Transition (37 page)

There is a saying that some foolish people believe: what does not kill you makes you stronger. I know for a fact, having seen
the evidence – indeed, often enough having been the cause of it – that what does not kill you can leave you maimed. Or crippled,
or begging for death or in one of those ghastly twilights experienced – and one has to hope that that is entirely not the right
word – by those in a locked-in or persistent vegetative state. In my experience the same people also believe that everything
happens for a reason. Given the unalleviatedly barbarous history of every world we have ever encountered with anything resembling
Man in it, this is a statement of quite breathtakingly casual retrospective and ongoing cruelty, tantamount to the condonation
of the most severe and unforgivable sadism.

Nevertheless – as much through chance, I am sure, as through any innate skill or other natural quality – I survived these trials
and did indeed grow more skilled, more capable and more adept at all the arcane, ethically dubious, technically overspecialised
and frankly disreputable techniques required.

I did, however, grow more frightened too, because with every new mission and each required high-risk intervention, attack
or killing, I knew that my gradually perfecting skills would not save me when my luck ran out, indeed that they would stand
for precisely nothing when the moment came, as it surely must, and that with every new mission I upped the chances of this
one being my last, not through any lessening of my preparation, creativity, vigilance or skill but due to the simple working-out
of statistical chance.

I had already long forgotten most of the interventions I had taken part in, then later could not recall how many people I
had harmed or injured, or left disabled or terrified for life.

Eventually, to my shame, I even lost count of those I’d killed.

I think there is a kind of queasily mixed emulsion of guilt and fatalism that settles on a man or woman engaged in such deadly,
fatal work. I mean deadly to those we target; fatal only potentially to ourselves, but still, eventually, if we keep going
long enough, always guaranteed to be terminal.

We come to know that the end cannot be evaded for ever, and the terror of that knowledge – the increasing certainty that every
successful mission and every triumphant side-stepping of death this time only makes it more likely that the next risk we take
could be the one that finally takes us – makes us more and more nervous, neurotic, unbalanced and psychologically fragile.

And, I believe, if we are involved with the business of killing others and have any sort of conscience at all – and even if
we know that we fight the good fight and do what we do for the best of motives – a part of us, if we are honest with ourselves,
comes to look forward to that end, begins even to welcome its increasingly likely arrival. If nothing else it will bring an
end to worry, an end to guilt and nightmares, both waking and sleeping.

(An end to tics, neuroses and psychoses, too. An end to seemingly always finding myself in the body and mind of somebody with
OCD, and that being the one trait that transfers.)

I might have said no, I might have resigned, but stupid pride, an urge not to be beaten or cowed by anybody, including Madame
d’Ortolan, even if she was now the undisputed head of the whole Concern, kept me going until, when that initial impetus fell
away and I might have justly claimed I’d made my point and stepped away, the resigned fatalism and thirst for it all to end – and
end as it had taken place so far, as though only that could somehow justify and make sense of everything I’d done – took over,
enabling and diseasing me at once.

So by the time I might have thought myself able to relinquish the role I had played, it was too late to do so. I was another
person. We all are, anyway, with every passing instant, even without the many worlds, changing from moment to moment, waking
to waking, our continuity found as much within the context of others and our institutions, but how much more so for those
of us who jump from soul to soul, world to world, mind to mind, context to context, husk to husk, leaving who knows what behind,
picking up who knows what from whom?

I thought my time had come on a few occasions, most recently when I was chasing a disgraced caudillo out of his estancia,
down the steps and into the man-high grasses of one of the great blue-green fields that stretched to the horizon. He fumbled
the revolver as he plunged, nearly falling, down the broad stone steps, trying both to hold his trousers up as he went and
to avoid tripping over the broad red sash that was supposed to secure them. (I’d surprised him both in flagrante and on the
toilet, both bucking and straining under a straddling slave girl. I swear people’s sexual predilections never cease to astound
me, and you’d have thought by now that I could reasonably claim I’d seen it all: wrong again.)

