Transition

by Iain M. Banks

  Keep it hidden, keep it safe. That was all.

  How the fuck had they known?

  Anyway, I lobbed the fucker into the back of the safe with the letter and did my best to forget about both of them, quite successfully.

  Months, years passed. Left Mr N’s firm when he retired in 2000, became a hedgie working out of an ultra-smart property in Mayfair with another dozen or so guys, left NYC the day before the towers came down and was never sure if I’d had a narrow escape or had missed something it would have been worth being there for, despite all the nastiness of it, just to be able to say I’d been there, know what I mean? Anyway, I was on a beach in Trinidad so it didn’t matter. Didn’t see much of the Noyces after Ed retired, though they kept inviting me to Spetley Hall for years afterwards.

  Made more money. Lost some of it opening a restaurant with a couple of mates when each of us thought one of the others must be the one who actually knew what he was doing. Still, live and learn, eh? Me and half a dozen other guys broke away from Tangible Topiary (that was the name of the hedge fund) and started up a new one a few doors down from our old office. We called it FMS. It was registered at Companies House and in the Cayman Islands as just FMS Ltd with no further detail though we told people who insisted on knowing that the letters stood for Financial Merchant Securities or Future Market Superstars or some such tosh, but really it stood for Fuck Me Sideways. As in Fuck Me Sideways, Look At The Amount Of Money We’re Making.

  Our Mayfair office was even grander than TT’s, deliberately. We had a pool put in in the basement, a gym in the attic, and a games room with wraparound monitors for driving and shoot-’em-up games. Oh, and a flotation pod each. All tax-deductible, as you’d expect. Even the computer games were there to help us work off all that testosterone and aggression, weren’t they? The place usually contained more people there to advise us or tutor us on stuff than it did us actual hedgies. We had personal trainers, an in-house masseur, fine-wine advisers, bespoke personal-scent consultants, grooming and presentational experts, lifestyle and diet gurus, yacht brokers, fencing instructors and personal shoppers arriving from Harrods or Jermyn Street every couple of hours or so with stuff they thought would suit us (no time or inclination to actually go to the shops or mix with the plebs).

  Not to mention an account with a very discreet top-of-the-range escort service based a couple of streets away for when all that testosterone needed another sort of outlet. We had a special room for that too that we called the canteen, though the joke was some guys took it at their desk. I was slow to start using that particular service. Never paid for it before, so it was like a pride thing? Only there’d be times when you’d be sitting there in front of the screens and feeling suddenly horny and knowing a fabulous-looking girl who needed absolutely no chatting up or dining or alcoholic lubrication or talk of Where do we think this is going? or even cuddling was only a phone call and maybe ten minutes away and even though it was a week’s wages for some wanker it was only petty cash given what we were making. Daft not to really, know what I mean? Like fast food, only really quality fast food.

  Lot of toot taken too. Not so much by yours truly but the other guys got wired into it. I was like the sommelier of the office, though, know what I mean? We had very good contacts though mostly the dealers weren’t people I’d mixed with, the turnover being what it is in the industry, but I was always the one they came to to check it was good stuff, which it almost always was. Stamp of authority, me. I should have issued certificates, charged.

  When Chas, the other senior guy from TT who’d left with me to set up FMS in the first place retired to raise kids and thoroughbred racehorses I realised I was actually the oldest of the people in the office, and I was only in my early thirties. FMS indeed.

  And we had our own financial advisers, believe it or not. We could make it and we could spend it (with a bit of help – see all the above), but putting it to best use, saving for a rainy day, that was another area of expertise. I mean, obviously we had a pretty good idea what to do with the loot, hundred times better than your average Joe Mug in the street, but there were people who specialised in that sort of stuff, so you listened to them. Tax shelters, write-offs, offshoring all you could, putting stuff in trusts which in theory were controlled elsewhere and just doled out what you needed if you asked nicely (ha ha). Cayman Islands, Bahamas, Channel Islands, Luxembourg, Liechtenstein, Switzerland…

  In the end we were paying less tax than our Paki cleaners. I’d drive through the clogged and teeming streets of west London and look at all those passing faces thinking, You mugs, you fucking mugs.

  Some of us were genius mathematicians. Not me, obviously. We split into two lots, really. There were the instinctive hedgies like me who just had a feel for what was going on and put ourselves about, keeping eyes and ears open and calling in and doing little favours here and there, and the Quants, the pure numbers guys, the mathematics wizards who in another stupider age would have been mouldering away in some ancient pile of stones in Oxbridge, inventing new numbers and burbling on about fuck knows what and doing nothing useful for society. We put them to work and paid them more money than even they could count. Then there were the programmers. They were a sort of subset of the maths guys, working on stuff that none of the rest of us even started to understand but that made everything work even more efficiently and let us make even more money.

  The lease on the property next door came up. We bought that, knocked through, upped the numbers. Place became a computer centre. Had to install industrial air-conditioning plant to get rid of all the heat that the machines produced.

  Guess what? Made even more money. Cars, flats, Mayfair townhouse, a nice little eight-bed new-build in Surrey, lots of hols, and girls girls girls. Still no call to make me start earning that 10K a month. Not that I needed the money, of course, but it was sort of a tradition by now, know what I mean?

