Transition (45 page)

“I’m sure they are. I’ve always assumed that when we meet you’ve taken care of that.”

“I do what I can.” She shrugged. “I think I’m still ahead of them.”

“You think they’re in hot pursuit?”

She nodded. “Theodora keeps at least two tracking teams on the lookout for me at all times. And she has her special projects,
her wild cards, randomisers whom she’s tormented and bent until they form specialist tools for seeking out people like me.
She thinks they might be able to work some magic and both find me and then disable me when I’m traced. I suppose I ought to
feel flattered to be the object of such obsessive attention.”

She looked away at the startlingly bright point of the rising sun. The surrounding peaks shone a bright yellow-white now,
the level of illumination dropping down their snow and rock flanks as the sun continued to rise, casting jagged shadows across
the steeply sloped snowfields and glacier heads. Just in that moment he thought she looked small and vulnerable and hunted,
even afraid. The urge to reach out and take her in his arms, to shelter and protect and reassure her was very strong, and
surprising. He wondered for a moment how much of this was deliberate, if he was being manipulated, and in that hesitation
the moment passed and she turned back to him, smiling, raising her face. “You need to take care, Tem,” she told him. “You
can only postpone making up your mind for so long. Perhaps no further, after this. You can seem to cooperate with them and
listen to me for now, but sooner or later they’ll insist you do something that settles it. You’ll need to decide.”

“I thought you were trying to get me to decide.”

“I am. But I’m not threatening you.”

“They’re not threatening me.”

“Not yet. They will. Unless you take the hints that will be put before you, if they haven’t been already, and obviate the
need for explicit threats.” She looked down towards the ruffled blanket of cloud far below, still in shadow. “The Central
Council prefers implied threats, the threat of threats. It’s more effective, leaving so much to the individual imagination.”

“You’re not going to tell me who the people on the Central Council are, are you? The ones who might think the way you do.”

“Of course not. You could probably make a fairly accurate guess, anyway. And it’s not as though I have signed contracts from
them, swearing to rebel when the time comes. I haven’t even talked to all of them, I’m just making assumptions. But feel free
to tell the Questionary Office that you asked the question.”

“I shall.”

She was silent again for a while. The wind roared on, picking up in strength while the weathervane apparatus creaked and moaned
and swung the glass barricade round to face the onrushing torrent of air. “You should take all this more seriously, Tem,”
she said, her tone gently chiding, close to hurt. “These people are slowly making monsters of themselves. Madame d’O is already
full-fledged. Under her, if they haven’t already, they’ll come to countenance anything to avoid what she sees as contamination.
Anything. Encouraging world wars, genocide, global warming; anything at all to disrupt the slow progress towards the unknown.”

“Don’t let my defensive flippancy deceive you,” he told her, pulling her to him, enfolding her. He hesitated.

“Deep down you still don’t take it seriously either?” she suggested, looking up at him with with a small, wan smile.

“There’s that flippancy again.” He squeezed her. “I take it as seriously as I’ve ever taken anything, including my own survival.”

She looked unimpressed. “I was hoping for better.”

“Leave it with me. I’ll see what I can do.”

She turned in his arms, staring out over the nearly lifeless waste of rock, ice and snow towards the faltering dawn.

“We may not be able to meet like this again,” she said quietly. “I’m sorry.”

“Then I’m glad,” he said, “that we were able to put so much effort into this meeting.” She looked back to him with an expression
on her face that he was unable to read, and he felt a real gut-stirring emotion, something between a kind of recidivist lust
and an entirely unexpected regret at the potential loss of somebody who only now, belatedly, he realised was and had always
been a soulmate. He would never now, never again, call it love.

She pushed herself away from him a little, then reached out and patted his gloved, mittened hand again, layers upon layers
separating them. “I’ve enjoyed everything about the times we’ve spent together,” she told him. “Would that there had been
more.”

He gave it a while, then said, “So what happens next?”

“Immediately, trivially? You go back to Calbefraques and I disappear again.”

