Transition. Part 8

I had been here before, in a minor key. I hadn't been tied to the chair with wire, and the light hadn't been in my eyes but there had been a chair and a man asking me questions, something had certainly gone wrong and there had been at least one death.

"Didn't you suspect?"

"Suspect what? That she might be one of us?"

"Yes."

"It crossed my mind. I thought-"

"When did it cross your mind?"

"When we were standing in front of a map of the world in the Doge's Palace. She said something about it being just the one world, and that being limiting."

"What did you think then?"

"I thought she was one of the guests staying here, somebody from the Concern I just hadn't happened to b.u.mp into; late arrival, maybe." We were back in the Palazzo Chirezzia, the black and white palace overlooking the Grand Ca.n.a.l.

"You didn't think to ask her this outright?"

"I could have been wrong. I might have misheard or misunderstood. Trying to discover whether she was Aware or not by just asking her would have been an unnecessary risk, don't you think?"

"You were not intrigued?"

"I was very intrigued. Masked ball, mystery woman, the back alleys of Venice. I'm not sure how much more intriguing something can get."

"Why did you leave the ball with her?"

I laughed. "Because I thought she might want to f.u.c.k me, of course."

"There is no need for coa.r.s.e language, Mr... Cavan."

I sat back and put my hand over my eyes. "Oh for f.u.c.k's sake," I breathed.

I was talking to the man who had shot and killed my little pirate captain. He was called Ingrez and did not appear to have forgiven me for getting the better of him in the bar an hour or so earlier. He wore a neat bandage over his right wrist, where I'd punctured it with the pirate captain's sword. He was no longer in the workman's clothes. He'd changed into a black suit and grey polo neck. He certainly didn't carry himself like a workman now. He looked like somebody used to giving rather than taking orders. He also had to be something of a specialist transitioner, a real adept, if he was able to take something as substantial as a gun between worlds with him; few of us could do that. I could, just, but it took a lot of effort. It was his effort, doing just that, that had been responsible for the hit of slew I'd experienced a second or two before he'd shot the girl. He had a broad, tanned, open-looking face with a lot of laughter lines that looked possessed, haunted by something much darker and without humour.

After I'd withdrawn the sword from his wrist and helped him to his feet there had barely been time for any explanations before two of Professore Loscelles's larger servants had burst through the door of the bar, their right hands rather ostentatiously inside their jackets. They had looked like they were spoiling for a fight and seemed disappointed that they had arrived too late, having instead to act as nurses to the two injured members of the team. Ingrez got one of them to walk us to the ca.n.a.l a minute away where the launch that had brought them sat idling, its engine loud in the narrow s.p.a.ces between the darkened buildings. It sat lightless, its driver wearing what looked like a pair of binoculars strapped to his head. It brought Ingrez and me back to the Palazzo Chirezzia, then sped away again. It kept its light on while it was on the Grand Ca.n.a.l.

I was asked to wait in a second-floor bedroom. There was a stout black grille over the window and the door was locked. No telephone. So that when I was escorted here, to the Professore's study, I was still wearing my priestly fancy dress.

Ingrez cleared his throat. "Were there any other points at which you thought she might be Aware?" he asked.

"Just before you arrived," I told him, "when she said something about not travelling, about me being off duty."

"Any other points?"

"No," I said. "She mentioned the word 'emprise.' Said it means a dangerous undertaking. Does that mean anything to you?"

"I know the word," Ingrez admitted, after the tiniest of hesitations. "What does it mean to you?"

"I'd never heard it before. Now I'm not sure what it should mean. Is it important?"

"I couldn't say. But she did not try to recruit you?"

"Into what?" I asked, mystified.

"She made you no offers?"

"Not even the one I was hoping she might make, Mr Ingrez." I tried a regretful smile. I might have spared myself the effort.

"What offer would that have been?"

I sighed. "The one involving she and I having s.e.x," I said quietly, as one might explain something obvious to an idiot. I paused. "For fornication's sake," I added. Ingrez just sat looking blankly at me. "How did you know about all this?" I asked him. "Who was she? What was she doing? Why did she want to contact me in the first place? Why were you trying to stop her, or catch her or... what?"

He looked at me for a while longer. "I am unable to answer any of those questions at this moment in time," he told me. It didn't even sound like he was trying to keep the tone of satisfaction out of his voice.

Madame d'Ortolan and I walked amongst the tombs and tall cypresses crowding the walled cemetery isle of San Michele, in the Venetian lagoon. The bright blue sky was strewn with ragged clouds, in the south-west already turning pale red in the late-afternoon sunset.

