Transition

by Iain M. Banks

“Certainly.”

  The Professore stood at the rear of Madame d’Ortolan’s chair.

  The sheet-covered table was moved back and the young man who was employed as a blocker was sat on a chair immediately in front of Bisquitine, almost knee to knee. He looked a little nervous. He pulled the robe tighter, cleared his throat.

  “She will take your wrists,” Mrs Siankung told him.

  He nodded, cleared his throat again. Bisquitine looked expectantly at Mrs Siankung, who nodded. The girl made a noise like “Grooh!” and sat forward quickly, grabbing at the young man’s wrists and encircling them as best she could with her own smaller hands while she thudded her head against his chest.

  The reaction was immediate. The young man bowed his back, jackknifed forward and as though doing so deliberately vomited copiously over Bisquitine’s head, hair and back before quivering as though suffering a fit and starting to slump backwards in the seat and then slide forwards out of it, legs splaying as he lost control of his bladder and bowels at the same time.

  “Dear fuck!” Madame d’Ortolan said, standing so suddenly that she knocked her chair over.

  Professore Loscelles put a handkerchief to his mouth and nose and turned away, bowing his head.

  Mr Kleist did not react at all, save to glance briefly, as though concerned, at Madame d’Ortolan. Then he walked over and carefully set her chair upright again.

  Mrs Siankung moved her feet away from the mess.

  Bisquitine didn’t seem to have noticed, still cuddling into the young man and pulling him to her as he spasmed and jerked and voided noisily from various orifices.

  “Who’s a bad boy, then?” they heard Bisquitine say over the noises of evacuation coming from the young man, her voice muffled as she hugged his shaking body and they collapsed together onto the floor. A thick, earthy stink filled the air. “Who’s a bad boy? Where’s this? Where’s this, then? You tell me. Ay, Ferrovia, Ferrovia, al San Marco, Fondamenta Venier, Ay! Giacobbe, is that you? No, it’s not me. Ponte Guglie; alora, Rio Tera De La Madalena. Strada Nova, al San Marco. Alora; il Quadri. Due espressi, per favore, signori. Bozman, who said you could come along? Get back, get away, get thee to your own shop, if you have one!… Euh, yucky.” Bisquitine seemed to notice the mess she was lying in. She let go of the young man, who flopped lifeless on the rug, streaked with his own excrement. His eyes – wide, almost popping – stared up at the biblical scene depicted on the ceiling.

  Bisquitine got to her feet, smiling brightly. She stuck the length of hair in her mouth again, then made a sour face and spat it out. She continued to spit for a few more moments before holding her arms out to Mrs Siankung as a child would, straight, fingers spread. “Bath time!” she cried out.

  Madame d’Ortolan looked to Professore Loscelles, who was dabbing at his lips with his handkerchief. He nodded. “It would sound,” he said hoarsely, “as though the person is heading from Santa Lucia – the railway station – towards the Piazza San Marco. So it would seem, given the names of the thoroughfares mentioned. Or they may already be there, at the Quadri. It is a café and rather fine restaurant. Very good cake.”

  Madame d’Ortolan looked at the other man standing nearby. “Mr Kleist?”

  “I’ll see to it, ma’am.” He left the room.

  Bisquitine stamped one foot, messily. “Bath time!” she said loudly.

  Mrs Siankung looked to Madame d’Ortolan, who said, “Shower.” She glanced distastefully at Bisquitine. “And don’t tarry. We may need her again, soon.”

  The Transitionary

  I make my way through the slow bustle of tourists on the main route leading towards the Rialto and beyond towards both the Accademia and Piazza San Marco, moving as quickly as I can without actually throwing people aside or trampling small children. “Scusi. Scusi, scusi, signora, excuse me, sorry, scusi, coming through. Scusi, scusi…”

  At the same time I’m still trying to monitor what’s going on just across the Grand Canal. What a stew of conflicting talents and abilities are massed around the Palazzo Chirezzia! There are blockers and trackers and inhibitors and foreseers and adepts with skills I barely recognise, many of them recently arrived. I think I can identify individual presences now, too. That one there would be Madame d’Ortolan, this one here might be Professore Loscelles. And at the centre of them all that bizarre presence, that strange, guileless malignity.

