Transition

13

Last night I left this bed and this room and this level and I took me down to the floor below, the ground floor, where I witnessed something I found most terrible just yesterday. I found the silent ward. I was there, I was in it, I lay there with them for a time. It did not last long but it was long enough. I found it terrifying.

It happened after I fainted in the office of the broad-shouldered lady doctor. I still don’t know quite what happened there. It ended up as some sort of bizarre hallucinatory experience, a lucid nightmare of voodoo cause and effect that ended with a keeling-over that I was frankly thankful for at the time and, despite the fact it meant it makes it harder to work out what did happen, that I am still thankful for.

Usually, I’ve found, there is a distinct point when one realises that one is asleep and dreaming. I can’t remember one in what happened – what seemed to happen – yesterday. Was it all a dream? It can’t have been. At the very least, I went or was taken somewhere else yesterday, out of my room.

I was brought back here on a trolley after my time in the silent ward (we’re coming to that). I am certain I was as awake at that point as I am now. Though, when I think about it, I felt just as awake at the start of the experience with the broad lady doctor as I do now. Well, we must leave that aside. There is a continuum of banal experience between waking up in the silent ward and now. No manipulated dolls causing people to have breathing difficulties or heart attacks or whatever and then to throw themselves out of windows. I imagined all that anyway, so I’m told.

This needs thinking about, obviously. That is why I am thinking about it. I am lying here, eyes closed, concentrating. I may have to get up and carry out further investigations in the day room amongst the droolers and perhaps ask further questions of the nursing staff, but for now I need to lie and rest and think without distractions.

Having said that, I am very aware that the door to my room is closed and I will open my eyes the instant I hear it open, just in case my assaulter from the other night has the audacity to attempt a repeat visit during daylight hours.

Two things. First, I cannot see where the visit to the broad lady doctor went from rational to absurd. It appears seamless in my memory. This is most vexing. Like not being able to see how a simple trick is performed in a magic show, or the join in a piece of mending where it ought to be obvious.

The second thing is what happened after I regained consciousness.

I woke flat out in a gurney, a trolley bed. It was dark; only a couple of soft glows from night-lights illuminated a large space the size of the day room at the end of my own corridor, maybe bigger. The ceiling looked higher than in my room or the day room. I felt groggy and sleepy but in no pain, unharmed. I tried to shift a little, but either the sheets were very tight or I had temporarily lost a lot of strength – I was too groggy to tell which – and I had to remain lying flat out. Listening carefully, I could hear gentle snores.

I turned my head to one side, then the other. I was at one end of a large open ward, the kind of thing you see in old photographs, or poor countries. My trolley was at the end of a line of beds, lying conveniently near the set of half-glazed double doors. On the other side of the room, beneath tall windows, was another line of beds. To see more, I tried again to raise my upper torso, attempting to bring my arms up so that I could support myself on my elbows, but without success.

Whatever sense we possess that informs us of such matters was busy informing me that I was not exhausted or hopelessly weakened; my muscles were working normally and were simply being physically prevented from accomplishing their allotted tasks. Something was stopping me from moving. I forced my head up as far as I could, to the point where my neck muscles were quivering, and realised, as I looked down the length of the sheet covering my body, that I was strapped in.

Strapped in! I felt a moment of panic and struggled to release myself. There were four straps: one across my shoulders, another over my belly, pinning my arms to my flanks, a third securing my legs at my knees and a fourth gripping my ankles. None of them seemed prepared to release me by as much as a millimetre. What if there was a fire? What if my attacker from the other night came back to find me helpless? How dare they do this to me? I had never been violent! Never! Had I? Of course, obviously, yes, ha, I had been extremely violent in my earlier life as a famously inventive ultra-assassin, but that was a long time ago and far far away and in another set of bodies entirely. Since I’d been here I had been a lamb, a mouse, a non-goose-booing paragon of matchless docility! How dare they truss me like a psychopathic lunatic!

All my struggles were to no effect. I was still tied tightly to the bed. The straps were as tight as they had been when I’d started and all I’d done was raise my heart rate, make myself very hot and sweaty and half exhaust myself.

At least, I thought, as I tried in vain to find any sort of seam or opening or purchase with my wriggling fingers, if the person who had tried to interfere with me in my room the night before did discover me lying helpless here they would be faced with the same problem of absurdly tight sheets as I was. I had to hope that it would be as impossible to squeeze a stealthily insinuating hand into the bed as my hands were finding it going in the opposite direction.

