Transition

by Iain M. Banks

Madame d’Ortolan yawned and stretched. She smiled at him. She looked just as she had, though bereft of her clothes and jewellery. She ran a hand through his hair, her gaze flicking about his face.

  “So, Tem,” she said lazily, and gave a little shiver, squeezing him inside her.

  “Your investigations are complete, I take it,” Oh said. His words sounded a little more cold than he’d meant.

  She gazed levelly at him. “I suppose they are, Tem.” It was hard to read her voice. She stroked his face. “And very pleasant they were to perform, too. Wouldn’t you say?” Her smile appeared engagingly tentative.

  He took one of her hands and kissed it gently with dry lips. “I would,” he said, but stalled there, and could not even look her in the eye. Confused, he felt a need to say more, to make light of this, or, perhaps, instead, to behave in an overtly and overly romantic, grateful manner, to reassure her even, to compliment and flatter her and declare his admiration and appreciation, yet at the same time he wanted to dismiss her, deflate her, hurt her, just get away from her.

  He felt caught, poised between these conflicting urges, as balanced on their cusp as he was on this absurd fucking chair.

  “I trust something of the lady’s spell might now be broken, yes?” she asked, bringing her mouth close to his ear as she stroked his cheek with the back of her fingers. “I’m sure she has her own naive charms, but further experience offers us greater richness, don’t you think? It offers us some extra perspective. We compare, contrast, measure and judge. Initial impressions, however enchanting they may have seemed at the time, are evaluated again in the light of something more accomplished. What might have seemed matchless becomes… re-valued, hmm?” She levered herself away a little and smiled, her hand still stroking his cheek. “The young wine serves its purpose and seems well enough when one knows no better, but only the fine wine, brought patiently to the summit of fruition where it may reveal all its complexities and subtleties, satisfies all the available senses, wouldn’t you say?”

  He stilled the stroking hand, folding it in his own. “Well,” he said, forcing himself to stare into her eyes. “Indeed. There was no comparison.”

  He felt her gaze pierce him, and knew immediately that the remark, which had been meant to deceive, which he had thought cunning and which was supposed to mean one thing to her and another entirely to him, had failed to mislead her.

  He felt something in her change. She pursed her lips, said, “We’ll go back now.”

  And they were back, back to the ice yacht and the corpuscular landscape of pillows and cushions they shared with the others, she just letting go of his hand and looking away, her expression bored. She lifted the mouthpiece for the hookah and drew deeply on it, then glanced back at him. Her face looked closed, composed. “Fascinating, Mr Oh,” she said. She waved one hand dismissively. “I’ll let you get back to the party. Good night.”

  He felt silenced by his own clashing emotions as much as by her. He hesitated, then decided that there was nothing he could say or do that would not make the situation worse. He nodded, rose and left.

  A drunk, singing dwarf in a spun-sugar dinghy rowed him back to shore, breaking off a bit of gunwale as they approached and offering it to him. “Tastes of rum, sir! Go on! Try it! Try it! Try it!”

  The Philosopher

  I must concede that I was lucky in a sense. On my return from abroad and my quitting the Army I found employment immediately during a time of high unemployment, having been recommended to the national police force by one of the special-forces liaison officers I had worked with overseas. My skills and abilities had been recognised at quite high levels and I will not pretend that I did not feel a degree of pride on realising this.

  I met with some ill feeling from a few of my new colleagues in the police force at first, perhaps because I had been brought in at a relatively senior level. However, I like to think that I soon won the respect of almost all of them, though of course there will always be those in any organisation who will find something to be resentful about and one simply has to live with that fact.

  I found myself in the civilian police, albeit the more senior and serious national police force, at a moment in time when the full extent of the Christian Terrorist threat was just beginning to become clear even to those, not least our own government, who had persuaded themselves that such people could be dealt with effectively by negotiation and the occasional slap on the wrist.

