Transition (20 page)

“I give in. Where the hell are we?” I put just a little edge into my voice.

“Set your watch forward two hours,” she told me.

“Seriously,” I said.

“Seriously,” she said, nodding at my wrist. “Two hours.”

I gave her a look but she wasn’t paying attention. I left my watch alone. I checked my mobile. No reception. Not even emergency
numbers. Fucking marvellous.

There was a partition between us and the driver. He looked old. Worn-looking uniform, open shirt, no cap. Connie lifted up
what looked like one of those very early mobile phones with a separate handset and looked at a dial on its top surface. Then
she put it back on the floor of the limo and went back to the newspaper.

We sped down this weedy highway. No other traffic at all. There was what looked like a big town or a small city off to one
side. We turned towards it, hurtling along a four-lane road still with no other traffic. The buildings looked pale, blocky,
very Fifties or Sixties and all the same. I caught a glimpse of what might have been a helicopter, low over the horizon.

It was a bit stuffy in the car. There was a big chrome rocker switch by the window that looked like it might lower the glass.
I tried pressing it. Didn’t work.

“Don’t bother,” Connie said. She clicked another switch on her side and spoke to the driver via a grille I’d thought was for
ventilation. Again, sounded like Russian. The driver’s voice crackled back at her and I could see him gesticulating as he
looked at us in his rear-view mirror. The car wove from side to side a bit as he did this, which would have been even more
alarming than it was if there had been anything else on the road.

Connie shrugged. “The air-conditioning is not working,” she told me, and went back to her paper. “The filters are okay.”

“Window on your side work?”

“No,” she said, not looking up from her paper.

I bent forward, studying the sun roof.

“I wouldn’t bother,” she said.

I looked out at the deserted city whistling past. Long tall lines of identical apartment blocks, all abandoned.

“Connie, where are we?”

She looked over the paper at me. She said nothing.

“Is this fucking Chernobyl?” I asked her.

“Pripyat,” she said, and started reading again.

I reached over and pushed the front of her paper down. She glared at my hand holding the newspaper.

“What-eh-at?”

“Pripyat,” she said. She nodded. “The city near Chernobyl.”

“What the fuck are you doing bringing me here?” I actually felt quite angry. No wonder we couldn’t open the windows to all
that dusty air. The big mobile-phone whatsit would be a Geiger counter, I guessed.

“It’s where my client would like to see you.”

“Why?”

“They have their reasons, I’m sure,” she said smoothly.

“Is it one of these fucking oligarchs or something?”

Connie appeared to think about this. “No,” she said.

We came up to a big shed of a building that looked like it had been a supermarket once. A wide metal door rolled part-way
up and the car drove straight in. We got out inside this brightly lit loading area that held a couple of other cars and a
small military-looking truck with big wheels and lots of ground clearance. The air was cool. A couple of very large bald guys
in shiny suits greeted us with nods and walked us up some steps, through a couple of those transparent plastic-curtain doorways.
Between the two plastic curtains there was a bit with a big circular grating in the ceiling and another in the floor. A blast
of air was roaring out of the overhead grating and down into the one beneath our feet. Then we went down a hushed, wood-panelled,
soft-carpeted corridor to a door which opened with a sucking noise. There was a very big plush office inside, all bright lights
and potted plants and desks and comfy leather sofas. One whole wall was a giant photo of a tropical beach with palm trees,
shining sand and blue sky and ocean.

A very pretty round-faced girl with a bit too much make-up smiled from behind a desk with a couple of computer monitors and
said something in Russian or whatever. Connie fired something back and we sat down on two of the plush leather couches, facing
each other across a glass table covered in the sort of magazines you only seem to see in posh hotel rooms.

Before I had time to get bored there was a buzzing noise from the receptionist’s desk. She said something to Connie, who nodded
at the wall of beach photo. There was a door in it that had been concealed until now. It was opening, all by itself.

