Forbidden Transition

Prologue

Jocelyn pushed himself upright. Where his palm had pressed against the cylinder’s polished surface, a dull mark showed. He pulled out a silk handkerchief and wiped it away.
‘He must be three hundred pounds if he’s an ounce,’ I thought with distaste.

Seeing that his action produced no reaction, Jocelyn shrugged and returned the handkerchief to the pocket of his voluminous cream suit.

‘Let’s get back, shall we?’ he asked. I nodded assent.

Jocelyn raised his left arm high above his head. At the other end of the almost deserted hangar, a technician lifted an arm in response and moved to the control unit. Moments later, the lights on the gantries faded.

The television cameras looked blindly down on the translucent cylinder as we walked away from it. At the other end, where yellow light still bathed the scene, we could see the technical crew moving around the primary cylinder. The occasional clang of a spanner or screwdriver hitting metal reached us.

Although Jocelyn walked slowly, he still had to pause for breath after every few paces. He was chewing again, I noted. From the occasional whiff, it seemed like cloves. Perhaps his teeth were still hurting.

What an unprepossessing creature you are, Jocelyn, I thought. Yet behind those jowls and close-set eyes, you have a brain I envy. The brain that pushed all this forward. At the ‘all this,’ I glanced back without thinking, looking once more at the secondary cylinder. Jocelyn noticed the movement. ‘Not worrying, are you?’ he asked.

‘No more than usual.’

The fat man stopped and spread his arms wide. ‘There’s nothing to worry about. I keep telling you. You’ve seen the equations, the blueprints; we’ve both understood them. We’ve both supervised every stage of the construction.’ Jocelyn paused. ‘If it weren’t for my heart, I’d be going, not you.’

‘I know that,’ I said, my voice lacking conviction.

Would the research budget have stretched to cover the increased energy cost, I wondered, given the difference in mass? Jocelyn moved off again towards the activity at the end of the hangar. ‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘Nothing can go wrong.’

‘Unless the power fails.’

Jocelyn stopped again. ‘That’s the one thing we can be sure won’t happen, isn’t it?’

We walked the rest of the distance in silence.

Part 1

The execution itself, my guard said, would be the most enjoyable part of the day from my point of view. Almost apologetically but not without relish, they explained that this terminal act – I was to be hanged, I gathered – would be preceded by a period of ‘punishment.’

The wooden cart, hauled by an undistinguishable quadruped, moved unevenly over the rough street. At its centre was a pole to which I was fixed by a leather strap which went around my neck. From the jolting of the cart, it seemed likely I would be strangled before I reached my destination.

The motion and its effect on my breathing hindered my understanding of the ambiguous phrases of the threesome who had, a few minutes earlier, brought me from a stinking, unlit cell and fixed me to the cart. Nonetheless, I had understood their assurances that this was not just a short journey but also one that required no return ticket.

My difficulties were compounded by not knowing where I was or what I had done. Not even who I was. Some days earlier, the period had been an unpleasant blur, impossible to quantify – I had awoken with an abrupt jolt in a dense wood. My apparently dreamless sleep had been disturbed by the baying of dogs.

I had risen from the ground, stood and scratched my head, trying to relieve the feeling of disorientation that often follows sleeping in an unfamiliar place. Sadly, it was not relieved.

Looking down, I found myself dressed in a tight-fitting garment which I had never seen before. Yet I was still me. The asymmetric knobbles showing through the knees of this garment were ones I had lived with for many years.

Apart from that, I seem to remember nothing.

Had I been able to stand there longer and think about it, something might have come to mind. Instead, while I was still inspecting my legs, I was knocked sprawling by a large dog. As it leaned over me, saliva rimming its mouth, I decided that lying still was the safest action. The dog waited for only the slightest excuse before burying its canines in my neck. That was clear as daylight. It was about the only thing that was.

The brute was soon joined by two companions. One was another dog which sniffed speculatively at my genitals. The other was a man who called the dogs to heal and stood over me, scowling.

In one hand, he held a long whip, in the other a short sword. ‘Get up,’ he said. I obeyed, trying to brush the loamy soil from my clothing as I did so.

‘Move,’ he said, nodding in the direction from which he and the two dogs had come. I moved. My companion said nothing during this walk through the woods. Occasionally, he made soft clucking noises at the dogs, which kept close behind me. Any attempt to stray or run, I felt, would be dealt with swiftly by firm teeth.

When we broke from the wood, across the meadow, I saw a moated castle, its walls and turrets a dirty grey, unrelieved by the bright sunlight. Men and women worked the fields that lay in a tight strip around the castle, separating its walls from the meadow. They stopped to watch me pass and muttered among themselves. I thought I heard unkind laughter.

