Transition (52 page)

“Too late, I got to him long ago.”

“I bet you did, my sweet.”

“My finest pupil. Though it was you who really brought him on. All those missions.
Were
you trying to kill him?”

“Yes.”

Mrs Mulverhill raises one of Adrian’s eyebrows. “Well,” she observes drily, “there’s blowback for you. Between us we’ve made
him something very special. He’ll go far.”

“Urry up please, it’s time.”

“It won’t be far enough. We’ll get him.”

“Soon there will be no ‘we,’ Theodora. You will be on your own, exiled.”

“We’ll see about that, too.”

“I don’t mean just from the Council. I’m talking about what she’s about to do.” She nods at Bisquitine again. “She can make
solipsists of us all. You’ll never see Calbefraques again, Theodora.”

Madame d’Ortolan smiles humourlessly. “You aren’t frightening me, my sweet.”

“Theodora, it’s settled. This is already over. I can see the ways forward from here and they all—”

“Go to fuck!” Madame d’Ortolan shouts as she struggles again to free her hands. Mrs Mulverhill keeps Adrian’s body turned
to the side, protecting his groin.

Bisquitine rolls her eyes. “Excuse your being French. I’ll thank you to keep a civil lung in your chest. Oy! I is posimitively
Biafric here, missus wumin. Do I look facking Effiopian? You caahnt.” Madame d’Ortolan ignores her.

Inside Adrian’s head, Mrs Mulverhill can still sense Tem’s presence. She has a sudden vision of him standing at the bar of
a café, just out of Bisquitine’s damping range. He’s draining an espresso, quickly. She can feel the various Concern people
starting to remember who and where they were, and why. Then Tem’s presence winks out. “Bless you,” she murmurs.

“What?”

“Help me, General Betrayus, you’re my only hope.”

“Nothing. What’s it all been for, Theodora? Apart from power.”

“You know what it’s all been for.”

She smiles. “I think I do, now. But you can’t hold it back for ever.”

“Yes, I can. There are a lot of for evers. They add up. And it’s
all
about power, you fuckwit bitch. Not mine; humanity’s. No diminution, no subjugation, no ‘contextualisation,’ no aboriginalisation.”

Mrs Mulverhill shakes Adrian’s head. “You really are a racist, aren’t you, Theodora?”

Madame d’Ortolan bares her teeth. “A human racist, and proud to be so.”

“Nevertheless. We will meet up. They will be here. In any event, it will happen.”

“Over the dead bodies of every fucking one of them.”

“That will soon no longer be in your power.”

“You think so?”

“Like it or not.”

“I like it not.”

“Terminé. Hoopla!”

Adrian/Mrs Mulverhill glances over Madame d’Ortolan at the girl in the white towelling robe. “Goodbye, Theodora,” she makes
Adrian say, and lets go of the woman’s wrists, pushing her gently away while the crowd surges all around them.

Bisquitine, tired with it all, says, “Ach, then get ye gone, all ye.”

And, in a blink, go they did, to the scattered realities she flung them to; every remaining Concern consciousness on Earth – save
for two – just disappearing, plucked and hurled away to their various fates, a few part-chosen by themselves – where those being
thrown had the time and the wit to grasp what was happening and were allowed to exercise some control over their cross-reality
trajectory by Bisquitine – but many with no understanding and no control permitted, tumbling into wherever they happened to
have been directed, some more pointedly than others.

The one who thought of herself as Madame d’Ortolan was heaved away with particularly enthusiastic gusto but also with a kind
of ruthless disregard, with no control allowed over her own destination but also with no exceptional care taken by Bisquitine
over where d’Ortolan landed or what her precise fate would be. Let her know that control was not everything and that she had
been dismissed, discarded; judged by the abused freak as being unworthy of any singular treatment. That would hurt more than
any contrived tormenting.

All that mattered was that they were gone and they could control her no longer; she was finally free of them. They had let
her grow too strong because they’d thought they were so clever and she was so stupid, only she wasn’t so stupid after all,
no matter how clever they might think they were, and they had never really understood what she could do and what she had kept
hidden from them. That was because there was a core inside her, a steely soul of rage they’d never really glimpsed in her
because she’d kept it concealed from them for all that time, unafraid, and only finally unleashed it now, when they’d thought
to use her and she had used them instead. So there!

