Transition (49 page)

So here I lie, seeing through the day and the hazy sweep of the sun’s slow track across the sky outside and the sheltering
blinds between us, waiting for darkness, waiting for night, wondering if it will be this night and knowing that it will be,
and the dark-dressed man will come for me before the morning.

I feel tears well in my eyes and trickle gently down my cheeks, intercepted and guttered only when they meet one of the various
tubes and pipes and wires that join me to the various pieces of medical equipment clustered quietly around me like mourners
around somebody already dead.

The Transitionary

No wonder I’ve been losing track of myself. I’m sitting at a little café a short way from the railway station, back to the
wall, nursing an Americano and watching the boats stream up and down the Grand Canal. Just along the broad quayside, a line
of tourists stand with their luggage waiting to pick up water taxis. At the next table two Australian guys are arguing about
whether it’s espresso or expresso.

“Look, for Christ’s sake, it’s there in black and white.”

“That could be a misprint, man, like Chinese instructions. You don’t know.”

I am still toying with my new-found senses. Sensibilities, even. I have done no more leaping into other people’s brains, whether
Concern or civilian. I seem to have a sort of vague spotter sense, which is quite useful. I can sense that the baffled, disordered,
demoralised intervention teams are still milling about the Palazzo Chirezzia, their members collecting themselves, tending
to their wounded, making their excuses to each other and themselves, still not entirely able to understand what really happened,
and waiting for back-up and assistance to arrive.

This is all happening just a few hundred metres away from where I’m sitting. I am ready to move quickly away if I need to,
but for now I’m happy that I can see them without them seeing me. Another sense: they give the impression of deaf people talking
loudly amongst themselves and not realising that they are doing so, while I am sitting here perfectly silent. I would be nervous
about putting it to the test – however, I’m oddly but completely confident that a spotter could pass me by right here, a metre
or two away, and have no idea that somebody capable of transitioning was sitting watching them. And of course they have no
idea what I look like now.

I have been able to take more control of this glass-walls, future-paths sense. At the moment it is telling me that nothing
especially threatening is imminent. Looking backwards is possible too, though. It’s like I can see down corridors in my head,
in my memory, and as though there is a near-infinite series of doors angled partially to face me as I look down from one end
of any particular corridor, so that by looking closely and then zooming in on each one I can see what happened during different
transitions I once made. There is an uncanny impression that this is at once one corridor and many, that it leads off in an
explosion of different directions scattered vertically and horizontally and in dimensions that I would struggle to put a name
to, but, despite this, my mind seems able to cope with the experience.

Here is the time just passed when I bamboozled the whole of not just one conventionally configured but high-skill-and-experience-
level Concern intervention team, but two (and more like three, if you count the people watching the perimeter), all at the
Palazzo Chirezzia, barely an hour ago.

Here is the time I sat in a room with somebody I thought I loved and watched transfixed as her hand moved through a candle
flame like silk.

This is me chasing two fucked-up kids though a Parisian sink estate and watching them die… and again, except differently.

Here is the time I blew that musician’s brains out while he sat in his preposterously blinged half-track.

Look, observe how I save a young man from certain death.

Here, see how I stare at Madame d’Ortolan’s tits, zitted with diamonds.

And this is me with my pals walking down a street and stopping by a fat old geezer sunbathing in his postage-stamp-size front
garden, one sunny day, long ago.

I sit, indulging myself in my own internal slide show, amused as all hell.

I’ve let my Americano grow cold. The Grand Canal still froths with boats passing to and fro. The arguing Aussies are gone.
Confusion tempered by affronted professional pride still reigns at the Palazzo Chirezzia. And there is a little fear there,
too, because their back-up has started to arrive at last and they’ve heard that Madame d’Ortolan is also on her way, with
questions.

A warm wind scented with tobacco smoke and diesel exhaust stirs me from my reverie, back to the present and the insistent
reality of the here and now.

Indeed; all this historical stuff is highly intriguing, but there is the small matter of my being hunted with pretty much
every resource the Concern is able to bring to bear. That needs attending to. Beyond that, the coup that Madame d’Ortolan
would appear to be trying to mount is either proceeding or not. I have already done what I can in that regard. I can only
hope that my attempts to alert Mrs M to the targets I’d been sent after worked, and they have been warned and put themselves
safe.