At the castle gates stood a contingent of guards. Without speaking, the dog-handler passed me to them and turned back towards the wood. Two of the guards hustled me along the rough-hewn corridors of the interior, down several flights of stone steps to a dark cellar, where they manacled me to a wall. There I stayed, unwashed, unfed, for an unidentified period. Then the guards took me back upstairs to a large room with a high vaulted ceiling.

I had been manacled to the wall at one end of this room for only a few minutes when the procession entered: six men, all dressed in black. Unlike my own tight-fitting garment, theirs were voluminous and flowing, giving the appearance of great substance. As they sat in a row on a high bench, they looked like a perch of giant birds of prey. For some moments, they watched me in silence.

‘Good morning,’ I said, hoping to evoke a response. None came, except a darkening of expressions from sombre to grim.

Eventually, one rose and stepped down to my level. He stood about halfway between his colleagues and me, one foot thrust forward. He crooked an arm to support his bearded chin in his hand. He moved his other hand across to hold his elbow, holding the position for a minute or more. Then he straightened up and strode to within a pace of me.

‘You have been foolish, have you not?’

I decided not to answer. The question seemed rhetorical.

‘The problem with foolishness, dear Marhan, is that it is often irrevocable.’ I noted briefly that my name was Marhan. On its own, it was not a useful piece of information, although the name did have a familiar ring.

Contrary to mythical belief, knowing the names of things or beings – including oneself – confers neither power nor understanding of them. It was interesting, nonetheless, that my name was known to these people, none of whom I could recall having seen ever before. It was becoming apparent, as a working hypothesis, that I must be suffering from amnesia.

It was my hope at the time that it might prove temporary. It soon became apparent that, in the eyes of these gentlemen, my existence was only temporary. Whether I recovered my memory before losing my life seemed an unwise bet.

The one in six who had come down from the dais was still delivering his lecture, I realised. Picking up the thread, it seemed that he had merely been embroidering on my foolishness and the irrevocability of the consequences that would proceed from it.

No doubt to impress his friends, he stopped suddenly on a question. ‘But why, Marhan? That is what we want to know. What made you do this foolish thing?’

Probably not a rhetorical question, but not one I could answer.

‘Silent, eh? Thinking, always thinking. Ah, Marhan, we know you of old.’

He paused for effect, adopting once more his hand-on-elbow, other-hand-cupping-chin stance.

‘At least, we thought we did. But what now? The clever Marhan, a man who has always walked the thin line of the law with the agility of a tightrope artist, is found asleep in the Imperial Wood. Far from its boundary, he has clearly been sneaking towards the castle, for what purpose I think we can all guess. But it does not matter. For the law assumes that purpose automatically of anyone trespassing within the bounds.’

The voice became heavy with menace. ‘As well you know, Marhan. So tell us why. Tell. Us. Why.’

Because the power failed.

The thought stood out in my mind with the clarity of revelation. It gave me the same feeling you get when you realise suddenly the final factor needed on one side of an equation, and the answer on the other side becomes so obvious you feel weak at the knees with the sheer pleasure of it. But when I thought about the thought, it didn’t mean anything. I knew that I didn’t know that was the answer, but it did seem a likely possibility. I mean, I would have been prepared to bet that it was the answer. But just like knowing my name was Marhan, it didn’t help me understand anything.

Nevertheless, I must have been convinced, for it seemed I had spoken the thought aloud. The vulture before me cocked her hand to his ear. ‘Power? Did I hear the word power? Repeat what you said, Marhan…’ He turned and waved an arm to encompass his fellows. ‘Loud enough for my colleagues to hear.’

I looked at the row of them, anger rising as a knot in my throat. ‘Because the power failed,’ I repeated loudly.

And everybody had said that that was the one thing that couldn’t possibly happen.

Another thought, achingly clear. This one I managed to keep to myself. Even if I had spoken it aloud, it would probably have been drowned in the laughter from the bench.

My inquisitor shrugged and smiled. ‘We can believe that Marhan. Yes, we can believe that.’

He lowered his voice. ‘Of course, the power has failed. It was never there except in your deranged mind. And in the minds of the poor innocents you tried to poison. The civilised world’ – with a sweeping gesture, he took in his companions – ‘has known all along that you were a mere nothing, a wild particle blown by a wind you do not understand, and yet you thought it was your own power that caused the movement.’

‘I am the movement. You are the movement. We are the movement.’ The pause following the emphasis, during which the hoard of upturned faces burst wide into a chorus of affirmation. And the power is like a burning light coursing around the body, pouring from my outstretched hands in great multicoloured streams that wash the crowd back towards silence.

