Transition

by Iain M. Banks

  I said that I still thought he was being too harsh on himself. He had done the right thing.

  He looked tired and defeated now, and we had, as I have made clear, applied no physical pressure whatsoever to him up to this point. “The thing is,” he said, “maybe in the same situation, even knowing what I know now, I’d still do the same thing. I’d still tear that Christian bastard’s nails out, get him to talk, find out where the bomb was, hope that the plods got the right street, the right end of it, the right fucking city.” He looked at me with what might have been defiance or even a sort of pleading. “But I’d still insist that I was charged and prosecuted.” He shook his head again. “Don’t you see? You can’t have a state where torture is legal, not for anything. You start saying it’s only for the most serious cases, but that never lasts. It should always be illegal, for everybody, for everything. You might not stop it. Laws against murder don’t stop all murders, do they? But you make sure people don’t even think about it unless it’s a desperate situation, something immediate. And you have to make the torturer pay. In full. There has to be that disincentive, or they’ll all be at it.” He raised his head and looked about him, his gaze obviously being meant to take in not just the room we were in but the whole building; maybe even more than that. “Or you end up with this.” He looked at me. “With you. Whoever you are.”

  I thought about this. It seemed to me that the fellow’s mind had been broken in prison, probably, but that he had also probably always been an idealist. He certainly sounded like one now. Almost like a fanatic. Nevertheless, had it been up to me I’d have released him, frankly. However, it was not up to me. There was high-level interest in this case, for one thing, and an accusation of having aided terrorist groups could not simply be ignored. He was right in that; the law had to be obeyed. I thought of handing him over to one of the younger people who would not have heard of him, but decided on reflection to question him myself, determining that I would be more lenient than they, given that I knew the unfortunate circumstances that had led him here.

  Accordingly, we employed the gagging tape/suffocation method. Jay admitted nothing regarding membership or support of clandestine or illegal organisations or even any sympathy with them or indeed any outright criticism of the state until approximately the average degree of pressure had been applied, whereupon, displaying all the standard and expected signs of distress, he informed us that he’d admit to anything, of course he would. This was what he’d meant, he claimed. People would admit to anything. The only real truth that torture produced was that people would admit to anything to get the torture to stop, even if they knew that the admissions they were being called upon to make would eventually prove fatal for them, or others. The whole process was pointless and cruel and a waste, he claimed. A state that allowed or condoned torture lost part of its soul, he said. He then pleaded directly with me to stop and reiterated that he would admit to anything we wanted him to admit to, and sign anything we put in front of him. I chose not to point out that what he had just endured was not true torture by my definition as it had not involved any actual pain or physical damage, just great discomfort and distress.

  That notwithstanding, I terminated the interrogation at that point, with, I will own, no small degree of relief, before he could admit to anything specific that we might be obliged to follow up.

  Jay was released the following day. I filed a report that implied we had been considerably more severe with him than we had in fact been, guessing that this was all that had been desired by the powers that be in the first place, and our skills and facilities had in effect been used as a means of punishment rather than as they were supposed to be, to discover the truth – a use of our time and resources concerning which, I need hardly emphasise, I was in some disapproval, if, of course, powerless to prevent.

  Sadly, a month later, we read that Jay, our Subject 47767, the one-time police officer who had been a hero to many of us, had taken his own life, throwing himself underneath the wheels of one of the trucks that deliver giant rolls of paper to newspaper printing presses. One of my colleagues pointed out that suicide, too, was technically illegal, which to me seemed ironic as well as very sad.

  Subject 7

  Only one person was ever truly kind to her. It was one of the brush ladies. There were various brush ladies. They were all small and dark and hunched. They had brushes that sucked at the air or that swallowed dust from the floor. And from lights overhead. The brush ladies only came at night. A man who was taller than them came with them and told them what to do.

  She liked the brush ladies because they did not hurt her. They left her alone. She had been afraid of them at first, because everything that happened here hurt her or confused her and they obviously belonged to this place and so she was scared of them. But in time she stopped being frightened and started to look forward to seeing them because they were not like the others.

  The others hurt her. The others had clipboard things and electrical things and torches they shone in her eyes and small hard heavy things they spoke into. They had glass things that they used to put liquids into her. These were called syringes. Also they had wires that they attached to her. Lots of wires. Some tubes too. Mostly wires. The tubes hurt more than the wires but the wires could hurt as well. They all wore white coats or pale blue uniforms. The hurt came from fire in her veins, usually. Though they had other sorts of pain they could make her feel. It depended.

  Some of the others did not wear white coats or pale blue uniforms but dressed like ordinary people did. These ones just sat around and stared at her. She got the impression that they could do things inside her head. This was because when she tried to think herself away from here – to escape the way she had escaped from things before, before she had been brought here – the sitting people would close their eyes or bunch their fists or sit forward suddenly and she could feel them in her head, pulling her away from anywhere she might find safety or at least a temporary numbing of the pain.

