Transition

by Iain M. Banks

  I might have said no, I might have resigned, but stupid pride, an urge not to be beaten or cowed by anybody, including Madame d’Ortolan, even if she was now the undisputed head of the whole Concern, kept me going until, when that initial impetus fell away and I might have justly claimed I’d made my point and stepped away, the resigned fatalism and thirst for it all to end – and end as it had taken place so far, as though only that could somehow justify and make sense of everything I’d done – took over, enabling and diseasing me at once.

  So by the time I might have thought myself able to relinquish the role I had played, it was too late to do so. I was another person. We all are, anyway, with every passing instant, even without the many worlds, changing from moment to moment, waking to waking, our continuity found as much within the context of others and our institutions, but how much more so for those of us who jump from soul to soul, world to world, mind to mind, context to context, husk to husk, leaving who knows what behind, picking up who knows what from whom?

  I thought my time had come on a few occasions, most recently when I was chasing a disgraced caudillo out of his estancia, down the steps and into the man-high grasses of one of the great blue-green fields that stretched to the horizon. He fumbled the revolver as he plunged, nearly falling, down the broad stone steps, trying both to hold his trousers up as he went and to avoid tripping over the broad red sash that was supposed to secure them. (I’d surprised him both in flagrante and on the toilet, both bucking and straining under a straddling slave girl. I swear people’s sexual predilections never cease to astound me, and you’d have thought by now that I could reasonably claim I’d seen it all: wrong again.)

  He’d thrown the girl at me and so bought himself enough time to start running, once he’d tripped over the still twitching bodies of his two guards in the hall outside. I disentangled myself from the screaming girl, then had to punch her with my free, non-cutlass-heaving hand when she came flying at me, nails out (the local gods alone knowing why). Finally I set off in pursuit, roaring for effect. I don’t even know where the pistol came from. I stooped and plucked it from the ground as the caudillo disappeared into the grasses, screaming hysterically. Not loaded. Well done. I pushed it into my waistband anyway and followed the trail of tall broken grasses, slackening my pace a little, then a lot. Ahead of me the caudillo had the hard job, pushing into and trampling over the finger-thick stalks, leaving me with a path that a one-legged blind man could have followed and still gained on his quarry.

  The wind sighed across the tops of the grasses somewhere over my head, and for a moment I was back in a banlieue just beyond the Périphérique, vaulting a burned-out car and chasing after the two young Maghrebis who’d thought to try and rape the girl in the tower block we’d just left. All gallant stuff, and she would allegedly turn into either a cowed, failed little thing who’d jump with her baby from the roof of this very block before she was twenty, or a noted authority on psycho-semantics – whatever that was – at the universities of Trier and Cairo, according to whether the mooted violation took place or not.

  The boys had a bottle of nitric with them. I was supposed to use it to do to them what they’d been going to do to her after they’d fucked her (otherwise they’d try again), but before I could catch them they leapt a wall and fell ten metres into a newly dug hole for a Métro line extension. One had time to scream before he hit the concrete. The other didn’t – scamp must have been between breaths. Parkour ninjas only in their PlayStation avatar forms, they’d both tumbled as they went and so hit head first. I’d just got to the wall. I still think I heard both necks snap, though it could have been their skulls popping, I suppose. The smashed bottle of nitric pooled around their bodies, raising fumes.

  Except this time they both scrambled up a chain-link fence into an electricity substation and started running across the top of the humming machinery, leaping equipment like hurdlers. They disappeared together inside a single titanic blue flash that wrecked my night vision and produced a concussive bang that left my ears ringing. I bounced to a stop against the fence.

  Wait, this hadn’t happened… I’d almost jumped the wall too, not been about to go geckoing up some chain-link and start dancing across the busbars.

  And then I was back in the blue-green field of giant grass again, still pacing heavily after the increasingly desperate caudillo. I could hear his panting breaths mingled with gasped, gulped pleas for mercy somewhere ahead. The path he was leaving was curved; he might be trying to circle back to the buildings, having worked out that he stood no chance while having to blaze the trail for both of us through the stiff, resistant crop.

  But no; I was charging down a hillside favela in Bahia, jumping empty oil cans and screaming at the departing back of another skinny young kid blurring through the crowds of shouting people. This one I just had to scare. I was supposed to be mistaken for an undercover cop and she was supposed to become a famous violinist, not a drug courier. She ran into the first big street at the bottom of the hill and missed getting flattened by a truck by about a centimetre. The truck swerved, half toppled, a man on a motorbike went full speed into the side of it, nearly taking his head off, flopping dead. The girl disappeared down an alley on the far side of the traffic and I stopped, stooped, hands on knees to get my breath back.

  I felt dizzy, staggered to one side and then the stagger turned into a run; I was still pelting down the alley after her. I shouted her name and she half turned immediately before she reached the street, long brown hair flung out to the side just for a moment. The truck hit her full on and tossed her into the oncoming stream of traffic, sending her spinning doll-loose under a bus, making it bounce on her body like it had gone over a speed bump. I skidded, stopping so fast against a corner that my sunglasses fell off. What the fuck was going on?

