Transition. Part 13

"You were not able to. You were captured before you could."

"But I had-"

"Be quiet. Plus, you took it upon yourself to kill at least one more person in addition to the already significant number you falsely claim you had been instructed to kill."

"As I-"

"Be quiet. I take it you were aware of the seniority of the persons you claim you were instructed to elide. Save for the Mulverhill woman, they are all on the Central Council of the Transitionary Office. Answer."

"Of course." (Are all on. An interesting choice of verb tense; inadvertently instructive, I hope.) all on. An interesting choice of verb tense; inadvertently instructive, I hope.) "And yet still you did not think to question the orders?"

"As we've established, I did did question them. And I did question them. And I did not not carry them out." carry them out."

"I see. Is there anything you would like to add?"

"I would like to know who you answer to. Under whose authority do you operate? I would also like to know where I am."

A pause. "I think that concludes the preliminary part of our investigations," the voice said. There was a hint of a question in the tone and I got the impression that he had turned his head and was talking to somebody else, not to me. I heard another, younger, man speak. Then the voice that had been conducting the interrogation said quietly, "No, we'll call that stress level zero." The young man's voice came again, then the older man's once more, patient and instructive, a teacher to a pupil: "Well, it is and it isn't. Absolute to the level per individual, but individuals differ. So, zero. Provides headroom." I was starting to sweat. The man cleared his throat. "Very well," he said.

I heard him rise from a chair and sensed him walking towards me. My heart had been beating quickly anyway. Now it started to beat even faster. Shadows twisted on the concrete floor. I sensed the man behind me. I heard the deep, rasping, tearing noise of thick sticky tape being unrolled. He reached over me and put the tape over my eyes and right round my head, blinding me. I was breathing short and shallow, my heart thras.h.i.+ng in my chest. More tearing. He put another long line of tape round across my mouth and, again, right round my head. I had no choice but to breathe through my nose now. I tried to calm myself, to take fewer, deeper breaths.

Imagine that you could simply flit away, I thought. Imagine that just by thinking, you could be elsewhere.

Yes, and imagine that you are any different from any other poor, helpless, doomed wretch about to suffer, as poor, helpless, doomed wretches have suffered across the many worlds and down the countless ages an infinitude of times. With no escape and no choice and no hope.

A final, brief noise of a short length of tape being ripped from a roll, then torn. A very short, narrow piece of tape.

I felt him reach over me, his clothed chest pressing on my naked back and sweating head. The last thing I smelled was an antiseptic scent from his hand. He pinched my nose with one pair of fingers, wiped my skin with a paper handkerchief and stuck the tape over my nostrils, smoothing it down.

Now I could not breathe.

Headache. He has a headache.

He is not certain, for a few moments, which way up he is. Indeed, initially he is not entirely certain what "up" even means.

Pressure. There is pressure on one side and not on the other. This reminds him of something and he feels frightened.

He was lying on his left side. His head was on the floor, his arms lay just so, his left side was taking most of his weight, his left leg lay here and his right ankle and foot lay on the floor too, the right knee lying supported by the left knee.

He supposes he ought to get up. He needs to get up. The people who have applied or who might apply pressure to him might be here, might be in pursuit of him. He can't remember why. Then, with a feeling of some astonishment, he realises that he does not know who he is.

He is a person, a human, a man, a male, lying here on this cool floor wood? in darkness, with darkness beyond his eyelids. He tells his eyes to open, and they do, with what feels like reluctance.

Still dark.

But with some light. A soft grey light, off to one side. Bars of light, a sort of grating of light, canted across the floor some distance away.

There is a faint breeze. I can feel it on my exposed skin. I realise that I am naked.

I s.h.i.+ft, rearranging my limbs. I am that he. He is me. I am the person who woke up but I am still not sure who he is and I am. I feel a sense of me-ness, all the same. I am confident and sure regarding my self now; it is simply my name I am unsure about. The same may be said for my history and memories, but that too is not that important. They will be there. They will come back, when they need to, when they have to.

If the pressure is on this side, then applying increased pressure reacting against that gravity, replying to it should lift me up.

I apply that pressure and lever myself up.

Unsteady, trembling. Breathing hard. Breathing fast and shallow, heart thras.h.i.+ng, bringing on a feeling of panic and a sudden s.h.i.+ver. The feeling pa.s.ses. I force myself to breathe more slowly and more deeply. My arm, supporting me, is still trembling. The floor beneath my hand feels wooden and cool. The grey light spills in from the far end of a long room.

I turn my head as far as I can in both directions, then tip it up and down, then shake it. This hurts but is good. Nothing s.h.i.+ny to look at my reflection in. Languages: Mandarin, English, Hindustani, Spanish, Arabic, Russian and French. I know that I know these but right now I'm not sure I could muster a word in any of them. I have never had such a rough, disorienting transition, not even in training.

