Transition. Part 9

"Perhaps she finds me attractive," I suggested, smiling. It was, if nothing else, a more sincere smile than Madame d'Ortolan's.

She leaned closer. A swirl of breeze brought a hint of her perfume to my nose; something flowery but cloying. "Do you mean," she said, "s.e.xually?"

"Or just attracted to my sunny character in general."

"Or attractive in the sense that she thought you one of those more likely to go over to her cause," Madame d'Ortolan suggested, smile gone now, head tipped to one side, evaluating. Her expression was not unkind, but it was intent.

"I can't imagine why she would have thought that," I said, drawing myself up. In her heels, Madame d'O was as tall as me. "I would not expect or appreciate to be under any sort of suspicion just because that lady chose to approach me."

"You can't think why she did?"

"No. For all I know she's working her way through whatever group she's chosen alphabetically."

Madame d'Ortolan looked to be about to say something, then didn't. She snorted and turned. We resumed walking. For a while, nothing was said. A jet stroked a double strand of white across the sky, ploughing heaven.

"You are one of the first," she told me as we approached the landing stage where the Palazzo Chirezzia's launch waited. "We think she is targeting transitioners alone. We have people and techniques able to predict her movements and we have, we believe, been able to prevent her doing any real mischief so far. We shall need the full cooperation of all concerned to propagate that fortunate trend onwards into the future, as I'm sure you are entirely able to appreciate."

"Of course," I said. I left a pause, then said, "If the lady's cause is so arcane and her threat so trifling, why is it necessary to oppose her with such force?"

She stopped suddenly and we turned, facing each other. Our eyes never truly flash, of course; we are not the luminously grotesque inhabitants of the deep sea (well, I certainly wasn't. I wouldn't vouch for Madame d'Ortolan). However, evolution has left us primed to notice when somebody's eyes widen suddenly, showing more white, due to surprise, fear or anger. Madame d'Ortolan's eyes flashed. "Mr Oh," she said, "she opposes opposes us us. Therefore she must be opposed in return. We cannot let such dissent go unchallenged. It would look weak."

"You could try ignoring her," I suggested. "That might look more confident. Stronger, even."

An expression crossed her face that might have been exasperation, then she smiled briefly and patted my arm as we resumed walking. "I dare say I could tell you more of the lady's corrupting theories and you would be both more horrified at her and more understanding of our position," she told me, with what sounded like forced amus.e.m.e.nt. "Her accusations are more alarming and damaging than it is necessary to reveal, but centre, as far as we can gather, on the whole course and purpose of the Concern's activities. She fantasises some vast ulterior motive in all we do, and so takes issue with us existentially. Such madness absolutely requires treatment. We cannot let it pa.s.s. Her charges against us must be defended, her argument broken." She flashed, this time, a smile. "You must trust us, as your superiors those with a broader, more knowledgeable and encompa.s.sing view to do the right thing in this."

She was watching me as we walked. I smiled at her. "Where would we be," I asked, "if we did not trust our superiors?"

Her eyes might have narrowed a tiny fraction, then she smiled in return and looked away. "Very well," she said, sounding like somebody who had just made her mind up about something. "There may be another debriefing." (There was not.) "You may be under moderately enhanced surveillance for a short time." (It was occasionally highly intrusive enhanced surveillance and it lasted a long time; a couple of years at least.) "Your career, which we are happy to note has already met with some success precocious success, in the eyes of some of my more conservative colleagues, though I hope we may dismiss their opinions is still at its beginning. I hope and would expect that this incident has not harmed it in any way. It would be such a tragedy if it did." (It was harmed. I harmed it. Still I became the best and most used of my peers.) We reached the jetty, coming out of the shadow of the island's encircling walls. Madame d'Ortolan accepted the hand of the boatman as he helped her into the launch. We sat down in the open rear well of the launch. "We hope that our trust in you is both well-founded and reciprocated," she said, smiling.

"Entirely, ma'am," I said. (This was a lie.) As the boat gunned away from the isle of the dead, Madame d'Ortolan detached the flower from her lapel. "They say these things are unlucky, outside of a cemetery," she said, and let the gelded blossom fall into the restless waters of the lagoon.

