Transition (33 page)

I think I can remember a common enough upbringing in a world no more exotic than any might appear to an outsider. A city,
a house and home, parents, friends, schooling, jobs, lusts and loves, ambitions, fears, triumphs and disappointments. All
seem present and correct (if a little vague, perhaps due to their very ordinariness). All in a minor key, though. All humdrum,
everyday, unremarkable, that’s all.

Then my true life (as I think of it) commenced; my entry into the many worlds and l’Expédience, my dealings with persons and
events that were anything but ordinary. That was when I became the me I was, even if I am, temporarily, a pale reflection
of that person now.

I shall be that person again. I know it.

But you can see why I might be worried. You, who might be a part of me, or a future self.

The Transitionary

Did I do what I think I just did? Surely not. If I did, I’d be the first. (Or not, of course. Maybe it happens all the time
but they keep it secret. This is the Concern we’re dealing with here. Secrecy comes as standard. But wouldn’t there be rumours?)

Could I have just flitted without septus? That isn’t supposed to be possible. You must have septus, the drug is absolutely
necessary, even if it is not entirely sufficient, if an individual is to transition between realities. I was out of the stuff.
They’d taken the emergency pill out of my hollow tooth and taken the tooth itself for good measure. I was unconscious but
it must have happened because the tooth was gone.

Or, it occurs to me, I swallowed the pill in a lucid interval – between the smack in the face in the plane and waking up tied
to the chair – which I don’t remember. Or maybe it went down my throat by pure chance when they punched me. The punch in the
face could easily have dislodged it; I swallowed it and they didn’t know I had. They’d have needed a bulky piece of kit like
an NMR scanner or something to have a chance of locating the pill inside my body, so even after they found the hollow tooth…

But they said they
had
found the hollow tooth, and removed the pill. Why lie about that? Didn’t make sense. And why the post-flit hangover? I didn’t
even know who I was for the first few seconds, and my head still hurts. Never had that before, not even in basic training.

Still, even with bits that didn’t add up right, that was a far more plausible explanation than somebody accomplishing a septus-free
flit. I had to go with the must-have-swallowed-it-by-accident scenario; I’d just got lucky, once again.

Anyway, whatever: I am naked, hardly presentable to the outside world, so the first thing to do is find some clothes. I try
the light switches by the door as I pad out of the great ballroom, but nothing happens. Pausing at the tall double doors to
the anteroom beyond, I listen for any sound that might indicate I am not alone in the Palazzo Chirezzia. Quiet as a tomb.
I shiver as I cross the anteroom and hall, making for the central staircase. The air is cool but it is the air of ghostly
desolation – all these rolled-up carpets, this sheet-wrapped furniture and gloomy light and smell of long abandonment – that truly
affects me.

I try one of the grand bedrooms on the first floor, but the wardrobes and cupboards in the dressing room are empty save for
mothballs sitting in little nests of twisted paper, or rolling around with dull and lazy clicks in drawers. My reflection
stares back at me through the shuttered gloom. Another bland-looking man of generally medium build, though reasonably well-muscled.

On the second floor, one room holds a wardrobe with various sets of clothing, some of which might be my size, but the clothes
look antique. I go to the window, crack the shutters and look out. The people I can see in the calle running along the side
of the palace look to be dressed in colourful, relatively slim-fitting, moderately heterogeneous clothes.

I would guess I am in a fairly standard late-twentieth or early-twenty-first-century Degenerate Christian High-Capitalist
reality (a Greedist world, to use the colloquial). The fragre certainly feels right. Probably the same Earth I visited before,
when my little pirate captain tried to recruit me, or near as dammit. If I did flit away from torture, without septus, through
sheer desperation, then a familiar world, one I’d visited before and felt comfortable in, but not one they’d expect me to
resort to, is where I would head for automatically.

Calbefraques might have seemed the obvious destination; you might think, why didn’t I just wake in my own body, in my own
house in the trees looking out over the town beneath? Because for years I have known I might turn traitor in deed as well
as thought, and prepared for it mentally, telling myself that in any transition under duress or in a state of semiconsciousness,
the place I thought of as home would be the last place I ought to aim for.

