Iain Banks - Transition

But then one of them seemed to change, and appeared to understand her, and talked to her. The brush lady who talked to her always wore a grey cloth tied round her head. She was sure that this brush lady had been one of the ones who had not been able to talk to her in her own language, so she was surprised that now suddenly she could. Still, that was good. Even so, she still didn’t understand everything the brush lady said. Sometimes it sounded as though she was talking to herself, or using the sort of complicated, mysterious words that the others did, the ones who hurt her.

Sometimes the brush lady with the grey cloth went back to not talking to her, or seemed not to be able to understand her again.

That was confusing.

The grey-cloth brush lady seemed different on the nights when she did talk to her compared to the nights when she didn’t. She walked differently, stood differently. She was the same all the time when the man who shouted was there, then – when he had definitely gone – she became slightly different, if she was going to talk to her. Perhaps nobody else would have noticed what changed in the brush lady with the grey cloth, but she did. She was able to see these things. She was special and could see things other people didn’t. That was just one of the special things that she could do, one of the things that had made her different and worse compared to everybody else. These things had made her a Problem Child and Educationally Special and Developmentally and Socially Challenged, before they’d decided she was Disturbed and a Delinquent and A Danger To Herself And Others (the others would always try to protect themselves – she understood that).

Finally these things had caused her to have a Breakdown and so she had to be Committed Into Indefinite Non-Elective Long-Term Institutional Care With Immediate Effect and so here she was in this long-term care. It had led to a hospital like a prison. And then to another one which was the same but different. And then to this place, which was worse than either of the hospital-prisons because here even the people supposed to be looking after her hurt her. Worse, she couldn’t even use the things that made her special to get away from the being hurt.

Also, she couldn’t retaliate. She could not hurt people who hurt her because they had these people in plain clothes who sat around her, the ones who sat watching her and did the eye-squeezing, fist-pumping, hunched-over thing. Or maybe it was because they put the liquids into her, using the syringes. These things put her to sleep, or made her just too woozy to think or aim straight.

Here are some of the things that the grey-cloth brush lady said to her:

“Hello. How are you? What have they got you on? What do they call you? Subject Seven. Well, that’s caring. Remember me? How are you? What have they done to you? Evening. Me again. I don’t even recognise this, what the hell is it? Oh. Hey, Subject Seven. Been a while. How’s things? Shit, what are they pumping… Are you with us, Seven? Are you? Anybody left in there? Fuck, you poor kid. Yes, they’ve seen something in you, haven’t they? Something they think they can use. Mm-hmm. Fate help us all… What? Oh, I wish I could. What are they doing to you now? You poor…”

And so on and so on.

She replied by saying things like these:

“I spy Monty’s video. Rent me a Sunder. I’ll have that child frashed, so elp me. Crivens, Mr Givens, you’ll be the deaf of me. Swear I never heard of such a thing. On me muvver’s grave, there’s a thing. Oi sat in a satin stain. Spot of block and truckle never hurt nobody. Alignment? I’ll show you alignment, you arrant plopinjay; bend over. So help me. Hold fast there, bothers and cistern, we shall not face such girlsterous times alone! Clunch.”

“… Can you? Can you hear me? Listen, I can’t get you out of here, Seven, not in any way, physically or otherwise. Minor miracle I’m here. Never thought I’d work so hard to get back in. I don’t think you can understand a damn thing, can you? But for the record – in case you somehow can, or one day will – you’ve made it worth it, all by yourself, just to get to see what they’ll do, what they want, what risks they’ll take, how low they’ll stoop. But look, maybe things will change. Now listen, kid. You do whatever you need to do to make things easy on yourself, okay? Go along. Do you understand? Do something of what they want but keep a true core inside you, a soul of rebelliousness; an anger, not a fear. One day you’ll be free, and then we’ll see what we can do. I might be there then. If I am, remember me. Good luck.”

“Well met by sunlight. We’ll greet by sinlight. Stroke me a clyper!”

The grey-cloth lady often touched her; she would stroke her hand or pat her arm or smooth her hair off her forehead. She did that again now, brushing hair from her brow.

Liquid.

In the light, she could see that there was liquid on the grey-cloth brush lady’s cheek. Tears.

That was strange. For some reason she’d thought that only she made tears, not anybody else.

Then the grey-cloth brush lady went away with the rest of the cleaners.

She never came back.

After the great septennial extravaganza under the Dome of the Mists, I was no longer Madame d’Ortolan’s golden boy. I was not at all sure that I ever had been, despite what Mrs Mulverhill might have believed, but certainly I was no longer. I must have passed whatever test she had arranged around that consummately bizarre serial two-person orgy she took me on, because I survived in the immediate thereafter and there were no further interrogations, but she felt that I had insulted her, obviously, and now I would be made to pay.

I was still convinced that the whole point of the exercise had been to test how easily I could be couriered and to give the trackers, spotters and foreseers who were undoubtedly in attendance nearby something to work on – like handing a sniffer hound a piece of clothing belonging to the person you wanted to track – and if there had been any personal component – Madame d’Ortolan feeling some curious form of jealousy regarding myself and Mrs Mulverhill, perhaps – then surely that had been entirely subordinate to the infinitely more important business of ensuring the security of the Concern.

Nevertheless, I knew I had insulted her and she had taken it very badly. I had not reacted as I had been expected to, required to. I had shown some distaste, even arguably some disgust. Certainly not the awed, stunned, perhaps embarrassed, perhaps humbled respect I believe she had anticipated and was convinced should be rightfully hers.

In the end, on any absolute scale it had been no great hurt; the average person must endure, absorb and forget a hundred equivalent or worse insults and denigrations each year. But for a person of Madame d’Ortolan’s unparalleled importance and continually reinforced pride, the very unexpectedness of it had magnified the offence and made it loom all the larger, set against the otherwise smoothly functioning progressions of her remorselessly flourishing life.

For a few months afterwards I was rested and given no assignments at all, but from then on I was sent on gradually more difficult and hazardous missions for l’Expédience. I was allowed to spend less and less time in my house in the trees on the ridge above Flesse. I spent my days instead spread serially far across the many worlds, engaging in feats of derring-do, close-quarter assassination and outright thuggery. Gradually even the house at Flesse stopped seeming the sanctuary it had been and when I had discretionary use of septus I would holiday, if that is the right word, in the world containing the Venice where I had met and lost my little pirate captain, wandering like a lost soul across its history-scorched face, becoming familiar with that single embodiment of a world crippled by its legacy of recent cruelties and a self-lacerating worship of the proceeds of selfishness and greed. Again, this was your world, and I guarantee that in many ways I know it better than you.