“Mrs Mulverhill will see you now,” she told me.

(Ensemble)

A man bursts into a book-lined room. On a chaise longue, there’s an old man lying underneath a younger woman. They both look
groggy and confused, lying/kneeling on the chaise. The man who has just burst in hesitates because the old man looks like
the person he is supposed to kill, but he seems vacant, like a husk or something, and when the old guy’s gaze meets his – the
man who has just broken into his private study and caught him mostly naked in flagrante with his mistress – the old fellow doesn’t
seem outraged, ashamed or embarrassed. He just stares up, blinking, at the younger man, and looks confused. The young woman
straddling the older man is staring, fascinated but unconcerned, at the gun he is holding. The younger man remembers what
he is supposed to be doing and shoots them both in the head, twice.

They found the woman sitting against a tree just off the hill path. She was humming and making little chains of flowers. Three
of them held her while the fourth garrotted her. She offered no resistance and they knew something was wrong. There followed
some debate regarding how much they ought to tell the people who had hired them.

The body washed up on the beach near Chandax was patently still smiling, despite having been nibbled by various aquatic fauna.
A small crowd was gathering on the morning-cool sand. A man standing at the back looked at the expression on the body and
frowned. He’d known it had been too easy, on the yacht, the night before. He thought about lying to his superiors.

The woman who’d sunk a razor-chisel between two of the Graf’s vertebrae conscientiously reported that her target had stopped
humming along with the aria a moment or two before she’d struck, though she was adamant that she had been so silent – and so
mindful as she’d entered the box of give-away drafts, not to mention careful of where her shadow might fall and her reflections
might lie – that he could not possibly have realised she was there.

It was agreed that the admiral had been staring ahead rather blankly in the instant before she was shot, despite the fact
her lover had just been cruelly cut down in front of her. Under pressure, the team agreed that perhaps the admiral had been
transitioned just before her death. Under further pressure, they agreed to consider the possibility that so had the Commandante.

The assassination teams still could find no trace of Mrs Mulverhill.

The Transitionary

I set some chips down on a green square, changed my mind and pushed them over to blue. I sat back as the last few gamblers
placed their own bets and the croupier looked expectantly, impatiently around. He announced “No more bets” and spun the wheel.
It whirled, glittering, forever if banally like a Ferris wheel from a funfair.

Through its whirring gilt spokes I saw the woman approaching the table. The ball inside the wheel clacked and rattled around
the vertical spinning cage of spokes, battering off the blurred edges like a fly trapped in a bottle. The woman – girl? – moved
with an easy, swinging step, almost like a dance. She was very tall and slim, dressed in flowing grey, and wore a small hat
with an attached grey veil. I thought of Mrs Mulverhill immediately, though the woman was too tall and seemed to move differently.
Not that that meant anything at all, of course. Veils were just about still common enough at the time for her not to look
out of place wearing one, though she still attracted some looks.

It was spring here in the southern hemisphere of Calbefraques. Perhaps five years had passed since that night in Venice when
my little pirate captain had tried to talk to me and had died for it. I had been asked – perhaps twice a year at first, later
once a year or so – by my Concern superiors if any other attempt had been made to recruit me to whatever paranoid cause Mrs
Mulverhill espoused. I had been able to answer honestly that no, neither she nor anybody else had tried to do so.

I had by now become a trusted agent of the Concern, spending a slim majority of my time in other worlds, doing whatever was
asked of me. It was mostly the very banal stuff: the delivering of objects, the couriering of people (not that I was especially
good at that), the pointed conversations, the leaving of pamphlets or computer files, the tiny, usually mundane interventions
made in a hundred different lives.

I had since made only one other intervention as dramatically salvationary as the one with the young doctor in the street,
when the building fell down; I was sent to one of the topmost floors of a tall building in a Manhattan, to buttonhole a young
man who was about to step into a lift. He was a physicist and the world was a fairly laggard reality so engaging him in a
conversation featuring an idea or two that he – and anybody else there, for that matter – had never heard of was not difficult.
This stopped him from entering the lift, which promptly plunged twenty storeys and killed everyone aboard.