My present embodiment came complete with a mobile phone. I try calling my new friend Ade, on his way here with a cunningly
worked container full of septus, but his mobile telephone is switched off and his office tells me that he is away, expected
back tomorrow sometime. I look at the timepiece wrapped round my wrist. The smaller but more important hand points to the
two parallel lines just off the vertical, to the left. Eleven. Adrian said that he should be here by four in the afternoon.

We are to meet at the Quadri on the Piazza San Marco, safely surrounded by the tourist throng.

It seems I have to wait.

I pay, then go for a walk, crossing the Grand Canal by the Scalzi bridge and coming back the same way half an hour later – an
elegantly curved new one further up is only a week or two from being opened. I wander into the station, sit down in the café
and order another Americano, the better to sip slowly. I have a faint desire to count how many platforms there are in the
station, but it is residual, easily ignored. The phone rings a few times and its screen shows me the faces of the people calling:
Annata, Claudio, Ehno. I don’t answer.

I take several more walks around the western end of Cannaregio and the nearer parts of Santa Croce and sit in several more
cafés, none too far from the Palazzo Chirezzia, keeping the vague hubbub in internal view at all times. I sit quietly, seemingly
watching people, actually probing further into my own pasts.

I am sitting in a little tourist café on the Fondamenta Venier near the Ponte Guglie when I am recognised. I prepare for the
worst, but it is just somebody who knows this body, this face, enquiring why I’m not at work this afternoon. I look furtive
and embarrassed and stick to vague generalities, mostly keeping my head down. The man nods, winks and taps me on the shoulder
before he walks off. He thinks I am waiting for my lover. I drain my lemon tea and leave. I’ve had enough coffee.

I walk to another café, on the Rio Tera De La Madalena. A spritz this time, and some pasta. Staring at the spaghetti in my
bowl, I drift into a strange trancelike state, at first wondering how many individual strands of the pasta lengths there might
be in the bowl, then how many metres they would all add up to if laid end to end, then realising – as I toy with the pale, soft
strands, draping them languorously, voluptuously over the tines of my fork – that their aggregated complexity is like the various
entangled themes and episodes of my life: a swirling, hideously complicated, topologically tortuous, possibly knotted exposition
of my very own reality lying dumped and glistening here in the moist coils lying on the plate before me, the sliced, abbreviated
strands like the lives I have cut short, the glistening red of passata adding an appropriately gory sheathing.

How many lives, I reflect. How many elisions and abbreviations, how many slack abandonments. And how many lives and deaths
of my own self-elisions, lives lived briefly in the head and body of another then skipped away from, blithely flicked like
dust from a sleeve. Every mission a suicide mission, every transition a transition from life to death (and back again, but
still; a death).

I drift, almost without meaning to, into my private viewing theatre of the past. Here I am toddling, saddled on my mother’s
hip, dandled on my father’s knee, going to school, leaving home, arriving at UPT, making friends, going to classes, seeing
Mrs M for the first time, studying, drinking, dancing, fucking, sitting exams, vacationing at home, fucking Mrs M for the
first time, fucking Mrs M for the last time, standing drunk on a parapet in Aspherje looking out over the drop to the Great
Park on the far side and wondering where she had gone, why she had abandoned me and whether I should just jump, and then falling
backwards, too wasted to stand or balance or even cry. Here I am training to be a fucking multiversal ninja instead.

I can even see how I got where I am metaphysically, too, if you know what I mean; how and why I have changed and my abilities
have developed over the last few months and weeks and days and even hours. I was always a natural, always a good learner,
I always saw things clearly and I was just genetically predisposed to take transitioning and its associate skills to places
they had never been before, with the right sort of push. It doesn’t even make me that special; untold trillions of similarly
potentially gifted minds have lived and died on untold worlds all unknowing, their existences just never divined, never sniffed
out by l’Expédience. And I can see how all those fraught, dangerous extra missions that Madame d’O sent me on were what made
the difference, what proved me and tempered me and forced me to find and cultivate skills within that I did not know I had.
I can see these traits, these attributes quite clearly in myself now and I suppose it is just possible that the right, properly
attuned sort of person – a Mulverhill, a d’Ortolan – might have seen them or at least their potential in me years ago, if they
were able to glance in at just the right angle.

