Transition

by Iain M. Banks

  The coloured family a couple of metres ahead of us would probably attract extra attention. A young man just beyond them carried a kitbag he’d be lucky to get checked as hand luggage. He was an army draftee, judging by his uniform, but even so. We shuffled forward some more.

  My fiancée took my hand and squeezed it. She smiled at me.

  My most disturbing feelings recently had been something close to treacherous. I had come to think that the CTs had a point, even that all terrorists had a point. They were still wrong, still evil and still had to be resisted with all the means at our disposal as a society, including emergency measures, but the question that had started to occur to me was: were we any better? I put this down to the depressing realisation that people were all the same. They all bled, they all burned, they all begged, they all screamed, they all reacted in the same ways. Guilty or innocent; that made little difference. Race made none. Sex, little. CTs were more fanatical, certainly, but I had begun to doubt they were any more fanatical than the extremists on “our” side who firebombed their congregations or crucified whole families in remote farms.

  Ordinary Christians, caught up in the trawls of their areas and families and friendship groups, were just the same as ordinary people. We all were. Almost without exception we human beings were weak and dishonest and cruel and selfish and dishonourable and desperate to avoid pain and torment and incarceration and death even to the point of implicating those we knew full well to be completely innocent.

  And that was the point. We were all the same.

  There was no difference. We reacted in the same ways to the same actions against us; I’d seen it a thousand times – many thousands of times. So what had driven the CTs to such desperate acts, to such mad fanaticism? Any society, any large group, any substantial creed contained sub-groups of people who would crack first under pressure and turn to violence and extremism. But what had created that pressure in the first place? Who had created it?

  And would we, the ordinary, decent people, the security services, my own department for that matter – swapped at birth in the cradle; I don’t know – have reacted any differently?

  I was still sure we were doing the right thing, but such questions had come to plague me.

  At the head of our slowly shuffling queue, between the two open desks, there was a big hip-high transparent plastic bin which contained all the knives, tweezers, pocket knives, metal toothpicks and tools and other bits and pieces which had been confiscated from absent-minded or ignorant people unaware of the relevant restrictions. It looked nearly full. I wondered if the bin’s contents would be sold as second-hand pieces, or melted down, or thrown away.

  The young trainee soldier ahead of us walked out of the line when he was about five metres away from the bin and waved at the surprised-looking border police official scanning the passports. The young fellow was saying something, sounding amused or jocular, not angry or frustrated. I imagined that he was late for a flight, perhaps liable to be posted AWOL if he didn’t get through ahead of the rest of us. I looked back. The nearest police officer, behind us, shook his head and started to head for the front of the queue, where the young man had reached the big bin and was starting to talk to the border control official. He put his heavy-looking kitbag down and stretched his back, putting his hands behind his neck in an unconscious parody of the position the approaching policeman would soon be asking him to assume if he persisted in this attempt to obtain priority. I heard people around us tutting.

  The big heavy kitbag was lying right behind the giant plastic bin full of sharps.

  To this day I don’t know exactly what made me react the way I did. I started to cry out, then somehow knew that there was no time, and pulled my fiancée to the side, throwing her down towards the wall and trying to throw myself on top of her.

  That is all I can claim to remember.

  The young soldier was a CT, a suicide bomber. The kitbag contained a blast bomb. The explosive charge it held could be made larger than it would have been otherwise because it required no shrapnel; the transparent bin provided that.

  Thirty-eight died, not counting the bomber. Both border control gate officials perished, as did the policeman who had been on his way to find out what was happening. Everybody ahead of us in the queue died instantly or within seconds, save for one baby asleep in a backpack cradle. For three or four metres behind where we had been standing, almost everybody died. My fiancée lived for five days. I was on the critical list for about the same amount of time and in intensive care for a further month. I had lost my left eye and left leg and both eardrums.

  What I thought most tragic and somehow hopeless was that the young CT suicide bomber had not murdered a real soldier for his uniform or even just stolen it; he really was an army draftee, and one who had come from a good, well-off, well-educated family of unquestionable loyalty and social credentials and who had passed all the relevant weeding-out stages and psychological tests with flying colours. He had only converted to Christianity, in secret, a few months earlier. A kind of conclusive despair settled within me when I learned that, and I had not, being quite frank about it, been in the best of spirits beforehand.

  I was in a private room at the hospital, still in some pain a couple of weeks after leaving the Intensive suite, when a lady came to see me while I was snoozing. I got the impression of a short, bustily attractive woman, well dressed and strongly perfumed. I didn’t recognise her, and wondered – a little groggily due to the painkillers – if she was one of my ex-subjects, arrived to inflict a bruise upon a bruise. She held my wrist as though about to take my pulse, then encircled it, her hand a bracelet, and with that, and no further ceremony, suddenly I was somewhere else.

  The Transitionary

  My new friend Adrian insists that he must be personally present to be of the most help, so is on his way. However, it will take most of the rest of the day for him to get here.