  Even when she was awake she heard voices and saw ghosts. When they put the liquids into her at night she went to sleep and had bad dreams as well. At first there had been little time to watch the brush ladies or try to talk to them before sleep rose up within her and dragged her down to where the nightmares waited. Then, she had thought that the brush ladies were a part of the bad dreams. But gradually she found that, each night, she stayed awake a little longer before falling asleep.

  Or perhaps the brush ladies came earlier – she wasn’t sure.

  Sometimes, after they had put the night-time liquids into her, one of the others would come to check on her. She would pretend to be asleep. The next morning, when they wanted her to wake up and be washed and fed before they started to do things to her, she would pretend to stay asleep. Gradually they put less liquid in the syringe each night before the lights were dimmed. She still pretended to be asleep in the evening but she woke up on time in the morning. They seemed satisfied with this. She was happy because now she got to watch the brush ladies.

  She tried talking to them but they ignored her, or – when they did come over to talk to her – they did not speak the same language.

  But then one of them seemed to change, and appeared to understand her, and talked to her. The brush lady who talked to her always wore a grey cloth tied round her head. She was sure that this brush lady had been one of the ones who had not been able to talk to her in her own language, so she was surprised that now suddenly she could. Still, that was good. Even so, she still didn’t understand everything the brush lady said. Sometimes it sounded as though she was talking to herself, or using the sort of complicated, mysterious words that the others did, the ones who hurt her.

  Sometimes the brush lady with the grey cloth went back to not talking to her, or seemed not to be able to understand her again.

  That was confusing.

  The grey-cloth brush lady seemed different on the nights when she did talk to her compared to the nights when she didn’t. She walked diffe
rently, stood differently. She was the same all the time when the man who shouted was there, then – when he had definitely gone – she became slightly different, if she was going to talk to her. Perhaps nobody else would have noticed what changed in the brush lady with the grey cloth, but she did. She was able to see these things. She was special and could see things other people didn’t. That was just one of the special things that she could do, one of the things that had made her different and worse compared to everybody else. These things had made her a Problem Child and Educationally Special and Developmentally and Socially Challenged, before they’d decided she was Disturbed and a Delinquent and A Danger To Herself And Others (the others would always try to protect themselves – she understood that).

  Finally these things had caused her to have a Breakdown and so she had to be Committed Into Indefinite Non-Elective Long-Term Institutional Care With Immediate Effect and so here she was in this long-term care. It had led to a hospital like a prison. And then to another one which was the same but different. And then to this place, which was worse than either of the hospital-prisons because here even the people supposed to be looking after her hurt her. Worse, she couldn’t even use the things that made her special to get away from the being hurt.

  Also, she couldn’t retaliate. She could not hurt people who hurt her because they had these people in plain clothes who sat around her, the ones who sat watching her and did the eye-squeezing, fist-pumping, hunched-over thing. Or maybe it was because they put the liquids into her, using the syringes. These things put her to sleep, or made her just too woozy to think or aim straight.

  Here are some of the things that the grey-cloth brush lady said to her:

  “Hello. How are you? What have they got you on? What do they call you? Subject Seven. Well, that’s caring. Remember me? How are you? What have they done to you? Evening. Me again. I don’t even recognise this, what the hell is it? Oh. Hey, Subject Seven. Been a while. How’s things? Shit, what are they pumping… Are you with us, Seven? Are you? Anybody left in there? Fuck, you poor kid. Yes, they’ve seen something in you, haven’t they? Something they think they can use. Mm-hmm. Fate help us all… What? Oh, I wish I could. What are they doing to you now? You poor…”

  And so on and so on.

  She replied by saying things like these:

  “I spy Monty’s video. Rent me a Sunder. I’ll have that child frashed, so elp me. Crivens, Mr Givens, you’ll be the deaf of me. Swear I never heard of such a thing. On me muvver’s grave, there’s a thing. Oi sat in a satin stain. Spot of block and truckle never hurt nobody. Alignment? I’ll show you alignment, you arrant plopinjay; bend over. So help me. Hold fast there, bothers and cistern, we shall not face such girlsterous times alone! Clunch.”

  “… Can you? Can you hear me? Listen, I can’t get you out of here, Seven, not in any way, physically or otherwise. Minor miracle I’m here. Never thought I’d work so hard to get back in. I don’t think you can understand a damn thing, can you? But for the record – in case you somehow can, or one day will – you’ve made it worth it, all by yourself, just to get to see what they’ll do, what they want, what risks they’ll take, how low they’ll stoop. But look, maybe things will change. Now listen, kid. You do whatever you need to do to make things easy on yourself, okay? Go along. Do you understand? Do something of what they want but keep a true core inside you, a soul of rebelliousness; an anger, not a fear. One day you’ll be free, and then we’ll see what we can do. I might be there then. If I am, remember me. Good luck.”

  “Well met by sunlight. We’ll greet by sinlight. Stroke me a clyper!”

  The grey-cloth lady often touched her; she would stroke her hand or pat her arm or smooth her hair off her forehead. She did that again now, brushing hair from her brow.

  Liquid.

  In the light, she could see that there was liquid on the grey-cloth brush lady’s cheek. Tears.

