Transition

8

Most worlds are Closed, a few are Open. Most people are not Aware, a few are Aware. An Open world is one in which most people are Aware and there is no need to dissemble regarding the business of flitting or transitioning between worlds. Where I am now, lying in this bed in this clinic, is a Closed world, a reality where possibly nobody except myself knows that the many worlds exist, let alone that they are connected and that travel between them is possible. This is as it should be, for my purposes. This is what I wanted when I came here. This is my protection.

I opened my eyes to find the fat bald man sitting staring at me; the same man with the bad skin who makes a habit of sitting beside me in the television room during my rare visits there and talking continually in his incomprehensible dialect or accent.

There is mist outside and the weather feels cold for the first time this year, though I am still warm inside my hospital bed. The fat man wears the same white and pale blue pyjamas that we all wear, and a faded blue dressing gown that has seen better days. He is talking to me. It is mid-morning and the usual mid-morning cup of fruit juice is sitting on my bedside cabinet. I was not aware of the orderly leaving it.

The fat man is talking quite animatedly to me, as though he expects me to understand what he’s saying. Actually he may be making an effort for me; I get the impression he is trying to talk more slowly, at least initially. Also, his skin condition appears to have improved recently too. He may be talking more slowly than usual, but he seems to be compensating by talking more loudly and with greater emphasis. He gestures quite a lot, too, and his upper body moves as he does so and I can see tiny specks of spittle arcing from his mouth to fall on the bedclothes between us. I am a little worried that some of his spittle might land on my face, even on my lips. I might catch something.

I frown, sit up in bed and cross my arms, enabling me to put one hand up to my mouth so that it looks like I am listening, or at least trying to listen, to what he’s saying, but really I’m just shielding my mouth from any errant spit. I frown some more as he jabbers on, I put a pained expression on my face and sigh deeply, generally trying to give the impression of wanting to understand what he is saying, but failing. He doesn’t appear to be paying much attention anyway, frankly, just talking away in a machine-gun flurry of sound within which I can barely make out one word in twenty.

I suppose if I concentrated I might understand more, but from the little I can make out he’s complaining about another patient stealing something from him, or insulting him, or taking his place in some queue, or all three, and the medical staff either being responsible in the first place or being complicit or guilty of not listening – or all three – and to be perfectly honest I don’t care. He just needs to talk to somebody, preferably somebody who might be neutral regarding whatever petty nonsense this is all about, and preferably, I suspect, somebody who is not likely to answer back or ask any pertinent questions or actually engage with him and his concerns at all. He’s just offloading. Depressingly, I am the perfect choice.

It’s strange, this need to talk, to express ourselves even when we know or strongly suspect that the person seemingly listening isn’t really, or can’t understand, or doesn’t care, or couldn’t do anything anyway even if all the above did not apply. Some of us just like the sound of our own voice and most of us need to vent sometimes, to get things out, to release pressure. Occasionally, too, we need to articulate vague but powerful feelings and so make them less frustratingly vague, the act of expressing them itself helping to define what it is we feel in the first place. I suspect the fat man, just now, hovers between the love-of-own-voice and letting-off-steam explanations.

He nods emphatically, falls briefly silent and sits back, hands on knees, having apparently just come to some conclusive break in his oration. He looks expectantly at me, as though I’m supposed to respond. I move my head in a sort of circular motion, something between a nod and a shake, and spread my hands. He looks annoyed at this and I feel I need to say something, but I don’t want to attempt anything in his own language as this will just encourage him. I can’t let slip that I can speak languages which are quite simply not of this world – vanishingly small though the chance may be that this could materially affect my security or threaten my anonymity – so I decide to make up some gibberish.

I say something like, “Bre trel gesem patra noch, cho lisk esheldevone,” and nod, as though for emphasis.

The fat man rocks back, eyes wide. He nods too, enthusiastically, and comes out with a barrage of quick-fire sounds not one of which I comprehend. He looks like he actually understood what I said. But that’s not possible.

“Bloshven braggle sna korb leysin tre epeldevein ashk,” I tell him when he stops to draw breath. “Kivould padal krey tre napastravodile eshestre chroom.” I shrug. “Krivin,” I add, with a nod for emphasis, for good measure.

He nods so hard that I expect to hear his teeth rattle. He slaps his knees. “Blah blah blah blah blah!” he replies. Not actually that one repeated nonsense filler word, obviously, but a stream of noise.

