Transition. Part 4

"Hmm. Some people do."

"Didn't think you'd disagree, in your position," I told him. Mr N was senior partner in one of the City's best-known stockbroking firms and allegedly worth a mint.

"I treat the market like a market," he agreed. He took a shot, stood admiring it for a moment. "Perverse to do otherwise." He smiled at me. "Probably expensive as well, I imagine."

"Yeah, but life's like that too, isn't it?" I said. "Don't you think? I mean, people tell themselves all these fairy stories about true love and stuff, but when it comes right down to it, people have a pretty good idea of their own value on the marriage market or relationship market or whatever you want to call it, know what I mean? Ugly people know better than to go up to beautiful ones and expect anything else but a knock-back. Beautiful people can grade themselves and other people, spot the pecking order. Like a squash ladder." I grinned. "You know where you are and you can challenge somebody a bit above you or be challenged by somebody a bit below, but it's going to end in embarra.s.sment if you outreach yourself. Bit like that."

"A squash ladder," Mr N said. He sighed, took his shot.

"Point is," I said, "people start from whatever social level they get born into but they can trade up with looks, can't they? Or a bit of looks and a lot of face, a lot of self-confidence. Or some sort of talent. Footballers do that. Film stars. Rock stars. Superstar DJs, whatever. Gets you money and fame. But the point is that looks are liquid, know what I mean? Specially for girls. Looks can take you anywhere. But only if you use them. A girl like my Lysanne, she's very aware of her looks. She knows how to use them, and she does use them, bless her. She thinks she can do better than me. Better than where I am at the moment, anyway. So she'll take any chance she can to trade up, do a bit better for herself. Well, fair play to her. Though there are risks, obviously. It's a bit like mountaineering. The trick for somebody like her is checking out the next hold's firm before you leave the security of the one you've been depending on until now."

"That is a lot of face, indeed."

I grinned, to show I'd got the joke, obscure though it might have been. "Can't blame her for it, though, can I? I mean, if I found somebody better-looking or as good-looking but better educated, a bit more sophisticated than Lysanne, I suppose I'd ditch her for them." I shrugged, gave him my cheeky-chappie grin. "Fair's fair."

"And 'up' always means up to more money, I take it?"

"Course, Edward. Money's what it's all about in the end, isn't it? Life's a game and whoever dies with the most toys wins. Don't ask me who said that, but it's true, don't you think?"

"Well," Mr N said, drawing the word out. "You have to be careful. One of the wisest things anybody ever said to me was that if all you ever care about is money, money is all that will ever care for you." He looked at me. I smiled back. He sighed as he surveyed the table. "Meaning, I suppose, that if you care nothing for people, then, when you're old and fading, only hired carers, and maybe what we used to call gold-diggers, will still be around to look after you."

"Yeah, well, I'll worry about that when it happens, Edward."

Mr N went to the side table where our drinks were and sipped from his whisky. "Well, I suppose as long as you both know where you stand." He tipped his head to one side. "Do you both know where you stand? Is this something you've talked about, together?" you both know where you stand? Is this something you've talked about, together?"

I grimaced. "It's... tacit."

"Tacit?" Mr N smiled.

I nodded. "It's understood."

"And is there no room for love in this terribly transactional view of human relationships, Adrian?"

"Oh, yeah, of course," I said breezily. "When it comes along. Kind of thing there's no allowing for. Another level. Boss level. Who knows?"

He just smiled, took his shot.

"Thing is," I said. "With all due respect, Edward, you can afford to think the way you think and feel the way you feel because you've kind of got it all, know what I mean?" I smiled broadly to show there was no edge here, no jealousy involved. Just an observation. "Lovely wife, family, important job, country estate, flat in London, skiing in Klosters, sailing in the Med, everything you could ask for. You have the luxury of observing the rest of us from your Olympian heights, haven't you? Me, I'm still scrabbling up the foothills. Knee-deep in scree down here, me." He laughed at that. "Most of us are. We need to be clear-sighted, we need to see things the way they really are to us." I shrugged. "Looking after number one. It's all we're doing."

"And how are things for you, Adrian?"

"They're fine, thanks." I took my shot. Lots of aimless clacking and movement.

"Good. I'm glad for you. Barney talks very highly of you. What is it you do again?"

"Web design. Got my own company." Which was nothing but the truth without being remotely like the whole of it.

"Well, I hope you do well, but you ought to know that no amount of success frees you of all problems." He stooped, evaluating.

"Well, we all have our crosses to bear, Edward, no doubt about that."