"Her name is Mrs Mulverhill," she told me.

I sensed her turning her head to look at me as she told me this. I kept my eyes on the path ahead between the rows of marble tombs and dark metal grilles. "She was one of my tutors," I said. I tried to say it as matter-of-factly as I could. Inside, I was thinking, It was her her! Something sang within me.

"Indeed," Madame d'Ortolan said, pausing to pick a lily from a small vase attached to the wall of one of the tombs. She handed the flower to me. I was about to say something grateful but she said, "Remove the stamina, would you?" I looked at her, puzzled. She pointed into the heart of the flower. "The stamens. Those bits with the orange pollen. Would you pinch those out for me? Please? I'd do it myself but this body's fingers are so... chubby."

Madame d'Ortolan was inhabiting the body of a middle-aged lady with bright auburn hair and a tall, powerful body. She wore a two-piece suit of pink with purple edging and a white silk blouse. Her fingers did look a little thick. I reached into the bell of the flower, trying to avoid the pollen-laden ends. Madame d'Ortolan leant in, watching this intently. "Careful," she said, almost whispering.

I removed the stamens. Two of my fingertips were turned orange by the operation. I presented her with the flower. She snipped the stem with two long fingernails and inserted the bloom into a b.u.t.tonhole in her jacket.

"Mrs Mulverhill has been many things in the Concern," she told me. "An unAware enabler, an arrangements officer, a theatre-logistics supervisor, a transitionary, a lecturer as you have pointed out a transitioneering theorist in the Speditionary Faculty itself and now, suddenly, a traitor."

No, I thought, she was always a traitor.

"What is it that you think we do, Temudjin?" she asked me quietly, stroking my belly with one slow and gentle hand.

"My G.o.d," I breathed, "is this a heavily disguised tutorial?"

She pulled at one of the light brown hairs that grew in a fluted line beneath my belly b.u.t.ton. I drew a breath in through my teeth, smacked at her hand. "Yes," she said, raising one dark eyebrow. "Do answer the question."

"Okay, then," I said, and stroked the stroking hand. "We are fixers." I was talking very quietly. The room was bathed in shadows, lit only by the embers of a near-dead fire and a single candle, still burning. The only sounds were our voices and the soft susurration of rain on a window slanted into the ceiling. "We fix what is broken," I said, trying to paraphrase, trying not to repeat what she had told me, told us, told all her students. "Or stop things about to break from breaking in the first place."

"But why?" She tried to smooth down the hairs on my belly.

"Why not?"

"Yes, but why? Why do this?" She slicked her palm with saliva and attempted to make the hairs stay flat like that.

"Because it's worth doing," I said. "Because we feel it's worth doing and we can act on that feeling."

"But, all else aside, why is it worth doing when we are only so many and there is an infinitude of worlds?" She rubbed my belly as though it was a puppy and then gently smacked it.

"Because there might be an infinitude of people like us too, an infinite number of Concerns; we just haven't met them yet."

"Though the further we expand without encountering anybody else like us, the less likely the chances of that being true become."

"Well, that's infinity for you."

"Good," she said drily, and traced a circle round my belly b.u.t.ton with one finger. "Though you skipped a bit. Before that, you are supposed to say that it is still worth doing some good rather than choosing to do none simply because it seems of so little significance."

"'Futility is self-imposed.'"

"Ah, so you weren't asleep after all." She cupped my b.a.l.l.s. Very gently, she began to knead them, working her hand round them in a soft, continuous, curling motion.

"Ma'am, you always had my full attention." It had been an enjoyable if strenuous few hours, here in her dacha. I'd thought we were finished for the evening, and I'd have guessed so did she, but maybe not; under her hand's caress, I began to feel the first stirrings, once again.

"There is a grain to the fabric of s.p.a.ce time," she said. "A scale on which there is no further divisible smoothness, only individual, irreducible quanta where reality itself seethes with a continual effervescence of sub-microscopic creation and destruction. I believe there to be a similarly irreducible texture to morality, a scale beyond which it is senseless to proceed. Infinity goes in only one direction; outward, into more inhabited worlds, more shared realities. In the other direction, on a reducing scale, once you reach the level of an individual consciousness for all practical purposes, a single human being you can usefully reduce no further. It is at that level that significance lies. If you do something to benefit one person, that is an absolute gain, and its relative insignificance in the wider scheme is irrelevant. Benefit two people without concomitant harm to others or a village, tribe, city, cla.s.s, nation, society or civilisation and the benefits are scalable, arithmetic. There is no excuse beyond fatalistic self-indulgence and sheer laziness for doing nothing."