  One of the blockers seems to have gone. I remember the first blocker I’d Tasered, the young man who was smoking and fell into the small canal at the side of the palace. He isn’t there any more. And some of the others are starting to move, quitting the Chirezzia and streaming in this direction, heading for the Rialto, others clustering in what must be a launch—

  “Jesus! Hey! Watch where you’re going! What the – I mean, Jesus.”

  “Scusi, sorry, sorry, signore, I beg your pardon,” I tell the backpacker I’ve just knocked to his knees, helping him back up to a surrounding chorus of tutting.

  “Well, just—”

  “Scusi!” Then I’m off again, sliding and dancing through the crowd like the people are flags on a slalom course, leading with one shoulder then the other, sliding and swivelling on the balls of my feet. The boat with the half-dozen or so Concern people in it is on its way down the Grand Canal. More – maybe a dozen – are on foot, heading over the Rialto now. I’m just a couple of minutes away from there. If they turn left on its far side, they’ll pass right by me or we’ll bump into each other.

  My phone goes. It’s Ade. A symbol on the display that wasn’t flashing before is flashing now. I suspect the battery is about to give out.

  “Fred?”

  “Hello, Adrian.”

  “Just landed at the Rialto, mate, just past the vaporetto sort of floating bus stop wotsit. On the bridge in one minute.”

  “I’ll see you very shortly.”

  I stop, walking into the doorway of a glove shop, breathing hard. I still can’t flit across to another person. I can feel the squad of Concern people splitting up, most heading on down the main route for San Marco, three coming this way. I turn to face the calle and close down as much as I can, calming myself, attempting, if it’s possible, to take all that I can of my new abilities off-line. A minute or two passes, the street teems with people. I recognise somebody and my heart leaps, then I realise they’re heading the other way and it’s just the backpacker I bowled into earlier. I try a quick toe-in reading with my sense of where the Concern people are. All three of the nearest are still heading up the way I’ve just come.

  I walk out and on and turn a corner, find myself facing the eastern end of the Rialto.

  Madame d’Ortolan

  “Cripes! Heads up, mateys! Here’s our boy! Whoop whoop! Last one in’s a scallop! I say, that ain’t politic. I ain’t even broke my fast yet, dontcha know?”

  “What? Where?” Madame d’Ortolan said. She glared at Mrs Siankung. “Is this something new?”

  Mrs Siankung stared into Bisquitine’s eyes, letting one of the other handlers take over the job of towelling her hair dry. “I think so,” she said. They were in one of the main bedroom suites of the palace. Mr Kleist and Professore Loscelles looked on, as did Bisquitine’s handlers and a spotter in a schoolboy’s uniform who was keeping in continual touch with the intervention teams heading for the San Marco and the smaller groups checking out the other places that Bisquitine had already mentioned. Bisquitine sat on the bed in a white towelling robe like the one the unfortunate young blocker had been wearing. “This is the bad man?” Mrs Siankung asked her gently.

  Bisquitine nodded. “Dish it all, Chaplip, I’m hungry! I mean, jeepahs!”

  Mrs Siankung took one of the girl’s hands in both of hers, stroking it as though it was a pet. “We shall eat, my love. Very soon. You get dressed now and we go to eat, yes? Where is the bad man?”

  “Sausinges would be nice. I says it like that cos it’s cute. Where’s my old ma, then? I ain’t seen her round the blinkin farmstead in mumfs.”
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  “The bad man, my love.”

  “He’s here, love-a-kins,” Bisquitine said, putting her face very close to Mrs Siankung’s. “Shalls we to go see da bad mun?” she said, deep-voiced, as though talking to a baby. She shook her head. “Shalls we? Shalls we to go and see the bad mun? Shalls we? Shalls we?”

  “Yes,” Mrs Siankung said quietly, at the same time as Madame d’Ortolan shouted, “Enough of this!”

  Bisquitine seemed to ignore them both. She stuck one finger sharply up into the air, narrowly missing the eye of the handler towelling her hair. “To the Rialto, me hearties! Realty bound! Tally fucking prostimitute!”

  Madame d’Ortolan looked at Professore Loscelles. “The Rialto. That’s close, isn’t it?”

  “Five minutes away,” he told her.

  Mrs Siankung patted Bisquitine’s hand. “We’ll get you dressed,” she started to say.

  “No, we won’t,” Madame d’Ortolan said, standing. “Bring her as she is. It’s warm out.” She looked sourly round them all. Only Professore Loscelles appeared like himself or well enough turned out to be presentable. “We can’t look any more ridiculous than we do already.”