He took his shot, stood up slowly. "What do you think of Barney?" He watched the b.a.l.l.s click and clack across the baize, not looking at me. He rechalked his cue, brows furrowed.

Ah-ha, I thought. I didn't reply too quickly. Took a shot in the meantime. "He's a great guy," I said. "Brilliant company." I put on a slightly pained expression. When Edward looked at me I took a breath and said, "He could choose some of his friends better." I laughed lightly. "Present company excluded, obviously."

Mr N didn't smile. He bent to size up another shot. "I worry that he's enjoying himself a bit too much. I've talked to the people at Bairns Faplish." This was the broking company Barney worked for, Mr N having thought it would look bad to bring the boy straight into his own firm after graduation. Barney had told me himself that he'd needed intensive tutoring to blag his way from Eton into Oxford and had barely sc.r.a.ped a 2.2. Whatever that is. I thought it was an airgun pellet. "They're a little concerned," Mr N continued. "He's not bringing in what he might. They can't let that situation go on for ever. It's not like the old days. Once, any idiot could be a stockbroker, and a lot were. Not good enough these days." He flashed me a mouth-only smile, no eyes involved at all. "There's a family name at stake, after all."

"We're all a bit wild when we're young, aren't we?" I suggested. Edward looked unconvinced. "He'll pull straight in time," I told him, looking serious. I could say this sort of s.h.i.t fairly convincingly on account of being a bit older than Barney. I put my cue down on the table, folded my arms. "Look, Mr N, Edward, it's always more pressure on a guy when he's got a successful father, know what I mean? He looks up to you, he does. I know that. But you're, you know. You're a lot to live up to. It's bound to be intimidating, being in your shadow. You might not see it, but that's you being up in your Olympian heights again, isn't it?"

He smiled. A little sadly, perhaps.

"Well, as you say, he could do with some better friends," he said, leaning on his cue and surveying the table. "I don't want to sound like some Victorian paterfamilias, but a little more of the straight and narrow would do him no harm."

"You're probably right, Edward." I picked up my cue. "My theory is that he's too nice."

"Too nice?"

"Had it all too easy, thinks the world's a nicer place than it really is. Expects everybody else to be as relaxed and good-natured as he is." I shook my head. I bent to my shot. "Dangerous."

"Perhaps you'd care to instruct him in life according to you. Oh, good shot."

"Thanks. I could," I agreed. "I mean I have, already, but I could make more of a point of it. If you liked. Don't know that he'll listen to me, but I could try."

"I'd be very grateful." Mr N smiled.

"It'd be my pleasure, Edward."

"Hmm." He looked thoughtful. "We're off to Scotland next month, shooting. Barney and Dulcima have said they'll be there for the first week, though I expect he'll find an excuse not to come at the last minute again. I think he finds us boring. Do you shoot, Adrian?"

(Great, I think. I can make Barney come along by promising him the whole week's my treat c.o.ke-wise and then I'll be right in with Mr N!) "Never tried, Edward."

"You should. Would you like to come along?"

Madame d'Ortolan Mr Kleist thought the lady took the news remarkably well, considering. He had done something he'd never thought to do in the several years he had been employed by her, and disturbed her while she was at her toilet. She had called him in and had continued to apply her make-up while she sat at her dressing table with him standing behind her. They looked at each other via the table's mirror. Madame d'Ortolan had donned a peignoir before receiving him; however, he found that if he let his eyes stray downwards he could see rather a large portion of both her b.r.e.a.s.t.s. He took a half-step backwards to save both their blushes. There had never been anything of that nature between them. Nevertheless, when the cat called M. Pamplemousse unentwined itself from beneath the stool its mistress sat upon and gazed up at him, it was with what looked like an accusation.

Madame d'Ortolan sighed. "Harmyle?"

"I'm afraid so, ma'am."

"Dead?"

"Quite entirely."

"Our boy has jumped the rails, then."

"Indeed, ma'am, he might be said to be on the opposite track, heading in precisely the wrong direction, and at some speed."

Madame d'Ortolan regarded Mr Kleist with a look of desiccated withering that most men would have flinched at. Mr Kleist was not the flinching sort. "He's still being tracked?"

"Just. Two of the five report they managed to hang on by their fingernails, metaphorically. However, his next transition ought to be much easier to follow, apparently."

"Bring him in," she told him. "Hurt but unharmed." Mr Kleist nodded, understanding. "And address all the correct targets individually and concurrently." He nodded. "Immediately," she told him, taking up her hairbrush.

"Of course, ma'am."

Mr Kleist did his best to kick M. Pamplemousse accidentally on purpose as he turned away, but the creature easily avoided his foot and mewed with what sounded like self-satisfaction.