  I hesitated as I paced after the caudillo, then kept on going, cutlass raised, shaking my head to loose the bizarrely vivid feeling of having just relived the recent past.

  Cutlass they wanted, cutlass they would get. It had some historical meaning, apparently. At any rate, there would be no comeback now, no triumphal return no matter how undeserved. (Ask not. Oh, ask then. The answer is: a corrupt press, the manipulations of a foreign power and rich, influential families bribing thugs and judges: any incompetence, any evil can be washed away with sufficient muscle and money.) But not for our boy here; not for this version in this iteration of the world. The trail was still curving back round through the grass. It was a little narrower now, too, less wasteful. The caudillo must be getting half clever, trying to slip between the stalks rather than batter and stumble his way over them. I upped my pace to a normal walk, still puzzling over what was happening with these not-quite/more-than flashbacks.

  I found the caudillo’s scarlet waist-sash first, scribbled like a trail of rather too neat blood on the flattened grass. And then the man himself, lying in the grass, chest heaving, tears streaming, pants still at three-quarter mast, air whistling in and out of his gaping mouth, his hands clasped in front of him as though in prayer while he pleaded with me and offered rapidly increasing sums to let him go.

  I swivelled the cutlass in the most economical of backstrokes – the grass constricted matters – and the bastard twisted, rolled and suddenly had a tiny silvery two-shot up-and-over pistol in his quivering hands, pointed right at my face. In that instant, I had time to see that the gun might be small but the barrels each looked wide enough to stick a little finger down and not get it wedged, and the range was laughable.

  How slowly my arm seemed to be moving as it brought the cutlass round and down. Had I time to flit away? Not quite. But I could start the process. You never knew.

  So, those flashbacks that were not quite and rather more than flashbacks had been some sort of premonition of things going terminally wrong. That was what they’d meant; they’d been a warning. How foolish of me to ignore my own subconscious, I thought, though it did also occur to me that a simple but very strong urge to take off after th
e caudillo and his girly cries waving a high-powered handgun might have been a still simpler and less ambiguous hint. But a cutlass they had wanted, and where would people like me be if we didn’t even have the weaselly excuse of just obeying orders?

  This was taking too long. I thought I could hear the swish of the cutlass edge tearing through the air as it accelerated, and feel its tip connecting with a couple of the closest stalks of grass as it passed, a blade amongst blades…

  The caudillo’s fist, the one holding the gun, jerked once.

  There was a click.

  No more.

  Gun jammed or safety still on.

  Or also not loaded, of course – precedent the fumbled pistol dropped on the steps. (The man had made an unholy mess of running the country – why expect him to be competent with a gun?)

  Didn’t particularly matter.

  The scimitar’s curved blade hit the blubbering caliph on one arm then the other, slicing all four bones and sending two halved forearms and the gun tumbling into the rushes. Wait a minute—

  The return stroke took the shrieking man’s head off. I was already flitting away, though whether from sighing blue-green grass in Greater Patagonia or tall rushes within the sunlit marshes of New Mesopotamia, I was no longer sure.

  12

  Patient 8262

  I must have made myself understood to the medical staff somehow. Initially I did no more than blow off steam to the nurse who came, grumbling, to investigate my shouting in the middle of the night. The fellow looked like he had just woken up despite the fact he was meant to be fully awake during his night shift.

  He gave no sign of understanding what I was saying – I was talking in my own language and so I did not expect him to. He made soothing noises in between his yawns and tucked my bed sheets back in. Then he patted my hand, took my pulse, put a hand on my forehead and then, after scribbling something on my notes, left.

  I stayed awake for some time, heart beating fast, mentally daring the pervert who’d tried to interfere with me to come back (I have a weapon I can use). Eventually I must have fallen asleep and only woke up, later than usual, as breakfast was served.

  But one of the trainee doctors appeared later that morning and asked me slowly in the local language what had disturbed me during the night. I told her what had happened, or what had nearly happened, as best I could with my still rudimentary vocabulary and she made some notes and left.

  Another doctor I haven’t seen before arrives after lunch. She is a solid, square-set woman with no-nonsense glasses and a mass of bleached blonde hair swept up and gathered in a bun from which a variety of curled wisps have escaped. Caught in the afternoon sun flooding into the room, they look like solar flares.

  She treats me like an idiot. She speaks very slowly and carefully and asks me – I am pretty sure – did something bad happen to me? I think I am right in nodding, indicating that it did. She asks me if I would like to come with her so that we can talk about it somewhere else. I try to make it clear that right here in the security and comfort of my own room is just fine but she looks very concerned and talks over my halting attempts at her language and says we’ll go to her office.

  I try to protest but eventually she calls on an orderly and, over my protests that this is tantamount to another assault, I am helped into a wheelchair and taken along the corridor, down to the ground floor in a large, creakily protesting lift and along the corridor underneath the one we just left until we get to what I assume is her office, situated, if my navigational skills have not entirely deserted me, somewhere close to the day room where the usual cast of droolers, slack-jaws and incontinence-pad habitués will be congregating about now to argue over the choice of afternoon TV channel.