7

Patient 8262

We change things. For the better, we would hope, obviously. What would be the point of trying to change things for the worse? We do what we can. We do all that we can. We do our very, very best. I cannot see how anyone could disagree. And yet still we encounter disagreement. People take issue with us. Our views and prescriptions are not accepted as being definitive, and correct, and desirable, by certain people.

This has to be regarded as their right, and yet it does seem also to be their conceit, perhaps even their indulgence.

I suppose we have to take these things and these people and their views into account. We are not, however, obliged to indulge them.

We work to make the many worlds better.

There. That's the official line.

The saying goes that Aspherje would be a great city even without the University of Practical Talents, but then so would the UPT without Aspherje. To me, coming from the background I came from, it looked like a crunched, piled-together collection of several dozen cathedrals; all domes, spires, elongated windows and flying b.u.t.tresses, with the great central dome extravagantly clothed in gold leaf so that even in dull weather it seemed to shine like something not entirely of that or any other world plonked on the rough summit of the whole chaotic frozen storm of brick, stone, concrete and clad steel like a gloriously irrelevant yet sublimely triumphant afterthought.

There we learned our trade. First, though, we had to learn ourselves, discover where the mother-lode of our talent truly lay. The Transitionary Office had developed its techniques for detecting likely candidates for training at the UPT over many centuries, and one of the talents that it found most useful was that of rapidly and reliably identifying those with any sort of talent that might prove of subsequent use to itself.

So spotters, as they were generally called, travelled amongst the many worlds, looking for those who might be recruited to the cause. A few could take themselves there; the vast majority could not.

The most widespread talent, or at least the one that it was easiest to find, was the ability to transition, that is, to shift oneself, preferably with a high degree of willed accuracy, between the many worlds. It was unheard of to find somebody already doing this; only the signs of a potential future proficiency were obvious to somebody attuned to such indicators, not naturally occurring instances of the applied talent itself. As far as we knew, that came only once the subject had been trained generally in the techniques of transitioning and instructed specifically in the use of the drug septus.

Beyond that extraordinary but in a sense basic skill, the most useful additional talent was that of being able to take somebody else with you when transitioning. A tandemiser could do that. This meant that the ability to flit became separated from any other talent that it might have been deemed would be useful on the target world.

Rumour had it that the ability to take another with oneself between realities had been discovered fortuitously, if not perhaps entirely accidentally, when a certain transitioning adept had willed the standard transitioning process while in the act of coition with their lover. Adept and lover both discovered themselves in the bodies of another s.e.xually joined couple on another world entirely. This was a shock, obviously, but allegedly not so great a one as to prevent the couple from being able to return successfully to their home world, or complete the act they had been engaged in. Nor was this pioneering transitionary shy about exploring the possibility that they alone had caused the event, rather than it being a function of the specific combination of qualities embodied by that specific first couple.

Further gossip insists that it was some time before our adventurous virtuoso informed the Transitionary Office of this innovation, the individual concerned claiming that they wanted to ensure this novel ability was not the result of some freak, one-off stroke of luck. They had carried out further research and established that the ability was controllable and the process both repeatable and, probably, transmissible: a teachable skill rather than a unique and freakish abnormality.

Allegedly, that same adept discovered how to bring an act of s.e.xual congress to a fully successful conclusion in one world and then transition to another world to experience the whole thing again (in some versions, with or without their partner in the first world).

Most strands of these rumours hold that it was Madame d'Ortolan who discovered this ability, and that she did so some two hundred years ago, thereafter using the influence and power that the discovery of this innovation provided her with both to fulfil her ambition of being elevated to the Central Council of the Transitionary Office and to gain the particular privilege the Central Council granted its most distinguished and ill.u.s.trious members: that of being allowed to skip back a generation or two every now and again when one's original or presently occupied frame grew old, so that re-emplaced in a succession of younger bodies one might never grow truly old, or save by violent chance die.