Nevertheless, I was still terrified. What if there was a fire? I’d roast or bake or burn to death. Smoke inhalation would be a mercy. But what if my attacker did return? Perhaps they couldn’t get a hand under my sheets without undoing me, but they could do anything else they wanted. They could suffocate me. Tape my mouth, pinch my nose. They could perform any unspeakable act they wanted upon my face. Or they might be able to undo the bedclothes at the foot of my bed and gain access to my feet. There were torturers who worked on nothing but feet, I’d heard. Just being severely beaten on the feet was allegedly excruciating.

I continued to try to free my feet, and to work my hands towards the sides of the bed where it might be possible to find some weakness in the confining sheets and straps. The muscles in my hands, forearms, feet and lower legs were starting to complain and even go into cramp.

I decided to rest for a while.

Sweat was running off me and I had a terribly itchy nose that I could not scratch or move my head enough to relieve against any part of the sheets. I looked around as best I could. There must have been two dozen people in there at least. Still not much detail visible, just dark shapes, lumps in the beds. Some were snoring, but not very loudly. I could just shout, I thought. Perhaps one of these sleepers would wake, arise and come to my aid. I looked at the bed next to mine, about a metre away. The sleeper appeared to be quite fat and to have his – her? – head turned away from me, but at least there were no straps securing them to their bed.

I was surprised that my struggles to free myself hadn’t woken anybody up. I must have been quiet, I supposed. There was a funny smell in the ward, I thought. That terrified me too for a moment or so. What if it was burning? Electrical burning! A mattress burning! But, when I thought about it, it wasn’t a burning smell. Not very pleasant, but not the smell of burning. Perhaps one of the people in the ward had had a little night-time accident.

I could shout. I cleared my throat quietly. Yes, no problem there; everything felt like it was working normally. And yet I was reluctant to shout out. What if one of these people was the person who had attempted to assault me? Even if that wasn’t the case, what if one of them was of a similar proclivity? Probably not, of course. Anyone dangerous would be in their own room, wouldn’t they? They’d be locked away, or at least restrained as I had been, erroneously and absurdly.

Still, I was reluctant to shout out.

One of the other patients in the ward made a grunting noise, like an animal. Another one seemed to answer. That smell wafted over me again.

An appalling thought insinuated its way into my mind. What if these were not people at all? What if they were animals? That would account for the lumpen misshapenness of so many of the shapes I could see, for the smell, for all the grunting sounds they were making.

Of course, over all the time I had been here, there had been no hint that the clinic was anything other than a perfectly respectable and humanely run establishment with impeccable medical and caring procedures. I had no reason beyond whatever my highly constrained senses could supply to my already terrified mind and feverishly overactive imagination to believe that I was in anything other than a ward full of ordinary patients, asleep. Nevertheless, when a person has a completely bizarre experience, faints, and then finds themself strapped helpless to a bed in an unknown room full of strangers, at night, it should come as no surprise that they start to imagine the worst.

The corpulent figure looming dimly in the bed next to mine, from whom it now occurred to me there was a good chance that the strange smell had been coming – as well as some of the grunting noises – made motions as though they might be about to turn over, bringing them face to face with me.

I heard myself make a noise, a sort of yelp of fear. The thing in the bed stopped moving for a moment, as though having heard me, or waking up. I decided I might as well make more noise. “Hello?” I said loudly. With a tone of authority, I trusted.

No reaction. “Hello?” I said again, raising my voice somewhat. Still nothing. “Hello!” I said, almost shouting now. A few snores, but the shape in the bed next to mine made no further move. “Hello!” I shouted. Not a soul stirred. “HELLO!”

Then, slowly, the shape in the next bed started to turn round towards me again.

Suddenly, a noise outside, on my other side, forcing me to look in that direction. There was a shape advancing on the barely lit glass of the half-glazed doors as someone or something came down the corridor. A figure, backlit, and then the doors swung open and a male nurse padded in, humming softly to himself, walked up to my gurney and looked, squinting, for a moment at the notes attached to the footboard. I took advantage of the slightly increased light and looked briefly round at the man in the nearby bed. I saw a dark, fat but entirely human face with a week’s worth of beard. Asleep, dumb-looking, mouth and facial muscles slack. He snored. I looked back and saw the young male nurse stepping on the wheel brakes, releasing them.

He wheeled me out into the corridor and let the double doors swing closed themselves, seemingly careless of the noise. He unclipped my notes from the end of the trolley and held them up to the light. He shrugged, replaced them and started pushing me up the corridor, whistling now.