  Still, it always gave me an ever so slight funny turn whenever I saw it on the statement.

  10

  Patient 8262

  I think it was our Philosophy tutor at UPT who said something which I took for granted (or, just as likely, didn’t bother to think about) at the time and have only lately begun to find worrying, now that I have had all this time to think about it. It was this: Any argument or point of view that makes solipsism look no less likely may be discounted.

  Solipsism, he told us, was in a sense the default state of humanity. There was, arguably, a kernel of us that always believed that we personally, our own individual consciousness, was the only thing that really existed and that nothing else mattered. That feeling we have – certainly that behaviour we exhibit – of utter selfishness as a child, absolutely demanding (beginning as an infant, when we are paradoxically all-powerful due to our very helplessness), transfigures into the common adolescent intuition that we are invulnerable, almost certainly marked out for something special, but in any event simply not capable of dying, not in our present gloriously fresh state of youthful primacy.

  Armed forces at war, our tutor pointed out, are full of barely mature individuals who are perfectly convinced by the proposition It Won’t Happen to Me, and that, significantly, this applies to many who have no serious religious faith predisposing them to such wildly optimistic and irrational self-centredness. This is not to say that there aren’t plenty of others who know perfectly well that It Can Happen to Anybody, or that somebody who started out feeling special and invulnerable cannot change into somebody who is rightly terrified by the randomness and capriciousness of fate – especially military fate – but the vast majority are convinced, despite the evidence all around them of that essentially uncaring arbitrariness, that nothing bad will happen to them.

  It might be said that we never entirely shake off this feeling, no matter how many of our illusions we lose in later life or how let down, abandoned and irrelevant we may feel as age extracts its various tolls from us. Of course, this persistence did not in any way mean it might actually be true. We h
ad to assume that solipsism was nonsense because otherwise everything else around us was nonsense and irrelevant, and the result of a kind of self-inflicted deceit.

  The tutor’s point, though, was to provide a kind of check on the wilder excesses of philosophical investigation. Of course it was always interesting and sometimes worthwhile to speculate on highly outré propositions and explore exquisitely rarefied and unlikely ideas, but that ought not to distract one overmuch from the mainstream of philosophical thought, or indeed reality.

  Whenever one was struck by a previously unlikely-seeming idea that had come to appear plausible or even sensible, one ought to apply that test: was it inherently any more likely than solipsism? If solipsism seemed to make just as much sense, then the idea could be dismissed.

  Of course, the proposition that nothing – or at least nobody – else in the universe really existed could never be disproved from first principles. No evidence that might be produced was capable of convincing somebody fully and determinedly holding this idea that they were not the only thinking, feeling thing in existence. Every apparently external event could be consistently accounted for through strict adherence to that central hypothesis, that only one’s own mind existed and that one had therefore made up – simply imagined – all apparent externalities.

  Now, our tutor pointed out that there was a weakness in the hard-line or extreme solipsist’s position which came down to the question why, if they were all that existed, they bothered to deceive themselves so? Why did it appear to the solipsistic entity that there was an external reality in the first place, and, more to the point, why this one specifically? Why did the solipsist appear to be constrained in any way by that supposedly physically non-existent and therefore utterly pliable reality?

  Often, in practice, one would be talking to the solipsist concerned in a sheltered institution or outright lunatic asylum. Why did they appear to be there, with all the restrictions such establishments tended to involve, rather than living some life of maximally efficient hyper-pleasure – a god, a super-heroic master-figure capable of any achievement or state of bliss through the simple act of thinking of it?

  How this argument affected the individual solipsist apparently depended entirely on their degree of self-deception and the history and development of their delusional state, our tutor informed us, but the depressing truth was that it pretty much never resulted in a eureka moment and the solipsist – now happily convinced of the existence of other people – returning to society as a rational and useful part of it. There was inevitably some underlying psychological reason why the individual had retreated to this deceptive bastion of selfish untouchability in the first place, and until that had been successfully addressed little real progress towards reality was likely.

  But do you start to appreciate my concerns? Here I am, lying in my hospital bed, relatively powerless and certainly obscure, unheeded by almost everybody, of merely passing interest even to those charged with my care, and yet I am convinced that I am merely hiding, biding my time before I resume my rightful place in the world – indeed, in the many worlds! Before this I had a life of adventure and excitement, of great risk and even greater achievement, of unarguable importance and prominence, and yet now I am here, an effectively bed-bound nonentity who spends a lot of the time asleep, or lying here with my eyes closed, listening to the banality of the clinic going on all around me, day after almost unchanging day, remembering – or imagining – my earlier life of dashing, daring feats of elegance and style, and positions of importance and great power attained.

  How likely, really, is it that these memories are real? The more vivid and spectacular they are, the more likely, perhaps, that they are dreams, mere notions, not the set-down traces of actual historical events. What is most likely? That these things happened, threaded through my life like some charged conducting wire spun through the drab fabric of my existence? Or that – doubtless under the influence of some of the drugs prescribed by the Clinic seemingly as a matter of course – I have used a febrile, undemanded-of mind with too much time to think and too little happening in the common weft of reality to distract it to conjure up a theatre of colourful characters and exciting events that flatter my own need to feel important?