  That was strange. For some reason she’d thought that only she made tears, not anybody else.

  Then the grey-cloth brush lady went away with the rest of the cleaners.

  She never came back.

  The Transitionary

  After the great septennial extravaganza under the Dome of the Mists, I was no longer Madame d’Ortolan’s golden boy. I was not at all sure that I ever had been, despite what Mrs Mulverhill might have believed, but certainly I was no longer. I must have passed whatever test she had arranged around that consummately bizarre serial two-person orgy she took me on, because I survived in the immediate thereafter and there were no further interrogations, but she felt that I had insulted her, obviously, and now I would be made to pay.

  I was still convinced that the whole point of the exercise had been to test how easily I could be couriered and to give the trackers, spotters and foreseers who were undoubtedly in attendance nearby something to work on – like handing a sniffer hound a piece of clothing belonging to the person you wanted to track – and if there had been any personal component – Madame d’Ortolan feeling some curious form of jealousy regarding myself and Mrs Mulverhill, perhaps – then surely that had been entirely subordinate to the infinitely more important business of ensuring the security of the Concern.

  Nevertheless, I knew I had insulted her and she had taken it very badly. I had not reacted as I had been expected to, required to. I had shown some distaste, even arguably some disgust. Certainly not the awed, stunned, perhaps embarrassed, perhaps humbled respect I believe she had anticipated and was convinced should be rightfully hers.

  In the end, on any absolute scale it had been no great hurt; the average person must endure, absorb and forget a hundred equivalent or worse insults and denigrations each year. But for a person of Madame d’Ortolan’s unparalleled importance and continually reinforced pride, the very unexpectedness of it had magnified the offence and made it loom all the larger, set against the otherwise smoothly functioning progressions of her remorselessly flourishing life.

  For a few months afterwards I was rested and given no assignments at all, but from then on I was sent on gradually more difficult and hazardous missions for l’Expédience. I was allowed to spend less and less time in my house in the trees on the ridge above Flesse. I spent my days instead spread serially far across the many worlds, engaging in feats of derring-do, close-quarter assassination and outright thuggery. Gradually even the house at Flesse stopped seeming the sanctuary it had been and when I had discretionary use of septus I would holiday, if that is the right word, in the world containing the Venice where I had met and lost my little pirate captain, wandering like a lost soul across its history-scorched face, becoming familiar with that single embodiment of a world crippled by its legacy of recent cruelties and a self-lacerating worship of the proceeds of selfishness and greed. Again, this was your world, and I guarantee that in many ways I know it better than you.

  There is a saying that some foolish people believe: what does not kill you makes you stronger. I know for a fact, having seen the evidence – indeed, often enough having been the cause of it – that what does not kill you can leave you maimed. Or crippled, or begging for death or in one of those ghastly twilights experienced – and one has to hope that that is entirely not the right word – by those in a locked-in or persistent vegetative state. In my experience the same people also believe that everything happens for a reason. Given the unalleviatedly barbarous history of every world we have ever encountered with anything resembling Man in it, this is a statement of quite breathtakingly casual retrospective and ongoing cruelty, tantamount to the condonation of the most severe and unforgivable sadism.

  Nevertheless – as much through chance, I am sure, as through any innate skill or other natural quality – I survived these trials and did indeed grow more skilled, more capable and more adept at all the arcane, ethically dubious, technically overspecialised and frankly disreputable techniques required.

  I did, however, grow more frightened too, because with every new mission and each required high-risk intervention, att
ack or killing, I knew that my gradually perfecting skills would not save me when my luck ran out, indeed that they would stand for precisely nothing when the moment came, as it surely must, and that with every new mission I upped the chances of this one being my last, not through any lessening of my preparation, creativity, vigilance or skill but due to the simple working-out of statistical chance.

  I had already long forgotten most of the interventions I had taken part in, then later could not recall how many people I had harmed or injured, or left disabled or terrified for life.

  Eventually, to my shame, I even lost count of those I’d killed.

  I think there is a kind of queasily mixed emulsion of guilt and fatalism that settles on a man or woman engaged in such deadly, fatal work. I mean deadly to those we target; fatal only potentially to ourselves, but still, eventually, if we keep going long enough, always guaranteed to be terminal.

  We come to know that the end cannot be evaded for ever, and the terror of that knowledge – the increasing certainty that every successful mission and every triumphant side-stepping of death this time only makes it more likely that the next risk we take could be the one that finally takes us – makes us more and more nervous, neurotic, unbalanced and psychologically fragile.

  And, I believe, if we are involved with the business of killing others and have any sort of conscience at all – and even if we know that we fight the good fight and do what we do for the best of motives – a part of us, if we are honest with ourselves, comes to look forward to that end, begins even to welcome its increasingly likely arrival. If nothing else it will bring an end to worry, an end to guilt and nightmares, both waking and sleeping.

  (An end to tics, neuroses and psychoses, too. An end to seemingly always finding myself in the body and mind of somebody with OCD, and that being the one trait that transfers.)