He must have seen me looking at him because he winked at me and said, “You awake Mr Kel? You should be asleep. Well, don’t (I didn’t understand this middle bit) out of those and into bed. I don’t know why (something something).” He sounded friendly, reassuring. I suspected he was surprised that I’d been trussed up like that in the first place. “Don’t know why they put you in there with the…” I didn’t get the last word, but the way he said it it probably meant something mildly insulting, one of those snappy, honest but potentially shocking terms that medical people use amongst themselves that are not supposed to be for public consumption.

We went up in the big rattly lift. It always went very slowly and he started undoing the straps pinning me to the bed while we made the ascent. Then he wheeled me along to my room, released me from the trolley and helped me into bed. He wished me night-night and I wanted to cry.

The next day, the young mousy-haired lady doctor visited me and asked me questions about what had happened two nights before. I did not understand everything she said but I tried to answer as fully as I could. No insulting dolls nonsense this time, for which I ought to have been grateful, I supposed. No apology or explanation regarding my being strapped to the trolley in a strange ward for the first part of the previous night, either, mind you. I wanted to ask her why that had been done, what was going on, what was being done to identify the perpetrator and what was being done to prevent them trying to interfere with me again. But I lacked the vocabulary to express exactly what I wanted to say, and anyway felt shy in front of the delicate young lady doctor. I should have been able to deal with this sort of thing myself. There was no need to trouble her and risk either of us being embarrassed.

The day passed. I sat up in bed or sat in my chair, mostly, thinking, eyes shut. The more I thought about it, the more I felt there had been something odd about that ward downstairs.

The atmosphere was too placid. The man who turned over to face me looked too out of it. Could they all be sedated? I supposed they might be. Problem patients often are – the chemical equivalent of the restraining straps I was unjustly subjected to. Perhaps the place would have been in uproar if they hadn’t all been given sedatives.

And yet it seemed to me more than that. There was something about the place, something almost familiar that woke a half or a quarter or a smaller fraction of a whole memory in me, something that might be important, one day if not now. Was it just the feel of the place, the atmosphere (I feel there ought to be another word, but it eludes me)? Or was it some detail I noticed subconsciously but which slipped past my attentive mental processes?

I resolved to investigate. I was aware that I had resolved the day or the night before to investigate the matter of my attempted assaulter, to ask questions of the staff and the slack-jaws in the day room, but had not done so. However, I decided that perhaps it was all best forgotten about and that so long as it did not happen again we’d say no more about it. It wasn’t worth granting the fellow the attention. The mystery of the very quiet people and the silent ward: that seemed more important somehow, more serious. That definitely did deserve a degree of scrutiny. I would take a look down there tonight.

I opened my eyes. I ought to go now. In daylight. The silent ward would tell me more in waking hours than it might at night when everybody was meant to be sleeping anyway.

I got out of bed, donned slippers and dressing gown and made my way down the corridor to the stairwell and the corridor below. The cleaners were washing the floor and shouted at me from near the doors to the silent ward. Mostly from the pointing, I gathered that I mustn’t walk on their still-wet floor.

I tried again in the later afternoon and got as far as the doors of the silent ward itself before I was turned back by a nurse. The glimpse I got of the ward through the closing door showed a tranquil scene. Hazy sunshine illuminated sparkling white beds, but nobody sat upright or sat at the side of their beds, and nobody was wandering around. It was, admittedly, a brief glimpse, but I found that very tranquillity disturbing. I retreated a second time, resolved to try again at night.

I slip out of my bed in the depths of the night and pull on my dressing gown. I feel only a little groggy and fuzzy from my usual post-supper medication; I swallowed just one of the pills and spat the other out later. I am allowed a little torch which I keep in my bedside cabinet. It has no batteries but works by being squeezed, a little flywheel whizzing round with a faint grinding noise to produce a yellow-orange light from the little bulb. I take that.

I also have a little knife that the staff do not know about. I think it is called a paring knife. It was on a tray they brought my lunch on one day, hidden by the underside of the main plate. It has a sharp little blade and a nick out of the dense black plastic which forms the handle. There was some slimy vegetable matter adhering to it when I found it, as though it had not long been used. It must have been misplaced by the kitchen staff, ending up on what happened to become my tray.

My first instinct was to report it, summon a member of staff immediately or just leave it lying obviously on the tray to be picked up and returned to the kitchen or thrown out (that nick on the handle might harbour germs). I don’t really know why I picked it up, cleaned it on my paper napkin and hid it on the little ledge at the back of my bedside cabinet. It just felt right. I am not superstitious, but the appearance of the knife felt like a little present from fate, from the universe, and one that it would be impolite somehow to turn down.

I take that with me too.