It is almost as though he does understand me. This is becoming alarming. I can feel myself getting rather hot. I determine to say no more, but he lets loose such a tirade of sound, complete with wild gestures and more spitting, that I feel it is impossible not to respond. If nothing else, at least when I am speaking he is not and so I am in no danger of being splashed with flecks of saliva.

“Lethrep stimpit kra zho ementeusis fla jun pesertefal, krin tre halulavala!” I respond. He nods again, talks quickly and incomprehensibly, then holds up one hand and gets up, grunting, disappearing into the corridor. I would like to think he has gone for the day. Or for good, but something about his last gesture, holding his hand up like that, leads me to believe he is going to reappear all too soon. While he is away I fan my face and flap the bedclothes to cool myself down.

He comes back a couple of minutes later, shepherding into my room another patient, a skinny, slack-jawed fellow I recognise but have never talked to. In fact he’s one of those I thought didn’t talk to anybody. His thin, worn face looks too old for his body. He has lank black hair, an expression of no expression and a straggly beard that never seems to grow. He shows no sign of acknowledging me. The fat man plonks him down in the seat he has just vacated and gibbers a stream of language at him. I think I catch a word or two about listening and talking, but he is talking too fast for me to be sure. The younger man looks at me and in a low voice says something I do not catch. The fat man, standing behind him, gestures expectantly at me. I signal back, a two-handed What? motion. The fat man rolls his eyes and makes a sort of circular hurrying signal with one of his hands while the other taps the younger man on the shoulder and then points at me.

“Skib ertelis byan grem shetlintibub,” I say to the younger man. “Bolzaten glilt ak etherurta fisriline hulp.” I feel my face grow hotter still and fear that I am blushing. Sweat is gathering on my brow. This is perfectly absurd, but both men now seem rapt, and I feel it is easier to go on talking, even if it is utter gibberish, than it is to fall silent and wait for them to reply, or just burst out laughing. “Danatre skehellis, ro vleh gra’ampt na zhire; sko tre genebellis ro binitshire, na’sko voross amptfenir-an har.” Finally I can go on no longer, and – as my throat dries up – I simply run out of nonsense to speak.

The younger man narrows his eyes and nods slowly, again as though he understands this absolute rubbish. He looks slowly away from me to the fat man and says something. The fat man nods and makes a hand gesture that might mean I told you so. The young man leans forward and says, quite slowly, “Poldi poldipol, pol pol poldipolpol poldi poldi.” He sits back, smirking.

Well, of course, they are simply making fun of me. I smile thinly, look him in the eyes and say, “Poldi poldi polodi plopolpopolpopilploop.”

I expect him to smirk again, or laugh, but he doesn’t. Instead he sits back as though struck, his expression changes to that of somebody who has just been profoundly insulted, he looks me up and down and then rises smartly to his feet, angrily shrugging off the hand of the fat man who appears to be trying to placate him. The fat man starts to say something, sounding soothing, but the young man interrupts him, shouting him down in what sounds like a stream of invective. The only word I can make out is the nonsense one “Poldi.” He turns imperiously, spits at the floor under my bed and storms out, head held high.

The fat man says something plaintive to him, goes to the door and says something after him, then gives a deep sigh, shakes his head and looks in at me, his expression regretful, hurt and disappointed. He scratches the back of his head with one chubby hand and expels another resigned sigh. He says something inflected to be a question, I think. I am definitely not saying anything else from this point on, and I just sit there glaring at him.

He shakes his head once more, asks another, similar-sounding question, then – when I still do not reply, but glare even more pointedly at him – he rubs one thick-fingered hand over his bald pate and stares down at the floor, possibly at where the younger patient spat. I doubt he will have the manners to do anything about that particular outrage. I bet I shall have to wait for an orderly or the cleaners to clean it up. I suppose I could do it myself, but I feel the gesture was both rude and uncalled-for and I don’t see why I should.

He mutters, staring away, as though talking to himself, and rubs his hands together, looking and sounding worried. He sighs theatrically, shakes his head one more time, and leaves, shoulders drooped, still muttering.

He stays away this time. Filled with relief, I reach for my thin plastic cup and the watery fruit juice. As I drink it, I notice that my hands are shaking.

“Did you kill Lord Harmyle?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“I was ordered to.”

“By whom?”

“Madame d’Ortolan.”