  I think the first airport massacre ended that policy of folly. The CTs sent in a small suicide team of big, well-trained men who simply overpowered one of the two-man armed police teams who patrolled our ill-defended airports at the time. The two officers stood no chance; they were bundled to the ground by three or four fanatics of substantial physical size, their throats were cut without mercy and their machine guns and ammunition clips taken from them and turned on the nearest check-in queue. The members of the suicide team not firing the guns set about slashing at as many of the screaming, fleeing holidaymakers as they could, chasing down women and children and slitting their throats too, without mercy. Nearly forty innocent people of all ages were butchered in this orgy of violence.

  When the machine guns ran out of ammunition everyone in the team was meant to kill themselves but two of them were overpowered by angry citizens before they could take that coward’s way out. One did not survive their summary justice but the other did and it was on him that I had what I will freely confess was the pleasure of working subsequently, with the aim of discovering as much as possible about the organisation and aims of the CT organisation.

  I felt intense pride that I had been chosen to conduct this interrogation. I took it as a compliment both to my technical skills but also to my reputation for the measured and considered application of my techniques. Such was the national outrage at the attack at the time that a more hot-headed operative might have botched the assignment. It is a myth that the police and other security personnel are immune to emotion, both their own and that of the law-abiding populace at large. We may be trained to combat the deleterious effects of acting on such emotions, but we are not inhuman.

  I too felt a cold fury towards the wretched individual who had carried out such a cowardly attack, but I would not let that emotion, however understandable, cloud my professional judgement regarding the task in hand or allow any rashness or overreaction so caused to effectively offer this animal of an extremist an overly quick escape from the torments he so richly deserved.

  The specific operational details of the interrogation need not detain us here. The desire to know of such things can be almost prurient at times, in my opinion. My colleagues and I are paid to do such things and are trained to cope with the psychological fallout of our actions and there are good reasons why a veil is drawn over such matters to protect the general populace, who do not deserve to have to confront the realities that we have to face every day to keep them safe.

  Suffice to say, despite the subject’s attempts to convert me to his bizarre, perverted and cruel religion with its emphasis on martyrdom, cannibalism and the alleged ability of their holy men to forgive all sins no matter how horrendous and barbaric, I did not reconvert to become a Christian! And let me just say that I do not even concede that he was displaying any real bravery or strength of will in trying to do so. Fanatics are driven purely by their own fanaticism, and anyway it is a common technique used by subjects trained to resist interrogation to try to turn the resultant discourse back upon the questioner, not so much in any realistic hope of altering their views or causing them to cease or go easier in what they are doing, of course, but simply as a way for the subject to take his mind off the process itself.

  In any case, I am satisfied that while the cell system of the terrorist organisation sadly protected the identities of its other members apart from the six in the suicide team itself, I, along with my colleagues, extracted all that there was to be extracted from the subject and, thanks to our restraint, we were able to deliver him alive if not intact
, and certainly not unbroken, to the Justice Ministry for his trial and subsequent (well-deserved in my opinion) execution.

  Adrian

  I made a lot of money for Mr Noyce. Not like that dingbat son of his. Barney lost Mr N a lot of money. Soaked it up, pissed it away and snorted it. He would reappear from his bar in Goa every couple of years and announce he was coming back to stay in London and do something useful but he never did. Always ended up going back to the bar. He thought his dad ought to bail him out by giving him a job with his own firm, but Mr N wasn’t having it. Blood might be thicker than water but it’s no match for liquidity, know what I mean? Money is serious. You fuck about with it at your peril.

  Barney was always at Mr N to give him the bar, too, to turn it over to him legally but Mr N was too clever for that as well. He knew Barney would just sell it or lose it in a poker game or use it as collateral to fund some shitwit scheme that he’d make the usual unholy fucking mess of and be back at Mr and Mrs N’s with the begging bowl shortly after.

