Transition (12 page)

I live an orderly, even quiet life, as entirely befits somebody who spends potentially highly disorienting amounts of time
flitting between one world and the next, too often for the unfortunate purpose of killing people. Murder is not all that I
do, however. Sometimes I will be a positive angel, a good fairy, an imp of the benign, showering some unfortunate who is down
on their luck with money or granting them a commission or pointing them in the direction of somebody who might be able to
help them. On occasion I do something almost unbearably banal, like trip somebody up in the street, or buy them a drink in
a bar or – once – fall down in front of them while apparently suffering a fit.

That was one of the few times when I glimpsed what I might really have been doing. The young doctor – hurrying to an appointment
but who nevertheless stopped to tend to me – was thereby prevented from entering a building that promptly collapsed in a great
burst of dust and mortar and smashed wooden beams. Lying there in the gutter, seeing this, just a few dozen strides down the
street, I feigned a partial recovery, thanked him and insisted that he hurry to treat the many wailing unfortunates injured
by the tenement’s collapse. “No, thank
you
, sir,” he muttered, face grey, not just with dust. “I believe your fit saved my life.” He disappeared into the growing crowd
while I sat there, trying not to get fallen over by those rushing to help or gawp.

I have no idea what that young fellow then went on to do or achieve. Something good, I trust.

Sometimes I simply introduce one person to another, or leave a particular book or pamphlet lying around for them to discover.
Sometimes I just talk to them, generally encouraging them or mentioning a particular idea. I relish such roles, but they are
not the ones I remember. They are certainly not the ones that keep me awake at night. Perhaps this is simply because geniality
is conventionally a little insipid. Havoc rocks.

Most of my colleagues and superiors choose to live in cities. It is where we are most at home and where one can most easily
make the transition from one reality to another. I do not pretend entirely to understand either the theories or the mechanics – spiritual
mechanics, if you will, but still mechanics – behind such profoundly disconnected travellings, but I know a little regarding
how these things work, some of it gleaned from others and some of it the result of simply working matters out for myself,
practically, rather as I was able to work out what the true purpose of my appearing to faint in front of that young doctor
was when the building he had been about to enter fell down.

Flitting from here to there to any-old-where requires a deep sense of place, and some sort of minimum level of societal complexity,
it would seem. It is as a result of this that cities are by far the easiest places in which to slip between realities.

Aircraft work too, though, if one has the skill. Something about the concentration of people, I suppose. I sip my gin and
tonic and look down at the clouds. The peaks of some of the higher mountains in the Norwegian coastal range protrude like
jagged ice cubes floating in milk. I am taking a direct Great Circle route from London to Tokyo, cosseted within a giant aircraft
coasting high above the weather where the sky is a deep, dark blue.

I may flit from here, within the plane. I may not. It is not an easy thing to do – many of us have wasted our drug by trying
to effect transitions from remote places or – especially – moving start points. The way it appears to work is that if a successful
flit cannot be made then nothing at all happens and one remains where one is. There are rumours, however, that people who
have tried such manoeuvres have indeed ended up in another reality, but without the benefit of whatever mode of transport
they left behind in the source reality being there to greet them in the target one. One pops into existence over open water
if one flitted from a liner, splashing into an empty ocean to drown or be eaten by sharks, or – if the attempted transition
is from an aircraft like this – one materialises in mid-air twelve thousand metres up with no air to breathe, a temperature
of sixty below and a long way to fall. I have had successes flitting from aircraft, and failures; obviously failures where
nothing happened.

I take the little ormolu case from my shirt pocket and turn it over and over on my fold-down table. To flit or not to flit.
If I do vacate the aircraft then I will cover my tracks more completely than if I wait until my arrival. However, I could
waste a pill. And I just might discover the hard way that the rumours are true, and find myself blast-frozen and gasping my
way to unconsciousness as I start the long fall to the sea or the land. There is also the well-documented complication that
sometimes one ends up in an aircraft going somewhere quite different to the destination of that one started from.