“I know that not to be true. Lord Harmyle was not on your list.”

“Really? Must have misread it.”

“Please don’t affect flippancy.”

“No? Okay.”

“Now, did you-”

“Have you seen the list?”

“What?”

“Have you seen the list?”

“Not relevant. Did you have orders to kill anybody else?”

“Yes.”

“Who?”

“Dr Seolas Plyte, Ms Pum Jésusdottir, Mr Brashley Krijk, der Graf Heurtzloft-Beiderkern, Commandante Odil Obliq and Mrs Mulverhill the younger.”

A pause. I got the impression this was being written down as well as recorded. The circle of lights surrounded me. My questioner was still behind me, unseen. “My information indicates that you were asked merely to forcibly transition the people you mention, with the exception of Lord Harmyle, who, as already indicated, we know was not on your list.”

“I was given verbal orders from Madame d’Ortolan that all those on the list were to be killed, not transitioned. Quickly as possible.”

“Verbal instructions?”

“Yes.”

“In a matter of such importance?”

“Yes.”

“To be confirmed in writing subsequently?”

“No. I asked specifically. Definitely not to be confirmed in writing subsequently.”

“That would be unprecedented, I take it?”

“Yes.”

“I see.”

“I would like to ask a question.”

Another pause. “Go ahead.”

“Who are you?” We were speaking a version of English which had separate “yous” for singular and plural; I had used the plural version.

“We are officers of the Concern,” the calm male voice said. “What did you think?”

“Who do you answer to?”

No pause. “Were your orders delivered to you in the usual fashion?”

“Yes. A one-time mechanical micro-reader.”

“Did you question your orders?”

“Yes. As I’ve said.”

“But you still accepted them, including the unprecedented alleged instruction to kill individuals who, according to your written orders, were only to be forcibly transitioned for their own safety.”

“Yes.”

“Had you received orders to kill so many people before?”

“No.”

“Were you aware that they were unusual orders in requiring such a… such a glut of killing?”

“Yes.”

“And yet you did not think to question them.”

“I did question them. And in the end I did not obey them.”

“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.)

“And yet still you did not think to question the orders?”

“As we’ve established, I did question them. And I did not 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 thrashing 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 shift, 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 thrashing, bringing on a feeling of panic and a sudden shiver. The feeling passes. 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 shiny 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 shine. 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 space, this place. I feel that of course 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 space, 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 Canal, 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 shiver again, look around. A great rectangular space. 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 Canal stares brightly back at me, grey and cool beneath what looks like an early-morning summer’s sky. A water taxi passes, 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 canal 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.

Bint was wearing a veil. Not a Muslim-type burka veil, I mean an old-fashioned 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 hello 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 nobody 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 snowboarding, 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, documents, the ear of officialdom. That sort of thing.”

Now, it so happened that I 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.

“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?”

“Yes.”

“And without penalty?”

“Yes. The monies will stop being paid, that’s all.”

“Call it ten K a month and I’ll think about it.”

“That is more than Mr Noyce receives.”

“Well, if you don’t tell him, neither will I,” I said. She was silent for a few moments. I spread my arms. “That’s my price, Mrs Mulverhill.”

“Very well. The first payment will be delivered forthwith. We’ll mail you the account details.”

“Like I say, I’ll think about it.” I wanted to talk to Mr N some more. This was too weird to just jump in on, given what I knew so far.

“Of course. Decide in your own time.”

“Is that it?” I asked. This had all been too easy. I strongly suspected I’d underpriced myself.

“That’s it,” she said. She just sat there, didn’t go to shake my hand or produce a contract or a letter of agreement to sign or anything.

“Our agreement to be reviewed annually,” I said.

“If you like.”

“Uh-huh.” I nodded for a bit. Still just sitting there. I sat forward in my seat. “So, Mrs M.”

“ Adrian.”

“Tell me who you work for.”

“The Concern,” she said smoothly. “You can call us the Concern, Adrian.”

“And who are you really?”

“We’re travellers.”

“What, like gypsies?” I said, with a fake smile.

“I don’t think so. Well, maybe a little.”

“Russian?”

“No.”

“No?”

“Definitely. No.”

“CIA?”

“No.”

“Some other American… organisation?”

“No.”

I took a breath. This time she jumped in on me before I could speak. “Don’t bother, Adrian. You’ll never guess.”

“You reckon?”