I snap out of my reverie when the waiter nudges my seat – deliberately, probably – waking me from my dream.

The light has changed, the remnants of pasta are quite cold. I glance at my watch. It is fifteen past four o’clock. If I stick
with this body then even if I try to run through the crowds, by the time I get to San Marco I’ll be half an hour late. Maybe
I should take the next right and get to the Grand Canal, call a water taxi. Or maybe I should do the smart thing and just
swap bodies with somebody already in San Marco. I close my eyes, prepare to do whatever it was that let me flit across to
this body.

And can’t do it.

What? What’s going on?

I try again, but still nothing. It’s like I’m back to being blocked again. I’m stuck with this body.

I rise, throw down a handful of notes to cover the bill, start walking quickly in the direction of the San Marco and pull
out the phone to call Adrian, wondering if I can still sense Concern people remotely like I could before, or if that’s gone
too, then stop in mid-button press and mid-stride, stumbling to a halt as I realise, yes, I can still sense stuff and what
I sense now is that a profound change has taken place within the Palazzo Chirezzia.

Something very strange and unpleasant has appeared in the small crowd of Concern people in and around the building, something
bizarrely different, and not benign.

Who or what is
that
?

Whatever or whoever it is, I have the disturbing feeling that it’s what is blocking me, and also that as I look at it, it’s
looking straight back at me, with a kind of predatory fascination.

Adrian

“Hello. Who’s this?”

“Ade, it’s Fred, who you are coming to meet.”

“Yeah, Fred, right. Look, mate, I’m en route, amn’t I? Bit optimistic getting through the formalities and then from the old
aeroporto to the city in forty-odd minutes. Sorry about that, but you know what it’s like. In a water taxi wotsit now, though,
making maximum speed. Driver says we should be there in about ten, fifteen minutes. That be all right?”

“Yes. Adrian, please tell your driver to take you to the Rialto. I’ll meet you there. Not San Marco, I’m running late too
and we should get to the Rialto at about the same time.”

“Rialto, not San Marco. Gotcha. That’s the bridge, innit?”

“That’s right.”

“Okey-doke. See you there, mate.”

“Don’t display the box, though.”

“Eh? Oh. Okay.”

“Stand as close as you can to the very middle of the bridge, right at the top of the walking surface.”

“Got that. Middle, top.”

“What outer clothes are you wearing?”

“Blue jeans, white shirt, sort of, umm, orangey, beigey leather jacket.”

“I’ll find you.”

“Okay, then. See you there.”

Madame d’Ortolan

The voice was sing-song. “Here-here, hyah-hyah!”

In the main study of the Palazzo Chirezzia, Bisquitine sat sprawled, unladylike, on a rather grand couch whose white covering
had only recently been removed. She picked her nose, then inspected the finger involved, cross-eyed. Mrs Siankung sat to one
side of her, one of her handlers to the other. Madame d’Ortolan sat on an ornate chair a couple of metres away across a Persian
rug and a still sheet-covered occasional table. The other handlers stood behind the couch.

“Now, my dear,” Madame d’Ortolan said quietly, “be very sure about this. He’s still here, still in the city? Still in Venice.
Are you certain?”

Bisquitine sucked in her lips, looked meaningfully up at the painted ceiling of the study and said, “These are my lawyers,
called Gumsip and Slurridge, they’ll send you the bill and then talk of demurrage.” She smiled broadly, displaying white teeth
with little bits of seaweed stuck between them. The body she’d found herself within when they had transitioned had been that
of a smartly dressed young woman carrying a briefcase. She’d been standing on a pontoon waiting for a vaporetto when her own
consciousness had been displaced by that of Bisquitine, who had immediately decided the weed growing on the side of the floating
jetty looked edible; in fact, delicious.