Transition (19 page)

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 clustered 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-aggrandisement. 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’Expédience 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 assist 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’Expédience (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 analyse their activities.
Bureaucrats, basically, and as loved for their activities as bureaucrats everywhere.

These days l’Expédience 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 competition 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 coke 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 passing 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
?” 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 tits 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 classless wanker, 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 sex, no commitments. Fucking 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 fucked.

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
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.

“Hello?”

“Connie, Adrian. We were just talking.”

“Of course.”

“All right, I’ll see your client. When’s good?”

“Well, possibly this Saturday, 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 passport.”

I thought about this. I had a date on Saturday night with a girl who owned a lingerie shop in deepest Chelsea. A proper Sloan.
And a lingerie shop. I mean, fuck. 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 Essex two days later on the Saturday 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 bumpy 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 fuck were we?

The place looked deserted. There was a passenger 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 Essex
and smelled of grass 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.