“Oh, I’m pretty certain.” She flashed the veiled smile again. “We should celebrate,” she said, “that you’re thinking of joining with us. Would you like that? Where shall we go?”

“I can’t imagine there’s much happening in this Pripyat place.”

“It is a little quiet,” she agreed. “Shall we go to Moscow? The plane will have been refuelled by now. Yes? I want to show you something.”

Seemingly my watch had to go forward yet another hour, though I still left the Rolex alone.

“ Adrian,” Mrs M said as we settled into the jet’s plush seats, “Connie and I have much to talk about. Can you amuse yourself?”

“Certainly. No, wait a minute.”

“What?” Connie asked.

“What if you keep me up past my bedtime?” I smiled.

Connie looked at me. “I understand there are hotels in Moscow.”

“What a relief,” I said.

They started talking some language I couldn’t even begin to unscramble. I left them to it and watched the ground slide by beneath. I’d hoped to see Chernobyl itself – from a safe height, obviously – but didn’t. It was only another hour’s flight but by the time we arrived in Moscow it was almost dark. Outside, on the tarmac of the airport, the wind felt cold enough for snow and smelled of jet fuel. A big black Merc was waiting. This time the driver had a cap and tie and everything. We went straight to a tall wire gate with a small guardhouse. A uniformed Customs/Immigration guy took the briefest look at our passports, exchanged a few words with Connie S. and waved us through to join chaotic traffic on a packed four-lane road.

My moby was happy again, reconnected to civilisation. I texted a couple of pals back in the big smoke to say where I was, and felt happier too.

The Novy Pravda was a club housed in a new-build block within sight of what I guessed was the Red River or whatever big river it is that runs through Moscow. Frankly I had no idea where we were. In something called the Central Administrative Okrug, which was not a vast amount of help. If we hadn’t driven through what was obviously Red Square with the big Disney church and stuff I’d only have had Mrs M’s word for it that we were even in Moscow.

The club was in a big black cube of a building. Lots of UV and dark purple lights on the outside, outlining it. The air shook with muffled music. Valet parking. Front of the line, two big bouncers with armpit bulges. Straight in, greeted by some guy in a very flash suit who took Mrs M’s long fur coat, fake-kissed Connie on both sides and gave me a small bow. I was in what I’d been wearing since I’d got up: black Converse, black 509s, a purple Prada shirt and a peach-soft thin black leather jacket. I felt underdressed for the first time that day.

“Kliment, how are you?” Connie said as the guy kept pace with us down a broad corridor lined with mirrors and what looked like blobs of mercury running down bronze mazes behind plates of glass.

“I am well, madam,” Kliment said, sounding very Russian. “You are well too, I hope.”

“Very. This is Mrs Mulverhill, my employer,” she told him.

“An honour, madam.”

“And this is Adrian. He’s from London.”

“ Adrian. Welcome. I love London,” he said.

“Smashing,” I said.

“This is Kliment’s club,” Connie told me.

I looked round. The sounds were getting loud and the light level dropping as we entered a big space with slowly flashing lights on the ceiling. A flunky came up, bowed to Kliment and took Mrs M’s coat and Connie’s jacket as well as my own to a coat-check counter staffed by two astoundingly beautiful girls, all high cheekbones, long black hair and sultry, unimpressed looks. The thudding music and faster flashing lights were coming from a big fluted archway ahead. “Tasty,” I said, smiling at Kliment. He nodded appreciatively, I think.

“Please,” he said. “We have your table.”

Vodka and champagne, caviar and blinis. We proceeded to get very drunk in our semicircular table facing a giant multi-level dance floor. I danced with Connie, then with Mrs M, who had a weird all-over-the-place way of dancing. In her black-bandages outfit and veil – yep, still with the veil – she got a lot of looks. Appreciative ones, too, and I could see why. She danced like she could move bits that other women didn’t even have. Connie was a lively bopper too. The two of them kept turning away bottles of bubbly from distant tables.

Connie leant over as they were opening our third bottle of Salon. “Come to the toilets. We’ll do some coke, yeah?”

By this time I’d drunk enough for this to seem like a good idea, and for the prospect of some white stuff to have taken on a sort of sensible, even medicinal quality, i.e. if I took some it’d sober me up a bit. Not to mention the fact that both Connie and Mrs M had only got even better-looking and more devastatingly attractive as the evening had gone on, and here was one of them inviting me to the loos. Well, why not? I looked from the gorgeous, blondely shining Connie to the shadowy Mrs M. Connie grinned and shook her head.