  Frankly, I think Ed found his boy a bit of an embarrassment. He was glad he was mostly arm’s length away in sunny Goa. Barney and me weren’t getting on so well any more either. I found him a bit of a moaner, always on about how tough things were for him when this was clearly a load of bollocks. Little cunt had had a charmed life with all the advantages, hadn’t he? Not my fault or his dad’s that he’d fucked it. And I mean, running a bar on a beach? That’s the fucking jackpot prize for most people, that is, that’s what your average geezer would regard as a brilliant retirement. Hard done by, my arse.

  And he had the nerve to blame me for this, at least partly. Good as told me this when we were drunk together once during a weekend at Spetley Hall. Like it was all my fault because I’d replaced him in Mr and Mrs N’s affections. So what if I had? I was a better friend to them than he was a son. I mean, the soft git.

  But I was the golden boy, wasn’t I? Never mind that the Noyces were like a second family to me, Mr N’s firm was like the first national bank of AC. I made a fucking mint. Most of it went to the firm but a lot came back to me in the way of a decent salary but especially in bonuses. Mr N and I had some heated discussions on the subject of bonuses on a few occasions but we always came to an agreement in the end.

  I suppose we both always knew I’d be leaving and going elsewhere eventually, but in the meantime the good times rolled with no hard feelings.

  Bought a bigger flat in delightful Docklands and a succession of less and less practical cars. Thought about a yacht but decided they just weren’t me – you could always charter if you really needed to. Took me hols in Aspen, the Maldives, Klosters, the Bahamas, New Zealand and Chile. Not to mention Majorca and Crete, doing a bit of old-fashioned raving in the big hot loud clubs.

  And the girls. Oh, bless their little cotton gussets, the girls: Saskia and Amanda and Juliette and Jayanti and Talia and June and Charley and Charlotte and Ffion and Jude and Maria and Esme and Simone. There were lots of others, but those were the non-casual ones, the ones I took the trouble of remembering their names and was happy to have stay over more than once. I loved them all in my own way and I guess they returned the favour. Most of them wanted to take things further but I never did. There’s no “us” in commitment, I’d tell them, there’s just a “me.” They couldn’t complain. I was generous and if there were ever hard feelings then it wasn’t my fault.

  And every month that 10K in US greenery appeared in my main spending account, and every time I saw it on the statement I got a little leap of the heart, remembering what had happened or what had seemed to happen that night in chilly Moscow, at the Novy Pravda.

  After our visit to the room with the black furniture and the amber light, Mrs M and I went back to the table where Connie Sequorin was chatting to two large Russian guys. They didn’t look very pleased to see me and Mrs M, especially me, but they left their cards and a bottle of Cristal and fucked off soon enough. We ate more blinis and caviar, drank more champagne and Mrs M and Connie both danced with me. I was still in a daze, though, not really paying attention to very much at all. Soon enough Mrs M paid the bill, we got our coats and walked straight to the waiting Merc that had brought us here. Snow was swirling from the orange-black sky. We went to this massive, very bright and warm hotel and I was handed the key to my own room. Mrs M said she’d be in touch and pecked me on the cheek. Connie said the same and did the two-cheek pretend-kiss thing. They had a suite and I wondered, as I padded down a very broad tall corridor to my room, if they had something going together.

  I slept till mid-afternoon the next day and found an envelope had been shoved under my door with a thousand roubles in it and a first-class BA ticket to Heathrow on a flight leaving four hours later. The room had been paid for. Mrs M and Connie had checked out hours earlier. A note left behind reception by Mrs M just said, “Welcome abroad. Mrs M.” Welcome abroad. Not Welcome aboard. Welcome abroad. I couldn’t tell if this was a mistake or a bit of cleverness.

  I went back. Back to Moscow and back to the club, the following month. I made friends with the manager guy Kliment (after a bit of suspicion – he didn’t really remember me or Mrs M or Connie Sequorin and probably thought I was police or a journalist or something) and got to have a look round the place one day. I found the room, the bedroom where Mrs M had taken me and we’d seemed to go on the weirdest of weird trips to a marshy wasteland where there was no Moscow, just ruins.

