Transition (42 page)

I opened my eyes. I ought to go now. In daylight. The silent ward would tell me more in waking hours than it might at night
when everybody was meant to be sleeping anyway.

I got out of bed, donned slippers and dressing gown and made my way down the corridor to the stairwell and the corridor below. The cleaners were washing the floor and shouted at me from near the doors to the silent ward. Mostly from the pointing, I gathered that I mustn’t walk on their still-wet floor.

I tried again in the later afternoon and got as far as the doors of the silent ward itself before I was turned back by a nurse. The glimpse I got of the ward through the closing door showed a tranquil scene. Hazy sunshine illuminated sparkling white beds, but nobody sat upright or sat at the side of their beds, and nobody was wandering around. It was, admittedly, a brief glimpse, but I found that very tranquillity disturbing. I retreated a second time, resolved to try again at night.

*   *   *

I slip out of my bed in the depths of the night and pull on my dressing gown. I feel only a little groggy and fuzzy from my usual post-supper medication; I swallowed just one of the pills and spat the other out later. I am allowed a little torch which I keep in my bedside cabinet. It has no batteries but works by being squeezed, a little flywheel whizzing round with a faint grinding noise to produce a yellow-orange light from the little bulb. I take that.

I also have a little knife that the staff do not know about. I think it is called a paring knife. It was on a tray they brought my lunch on one day, hidden by the underside of the main plate. It has a sharp little blade and a nick out of the dense black plastic which forms the handle. There was some slimy vegetable matter adhering to it when I found it, as though it had not long been used. It must have been misplaced by the kitchen staff, ending up on what happened to become my tray.

My first instinct was to report it, summon a member of staff immediately or just leave it lying obviously on the tray to be picked up and returned to the kitchen or thrown out (that nick on the handle might harbour germs). I don’t really know why I picked it up, cleaned it on my paper napkin and hid it on the little ledge at the back of my bedside cabinet. It just felt right. I am not superstitious, but the appearance of the knife felt like a little present from fate, from the universe, and one that it would be impolite somehow to turn down.

I take that with me too.

My room is not locked. I let myself out and close the door again quietly, looking down the dimly lit corridor to the day room and the nurses’ station. There is a small pool of light there and the faint sound of a radio, playing jingly music. How much more daunting the journey ahead seemed now compared to exactly the same one taken twice in daylight a few hours earlier.

I walk to the stairs, the soles of my slippers making only the quietest of slapping noises. I open and close the door carefully. The stairwell is better lit than the corridor and smells of cleaning fluids. I descend to the ground floor and enter the lower corridor just as silently as I left the one above. Another dim expanse. I approach the two half-glazed doors and the darkness beyond them.

I shut the door behind me. The ward looks just as it did the night before. I approach the fat man lying in the bed nearest the door, the one my trolley had been parked next to. He looks just as he had last night, I think. I walk down past the other beds. They are just ordinary people, all men, a mixture of body shapes and skin colours. All sleeping peacefully.

Something nags at me. Something about the first man I looked at, the fat man near the doors. Perhaps it will become obvious when I look at him again, on my way back out. Near the far end of the ward, I notice that one of the sleeping men has something on his neck. I have to use the torch, shielding it so that it does not shine in his eyes. There is dried blood near his Adam’s apple. Just a little, though, nothing sinister. A shaving nick, I suppose.

Ah. That’s it. I pad back up to the fat man. He has been shaved. He had a week’s worth of beard last night, but now he is clean-shaven. I look back down the ward. They are all clean-shaven. You see men with beards here, and moustaches; there seems to be no particular rule regarding facial hair. Out of over twenty men you’d think at least one or two would have beards. I study the fat man’s slack, smooth face. He has not shaved – or been shaved – very well. There are little tufts of hair here and there, and he has been nicked with the razor too. On impulse I put my hand on his shoulder and shake him gently.

“Excuse me?” I say quietly in the local language. “Hello?”

