Calbefraques might have seemed the obvious destination; you might think, why didn’t I just wake in my own body, in my own house in the trees looking out over the town beneath? Because for years I have known I might turn traitor in deed as well as thought, and prepared for it mentally, telling myself that in any transition under duress or in a state of semiconsciousness, the place I thought of as home would be the last place I ought to aim for.
All the same, I would not have thought I’d end up here.
The clothes in this wardrobe are fancy dress, I realise; ancient costumes for balls and masquerades.
Three rooms later I discover men’s clothes of the appropriate era and that fit. Just dressing makes me feel better. There is no hot water in the Palazzo Chirezzia; I wash myself from a bathroom cold tap.
There is no electric power either, but when I remove the sheet from the desk in the Professore’s study and lift the telephone I hear a dialling tone.
But what to do next? I stand there until the phone starts making electronic complaining noises at me. I replace it on the cradle. I’m here without money, connections and a supply of septus; conventionally the first thing I ought to do is establish contact with an enabler or other sympathetic and Aware, clued-in soul, to put myself back in contact with l’Expédience and to locate a source of septus. But I’d only be putting myself in jeopardy, handing myself back to my earlier captors and my gently talking friend with his sticky tape, if I do. I have been faced with the choice Mrs M always said I would be faced with and I have made my decision. It is a big thing that I have done and I am still not entirely certain I have jumped the right way, but it is done and I must live with the consequences.
However, the point here is that I will play into the hands of those I oppose if I take the most obvious route and attempt to contact a normally accredited agent of l’Expédience in this world.
The most important thing is to get my hands on some septus. Without that, probably, there’s little I can do. Certainly I appear to have flitted, once, without the aid of the drug. However, it was in extremis, uncontrolled, impromptu (a surprise even to me when it happened), it was to a semi-random location and it resulted in considerable discomfort as well as a state of profound confusion – I did not even know who I was initially – that lasted quite long enough to have made me extremely vulnerable in the immediate aftermath of the flit. Had there been anybody who wished me ill present at that point, I would have been in their power, or worse.
For all I know I had that one spontaneous flit in me and no more – perhaps some residue of septus had built up in my system that allowed me to make that single transition, but is now cleared out, exhausted – and even voluntarily putting myself in another situation as terrifying and threatening as being suffocated while tied to a chair would fail to result in anything more remarkable than me pissing my pants. So, I need septus. And the only supplies of it in this world, as in all worlds, are supposed to be in the obsessively wary and inveterately paranoid gift of the Concern.
However, there ought to be a way round this.
I run my hand over the sheet covering the seat by the telephone. Very little dust.
I sit and start entering short strings of numbers at random into the telephone keypad until I hear a human voice. I have forgotten almost all the Italian I learned last time so I have to find somebody who shares a language. We settle on English. The operator is patient with me and finally we establish that what I require is Directory Enquiries, and not here but in Britain.
The Concern has bolt-holes, safe houses, deep-placement agents and cover organisations distributed throughout the worlds it operates most frequently in. As far as I was aware I knew about all the official Concern contacts in this reality, though of course it would be naive to assume there would be none that had been kept from me.
However, I also knew of one that wasn’t an official Concern contact because it had been set up by somebody who wasn’t part of the Concern proper at alclass="underline" the ubiquitous and busy Mrs M. So she had assured me, anyway.
“Which town?”
“Krondien Ungalo Shupleselli,” I tell them. I ought to be remembering the name correctly; we are solemnly assured in training that these emergency codes should be so ingrained within us that we ought still to remember them even if we have, through some shock or trauma, forgotten our own names. This one has been thought up, probably, by Mrs Mulverhill rather than some name-badged Concern techies in an Emergency Procedures (Field Operatives) Steering Group committee meeting, but, like the official codes, it ought to work across lots of worlds and languages. It will probably sound odd in almost all of them, but not to the point of incomprehensibility. And it should be far enough removed from the name of any person or organisation to avoid accidental contacts and resultant misunderstandings with possible security implications.
“Sorry. Where?”
“It may be a business or a person. I don’t know the town or city.”
“Oh.”
I think about it. “But try London,” I suggest.
There is indeed a business answering to that name in the English capital. “Putting you through.”
“… Hello?” says a male voice. It sounds fairly young, and just that single word, spoken slowly and deliberately, had been enough for a tone of caution, even nervousness, to be evident.
“I’m looking for Krondien Ungalo Shupleselli,” I say.
“No kidding. Now there’s a name I haven’t heard in a while.”
“Yes,” I say, sticking to the script. “Perhaps you might be able to help.”
“Well, that’s what this is all about, isn’t it?”
“May I ask to whom I’m talking?”
A laugh. “My name’s Ade.”
“Aid?” I ask. This seems a little too obvious.
“Short for Adrian. What about yourself?”
“I assume you know the procedure.”
“What? Oh, yeah. I’m supposed to give you a name, that right? Okey-doke. How about Fred?”
“Fred? Is that common enough?”
“As muck, mate. Common as muck. Trust me.”
“Indeed I do, Adrian.”
“Brill. Consider yourself sorted. What can I do for you, mate?”
Madame d’Ortolan sat in the rooftop aviary of her house in Paris, listening to the flurrying of a thousand soft wings and looking out over the darkening city as the street lights came on. The view, graphed by the bars of the aviary, showed deep dark reds and bruised purples towards the north-west, where a recently passed rainstorm was retreating towards the sunset. The city still smelled of late-summer rain and refreshed foliage. Somewhere in the distance, a siren sounded. She wondered how big a city had to become, and how lawless and dangerous in this sort of reality, for a siren always to be heard somewhere. Here, the siren was like an audible signature of fragre.
Madame d’Ortolan took a breath and said, “No, he must have had another pill hidden somewhere.”
Mr Kleist stood in the shadows, behind and to one side of her seat, which was an extravagant work in bamboo with a great fan-shaped top. He looked about at the various birds still flying within the aviary. His head jerked as one flew too close and he ducked involuntarily. He shook his head.
“He did not, ma’am, I am sure.”
“Nevertheless.”
“He was fully restrained, ma’am. It could only have been in his mouth, and that was checked very thoroughly, both before the interrogation began and afterwards. Even more thoroughly, subsequent to his apparent transition.”