  It hadn’t occurred to me at the time to bring back a flower or a pebble or something – I’d been too fucking freaked out, I suppose. Not that that would have proved anything anyway. I knew something bizarre had happened but I didn’t know exactly what. I had the use of the room and the run of the place for the afternoon, until the staff arrived in the early evening to make the club ready for the night’s fun, and I had a good look round the room, the rooms on either side and even the cellar underneath and the little private bar directly above but it all looked plain and kosher, just slightly seedy in the cold strip light of day and I couldn’t see how the trick, assuming it was a trick, obviously, had been pulled. Drugs, I supposed. Or hypnosis. Suggestion and all that, know what I mean?

  No, I didn’t know what I meant either. It had just been too fucking real. I left the place no wiser than when I’d arrived and even turned down the offer of VIP entry, a nice table and a free bottle of bubbles from my new friend Kliment. Tired, I said. Some other time. Flew straight back to dear old fuck-off Blighty that night.

  I looked into travelling back to the Zone, around Chernobyl, but it was properly difficult to arrange and I never really felt happy with the whole idea. The more I thought about it the more sure I was I’d go back, at some risk to my future health, find the place where Mrs M had been hanging out and discover, oh wow, it was empty and deserted and it was as if it had all never been. No office, just an old supermarket or warehouse or whatever the fuck.

  Tried asking Ed about it but he claimed he knew nothing. Never met or heard of a Mrs Mulverhill. Connie S was just a woman he’d vaguely heard of recently at the time when she asked to be introduced to me. He swore he’d never heard of anything called the Concern and he certainly wasn’t getting any mysterious dosh every month, eight and a half K or otherwise. I’d have pushed further but he was just on the edge of getting annoyed with me, I could tell, and I was pretty sure I knew when Mr N was telling the truth by now. I hadn’t told him any more than I’d needed to but he was obviously intrigued just from the little I had said and started asking me questions. I stonewalled him, told him he didn’t want to know any more.

  Connie herself seemed to have disappeared off the face of the fucking Earth. Phones disconnected, business address a briefly rented office in Paris, unheard of by anybody who might have known somebody in her line of work.

  Checked the account, saw the money, waited for the call that never came. All that happened was that a couriered letter arrived from a C. Sequorin in Tashkent, Uzbekistan with a bunch of weird-looking names that were co
des, apparently. I was to commit them to memory if I could, otherwise just keep the letter safe for future reference. I put it in my safe. (I hired a private eye in Tashkent, because you can do that sort of thing these days in the wonderful new globalised world, providing only that you have access to piles of dosh. Nothing. Another deserted office. No joy tracing the source of the funds in the Cayman Islands either. Well, of course not. If governments can’t trace anything in tax havens, how the fuck was I supposed to? When I thought about this it was actually highly fucking reassuring.)

  A week after the letter with the codes, a padded envelope arrived with something the size and weight of a brick inside. It was a black box of thick plastic and inside that was a steel box with a sort of dial on the top made of seven concentric rings of different metals arranged around a very slightly concave button in the centre. These rings circled round and back with a sort of smooth clickiness, if you know what I mean, and if you looked carefully they had lots of little patterns of dots on them but they didn’t seem to do anything. There was a thinner-than-hair fine line around the middle of the box, like it was meant to open, maybe if you got the dials on the top arranged just right, like a combination lock on a safe, I suppose, but with the box came a note from Mrs Mulverhill saying I was to keep this metal box safe, guard it with my life and only give it to somebody who knew the codes from the letter.

  I tried having it X-rayed via a pal who works in airport security at City, but the box wasn’t having it. In fact, my mate thought his machine must be broken cos the thing didn’t show up at all. How fucking weird is that? If you could make a gun out of this stuff you could saunter onto any plane in the world totally tooled up. My guy pointed this out and I told him it’d be very unhealthy indeed for both of us if he breathed so much as a syllable about it. I’d barely finished telling him this when I got a very terse text message on my mobile telling me never to X-ray the box again or even think about trying any other method of looking inside.