The Transitionary.

I sniff, blow my nose, look round. I am in another version of the building which housed the Perineum Club, back where Lord Harmyle is at this very moment, I should think lying on the floor, kicking and gurgling his way to a rather b.l.o.o.d.y death.

In this reality, the Vermyn Street building contains a parfumerie. The dark wood panels are mostly hidden by exquisite wall rugs and creamy, gently glowing light panels illuminating a smattering of tear-shaped perfume bottles arrayed on gla.s.s shelves. The air is laced with enchanting female scents and no one looks in the least surprised that I have just sneezed. The well-heeled clientele is composed mostly of ladies. One or two are with gentlemen, and there are a couple of other unescorted men besides myself. It is the men I find myself looking at. The shop a.s.sistants are mostly very good-looking young men. One especially chiselled specimen, tall and dark, smiles at me. I smile back, a little thrill running through me.

Ah well. I never fully appreciate being gay, but at least I haven't hit the ground counting the cracks in the parquet flooring. I seem to have left the OCD behind, for now at least. My languages are English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, German and Cantonese, plus smatterings.

I quickly review my attire in a full-length mirror. I am dressed similarly to the way I was with Lord Harmyle (I wonder if he is the late late Lord Harmyle yet). My hair is long and dark and ringleted in what would appear to be the fashion here, though it looks particularly good on me, I must say. No wonder the young a.s.sistant favoured me with a smile. I check my hands for any signs of blood. It would be unusual and alarming if there were any, but one always looks. Spotless. I have very pale hands, beautifully manicured and sporting two silver or white gold rings on each hand. Lord Harmyle yet). My hair is long and dark and ringleted in what would appear to be the fashion here, though it looks particularly good on me, I must say. No wonder the young a.s.sistant favoured me with a smile. I check my hands for any signs of blood. It would be unusual and alarming if there were any, but one always looks. Spotless. I have very pale hands, beautifully manicured and sporting two silver or white gold rings on each hand.

I have no time to dally. One further regretful smile at the handsome young a.s.sistant and I make for the door, checking my wallet, papers and ormolu pill box as I go. I am Mr Marquand Ys, according to my British pa.s.sport. That is all in order. The wallet is full of large white banknotes and several important-looking bits of plastic with silvery chips embedded.

Into the street. Still no airships. Dommage Dommage!

However: above the relatively low-rise buildings a very large aircraft sails serenely overhead, heading west. I wave my cane at a cab a whirring, hunchbacked-looking thing which I'd surmise runs off electricity and order the lady cabbie to take me to the airport.

In the mirror, the woman's brow creases. "Which one?"

Ah, a large large London; Londres grande! How splendid. "Where's that aircraft heading?" I ask, pointing with my cane. London; Londres grande! How splendid. "Where's that aircraft heading?" I ask, pointing with my cane.

She cranes her neck out of her window, squinting. "Eafrow, I should fink."

"There, then."

"It'll cost ya."

"I'm sure. Now do drive on." We set off. "Plyte, Jesusdottir, Krijk, Heurtzloft-Beiderkern, Obliq, Mulverhill," I mutter. It feels pleasing to me, just saying it. It has a become a mantra, I suppose. The girl cabby glances askance at me in her mirror. "Plyte, Jesusdottir, Krijk, Heurtzloft-Beiderkern, Obliq, Mulverhill," I repeat, smiling.

"Wottevah, mate."

I sit back, watching the relatively quiet traffic and rather loud architecture glide past. My heart has been beating rather rapidly since my transition well, since Lord Harmyle's murder, I suppose. Now it begins to slow, allowing me the luxury of reflection.

Of course I think about whatever poor wretch I've left behind to deal with the aftermath of my actions, especially when it is something as dramatic and unpleasant as a murder. What must it be like for them, I wonder? Allegedly they know nothing about what has happened until after I have gone, though I always wonder if this is really true. Might they not be aware of what I am making them do, even as I do it? Are they not perhaps along for the ride when I take over their body, observing doubtless terrified and frustrated as I perform whatever actions I deem to be necessary to fulfil whatever orders I have been given?

Or are they genuinely oblivious, and effectively wake up to be suddenly confronted with in the case of the operation just concluded a dying man, blood on their hands and the stares of shocked witnesses? What could one possibly do in such circ.u.mstances? Flinch back, horrified, exclaiming, "But it wasn't me!"? Scarcely supportable. One would do best to run, I'd imagine. It might be better for the poor b.a.s.t.a.r.ds to collapse, quite dead, the instant I leave them. I have asked about this kind of thing, but the Concern is by its nature very conservative and secretive and even the researchers, technicians and experts whose business it is to know of such matters are not inclined to divulge the relevant answers.