Mrs Mulverhill must have overheard, or guessed. She waved one hand. “Enjoy,” she said, watching the mass of people pulse and surge around the dance floor.

No eyelids were batted when we entered an extremely posh Ladies and commandeered a cubicle. We took turns snorting from a handily placed glass ledge. Good gear, almost uncut.

We stood up, grinning from ear to ear at each other. “Another dance?” Connie suggested.

I leant back against the wall, gave her a long look up and down. “We in a hurry?”

She laughed, shook her head. “Too sordid. Let’s away.”

I thought she might have meant Let’s away to somewhere quieter, but she just meant back to the dance floor and then the booth and the table where Mrs M was knocking back another deep-chilled vodka and looking as sober as when we’d walked in. She nodded at me. “We dance now,” she told me, rising.

“Can I catch my breath?” I asked.

She shook her head and took my hand.

It was quite a sexy dance. There were slow bits in the tune and she moved round me, curling and uncurling and rising and falling, circling about me like she was caressing my personal space. I’m not a bad dancer – many compliments received, know what I mean? But Mrs M was something else. Maybe it was the booze and toot, but I seriously felt I was in the presence of bopping royalty.

She sidled up, pressing herself against me. I felt the heat of her body through her black-bandage outfit and my own clothes. She was half a head shorter than me. She put her veiled lips close to my ear as I leant down to her. “ Adrian,” she said loudly, just audible over the music, “I want to take you somewhere. Will you come with me?”

I pulled back, showed some amused, pleased surprise and then bent to her ear. “Really?”

“Really,” she said. Then added, “Yes, that’s a way of putting it.” Which seemed unnecessary. “Follow me.”

“To the ends of the Earth, Mrs M,” I said as she took me by the hand. She laughed. Strange noise, almost like a bark. Her hand was very warm but perfectly dry. We slunk through the press of dancing people. She let go of my hand once we were clear of the dance floor and were heading for some cordoned-off steps. Not the loos again, then. Another pair of bouncers, nodded to. Down some wide, spiralling steps.

“This is called the Black Room, apparently,” she said as a large door was opened for us by another wide-shouldered gent, this one in dark glasses. Fair enough, it was nearly black inside. From what I saw as we walked through it was a fuck club. Lot of humping and humping-watching going on in/around/on/over tables and big comfy seats. Warm, it was.

We walked on through to the far wall and another door. Yet another bouncer. Lady, this time. She was much bigger and wider than me. She handed Mrs M a key. We entered what looked like a dark hotel corridor. Mrs M let us into a dimly lit bedroom and closed the door behind her.

“People come here to have sex, Adrian,” Mrs Mulverhill said.

“You don’t say,” I said. From the way she’d said what she just had I was already starting to guess that wasn’t why we were here. I felt some disappointment, and just a tiny bit of nervousness. Still, I’ve always had, right from the first days when I started dealing, a completely reliable alarm system in my head for situations that might be about to turn genuinely nasty and threatening, know what I mean? And so far the alarm bells hadn’t gone off.

“I do say. But you and I are not here to have sex. I hope you are not disappointed if that was what you were expecting.”

“Devastated, Mrs M.”

“You are, I think, joking.”

“Not entirely.”

From somewhere in those bizarre clothes Mrs M produced two little pills. Smaller than any E pills I’d ever seen; nearer to sweeteners or something. She popped one herself, held the other out to me. “Please, take this.”

“What is it?”

“It is a form of lifebelt.”

“Well, that’s a new one.” I shrugged, popped it.

She watched my neck to see me swallow. Again, just a little worrying. She reached up and put her veil up at last. The light wasn’t great but I could see a little more of her face. A very beautiful, strong, semi-Asiatic, semi-I-couldn’t-tell-what face, with big, wide eyes. And with catlike slits for pupils, not round ones. Ah-ha. I’d heard you could have contacts like that and a few weirdos had even had eye surgery to get the same effect. Music thudded very distantly. She looked into my eyes and said quietly, “Nothing should go wrong, Adrian, but if we become separated I want you to think yourself back to here, to this room.” She waved one hand. “Take a good look round.”

I looked around the place, humouring her.