It is said that for those perverse souls for whom the prospect of travelling throughout an infinitude of worlds is somehow not incentive enough to undergo the training that the Transitionary Office requires, the rather more base promise of serial s.e.xual transitioning makes all the difference, even if the practice is both frowned on and made difficult by the Office's tightly controlled monopoly of septus. Equally, for those for whom power stretching across unnumbered realities is not enough, effective immortality helps provide an extra spur to aspire to a place on the Central Council.

Subsequent research has revealed that for most people capable of the technique it is not necessary to penetrate or be penetrated; a tight hug over as much of the body as possible, with a minimal amount of skin-to-skin contact, preferably about the head or neck, is all that's required. A few blessed individuals need only encircle or nearly encircle both wrists, or just one, and an even tinier number need only hold the other person's hand.

Foreseers are those who can see into the future, though usually only for a brief moment as they transit from one world to another, and hazily. It is a highly limited skill, the least well understood of those we know about and the least reliable and consistent of those of interest to us, but it is the most highly prized nevertheless, for its rarity apart from anything else.

Trackers may or may not be a specialised form of foreseer (the foreseers claim this, the trackers deny it). Trackers are those who are able to follow individuals or more unusually specific events or trends between the worlds. They are spies, essentially; a semi-secret police force that the Transitionary Office uses to keep its transitionaries under some sort of control.

That the trackers' services are required to the degree that they undeniably are is due to a quality of character shared by most transitionaries. The people who turn out to be capable of flitting amongst the many worlds are almost without exception selfish, self-centred individuals and individualists, people who think rather highly of themselves and exhibit or at least possess a degree of scorn for their fellow humans; people who think that the rules and limitations that apply to everybody else don't or shouldn't apply to them. They are people who already feel that they live in a different world to everybody else, in other words. As a specialist from the UPT's Applied Psychology Department expressed it to me once, such individuals are some lopsided distance along the selfless selfish spectrum, and cl.u.s.tered close to the latter, hard-solipsism end.

Clearly, if left to their own devices such rampant egoists might misuse their skills and abilities to pursue their own agendas of self-glorification and self-aggrandis.e.m.e.nt. Such individuals need to be controlled, and to be controlled they need to be watched, and that is what trackers do: they spy on and help to police the transitioners. Trackers and transitionaries are as a result kept as far apart from each other as possible, to prevent them concocting their own little conspiracies or drawing up plans of benefit to them but not to l'Expedience and its aims.

As a result, the general demeanour of the Transitionary Office, the University of Practical Talents, the Speditionary Faculty and the Concern itself their own collective fragre, if you like is one of some watchfulness, a degree of suspicion and outright paranoia, both unfounded and entirely justified. An entire Department the Department of Shared Ideals exists to attempt to ameliorate this unfortunate and if only at a low level debilitating effect and investigate further how it might be both treated and prevented.

The Department's success, however, might be fairly if sadly judged by the fact that the overwhelming preponderance of those it ventures to a.s.sist in the course of its duties are absolutely convinced that it is itself simply another part of the whole rigidly proscriptive controlling apparatus whose baleful influence it is supposedly there to mitigate.

There is a smattering of other categories of skills, all of them essentially negative in their effects: blockers, who by their presence usually they have to be touching can prevent a transitioner from flitting; exorcisers, who can cast a transitioner out of their target mind; inhibitors, who can frustrate the abilities of the trackers; envisionaries, who can see albeit indistinctly into other realities without going there and randomisers, whose skills are almost too wayward to categorise fully but who can often adversely influence the abilities of other adepts around them. Randomisers are severely restricted in what they are allowed to do, where they are allowed to go and who they are permitted to meet rumours exist to the effect that some of them are imprisoned for life or even disposed of.

Transitioners, tandemisers, trackers, foreseers, blockers, exorcisers and the rest are in effect the front-line troops of l'Expedience (it does have proper troops too the Speditionary Guard: rarely mobilised and never, in the thousand-year history of the Concern, yet used, thank Fate). They are outnumbered ten or more to one by the back-up grades of support staff who provide all the logistical and intelligence services they need and who plan, oversee, record and a.n.a.lyse their activities. Bureaucrats, basically, and as loved for their activities as bureaucrats everywhere.