There are those who a.s.suredly do know the answers to all these questions and more. Madame d'O would know; Mrs M would too, and Dr Plyte and Professore Loscelles and all the others on the Central Council. There is in all likelihood an entire division of the... hmm, for some reason I don't want to think of it as the Concern. This is one of the worlds where it is thought of as l'Expedience.

Anyway, indeed. There is an entire cadre of experts who have studied what happens when someone like myself takes over a previously existing person in another reality and then leaves them again, but l'Expedience does not deem me to be one of those who needs to know the results of their research. I'd love to know. I have carried out my own modest experiments, attempting to rummage round in the memories I find or the feelings I discover, trying to find some trace of the personality I have displaced, but so far such vicarious introspections have produced nothing except a lingering feeling of foolishness at having undertaken them in the first place.

Plainly I inherit something of the character of the person whose being I usurp. That must be where the OCD comes from, and one's s.e.xual inclination, as does the taste for, variously, coffee, tea, chocolate, spiced milk, hard liquor, bland or spicy food, or prunes. I have found myself, over the years, surveying the reality I find myself in with the eyes of somebody who is plainly a general medical pract.i.tioner, a surgeon, a landscape designer, a mathematician, a structural engineer, a livestock breeder, a litigation lawyer, an insurance a.s.sessor, an hotelier and a psychiatrist. I seem to be at home amongst the professions. Once I was a sewerage system designer who was also a serial killer. (Yes, I know, but I would beg the indulgence of being regarded, rather, as an a.s.sa.s.sin. I will even accept Paid Killer, so long as it is understood that I do what I do through informed choice rather than due to some grubbily psychotic urge. Though I'll allow that the importance of this distinction might escape my victims.) On that occasion I had to suppress the urge to strangle prost.i.tutes in order to carry out my mission, which was to track down and kidnap (ha! You see? Not kill) my quarry.

On the other hand, I have never been a woman, which is slightly odd and even a little disappointing. Obviously there are limits.

And are these bodies I inhabit ever used more than once? I have never visited the same body twice indeed, I rarely visit the same reality twice.

These taken-over persons will have had perfectly full lives before I invade them. They have pasts, careers, networks of relationships both personal and professional; all that one would expect. I have had "my" wives, partners, girlfriends, "my" children and "my" best friends greet me without a trace of discomfiture or any sign that I am behaving oddly or out of character. I seem to know how to behave when I am somebody else, as naturally as the most gifted actor, and when I search my/their memories I find no trace of earlier exposure to the Concern or whatever it might be called locally or preparation for what has happened.

I extract my little ormolu pill case from my coat and study it. I shall probably next take one of the tiny capsules it contains while ten kilometres above the Atlantic, or over the Alps, or while looking down at the Sahara. Or I could wait until I arrive wherever it is I decide to go. In any event, how do these little white pills small enough for one to fit three or four on the nail of one's smallest finger actually work? Who manufactures them, where? Who invented them, tried and tested them? I work the sweetener case conventionally, causing it to produce a perfectly normal sweetener such as any diet-conscious person might slip into their tea or coffee (while often, of course, tucking one's snout into a glistening cream bun). It is almost identical to the special pills, lacking only a tiny blue dot scarcely visible to the naked eye in the very centre of one face. I slide open the end of the ormolu case and replace the sweetener.

The little case itself is quite an exquisite piece of work. Used as one would expect it to be used it will happily dispense sweeteners and nothing but sweeteners all day until they run out; only by holding and pressing it just so may one access the small compartment concealed within that contains its real treasure, so that it releases one of the little pills which lead one to flit, bringing about a transition, flicking one into another soul and another world.

Questions, questions. I know how I am supposed to think. I am supposed to think that one day I might rise to the level of Madame d'Ortolan and her ilk, and discover some of the answers. Eliding everybody on the list my orders contained might well be quite enough by itself to ensure just such an elevation, and I should think so too; such a close-packed sequence of elisions would require my best work, and success would by no means be a.s.sured.

Anyway sadly, as far as Madame d'Ortolan's purposes are concerned I have no intention of killing the people on the list. On the contrary: I will save them if I can (with any luck, in a sense I already have). No, I intend to go quite diametrically off-message in this matter.

I already have, of course; Lord Harmyle wasn't even on the list.