He’d thrown the girl at me and so bought himself enough time to start running, once he’d tripped over the still twitching
bodies of his two guards in the hall outside. I disentangled myself from the screaming girl, then had to punch her with my
free, non-cutlass-heaving hand when she came flying at me, nails out (the local gods alone knowing why). Finally I set off
in pursuit, roaring for effect. I don’t even know where the pistol came from. I stooped and plucked it from the ground as
the caudillo disappeared into the grasses, screaming hysterically. Not loaded. Well done. I pushed it into my waistband anyway
and followed the trail of tall broken grasses, slackening my pace a little, then a lot. Ahead of me the caudillo had the hard
job, pushing into and trampling over the finger-thick stalks, leaving me with a path that a one-legged blind man could have
followed and still gained on his quarry.

The wind sighed across the tops of the grasses somewhere over my head, and for a moment I was back in a banlieue just beyond
the Périphérique, vaulting a burned-out car and chasing after the two young Maghrebis who’d thought to try and rape the girl
in the tower block we’d just left. All gallant stuff, and she would allegedly turn into either a cowed, failed little thing
who’d jump with her baby from the roof of this very block before she was twenty, or a noted authority on psycho-semantics – whatever
that was – at the universities of Trier and Cairo, according to whether the mooted violation took place or not.

The boys had a bottle of nitric with them. I was supposed to use it to do to them what they’d been going to do to her after
they’d fucked her (otherwise they’d try again), but before I could catch them they leapt a wall and fell ten metres into a
newly dug hole for a Métro line extension. One had time to scream before he hit the concrete. The other didn’t – scamp must
have been between breaths. Parkour ninjas only in their PlayStation avatar forms, they’d both tumbled as they went and so
hit head first. I’d just got to the wall. I still think I heard both necks snap, though it could have been their skulls popping,
I suppose. The smashed bottle of nitric pooled around their bodies, raising fumes.

Except this time they both scrambled up a chain-link fence into an electricity substation and started running across the top
of the humming machinery, leaping equipment like hurdlers. They disappeared together inside a single titanic blue flash that
wrecked my night vision and produced a concussive bang that left my ears ringing. I bounced to a stop against the fence.

Wait, this hadn’t happened… I’d almost jumped the wall too, not been about to go geckoing up some chain-link and start dancing
across the busbars.

And then I was back in the blue-green field of giant grass again, still pacing heavily after the increasingly desperate caudillo.
I could hear his panting breaths mingled with gasped, gulped pleas for mercy somewhere ahead. The path he was leaving was
curved; he might be trying to circle back to the buildings, having worked out that he stood no chance while having to blaze
the trail for both of us through the stiff, resistant crop.

But no; I was charging down a hillside favela in Bahia, jumping empty oil cans and screaming at the departing back of another
skinny young kid blurring through the crowds of shouting people. This one I just had to scare. I was supposed to be mistaken
for an undercover cop and she was supposed to become a famous violinist, not a drug courier. She ran into the first big street
at the bottom of the hill and missed getting flattened by a truck by about a centimetre. The truck swerved, half toppled,
a man on a motorbike went full speed into the side of it, nearly taking his head off, flopping dead. The girl disappeared
down an alley on the far side of the traffic and I stopped, stooped, hands on knees to get my breath back.

I felt dizzy, staggered to one side and then the stagger turned into a run; I was still pelting down the alley after her.
I shouted her name and she half turned immediately before she reached the street, long brown hair flung out to the side just
for a moment. The truck hit her full on and tossed her into the oncoming stream of traffic, sending her spinning doll-loose
under a bus, making it bounce on her body like it had gone over a speed bump. I skidded, stopping so fast against a corner
that my sunglasses fell off. What the fuck was going on?

I hesitated as I paced after the caudillo, then kept on going, cutlass raised, shaking my head to loose the bizarrely vivid
feeling of having just relived the recent past.