  I wander the abandoned palace for a while, imprisoned within all this luxury and space, reluctant to show signs of life in case anybody is watching and equally reticent about leaving it. I feel safe here, even as I fret at the feeling of confinement and the prospect of presenting an unmoving target for the next five or six hours. I stand looking at a walk-in freezer on the ground floor. The freezer is switched off, dark, dry, its thick, stepped door wedged open by a shrink-wrapped case of Coca-Cola. I shiver, suddenly remembering the time I came here when it snowed, when I met my little pirate captain, and the very first time I came to this world, when I tasted its unique fragre.

  During the initial moments of that original visit, knowing nothing of the place save for that first hint of its true essence, I’d happily have bet somebody else’s bottom dollar this was a Greedist world, a world where the untrammelled pursuit of material wealth and the virtues of money itself were extolled, venerated and even worshipped. Not as an original act of faith of course; we always give ourselves more credit than that. Accidentally, rather. Perdition awaits at the end of a road constructed entirely from good intentions, the devil emerges from the details and hell abides in the small print.

  I claim no moral superiority here. People like me get to see this more clearly than most only because we are privileged to witness lots of non-unique examples spread across a variety of worlds, not because we are intrinsically wiser or more ethically refined. And even I – knowing full well that the technicalities profoundly matter – have to accept that it is precisely from the details, from the clutter and the turmoil of existence, that the fatal blow inescapably arises, like a freak wave, overwhelming, from the distributed chaos of the ocean.

  The specifics will claim me one day; the details always deliver in the end.

  There are as many types of capitalism as there are types of socialism – or any other ism for that matter – but one of the major differences – a major difference founded on what appears to be a minor detail – between whole bundles of ostensibly fully capitalist societies centres (indeed, depends) on whether commerce i
s governed by private firms and partnerships, or by limited companies.

  I’d lie if I claimed I possessed any congenital interest in economics, but – from what I’ve gathered over the years – the invention and acceptance of the limited company means people can take big risks with money not their own and then – if it all goes wrong – lets them just walk away from the resulting debts, because the company is somehow regarded as being like a person in its own right, so that its debts die with it (not the sort of fairy story a partnership is allowed to get away with).

  It’s a piece of nonsense, really, and I used to wonder that legislatures anywhere bought into this blatant fantasy and agreed to give it legal house room. But that was just me being naive, before I realised that there was a reason why it always dawned on all those ambitious, powerful gents in all those various legislatures that this ludicrous hooey might actually be quite a good idea.

  Anyway, limited company worlds often progress faster than other types, but always less smoothly and reliably, and sometimes disastrously. I’ve looked into it and frankly it just isn’t worth it, but you can’t tell that to anyone caught up within the seductive madness of the dream; they have the faith, and are forever relieved by the invisible hand.

  I kick the case of Coca-Cola aside, letting the freezer door thud closed.

  There is a generously sized kitchen in the Palazzo. It also has no electricity, of course, and no other sort of power I can get to work, but it does have drawers full of cutlery and cupboards full of tin cans. I eat cold peas by candlelight.

  As I begin to relax, I discover a need to know how many peas are on the spoon I am eating with. Oh dear. I thought I’d shaken that weakness off.

  I try to ignore this absurd compulsion and just keep on eating, but it is as though there is an elastic band joining the plate and the spoon, or a membrane in front of my face, physically preventing me from bringing the spoon to my mouth. Preposterous as it may be, it is actually easier to give in and count the peas. I cannot arrive at an accurate figure just staring at the slowly collapsing pile on the spoon, of course (though I’m sure an estimate would be pretty close to the final figure), so I have to spoon the load onto the plate and count them there. In the dim glow of the single candle, this is harder than it sounds. I have to sort them into files of five to ensure accuracy. Having arrived at a figure it proves impossible to pick all the peas up again. I push them back into the mass of peas on the plate and take up another spoonful. That first spoonful was a pretty typical one, I reckon. This one poised before me now is also pretty typical, so ought to have the same number of peas.

  But does it? I am growing annoyed at myself and my stomach is growling at me, still mostly empty, but I need to know. Was that first spoonful typical? Did I arrive at a reliable number before? I let this latest sample slide onto the side of the plate and count them as well. Slightly more than the first spoonful. I take an average of the two. Though even as I do this I realise that two just seems an inadequate number. One more sample ought to do it. Three is the number required for triangulation, after all.

  There, this third spoonful contains a number in between the first two spoonfuls; a straddle, a sure sign that we are zeroing in on the right number. I decide to take no more nonsense from myself and just eat this spoonful. This works and I am able to sit back again. I sigh through my nose as my teeth and tongue quickly convert the mass of peas into a single lump of paste inside my mouth. I swallow and sit forward, scooping up the next mouthful of piselli picolli. On the table the candle flame flickers, as though shivering.

  I stop and let the spoon fall back into the plate. I stare at the candle, remembering.

  And then, suddenly, I was not merely remembering. I was—

  I watched her move her hand above the lit candle, through the yellow flame, fingers spread fluttering through the incandescing gas, her unharmed flesh ruffling the very burning of it. The flame bent this way and that, guttered, sent curls of sooty smoke towards the dim ceiling of the room where we sat as she moved her hand slowly back and forth through the gauzy teardrop of flame.

