Transition

by Iain M. Banks

  As I close my eyes I picture the ward downstairs again, and I realise that one of the things that felt wrong, one of the things disturbing me about it, even though I could not pin it down at the time, was the sameness of it all. The bedside cabinets all looked the same. There were no Get Well Soon cards, no flowers, no baskets of fruit or other items that would personalise the allotment of space each patient is allowed. I can remember seeing a water jug and a small plastic cup on each cabinet, but that was all. I can’t recall seeing any chairs by the sides of the beds either. No chairs anywhere in the ward that I could remember.

  Husks. I keep coming back to this strangely significant word. Whenever I think about the silent ward and those deeply drugged or in some other way near-comatose men, I think of it. Husks. They are husks. I am not sure why this means so much to me, but it would appear that it does.

  Husks…

  Madame d’Ortolan

  “But, madame, is it really such a terrible thing?”

  Madame d’Ortolan looked at Professore Loscelles as though he was quite mad. The two of them were squeezed into a dusty study carrel high in a spire of one of the less fashionable UPT buildings, an outskirt adjunctery within sight of the Dome of the Mists but sufficiently distant and obscure for their conversation to stand no chance of being recorded. “Someone transitioning without septus?” she asked, emphatically. “Not a terrible thing?”

  “Indeed,” Loscelles said, waving his chubby-fingered hands about. “Ought we not, madame, rather, indeed, to celebrate the fact one of our number has, or may have, discovered how to transition without the use of the drug? Is this not a great breakthrough? A veritable advance, indeed?”

  Madame d’Ortolan – immaculately dressed in a cream twin-set, an unlined notebook to the olive graph-paper of Professore Loscelles’s bucolic three-piece – gave every appearance of thinking fairly seriously about trying to cram the Professore through the unfeasibly narrow window of the tiny study space and out to the sixty-metre drop below. “Loscelles,” she said, with an icy clarity, “have you gone completely insane?” (Professore Loscelles flexed his eyebrows, perhaps to signal that, as far as he was aware, he had not.) “If people,” Madame d’Ortolan said slowly, as though to a young child, “are able to transition without the drug… how are we to control them?”

  “Well—” the Professore began.

  “First of all,” Madame d’Ortolan said briskly, “this has not turned up in one of our extremely expensive but – now, apparently – rather irrelevant laboratories, or within the context of a carefully regulated field trial, or constrained by any sort of controlled environment; this has come upon us on the hoof, in the midst of a profound crisis in the Council, and in the guise of a previously loyal but now suddenly renegade assassin who, I am nervously informed by those trying and mostly failing to track him, may be continuing to develop other heretofore undreamt-of powers and worryingly unique abilities in addition to this one. As though—”

  “Really? But that’s extraordinary!” the Professore exclaimed, seemingly quite excited by such a development.

  The lady’s brows knitted. “Well, fascinating!” she shouted, and slammed her palm on the carrel’s small desk, raising dust. The Professore jumped. Madame d’Ortolan collected herself. “I’m sure,” she continued, breathing hard, “you’ll be glad to know that the relevant scientists, experts and Facultarians all share both your enthusiasm and your inability to appreciate what a catastrophe this represents for us.” She put her hands on either side of the Professore’s ample cheeks and brought them towards each other so as to compress his smooth, perfumed flesh, making it look as though his squashed mouth and ruddily bulbous nose had been jammed between two glisteningly plump pink cushions.

  “Loscelles, think! Defeating an individual or grouping of people is easy; one simply brings greater numbers to bear. If they have clubs, and so do we, then we simply ensure that our clubs are always bigger and more numerous than theirs. The same with guns, or symbols, or bombs, or any other weapons or abilities. But if this man – who is now patently not one of us, whose hand, rather, is most forcibly turned against us – can do something that none of our own people can do, how do we combat that?”