Usually there is a reliable commonality between a roughly aligned group of worlds regarding the placement of continents, major
geographical features such as mountain ranges and rivers and hence big cities and therefore the air routes between them, so
that leaving one aircraft results in a transition to a similar craft on a parallel course, but not always. There appear to
be limits to the maximum displacement in space and time that people have made in such circumstances – a few kilometres up or
down, a few dozen laterally, and some hours later or earlier – and it is as if some aspect of one’s will or visualisation is
guiding one to the nearest approximation it’s possible to find, but sometimes the influence of this ghostly presence goes
quite awry, or just accepts something that it hopes will do, but which will not.

Once, flitting while flying over the Alps bound for Napoli from Dublin, I ended up on a flight from Madrid to Kiev. That’s
practically a right-angle! It took me a day and a half to repair the damage to my itinerary, and I missed one appointment.
I had and have no idea why this happened. When I mentioned this little adventure to someone from the Transitionary Office – the
primary body of l’Expédience, which at least in theory oversees all the actions of those like myself and Madame d’Ortolan – the
bureaucrat concerned just blinked behind his rimless glasses and said how interesting this was and hastened to record a note!
I mean, really.

The drug we take to effect our travels is called septus. Some take theirs in liquid form, from tiny vials like medical ampoules.
Others prefer to snort their travellers’ medicine, or inject it. Some like it to be in the form of a suppository or pessary.
Madame d’Ortolan was always said to have favoured the latter option.

I tap the little ormolu case gently on one corner, rotate it a quarter turn, tap it again, and repeat. Most of us take septus
in pill form; it is simply less of a bother. I regard most of the other methods as being rather like showing off.

A clear patch of sea gleams up at me. A ship, made tiny by the vertical kilometres between us, slides slowly north across
the ruffled grey surface, drawing a feathery white wake after it. I imagine somebody on that ship looking up and seeing this
aircraft, a bright white dot leaving its own thin trail inscribed across the blue.

Perhaps some of those who are said to have disappeared are gone to other Earths entirely, where Pangaea still holds, Man never evolved and sapient otters or insectile hive-minds rule in our place – who can say?

When we flit we go to where we imagine, and if – distracted, disoriented – we imagine something too far away from what we know and where we wish to go to, we may end up somewhere it is somehow impossible to imagine one’s way back from. I don’t know how that could be – what saves people like myself, sometimes, is how intensely we long for our home – but you never know.

I have quizzed the theorists, technicians and general functionaries of the Transitionary Office regarding just how all of this works and have yet to receive a satisfactory answer. I am not supposed to know because I have no need to know. Still, I would like to know. My being sent to save that young doctor from being crushed in that collapsing building in Savoie, for example: does that not imply foresight? Must we – I mean the Concern – not have some ability to look ahead in time, or be able to use realities otherwise similar to another but separated only by being slightly displaced in time so that – having observed what has happened in the leading one – one is able to affect events in the trailing one? This would amount to the same thing.

Of course, maybe it was complete happenstance that the tenement collapsed, pure chance. I find this unlikely, however. Chance is rarely pure.

It was at the casino that I encountered Mrs Mulverhill again, for the first time in a long time – or at least so I thought. Not that I realised immediately.

Cities are, as I’ve said, the best places to flit between realities; nexuses of transportation in our multiple existence just as they are in any given single world. The principal embassy of l’Expédience in the world I have tended to travel to and within – partly though chance and partly through some affinitive predisposition on my part, I dare say – is in what is called variously Byzantium, Constantinople, Konstantiniyye, Stamboul or Istanbul, depending. It is an ideal focus for our interests and abilities, straddling continents, linking east and west and evoking the past and its manifold legacies in a way that few other cities do on this meta-Earth I deal with. Ancient, modern, a furious mix of peoples, faiths, histories and attitudes, poised above and threatened by myriad fault lines, it exemplifies both heritage, jeopardy, division and linkage all at once. We have another office in Jerusalem.