I shake him again, a little more vigorously this time. He makes a sort of grumbling noise and his eyes flicker. I shake him again. His eyes open fully and he gazes slowly up at me, his expression only a little less vacant. There does not look to be much intelligence in those eyes. “Hello?” I say. “How are you?” I ask, for want of anything better. He looks up at me, seemingly uncomprehending. He blinks a few times. I snap my fingers in front of his eyes. “Hello?” No reaction.

I take out my torch and shine it into his eyes. I have seen the medics do this, I’m sure. He squints and tries to move his head away. His pupils contract very slowly. This means something, though I’m not entirely sure what. I stop squeezing the torch’s handle. It wheezes to silence and the beam fades to darkness. Within seconds the man is snoring again.

I choose another man at random halfway down the ward on the far side and get the same responses. I have just switched the torch off again and he has just fallen back asleep when I hear footsteps in the corridor. I duck down as a figure approaches the doors, then I crouch out of sight as one of the doors starts to open. I crawl underneath the bed, banging my head on a metal strut, and have to make an effort not to cry out. I can hear the person walking down the ward, and I see a soft light flicking on and off. A pair of legs comes into view: white shoes and a skirt. The nurse passes by the bed I am crouched beneath without pausing. I lower my head so that I can watch her. She goes to the far end of the ward, stopping at a couple of beds, flicking her small torch on and off each time. She turns and walks back down the ward, stops at the door for some moments and then leaves, letting one of the doors swing shut against the other without closing it especially quietly.

I wait a few minutes. My heart calms. In fact I become so relaxed I think I might even drift off to sleep for a few moments, but I’m not sure. Then I let myself out. I negotiate the lower corridor and stairwell without being seen but the light is on in my room when I return. The duty nurse for our floor is in my room, frowning as he looks at my notes on the clipboard. “Toilet,” I tell him. He looks unconvinced but helps me back into bed and tucks me in.

As I close my eyes I picture the ward downstairs again, and I realise that one of the things that felt wrong, one of the things
disturbing me about it, even though I could not pin it down at the time, was the sameness of it all. The bedside cabinets
all looked the same. There were no Get Well Soon cards, no flowers, no baskets of fruit or other items that would personalise
the allotment of space each patient is allowed. I can remember seeing a water jug and a small plastic cup on each cabinet,
but that was all. I can’t recall seeing any chairs by the sides of the beds either. No chairs anywhere in the ward that I
could remember.

Husks. I keep coming back to this strangely significant word. Whenever I think about the silent ward and those deeply drugged
or in some other way near-comatose men, I think of it. Husks. They are husks. I am not sure why this means so much to me,
but it would appear that it does.

Husks…

Madame d’Ortolan

“But, madame, is it really such a terrible thing?”

Madame d’Ortolan looked at Professore Loscelles as though he was quite mad. The two of them were squeezed into a dusty study
carrel high in a spire of one of the less fashionable UPT buildings, an outskirt adjunctery within sight of the Dome of the
Mists but sufficiently distant and obscure for their conversation to stand no chance of being recorded. “Someone
transitioning
without
septus
?” she asked, emphatically. “
Not
a terrible thing?”

“Indeed,” Loscelles said, waving his chubby-fingered hands about. “Ought we not, madame, rather, indeed, to celebrate the
fact one of our number has, or may have, discovered how to transition without the use of the drug? Is this not a great breakthrough?
A veritable advance, indeed?”

Madame d’Ortolan – immaculately dressed in a cream twin-set, an unlined notebook to the olive graph-paper of Professore Loscelles’s
bucolic three-piece – gave every appearance of thinking fairly seriously about trying to cram the Professore through the unfeasibly
narrow window of the tiny study space and out to the sixty-metre drop below. “Loscelles,” she said, with an icy clarity, “have
you gone completely insane?” (Professore Loscelles flexed his eyebrows, perhaps to signal that, as far as he was aware, he
had not.) “If people,” Madame d’Ortolan said slowly, as though to a young child, “are able to transition without the drug…
how are we to control them?”

“Well—” the Professore began.

