Rumour had it that the ability to take another with oneself between realities had been discovered fortuitously, if not perhaps entirely accidentally, when a certain transitioning adept had willed the standard transitioning process while in the act of coition with their lover. Adept and lover both discovered themselves in the bodies of another sexually joined couple on another world entirely. This was a shock, obviously, but allegedly not so great a one as to prevent the couple from being able to return successfully to their home world, or complete the act they had been engaged in. Nor was this pioneering transitionary shy about exploring the possibility that they alone had caused the event, rather than it being a function of the specific combination of qualities embodied by that specific first couple.
Further gossip insists that it was some time before our adventurous virtuoso informed the Transitionary Office of this innovation, the individual concerned claiming that they wanted to ensure this novel ability was not the result of some freak, one-off stroke of luck. They had carried out further research and established that the ability was controllable and the process both repeatable and, probably, transmissible: a teachable skill rather than a unique and freakish abnormality.
Allegedly, that same adept discovered how to bring an act of sexual congress to a fully successful conclusion in one world and then transition to another world to experience the whole thing again (in some versions, with or without their partner in the first world).
Most strands of these rumours hold that it was Madame d’Ortolan who discovered this ability, and that she did so some two hundred years ago, thereafter using the influence and power that the discovery of this innovation provided her with both to fulfil her ambition of being elevated to the Central Council of the Transitionary Office and to gain the particular privilege the Central Council granted its most distinguished and illustrious members: that of being allowed to skip back a generation or two every now and again when one’s original or presently occupied frame grew old, so that – re-emplaced in a succession of younger bodies – one might never grow truly old, or – save by violent chance – die.
It is said that for those perverse souls for whom the prospect of travelling throughout an infinitude of worlds is somehow not incentive enough to undergo the training that the Transitionary Office requires, the rather more base promise of serial sexual transitioning makes all the difference, even if the practice is both frowned on and made difficult by the Office’s tightly controlled monopoly of septus. Equally, for those for whom power stretching across unnumbered realities is not enough, effective immortality helps provide an extra spur to aspire to a place on the Central Council.
Subsequent research has revealed that for most people capable of the technique it is not necessary to penetrate or be penetrated; a tight hug over as much of the body as possible, with a minimal amount of skin-to-skin contact, preferably about the head or neck, is all that’s required. A few blessed individuals need only encircle or nearly encircle both wrists, or just one, and an even tinier number need only hold the other person’s hand.
Foreseers are those who can see into the future, though usually only for a brief moment as they transit from one world to another, and hazily. It is a highly limited skill, the least well understood of those we know about and the least reliable and consistent of those of interest to us, but it is the most highly prized nevertheless, for its rarity apart from anything else.
Trackers may or may not be a specialised form of foreseer (the foreseers claim this, the trackers deny it). Trackers are those who are able to follow individuals or – more unusually – specific events or trends between the worlds. They are spies, essentially; a semi-secret police force that the Transitionary Office uses to keep its transitionaries under some sort of control.
That the trackers’ services are required to the degree that they undeniably are is due to a quality of character shared by most transitionaries. The people who turn out to be capable of flitting amongst the many worlds are almost without exception selfish, self-centred individuals and individualists, people who think rather highly of themselves and exhibit or at least possess a degree of scorn for their fellow humans; people who think that the rules and limitations that apply to everybody else don’t or shouldn’t apply to them. They are people who already feel that they live in a different world to everybody else, in other words. As a specialist from the UPT’s Applied Psychology Department expressed it to me once, such individuals are some lopsided distance along the selfless – selfish spectrum, and clustered close to the latter, hard-solipsism end.
Clearly, if left to their own devices such rampant egoists might misuse their skills and abilities to pursue their own agendas of self-glorification and self-aggrandisement. Such individuals need to be controlled, and to be controlled they need to be watched, and that is what trackers do: they spy on and help to police the transitioners. Trackers and transitionaries are as a result kept as far apart from each other as possible, to prevent them concocting their own little conspiracies or drawing up plans of benefit to them but not to l’Expédience and its aims.
As a result, the general demeanour of the Transitionary Office, the University of Practical Talents, the Speditionary Faculty and the Concern itself – their own collective fragre, if you like – is one of some watchfulness, a degree of suspicion and outright paranoia, both unfounded and entirely justified. An entire Department – the Department of Shared Ideals – exists to attempt to ameliorate this unfortunate and – if only at a low level – debilitating effect and investigate further how it might be both treated and prevented.
The Department’s success, however, might be fairly if sadly judged by the fact that the overwhelming preponderance of those it ventures to assist in the course of its duties are absolutely convinced that it is itself simply another part of the whole rigidly proscriptive controlling apparatus whose baleful influence it is supposedly there to mitigate.
There is a smattering of other categories of skills, all of them essentially negative in their effects: blockers, who by their presence – usually they have to be touching – can prevent a transitioner from flitting; exorcisers, who can cast a transitioner out of their target mind; inhibitors, who can frustrate the abilities of the trackers; envisionaries, who can see – albeit indistinctly – into other realities without going there and randomisers, whose skills are almost too wayward to categorise fully but who can often adversely influence the abilities of other adepts around them. Randomisers are severely restricted in what they are allowed to do, where they are allowed to go and who they are permitted to meet – rumours exist to the effect that some of them are imprisoned for life or even disposed of.
Transitioners, tandemisers, trackers, foreseers, blockers, exorcisers and the rest are in effect the front-line troops of l’Expédience (it does have proper troops too – the Speditionary Guard: rarely mobilised and never, in the thousand-year history of the Concern, yet used, thank Fate). They are outnumbered ten or more to one by the back-up grades of support staff who provide all the logistical and intelligence services they need and who plan, oversee, record and analyse their activities. Bureaucrats, basically, and as loved for their activities as bureaucrats everywhere.
These days l’Expédience also has its own transitioneering research facilities – controversially as far as the UPT is concerned, its Speditionary Faculty believing that it ought to hold a monopoly regarding such matters. The Central Council has made noises about the wasteful duplication of effort involved but seems unwilling to act to resolve the issue, either because it believes the competition might be fruitful (plausible if unprovable), the redundancy a safety feature (safeguarding against what has never been made clear) or because it was Madame d’Ortolan’s idea in the first place and it provides her and the Central Council with the ability to pursue avenues of transitioneering research as they see fit without having to appeal to – and wait on the approval of – the notoriously staid and conservative Professors and other members of the Research Council Senate of the Speditionary Faculty itself.