  The unyielding firmness of her grip on his face and the concomitant unlikelihood of him being able to form a comprehensible reply led the Professore to believe that this was in the nature of a rhetorical question. She shook his face gently back and forwards in her hands. “We could be in terrible, terrible trouble, thanks just to the threat of this one individual.” She jiggled his face in her hands. “And, then – worse, for this can get much worse – what if anybody can do this, just with some training? What if any idiot, any zealot, any enthusiast, any revolutionary, dissident or revisionist can just decide they want to flit into another person’s body, displacing their mind? Without planning? Without the necessary safeguards and respect for just cause and proven importance? Without the guidance and experience of the Concern? Where does that leave us then? Hmm? I’ll tell you: powerless to control what is arguably the single most potent ability an individual can possess in this or any other world. Can we allow that? Can we countenance that? Can we indulge that?” She spread her hands slowly, letting go of Loscelles’s cheeks. The Professore’s features rearranged themselves into their accustomed alignments. He looked surprised and a little shocked to have been handled so.

  Madame d’Ortolan was shaking her head slowly, her expression sorrowful and grave. Professore Loscelles found his own head shaking in time with hers, as though in sympathy.

  “Indeed,” the lady told him, “we cannot.”

  “It might, I suppose, lead to anarchy,” the Professore said profoundly, frowning somewhere towards the floor.

  “My dear Professore,” Madame d’Ortolan said, sighing, “we might greet anarchy with an open door, garland its brows, hand it all the keys and skip away whistling with nary a care in our heads, compared to what this might lead to, trust me.”

  Loscelles sighed. “What do you think we might do, then?”

  “Use all our weapons,” she told him bluntly. “He wields a new kind of club; well, we have some unusual clubs of our own.” The lady glanced to the window. “I can think of one in particular.” She watched clouds drift past in a silver-grey sky before turning back to the Professore’s frown. “We have been too cautious, I believe,” she told him. “It may even be to the good that something’s forced our hand at last. Left to ourselves we might have hesitated for ever.” She smiled suddenly at him. “Gloves off, claws out.”

  The Professore’s frown deepened. “This will be one of your special projects, I take it?”

  “Indeed.” Madame d’Ortolan’s smile went wide. She put one hand out to his face again – he flinched, almost imperceptibly, but she only smoothed and patted his right cheek, affectionate as though he were a treasured cat. “And I know you will support me in this, won’t you?”

  “Would it prevent you if I did not?”

  “It would prevent my adoring respect for you continuing, Professore,” she said, with a tinkling laugh in her voice that found no echo in her expression.

  Loscelles looked her in the eyes. “Well then, ma’am,” he said softly, “I could not allow that. It might serve to put me with Obliq, and Plyte, and Krijk, and the rest. There have been… narrow squeaks reported; abnormal events.”

  Madame d’Ortolan nodded, her expression a picture of concern. “Haven’t there?” She tutted. “We should all be very careful.”

  Loscelles smiled wanly. “I believe I am being.”

  She smiled radiantly at him. “Why, I believe you are too!”

  The Transitionary

  “What is it that we do? What are we for and what are we against? What are we for?”

  “This again? I have a feeling that if I say what anybody else in the Concern would expect me to say, you’re going to tell me I’m wrong.”

  “Give it a go.”

  “We help societies across the many worlds, aid
ing and advancing positive, progressive forces and confounding and disabling negative, regressive ones.”

  “To what end?”

  He shrugged. “General philanthropy. It’s nice to be nice.”

  They sat in a hot tub looking out across a polished granite floor towards a starlit sea of cloud. She scooped a handful of the warm water and bubbles and let it fall over her left shoulder and upper breast, then repeated the action for her right side. Tem watched the bubbles slide. Mrs Mulverhill, even here, wore a tiny white hat like piled snow, and a spotted white veil. She said, “How do we define the different forces?”