The light seems to increase. The bars of grey laid across the floor in the distance s.h.i.+ne. They turn to silver, then a pale gold. I cough. That hurts too.

... This is a large room.

And I feel I have been here before. Just looking at it I feel this, but the fragre of the place is familiar too. I know this room, this s.p.a.ce, this place. I feel that of course of course I know it. I feel that my knowing it is precisely why I am here. I know it. I feel that my knowing it is precisely why I am here.

I feel this, but I do not know why I feel this or what it is I am really feeling.

Ballroom.

Palace.

A sudden rush of sensation as though dry conduits throughout my body are flooded with glittering water.

The palace in Venezia, the unique city in so many worlds. And the ballroom, the great s.p.a.ce, a map and a studied beguilement and the sudden flash of seamy violence, leading to interrogation, a chair and a certain Madame...

I am in the Palazzo Chirezzia, overlooking the Grand Ca.n.a.l, in Venice. This is the ballroom: quiet, deserted, out of season (or decaying years later or decades later or centuries later or millennia for all I know). I came here from who knows where, as I was about to be tortured.

Did I? Could I have?

It's the last thing I remember. I can still smell the antiseptic scent of his fingers...

I s.h.i.+ver again, look around. A great rectangular s.p.a.ce. Three enormous shapes like inverted teardrops hang from the high ceiling, covered in grey; wrapped ghosts of chandeliers. Little sign of any furniture, but what there is also appears to be wrapped in dust sheets. The draught is on my back and legs too now. I am quite naked. I touch my mouth and nose, look at my naked wrists. Unfettered.

Using my tongue, I feel for the hole in my gum where a tooth used to be. There is an intact tooth instead. I prise open its hinged cap with one fingernail. It is empty.

It is empty, but it is there. The tooth remains, as though it was never extracted in the first place. Something more than just my sense of self was carried over.

What has happened to me? I raise my head and moan and then force myself slowly up from the floor, going briefly on all fours and then standing, staggering and swaying, unsteady.

This cannot be, I think. I must still be there, still suffocating in that chair. This is an hallucination, a waking dream, or the self-deceiving fantasy of somebody deprived of oxygen because their mouth and nose have been taped up. This is not possible.

I stumble to the nearest tall window and scrabble ineffectually for a while before seeing and feeling how to open the shutters. I barely crack them, just enough to see out.

The Grand Ca.n.a.l stares brightly back at me, grey and cool beneath what looks like an early-morning summer's sky. A water taxi pa.s.ses, a work-boat laden with bagged garbage creases down the waves in the opposite direction and is narrowly avoided by a clattering vaporetto crossing from one side of the ca.n.a.l to the other, running lights still greasily bright in the half-dawn, a few sleepy commuters sitting hunched on seats inside.

I bite on a knuckle until I make myself cry out with the pain of it, but I do not wake up. I shake my bitten hand and stare out at a place where I have no right to be.

And yet I am here.

Adrian.

Bint was wearing a veil. Not a Muslim-type burka veil, I mean an old-fas.h.i.+oned sort of black-lace-with-spots-on-it thing hanging from a tiny little hat. Actually, the hat looked like an afterthought, only there to support the veil. The office was as big as the reception area, lined in very fancy-looking wood panelling that had silver or some other metal inlaid into it. I'd never seen anything like it. She sat behind a big desk. Some sort of computer screen was just sort of flattening itself out of the way and becoming part of the surface of the desk as I went in. She stood up and said h.e.l.lo but didn't offer to shake hands.

She waved me to a seat on the far side of the desk. She wore a sort of weird-looking suit thing, like she'd been wrapped in black bandages. Actually looked quite tasty, especially with the veil for some reason, but still like she'd just paced off a catwalk rather than being in a converted warehouse or whatever in the middle of one of the most poisoned places on the planet. I wondered if this was some sort of radiation-proof suit or something, though it seemed unlikely.

"You're Adrian?"

"Adrian Cubbish. Pleased to meet you."

"I'm Mrs Mulverhill. I am glad to meet you, Adrian."

Another confusing accent. I supposed it was from somewhere round here, Ukraine, Russia, Eastern Europe, whatever. Hints of US English, too. We both sat down.

She opened her mouth to speak but I started first. "Well, Mrs Mulverhill, I really hope you're going to tell me why I'm here, cos otherwise this is just going to be a big waste of my time, and frankly my time is quite precious to me. Plus I don't appreciate being brought into this place what do they call it? The Zone? No one said anything about this, know what I mean? I mean technically I'm not here against my will cos I got on that plane of my own free will, didn't I? But if I'd been told where we were coming then maybe I wouldn't have, so legally you could be on dodgy ground. If I start growing a second head any time in the next few years there will be lawyers, I'm telling you now."

