Transition (21 page)

Suddenly, I was sitting at the corner of another gaming table in a different casino. She was in the next chair, just round
the corner of the table from me so that we could talk easily. The game was under way; the wheel in this version was horizontal,
sunk into the table’s surface. It was spun by what looked like the top of a giant golden tap. The only colours on the table
appeared to be red and black, though the baize was green.

“Hmm,” I said. My companion was looking much more glamorous and more heavily made-up than she had been, though the face was
not dissimilar. Better cheekbones, maybe. Her hair was blonde where she had been auburn. She wore a lot of jewellery. I appeared
to be heavier than I was used to being. Nice black suit, though. I went to smooth my hair down and discovered I didn’t have
any. There was a polished cigarette case lying by my ice-filled drinks glass, and an ashtray. That would account for the gurgling
feeling in my chest when I breathed, and the slight but insistent craving for tobacco. I looked at myself in the reflective
metal of the cigarette case. Not a prepossessing figure of a man. My languages were French, Arabic, English, German, Hindi,
Portuguese and Latin. A smattering of Greek. “This is, ah, interesting,” I told her.

“Best I could do,” she said.

“You did say you were a civilian,” I reminded her, a little reproachfully.

She flashed me a look. “So: a lie, then.”

The last time somebody else had couriered me, taking me on a transition I was not controlling, had been back in UPT, when
I was still being trained. That had been over ten years earlier. What she had just done was impolite at least, though I suspected
this was beside the point.

“Have we met before?” I asked. It was time to place bets. We had some plastic chips in front of us; she had more than me.
We both chose nearby numbers.

“Most recently, here,” she said quietly. “This world, or as good as. Venezia, Italia. Five years ago. We discussed restrictions
on power and the penalties associated with trying to evade them.”

“Ah. Yes. That didn’t end too well for you, really, did it?”

“Have you been shot yet, Tem?”

I looked at her. “Yet?”

“Hurts,” she said. “The way the shock of it spreads through your body from the point of impact. Waves in a fluid. Fascinating.”
Her eyes narrowed fractionally as she watched the horizontal wheel spin, its centre glittering. “But painful.”

I looked round some more. The casino was gaudy, over-lit, expensively tasteless and full of mostly slim and beautiful women
accompanying mostly fat and ugly men. The fragre was not so much of too much money as of too intense a degree of concentration
of it in too few places. It’s not uncommon. I’d thought I’d recognised it.

“Can you remember your very last words?” I asked. “From that earlier occasion?”

“What?” she said, brows furrowing attractively. “You want to check it’s really me?”

“Really who?”

“I never said.”

“So say now.”

She leaned right in to me, as though sharing some intimacy. Her perfume was intense, musk-like. “Unless I’m much mistaken,
I said, ‘Some other time, Tem.’ Or, ‘Another time, Tem’; something like that.”

“You’re not sure?”

She frowned. “I was in the process of dying in your arms at the time. Perhaps you didn’t notice? Anyway, hence I was a little
distracted. However, the interception team might have heard me use those words. More to the point, before my violent but dashing
end, I used the term ‘emprise.’ Only you heard that.”

Which was true, I recalled, though I had told the debriefing team from the Questionary Office this fact as well, so that didn’t
really prove anything either.

“And so you are…?”

“Mrs Mulverhill.” She nodded forward as we were asked to bet again. I hadn’t even noticed we’d lost the last gamble. “Good
to see you again,” she added. “Had you guessed?”

“Soon as I saw you coming.”

“Really? How sweet.” She glanced at a thin, glittering watch on her honey-tanned wrist. “Anyway, we don’t have for ever. You
must be wondering why I’m so keen to talk to you again.”

“Not just the sex, then.”

“Wonderful though it was, obviously.”

“Uh-huh. Consider any latent male insecurity dealt with. Carry on.”

