the head of all this tiered knowledge and power, a kind of organisational autocrat to whom everybody else was obliged to defer. But for all we knew that final, single, near-godlike Emperor of the realities – if he or she did exist – was little better than a foot soldier in a still greater grouping of other Concerns and meta-Concerns extending further and higher out across and through the furiously expanding realities and numbered in millions, billions, trillions… who knew?

  For us lowly foot soldiers, though, mere trainees that we were, the centre of our world – the centre of all our many worlds – was the Speditionary Faculty of the University of Practical Talents, Aspherje, on an Earth that – almost uniquely – did not call itself Earth, but Calbefraques.

  Calbefraques was the ultimate Open world, the mirror image of one of the numberless perfectly Closed Earths where nobody knew about the many worlds; a place where possibly every single adult soul who walked its surface knew that it was merely one world within an infinitude of worlds, and a nexus at that, a stepping-off point for as much of that infinitude as it was possible to imagine.

  And a world, an Earth that was close to unique. Logically there had to be other versions of this Earth that were close to the Calbefraques that we knew, but we seemed to be unable to access them. It was as though by being the place that could act as a gateway to any other version of Earth, Calbefraques had somehow outpaced all the other versions of itself that would otherwise have existed. It seemed that in the same way that the true consciousness of a transitioner could only be in one world at a time, there could only be one world that was perfectly Open, and that world, that unique Earth was this one, called Calbefraques.

  It was here that almost all the transitioners lived when they were not on missions to other worlds, and here too that the vast majority of theorists of transitioning, experts in transitioning, researchers into transitioning and experimental practitioners of transitioning both made their home and plied their trade. In its globally distributed factories and laboratories all the multifarious paraphernalia of tran
sitioning was manufactured, and – somewhere, allegedly – the ultimately precious substance we called septus, the drug that made flitting possible in the first place, was brought into being. Exactly how and where this was done and exactly what septus really was, nobody seemed to know. The secrecy surrounding the drug’s creation was of an order more intense even than that associated with the severely security-conscious operations of the Transitionary Corps. Naturally, this meant that the speculation regarding this piece of arcana was, to put it mildly, unrestrained.

  There were strict rules about the use and exposure of septus within this world or any other, restricting its use to its flitting-enabling purpose and absolutely nothing else. But it was rumoured that, if one did try to have some of it analysed, in the most advanced laboratories one could find, the sample itself simply vanished, or appeared on inspection – by chemical analysis, mass spectrometry, microscopes working on a variety of wavelengths or any other technique available – to be nothing more complicated than pond slime, or even pure water.

  Here, in the university that was a city within a city, within its piled pyramids, ziggurats, towers and colonnades, and in the profusion of outlying buildings distributed all across the greater city – an ever-multiplying number, in a fit image of what was studied within them – millions of students like myself had, over the years, learned as much of that proportion of the truth as it was thought appropriate for us to be allowed to comprehend. What some of us really wanted to know, naturally, was the size of that proportion, and what was concealed in the fraction of it being denied us.

  The Transitionary

  It was the septennial Festival of Death in Aspherje, Calbefraques, and the Central Council of the Transitionary Office had arranged a particularly extravagant party and ball to celebrate both the formal cultural event and the latest expansion and reconstitution of the Council.

  Guests arrived on a specially constructed narrow-gauge railway which ran in a loop round the closed city centre, picking up guests from a variety of temporary stations – manned by servants dressed as ghouls – which were dotted around the periphery of the cordoned-off area, where the guests’ own transport had deposited them. The track was lit by tall, smokily guttering torches and by burning braziers hanging from gibbets and made to look like ancient roadside punishment cages, the skeletons of starved miscreants visible through the smoke and flames inside.

  At the Final Terminus, the station – seemingly made entirely of dinosaur bones – where the guests were deposited, a wide moat had been dug across the park in front of the entrance to the University’s Great Hall. Beneath the water lay a system of pipes which fed marsh gases and flammable oils to the surface, where they were lit or detonated by floating bundles of burning rags containing clockwork mechanisms that made them jerk and move and appear briefly human.

  Guests proceeded across a bridge bowed out across this waste of sporadic conflagration and entered the Great Hall through a recently constructed ill-lit tunnel of soot-blackened stone. Enormous iron doors creaked open to admit guests to a tall circular space containing another, near-circular moat of unpleasant-smelling water lying at the foot of a great steep bowl of curved walls running with liquids. Across a bridge ahead stood a great wall of what appeared to be slate, its slick surface running with water cascading down its imperfectly vertical surface in fast, hissing waves. Beyond the far end of the bridge, where one might have expected to see a door, there was only this wall of water, nothing else.

  The great iron doors behind swung shut on each batch of two dozen or so guests, leaving them looking nervously round, unable to see a way out. Streamers of fire appeared twenty metres above them, all around the top of the vast bowl they found themselves trapped within, while the small bridge that had led them from the tunnel behind was drawn quickly back up to clang and echo against the rust-pitted surface of the doors.

  The burning oils quickly covered most of the bowl’s curtain wall and started to pool on the surface of the water at the foot, spreading slowly towards the low island of dry stone in the middle where the now-fearful group of guests huddled, beginning to wonder if something had gone wrong with one of the various mechanisms – large parts of the university had been closed for months while all this had been set up and there had been rumours of cost overruns, technical problems, project delays and last-minute panics – or if it was all some horrendously complicated and involved plot directed at them personally and they were to be cruelly put to death for some real, exaggerated or entirely imaginary crime.