My room is not locked. I let myself out and close the door again quietly, looking down the dimly lit corridor to the day room and the nurses’ station. There is a small pool of light there and the faint sound of a radio, playing jingly music. How much more daunting the journey ahead seemed now compared to exactly the same one taken twice in daylight a few hours earlier.

I walk to the stairs, the soles of my slippers making only the quietest of slapping noises. I open and close the door carefully. The stairwell is better lit than the corridor and smells of cleaning fluids. I descend to the ground floor and enter the lower corridor just as silently as I left the one above. Another dim expanse. I approach the two half-glazed doors and the darkness beyond them.

I shut the door behind me. The ward looks just as it did the night before. I approach the fat man lying in the bed nearest the door, the one my trolley had been parked next to. He looks just as he had last night, I think. I walk down past the other beds. They are just ordinary people, all men, a mixture of body shapes and skin colours. All sleeping peacefully.

Something nags at me. Something about the first man I looked at, the fat man near the doors. Perhaps it will become obvious when I look at him again, on my way back out. Near the far end of the ward, I notice that one of the sleeping men has something on his neck. I have to use the torch, shielding it so that it does not shine in his eyes. There is dried blood near his Adam’s apple. Just a little, though, nothing sinister. A shaving nick, I suppose.

Ah. That’s it. I pad back up to the fat man. He has been shaved. He had a week’s worth of beard last night, but now he is clean-shaven. I look back down the ward. They are all clean-shaven. You see men with beards here, and moustaches; there seems to be no particular rule regarding facial hair. Out of over twenty men you’d think at least one or two would have beards. I study the fat man’s slack, smooth face. He has not shaved – or been shaved – very well. There are little tufts of hair here and there, and he has been nicked with the razor too. On impulse I put my hand on his shoulder and shake him gently.

“Excuse me?” I say quietly in the local language. “Hello?”

I shake him again, a little more vigorously this time. He makes a sort of grumbling noise and his eyes flicker. I shake him again. His eyes open fully and he gazes slowly up at me, his expression only a little less vacant. There does not look to be much intelligence in those eyes. “Hello?” I say. “How are you?” I ask, for want of anything better. He looks up at me, seemingly uncomprehending. He blinks a few times. I snap my fingers in front of his eyes. “Hello?” No reaction.

I take out my torch and shine it into his eyes. I have seen the medics do this, I’m sure. He squints and tries to move his head away. His pupils contract very slowly. This means something, though I’m not entirely sure what. I stop squeezing the torch’s handle. It wheezes to silence and the beam fades to darkness. Within seconds the man is snoring again.

I choose another man at random halfway down the ward on the far side and get the same responses. I have just switched the torch off again and he has just fallen back asleep when I hear footsteps in the corridor. I duck down as a figure approaches the doors, then I crouch out of sight as one of the doors starts to open. I crawl underneath the bed, banging my head on a metal strut, and have to make an effort not to cry out. I can hear the person walking down the ward, and I see a soft light flicking on and off. A pair of legs comes into view: white shoes and a skirt. The nurse passes by the bed I am crouched beneath without pausing. I lower my head so that I can watch her. She goes to the far end of the ward, stopping at a couple of beds, flicking her small torch on and off each time. She turns and walks back down the ward, stops at the door for some moments and then leaves, letting one of the doors swing shut against the other without closing it especially quietly.

I wait a few minutes. My heart calms. In fact I become so relaxed I think I might even drift off to sleep for a few moments, but I’m not sure. Then I let myself out. I negotiate the lower corridor and stairwell without being seen but the light is on in my room when I return. The duty nurse for our floor is in my room, frowning as he looks at my notes on the clipboard. “Toilet,” I tell him. He looks unconvinced but helps me back into bed and tucks me in.

As I close my eyes I picture the ward downstairs again, and I realise that one of the things that felt wrong, one of the things disturbing me about it, even though I could not pin it down at the time, was the sameness of it all. The bedside cabinets all looked the same. There were no Get Well Soon cards, no flowers, no baskets of fruit or other items that would personalise the allotment of space each patient is allowed. I can remember seeing a water jug and a small plastic cup on each cabinet, but that was all. I can’t recall seeing any chairs by the sides of the beds either. No chairs anywhere in the ward that I could remember.

Husks. I keep coming back to this strangely significant word. Whenever I think about the silent ward and those deeply drugged or in some other way near-comatose men, I think of it. Husks. They are husks. I am not sure why this means so much to me, but it would appear that it does.

Husks…

“But, madame, is it really such a terrible thing?”