  She said, “No, I see consciousness as a matter of focus. It’s like a magnifying glass concentrating rays of light on a point on a surface until it bursts into flame. The flame is consciousness; it is the focusing of reality that creates that self-awareness.” She looked up at me. “Do you see?”

  I stared at her.

  I was here, here with her, in this place, right now.

  This was not a memory, not a flashback. Certainly we had taken drugs and we were still at this point under their influence, but this was definitely not some addled consequence of their effects. This was startlingly immediate and unquestionably vivid. Real, in a word.

  She put her head to one side a little, flexed an eyebrow. “Tem?” she said softly. “Are you listening?”

  “I’m listening,” I said.

  “You look distracted,” she told me. She pulled the sheet that was all she wore a little tighter about her, as though she was cold. She took a breath, went to speak.

  I said, “There is no intelligence without context.”

  Her brows flicked momentarily into a tremulous frown.

  “That’s what—” Still frowning, she sat back, removing her hand from the candle flame; it curled out after her fingers in a long flexing trail of glowing yellow, as though reluctant to let go of her. “Have I said this to you before?” she asked.

  “Not really,” I said, watching the candle flame restore itself. “Not as… No.”

  She looked at me with what could have been either suspicion or bafflement. “Hmm,” she said. “Well, it’s like a magnifying glass, and the partial shadow it casts around its focus. The halo of reduced light around the bright spot at its centre is the debt required to produce that central concentration. In the same way, meaning is sucked out of our surroundings and concentrated in ourselves, in and by our minds.”

  (Her hair—)

  Her hair, a brown-red spill of curls across her shoulders and along her slender neck, formed a quiet nimbus around her canted head. Her deep orange-brown eyes looked almost black, reflecting the poised stillness of the candle’s flame like some image of the consciousness she had been talking about. They looked perfectly still and steady. I could see the minuscule spark of the flame reflected in them, unwavering, constant, alive. She blinked slowly, languorously.

  I recalled recalling that the eyes only see by moving: we can fasten our gaze on something and stare intently at it only because our eyes are constantly consumed with dozens of tiny involuntary movements each second. Hold something perfectly and genuinely still in our field of vision and that very fixity makes it disappear.

  “I love you,” I said.

  She sat forward suddenly. “What?”

  The word, so emphatically pronounced, was enough to blow out the candle’s little flame and plunge the room into darkness.

  The candle sitting on the table in front of me, here in the kitchen of the Palazzo Chirezzia, blows out, caught in a sudden draught I can feel on my face, bringing a chill that lifts the hairs on the back of my neck. The spoonful of cold peas I was about to eat remains poised halfway to my mouth, exactly where it was the instant before I relived, replayed and changed those moments from a room a dozen years and an infinitude of worlds away. But I thought the spoon fell—

  A door thuds somewhere in the building. Here in the kitchen, things click and buzz and motors start turning, fridge and freezer compressors sighing into life as a light comes on in the hallway outside and I hear distant footsteps.

  13

  Patient 8262

  Last night I left this bed and this room and this level and I took me down to the floor below, the ground floor, where I witnessed something I found most terrible just yesterday. I found the silent ward. I was there, I was in it, I lay there with them for a time. It did not last long but it was long enough. I found it terrifying.

  It happened after I fainted in the office of the broad-shouldered lady
doctor. I still don’t know quite what happened there. It ended up as some sort of bizarre hallucinatory experience, a lucid nightmare of voodoo cause and effect that ended with a keeling-over that I was frankly thankful for at the time and, despite the fact it meant it makes it harder to work out what did happen, that I am still thankful for.

  Usually, I’ve found, there is a distinct point when one realises that one is asleep and dreaming. I can’t remember one in what happened – what seemed to happen – yesterday. Was it all a dream? It can’t have been. At the very least, I went or was taken somewhere else yesterday, out of my room.

  I was brought back here on a trolley after my time in the silent ward (we’re coming to that). I am certain I was as awake at that point as I am now. Though, when I think about it, I felt just as awake at the start of the experience with the broad lady doctor as I do now. Well, we must leave that aside. There is a continuum of banal experience between waking up in the silent ward and now. No manipulated dolls causing people to have breathing difficulties or heart attacks or whatever and then to throw themselves out of windows. I imagined all that anyway, so I’m told.

  This needs thinking about, obviously. That is why I am thinking about it. I am lying here, eyes closed, concentrating. I may have to get up and carry out further investigations in the day room amongst the droolers and perhaps ask further questions of the nursing staff, but for now I need to lie and rest and think without distractions.

  Having said that, I am very aware that the door to my room is closed and I will open my eyes the instant I hear it open, just in case my assaulter from the other night has the audacity to attempt a repeat visit during daylight hours.

  Two things. First, I cannot see where the visit to the broad lady doctor went from rational to absurd. It appears seamless in my memory. This is most vexing. Like not being able to see how a simple trick is performed in a magic show, or the join in a piece of mending where it ought to be obvious.