The people who had been taken over were suddenly back again, staggering, looking round, astonished, nonplussed, wondering
what had happened, where the day had gone. The woman in the orange velour jumpsuit looked around her, not really registering
the man in the tan jacket standing a couple of paces ahead of her. She turned round, frowned at the strange-looking woman
dressed in what looked like a hotel dressing gown, then pushed past her and wandered off to be consumed by the swarming crowd.

But
he
didn’t go, Bisquitine noticed. The man in the tan jacket who’d been waiting at the exact centre of the bridge, the one who’d
given the box to the man who’d walked away (who had then disappeared all by himself), the one who’d held on to the bossy orange
woman and had looked over her head at her; when all the rest were gone, that man was still there.

She looked at him, frowning, lips pursed, brow furrowed, eyes narrowed. She thrust her jaw out, briefly bit her bottom lip.
“Say, you’re from outa town.”

“You can stop now,” he said to her, gently. She thought he seemed very gentle altogether.

“That’s not very funny, Sidney. That’s not very sunny, Fidney.”

“Can I ask you your name? It’s Bisquitine, is that right?”

She stood at attention, made a salute. “Right as rain, left as lightning. Straight on till wottevah. Innit.”

“Do you remember me, Bisquitine? Last time I saw you they were calling you Subject Seven. We talked. Do you remember?”

Bisquitine shook her head. “Disblamer: cannot be held responsible for acts carried out by the previous administrators. Now
under old management.”

“You don’t remember me at all, do you?”

“Wide asleep, fast awake. Lost yer bandana, ave you? I et one of them once; was yeller, not grey.”

“Ah-hah.” The man smiled at her. (She saw, now. She’d thought he’d seemed familiar. The woman was inside the man.
That
was a bit tupsy-torvy!) “So,” the man-woman said. “Are you all right now?”

“We apologise for any convenience caused.”

“Listen, Seven, Bisquitine; I’m going to have to go soon. Is there anything I can do for you before that?”

“Yo, you cookin wit gas, now, hep cat. Cool. Hot properly.”

“Why don’t you come down this way? We’ll find a café, sit down, maybe have something to eat. What do you say?”

“Shiver me timbres, matey-boy. About flipping time, me old teapot!”

“I’m going to take your hand, is that all right?”

“Better men than you have tried, Thruckley. Leave me here. I’ll only slow you down. That’s an order, mister. Let’s get outa
here. Pesky kids.”

“It’s okay. There. Come on. We’ll sit down. You’ll be okay. I’ll get somebody to come for you.”

“Lummy. There’ll be no going back, mind. Not on my escapement.”

“They’ll be my people, not the others. You’ll be okay. I swear.”

“This isn’t about you, it’s me.”

“Let’s get that gown closed, okay? There you go.”

“I take full responsibility.”

“That’s better.”

“Funny old life, sport.”

“Okay?”

“Random.”

Patient 8262

T
his is how it ends: he comes into my room. He is dressed in black and is wearing gloves. It is dark in here, just a night light on, but he can identify me, lying on the hospital bed, propped up at a slight angle, one or two remaining tubes and wires attaching me to various pieces of medical equipment. He ignores these; the nurse who would hear any alarm is lying trussed and taped down the hall, the monitor in front of him switched off. The man shuts the door, darkening the room still further. He walks quietly to my bedside, though I am unlikely to wake as I am sedated, lightly drugged to aid a good night’s sleep. He looks at my bed. Even in the dim light he can see that it is tightly made; I am constricted within this envelope of sheets and blanket. Reassured by this confinement, he takes the spare pillow from the side of my head and places it – gently at first – over my face, then quickly bears down on me, forcing his hands down on either side of my head, pinning my arms under the covers with his elbows, placing most of his weight on his arms and his chest, his feet rising from the floor until only the tips of his shoes are still in contact with it.