  The Transitionary

  It looks like all humanity is packing the Rialto; the bridge over the Grand Canal is compact but massive, sturdy yet elegant. Two lines of small packed shops are separated by the broad central way whose surface is composed of flights of shallow grey-surfaced steps edged with the same cream-coloured marble found throughout the city. Behind the shops two further walkways face up and down the canal, linked to the pitched street of the central thoroughfare at either end and the centre. The walkway facing south-west is the busier as it provides a longer, more open view down the Canal and the bustle of boats plying its milky blue-green waters.

  They’ve left the Palazzo Chirezzia. The thing, the person, the nexus of sheer terrifying weirdness is on the move, and so is practically everybody else who was still there, including Madame herself and the Prof. They’re a minute away; they can probably see the bridge by now.

  My mobile phone goes and I start to answer it, seeing that it’s Adrian. The display blinks off. The phone won’t come back to life. I shove it in a pocket and start up the slope of the Rialto with the rest of the tourist crowd.

  Madame d’Ortolan

  “When, sir? Why, sir. I’ll tell you when, then; between the Quilth of Octoldyou-so and the Nonce of Distember, THAT’S JOLLY WELL WHEN!” Bisquitine’s shout echoed off the surrounding buildings.

  “Hush, my dear,” Mrs Siankung said, conscious of the stares they were attracting.

  They were on the Ruga Orefici, within sight of the Rialto. Bisquitine padded happily along in the midst of their motley collection of ungainly bodies and unfortunate clothing styles. She wore the same towelling robe she’d been wrapped in after her shower and had been persuaded into a pair of panties but had adamantly refused shoes or even slippers. She hugged the gown about her, looked round at the various shops with their excitingly bright displays and tried unsuccessfully to whistle.

  The smell of a bakery distracted her as the square in front of San Giacomo di Rialto opened out to their left.

  “Still hungry!” she cried out.

  “I know, dear,” Mrs Siankung said, trying to keep an arm round the girl’s waist. “We’ll eat soon.”

  “Wot you lookin at then, squire?” Bisquitine said in a deep voice as two bronze-skinned teenage girls passed by, staring and then laughing at her. “Pop a crap on yo petal, bitches, upside ya head. An no mitsake, mistake, mystique, Mustique. I meant that.”

  “Shush now, dear.”

  “Claudia?” a man said suddenly, stepping right in front of Bisquitine. She had to stop, as did the others. The man was tall. He wore sunglasses, had salt-and-pepper hair, wore a suit and carried a briefcase. He took the sunglasses off, frowned, eyes screwing up as he stared into Bisquitine’s eyes.

  “Ill met by sunlight, my good fellow,” Bisquitine said haughtily. “Why, I’ve half a mind to scratch the boundah!”

  The man looked confused and concerned in equal measure. “Claudia?” he asked. “Is that you? You were supposed to be at—” He took a step back, taking in the knot of people obviously with this woman who looked like somebody he knew and yet was not her. “Hey, what the hell’s—”

  Mr Kleist didn’t wait for the nod from Madame d’Ortolan. He stepped up to the man, saying. “Sir, if I may explain…” and did a straight-finger jab into his throat. Gasping, eyes wide, unable to speak, clutching his gullet, the man staggered back. It had been done so quickly that it seemed nobody had noticed. “I’ll catch you up,” Mr Kleist told the others quietly. He squatted as he made the man sit down on the road surface, still wheezing and struggling for air. Madame d’Ortolan glared at Mr Kleist but he couldn’t just leave the man making that noise. He told himself that he was lingering here because he needed to make sure the man stayed down, out of action, not likely to follow them, but really it was to stop him making that terrible choking, gasping noise; to ease him. He pinched the fellow’s neck, attempting to reopen his windpipe. The man tried to bat his hand away. A crowd of people had formed around them and he heard somebody call for the carabinieri. The man made a series of terrible gagging, strangling, sucking noises.

  Bisquitine glanced back as they hurried away. “Dat gotta hurt, sho nuff. I’d get some cream on that. Trot on!”

  “Dearest,” Mrs Siankung said, “please. We’re nearly there. Very soon.”

