Transition (28 page)

I stared at her. “I was going to need time to think anyway,” I said. “Now, I… I think, I mean… This has given me…” I thought
she looked disappointed behind the veil. I sighed. “Oh fuck, who am I trying to kid? Sure. Yes, of course. Either I’ve gone
fucking nuts or you’ve got the keys to the universe in a pill. Or now in a handy spray version.”

“Well, the keys to different versions of Earth,” she said.

“No other planets?”

“Not as such, yet,” she said. “No true time travel, either.”

“What about untrue time travel?”

“There is an apparent phenomenon called lag – though I suppose it could equally justly be called lead – where otherwise near-identical
worlds differ only in one being ahead or behind the other, by any interval up to several million years, but it’s not a real
phenomenon, any more than a celestial constellation is. They remain intrinsically separate and nothing occurring in one directly
affects the other.”

“Sorry I asked. No aliens?”

“We’re still looking.”

I paused. “You look a bit alien yourself, Mrs M. No offence.”

“None taken. You ready to go back?”

“I think so.”

“You may still feel a little disoriented.”

“You reckon?”

“You will be finding out something about yourself over the next few days, weeks and months, Adrian.”

“Oh yeah?”

“What I said about the pill you took was true, but its other purpose is to give you an excuse to dismiss this as some sort
of drug-induced hallucination.”

I must have looked sceptical.

Mrs M spread her arms. “Right now you know that this is real and all this has definitely happened. But when you’re back in
your own body and back in your own world and country and house and job and so on, with life going on as usual, you will start
to doubt that any of it was real at all. You may well determine that it did not happen, in which case that is probably what
you need to believe to protect your sanity. Or you may accept that it did. Either way this will tell you something about yourself.”

“Can’t wait.” I paused. “Anyway, so long as the money’s real. Know what I mean?”

She laughed. A high, tinkly kind of laugh this time. “We try to choose pragmatic, selfish people for such positions, Adrian.”

“Selfish, am I?”

“Of course. You know you are. It’s not high praise, Adrian, but it’s not criticism either. It’s just an acknowledgement. All
our best people are highly self-centred. It’s the only thing that holds them together in the chaos.” She grinned. “Anyway.
I think you will do very well. Time to go back.”

We both stood up. A low breeze ruffled my hair and some of her black bandages. I took a last look round this landscape of
watery ruins.

“What happened here, anyway?” I asked.

She looked round briefly. “I don’t know,” she said. “Something terrible, I should think.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I should think so too.” Even I knew enough history to think of Napoleon and Hitler, and what might have happened
in a Third World War.

“Oh,” she said, clicking her fingers. “I should warn you.”

“What?”

“The selves we left behind, back at the Novy Pravda.”

I stared at her. “They’re still there?”

“Oh yes. On standby, if you like. Our minds, our true selves are in these bodies, the ones that we happened to find here,
but the husks remain where we left them.”

I looked at my freckled hand again, then at her. “But you look just like you did.”

She smiled behind the black veil. “Well, I am very good at this. And there are infinitudes of worlds to work with. There are
even an infinite number where we are having exactly the same conversation as this right now, worlds differing only in one
tiny detail – which might be an atom of uranium in a deposit deep underground in Venezuela decaying a microsecond earlier than
it did here, or a photon in the University of Tasmania taking one slit, not the other, in another running of the two-slit
experiment. There may even be an infinite number which are utterly indistinguishable from this one and which are taking place
precisely contemporaneously, where the divergence has yet to occur. Though there may not. Partly it depends how you look at
it.” She gave me a big smile. I’d been looking at her blankly, I guess. “Further research is required,” she said. “Anyway,
about our other selves, the barely aware husks we left behind.”

“Yeah?”

“We may get back to find they are having sex.”

I stared at her. “Seriously?”

“When you leave two physically healthy adult humans of each other’s preferred gender alone in such close proximity, and they’re
effectively morons, it tends to happen.”

