I take the little ormolu case from my shirt pocket and turn it over and over on my fold-down table. To flit or not to flit. If I do vacate the aircraft then I will cover my tracks more completely than if I wait until my arrival. However, I could waste a pill. And I just might discover the hard way that the rumours are true, and find myself blast-frozen and gasping my way to unconsciousness as I start the long fall to the sea or the land. There is also the well-documented complication that sometimes one ends up in an aircraft going somewhere quite different to the destination of that one started from.
Usually there is a reliable commonality between a roughly aligned group of worlds regarding the placement of continents, major geographical features such as mountain ranges and rivers and hence big cities and therefore the air routes between them, so that leaving one aircraft results in a transition to a similar craft on a parallel course, but not always. There appear to be limits to the maximum displacement in space and time that people have made in such circumstances – a few kilometres up or down, a few dozen laterally, and some hours later or earlier – and it is as if some aspect of one’s will or visualisation is guiding one to the nearest approximation it’s possible to find, but sometimes the influence of this ghostly presence goes quite awry, or just accepts something that it hopes will do, but which will not.
Once, flitting while flying over the Alps bound for Napoli from Dublin, I ended up on a flight from Madrid to Kiev. That’s practically a right-angle! It took me a day and a half to repair the damage to my itinerary, and I missed one appointment. I had and have no idea why this happened. When I mentioned this little adventure to someone from the Transitionary Office – the primary body of l’Expédience, which at least in theory oversees all the actions of those like myself and Madame d’Ortolan – the bureaucrat concerned just blinked behind his rimless glasses and said how interesting this was and hastened to record a note! I mean, really.
The drug we take to effect our travels is called septus. Some take theirs in liquid form, from tiny vials like medical ampoules. Others prefer to snort their travellers’ medicine, or inject it. Some like it to be in the form of a suppository or pessary. Madame d’Ortolan was always said to have favoured the latter option.
I tap the little ormolu case gently on one corner, rotate it a quarter turn, tap it again, and repeat. Most of us take septus in pill form; it is simply less of a bother. I regard most of the other methods as being rather like showing off.
A clear patch of sea gleams up at me. A ship, made tiny by the vertical kilometres between us, slides slowly north across the ruffled grey surface, drawing a feathery white wake after it. I imagine somebody on that ship looking up and seeing this aircraft, a bright white dot leaving its own thin trail inscribed across the blue.
Perhaps some of those who are said to have disappeared are gone to other Earths entirely, where Pangaea still holds, Man never evolved and sapient otters or insectile hive-minds rule in our place – who can say?
When we flit we go to where we imagine, and if – distracted, disoriented – we imagine something too far away from what we know and where we wish to go to, we may end up somewhere it is somehow impossible to imagine one’s way back from. I don’t know how that could be – what saves people like myself, sometimes, is how intensely we long for our home – but you never know.
I have quizzed the theorists, technicians and general functionaries of the Transitionary Office regarding just how all of this works and have yet to receive a satisfactory answer. I am not supposed to know because I have no need to know. Still, I would like to know. My being sent to save that young doctor from being crushed in that collapsing building in Savoie, for example: does that not imply foresight? Must we – I mean the Concern – not have some ability to look ahead in time, or be able to use realities otherwise similar to another but separated only by being slightly displaced in time so that – having observed what has happened in the leading one – one is able to affect events in the trailing one? This would amount to the same thing.
Of course, maybe it was complete happenstance that the tenement collapsed, pure chance. I find this unlikely, however. Chance is rarely pure.
It was at the casino that I encountered Mrs Mulverhill again, for the first time in a long time – or at least so I thought. Not that I realised immediately.
Cities are, as I’ve said, the best places to flit between realities; nexuses of transportation in our multiple existence just as they are in any given single world. The principal embassy of l’Expédience in the world I have tended to travel to and within – partly though chance and partly through some affinitive predisposition on my part, I dare say – is in what is called variously Byzantium, Constantinople, Konstantiniyye, Stamboul or Istanbul, depending. It is an ideal focus for our interests and abilities, straddling continents, linking east and west and evoking the past and its manifold legacies in a way that few other cities do on this meta-Earth I deal with. Ancient, modern, a furious mix of peoples, faiths, histories and attitudes, poised above and threatened by myriad fault lines, it exemplifies both heritage, jeopardy, division and linkage all at once. We have another office in Jerusalem.
There used to be another, in Berlin, but that city has, perversely, become less attractive for our purposes since the fall of the Wall and the reunification of Germany (one of those distributed, straggling meta-events that resonated through the sheaved realities for all the many worlds like some coordinated spawning phenomenon). So the office was closed. A shame, in a way; I liked the old, divided Berlin, with its wall. The greater city was a vast, open, airy place enfolded with lakes and sprawling tracts of forest on both sides of the divide but still, at its core, there was always a forlorn air about it, as well as a faint feeling of imprisonment, on both sides.
And a slowly spinning plate, if you know what I mean. We look for spinning, wobbling plates; places where it feels that matters could go either way, where another spin, another input of energy might restore stability, but where, equally, just a little more neglect – or even a nudge in the right/wrong place – could produce catastrophe. There are interesting lessons to be gleaned from the wreckage that results. Sometimes you cannot tell everything about a thing until you’ve seen it broken.
There ought to be a certain point in one’s training for the post of transitionary (our official job title – clunky, I know; I prefer the sobriquet “flitter” – or “transitioner” or “transitioneer,” at a pinch) when one realises that one has discovered or acquired an extra sense. It is in a sense the sense of history, of connection, of how long a place has been lived in, a feeling for the heritage of human events attached to a particular piece of landscape or set of streets and stones. We call it fragre.
Part of it is akin to having a sharp nose for the scent of ancient blood. Places of great antiquity, where much has happened over not just centuries but millennia, are often steeped in it. Almost any site of massacre or battle will have a whiff, even thousands of years later. I find it at its most pungent when I stand within the Colosseum, in Rome. However, much of it is simply the layered result of multifarious generations of people having lived there; lived and died, certainly, but then as most people live for decades and die just the once, it is the living part that has the greatest influence over the aroma, the feel of a place.