All the same, I would not have thought I’d end up here.

The clothes in this wardrobe are fancy dress, I realise; ancient costumes for balls and masquerades.

Three rooms later I discover men’s clothes of the appropriate era and that fit. Just dressing makes me feel better. There
is no hot water in the Palazzo Chirezzia; I wash myself from a bathroom cold tap.

There is no electric power either, but when I remove the sheet from the desk in the Professore’s study and lift the telephone
I hear a dialling tone.

But what to do next? I stand there until the phone starts making electronic complaining noises at me. I replace it on the
cradle. I’m here without money, connections and a supply of septus; conventionally the first thing I ought to do is establish
contact with an enabler or other sympathetic and Aware, clued-in soul, to put myself back in contact with l’Expédience and
to locate a source of septus. But I’d only be putting myself in jeopardy, handing myself back to my earlier captors and my
gently talking friend with his sticky tape, if I do. I have been faced with the choice Mrs M always said I would be faced
with and I have made my decision. It is a big thing that I have done and I am still not entirely certain I have jumped the
right way, but it is done and I must live with the consequences.

However, the point here is that I will play into the hands of those I oppose if I take the most obvious route and attempt
to contact a normally accredited agent of l’Expédience in this world.

The most important thing is to get my hands on some septus. Without that, probably, there’s little I can do. Certainly I appear
to have flitted, once, without the aid of the drug. However, it was in extremis, uncontrolled, impromptu (a surprise even
to me when it happened), it was to a semi-random location and it resulted in considerable discomfort as well as a state of
profound confusion – I did not even know who I was initially – that lasted quite long enough to have made me extremely vulnerable
in the immediate aftermath of the flit. Had there been anybody who wished me ill present at that point, I would have been
in their power, or worse.

For all I know I had that one spontaneous flit in me and no more – perhaps some residue of septus had built up in my system
that allowed me to make that single transition, but is now cleared out, exhausted – and even voluntarily putting myself in another
situation as terrifying and threatening as being suffocated while tied to a chair would fail to result in anything more remarkable
than me pissing my pants. So, I need septus. And the only supplies of it in this world, as in all worlds, are supposed to
be in the obsessively wary and inveterately paranoid gift of the Concern.

However, there ought to be a way round this.

I run my hand over the sheet covering the seat by the telephone. Very little dust.

I sit and start entering short strings of numbers at random into the telephone keypad until I hear a human voice. I have forgotten
almost all the Italian I learned last time so I have to find somebody who shares a language. We settle on English. The operator
is patient with me and finally we establish that what I require is Directory Enquiries, and not here but in Britain.

The Concern has bolt-holes, safe houses, deep-placement agents and cover organisations distributed throughout the worlds it
operates most frequently in. As far as I was aware I knew about all the official Concern contacts in this reality, though
of course it would be naive to assume there would be none that had been kept from me.

However, I also knew of one that wasn’t an official Concern contact because it had been set up by somebody who wasn’t part
of the Concern proper at all: the ubiquitous and busy Mrs M. So she had assured me, anyway.

“Which town?”

“Krondien Ungalo Shupleselli,” I tell them. I ought to be remembering the name correctly; we are solemnly assured in training
that these emergency codes should be so ingrained within us that we ought still to remember them even if we have, through
some shock or trauma, forgotten our own names. This one has been thought up, probably, by Mrs Mulverhill rather than some
name-badged Concern techies in an Emergency Procedures (Field Operatives) Steering Group committee meeting, but, like the
official codes, it ought to work across lots of worlds and languages. It will probably sound odd in almost all of them, but
not to the point of incomprehensibility. And it should be far enough removed from the name of any person or organisation to
avoid accidental contacts and resultant misunderstandings with possible security implications.

“Sorry. Where?”

“It may be a business or a person. I don’t know the town or city.”