“First of all,” Madame d’Ortolan said briskly, “this has not turned up in one of our extremely expensive but – now, apparently – rather
irrelevant laboratories, or within the context of a carefully regulated field trial, or constrained by any sort of controlled
environment; this has come upon us on the hoof, in the midst of a profound crisis in the Council,
and
in the guise of a previously loyal but now suddenly renegade assassin who, I am nervously informed by those trying and mostly
failing to track him, may be continuing to develop other heretofore undreamt-of powers and worryingly unique abilities in
addition to this one. As though—”

“Really? But that’s extraordinary!” the Professore exclaimed, seemingly quite excited by such a development.

The lady’s brows knitted. “Well,
fascinating
!” she shouted, and slammed her palm on the carrel’s small desk, raising dust. The Professore jumped. Madame d’Ortolan collected
herself. “I’m sure,” she continued, breathing hard, “you’ll be glad to know that the relevant scientists, experts and Facultarians
all share both your enthusiasm and your inability to appreciate what a catastrophe this represents for us.” She put her hands
on either side of the Professore’s ample cheeks and brought them towards each other so as to compress his smooth, perfumed
flesh, making it look as though his squashed mouth and ruddily bulbous nose had been jammed between two glisteningly plump
pink cushions.

“Loscelles, think! Defeating an individual or grouping of people is easy; one simply brings greater numbers to bear. If they
have clubs, and so do we, then we simply ensure that our clubs are always bigger and more numerous than theirs. The same with
guns, or symbols, or bombs, or any other weapons or abilities. But if this man – who is now patently not one of us, whose hand,
rather, is most forcibly turned against us – can do something that none of our own people can do, how do we combat
that
?”

The unyielding firmness of her grip on his face and the concomitant unlikelihood of him being able to form a comprehensible
reply led the Professore to believe that this was in the nature of a rhetorical question. She shook his face gently back and
forwards in her hands. “We could be in terrible, terrible trouble, thanks just to the threat of this one individual.” She
jiggled his face in her hands. “And, then – worse, for this can get much worse – what if anybody can do this, just with some training?
What if any idiot, any zealot, any enthusiast, any revolutionary, dissident or revisionist can just decide they want to flit
into another person’s body, displacing their mind? Without planning? Without the necessary safeguards and respect for just
cause and proven importance? Without the guidance and experience of the Concern? Where does that leave us
then
? Hmm? I’ll tell you: powerless to control what is arguably the single most potent ability an individual can possess in this
or any other world. Can we allow that? Can we countenance that? Can we indulge that?” She spread her hands slowly, letting
go of Loscelles’s cheeks. The Professore’s features rearranged themselves into their accustomed alignments. He looked surprised
and a little shocked to have been handled so.

Madame d’Ortolan was shaking her head slowly, her expression sorrowful and grave. Professore Loscelles found his own head
shaking in time with hers, as though in sympathy.

“Indeed,” the lady told him, “we cannot.”

“It might, I suppose, lead to anarchy,” the Professore said profoundly, frowning somewhere towards the floor.

“My dear Professore,” Madame d’Ortolan said, sighing, “we might greet anarchy with an open door, garland its brows, hand it
all the keys and skip away whistling with nary a care in our heads, compared to what this might lead to, trust me.”

Loscelles sighed. “What do you think we might do, then?”

“Use all our weapons,” she told him bluntly. “He wields a new kind of club; well, we have some unusual clubs of our own.”
The lady glanced to the window. “I can think of one in particular.” She watched clouds drift past in a silver-grey sky before
turning back to the Professore’s frown. “We have been too cautious, I believe,” she told him. “It may even be to the good
that something’s forced our hand at last. Left to ourselves we might have hesitated for ever.” She smiled suddenly at him.
“Gloves off, claws out.”

The Professore’s frown deepened. “This will be one of your special projects, I take it?”

“Indeed.” Madame d’Ortolan’s smile went wide. She put one hand out to his face again – he flinched, almost imperceptibly, but
she only smoothed and patted his right cheek, affectionate as though he were a treasured cat. “And I know you will support
me in this, won’t you?”

“Would it prevent you if I did not?”

“It would prevent my adoring respect for you continuing, Professore,” she said, with a tinkling laugh in her voice that found
no echo in her expression.