"Absolutely. Let me do this." I reached over the golden scoop of her back and slid my hand down between her legs. She s.h.i.+fted, bringing herself a little closer so that I didn't have to stretch. She opened her legs a little, scissoring across the crumpled bedclothes. My thumb pressed lightly on the tiny dry flower of her a.n.u.s while my fingers caressed her s.e.x, already half lost in its moistness and heat.

"There you are," she said, sounding amused. "I am experiencing some benefit already." She became quiet for a while, moving her backside rhythmically up and down a little and pressing back against my exploring hand. She brushed some hair from her face, s.h.i.+fted up the bed to kiss me, fully, luxuriantly, one hand behind my head, cupping, then settled back again, her head down, hair veiling her face as I worked my fingers further into her. Her other hand closed round my c.o.c.k, thumb stroking its glans, side to side.

"The question," she said, a little breathless now, "is who determines what is done, and to whom, on whose behalf, and precisely why; to what end?"

"Perhaps," I suggested, "we are working up to some sort of climax, a consummation."

Her body trembled, in what might have been a silent laugh. Or not. "Perhaps we are," she said, then caught her breath. "Ah. Yes, do keep doing that."

"That was my intention."

"Who benefits?" she murmured.

"Perhaps more than one group does," I suggested. "Perhaps those producing the benefit for those most in need also benefit. Why should it not be mutual?"

"That is one view," she said. She brought the hand not supporting her upper body, the one that had been stroking me, up to my mouth, half cupped. "Spit," she said through her dark fringe of hair. I drew more saliva into my mouth, raised my head and let it dribble into her palm. She brought the hand carefully down to her own mouth and did the same, worked the fingers into the glistening fluid on her skin just seeing that made me harder still, when I'd have thought I couldn't be then she set her hand around my c.o.c.k once more, gripping it more firmly, moving her hand more forcefully now. I did the same, watching the sweet mounds of her b.u.t.tocks shake as my fingers moved in and out of her.

"There is another view?" I asked.

"There might be," she said, each breath a gasp now. I was impressed that she could still concentrate on speaking at all. "With sufficient knowledge, if we were able to delve deeper into matters."

"One should," I said, swallowing, "always explore as thoroughly as possible." I cleared my throat. "You taught me that."

"I did," she agreed. Through her hanging fringe of hair, I could just make out that her eyes were tightly closed. "We do some good," she said, her voice raw now, her words clipped, bitten off, "but do we do as much as we might? Is not some of any good we do merely... collateral benefit created as we follow unwittingly at our level, perhaps... perhaps quite deliberately by those in possession of more knowledge and power some other and greater... greater... greater agenda?"

"Such as?"

"Who knows?" she said. "The point is... that by now we might be blind to such subterfuge. We trust our own forecasting techniques so fully that those in the field charged with doing the... doing the dirty work... blindly obey orders without a second thought, even though there is no obvious immediate or even medium-term benefit to be observed, because they have come to trust that genuine good will always accrue in the fullness of time; that's what's always happened and that's what they've been taught to expect, so it's what they accept and what they believe. Thus they do less than they think but more than they know. It is, if I am right, an astonis.h.i.+ng trick; to conjure the symptoms of zealotry from those who believe they are being merely pragmatic, even utilitarian."

(When I first saw her, she was half sitting on a stone parapet, one slim trousered leg extended in front of her, the other drawn up beneath her rear, her face and body turned to one side as she talked to one of a group of men all but surrounding her. She held a gla.s.s in one hand and was in the act of laughing as she raised her other palm towards the chest of the tall man standing, also laughing, by her side. She was slim, compact and still seemed even sitting, seemingly cornered, her back to the drop beyond the terrace edge to dominate the company with a confident ease.

This was on a wide balcony of the Speditionary Faculty main building on the outskirts of central Aspherje. The view led the gaze out across the exquisitely terraced valley beneath to the forested undulations of the Great Park on the far side and then, over the encircling outer reaches of the city hazily indistinct in the low evening rays to the misty foothills guarding the still snow-bright peaks of the far Ma.s.sif. It turned out that from her dacha in the hills you could see the University's Dome of the Mists on a clear day, though you had to stand on the cabin's roof to see over the trees.

