Iain Banks - Transition

Here is the time just passed when I bamboozled the whole of not just one conventionally configured but high-skill-and-experience- level Concern intervention team, but two (and more like three, if you count the people watching the perimeter), all at the Palazzo Chirezzia, barely an hour ago.

Here is the time I sat in a room with somebody I thought I loved and watched transfixed as her hand moved through a candle flame like silk.

This is me chasing two fucked-up kids though a Parisian sink estate and watching them die… and again, except differently.

Here is the time I blew that musician’s brains out while he sat in his preposterously blinged half-track.

Look, observe how I save a young man from certain death.

Here, see how I stare at Madame d’Ortolan’s tits, zitted with diamonds.

And this is me with my pals walking down a street and stopping by a fat old geezer sunbathing in his postage-stamp-size front garden, one sunny day, long ago.

I sit, indulging myself in my own internal slide show, amused as all hell.

I’ve let my Americano grow cold. The Grand Canal still froths with boats passing to and fro. The arguing Aussies are gone. Confusion tempered by affronted professional pride still reigns at the Palazzo Chirezzia. And there is a little fear there, too, because their back-up has started to arrive at last and they’ve heard that Madame d’Ortolan is also on her way, with questions.

A warm wind scented with tobacco smoke and diesel exhaust stirs me from my reverie, back to the present and the insistent reality of the here and now.

Indeed; all this historical stuff is highly intriguing, but there is the small matter of my being hunted with pretty much every resource the Concern is able to bring to bear. That needs attending to. Beyond that, the coup that Madame d’Ortolan would appear to be trying to mount is either proceeding or not. I have already done what I can in that regard. I can only hope that my attempts to alert Mrs M to the targets I’d been sent after worked, and they have been warned and put themselves safe.

My present embodiment came complete with a mobile phone. I try calling my new friend Ade, on his way here with a cunningly worked container full of septus, but his mobile telephone is switched off and his office tells me that he is away, expected back tomorrow sometime. I look at the timepiece wrapped round my wrist. The smaller but more important hand points to the two parallel lines just off the vertical, to the left. Eleven. Adrian said that he should be here by four in the afternoon.

We are to meet at the Quadri on the Piazza San Marco, safely surrounded by the tourist throng.

It seems I have to wait.

I pay, then go for a walk, crossing the Grand Canal by the Scalzi bridge and coming back the same way half an hour later – an elegantly curved new one further up is only a week or two from being opened. I wander into the station, sit down in the café and order another Americano, the better to sip slowly. I have a faint desire to count how many platforms there are in the station, but it is residual, easily ignored. The phone rings a few times and its screen shows me the faces of the people calling: Annata, Claudio, Ehno. I don’t answer.

I take several more walks around the western end of Cannaregio and the nearer parts of Santa Croce and sit in several more cafés, none too far from the Palazzo Chirezzia, keeping the vague hubbub in internal view at all times. I sit quietly, seemingly watching people, actually probing further into my own pasts.

I am sitting in a little tourist café on the Fondamenta Venier near the Ponte Guglie when I am recognised. I prepare for the worst, but it is just somebody who knows this body, this face, enquiring why I’m not at work this afternoon. I look furtive and embarrassed and stick to vague generalities, mostly keeping my head down. The man nods, winks and taps me on the shoulder before he walks off. He thinks I am waiting for my lover. I drain my lemon tea and leave. I’ve had enough coffee.

I walk to another café, on the Rio Tera De La Madalena. A spritz this time, and some pasta. Staring at the spaghetti in my bowl, I drift into a strange trancelike state, at first wondering how many individual strands of the pasta lengths there might be in the bowl, then how many metres they would all add up to if laid end to end, then realising – as I toy with the pale, soft strands, draping them languorously, voluptuously over the tines of my fork – that their aggregated complexity is like the various entangled themes and episodes of my life: a swirling, hideously complicated, topologically tortuous, possibly knotted exposition of my very own reality lying dumped and glistening here in the moist coils lying on the plate before me, the sliced, abbreviated strands like the lives I have cut short, the glistening red of passata adding an appropriately gory sheathing.

How many lives, I reflect. How many elisions and abbreviations, how many slack abandonments. And how many lives and deaths of my own self-elisions, lives lived briefly in the head and body of another then skipped away from, blithely flicked like dust from a sleeve. Every mission a suicide mission, every transition a transition from life to death (and back again, but still; a death).

I drift, almost without meaning to, into my private viewing theatre of the past. Here I am toddling, saddled on my mother’s hip, dandled on my father’s knee, going to school, leaving home, arriving at UPT, making friends, going to classes, seeing Mrs M for the first time, studying, drinking, dancing, fucking, sitting exams, vacationing at home, fucking Mrs M for the first time, fucking Mrs M for the last time, standing drunk on a parapet in Aspherje looking out over the drop to the Great Park on the far side and wondering where she had gone, why she had abandoned me and whether I should just jump, and then falling backwards, too wasted to stand or balance or even cry. Here I am training to be a fucking multiversal ninja instead.

I can even see how I got where I am metaphysically, too, if you know what I mean; how and why I have changed and my abilities have developed over the last few months and weeks and days and even hours. I was always a natural, always a good learner, I always saw things clearly and I was just genetically predisposed to take transitioning and its associate skills to places they had never been before, with the right sort of push. It doesn’t even make me that special; untold trillions of similarly potentially gifted minds have lived and died on untold worlds all unknowing, their existences just never divined, never sniffed out by l’Expédience. And I can see how all those fraught, dangerous extra missions that Madame d’O sent me on were what made the difference, what proved me and tempered me and forced me to find and cultivate skills within that I did not know I had. I can see these traits, these attributes quite clearly in myself now and I suppose it is just possible that the right, properly attuned sort of person – a Mulverhill, a d’Ortolan – might have seen them or at least their potential in me years ago, if they were able to glance in at just the right angle.

I snap out of my reverie when the waiter nudges my seat – deliberately, probably – waking me from my dream.

The light has changed, the remnants of pasta are quite cold. I glance at my watch. It is fifteen past four o’clock. If I stick with this body then even if I try to run through the crowds, by the time I get to San Marco I’ll be half an hour late. Maybe I should take the next right and get to the Grand Canal, call a water taxi. Or maybe I should do the smart thing and just swap bodies with somebody already in San Marco. I close my eyes, prepare to do whatever it was that let me flit across to this body.

And can’t do it.