“Briefly, Madame Theodora d’Ortolan is a threat to more than just the good name and reputation of the Concern. She, with her
several accomplices on the Central Council of the Transitionary Office, will lead us all to disaster and ruin. She is a threat
to the very existence of l’Expédience, or, even worse, if she is not, and instead represents all that it most truly stands
for, proves beyond any doubt, reasonable or otherwise, by her past actions and present intentions that l’Expédience itself
is a force for evil that must be resisted, contended with, brought down and, if it’s possible, replaced. But in any case reduced,
entirely levelled, regardless of what may or may not come after it. In addition, there may well be a secret agenda known only
to the Central Council, and perhaps not even to all on it, which we – or, at least, you and your colleagues, given that I am
not one of you any longer – are unwittingly helping to carry out. This secret agenda has to stay secret because it is something
that people would reject utterly, perhaps violently, if they knew about it.”

I thought about this. “Is that all?”

“It’s enough to be going on with, wouldn’t you say?”

“I was being sarcastic.”

“I know. I was seeing your sarcasm and raising you deadpan literalness.” She nodded forward. “Time to bet again.” We both
placed more chips.

“Have you any proof of any of this?”

“None you’d accept. Nothing that would convince you empirically.”

I turned to her. “And what was it that convinced you, Mrs M? One instant you’re a lecturer; bit truculent, bit misfit, but
a star of common room and lecture hall and marked for greatness, according to the rumours; the next you’re some sort of bandit
queen. An outlaw. Wanted everywhere.”

“Wanted everywhere,” she agreed beneath a flexed brow. “Unwelcome throughout.”

“So what happened?”

She hesitated, gaze flicking restlessly across the table for a few moments. “You really want to know?”

“Well, I thought I did. Why? Am I going to regret asking?”

Another uncharacteristic hesitation. She sighed, tossed a chip to a nearby square on the table and sat back. I placed some
chips on another part of the table. She kept looking at the table while she talked quietly. I had to sit closer to hear her,
hunched over the giant ball that was my borrowed belly. “There is a facility at a place called Esemier,” she said. “I was
never privileged with the exact world coordinates, I was always tandemed there by somebody with impeccable security clearance.
It’s on a large island covered in trees on a big lake or inland freshwater sea. Wherever it is, it’s where Madame d’Ortolan
used to carry out research and test some of her theories, especially on those transitioners with an abnormal twist to their
talents. Both the official line and what you might call the top layer of rumour have it that it’s gone now, the remaining
research decentralised, distributed, but Esemier is where the important programmes started. Maybe where they’re still going
on. One day I might go back there, find out.”

“I’ve never heard of it.”

“That would please her.”

“Go on.”

“As you say, I was seen as promising; a future high-flyer. Madame d’Ortolan likes to have such people on her side, or at least
brought before her so that she can test them; evaluate them while they think they’re the ones doing the evaluating. I was
invited to take part in a programme investigating – amongst other things – the possibility of involuntary transitioning; the theoretical
possibility that changes in the structure of an adept’s mind might let them flit without septus, or at least without a specific
pre-enabling dose.”

“I thought that was completely impossible.”

“Well, quite, and if you ever ascend to the clearance levels that allow you access to the results of the research I’m talking
about you’ll learn it was this programme that’s credited with determining that.”

“And did it?”

“After a fashion. It was more thorough and wide-ranging than just that, though. The full programme was aimed at establishing
what randomisers were capable of, removing the myths and superstitions associated with their weird-shit powers and giving
the field a proper scientific grounding, but septus-free transitioning was the pinnacle, the platinum-standard goal we were
never likely to achieve but should never quite lose sight of, either.”

“What did it involve?”

“Torture,” she said, fixing her gaze on me for a moment. “In time, it involved torture.” She looked back at the gaming table
as the chips we’d placed were raked away. She reached out, placed another on the same square. I placed some of mine nearby.
“The randomisers ranged from the cretinous through the educationally subnormal and the socially awkward to the odd disturbed
genius. Initially it was harmless. We were convinced we were helping these misfit people. And it was fascinating, enthralling;
it was a privilege to be spending a vacation researching something that was almost certainly impossible but which would be
simply astounding if it proved to be a viable technique, the sort of breakthrough that resounds across the many worlds and
down the centuries, the kind of achievement that means your name is known for evermore. Even if it proved to be an entirely
mythical talent – as we suspected – we were finding out lots of stuff. It was the single most exciting time of my life. When the
autumn came and I was supposed to resume work at UPT, I volunteered to take a year’s special leave so that I could stay on
at the facility and keep working on the problem. Madame d’O herself smoothed away any problems the faculty might have offered.
For most people, that was when I disappeared.” She looked at me. “I’m sorry I never did say goodbye to you, not properly.
I thought I would see you at the start of the new term, then… well, I’m sorry.” She looked away again.