There used to be another, in Berlin, but that city has, perversely, become less attractive for our purposes since the fall
of the Wall and the reunification of Germany (one of those distributed, straggling meta-events that resonated through the
sheaved realities for all the many worlds like some coordinated spawning phenomenon). So the office was closed. A shame, in
a way; I liked the old, divided Berlin, with its wall. The greater city was a vast, open, airy place enfolded with lakes and
sprawling tracts of forest on both sides of the divide but still, at its core, there was always a forlorn air about it, as
well as a faint feeling of imprisonment, on both sides.

And a slowly spinning plate, if you know what I mean. We look for spinning, wobbling plates; places where it feels that matters
could go either way, where another spin, another input of energy might restore stability, but where, equally, just a little
more neglect – or even a nudge in the right/wrong place – could produce catastrophe. There are interesting lessons to be gleaned
from the wreckage that results. Sometimes you cannot tell everything about a thing until you’ve seen it broken.

There ought to be a certain point in one’s training for the post of transitionary (our official job title – clunky, I know;
I prefer the sobriquet “flitter” – or “transitioner” or “transitioneer,” at a pinch) when one realises that one has discovered
or acquired an extra sense. It is in a sense the sense of history, of connection, of how long a place has been lived in, a
feeling for the heritage of human events attached to a particular piece of landscape or set of streets and stones. We call
it fragre.

Part of it is akin to having a sharp nose for the scent of ancient blood. Places of great antiquity, where much has happened
over not just centuries but millennia, are often steeped in it. Almost any site of massacre or battle will have a whiff, even
thousands of years later. I find it at its most pungent when I stand within the Colosseum, in Rome. However, much of it is
simply the layered result of multifarious generations of people having lived there; lived and died, certainly, but then as
most people live for decades and die just the once, it is the living part that has the greatest influence over the aroma,
the feel of a place.

Certainly the entirety of the Americas has a significantly different fragre compared to Europe and Asia; less fusty, or less
rich, according to your prejudices.

I’m told that New Zealand and Patagonia appraise as terribly fresh compared with almost everywhere else.

Myself, I love the fragre of Venezia. Not the fragrance – at least, not in summer, anyway – but very much the fragre.

I prefer to arrive in Venice by train, from Mestre. As I disembark at Santa Lucia station I can, if I declutch my senses and
memory, fool myself into thinking that I have arrived at just another big Italian railway station, one more terminus amongst
many. One walks between the towering trains, crosses the indifferent commercialism of the rather brutalist concourse and expects
to find what one would find anywhere: a busy road or square, another bustling vista of car and truck and bus – a pedestrianised
piazza and a few taxis, at best.

Instead, spreading beyond the sweep of steps and the scatter of people – the Grand Canal! Light green choppy water, the churning
wakes of vaporetti, launches, water taxis and work boats, reflected light slicing off the waves to dance along the façades
of palazzos and churches; spires, domes and inverted-cone chimneys ranged against a sky of cobalt shine. Or against milky
clouds, their mirrored pastel tones softening the restless waters of the canal. Or against dark veils of rain cloud, the canal
flattened and subdued under a downpour.

The first time I visited the place was for the carnival in February. I discovered mist and fog and quietness, and a chill
in the air that seemed to rise from the water like a promise. My name was Mark Cavan. My languages were Mandarin, English,
Hindustani, Spanish, Arabic, Russian and French. The Berlin Wall was already history, though still mostly standing.

It was your world.

Some way down the Grand Canal, on its west bank, sits an imposing near-cubical palazzo. Its walls are a glacial white, the
shutters shielding its many windows matt black. This severely formal and symmetrical building is the Palazzo Chirezzia, once
the home of a Levantine prince, later that of a cardinal of the Roman Catholic church, then for a hundred and fifty years
an infamous brothel. It belonged, then as now, to Professore Loscelles, a gentleman who knew about and was sympathetic to
the Concern. Back then, he simply made himself, his money and connections useful to us, and, equally, gained much through
the association. He has since risen to join the ruling Central Council, though on that cold February morning twenty years
ago this was still an ambition of his.