Transition (10 page)

In this reality, the Vermyn Street building contains a parfumerie. The dark wood panels are mostly hidden by exquisite wall
rugs and creamy, gently glowing light panels illuminating a smattering of tear-shaped perfume bottles arrayed on glass shelves.
The air is laced with enchanting female scents and no one looks in the least surprised that I have just sneezed. The well-heeled
clientele is composed mostly of ladies. One or two are with gentlemen, and there are a couple of other unescorted men besides
myself. It is the men I find myself looking at. The shop assistants are mostly very good-looking young men. One especially
chiselled specimen, tall and dark, smiles at me. I smile back, a little thrill running through me.

Ah well. I never fully appreciate being gay, but at least I haven’t hit the ground counting the cracks in the parquet flooring.
I seem to have left the OCD behind, for now at least. My languages are English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, German and Cantonese,
plus smatterings.

I quickly review my attire in a full-length mirror. I am dressed similarly to the way I was with Lord Harmyle (I wonder if
he is the
late
Lord Harmyle yet). My hair is long and dark and ringleted in what would appear to be the fashion here, though it looks particularly
good on me, I must say. No wonder the young assistant favoured me with a smile. I check my hands for any signs of blood. It
would be unusual and alarming if there were any, but one always looks. Spotless. I have very pale hands, beautifully manicured
and sporting two silver or white gold rings on each hand.

I have no time to dally. One further regretful smile at the handsome young assistant and I make for the door, checking my
wallet, papers and ormolu pill box as I go. I am Mr Marquand Ys, according to my British passport. That is all in order. The
wallet is full of large white banknotes and several important-looking bits of plastic with silvery chips embedded.

Into the street. Still no airships.
Dommage
!

However: above the relatively low-rise buildings a very large aircraft sails serenely overhead, heading west. I wave my cane
at a cab – a whirring, hunchbacked-looking thing which I’d surmise runs off electricity – and order the lady cabbie to take me
to the airport.

In the mirror, the woman’s brow creases. “Which one?”

Ah, a
large
London; Londres grande! How splendid. “Where’s that aircraft heading?” I ask, pointing with my cane.

She cranes her neck out of her window, squinting. “Eafrow, I should fink.”

“There, then.”

“It’ll cost ya.”

“I’m sure. Now do drive on.” We set off. “Plyte, Jésusdottir, Krijk, Heurtzloft-Beiderkern, Obliq, Mulverhill,” I mutter.
It feels pleasing to me, just saying it. It has a become a mantra, I suppose. The girl cabby glances askance at me in her
mirror. “Plyte, Jésusdottir, Krijk, Heurtzloft-Beiderkern, Obliq, Mulverhill,” I repeat, smiling.

“Wottevah, mate.”

I sit back, watching the relatively quiet traffic and rather loud architecture glide past. My heart has been beating rather
rapidly since my transition – well, since Lord Harmyle’s murder, I suppose. Now it begins to slow, allowing me the luxury of
reflection.

Of course I think about whatever poor wretch I’ve left behind to deal with the aftermath of my actions, especially when it
is something as dramatic and unpleasant as a murder. What must it be like for them, I wonder? Allegedly they know nothing
about what has happened until after I have gone, though I always wonder if this is really true. Might they not be aware of
what I am making them do, even as I do it? Are they not perhaps along for the ride when I take over their body, observing – doubtless
terrified and frustrated – as I perform whatever actions I deem to be necessary to fulfil whatever orders I have been given?

Or are they genuinely oblivious, and effectively wake up to be suddenly confronted with – in the case of the operation just
concluded – a dying man, blood on their hands and the stares of shocked witnesses? What could one possibly do in such circumstances?
Flinch back, horrified, exclaiming, “But it wasn’t me!”? Scarcely supportable. One would do best to run, I’d imagine. It might
be better for the poor bastards to collapse, quite dead, the instant I leave them. I have asked about this kind of thing,
but the Concern is by its nature very conservative and secretive and even the researchers, technicians and experts whose business
it is to know of such matters are not inclined to divulge the relevant answers.