There were two other occasions when I was asked to take rather more violent action, once in a sword fight in a sort of unevenly
early Victorian Greater Indonesian reality (leaping in to defend a great poet and hack off the limbs of a couple of his attackers)
and once when I transitioned straight into the mind of a very brilliant, very handsome but very headstrong young chemist who
had made powerful enemies in a Zimbabwean United Africa. I became him for just the few seconds required to turn, aim and fire
his duelling pistol – blowing his much more experienced opponent’s brains out – before exiting again.

My handlers were most impressed. I got the impression that ever since the affair in the Venetian bar they had had me marked
out as a natural thug. I did ask not to have to do too much of that kind of blood-sport stuff in future, but I was also quietly
proud to have acquitted myself so well. Still, every now and again I was asked, and I obliged.

Meanwhile, I had been learning. I knew more about the history and organisation of the Concern now and had studied it the way
it studied other worlds.

Mrs Mulverhill, I’d learned – through rumour rather than any official channel – was the latest of the very small number of Concern
officers who had gone bad, mad or native over the centuries. She had somehow evaded the network of spotters and trackers and
foreseers who were supposed to guard against this sort of thing and might even have had her own supply of septus, the transitioning
drug, though this probably just indicated that she had access to a stockpile she’d somehow built up while still in the fold,
as it were, rather than a way of making it from scratch.

She was regarded as a strange, remote, almost mythical figure, and – given her patent irrelevance and powerlessness – one to be
pitied rather than reviled, though of course one was supposed to report immediately any contact with anybody who might be
operating in a manner similar to that of l’Expédience but who was doing so outwith its control and oversight, and that would
certainly cover her and her behaviour. I was, in any case, still not sure my little pirate captain really had been her.

The woman in grey in the Flesse casino came up to the table and stood watching the play. The ball clicked and clacked inside
the slowing wheel and settled into its trap when the wheel finally swung to a stop. Gold. I comforted myself that my first
instinct – putting the chips on green – had been no more prescient than my later change of mind favouring blue.

The game went on. She refused a seat when one came free. I tried to see her face but the grey veil hid it effectively. She
turned and left ten minutes later, disappearing into the crowd.

I lost fairly steadily, then won moderately and finished a fraction down over the evening.

I tested the air in the outside bar, on the terrace under the trees by the side of the river, the town centre a buzz of music
and traffic under the lights on the far side. It was warm enough under the hissing table heaters. I had met some people I
knew and sat with them for a drink. The grey-veiled woman was standing by the stone wall a couple of tables away, looking
out over the river.

At one point, I was fairly sure, she turned and looked at me as I talked with my friends. Then she turned slowly away again.

I excused myself and went up to her. “Excuse me,” I said.

She looked at me. She put the veil up over the front of the little hat. It was a pleasant, unremarkable face. “Sir?”

“Temudjin Oh,” I said. “Pleased to meet you.” I put out my hand. She took it in one grey-gloved hand.

“And I am pleased to meet you.”

I hesitated, waiting on a name, then said, “Would you care to join me and my friends?”

She looked over at our table. “Thank you.”

Much talk, all very congenial. She said her name was Joll and that she was a civilian, not part of the Concern, an architect
making a submission to the local authorities in the town in a couple of days.

The evening drifted on, people drifted away.

Finally only we two were left. We had got on terribly well and shared a bottle of wine. I invited her to see the town from
my house on the ridge and she accepted with a smile.

She stood on the terrace of the house, gazing at the lights. I put my hand on the smooth grey surface covering the small of
her back and she turned to me, setting her drink down on the balustrade and removing her hat and veil entirely.

We repaired to bed, with the lights out at her request. We had fucked once and she was still holding me in her arms and inside
her when she took me.