“How romantic.”

“Yes. Though it depends. Was it something on your mind before we left?”

“What, you and me having sex?”

“Yes.”

“The idea had crossed it.”

She tipped her head to one side. “Well, you’re not my usual type, but I was finding you moderately attractive, possibly due
to the disinhibiting effects of alcohol.”

“Don’t you get carried away there now, know what I mean?”

She shrugged. “There are couriers who can only take another person with them when they are penetratively conjoined. I have
to embrace my fellow traveller. One or two can co-transition just by holding the other’s hand. Anyway. We’ll see. All I’m
saying is, don’t be alarmed if we flit back and that’s what we’re doing.”

“Okay,” I said. “I’ll try not to be alarmed.”

She stepped up to me. “Now we embrace, yes?”

My brain felt like it was turning inside out again. Or outside in this time. Whatever. But when we got back I was lying curled
up on the floor of the amber-lit room and Mrs M was sitting cross-legged by my side, patting my shoulder and making sorrowful,
comforting noises and I had tears in my eyes and a sick feeling in my gut, nursing what felt like a pair of badly bruised
testicles, exactly as though somebody had kneed me in the balls a few minutes earlier.

“Ah,” she said. “Sorry. Sometimes that happens, too.”

Patient 8262

I
nfinities within infinities within infinities… The human brain quails when confronted with such proliferating vastness.
We think we have a grasp of it, brandishing our numbers – natural, rational, complex, real, unreal – in the face of all that’s
inestimable, but truthfully these resources are mere talismans, not practical tools. A comfort; no more.

Nevertheless, the doorways into that inexhaustible wilderness of forever multiplying worlds had been opened to us, and we
required the means to at least try to understand as much as we could of their hidden mechanisms and how they might be comprehended
and navigated.

Learning about the many worlds occurred, appropriately, in layers. One was history. In at least three categories.

There was history that we knew we were allowed to know, history that we knew we were not allowed to know, and history that
allegedly didn’t exist but that we – that is, the students of this effectively measureless subject – suspected did exist but was
never talked about, not at our level and perhaps not even at the level of the people who taught us.

We were aware from the beginning that the Concern had many more levels than were immediately visible from the lowly strata
where we existed in its tortuously convoluted hierarchy, and it was hard even to guess at how far beyond us it extended, given
both the irredeemably complex nature of the many worlds themselves and the seemingly quite deliberate opacity of the organisation’s
structure.

We knew there were various levels and classes of executives within l’Expédience with, at the apparent pinnacle of this structure,
the Central Council itself, composed of people who knew all there was to know about the Concern’s provenance, internal configuration,
extent, operational methods and aims, and some of us were of the opinion – always perverse, in mine – that there might be one
central authority figure at the head of all this tiered knowledge and power, a kind of organisational autocrat to whom everybody
else was obliged to defer. But for all we knew that final, single, near-godlike Emperor of the realities – if he or she did
exist – was little better than a foot soldier in a still greater grouping of other Concerns and meta-Concerns extending further
and higher out across and through the furiously expanding realities and numbered in millions, billions, trillions… who knew?

For us lowly foot soldiers, though, mere trainees that we were, the centre of our world – the centre of all our many worlds – was
the Speditionary Faculty of the University of Practical Talents, Aspherje, on an Earth that – almost uniquely – did not call itself
Earth, but Calbefraques.

Calbefraques was the ultimate Open world, the mirror image of one of the numberless perfectly Closed Earths where nobody knew
about the many worlds; a place where possibly every single adult soul who walked its surface knew that it was merely one world
within an infinitude of worlds, and a nexus at that, a stepping-off point for as much of that infinitude as it was possible
to imagine.