“Do it for real, Adrian,” she said, as though guessing I was only pretending to. “Look at it, remember its visual details, remember the smell and the sound of this place. Will you be able to envisage it accurately again?”

The light in the room was amber, like sunset, subdued. The bed was queen- or king-size, with black satin sheets. There was a black couch, one ornate chair of red and gold, a mirror on the ceiling, a TV set into the wall and in one corner a black cube with the one word MINIBAR on it in blue neon. There was one other door, presumably leading to a bathroom. The bed had those unnecessary bedposts that are handy for tying people to with furry handcuffs or whatever.

“I guess,” I said. Separated? What was she talking about? Still no actual alarm bells, but I was starting to think that I needed a second set to go off to tell me when the first lot had mysteriously stopped working.

Now Mrs M produced what looked like a tiny cigarette lighter.

“I shall apply this to myself first, then to you. It must happen in rapid succession,” she said, bringing the device up to her neck and putting her free hand behind my head, fingers spread over my sweaty hair like some giant spider. “Please try not to flinch when I apply it to you. Then I will hug you tightly. Do you understand?”

“Got you.” Must confess, my mouth was dry. The music stopped briefly, its thud-thudding gone, leaving only my heart.

“Then here we go.”

She stepped up to me, her body tight against mine. I could feel her small, firm breasts pressing into my chest and smell a scent somewhere between antiseptic and a musky perfume. She pushed the lighter up into her lower jaw and it clicked. A hiss. Her hand swooped from under her chin and came up to my neck. Pressure, another click and a hiss and a cold sensation in my neck and jaw like an infusion of ice. She wrapped her arms tight around my back, then wrapped her legs around mine too, rising a little on her feet and pressing her head side to side against mine. I put my arms around her. She felt good. There were stirrings down below. I was getting wood. I wondered if she could feel it. She would soon if she hadn’t already. Then, very suddenly, it felt like my head turned itself inside out.

I must have closed my eyes. I swayed and staggered as I opened them again. There was a grey light all around us and the air was suddenly chill and fresh. Mrs M was releasing me from her grip but holding one of my hands so I didn’t fall over and saying over and over, “It’s all right, Adrian, it’s all right, it’s all right…”

But it wasn’t all right, because not only was there was no dark, amber-lit room around us, there was no fucking building around us.

The Novy Pravda was gone and here we were in the grey light of a dawn that was hours too early on a low hill surrounded by marshes with a big river coiled across the landscape in the direction of the still-cloud-obscured rising sun. Great. Not just the room, not just the Novy Pravda. The whole of fucking Moscow had gone.

Scattered all about, stretching to the horizon, lay ruins.

I felt like I was going to keel over and we did a bizarre dance for a few seconds as Mrs M still held my hand and tried to stop me falling onto my bum and I sort of staggered and revolved around her, trying to get my balance back and gasping as my shoes slipped on the tussocky grass on the cold hilltop. Finally I got my legs spread far enough apart to stop gyrating and Mrs M pulled me to a stop, taking me by both shoulders while I bent, breathing hard and fast and not believing what I was seeing whenever I took a look out across this deserted landscape of grey marshes and black ruins.

“I’m okay,” I said. “I’m okay.”

I straightened up. She kept one hand on my elbow.

I took a few deep breaths, holding them a handful of seconds each. I looked around. Couldn’t see another soul. There was a dot on the distant river under the light patch of sky where the dawn was. It might have been a boat. The ruins spread in every direction. A few were on the horizon, darkly jagged. Towers and bits of domes; bitten, slumped-looking squared things that might once have been tower blocks or big office buildings.

There were some dressed stones sitting half-overgrown by longer grass a few steps away down the slope towards the nearest marsh.

“Let’s sit,” Mrs M said. She sat me down on the cold hard stones.

“Where the fuck is this?” I asked when I had my breathing back to something like normal.

“Another Earth, another Moscow,” she said. She sat beside me, half turned to me. The veil was down again, had been ever since we got here.

I rubbed my neck. “Was that the pill did this, or-?”

“This did this,” she said, showing me the little lighter gadget. “The pill was for if something went wrong. You had to visualise the room we left from, remember?” I nodded. “That was your way back. You shouldn’t need it now, though. We can go back together. The first transition is always the most problematic. We’re well attuned.” She smiled, patted my arm reassuringly.