Madame d’Ortolan looked at Professore Loscelles as though he was quite mad. The two of them were squeezed into a dusty study carrel high in a spire of one of the less fashionable UPT buildings, an outskirt adjunctery within sight of the Dome of the Mists but sufficiently distant and obscure for their conversation to stand no chance of being recorded. “Someone transitioning without septus?” she asked, emphatically. “Not a terrible thing?”

“Indeed,” Loscelles said, waving his chubby-fingered hands about. “Ought we not, madame, rather, indeed, to celebrate the fact one of our number has, or may have, discovered how to transition without the use of the drug? Is this not a great breakthrough? A veritable advance, indeed?”

Madame d’Ortolan – immaculately dressed in a cream twin-set, an unlined notebook to the olive graph-paper of Professore Loscelles’s bucolic three-piece – gave every appearance of thinking fairly seriously about trying to cram the Professore through the unfeasibly narrow window of the tiny study space and out to the sixty-metre drop below. “Loscelles,” she said, with an icy clarity, “have you gone completely insane?” (Professore Loscelles flexed his eyebrows, perhaps to signal that, as far as he was aware, he had not.) “If people,” Madame d’Ortolan said slowly, as though to a young child, “are able to transition without the drug… how are we to control them?”

“Well-” the Professore began.

“First of all,” Madame d’Ortolan said briskly, “this has not turned up in one of our extremely expensive but – now, apparently – rather irrelevant laboratories, or within the context of a carefully regulated field trial, or constrained by any sort of controlled environment; this has come upon us on the hoof, in the midst of a profound crisis in the Council, and in the guise of a previously loyal but now suddenly renegade assassin who, I am nervously informed by those trying and mostly failing to track him, may be continuing to develop other heretofore undreamt-of powers and worryingly unique abilities in addition to this one. As though-”

“Really? But that’s extraordinary!” the Professore exclaimed, seemingly quite excited by such a development.

The lady’s brows knitted. “Well, fascinating!” she shouted, and slammed her palm on the carrel’s small desk, raising dust. The Professore jumped. Madame d’Ortolan collected herself. “I’m sure,” she continued, breathing hard, “you’ll be glad to know that the relevant scientists, experts and Facultarians all share both your enthusiasm and your inability to appreciate what a catastrophe this represents for us.” She put her hands on either side of the Professore’s ample cheeks and brought them towards each other so as to compress his smooth, perfumed flesh, making it look as though his squashed mouth and ruddily bulbous nose had been jammed between two glisteningly plump pink cushions.

“Loscelles, think! Defeating an individual or grouping of people is easy; one simply brings greater numbers to bear. If they have clubs, and so do we, then we simply ensure that our clubs are always bigger and more numerous than theirs. The same with guns, or symbols, or bombs, or any other weapons or abilities. But if this man – who is now patently not one of us, whose hand, rather, is most forcibly turned against us – can do something that none of our own people can do, how do we combat that?”

The unyielding firmness of her grip on his face and the concomitant unlikelihood of him being able to form a comprehensible reply led the Professore to believe that this was in the nature of a rhetorical question. She shook his face gently back and forwards in her hands. “We could be in terrible, terrible trouble, thanks just to the threat of this one individual.” She jiggled his face in her hands. “And, then – worse, for this can get much worse – what if anybody can do this, just with some training? What if any idiot, any zealot, any enthusiast, any revolutionary, dissident or revisionist can just decide they want to flit into another person’s body, displacing their mind? Without planning? Without the necessary safeguards and respect for just cause and proven importance? Without the guidance and experience of the Concern? Where does that leave us then? Hmm? I’ll tell you: powerless to control what is arguably the single most potent ability an individual can possess in this or any other world. Can we allow that? Can we countenance that? Can we indulge that?” She spread her hands slowly, letting go of Loscelles’s cheeks. The Professore’s features rearranged themselves into their accustomed alignments. He looked surprised and a little shocked to have been handled so.

Madame d’Ortolan was shaking her head slowly, her expression sorrowful and grave. Professore Loscelles found his own head shaking in time with hers, as though in sympathy.

“Indeed,” the lady told him, “we cannot.”

“It might, I suppose, lead to anarchy,” the Professore said profoundly, frowning somewhere towards the floor.

“My dear Professore,” Madame d’Ortolan said, sighing, “we might greet anarchy with an open door, garland its brows, hand it all the keys and skip away whistling with nary a care in our heads, compared to what this might lead to, trust me.”

Loscelles sighed. “What do you think we might do, then?”