  “The bad guys tend to enjoy killing people, preferably in large numbers. The good guys – and girls – don’t; they get a buzz when infant mortality rates go down and life expectancy goes up. The bad guys like to tell people what to do, the good guys are happy to encourage people to make up their own minds. The bad guys like to keep the riches and the power to themselves and their cronies, the good guys want the money and power spread evenly, subject to the making-up-your-own-minds thing.”

  In this world, there had once been an Emperor of the World. He had caused this palace to be built, levelling the top of the mountain that was variously called Sagarmatha, Chomolungma, Peak XV or Mount Everest (or Victoria or Alexander or Ghandi or Mao, or many, many other names). The palace was vast, enclosed by great glass domes which were pressurised and warmed to mimic the conditions of a tropical island. Now, though, after a catastrophe caused by a gamma-ray burster happening relatively nearby by cosmic standards, the world was devoid of humans or almost any other living thing, and was in the slow, eons-long process of changing profoundly as all the processes associated with life, including carbon capture and even most of its plate tectonics, started to shut down.

  The Concern had first discovered the world a few years after the catastrophe and had repaired and restored the palace. It had become a place where privileged officers of the Concern could holiday. Mrs Mulverhill, who now seemed to be able to go anywhere and do anything as long as she stayed away from the Concern proper, had found a version – indeed, a whole unshuffled deck of versions – where this had been done but nobody had yet come to visit. For now at least it was her private world. She had brought him here. This time, she had only needed to hold his hand.

  “What is the point,” she asked him, “of trying to do any good in the many worlds when there will always be an infinite number of realities where the horrors unfold unstopped?”

  “Because one ought to do what one can. Good is good. Specific people and societies benefit. That not all people and societies benefit is beside the point. That a finite number of lives and worlds are better as a result of the actions of the Concern is all the justification that is required, and refusing to do a finite amount of good because you cannot do an infinite amount of good is a morally perverse position. If you feel sorry for a beggar you still give them money even though doing so does nothing for the plight of all other beggars.” He let himself slide under the steaming water and the islands of bubbles, resurfacing and wiping water from his face. “How am I doing? I’m paraphrasing here, but it’s sounding pretty good to me. I should probably write a paper or something.”

  “Extremely well. You’re a credit to your teachers.”

  “I thought so.” He pushed his fingers through his hair like a rough comb. “So. Tell me where I’m wrong and what the Concern is really up to.”

  She nodded once. There were times when he thought she lacked any sense of humour, irony or sarcasm. “I think now that the Concern,” she said, “exists for a much more specific purpose than simply acting as a multiversal niceness-enforcement agency. It does do some good, but it’s incidental, a cover for its true purpose.”

  “Which is what?”

  “That is what I hope you will agree to help me find out.”

  “So you still don’t know?”

  “Correct.”

  “But you suspect they’re up to something.”

  “I know they are.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I feel it.”

  “You feel it.”

  “Indeed. In fact I feel certain of it.”

  “You know, if you’re going to convince anybody else about this, including me, you’re going to have to do better than just telling them you’re certain. It’s a little vague.”

  “I know. But consider this.”

  Of course, she had a slyly refined sense of humour and appreciated ironies that entirely passed him by. Sarcasm was generally beneath her, but even so.

  “I am,” he told her, “sitting comfortably.”

  She put one hand up to the side of her head, so that one rosy nipple surfaced briefly from the white bubbles. She took the little white hat and the veil off, laid them on the black granite at the side of the tub. Slitlike pupils in amber irises narrowed fractionally as they regarded him.

  “We have access to an infinite number of worlds,” she said, “and have visited some very strange ones. We suspect there are some so strange that we are unable to access them just because of that strangeness: they are unenvisageable, and because we cannot imagine going to them, we cannot go to them. But think how relatively limited is the type of world we do visit. For one thing, it is always and only Earth, as we understand it. Never the next planet further in towards or further out from the sun: Venus or Mars or their equivalents. This Earth is usually about four and a half billion years old in a universe just under fourteen billion years old. Usually, even if it supports no intelligent life, it supports some life. Almost without variance, it exists as part of a solar system in a galaxy composed of hundreds of millions of other solar systems, in a universe composed of hundreds of millions of other galaxies.”