“Fuck,” I said, shaking my head and standing up again and looking desperately around. I found a fist-sized lump of stone and threw it as hard as I could towards the still-rising spread of light where the dawn was. It disappeared into the grass downhill with a barely audible thud. I turned back to Mrs M. “No, just give me a minute, okay?”

“I’ll stay here,” she said, smiling behind the veil and clasping her hands over one raised knee.

I ran down the slope, skidding in places, jumping over a few more of the piles of dark brown stones lying in heaps within the grass. When the slope levelled out the marsh began and I squelched into muddy water. I put my hand down, brought up some grey-brown mud, stared at it then stared out over the grey landscape and let the mud dribble back through my fingers. A bird made a lonely mewling cry in the distance and another answered from even further away.

It all looked and felt and smelled real as fuck. The surface of dark water pooling between my shoes – black slip-ons! What happened to my Converse? – was going still. Looking at my face reflected in it, I didn’t even look like myself. My trousers felt coarser, and were more like very dark brown than black. No Nokia; nothing in the pockets at all. No Rolex on my wrist, either. I studied my hands. They looked a bit different too. They had freckles. I didn’t have freckles, did I? Suddenly I wasn’t sure any more. Fuck me, it turned out that I didn’t even know the back of my hand like the back of my hand. I turned and saw the small black figure of Mrs Mulverhill sitting where I’d left her. I trudged back up.

“I am able to tandem,” she explained as we sat side by side on the stones. A hint of pale yellow-orange sun had peeked out between two layers of cloud to the east. “Some people can. A tandemiser can take one other person with them when they transition. Usually just one. Most people can’t transition at all, but of those who can, few can take anything other than themselves from world to world.”

“Transition?”

“From one world to another.”

“Uh-huh. And you need a pill or something?”

“There is a substance called septus, both in the pill you took and in the spray in here.” She brandished the little lighter thing, then secreted it away in the black bandages again somewhere under her ribcage.

I closed my eyes, rubbed my face. When I looked out again, everything was just as it had been. Grey skies, rising sun gleaming all watery, wide marshes, distant black ruins. “So is this like another dimension or something?” I asked. Fuck, I was struggling. I almost wished I’d paid attention in physics lessons.

The whole total bizarre weirdness of this was still affecting me in waves of dizziness, unless it was the drugs I’d swallowed or been injected with. Had there really been no blackout phase? We seemed to have come here from the Novy Pravda between heartbeats, with only that rush of head-turning-inside-out to lead up to it, and that had felt like part of the experience itself rather than something properly separate from it. But had there really been no time to get me properly drugged and able to be shipped out to wherever we were now? It didn’t feel like it, but it still had to be more likely, I mean logically, than what Mrs M was telling me.

She shrugged. “This is one of the many worlds,” she said. “There are infinities of them. The people I represent travel between them. Sometimes they might need help. Transitioning – travelling between worlds – is not a perfected process. We would like to employ you to be there to help any travellers blown off-course into your world, as it were, or who would otherwise need help in it. Minor help. Would you do that for us?”

“What exactly do you do? Why are you doing all this travelling, anyway?”

Mrs M made a clicking noise with her mouth. “Nothing that bad, but nothing I can tell you about, either. Nothing that we are doing ought to get you into any legal trouble with your authorities, in the highly unlikely event that they ever find out. You must have heard of the idea of need-to-know?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, you don’t need to know, so it’s best for you not to.” A pause while she looked out over the chilly landscape before turning back to me. “Though I suppose I should say that it’s not unknown for people to start out doing what we’re asking you to do and them then going on to become more actively and operationally involved and even eventually becoming transitioners themselves.” That smile behind the lace and dots again. “Not unknown. But one thing at a time, eh? What do you say? Do you think you might accept our offer?”

I stared at her. “I was going to need time to think anyway,” I said. “Now, I… I think, I mean… This has given me…” I thought she looked disappointed behind the veil. I sighed. “Oh fuck, who am I trying to kid? Sure. Yes, of course. Either I’ve gone fucking nuts or you’ve got the keys to the universe in a pill. Or now in a handy spray version.”

“Well, the keys to different versions of Earth,” she said.

“No other planets?”

“Not as such, yet,” she said. “No true time travel, either.”

“What about untrue time travel?”

“There is an apparent phenomenon called lag – though I suppose it could equally justly be called lead – where otherwise near-identical worlds differ only in one being ahead or behind the other, by any interval up to several million years, but it’s not a real phenomenon, any more than a celestial constellation is. They remain intrinsically separate and nothing occurring in one directly affects the other.”