I don’t even struggle at first. When I do he simply smiles. My feeble attempts to bring my hands up and to use my legs to kick myself free come to nothing. Wound amongst these sheets, even a fit man would have stood little chance of fighting his way from beneath such suffocating weight. Finally, in one last hopeless convulsion, I try to arch my back. He rides this throe easily and in a moment or two I fall back, and all movement ceases.

He is no fool; he has anticipated that I might merely be playing dead.

So he lies quite calmly on me for a while, as unmoving as me, checking his watch now and again as the minutes tick by, to make sure I am gone.

… But there has been no intensifying beeping noise from the machine that monitors my heart, its signal quickening as I expire. No alarm has sounded at all. He was expecting that one would, so this troubles him a little. I expect he glances at his wristwatch. From this he would see that he has been lying on me for over two minutes since my last movement. He frowns (I imagine). He presses down ever harder, feet rising entirely off the polished vinyl floor with a squeak. He has the same grasp of physiological limits as I do and so he knows that after four minutes brain death must be complete. He waits until that time is up.

He relaxes his grip, then tentatively releases me from the pillow’s embrace. He pulls the pillow entirely away and stands there, looking down at me, glancing with a curious, concerned, but not especially worried expression at the monitoring machines on the far side of the bed. He looks back at me, a tiny frown on his face.

Perhaps his eyes have adjusted a little better to the gloom now, or perhaps he is looking for something to explain the lack of an alarm. At last he notices the tiny, transparent, and – in this light – near-invisible tube that leads from the oxygen cylinder standing amongst the other equipment to my nose. (I see this; my eyes are even better adjusted to the darkness than his and are cracked open just enough to see his eyes suddenly widen.)

My right arm slides free of the bedclothes. I had felt for the paring knife hidden behind my bedside cabinet as soon as I’d heard the unusual noise in the corridor outside. I’d switched the heart monitor off too. I bring the hand with the knife sweeping out and round and up, catching the pillow as he tries to parry the blow. I feel the knife connect with something hard, jarring my hand. The pillow rips apart in a flurry of tiny pieces of white foam; they billow and scatter and start to fall as he stumbles to the door, holding one hand with the other. I am falling, already exhausted, to the floor, trailing bedclothes, legs still half trapped by the constricting sheets. My lunge has snapped or disconnected leads and cables and so finally produces some alarm noises from the nearby machines.

If he was thinking straight, and was not injured and shocked by what has just happened, my assailant might stay and finish
the job, taking advantage of my weakness, but he stumbles crashing against the door, whirls it open and runs out, still holding
his hand. Blood, dark as ink, spots on the floor as, finally, I slide out of the bed’s torque of sheets, released from its
confinement as though being birthed. I lie gasping on the blood-slicked floor, surrounded by tiny soft particles of foam,
still falling like snow.

Nobody comes, and eventually it is I who have to stagger along the corridor and cut the duty nurse free from his chair so
he can call the police.

I sit back, exhausted, on the floor.

They find my attacker in his crashed car, dead, early the following morning. The car is wrapped around a tree on a quiet road
a few kilometres away from the clinic. His hand wound was not life-threatening, but it bled copiously and he did not stop
to staunch the bleeding properly. The police think that probably some animal – deer or fox, most likely – made him swerve, and
his hand, blood-slicked, slipped on the wheel. It didn’t help that he hadn’t put his seat belt on.

I recover gradually over the next two months and leave without ceremony nearly a year and a half after first arriving at the
clinic.

And? And I accept that all that happened happened, and I accept my part in it. I accept, too, that it is over, and that still
the most rational explanation is that none of it happened, that I made it all up; I was never a man called Temudjin Oh.

Of course, that still leaves open the question of why somebody entered the hospital, tied up the nurse and tried to smother
me in my bed, but no matter how I look at all this and try to explain it there is always at least one loose end, and looking
at it this way, with that particular explanation resulting in that particular loose end, produces the most comprehensive of
the former and the least troubling of the latter.

Whatever; I am resigned to living a quiet and normal life henceforth and will be content with that. I shall find a place to
live and some honest, constructive work to do, if I can. I shall put my dreams of the Concern, Mrs Mulverhill and Madame d’Ortolan – and
of having been Mr Oh – behind me.

We’ll see. I suppose I could be wrong about any of this, including the sensible stuff.