“Oh.”

I think about it. “But try London,” I suggest.

There is indeed a business answering to that name in the English capital. “Putting you through.”

“… Hello?” says a male voice. It sounds fairly young, and just that single word, spoken slowly and deliberately, had been
enough for a tone of caution, even nervousness, to be evident.

“I’m looking for Krondien Ungalo Shupleselli,” I say.

“No kidding. Now there’s a name I haven’t heard in a while.”

“Yes,” I say, sticking to the script. “Perhaps you might be able to help.”

“Well, that’s what this is all about, isn’t it?”

“May I ask to whom I’m talking?”

A laugh. “My name’s Ade.”

“Aid?” I ask. This seems a little too obvious.

“Short for Adrian. What about yourself?”

“I assume you know the procedure.”

“What? Oh, yeah. I’m supposed to give you a name, that right? Okey-doke. How about Fred?”

“Fred? Is that common enough?”

“As muck, mate. Common as muck. Trust me.”

“Indeed I do, Adrian.”

“Brill. Consider yourself sorted. What can I do for you, mate?”

Madame d’Ortolan

Madame d’Ortolan sat in the rooftop aviary of her house in Paris, listening to the flurrying of a thousand soft wings and
looking out over the darkening city as the street lights came on. The view, graphed by the bars of the aviary, showed deep
dark reds and bruised purples towards the north-west, where a recently passed rainstorm was retreating towards the sunset.
The city still smelled of late-summer rain and refreshed foliage. Somewhere in the distance, a siren sounded. She wondered
how big a city had to become, and how lawless and dangerous in this sort of reality, for a siren always to be heard somewhere.
Here, the siren was like an audible signature of fragre.

Madame d’Ortolan took a breath and said, “No, he must have had another pill hidden somewhere.”

Mr Kleist stood in the shadows, behind and to one side of her seat, which was an extravagant work in bamboo with a great fan-shaped
top. He looked about at the various birds still flying within the aviary. His head jerked as one flew too close and he ducked
involuntarily. He shook his head.

“He did not, ma’am, I am sure.”

“Nevertheless.”

“He was fully restrained, ma’am. It could only have been in his mouth, and that was checked very thoroughly, both before the
interrogation began and afterwards. Even more thoroughly, subsequent to his apparent transition.”

Madame d’Ortolan looked unconvinced. “Thoroughly?”

Mr Kleist produced a little transparent plastic bag from one pocket and placed it on the small cane table standing at the
side of her seat. She leant over, looked at the thirty or so bloodstained teeth inside.

“They are all present,” he said. “They are just teeth.”

She looked at them. “The false one with the cavity. Was there room inside it for two pills?”

“No, and the septus pill was removed from it and the tooth itself extracted while he was still unconscious.”

“Some residue of septus left with the mouth or throat?”

“I have already asked our most knowledgeable experts. Such an effect is next to impossible.”

“Send these to be analysed, all the same.”

“Of course.” Mr Kleist picked up the plastic bag and replaced it in his pocket.

“Some sort of osmotic patch, or a subcutaneous implant?”

“Again, ma’am, we did check, both before and after.”

“Perhaps up his nose,” Madame d’Ortolan mused, more to herself than to Mr Kleist. “That might be possible. Ill-bred people
sometimes make that ghastly snorting, pulling-back noise with their noses. One might ingest a pill in that manner.”

Mr Kleist sighed. “It is a theoretical possibility,” he conceded. “Though not in this case.”

“Did he make such a noise?”

“No, ma’am. In fact he was probably incapable of doing so or of performing the action you mention because his nose and mouth
were both tightly secured by tape. No air movement would have been possible.”

“You checked for some infusionary device? Perhaps something concealed within the rectum, activated by…” She could not think
how you would activate something like that.

“We checked the subject’s clothing and performed a second internal examination. There was nothing.”

“An accomplice. The septus delivered by a dart or some such thing.”

“Impossible, ma’am.”

“You were alone with him?”

“No. An assistant was present.”