“Sorry I asked. No aliens?”

“We’re still looking.”

I paused. “You look a bit alien yourself, Mrs M. No offence.”

“None taken. You ready to go back?”

“I think so.”

“You may still feel a little disoriented.”

“You reckon?”

“You will be finding out something about yourself over the next few days, weeks and months, Adrian.”

“Oh yeah?”

“What I said about the pill you took was true, but its other purpose is to give you an excuse to dismiss this as some sort of drug-induced hallucination.”

I must have looked sceptical.

Mrs M spread her arms. “Right now you know that this is real and all this has definitely happened. But when you’re back in your own body and back in your own world and country and house and job and so on, with life going on as usual, you will start to doubt that any of it was real at all. You may well determine that it did not happen, in which case that is probably what you need to believe to protect your sanity. Or you may accept that it did. Either way this will tell you something about yourself.”

“Can’t wait.” I paused. “Anyway, so long as the money’s real. Know what I mean?”

She laughed. A high, tinkly kind of laugh this time. “We try to choose pragmatic, selfish people for such positions, Adrian.”

“Selfish, am I?”

“Of course. You know you are. It’s not high praise, Adrian, but it’s not criticism either. It’s just an acknowledgement. All our best people are highly self-centred. It’s the only thing that holds them together in the chaos.” She grinned. “Anyway. I think you will do very well. Time to go back.”

We both stood up. A low breeze ruffled my hair and some of her black bandages. I took a last look round this landscape of watery ruins.

“What happened here, anyway?” I asked.

She looked round briefly. “I don’t know,” she said. “Something terrible, I should think.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I should think so too.” Even I knew enough history to think of Napoleon and Hitler, and what might have happened in a Third World War.

“Oh,” she said, clicking her fingers. “I should warn you.”

“What?”

“The selves we left behind, back at the Novy Pravda.”

I stared at her. “They’re still there?”

“Oh yes. On standby, if you like. Our minds, our true selves are in these bodies, the ones that we happened to find here, but the husks remain where we left them.”

I looked at my freckled hand again, then at her. “But you look just like you did.”

She smiled behind the black veil. “Well, I am very good at this. And there are infinitudes of worlds to work with. There are even an infinite number where we are having exactly the same conversation as this right now, worlds differing only in one tiny detail – which might be an atom of uranium in a deposit deep underground in Venezuela decaying a microsecond earlier than it did here, or a photon in the University of Tasmania taking one slit, not the other, in another running of the two-slit experiment. There may even be an infinite number which are utterly indistinguishable from this one and which are taking place precisely contemporaneously, where the divergence has yet to occur. Though there may not. Partly it depends how you look at it.” She gave me a big smile. I’d been looking at her blankly, I guess. “Further research is required,” she said. “Anyway, about our other selves, the barely aware husks we left behind.”

“Yeah?”

“We may get back to find they are having sex.”

I stared at her. “Seriously?”

“When you leave two physically healthy adult humans of each other’s preferred gender alone in such close proximity, and they’re effectively morons, it tends to happen.”

“How romantic.”

“Yes. Though it depends. Was it something on your mind before we left?”

“What, you and me having sex?”

“Yes.”

“The idea had crossed it.”

She tipped her head to one side. “Well, you’re not my usual type, but I was finding you moderately attractive, possibly due to the disinhibiting effects of alcohol.”

“Don’t you get carried away there now, know what I mean?”

She shrugged. “There are couriers who can only take another person with them when they are penetratively conjoined. I have to embrace my fellow traveller. One or two can co-transition just by holding the other’s hand. Anyway. We’ll see. All I’m saying is, don’t be alarmed if we flit back and that’s what we’re doing.”

“Okay,” I said. “I’ll try not to be alarmed.”

She stepped up to me. “Now we embrace, yes?”

My brain felt like it was turning inside out again. Or outside in this time. Whatever. But when we got back I was lying curled up on the floor of the amber-lit room and Mrs M was sitting cross-legged by my side, patting my shoulder and making sorrowful, comforting noises and I had tears in my eyes and a sick feeling in my gut, nursing what felt like a pair of badly bruised testicles, exactly as though somebody had kneed me in the balls a few minutes earlier.

“Ah,” she said. “Sorry. Sometimes that happens, too.”