I didn't know that on the evening when we first met, of course. Then it was close to sunset, the gold-leafed Dome s.h.i.+ning like a second setting sun and the blond stones of the building and the multifarious skin tones of the faculty members, senior students and undergraduates all appearing rouged with that silky light. She wore a long jacket and a high-cut top, ruched but tight across her b.r.e.a.s.t.s.

"... like an infinite set of electron sh.e.l.ls," she was saying to one of the surrounding academics as I approached. "The set is still infinite but there are measurable, imaginable and innumerable s.p.a.ces in between that can't be occupied."

She grasped my hand when we were introduced.

"Mr... Oh Oh?" she said, one eyebrow flexing. She wore a small white pillbox hat with an attached veil, which seemed an absurd affectation, though the material was white, light as gauze and showed her face within. It was a face of some beauty; broadly triangular, with large, hooded eyes, a proud nose, dramatically flared nostrils and a small, full mouth. The expression was harder to read. You could have believed it was one of charmingly casual cruelty, or just a sort of amused indifference. She was maybe half as old again as me.

"Yes," I said. "Temudjin Oh." I could feel myself colouring. I'd long got used to the fact that my Mongolian-extraction surname could cause some amus.e.m.e.nt amongst English speakers determined to extract a toll of discomfiture from anybody whose name was not as ba.n.a.l or as ugly as theirs. However, there was something about the way she p.r.o.nounced it that immediately brought a blush to my cheeks. Perhaps the sunset would cover my embarra.s.sment.

I was no innocent, had known many women despite my relative lack of years and felt perfectly comfortable in the presence of my supposed superiors, but none of this appeared to matter. It was frustrating to feel reduced again, and so easily, to such callowness.

The handshake was brief and firm, almost more of a squeeze. "You must make many a partner jealous," she told me.

"I... yes," I said, not entirely sure what she was talking about.

I wanted her immediately. Of course I did. I fantasised about her outrageously over the next year and I'm sure I did significantly worse in my finals because I spent so many lectures distracting myself imagining all the things I wanted to do to her there, draped over that lectern, against that blackboard, across that desk when I should have been listening to what she was telling us. On the other hand I tried especially hard to impress her in tutorials with immaculately researched and devastatingly well-argued papers. So maybe it balanced out.) "Been thinking about this?" I asked her. Her hand, sliding up and down my c.o.c.k, was just starting to be less than perfectly blissful, becoming too hot and dry. "Reached any conclusion?"

She let go, raised her head, blew hair from her face and said, breathing hard, "Yes. I think you should f.u.c.k me. Now."

Later, we sat at the table, she in a sheet, me in my s.h.i.+rt, sharing some food, drinking water and wine.

"I've never asked. Is there a Mr Mulverhill?"

She shrugged. "I'm sure there is somewhere," she said, tearing bread from the loaf.

"Let me rephrase that. Are you married?"

"No." She glanced up. "You?"

"No. So... you were married."

"No," she said, smiling and sitting luxuriously back, stretching. "I just like the sound of the name."

I poured her more wine.

She ran her hand fingers spread across the candle flame.

Madame d'Ortolan adjusted her cropped lily blossom until it lay just so on her pink-jacketed breast. We paced the uneven flagstones between the gracefully looming tombs and wanly s.h.i.+ning mausolea. The parched, faded flowers, left lovingly to adorn vases in front of some of the sepulchres, contrasted with the motley green scrub of vigorously healthy weeds pus.h.i.+ng up between the stones.

"Mrs Mulverhill has gone renegade," Madame d'Ortolan told me. "She has lost her wits and found a cause, which appears to be attempting to frustrate us. She has used that famously imaginative mind of hers to concoct a lunatic theory so deranged that we cannot even grasp exactly what it is. But, at any rate, she thinks we take a wrong course, or some such idiocy, and opposes us. It is irritating, and ties up resources we could employ to more actively beneficial effect elsewhere, but so far she has done little real damage." She glanced at me. "That might change, obviously, should she grow more aggressive through frustration, or recruit any others to her cause."

"Do you think that's what she was trying to do with me?"

"Probably." Madame d'Ortolan stopped and we faced each other. "Why do you think she would approach you, particularly?" She smiled. Not entirely unconvincingly.

"Why, has she singled me out?" I asked. She just looked at me and raised her eyebrows. "Has she approached other people?" I asked her. "If she has, were they all transitioners?"

Madame d'Ortolan looked up at the sky, hands behind her back. I imagined the chubby fingers clasped awkwardly, tight. "It may not be in your best interest to know the answers to those questions," she said smoothly. "We would simply like to know if there is any special reason she may have had to choose to approach you."