‘If there is any surprise at all,’ the quiet venom continued to drip, corroding the silence of the room, ‘it is that you should at last admit it. And, admitting it, that you should plan this last mad gesture. Well, you have achieved one part of it. You were in the castle itself. But from now on, the game is ours, not yours.’

He paused.

‘That concludes our business for today, I think… Ah, no, I almost forgot, we still must choose the place for your execution.’

He turned and walked towards his colleagues.

‘It is a subject perhaps worth some little discussion, but one which I feel could only bore our friend.’

He turned to face me again, ‘and, perhaps, remove what little excitement you may be expected to feel at the event itself. We shall, I think, discuss it over lunch.’

The other five nodded assent. All six then left the room.

Over lunch, the gentlemen in black selected Fenton as a suitable location. They did not tell me this and I did not see them again. But, after a passage of time, two surly guards came to the room and took me out of the castle again.

I was bundled into the back of a covered wagon, to which were harnessed a pair of horses. At least, my immediate reaction on looking at them was that they were horses, although of course they were not. It took only a moment’s close examination to see that they were not horses. That, however, left a question which I had plenty of time to ponder on my journey in the uncomfortable cart. The guard who sat beside me discouraged my attempts to sit upright. So, I lay on my back and wondered: if the beasts pulling me along in such a bone-jerking manner are not horses, then what on earth were horses? The further realisation that the dogs in the wood had not been dogs added the linked puzzles of what they had been and what dogs were.

My thoughts on these subjects got nowhere, but they passed some time. Towards the end of this stage of the journey, the orange sun sank low in the sky and shone through the back of the cart, which seemed to be constructed from a loosely woven wicker frame on a wooden base. It lit the face of my guard, accentuating the slackness of the muscles around his mouth. A large man and one, I suspected, of little intelligence, he managed to remain upright, his eyes fixed on me despite the swinging of the cart. The eyes were cold and empty, telling me only that I need not bother to try conversation. We had nothing to say to one another.

When night fell, we halted briefly. The guard tied my wrists and ankles and went away - for his dinner, I assumed. Outside, there were occasional noises and, from time to time, the cart jolted. Perhaps fresh animals were being harnessed to it, for soon the guard reappeared and the journey began again. The guard untied me and handed me a flagon of water and some stale bread.

Our journey continued thus for several days. On the last of these, soon after sunset, we entered a town or city. It was obviously Fenton, for only shortly after the noises outside the cart had made me realise that we were no longer travelling across country, the vehicle stopped. Its wicker back was removed, and my guard pushed me out into a nearly dark courtyard. Faint lamps burned at its perimeter, but I could make out no details beyond the chunkiness of massive stone wall studded at intervals with doors. They pushed me towards one of these, laboriously unlocked it, and hustled me into an unlit room.

The door closed behind me with a resonant boom, and the laborious clanking of the lock was repeated. This, I thought, must be the condemned cell. Or one of them. Perhaps all the other doors led to condemned cells, and I had found myself in a city where mass executions were in fashion.

Such thoughts did not trouble me greatly. It was perhaps odd that the idea of losing my life seemed almost trivial besides the loss of identity from which I was suffering. During the indeterminate period I spent in that cell, one day, two, I doubt it was more, for they did not feed or water me in and by the time they removed me from the cell for my final journey, the pains of hunger and thirst were no more than a persistent reminder – I puzzled constantly over who and where I was.

Deep down, I was sure that I was a rational human being. This was of little help. Reason only functions effectively when it has facts to feed on. Pure reason was something I was sure I had never had much time for. But what I had had time for was an impenetrable pool. And the rod with which I fished it brought up nothing but disjointed fragments – the strange wood and the castle, the trial, the whole air of anachronism. It was as if I had suddenly recorded the contents of a school history book in the middle of a nightmare. Yet the nightmare was my only frame of reference, apart from the odd half thoughts about power and its loss.

So, it was in a state of bewilderment rather than fear that I journeyed to the gallows.

People lined the road. For some reason, I imagined that they ought to be cheering or chanting. Instead, there was almost silence. It was sufficiently quiet that I could clearly hear the metal-rimmed wheels of the cart rumbling across the stones of the roadway.

In the central square of Fenton, where a scaffold had been raised to provide a better view for the audience, people stood in silence, mouths half agape, in anticipation of the spectacle to come. On the scaffold itself were the gallows together with a number of other objects, the purpose of which escaped me at first, and the speechmaker from my trial.

He wore the same black garb as before, but additionally a complex insignia upon his left arm.

The guards hauled me from the cart to a place beside him on the scaffold, and re-fixed my leather collar to another stake.