“If I do need to contact you, if I do decide—”

“I’ll leave a note of places, times, people.”

“And beyond that?”

“Over time, more to the point, I think Madame d’Ortolan will eventually move against the people on the Central Council who
disagree with her. She’ll try to isolate them, perhaps even kill them.”

“
Kill
them? You’re not serious.” This was not the sort of behaviour the Central Council was known for. There had been one or two
suspicious deaths on the Council centuries before that might have been due to some judicious poisoning, but nothing untoward
since. Stolid and boring were the words most people associated with the Council, even after the ascendancy of Madame d’O;
not danger, not assassination.

“Oh, I’m as serious as she is,” Mrs Mulverhill told him, eyes wide. “Madame d’Ortolan is one of those people – civilised on
the surface, brutish underneath – who think themselves realists when they contemplate their own barbarism, and ascribe the same
callousness to others. Making the assumption that everybody else is as ruthless as she is helps her live with her own inhumanity,
though she would justify it as simple prudence. She knows how
she
would deal with somebody like herself: she’d kill them. So she assumes those who oppose her must be planning the same, or
shortly will. Obviously, then, by her demented logic, she needs to kill them before they kill her. She will think through
this psychotic escalation without any evidence that her opponents actually do intend her harm and she’ll pride herself on
her disinterested practicality, probably even persuading herself that she bears those she has marked for death no personal
ill will. It’s just politics.”

Mrs Mulverhill smiled briefly. “She will move against them, Tem; decisively as she would see it, murderously as anyone else
would.” She put one mittened hand on his arm. “And she may think to use you to do so, as you are still her promising boy.
Discover and test your loyalty and commitment by ordering you to make the cull. Though she will undoubtedly have alternative
means set up if you decide not to cooperate.” Her gaze fastened on him. “If you do decide against her, you will be making
yourself an outlaw too, or at best symbolically leaping behind a barricade with others, like myself. And, unless we succeed,
the full force of the Central Council and the Concern itself will be turned against you, against us, in time. We have to persuade
the waverers, who are probably the majority, that we are right, and we need to survive long enough to do that. If we can resist
the Council successfully they will look weak and be seen to lose authority. Then negotiation, compromise might be possible.”

“You don’t sound very hopeful.”

She shrugged. “Oh, I am full of hope,” she said, though her voice sounded small and faint.

He went to her and put his arms around her. She pressed gently against him, her head against his chest. Moments later, almost
together, a series of beeps announced that their oxygen cylinders each only held enough gas for a few more minutes.

Patient 8262

I
think I have to leave. I cannot stay here. Or maybe I can. I’m not sure.

It is comfortable here. All is not perfect; I still worry that somebody might try to violate me again, and there remains the
disturbing incident with the broad-shouldered lady doctor and her dolls, when things seemed to slip aside from reality and
it felt like I could only escape through fainting, but, even so, my existence here is relatively calm and unthreatened. Maybe
I should stay.

I am trying to spend less time asleep or snoozing or just with my eyes closed. I am trying to discover more about where I
am: about this society and the clinic and about myself. This has met with mixed results so far. However, I feel it is necessary
no matter whether I stay here or leave. If I stay I need to know where it is that I am staying, so that I am prepared for
what may happen. (Suppose I am only here for as long as some sickness fund or medical insurance settlement lasts and then
get thrown out regardless, for example.) If I am to leave then I need to know into what sort of world I would be venturing.

So I have, albeit reluctantly, especially at first, been spending more time in the day room, watching television with the
slack-jaws, droolers, mumblers, random shouters and nappy-wearers who inhabit the place. (There are one or two of its denizens
who are not irredeemable, but they are very much in the minority.) It is amazing, though, how little one can glean from the
sort of broadcasts these people choose to watch. I have tried finding news or current-affairs channels, but this always causes
protests, even from the true slack-jaws who you’d have sworn might as well have been sitting watching a turnip rather than
a functioning television.