5

Patient 8262

Ah, our profession. Mine, and those who will now be looking for me. My peers, I suppose. Though I was peerless, if I say so myself. There was especially at the more colourful end of the reality spectrum an insane grace to my elisions, a contrived but outrageous elegance. As evidence, the fiery fate of one Yerge Aushauser, arbitrageur. Or perhaps you would prefer the brain-frying exit of Mr Max Fitching, lead singer of Gun Puppy, the first true World Band in more realities than we cared to count. Or the painful and I'm afraid protracted end of Marit Shauoon, stunt driver, businessman and politician.

For Yerge, I arranged a special bubble bath at his Nevada ranch, replacing the air feed to the nozzles in his hot tub with hydrogen. The cylinders, hidden under the wooden decking around the tub, were controlled by a radio-activated valve. I was watching from the other side of the world through a digital camera attached to a spotting scope, a sunlight-powered computer and a proprietary satellite uplink, all sitting disguised by sage bushes on a hillside a mile away. A motion sensor alerted me that the hot tub was in use while I was asleep in my hotel in Sierra Leone. When I gazed, bleary-eyed, into my phone I saw Yerge Aushauser striding up to the tub, alone for once. I swung out of bed, woke the laptop for a higher-definition view and waited until he was sitting there in the frothing water, all hairy arms and furious expression. Probably another expensive night at the gaming tables. He usually brought home a girl or two to knock around on such occasions, but perhaps this morning he was tired. The view was quite clear through the cool morning air, untroubled by thermals. I could see him put something long and dark to his mouth, then hold something to its end. A spark. His fat fingers would be closing round his Gran Corona, his throat exposed as he put his head back against the cushion on the tub's rim and blew the first mouthful of smoke into the clear blue Nevada sky.

I punched in the code for the valve controlling the feed from the hydrogen cylinders. Seconds later, half a world away, the water frothed crazily, briefly seemed to steam as though boiling, hiding first Yerge and then the tub in a ball of vapour. This erupted almost immediately into an intense yellow-white fireball which engulfed the tub and all the nearby decking. Even in the early morning sunshine it blazed brightly.

Amazingly, after a few seconds, while the pillar of roaring flame piled towards the heavens like an upside-down rocket plume, Yerge stumbled out of the conflagration and across the decking, hair on fire, skin blackened, strips of it hanging off him like dark rags. He fell down some steps and lay there, motionless, minus his cigar but still in a sense smoking.

Until the decking itself caught fire Yerge's servants had run out from the house and dragged him away by then there was little smoke; oxygen and hydrogen burn perfectly, producing, of course, only water. Most of the initial burst of smoke, now drifting and dissipating in the cool morning breeze and heading towards the distant grey sierras, would have come from Yerge himself.

He had ninety-five per cent burns, and lungs seared by flame inhalation. They managed to keep him alive for nearly a week, which was remarkable.

Max Fitching was a G.o.d amongst mortals, a man with the voice of an angel and the proclivities of a satyr. I killed Max while he sat in a seriously pimped open-top half-track in Jakarta, waiting for a roadie to return with his drugs (Max never did get the hang of dressing down. Or going incognito). The Israeli laser weapon was originally an experimental device designed to bring down Iranian missiles while they were still over Syria, or, better still, Iraq. I fired it from a container truck a block down the street from Max's idling half-track. Even attenuated to the minimum it was grossly overpowered for the job and rather than drill a neat hole straight through Max's fashionably pale, heavily sungla.s.sed, wildly dreadlocked head, it blew it to smithereens. Windows shattered three storeys up.

This was not elegant far from it. The elegance came from the fact that the laser burst was not a single brutally simple pulse but one which had been precisely frequency-modulated to mirror the digitalised information of a high-sample-rate MP3 signal, compressed into a microsecond. What hit Max was effectively an MP3 copy of "Woke Up Down," Gun Puppy's first worldwide hit and the song that had made Max truly famous.

Marit Shauoon was a populist politician in the Peron mould, and, like the others, I had been reliably informed that he would, if left alone, take the world to a Very Bad Place, in his case starting with South and Central America. (As if any of this really mattered to me. Craft, my trade, was all. I let those who handed me my orders worry about the morality of it.) He had been a motorcycle stunt rider, the most famous in Brazil and then in the world. He crashed a lot but that just added to the excitement, antic.i.p.ation and sense of jeopardy in the crowd. All four of his major limbs were pinned and strengthened with extensive amounts of surgical steel and even without those there were enough metal implants in the rest of his body to set off airport security scanners while he was still walking stiffly from the car park.

I found an induction furnace for him. He heated up, quite slowly, from the inside, to the sound of vastly thrumming magnets all around him, and his own screams.