  She thanks the orderly, closes the door behind her and after some smiles and soothing words she sits me to the side of her desk while she moves her chair so that we are sitting quite close together at the corner of the desk. She produces two dolls from a drawer. The dolls look as though they have been knitted from vaguely flesh-coloured wool. One is dressed like a girl, one like a boy and they both have blank faces. She hands me the girl doll for some reason and seems to want me to use it to indicate where I might have been touched when the interfering miscreant came to my room last night.

  I sigh, lift up the skirt of the girl doll – at least it is not embarrassingly anatomically correct, with only a little sewn line to indicate the female genital area – and point at its crotch. She holds the male doll up and asks do I want it as well? I nod and she hands me the male doll.

  I indicate on it as well where I was touched, which seems to confuse her. She leans forward and seems as if she wants to take the dolls for herself and show me what she thinks must have happened, but then stops herself. I begin to use the two dolls to show her what actually occurred, then hold up the girl doll and ask – as slowly as she has been talking to me – if she has another male doll. She looks uncertain at first, then takes the girl doll away, swapping it for another male doll.

  I use a box of handkerchiefs on her desk as a makeshift bed for one of the dolls and point from it to me a couple of times so that there is no ambiguity about what is going on; that’s me asleep in my bed. I even mime sleeping. Then I use the second male doll to indicate it walking along, entering my room and approaching the bed. At this point it occurs to me that I am not absolutely certain that the person who did the attempted interfering was indeed male. I did not see them clearly enough and could not tell from the touch of their hand, the feel of their skin or their smell what gender they might have been. I just assumed it was a man.

  I show the second male doll reaching over the first, sleeping one and briefly touching it around its genitals, then the bed-bound one sitting up quickly and shouting while the second doll startles and runs away. I lay the second doll down on the desk and spread my arms, indicating that the little show is over.

  The broad lady doctor sits looking thoughtful and makes some more soothing noises. She appears to be thinking. I pick up the second doll and sit it on my knee, crossing its legs as it sits there.

  From what I can tell, the lady doctor seems to be questioning my version of events, although on what authority I am at a loss to tell. Is there another, conflicting account? I wouldn’t have thought so!

  I take the doll on my lap in both hands. Is the doctor saying what I think she is? Is she saying that this did not, could not have happened the way that I say that it did? How dare she? Who does she think she is? She wasn’t there! I had hoped that at least I might be believed. Does she think I would bother to make something like this up? An injustice upon an assault! I can feel my hands tightening into fists.

  Meanwhile, above our heads, there is the sound of some commotion: shouting and a series of small thumps followed by a large, ragged one. More distant shouting. It is a warm day and the window of the doctor’s room is lying half open. Outside, I can hear birdsong and leaves rustling in the wind. That and the shouting coming from upstairs.

  You are sure it was another person doing this? the doctor appears to be asking. I nod and say “Yes!” with some considerable emphasis. Above our heads, some sort of alarm is going off and I can hear running feet. The doctor appears oblivious.

  You know not who it was? she asks.

  “No!” I tell her. “I know not!”

  You might have dreamed it, she suggests.

  “I might have but I did not! It happened!”

  “You know not who it was?”

  “No! No! How many more times? No!”

  “Or could have been?”

  “Anyone. Any person it could have been.”

  “Not nurse,” she begins, then I lose the rest. Possibly something about duties, which would make sense.

  “Not nurse,” I tell her. (Upstairs, more thumping.)

  The broad doctor looks down at the doll in my hands. I am holding it rather tightly, squeezing its chest as though trying to throttle it by the lungs. She reaches over and takes it gently from my ha
nds, placing it beside the other one, which is still reclining in its handkerchief-box bed.

  Upstairs, the rhythmic thumping ceases and a weak cheer sounds.

  “There is (something something) of doll,” the doctor says.

  “What?” I ask.

  Above our heads, the sound of something scraping, probably chair legs on the wooden floor of the day room. Is that clapping?

  The male doll I was holding earlier slides off the edge of the desk and flops to the floor. There is a scream from somewhere outside and a white-clad body falls from above, past the window, hitting the ground outside the window with a thump and a roar of pain. I seem to feel that pain. I shiver, half closing my eyes. The room around me starts to dim.

  I watch the doctor recede in my gaze, seeming to fall slowly horizontally away from me as the office disappears hazily around me, starting with the outskirts, spreading to the wall behind the desk and the desk itself and ending with just the doctor, an indeterminate dot somewhere in the far distance, looking round in horror at the window and then starting to her feet and dashing towards it.

  I see no more. It is as though I am falling down a great dark pipe away from everything and eventually I’m too far away to make out anything at all.

  Upstairs: more shouting, again. It too sounds like it is being heard from one end of a long pipe, very distant and echoey and strange. It fades quickly away to nothing.

  Finally, I think, I faint.

  Adrian

  What? Kennedy? Man on the moon? The Wall comes down? Mandela walking? 9/11? 7/7? Notable dates for your diary, end-of-an-era stuff like that? I’ll tell you one:

  “What, to each according to their greed, is that it, yeah?”

  “Yeah,” I said, thinking about this. “Yeah, that’s a pretty fair what-do-you-call-it. Summation. Yeah, I should think.”