  Just when the guests could feel the heat from the wall of flame around them starting to become uncomfortable and were genuinely beginning to fear not just for their costumes but for their lives, the vast wall of slate covered in spilling water ahead of them cracked vertically to reveal itself as a pair of enormous doors which began to open with a crushingly ponderous grace, their burden of water still crashing down their faces undiminished while a broad tongue of stone levered smoothly down between them to provide a bridge over the encircling noose of fire.

  Servants dressed as ghosts and the risen dead – a few of them equipped with fire extinguishers, just in case – beckoned the by now usually highly relieved and indeed cheering partygoers over the stone bridge and into the throat of another dark tunnel which led via almost disappointingly conventional cloak- and restrooms into the main body of the Great Hall, where the ball was to be held under a vast black tent of a roof studded with high and distant lights arranged in starlike constellations.

  A short walk away down a corridor lined with skulls gleaned from catacombs across the continent another only slightly smaller hall held a collection of circular drink, food, drug and smoking bars around which people milled like magnetic particles ricocheting within some colossal game. Further away, up some wide steps turned into an uphill slalom slope by dense wavy lines of antique funeral urns, the way led to the great circular space underneath the Dome of the Mists itself.

  This space too had been waterproofed and filled with a little artificial sea a metre deep; a circular lake over a hundred metres across was covered with fragrant floating plants and dotted with tiny islands covered in food and tinkling fountains of wine. Skiffs, rowing boats and barges rowed by exotically uniformed children plied the placid waters while, above, tumbling and high-wire acts were performed, surrounded by make-believe shooting stars composed of great fireworks raining sparks and running on lines suspended across the darkly glittering lake. An orchestra on the largest island, situated in the centre of the waters, filled the space with music while the wildly decorated lantern-lit vessels sailed serenely around.

  A porcelain coracle rowed by a preposterously dressed dwarf bumped very gently into the rushes-bundle fenders lining the wooden quay near the hall’s entrance. The miniature man toked on a tube sticking out from a frill on one of his sparkling concentric collars. “Mr Oh?” he asked in a helium-high voice.

  “Good evening.”

  “Madame d’Ortolan awaits, sir.” He nodded at the other man’s shoes. “Boat’s a bit delicate, squire. You’ll have to take those off.” Oh undid his shoes. He had dressed conservatively in his old Speditionary Faculty dress uniform, having no particular intention of joining in the ball and – slightly to his own surprise – no desire to dress in a fancy costume. “You can leave them with the quay master, sir,” the dwarf said when Oh went to take his shoes with him. “You won’t be needing them on the barge.”

  Oh handed his shoes to the cadaverously dressed man in charge of the little pier. He stepped carefully into the fur-lined interior of the bizarrely fragile craft. The ceramic hull was so thin that, where the furs did not cover it, you could see the shadow of the waters lapping around its waterline from inside. The dwarf took a breath from a different tube and said in an unfeasibly deep voice, “Off we go, sir. Please do sit still and don’t touch the sides.”

  Oh sat patiently where he was, legs and arms crossed, and let the dwarf row him slowly out over the gently chopping water towards the m
ost extravagantly decorated vessel on the whole lake. It was made of ice and glided unhurriedly across the waves in its own surrounding skirt of curling mists. It was sculpted to look like an ancient royal barge: its carriage-like superstructure was covered in gold leaf and it bore at its centre a great square sail on which was projected a filmed performance of a famously sensual and erotic ballet.

  The air grew noticeably colder as the dainty coracle approached the ice barge; the dwarf used one oar to prevent his frangible craft hitting the larger vessel’s hull. Servants dressed like skeletons helped Oh up to the deck and the dwarf rowed slowly away again. The barge’s deck covering looked like some form of dark skin, and felt as warm.

  Madame d’Ortolan reclined with a few other members of the Central Council in a nest of glistening blood-red cushions inside the main cabin of the craft, surrounded by canted gilt poles holding furled curtains of gold-threaded purple material. The tented ceiling of the enclosure appeared insubstantial, made from thousands of little black and white pearls threaded on silver wires.

  The raised, airy cabin afforded views out across the lake, its tiny jewel-like islands and the flotilla of slowly swirling vessels. Oh recognised the others of the Council who were present and greeted them individually: Mr Repton Bik, Madama Gambara-Cilleon, Lord Harmyle, Professor Prieska Dottlemien, Comptroller Lapsaline-Hregge, Captain Yollyi Suyen and of course Madame d’Ortolan herself, who, with the latest changes to the Council, was now its acknowledged if unofficial head.

  She was dressed in some ancient wildly complicated costume, all frills and ruffles and floaty films of material, the outer layers of which which seemed barely heavier or less transparent than the air. Jewels glittered on the lacy extremities of her pooled skirts and on her fingers, ears, throat, forehead and nose. She had lately been accorded the privilege of moving from her earlier, aged body – already her second since she had been invited to join the Council – and was now a curvaceously beautiful white-skinned creature, raven-haired, with icy blue eyes and fabulously near-spherical breasts which she had chosen to reveal in all their considerable glory. Her extravagant costume stopped at her amazingly thin waist and only resumed again at her shoulders, where a little lacy thing like a voluptuary’s idea of a bed-jacket covered her shoulders and arms.