  I could easily believe that I am mad, or at least self-deceiving, or at the very least that I have been so, and that only now am I beginning to grasp the reality of my situation, my plight. Perhaps these very thoughts are the start of the process of me dragging myself out of this pit of lies that I have dug for myself.

  And yet, where did all these traces come from? Where could they have come from? Whether they are genuine memories of actual events which occurred in the real world, or even several real worlds, or whether they are stories I have told myself, where must they have come from? Could I really have made them all up? Or is it not more likely that their very variety and dazzle indicated that they must genuinely have happened? If I am so banal and ordinary, where did these absurd fancies appear from? I must have had some life before I ended up here. Why should it not be as I appear to recall?

  I think I can remember a common enough upbringing in a world no more exotic than any might appear to an outsider. A city, a house and home, parents, friends, schooling, jobs, lusts and loves, ambitions, fears, triumphs and disappointments. All seem present and correct (if a little vague, perhaps due to their very ordinariness). All in a minor key, though. All humdrum, everyday, unremarkable, that’s all.

  Then my true life (as I think of it) commenced; my entry into the many worlds and l’Expédience, my dealings with persons and events that were anything but ordinary. That was when I became the me I was, even if I am, temporarily, a pale reflection of that person now.

  I shall be that person again. I know it.

  But you can see why I might be worried. You, who might be a part of me, or a future self.

  The Transitionary

  Did I do what I think I just did? Surely not. If I did, I’d be the first. (Or not, of course. Maybe it happens all the time but they keep it secret. This is the Concern we’re dealing with here. Secrecy comes as standard. But wouldn’t there be rumours?)

  Could I have just flitted without septus? That isn’t supposed to be possible. You must have septus, the drug is absolutely necessary, even if it is not entirely sufficient, if an individual is to transition between realities. I was out of the stuff. They’d taken the emergency pill out of my hollow tooth and taken the tooth itself for good measure. I was unconscious but it must have happened because the tooth was gone.

  Or, it occurs to me, I swallowed the pill in a lucid interval – between the smack in the face in the plane and waking up tied to the chair – which I don’t remember. Or maybe it went down my throat by pure chance when they punched me. The punch in the face could easily have dislodged it; I swallowed it and they didn’t know I had. They’d have needed a bulky piece of kit like an NMR scanner or something to have a chance of locating the pill inside my body, so even after they found the hollow tooth…

  But they said they had found the hollow tooth, and removed the pill. Why lie about that? Didn’t make sense. And why the post-flit hangover? I didn’t even know who I was for the first few seconds, and my head still hurts. Never had that before, not even in basic training.

  Still, even with bits that didn’t add up right, that was a far more plausible explanation than somebody accomplishing a septus-free flit. I had to go with the must-have-swallowed-it-by-accident scenario; I’d just got lucky, once again.

  Anyway, whatever: I am naked, hardly presentable to the outside world, so the first thing to do is find some clothes. I try the light switches by the door as I pad out of the great ballroom, but nothing happens. Pausing at the tall double doors to the anteroom beyond, I listen for any sound that might indicate I am not alone in the Palazzo Chirezzia. Quiet as a tomb. I shiver as I cross the anteroom and hall, making for the central staircase. The air is cool but it is the air of ghostly desolation – all these rolled-up carpets, this
sheet-wrapped furniture and gloomy light and smell of long abandonment – that truly affects me.

  I try one of the grand bedrooms on the first floor, but the wardrobes and cupboards in the dressing room are empty save for mothballs sitting in little nests of twisted paper, or rolling around with dull and lazy clicks in drawers. My reflection stares back at me through the shuttered gloom. Another bland-looking man of generally medium build, though reasonably well-muscled.

  On the second floor, one room holds a wardrobe with various sets of clothing, some of which might be my size, but the clothes look antique. I go to the window, crack the shutters and look out. The people I can see in the calle running along the side of the palace look to be dressed in colourful, relatively slim-fitting, moderately heterogeneous clothes.

  I would guess I am in a fairly standard late-twentieth or early-twenty-first-century Degenerate Christian High-Capitalist reality (a Greedist world, to use the colloquial). The fragre certainly feels right. Probably the same Earth I visited before, when my little pirate captain tried to recruit me, or near as dammit. If I did flit away from torture, without septus, through sheer desperation, then a familiar world, one I’d visited before and felt comfortable in, but not one they’d expect me to resort to, is where I would head for automatically.

  Calbefraques might have seemed the obvious destination; you might think, why didn’t I just wake in my own body, in my own house in the trees looking out over the town beneath? Because for years I have known I might turn traitor in deed as well as thought, and prepared for it mentally, telling myself that in any transition under duress or in a state of semiconsciousness, the place I thought of as home would be the last place I ought to aim for.

  All the same, I would not have thought I’d end up here.

  The clothes in this wardrobe are fancy dress, I realise; ancient costumes for balls and masquerades.