Transition Page 9

  There are colleagues who prefer to use the tried and trusted tools of torture: thumbscrews, pincers, pliers, hammers, certain acids and, of course, fire; flame or just heat, supplied by gas burners, blowtorches, soldering irons, steam or boiling water. These are sometimes the techniques of last resort when others have failed. The subject will usually be scarred for life should they survive, and the survival rate, even if full cooperation is achieved, is not high.

  Another of our colleagues likes to use cocktail sticks: hundreds of wooden cocktail sticks inserted into the soft tissues of the body. He talks too, softening the subject up psychologically by sitting in front of them and using a small penknife to slit the cocktail sticks, producing little barbs and curls of wood which will increase the pain caused both when they are inserted and when – and if – they are removed. He sits there for an hour or more with a big pile of sticks, using the tiny knife on these hundreds of little wooden slivers and detailing to the subject precisely where they will be placed. He too has some medical training and describes to the subject the thinking behind his technique as being in some ways the opposite of acupuncture, where the needles are inserted with the aim of causing little or no pain on entry and alleviating pain thereafter.

  This preparatory dialogue can in itself be sufficient to produce full cooperation from the subject, though, as I say, there is a minimum level of pain which has to be inflicted in any event, just to be sure that full cooperation really has been achieved and to ensure that we, as an agency, are taken seriously.

  My own talking technique is in some ways my personal favourite. I like the economy of it. I have found it is especially useful on artistic people or those of an intellectual persuasion as they tend to have their own very active imaginations and thus this technique lets these imaginations do my work for me. Over the years, some of them have even mentioned said phenomenon themselves, though this recognition would appear to make the process no less effective.

  I do not like to question females. The rather obvious reason would be that their screams remind me of those of my mother when my father raped her on that never-to-be-forgotten night following her return home after the birth of my sister. However, I would prefer to think that it is simply good old-fashioned manners. A gentleman simply does not wish to subject a female to anything unpleasant. This does not stop me torturing women; it is still something that has to be done, and I am a professional, and conscientious, but I enjoy the process even less than I do when working with a male subject and I am not ashamed to admit that I have on occasion begged – literally begged – a female subject to exhibit full co-operation as quickly as possible, and I am also not ashamed to reveal that I have felt tears come to my eyes when I have had to work especially hard with a female subject.

  The use of tape across the mouth, regardless of what other technique is being employed, is good for cutting down the sound of screams, which must then all exit the subject via the nasal passages – more than somewhat reduced in volume, I am relieved to be able to report.

  I do draw the line at children. Some of my colleagues will happily oblige when a child must be tortured to force a parent to talk, but I think this is both morally objectionable and suspect in principle. A child ought not to have to suffer for the follies or beliefs of his or her parents, and to the extent that the techniques we employ on the subjects are in themselves a kind of punishment for subversion, treachery and lawbreaking, they ought to be applied to the guilty party, not visited upon their family or dependants. Everyone talks eventually. Everyone. Using a child to shorten the process is, in my opinion, sloppy, lazy and simply bad technique.

  Largely due to this scruple and perhaps also because I find it interesting and illuminating to discuss or at least attempt to discuss with my colleagues subjects such as those enumerated above, my code name within the department is The Philosopher.

  The Transitionary

  I live in a Switzerland. The indefinite article is germane.

  The particular Switzerland I live in is not even called Switzerland, but it is a recognised type, a place whose function and demeanour will be familiar to all those we number amongst the Aware. “Aware” means being au fait with the realities of the realities. “Aware” is a term applied to those who understand that we live not in one world – singular, settled and linear – but within a multitude of worlds, forever exponentially and explosively multiplying through time. More to the point, it applies to those who know how easy it is to travel between these disparate, ever-branching and unfolding and developing realities.

  My home is an old lodge in the pines, on a ridge looking out over the small but sophisticated spa town of Flesse. Beyond the town, to the west, is high rolling ground, clothed with trees. To the east, behind my lodge, the hills rise in craggy increments, culminating in a serrated massif of mountains high enough to hold snow all the year. Sufficiently compact for one to take all of it in with a single glance from my terrace, Flesse nevertheless boasts an opera house, a railway station and junction, a medley of fascinating and eccentric shops, two superior hotels and a casino. When I am not on my travels, working for Madame d’Ortolan or some other member of l’Expédience – the Concern – I am here: reading in my library during wet weather, walking in the hills on the finer days and, in the evening, frequenting the hotels and the casino.

  When I am, as it were, away, flitting between other worlds and other bodies, I still have a life here; a version of me remains, living on, inhabiting my house and my body and going through all the appropriate motions concomitant with existence, though by all accounts I am, in the shape of this residual self, quite astoundingly boring. According to my housekeeper and a few other people who have encountered me in this state, I never leave the house, I sleep a great deal, I will eat but not cook food for myself, I am reluctant to get dressed properly and I show no interest in music or conversation. Sometimes I try to read a book but sit staring at the same page for hours, either not really reading it or reading it over and over again. Art books, paintings and illustrations appear to pique my interest as much as anything, which is to say not very much at all, as will a television programme, though only if it is visually arresting. My conversation becomes monosyllabic. I seem happiest just sitting in the loggia or staring out of a window at the view.

  I’m told that I appear drugged, or sedated, or as though I have had a stroke or been lobotomised. I maintain that I have met several allegedly normal persons and not a few students who exhibit a lesser degree of day-to-day animation – I exaggerate only slightly. However, I have no cause to complain. I don’t get into trouble while I’m away from myself (well, I don’t get into trouble here) and my appetite is not sufficient to cause me to gain weight. Perish the thought that I might go for a walk in the hills and fall off a cliff, or head for the casino and incur vast debts, or start an ill-advised affair while my back is turned on myself.

  The rest of the time, though, I am entirely here, living fully, attention undivided, in this world, this reality, on the seemingly singular version of the Earth that calls itself Calbefraques. My name – in what is for me at least this base or root reality – is nothing like the ones I usually end up with when transitioning. Here I am called Temudjin Oh, a name of Eastern Asian origin. The Earth I came from is one of the many where the influence of the Mongolian Empires, especially in Europe, was more profound than the one in which you are reading these words.

  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 fro
nt 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 trav
el 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.