Iain Banks - Transition

“So what do you propose, Mrs Mulverhill?”

Her smile looked defensive. “Ultimately, that the Central Council either ceases to exist or is severely reined in and radically reconstituted. Certainly that it is subject to some sort of democratic oversight. They can even keep their serial immortality, as long as they resign in perpetuity from the Council itself. Long life for long service. An incentive to serve but not to entrench.”

“All the same, you’re asking a lot of them.”

“I know. I don’t see them giving up what they have at present without a fight.”

“And is the other side just you and your bandit gang?”

“Oh, there are plenty of people who feel the same way, including a few people on the Central Council itself.”

“Like who?”

That smile again. A little wary, this time. “First tell me if you’ve betrayed me, Tem,” she said softly. She lowered her head a fraction as she gazed up at him.

“Betrayed?” he said.

“We’ve talked before. I’m an outlaw. If you were playing by the book you ought to have reported our meetings.”

“I did,” he said. “Is that betrayal?”

“Not by itself. What else, though? What did they suggest you do?”

“Keep meeting you, keep talking to you.”

“Which you have done.”

“Which I have done.”

“And reporting back.”

“Which I have also done.”

“Fully?”

“Not quite fully.”

“And have you agreed to help catch me?”

“No.”

“But have you refused ever to help catch me?”

“No. They did ask. I told them that of course I’d do what was right.”

She smiled. “And do you yet know what is right?”

He took a long deep breath of the pure gas and the stunningly cold air. “I think I would find it very hard to help them catch you.”

She looked pleased and amused at once. “Is that gallantry, Tem?”

“Perhaps. I’m not entirely sure myself.”

“Sexual sentimentality, is what Madame d’Ortolan would call it.”

“Would she now?”

“She is a very unsentimental woman. Well, apart from her cats, maybe.” Mrs Mulverhill was silent for a moment, then said, “Do you think they’re using you to try and catch me even without your consent?”

“I’m sure they are. I’ve always assumed that when we meet you’ve taken care of that.”

“I do what I can.” She shrugged. “I think I’m still ahead of them.”

“You think they’re in hot pursuit?”

She nodded. “Theodora keeps at least two tracking teams on the lookout for me at all times. And she has her special projects, her wild cards, randomisers whom she’s tormented and bent until they form specialist tools for seeking out people like me. She thinks they might be able to work some magic and both find me and then disable me when I’m traced. I suppose I ought to feel flattered to be the object of such obsessive attention.”

She looked away at the startlingly bright point of the rising sun. The surrounding peaks shone a bright yellow-white now, the level of illumination dropping down their snow and rock flanks as the sun continued to rise, casting jagged shadows across the steeply sloped snowfields and glacier heads. Just in that moment he thought she looked small and vulnerable and hunted, even afraid. The urge to reach out and take her in his arms, to shelter and protect and reassure her was very strong, and surprising. He wondered for a moment how much of this was deliberate, if he was being manipulated, and in that hesitation the moment passed and she turned back to him, smiling, raising her face. “You need to take care, Tem,” she told him. “You can only postpone making up your mind for so long. Perhaps no further, after this. You can seem to cooperate with them and listen to me for now, but sooner or later they’ll insist you do something that settles it. You’ll need to decide.”

“I thought you were trying to get me to decide.”

“I am. But I’m not threatening you.”

“They’re not threatening me.”

“Not yet. They will. Unless you take the hints that will be put before you, if they haven’t been already, and obviate the need for explicit threats.” She looked down towards the ruffled blanket of cloud far below, still in shadow. “The Central Council prefers implied threats, the threat of threats. It’s more effective, leaving so much to the individual imagination.”

“You’re not going to tell me who the people on the Central Council are, are you? The ones who might think the way you do.”

“Of course not. You could probably make a fairly accurate guess, anyway. And it’s not as though I have signed contracts from them, swearing to rebel when the time comes. I haven’t even talked to all of them, I’m just making assumptions. But feel free to tell the Questionary Office that you asked the question.”

“I shall.”

She was silent again for a while. The wind roared on, picking up in strength while the weathervane apparatus creaked and moaned and swung the glass barricade round to face the onrushing torrent of air. “You should take all this more seriously, Tem,” she said, her tone gently chiding, close to hurt. “These people are slowly making monsters of themselves. Madame d’O is already full-fledged. Under her, if they haven’t already, they’ll come to countenance anything to avoid what she sees as contamination. Anything. Encouraging world wars, genocide, global warming; anything at all to disrupt the slow progress towards the unknown.”

“Don’t let my defensive flippancy deceive you,” he told her, pulling her to him, enfolding her. He hesitated.

“Deep down you still don’t take it seriously either?” she suggested, looking up at him with with a small, wan smile.

“There’s that flippancy again.” He squeezed her. “I take it as seriously as I’ve ever taken anything, including my own survival.”

She looked unimpressed. “I was hoping for better.”

“Leave it with me. I’ll see what I can do.”

She turned in his arms, staring out over the nearly lifeless waste of rock, ice and snow towards the faltering dawn.

“We may not be able to meet like this again,” she said quietly. “I’m sorry.”

“Then I’m glad,” he said, “that we were able to put so much effort into this meeting.” She looked back to him with an expression on her face that he was unable to read, and he felt a real gut-stirring emotion, something between a kind of recidivist lust and an entirely unexpected regret at the potential loss of somebody who only now, belatedly, he realised was and had always been a soulmate. He would never now, never again, call it love.

She pushed herself away from him a little, then reached out and patted his gloved, mittened hand again, layers upon layers separating them. “I’ve enjoyed everything about the times we’ve spent together,” she told him. “Would that there had been more.”

He gave it a while, then said, “So what happens next?”

“Immediately, trivially? You go back to Calbefraques and I disappear again.”

“If I do need to contact you, if I do decide-”

“I’ll leave a note of places, times, people.”

“And beyond that?”

“Over time, more to the point, I think Madame d’Ortolan will eventually move against the people on the Central Council who disagree with her. She’ll try to isolate them, perhaps even kill them.”

“Kill them? You’re not serious.” This was not the sort of behaviour the Central Council was known for. There had been one or two suspicious deaths on the Council centuries before that might have been due to some judicious poisoning, but nothing untoward since. Stolid and boring were the words most people associated with the Council, even after the ascendancy of Madame d’O; not danger, not assassination.