“Use all our weapons,” she told him bluntly. “He wields a new kind of club; well, we have some unusual clubs of our own.” The lady glanced to the window. “I can think of one in particular.” She watched clouds drift past in a silver-grey sky before turning back to the Professore’s frown. “We have been too cautious, I believe,” she told him. “It may even be to the good that something’s forced our hand at last. Left to ourselves we might have hesitated for ever.” She smiled suddenly at him. “Gloves off, claws out.”

The Professore’s frown deepened. “This will be one of your special projects, I take it?”

“Indeed.” Madame d’Ortolan’s smile went wide. She put one hand out to his face again – he flinched, almost imperceptibly, but she only smoothed and patted his right cheek, affectionate as though he were a treasured cat. “And I know you will support me in this, won’t you?”

“Would it prevent you if I did not?”

“It would prevent my adoring respect for you continuing, Professore,” she said, with a tinkling laugh in her voice that found no echo in her expression.

Loscelles looked her in the eyes. “Well then, ma’am,” he said softly, “I could not allow that. It might serve to put me with Obliq, and Plyte, and Krijk, and the rest. There have been… narrow squeaks reported; abnormal events.”

Madame d’Ortolan nodded, her expression a picture of concern. “Haven’t there?” She tutted. “We should all be very careful.”

Loscelles smiled wanly. “I believe I am being.”

She smiled radiantly at him. “Why, I believe you are too!”

“What is it that we do? What are we for and what are we against? What are we for?”

“This again? I have a feeling that if I say what anybody else in the Concern would expect me to say, you’re going to tell me I’m wrong.”

“Give it a go.”

“We help societies across the many worlds, aiding and advancing positive, progressive forces and confounding and disabling negative, regressive ones.”

“To what end?”

He shrugged. “General philanthropy. It’s nice to be nice.”

They sat in a hot tub looking out across a polished granite floor towards a starlit sea of cloud. She scooped a handful of the warm water and bubbles and let it fall over her left shoulder and upper breast, then repeated the action for her right side. Tem watched the bubbles slide. Mrs Mulverhill, even here, wore a tiny white hat like piled snow, and a spotted white veil. She said, “How do we define the different forces?”

“The bad guys tend to enjoy killing people, preferably in large numbers. The good guys – and girls – don’t; they get a buzz when infant mortality rates go down and life expectancy goes up. The bad guys like to tell people what to do, the good guys are happy to encourage people to make up their own minds. The bad guys like to keep the riches and the power to themselves and their cronies, the good guys want the money and power spread evenly, subject to the making-up-your-own-minds thing.”

In this world, there had once been an Emperor of the World. He had caused this palace to be built, levelling the top of the mountain that was variously called Sagarmatha, Chomolungma, Peak XV or Mount Everest (or Victoria or Alexander or Ghandi or Mao, or many, many other names). The palace was vast, enclosed by great glass domes which were pressurised and warmed to mimic the conditions of a tropical island. Now, though, after a catastrophe caused by a gamma-ray burster happening relatively nearby by cosmic standards, the world was devoid of humans or almost any other living thing, and was in the slow, eons-long process of changing profoundly as all the processes associated with life, including carbon capture and even most of its plate tectonics, started to shut down.

The Concern had first discovered the world a few years after the catastrophe and had repaired and restored the palace. It had become a place where privileged officers of the Concern could holiday. Mrs Mulverhill, who now seemed to be able to go anywhere and do anything as long as she stayed away from the Concern proper, had found a version – indeed, a whole unshuffled deck of versions – where this had been done but nobody had yet come to visit. For now at least it was her private world. She had brought him here. This time, she had only needed to hold his hand.

“What is the point,” she asked him, “of trying to do any good in the many worlds when there will always be an infinite number of realities where the horrors unfold unstopped?”

“Because one ought to do what one can. Good is good. Specific people and societies benefit. That not all people and societies benefit is beside the point. That a finite number of lives and worlds are better as a result of the actions of the Concern is all the justification that is required, and refusing to do a finite amount of good because you cannot do an infinite amount of good is a morally perverse position. If you feel sorry for a beggar you still give them money even though doing so does nothing for the plight of all other beggars.” He let himself slide under the steaming water and the islands of bubbles, resurfacing and wiping water from his face. “How am I doing? I’m paraphrasing here, but it’s sounding pretty good to me. I should probably write a paper or something.”

“Extremely well. You’re a credit to your teachers.”

“I thought so.” He pushed his fingers through his hair like a rough comb. “So. Tell me where I’m wrong and what the Concern is really up to.”

She nodded once. There were times when he thought she lacked any sense of humour, irony or sarcasm. “I think now that the Concern,” she said, “exists for a much more specific purpose than simply acting as a multiversal niceness-enforcement agency. It does do some good, but it’s incidental, a cover for its true purpose.”