These days l'Expedience also has its own transitioneering research facilities controversially as far as the UPT is concerned, its Speditionary Faculty believing that it ought to hold a monopoly regarding such matters. The Central Council has made noises about the wasteful duplication of effort involved but seems unwilling to act to resolve the issue, either because it believes the compet.i.tion might be fruitful (plausible if unprovable), the redundancy a safety feature (safeguarding against what has never been made clear) or because it was Madame d'Ortolan's idea in the first place and it provides her and the Central Council with the ability to pursue avenues of transitioneering research as they see fit without having to appeal to and wait on the approval of the notoriously staid and conservative Professors and other members of the Research Council Senate of the Speditionary Faculty itself.

Adrian.

"Cubbish. Adrian Cubbish," I told her. I grinned. "Call me AC."

"Why, are you cool?"

I was impressed. Usually I have to make the AC/Air-Conditioning thing clear myself. This was a clever one. "Course I am, doll."

"Course you are," she agreed, looking like she wasn't sure she agreed, but still smiling. She was tall and blonde, though her face had a hint of Asian about it that made the tall blonde part look odd and meant it was hard to be sure how old she was. I'd have said about my age, but wouldn't have wanted to swear to it. She wore a black suit and a pink blouse and carried herself like somebody who was even more of a stunner than she actually was, know what I mean? Confidence. I've always liked that.

"So you're Connie?"

"Sequorin. Connie Sequorin. Pleased to meet you."

Sequorin sounded like Sequoia, which is those big trees in California, and she was tall. Or there was that CS gas they use in Northern Ireland. But I thought better of saying anything. Clever ones need careful handling and usually it's better to say nothing and stay silent and mysterious than try to make jokes that probably won't impress them. Probably heard it all before, anyway.

"Good to meet you, Connie. Ed Mr Noyce said you wanted a word."

"Did he?" She looked a bit surprised. She glanced over to him. We were at the house-warming party for Ed's new gaff, a loft conversion in Limehouse with views upriver. He'd sold the house on the coast in Lincolnshire after another bit of garden fell into the sea. Still got a tidy price from some Arab he vaguely knew who never even bothered to go and see it. Some sort of investment or tax dodge or whatever. The loft was tidy, all tall ceilings, white walls and black beams and timber walls on the outside like a yacht's deck with stanchions and cables round the balconies. Small-fortune territory. The area was still getting gentrified, but you could smell the smart money moving in.

This would have been mid-Nineties now, I suppose. I was working in Ed's brokerage firm, which was a private company these days rather than a partnership. This made sound business sense according to the lawyers. The boy Barney had been living on a farm in Wales for the last year with some hippies or something but had recently turned up in Goa and was running a bar that his dad had helped him buy. Bit of a disappointment, really, but at least he'd tamed the c.o.ke habit, seemingly. I was almost clean myself, just took the occasional toot on special occasions and had stopped dealing entirely. Healthier.

I'd clocked that the real currency involved in making money out of money is knowledge, info. The more people you knew involved in a business, and the more you knew of what they knew, the better informed you were and the better the judgements you could make about when to buy and when to sell. That was all there was to it, really, though that's a bit like saying all there is to maths is numbers. Still enough complications involved to be going on with, thanks.

"Mr Noyce speaks very highly of you," Connie told me. Something about the way she said this made me think she wasn't my age at all, but a lot older. Confusing.

"Does he? That's nice." I moved round her a bit as though making room for somebody pa.s.sing nearby, but really getting her to turn more fully into the light. No, she really did look quite young. "What do you do yourself, Connie?"

"I'm a recruitment consultant."

I laughed. "You're a headhunter headhunter?" I glanced over at Ed.

"If you like." She looked over at Mr N too. "Oh, I'm not trying to entice you away from Mr Noyce's firm."

"You're not?" I said. "That's a pity, isn't it?"

"It is?" she asked. "You're not happy there?" She had an accent that was hard to pin down. Maybe Middle European, but spent some time in the States.