And a world, an Earth that was close to unique. Logically there had to be other versions of this Earth that were close to
the Calbefraques that we knew, but we seemed to be unable to access them. It was as though by being the place that could act
as a gateway to any other version of Earth, Calbefraques had somehow outpaced all the other versions of itself that would
otherwise have existed. It seemed that in the same way that the true consciousness of a transitioner could only be in one
world at a time, there could only be one world that was perfectly Open, and that world, that unique Earth was this one, called
Calbefraques.

It was here that almost all the transitioners lived when they were not on missions to other worlds, and here too that the
vast majority of theorists of transitioning, experts in transitioning, researchers into transitioning and experimental practitioners
of transitioning both made their home and plied their trade. In its globally distributed factories and laboratories all the
multifarious paraphernalia of transitioning was manufactured, and – somewhere, allegedly – the ultimately precious substance we
called septus, the drug that made flitting possible in the first place, was brought into being. Exactly how and where this
was done and exactly what septus really was, nobody seemed to know. The secrecy surrounding the drug’s creation was of an
order more intense even than that associated with the severely security-conscious operations of the Transitionary Corps. Naturally,
this meant that the speculation regarding this piece of arcana was, to put it mildly, unrestrained.

There were strict rules about the use and exposure of septus within this world or any other, restricting its use to its flitting-enabling
purpose and absolutely nothing else. But it was rumoured that, if one did try to have some of it analysed, in the most advanced
laboratories one could find, the sample itself simply vanished, or appeared on inspection – by chemical analysis, mass spectrometry,
microscopes working on a variety of wavelengths or any other technique available – to be nothing more complicated than pond
slime, or even pure water.

Here, in the university that was a city within a city, within its piled pyramids, ziggurats, towers and colonnades, and in
the profusion of outlying buildings distributed all across the greater city – an ever-multiplying number, in a fit image of
what was studied within them – millions of students like myself had, over the years, learned as much of that proportion of the
truth as it was thought appropriate for us to be allowed to comprehend. What some of us really wanted to know, naturally,
was the size of that proportion, and what was concealed in the fraction of it being denied us.

The Transitionary

It was the septennial Festival of Death in Aspherje, Calbefraques, and the Central Council of the Transitionary Office had
arranged a particularly extravagant party and ball to celebrate both the formal cultural event and the latest expansion and
reconstitution of the Council.

Guests arrived on a specially constructed narrow-gauge railway which ran in a loop round the closed city centre, picking up
guests from a variety of temporary stations – manned by servants dressed as ghouls – which were dotted around the periphery of
the cordoned-off area, where the guests’ own transport had deposited them. The track was lit by tall, smokily guttering torches
and by burning braziers hanging from gibbets and made to look like ancient roadside punishment cages, the skeletons of starved
miscreants visible through the smoke and flames inside.

At the Final Terminus, the station – seemingly made entirely of dinosaur bones – where the guests were deposited, a wide moat
had been dug across the park in front of the entrance to the University’s Great Hall. Beneath the water lay a system of pipes
which fed marsh gases and flammable oils to the surface, where they were lit or detonated by floating bundles of burning rags
containing clockwork mechanisms that made them jerk and move and appear briefly human.

Guests proceeded across a bridge bowed out across this waste of sporadic conflagration and entered the Great Hall through
a recently constructed ill-lit tunnel of soot-blackened stone. Enormous iron doors creaked open to admit guests to a tall
circular space containing another, near-circular moat of unpleasant-smelling water lying at the foot of a great steep bowl
of curved walls running with liquids. Across a bridge ahead stood a great wall of what appeared to be slate, its slick surface
running with water cascading down its imperfectly vertical surface in fast, hissing waves. Beyond the far end of the bridge,
where one might have expected to see a door, there was only this wall of water, nothing else.

The great iron doors behind swung shut on each batch of two dozen or so guests, leaving them looking nervously round, unable
to see a way out. Streamers of fire appeared twenty metres above them, all around the top of the vast bowl they found themselves
trapped within, while the small bridge that had led them from the tunnel behind was drawn quickly back up to clang and echo
against the rust-pitted surface of the doors.