She looked surprised at first, then smiled. The face behind the veil looked Asian, I thought. Maybe Chinese, though less flat than Chinese faces usually are. Sort of triangular. Eyes too big to be Chinese, too. Cheekbones too high as well. Actually, maybe not Asian at all. You'd need more light, or just that veil off, to tell for sure.

"You should be safe," she told me. "The car's air is filtered and the atmosphere in here is healthier than it would be in a hospital operating theatre. Any dust on your clothes and shoes was removed before you entered here."

I nodded. "Consider me mollified for the moment. Now, about the why bit of me being here in the first place."

"Perhaps Mr Noyce has given you some idea of what we offer and what we might require."

"He said you paid well and didn't ask for much. Not normally, anyway."

"That would be accurate, I'd say."

"Okay. Keep going."

"Let me set out the basics, Adrian-"

"Shouldn't you be calling me Mr Cubbish," I said, "seeing as I've got to call you Mrs Mulverhill? Or would you like to tell me your first name?" So far this was all still too much on her terms, frankly, and I wanted to unsettle or even annoy her. How sensible this was is another matter, of course, as, when you think about it, I was in the middle of a fenced-off nowhere where n.o.body with any brains wanted to be anyway, a thousand or two thousand miles away from home, having got on a plane and as good as disappeared as far as anybody back in the UK was concerned, with no forwarding address or destination or nothing and with no reception on my moby.

Didn't care. I really was annoyed at them bringing me here, even if it was eventually going to be in my own interests. Who did these people think they were? Anyway; hence the remark about her calling me Mr Cubbish or telling me her first name.

"No," she said, sounding not in the least insulted. "I wouldn't like to tell you my first name. Mrs Mulverhill is what I answer to. If you're uncomfortable with me calling you Adrian, I'll happily call you Mr Cubbish."

I shrugged. "Adrian is fine. You were saying?"

"That we will pay you a retainer, monthly, plus an extra annual payment, for your services as a consultant and for other services we may occasionally require. You would be free to terminate this arrangement at any time, without notice."

"Consultant? Me?"

"Yes."

"Consulting on what?"

"General cultural, economic and political matters."

I laughed. "Oh yeah?"

"Yes," she said. The veil made it hard to see what was going on with her expression.

"Mrs M," I said, "I'm a trader. I trade stocks. I know a lot about that. Though probably not as much as Mr Noyce. Also I know about some computer games. Oh, and s...o...b..arding, though I'm what they call an enthusiastic amateur, not an expert, know what I mean? I'm not the person to consult on cultural and political matters."

"Tell me what you think about the political parties in your own country."

"Tories are toast. Labour are going to get back in at the next election and people like me may have to leave the country. I should point out that Mr N doesn't think they're going to be so bad Labour, he means. He's met this Blair geezer and reckons they'll leave us alone to make money, but I'm not convinced."

"There you are," the lady purred. "You've started work for us already."

"Course I have, Mrs Mulverhill. What were the other services you were thinking of?"

"Liaison with individuals. Helping them out if they need help."

"What sort of help?"

"Getting them on their feet. Obtaining funds, doc.u.ments, the ear of officialdom. That sort of thing."

Now, it so happened that I could could help with some of that stuff, through contacts I had, some got through dealing and some through trading. But I hadn't thought that Mr N would know much about that, and it must have been him who recommended me to whoever this Mulverhill woman worked for. help with some of that stuff, through contacts I had, some got through dealing and some through trading. But I hadn't thought that Mr N would know much about that, and it must have been him who recommended me to whoever this Mulverhill woman worked for.

"These would be serious, capable people, Adrian, but they would be starting out with very little when they make themselves known to you. Once they have a start they'll rapidly make their own way, but they need that initial boost, do you see?"

"Are you smuggling immigrants?" I asked. "You people-trafficking is that it?"

"Not in the manner you mean, I suspect. These people would not be foreign nationals as your government would understand it, were they to come to its attention. Which they almost certainly never would. It is quite possible, though, that all you'd ever be asked to do would be to provide guarantees for bank accounts, references, letters of recommendation, that sort of thing. All expenses would be repaid to you and any loans reimbursed expeditiously."

"Expeditiously?" I pretended to be impressed.

"Expeditiously." She pretended she hadn't noticed.

"So," I said, "is this what Mr Noyce does already?"

"That's a good question. Fortunately Mr Noyce has already pre-cleared me answering it honestly. The answer is yes." I could see the smile through the black veil.

"So if it's good enough for him it should be good enough for me, is that the idea?"

"Yes, it is."

"And of course he'll be retiring in a few years, I should think."

"I should think so too." Mrs M tipped her head to one side. "More to the point, so does he."

"And what sort of sums would we be talking about here, for this, um, consultancy and services unspecified?"

"The same as Mr Noyce receives. Eight and one half thousand United States of America dollars per calendar month, paid into a bank account in your name in the Cayman Islands. The extra annual payment would be twice that monthly amount, payable at the commencement of the last month of the year."

"And I can quit any time without notice?"