There are those who assuredly do know the answers to all these questions and more. Madame d’O would know; Mrs M would too,
and Dr Plyte and Professore Loscelles and all the others on the Central Council. There is in all likelihood an entire division
of the… hmm, for some reason I don’t want to think of it as the Concern. This is one of the worlds where it is thought of
as l’Expédience.

Anyway, indeed. There is an entire cadre of experts who have studied what happens when someone like myself takes over a previously
existing person in another reality and then leaves them again, but l’Expédience does not deem me to be one of those who needs
to know the results of their research. I’d love to know. I have carried out my own modest experiments, attempting to rummage
round in the memories I find or the feelings I discover, trying to find some trace of the personality I have displaced, but
so far such vicarious introspections have produced nothing except a lingering feeling of foolishness at having undertaken
them in the first place.

Plainly I inherit something of the character of the person whose being I usurp. That must be where the OCD comes from, and
one’s sexual inclination, as does the taste for, variously, coffee, tea, chocolate, spiced milk, hard liquor, bland or spicy
food, or prunes. I have found myself, over the years, surveying the reality I find myself in with the eyes of somebody who
is plainly a general medical practitioner, a surgeon, a landscape designer, a mathematician, a structural engineer, a livestock
breeder, a litigation lawyer, an insurance assessor, an hotelier and a psychiatrist. I seem to be at home amongst the professions.
Once I was a sewerage system designer who was also a serial killer. (Yes, I know, but I would beg the indulgence of being
regarded, rather, as an assassin. I will even accept Paid Killer, so long as it is understood that I do what I do through
informed choice rather than due to some grubbily psychotic urge. Though I’ll allow that the importance of this distinction
might escape my victims.) On that occasion I had to suppress the urge to strangle prostitutes in order to carry out my mission,
which was to track down and kidnap (ha! You see? Not kill) my quarry.

On the other hand, I have never been a woman, which is slightly odd and even a little disappointing. Obviously there are limits.

And are these bodies I inhabit ever used more than once? I have never visited the same body twice – indeed, I rarely visit the
same reality twice.

These taken-over persons will have had perfectly full lives before I invade them. They have pasts, careers, networks of relationships
both personal and professional; all that one would expect. I have had “my” wives, partners, girlfriends, “my” children and
“my” best friends greet me without a trace of discomfiture or any sign that I am behaving oddly or out of character. I seem
to know how to behave when I am somebody else, as naturally as the most gifted actor, and when I search my/their memories
I find no trace of earlier exposure to the Concern – or whatever it might be called locally – or preparation for what has happened.

I extract my little ormolu pill case from my coat and study it. I shall probably next take one of the tiny capsules it contains
while ten kilometres above the Atlantic, or over the Alps, or while looking down at the Sahara. Or I could wait until I arrive
wherever it is I decide to go. In any event, how do these little white pills – small enough for one to fit three or four on
the nail of one’s smallest finger – actually work? Who manufactures them, where? Who invented them, tried and tested them? I
work the sweetener case conventionally, causing it to produce a perfectly normal sweetener such as any diet-conscious person
might slip into their tea or coffee (while often, of course, tucking one’s snout into a glistening cream bun). It is almost
identical to the special pills, lacking only a tiny blue dot – scarcely visible to the naked eye – in the very centre of one face.
I slide open the end of the ormolu case and replace the sweetener.

The little case itself is quite an exquisite piece of work. Used as one would expect it to be used it will happily dispense
sweeteners and nothing but sweeteners all day until they run out; only by holding and pressing it just so may one access the
small compartment concealed within that contains its real treasure, so that it releases one of the little pills which lead
one to flit, bringing about a transition, flicking one into another soul and another world.

Questions, questions. I know how I am supposed to think. I am supposed to think that one day I might rise to the level of
Madame d’Ortolan and her ilk, and discover some of the answers. Eliding everybody on the list my orders contained might well
be quite enough by itself to ensure just such an elevation, and I should think so too; such a close-packed sequence of elisions
would require my best work, and success would by no means be assured.

Anyway – sadly, as far as Madame d’Ortolan’s purposes are concerned – I have no intention of killing the people on the list. On
the contrary: I will save them if I can (with any luck, in a sense I already have). No, I intend to go quite diametrically
off-message in this matter.