  As she spoke, she flexed one leg and reached out with it to find his groin with her foot. Her toes brushed against his balls, his cock, stroking them, wafting like the water.

  “Wait,” he said, opening his legs a little to allow her more room, “this isn’t the ‘Where Is Everybody?’ question, is it?”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s easy. There is no everybody. There is only us. There are no aliens. Not a single one of the many worlds shows any sign of alien contact, past or present. Their lack, throughout the multiverse, proves the point. We are alone in the universe.” Her toes were gently brushing first one side of his penis, then the other, bringing him erect.

  “In all the universes?” she asked, smiling.

  “In every single one.”

  “Then infinity seems to be failing somehow, wouldn’t you agree?”

  “Failing?”

  “It hasn’t produced any aliens. It has produced only us. A single intelligent species in all the wide universe does not smack of infinity.” She supported herself by stretching her arms out to either side of the tub and reached out now with both feet, finding his erection with two sets of toes and stroking it gently up and down.

  He cleared his throat. “What does it smack of then?”

  “Well, it could simply be due to what the transitioneering theorists call the problem of unenvisionability, as mentioned: we cannot imagine a world that includes aliens – or perhaps, deep down, we don’t want to.” Mrs Mulverhill raised one hand and blew some bubbles from it to inspect her fingernails before looking at him and saying, “Or it might smack of deliberate quarantine, systematic enclosure, some vast cover-up…”

  “Why, Mrs Mulverhill, you’re a conspiracy theorist!”

  “Yes,” she agreed, smiling. “But not by nature. I’ve been forced into it by the conspiracy I’m investigating.” She hesitated, uncharacteristically. “I’ve found some examples. Ones you’ll know about. Want to hear?”

  “Fire away.” He nodded down to where her glistening feet, bobbing rhythmically through the surface of the swirling, bubbling water, were caressing his cock, parenthetical. “Feel free to not stop doing that, though.”

  She smiled. “The examples are from the more extreme end of the exoticism
spectrum,” she told him, “but still.”

  “I’ve always liked extremities.”

  “I’m sure. Max Fitching, the singer?”

  “I remember.”

  “The green terrorist explanation was a lie. He was going to give his money to SETI research.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Marit Shauoon?”

  “I still wince.”

  “He was going to use his network of communication satellites to do a SETI in reverse, deliberately broadcasting signals to the stars. In his will he’d have funded a trio of orbiting telescopes dedicated to finding Earth-like planets and looking for signs of intelligent life on them. You killed him days before he was going to alter his will with just that provision in mind. Glimpsing how it’s all heading?”

  “You missed out Serge Anstruther.”

  “Yerge Aushauser. No, he really was a shit. He wasn’t really a genocidal racist as such but whenever he’s not stopped he ends up causing such havoc he might as well have been. Wanted to buy up a state in the US midwest and build an impregnable Nirvana for the super-rich; Xanadu, Shangri-La. Fantasy made real. A Libertarian.” From his expression she must have thought he wasn’t entirely familiar with the term. She sighed. “Libertarianism. A simple-minded right-wing ideology ideally suited to those unable or unwilling to see past their own sociopathic self-regard.”

  “You’ve obviously thought about it.”

  “And dismissed it. But expect to hear a lot more about it as Madame d’O consolidates her power-base – it’s a natural fit for people just like you, Tem.”

  “I’m already intrigued.”

  “Well, you would be.”

  “How do you know all this?”

  She waggled her toes over his penis as though it was a flute and her feet were intent on playing it. “I seduce forecasters. I’ve even turned a few. I have my own now.”

  “Uh-huh.”