  “When, sir? Why, sir. I’ll tell you when, then; somba tyme atwixt da the Quilth of Oncoldyou-such and zee Chonce of Plastemper; tankums, wilcums, noddinks, hurtsies. Oh-dear-oh-dear-oh-drear. Oh-dear-oh-drear-oh-drolldums. The backstroke? In these shoes? Have you taken leafs off your fences? Enough already. You muddy funster; you’re landfill.”

  “I wish we could shut her up,” Madame d’Ortolan muttered to Professore Loscelles as they hurried up towards the broad shallow steps of the Rialto itself.

  “I suspect—” the Professore began.

  “Tuk-tuk, talkink in the ranks!” Bisquitine sounded affronted.

  “There there, dearest,” Mrs Siankung said, patting her arm. She glanced back at Madame d’Ortolan.

  “Noo,” Bisquitine intoned in her deep, masculine-sounding voice. “But quate appy to use this poor damaged creatchah for your own dimmed ignoble ends, midim. Ain’t dat de trute!”

  “Bisq, shh!”

  “Poor damaged creatchah, poor damaged creatchah…”

  They had climbed almost to the summit of the Rialto, the crowds growing ever thicker and more chaotic. Madame d’Ortolan grasped Mrs Siankung’s arm. “Is he here?”

  Bisquitine stopped suddenly, did a little dance and with one arm straight out pointing said triumphantly, “Bingo! Bandits ahoy, chumlets! Thar she blows!”

  Adrian

  So I’m standing here at the very top of the very middle bit of the Rialto in Venice, feeling like a bit of a muppet and wondering what the chances are that this is some gigantic long-winded, long-game wind-up. (Except it can’t be, can it? All that monthis as standard instruction ey over the years was real enough, and the box Mrs M sent and Fred asked me to bring didn’t show up in my hand luggage when I went through Heathrow security, did it? Sailed past.) But anyway, that isn’t stopping me from getting that What-the-fuck-am-I-doing-here? feeling, even though, yes, it’s all very lovely in a sunny, chocolate-boxy, can’t-move-for-bleedin-tourists kind of a way, and here I go having to step away from the very top of the very centre bit yet again because yet another group of Japanese or Chinese or whatever tourists want to take a photograph of one of them standing at exactly that point, when this little bunch of frankly not very well dressed people come marching up the steps from the opposite direction I arrived from.

  There’s a mousy bint in a white dressing gown in the middle of them, hair straggling everywhere, muttering to herself. Proper nutter. Then she sees me and sort of jogs on the spot and points and blabbers something, j
ust as I feel a hand on my elbow, cupping it like a brandy glass but I don’t know which way to look because this lot with the lady in white at their centre are all fucking looking at me now and starting up the slope towards me while the person behind me holding my elbow says quietly, “Adrian? I’m Fred.”

  The Transitionary

  Adrian turns to me and his expression and body language changes instantly. “Tem, my darling man,” he says.

  I stare at him, then look beyond him to where the others are, the small group intermittently visible through the swirl of people coming and going and chattering and laughing on the bridge. This group includes Madame d’Ortolan, Professore Loscelles and the frightening weirdness of the presence that has been blocking my new-found abilities for the last half-hour. Except she isn’t blocking them any more. Not since the instant that somebody different stepped into Adrian’s shoes.

  The approaching group is six or seven metres away, hurrying raggedly towards us.

  “Tem, my love,” Adrian says. “I believe you’re free to do something now. I think you’d better do it. Leave Madame d’O. I need to talk to her.”

  I can’t approach the girl’s mind. The rest – the people who attend her, the Prof, the muscle boys and the specialist adepts, including a guy called Kleist who’s hurrying towards the group from the street behind – them I can work with. They all become convinced they really are tourists and just wander off to look at the lovely views. I work the same trick with the rest of the intervention teams, all of whom had been ordered to about-turn and are in the process of converging on the Rialto. The group in the launch – currently exceeding the speed limit back up the Grand Canal to a wavelike chorus of shouts and horns, and almost at the Rialto – unanimously decide to visit Burano for ice creams, though they’ll be pulled over by a police launch near the railway station a few minutes later anyway.

  Meanwhile, all l’Expédience people who were carrying weapons have picked them out of their pockets with looks of puzzled distaste and, holding them by thumb and finger, disposed of them. Four Tasers and six handguns have splashed into canals, to join all the other secrets the waves have hidden over the centuries. The whole fragre of the locality relaxes distinctly.