“Which is what?”

“That is what I hope you will agree to help me find out.”

“So you still don’t know?”

“Correct.”

“But you suspect they’re up to something.”

“I know they are.”

“How do you know?”

“I feel it.”

“You feel it.”

“Indeed. In fact I feel certain of it.”

“You know, if you’re going to convince anybody else about this, including me, you’re going to have to do better than just telling them you’re certain. It’s a little vague.”

“I know. But consider this.”

Of course, she had a slyly refined sense of humour and appreciated ironies that entirely passed him by. Sarcasm was generally beneath her, but even so.

“I am,” he told her, “sitting comfortably.”

She put one hand up to the side of her head, so that one rosy nipple surfaced briefly from the white bubbles. She took the little white hat and the veil off, laid them on the black granite at the side of the tub. Slitlike pupils in amber irises narrowed fractionally as they regarded him.

“We have access to an infinite number of worlds,” she said, “and have visited some very strange ones. We suspect there are some so strange that we are unable to access them just because of that strangeness: they are unenvisageable, and because we cannot imagine going to them, we cannot go to them. But think how relatively limited is the type of world we do visit. For one thing, it is always and only Earth, as we understand it. Never the next planet further in towards or further out from the sun: Venus or Mars or their equivalents. This Earth is usually about four and a half billion years old in a universe just under fourteen billion years old. Usually, even if it supports no intelligent life, it supports some life. Almost without variance, it exists as part of a solar system in a galaxy composed of hundreds of millions of other solar systems, in a universe composed of hundreds of millions of other galaxies.”

As she spoke, she flexed one leg and reached out with it to find his groin with her foot. Her toes brushed against his balls, his cock, stroking them, wafting like the water.

“Wait,” he said, opening his legs a little to allow her more room, “this isn’t the ‘Where Is Everybody?’ question, is it?”

“Yes.”

“That’s easy. There is no everybody. There is only us. There are no aliens. Not a single one of the many worlds shows any sign of alien contact, past or present. Their lack, throughout the multiverse, proves the point. We are alone in the universe.” Her toes were gently brushing first one side of his penis, then the other, bringing him erect.

“In all the universes?” she asked, smiling.

“In every single one.”

“Then infinity seems to be failing somehow, wouldn’t you agree?”

“Failing?”

“It hasn’t produced any aliens. It has produced only us. A single intelligent species in all the wide universe does not smack of infinity.” She supported herself by stretching her arms out to either side of the tub and reached out now with both feet, finding his erection with two sets of toes and stroking it gently up and down.

He cleared his throat. “What does it smack of then?”

“Well, it could simply be due to what the transitioneering theorists call the problem of unenvisionability, as mentioned: we cannot imagine a world that includes aliens – or perhaps, deep down, we don’t want to.” Mrs Mulverhill raised one hand and blew some bubbles from it to inspect her fingernails before looking at him and saying, “Or it might smack of deliberate quarantine, systematic enclosure, some vast cover-up…”

“Why, Mrs Mulverhill, you’re a conspiracy theorist!”

“Yes,” she agreed, smiling. “But not by nature. I’ve been forced into it by the conspiracy I’m investigating.” She hesitated, uncharacteristically. “I’ve found some examples. Ones you’ll know about. Want to hear?”

“Fire away.” He nodded down to where her glistening feet, bobbing rhythmically through the surface of the swirling, bubbling water, were caressing his cock, parenthetical. “Feel free to not stop doing that, though.”

She smiled. “The examples are from the more extreme end of the exoticism spectrum,” she told him, “but still.”

“I’ve always liked extremities.”

“I’m sure. Max Fitching, the singer?”

“I remember.”

“The green terrorist explanation was a lie. He was going to give his money to SETI research.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Marit Shauoon?”

“I still wince.”

“He was going to use his network of communication satellites to do a SETI in reverse, deliberately broadcasting signals to the stars. In his will he’d have funded a trio of orbiting telescopes dedicated to finding Earth-like planets and looking for signs of intelligent life on them. You killed him days before he was going to alter his will with just that provision in mind. Glimpsing how it’s all heading?”

“You missed out Serge Anstruther.”

“Yerge Aushauser. No, he really was a shit. He wasn’t really a genocidal racist as such but whenever he’s not stopped he ends up causing such havoc he might as well have been. Wanted to buy up a state in the US midwest and build an impregnable Nirvana for the super-rich; Xanadu, Shangri-La. Fantasy made real. A Libertarian.” From his expression she must have thought he wasn’t entirely familiar with the term. She sighed. “Libertarianism. A simple-minded right-wing ideology ideally suited to those unable or unwilling to see past their own sociopathic self-regard.”