Cutlass they wanted, cutlass they would get. It had some historical meaning, apparently. At any rate, there would be no comeback
now, no triumphal return no matter how undeserved. (Ask not. Oh, ask then. The answer is: a corrupt press, the manipulations
of a foreign power and rich, influential families bribing thugs and judges: any incompetence, any evil can be washed away
with sufficient muscle and money.) But not for our boy here; not for this version in this iteration of the world. The trail
was still curving back round through the grass. It was a little narrower now, too, less wasteful. The caudillo must be getting
half clever, trying to slip between the stalks rather than batter and stumble his way over them. I upped my pace to a normal
walk, still puzzling over what was happening with these not-quite/more-than flashbacks.

I found the caudillo’s scarlet waist-sash first, scribbled like a trail of rather too neat blood on the flattened grass. And
then the man himself, lying in the grass, chest heaving, tears streaming, pants still at three-quarter mast, air whistling
in and out of his gaping mouth, his hands clasped in front of him as though in prayer while he pleaded with me and offered
rapidly increasing sums to let him go.

I swivelled the cutlass in the most economical of backstrokes – the grass constricted matters – and the bastard twisted, rolled
and suddenly had a tiny silvery two-shot up-and-over pistol in his quivering hands, pointed right at my face. In that instant,
I had time to see that the gun might be small but the barrels each looked wide enough to stick a little finger down and not
get it wedged, and the range was laughable.

How slowly my arm seemed to be moving as it brought the cutlass round and down. Had I time to flit away? Not quite. But I
could start the process. You never knew.

So, those flashbacks that were not quite and rather more than flashbacks had been some sort of premonition of things going
terminally wrong. That was what they’d meant; they’d been a warning. How foolish of me to ignore my own subconscious, I thought,
though it did also occur to me that a simple but very strong urge to take off after the caudillo and his girly cries waving
a high-powered handgun might have been a still simpler and less ambiguous hint. But a cutlass they had wanted, and where would
people like me be if we didn’t even have the weaselly excuse of just obeying orders?

This was taking too long. I thought I could hear the swish of the cutlass edge tearing through the air as it accelerated,
and feel its tip connecting with a couple of the closest stalks of grass as it passed, a blade amongst blades…

The caudillo’s fist, the one holding the gun, jerked once.

There was a click.

No more.

Gun jammed or safety still on.

Or also not loaded, of course – precedent the fumbled pistol dropped on the steps. (The man had made an unholy mess of running
the country – why expect him to be competent with a gun?)

Didn’t particularly matter.

The scimitar’s curved blade hit the blubbering caliph on one arm then the other, slicing all four bones and sending two halved
forearms and the gun tumbling into the rushes. Wait a minute—

The return stroke took the shrieking man’s head off. I was already flitting away, though whether from sighing blue-green grass
in Greater Patagonia or tall rushes within the sunlit marshes of New Mesopotamia, I was no longer sure.

Patient 8262

I
must have made myself understood to the medical staff somehow. Initially I did no more than blow off steam to the nurse who
came, grumbling, to investigate my shouting in the middle of the night. The fellow looked like he had just woken up despite
the fact he was meant to be fully awake during his night shift.

He gave no sign of understanding what I was saying – I was talking in my own language and so I did not expect him to. He made
soothing noises in between his yawns and tucked my bed sheets back in. Then he patted my hand, took my pulse, put a hand on
my forehead and then, after scribbling something on my notes, left.

I stayed awake for some time, heart beating fast, mentally daring the pervert who’d tried to interfere with me to come back
(I have a weapon I can use). Eventually I must have fallen asleep and only woke up, later than usual, as breakfast was served.

But one of the trainee doctors appeared later that morning and asked me slowly in the local language what had disturbed me
during the night. I told her what had happened, or what had nearly happened, as best I could with my still rudimentary vocabulary
and she made some notes and left.