They like cartoons, mostly. They will watch programmes with lots of shouting and movement and colour, but anything that might
actually engage the brain’s higher functions, beyond the sort of stimulus on a par with a chain of plastic toys stretched
across an infant’s cot or pram, that they cannot cope with. I have learned a little more of the local language, that’s about
all. I persist only because the very distracting nature of the programmes sometimes lets my higher functions disengage more
easily from the here and now, freeing me to think.

I asked for and was given a radio to use in my room. That was better. I am still struggling to understand more than about
a quarter of what is said – less when people talk too fast – but I have worked out that this is a mostly peaceful world and that
this is a relatively benign, egalitarian society – my care here will continue indefinitely, paid for by the state – and that I
am here because I suffered some sort of breakdown which left me in a catatonic condition for a month. The medical staff think
I must still be suffering from a mixture of amnesia and delusion, or that I am just plain putting it on, pretending to be
crazy to escape… well, whatever it was I felt the need to escape.

I have been back to the ward of sleeping men, in daylight. Nobody tried to stop me. It is an ordinary ward, after all. The
men were mostly awake – a few were snoozing, but not all – and there were chairs by the bedsides, and there were flowers and Get
Well Soon cards on the bedside cabinets, and there was even a family – what I took to be a wife, sad and sallow-faced with two
small, silent children – visiting one of the patients. The two adults were talking quietly. Some of the other men, sitting up
in bed, looked at me as I stood at the doors of the ward, staring in. I met their level, mildly inquisitive gazes, felt foolish,
and turned and walked away down the echoing corridor, relieved and disappointed at once.

My name still means nothing to me. Kel. Mr Kel. Mr P. Kel. Mr Pohley Kel. Nothing. It means nothing to me – well, beyond that
it feels the wrong way round somehow. Still, it seems that I am stuck with it and I suppose it will do as well as any other.

I was a crane driver, they tell me. I worked in one of those tower cranes they use to build tall buildings and other large
structures. This is a job of some skill and responsibility, and one that you’d want someone quite sane and sensible doing,
so I probably couldn’t just walk back into it. But it occurs to me that it is also a job that somebody who did not very much
like interacting with other people might choose, and one that might allow the imagination to roam free and unfettered above
the city and the site, so long as the mechanics of the job got done safely.

I lived alone, a loner, both in my home life and up there in the sky, swinging loads around from place to place while the
people below scurried like ants and I took instructions from disembodied voices crackling over the radio. No family, no close
friends (hence no visitors, save a foreman from the firm while I was still catatonic, apparently – anyway, the whole building
team has moved to another city now). I’m told I rented a small flat from the city council which has now been allocated to
somebody else. My possessions, such as they may be, are in storage until I claim them.

But I remember nothing of that life.

Rather I was a dangerous, skilled, swashbuckling hero, a remorseful but utterly deadly assassin, a thinking person’s hooligan
and later (or perhaps just potentially) a mover and shaker, high-flying, fast-tracked, in a vast and burgeoning shadow-organisation
spreading secretly under our banal existence like some fabulously bright and intricate mosaic long buried unglimpsed beneath
a humble hearth.

I remain convinced that this calm, unambitious, self-satisfied, unspectacular little world is not all there is. There exists
a greater reality beyond this dull immediacy and I have been part of it – an important part – and will return to it. I was betrayed,
or at least persecuted, and I fell and nearly perished, but I escaped – as of course I would, being who and what I am – and now
I am hiding here, waiting, biding my time. So I need to prepare, and work out whether I should do nothing but wait here patiently,
or take matters into my own hands and strike out purposefully.

There is much to be done.

Madame d’Ortolan

Between the plane trees and belvederes of Aspherje, on this clear midsummer early morning, the dawn-glittering Dome of the
Mists rises splendidly over the University of Practical Talents like a vast gold thinking cap. Below, amongst the statues
and the rills of the Philosophy Faculty rooftop park, walks the Lady Bisquitine, escorted.