I already have, of course; Lord Harmyle wasn’t even on the list.

Patient 8262

A
h, our profession. Mine, and those who will now be looking for me. My peers, I suppose. Though I was peerless, if I say so
myself. There was – especially at the more colourful end of the reality spectrum – an insane grace to my elisions, a contrived
but outrageous elegance. As evidence, the fiery fate of one Yerge Aushauser, arbitrageur. Or perhaps you would prefer the
brain-frying exit of Mr Max Fitching, lead singer of Gun Puppy, the first true World Band in more realities than we cared
to count. Or the painful and I’m afraid protracted end of Marit Shauoon, stunt driver, businessman and politician.

For Yerge, I arranged a special bubble bath at his Nevada ranch, replacing the air feed to the nozzles in his hot tub with
hydrogen. The cylinders, hidden under the wooden decking around the tub, were controlled by a radio-activated valve. I was
watching from the other side of the world through a digital camera attached to a spotting scope, a sunlight-powered computer
and a proprietary satellite uplink, all sitting disguised by sage bushes on a hillside a mile away. A motion sensor alerted
me that the hot tub was in use while I was asleep in my hotel in Sierra Leone. When I gazed, bleary-eyed, into my phone I
saw Yerge Aushauser striding up to the tub, alone for once. I swung out of bed, woke the laptop for a higher-definition view
and waited until he was sitting there in the frothing water, all hairy arms and furious expression. Probably another expensive
night at the gaming tables. He usually brought home a girl or two to knock around on such occasions, but perhaps this morning
he was tired. The view was quite clear through the cool morning air, untroubled by thermals. I could see him put something
long and dark to his mouth, then hold something to its end. A spark. His fat fingers would be closing round his Gran Corona,
his throat exposed as he put his head back against the cushion on the tub’s rim and blew the first mouthful of smoke into
the clear blue Nevada sky.

I punched in the code for the valve controlling the feed from the hydrogen cylinders. Seconds later, half a world away, the
water frothed crazily, briefly seemed to steam as though boiling, hiding first Yerge and then the tub in a ball of vapour.
This erupted almost immediately into an intense yellow-white fireball which engulfed the tub and all the nearby decking. Even
in the early morning sunshine it blazed brightly.

Amazingly, after a few seconds, while the pillar of roaring flame piled towards the heavens like an upside-down rocket plume,
Yerge stumbled out of the conflagration and across the decking, hair on fire, skin blackened, strips of it hanging off him
like dark rags. He fell down some steps and lay there, motionless, minus his cigar but still – in a sense – smoking.

Until the decking itself caught fire – Yerge’s servants had run out from the house and dragged him away by then – there was little
smoke; oxygen and hydrogen burn perfectly, producing, of course, only water. Most of the initial burst of smoke, now drifting
and dissipating in the cool morning breeze and heading towards the distant grey sierras, would have come from Yerge himself.

He had ninety-five per cent burns, and lungs seared by flame inhalation. They managed to keep him alive for nearly a week,
which was remarkable.

Max Fitching was a god amongst mortals, a man with the voice of an angel and the proclivities of a satyr. I killed Max while
he sat in a seriously pimped open-top half-track in Jakarta, waiting for a roadie to return with his drugs (Max never did
get the hang of dressing down. Or going incognito). The Israeli laser weapon was originally an experimental device designed
to bring down Iranian missiles while they were still over Syria, or, better still, Iraq. I fired it from a container truck
a block down the street from Max’s idling half-track. Even attenuated to the minimum it was grossly overpowered for the job
and rather than drill a neat hole straight through Max’s fashionably pale, heavily sunglassed, wildly dreadlocked head, it
blew it to smithereens. Windows shattered three storeys up.

This was not elegant – far from it. The elegance came from the fact that the laser burst was not a single brutally simple pulse
but one which had been precisely frequency-modulated to mirror the digitalised information of a high-sample-rate MP3 signal,
compressed into a microsecond. What hit Max was effectively an MP3 copy of “Woke Up Down,” Gun Puppy’s first worldwide hit
and the song that had made Max truly famous.