Quite. I had no intention of telling her how much I had missed her throughout all these years, or that I had felt, at the
time, as though my heart had been broken, or that I became a different person thereafter, and became so specifically because
of that abrupt abandonment, turning from a prospective career in academia or research to the training required to become a
transitionary, an operative, an agent; eventually, an assassin. It would only have sounded maudlin, and what good would it
have done?

“I think,” she continued, “Theodora mistook my fascination with the theoretical side of the research for outright zeal, a
shared passion.” She glanced at me and a smile, soon gone, flickered across her face. She stared at the chip on the table
again. It was scraped away too and she replaced it with another.

“It was during that year, after the people who’d just been there for the vacation had gone back to their studies, that we
started to make real progress. Just the hard core were left. We had our own septus techs on the staff, seconded from wherever
they actually formulate the stuff; experts in its manufacture, use and side effects. That was a privilege in itself; you never
get to meet these people. Did you know there are trace elements put into septus to make transitioners easier to track?” She
glanced at me, long enough to see my eyes widen. “Trackers would have a much more difficult job if those trace elements weren’t
present. They would have to rely on something like pure instinct. As it is, with the elements there in every standard dose
of septus, it’s as though they see a puff of smoke left behind where somebody has just transitioned, and can follow a faint
line of that discharge to the next embodiment.”

“Seriously?” I asked.

“Absolutely seriously.” Mrs Mulverhill nodded slowly, still staring at the gaming table. “And Madame d’Ortolan was absolutely
serious about what we were doing, too. She spent a lot of time at the facility, directing our research, guiding our enquiries,
even helping to refine some of the abstract, speculative stuff. I spent a few evenings doing nothing but talk with her about
transitioning theory. She has quite a fine mind, for a psychopath. At the time, I didn’t know that was possible. However,
she was… overenthusiastic. Wanting what she did so much, she took risks, cut corners, overextended herself. She let transitioners
and trackers and septus chemists get together properly for the first time in centuries, and some of us learned things we were
never supposed to know.”

“Like the trace-elements thing.”

“Like the trace-elements thing.” She nodded again. “I think she assumed my hunger to know was directed solely at the problem
in hand: finding out what the randomisers were really capable of and grasping after septus-free flitting. I don’t think it
occurred to her that I might just have a general urge to find out all I could about everything, especially whatever was being
kept purposefully hidden.”

More of our chips had disappeared. Some people left the table, to be replaced by others. Mrs M put another chip on the same
square. I placed mine on the square next to hers. “The randomisers were troublesome. Socially inept, highly neurotic, riddled
with problems and often medically challenged. Continence seemed to be a particular problem. It was possible to grow to despise
them, certainly to dismiss them, to forget their humanity. One began to feel that they kept their secrets locked away inside
them deliberately, just to spite us. We were encouraged never to fraternise, to treat them as experimental subjects, in the
name of objectivity. They were broken, mostly useless people; a threat to themselves as well as society. We were doing them
a favour, almost ennobling them, by containing their awkward, undisciplined powers and giving them a purpose, making them
a part of a programme which would benefit everybody.

“We began to stress them. It was quite easy to do. They were like uncooperative children: wilful, perverse, often knowingly
obstructive, sometimes aggressive. Stressing them – severely rationing their food and water, depriving them of sleep, giving
them impossible puzzles while they were forced to listen to painfully intense noise – felt like a necessary discipline, like
a sort of small collateral punishment they had already asked for, yet at the same time it seemed perfectly excusable because
it was for research, for science, for progress and the good of all, and we weren’t enjoying it; in fact we suffered maybe
as much as they did because we knew more fully what we were doing. They were something like brutes while we were properly
functioning human beings: educated, cultured, sensitive. Only the best could be asked to do the worst, as Madame d’Ortolan
liked to say.