"Perfectly happy, Connie. Though Mr N and me think the same way." I glanced over at him again. "He knows if I got a much better offer from somebody else I'd be a fool not to take it." I looked back at her. I did that glance thing, where you sort of flick your gaze over a woman, certainly as far as their t.i.ts if not their waist. Too quick to really take in anything you haven't already seen through peripheral vision, but enough to let them know you're, what's the best way of putting it, alive to their charms, shall we say, without actually ogling them like a cla.s.sless w.a.n.ker, know what I mean? "No, I just meant we could all do with a bit of enticement now and again, don't you think, Connie?"

I should explain that Lysanne was history by now. The barmy Scouse bint had stormed out once too often and I'd changed the locks on her. She was back in Liverpool running a tanning salon. I was playing the field, as they say, which meant I was seeing a few girls at a time on my terms. Plenty of s.e.x, no commitments. f.u.c.king Holy Grail, isn't it?

She smiled. "Well then, maybe I can entice you to meet a client of mine." She handed me a card.

"What's it in connection with?"

"They would have to explain that themselves." She glanced at her watch. "I have to go." She reached out and touched my arm. "It was good to meet you, Adrian. Call me."

And off she f.u.c.ked.

I asked Mr N.

"Some people that I know, Adrian," he told me. He was standing under a really bright light, his white-sand hair shining like a halo. "They've been helpful to me in the past. I'm on a consultancy for them. I hold myself ready to help them if and when they need it. They rarely do, apart from some very trivial matters. Frankly, so far I've been able to hand everything over to my secretary to deal with." He smiled.

I frowned. "What sort of people, Ed?"

"People it's very useful and lucrative to know, Adrian," he said patiently.

"They Italian?" I asked. "Or American? Or Italian-American?" I was already thinking Mafia or CIA or something.

He laughed lightly. "Oh, I don't think so."

"Do you know know so?" so?"

"I know they've been very helpful and generous and have asked for next to nothing in return. I'm quite certain they're not criminals or a threat to the state or anything. Have they asked you to talk to them?"

"I've to call Connie."

"Well, perhaps you should." There was a minor fuss at the door. Ed glanced over. "Ah, the minister, fresh off Channel Four News. Excuse me, Adrian." He went over to greet him.

I think I was supposed to think about it but I called her moby right then.

"h.e.l.lo?"

"Connie, Adrian. We were just talking."

"Of course."

"All right, I'll see your client. When's good?"

"Well, possibly this Sat.u.r.day, if that's good for you."

"Yeah, all right."

There was a slight hesitation. "You have the whole day free?"

"Could do. Would I need it?"

"Pretty much, yes. And your pa.s.sport."

I thought about this. I had a date on Sat.u.r.day night with a girl who owned a lingerie shop in deepest Chelsea. A proper Sloan. And a lingerie shop. I mean, f.u.c.k. I watched Mr N glad-handing the Minister for Transport. "Yeah, why not?" I said. "Okay."

"Let me call you back."

Which was how I found myself at a cold, rainy Retford airport in Ess.e.x two days later on the Sat.u.r.day morning and then in a proper executive jet heading out across the Channel, pointing due east as far as I could tell. Connie had met me at the airport, dressed the same apart from a purple blouse, but she wasn't saying where we were heading. She had a bundle of newspapers with her and seemed determined to read them all, even the foreign-language ones, and didn't want to talk. After I stopped checking out the luxury fittings I started to get bored so I had to read too.

I'd dozed off. I only woke when we touched down, the plane slowing along a b.u.mpy runway with a lot of weeds at the edges. Flat country with lots of bare trees which looked like they were ready for winter a bit early. I checked my watch. Four hours in the air. Where the f.u.c.k were we?

The place looked deserted. There was a pa.s.senger terminal in the distance but it looked run-down and abandoned, concrete all stained. A couple of big dark hangars even further away, streaked with rust. The air here was a bit less chilly than in Ess.e.x and smelled of gra.s.s or trees or something. No Customs or other officials about, just a big military-looking tanker truck which started refuelling the plane immediately and a long black saloon. Both the vehicles looked Eastern European to me and the two guys dealing with the fuelling sounded Russian or something, not that I got much of a chance to listen to them as we were shown straight into the limo and it tore off across the runway and out through a half-collapsed boundary fence in a cloud of dust.

"So, where are we, Connie?"

"You have to guess," she told me, not looking up from the newspaper she'd brought from the plane.