Iain Banks - Transition

But no; I was charging down a hillside favela in Bahia, jumping empty oil cans and screaming at the departing back of another skinny young kid blurring through the crowds of shouting people. This one I just had to scare. I was supposed to be mistaken for an undercover cop and she was supposed to become a famous violinist, not a drug courier. She ran into the first big street at the bottom of the hill and missed getting flattened by a truck by about a centimetre. The truck swerved, half toppled, a man on a motorbike went full speed into the side of it, nearly taking his head off, flopping dead. The girl disappeared down an alley on the far side of the traffic and I stopped, stooped, hands on knees to get my breath back.

I felt dizzy, staggered to one side and then the stagger turned into a run; I was still pelting down the alley after her. I shouted her name and she half turned immediately before she reached the street, long brown hair flung out to the side just for a moment. The truck hit her full on and tossed her into the oncoming stream of traffic, sending her spinning doll-loose under a bus, making it bounce on her body like it had gone over a speed bump. I skidded, stopping so fast against a corner that my sunglasses fell off. What the fuck was going on?

I hesitated as I paced after the caudillo, then kept on going, cutlass raised, shaking my head to loose the bizarrely vivid feeling of having just relived the recent past.

Cutlass they wanted, cutlass they would get. It had some historical meaning, apparently. At any rate, there would be no comeback now, no triumphal return no matter how undeserved. (Ask not. Oh, ask then. The answer is: a corrupt press, the manipulations of a foreign power and rich, influential families bribing thugs and judges: any incompetence, any evil can be washed away with sufficient muscle and money.) But not for our boy here; not for this version in this iteration of the world. The trail was still curving back round through the grass. It was a little narrower now, too, less wasteful. The caudillo must be getting half clever, trying to slip between the stalks rather than batter and stumble his way over them. I upped my pace to a normal walk, still puzzling over what was happening with these not-quite/more-than flashbacks.

I found the caudillo’s scarlet waist-sash first, scribbled like a trail of rather too neat blood on the flattened grass. And then the man himself, lying in the grass, chest heaving, tears streaming, pants still at three-quarter mast, air whistling in and out of his gaping mouth, his hands clasped in front of him as though in prayer while he pleaded with me and offered rapidly increasing sums to let him go.

I swivelled the cutlass in the most economical of backstrokes – the grass constricted matters – and the bastard twisted, rolled and suddenly had a tiny silvery two-shot up-and-over pistol in his quivering hands, pointed right at my face. In that instant, I had time to see that the gun might be small but the barrels each looked wide enough to stick a little finger down and not get it wedged, and the range was laughable.

How slowly my arm seemed to be moving as it brought the cutlass round and down. Had I time to flit away? Not quite. But I could start the process. You never knew.

So, those flashbacks that were not quite and rather more than flashbacks had been some sort of premonition of things going terminally wrong. That was what they’d meant; they’d been a warning. How foolish of me to ignore my own subconscious, I thought, though it did also occur to me that a simple but very strong urge to take off after the caudillo and his girly cries waving a high-powered handgun might have been a still simpler and less ambiguous hint. But a cutlass they had wanted, and where would people like me be if we didn’t even have the weaselly excuse of just obeying orders?

This was taking too long. I thought I could hear the swish of the cutlass edge tearing through the air as it accelerated, and feel its tip connecting with a couple of the closest stalks of grass as it passed, a blade amongst blades…

The caudillo’s fist, the one holding the gun, jerked once.

There was a click.

No more.

Gun jammed or safety still on.

Or also not loaded, of course – precedent the fumbled pistol dropped on the steps. (The man had made an unholy mess of running the country – why expect him to be competent with a gun?)

Didn’t particularly matter.

The scimitar’s curved blade hit the blubbering caliph on one arm then the other, slicing all four bones and sending two halved forearms and the gun tumbling into the rushes. Wait a minute-

The return stroke took the shrieking man’s head off. I was already flitting away, though whether from sighing blue-green grass in Greater Patagonia or tall rushes within the sunlit marshes of New Mesopotamia, I was no longer sure.

I must have made myself understood to the medical staff somehow. Initially I did no more than blow off steam to the nurse who came, grumbling, to investigate my shouting in the middle of the night. The fellow looked like he had just woken up despite the fact he was meant to be fully awake during his night shift.

He gave no sign of understanding what I was saying – I was talking in my own language and so I did not expect him to. He made soothing noises in between his yawns and tucked my bed sheets back in. Then he patted my hand, took my pulse, put a hand on my forehead and then, after scribbling something on my notes, left.

I stayed awake for some time, heart beating fast, mentally daring the pervert who’d tried to interfere with me to come back (I have a weapon I can use). Eventually I must have fallen asleep and only woke up, later than usual, as breakfast was served.

But one of the trainee doctors appeared later that morning and asked me slowly in the local language what had disturbed me during the night. I told her what had happened, or what had nearly happened, as best I could with my still rudimentary vocabulary and she made some notes and left.

Another doctor I haven’t seen before arrives after lunch. She is a solid, square-set woman with no-nonsense glasses and a mass of bleached blonde hair swept up and gathered in a bun from which a variety of curled wisps have escaped. Caught in the afternoon sun flooding into the room, they look like solar flares.

She treats me like an idiot. She speaks very slowly and carefully and asks me – I am pretty sure – did something bad happen to me? I think I am right in nodding, indicating that it did. She asks me if I would like to come with her so that we can talk about it somewhere else. I try to make it clear that right here in the security and comfort of my own room is just fine but she looks very concerned and talks over my halting attempts at her language and says we’ll go to her office.

I try to protest but eventually she calls on an orderly and, over my protests that this is tantamount to another assault, I am helped into a wheelchair and taken along the corridor, down to the ground floor in a large, creakily protesting lift and along the corridor underneath the one we just left until we get to what I assume is her office, situated, if my navigational skills have not entirely deserted me, somewhere close to the day room where the usual cast of droolers, slack-jaws and incontinence-pad habitués will be congregating about now to argue over the choice of afternoon TV channel.

She thanks the orderly, closes the door behind her and after some smiles and soothing words she sits me to the side of her desk while she moves her chair so that we are sitting quite close together at the corner of the desk. She produces two dolls from a drawer. The dolls look as though they have been knitted from vaguely flesh-coloured wool. One is dressed like a girl, one like a boy and they both have blank faces. She hands me the girl doll for some reason and seems to want me to use it to indicate where I might have been touched when the interfering miscreant came to my room last night.