“You’ve obviously thought about it.”

“And dismissed it. But expect to hear a lot more about it as Madame d’O consolidates her power-base – it’s a natural fit for people just like you, Tem.”

“I’m already intrigued.”

“Well, you would be.”

“How do you know all this?”

She waggled her toes over his penis as though it was a flute and her feet were intent on playing it. “I seduce forecasters. I’ve even turned a few. I have my own now.”

“Uh-huh.”

“The Concern use you, and others, to do this sort of thing more and more these days, Tem. You still get to kill the genuine bad guys now and again, but that’s become little more than cover now, not the main focus of their activities. They’ve even started going after people who’re just thinking about what humanity’s true place in the cosmos might be. There’s a guy called variously Miguel Esteban/Mike Esteros/Michel Sanrois/Mickey Sants who keeps cropping up across one batch of worlds. All the poor fucker wants to do is make a film about finding aliens but they’ve started kidnapping him too now. That’s one of the few examples we know about. I’m betting there are hundreds of others.”

“This is all back to Madame d’O, isn’t it?” he said, gripping the rim of the tub and flexing his shoulders to ease his hips forward, closer to her, so that her legs spread a little more, glistening knees appearing out of the surface of the gently bubbling water on either side while her soles and toes still grasped his cock.

“Madame d’Ortolan continues to believe in her imbecilic theories and pursue her sadistic research,” Mrs Mulverhill agreed graciously.

“It just always seems more personal,” he said, “this thing between her and you.”

“I’ve no particular desire to personalise any of this, Tem, it’s just that when you follow the relevant trails she’s always what’s waiting at the end.”

“No doubt.” He reached forward, took her ankles in his hands. “And now I think you should come over here.”

She nodded. “I think I should, too.”

The dawn began to break across the teeth of the eastward mountains, a yellow-pink stain slowly spreading. They stood, bundled in pillowed layers of high-altitude, four-season clothing, on a high circular balcony situated on the summit of the highest dome of the great empty palace. They were in the open air, beyond a small airlock, sucking oxygen from transparent masks over their noses, leaving their mouths free.

Small oxygen tanks in their outer jackets kept them supplied with the life-giving gas and a back-up system of valves dotted round the balcony stood ready to replace those if something went wrong. Even so, one could not simply step from the scented sea-level warmth of the palace into the open air of nine and a half kilometres above the ocean; the pressure difference was so great that a period of adjustment was required in the airlock to prevent discomfort. Before dawn, when the air was most likely to be still, was the best time to be here. Nevertheless, a strong, thin wind was blowing from the north. A movable glass screen linked to a man-high tail of a blade like a giant weathervane had positioned itself to deflect the worst of the blast over the balcony. Glowing figures on a small screen set into the parapet indicated that the temperature was forty below. The air, felt on the lips and the few square centimetres of exposed skin around the eyes, seemed powder-dry, sucking up moisture as much as warmth.

She said, “People will generally make whatever compromises with the world they think necessary still to convince themselves that they are the most important thing in it. The trouble with what we’re able to do – specifically the trouble with unfettered access to septus and through it to the many worlds – is that it abets and encourages this delusion to the point of naked solipsism.” Her voice, carried over the steady roar of wind, sounded calm and strong, unaffected by the thin air.

“All the same,” he said, “it’s still an illusion. The world exists without us, whether we like it or not.”

She smiled. “A hard-line solipsist would dismiss your words as mere wind,” she said. “The point is that to a true solipsist there is no distinction between objective and subjective truth. Subjectivity is all that matters because it is effectively all that exists. And to be a member of the Central Council of the Transitionary Office is to exist in a state that positively encourages such a state of mind. It is not healthy, not for the Office, l’Expédience, or for anything or anybody.”

“I’d have thought it was very healthy indeed for those on the Council itself.”

“Only in the trivial sense that now they need never die.”

“I bet it doesn’t seem trivial to them.”

“Well, quite.” Mrs Mulverhill sat back against the balustrade, its curved top fitting into the small of her back within the puffy layers of insulation. Her outer wear was white. The slowly increasing light to the east washed it with a chilly pinkness. “But one has to ask what this has done to their outlook.”

“I cannot wait for you to tell me,” he told her.

She smiled. “Unless we have been lied to even more comprehensively than even I suspect, the Concern has existed for a thousand years. In that time, certainly for the first eight centuries, it spent its time investigating the many worlds, researching the properties of septus and the abilities it confers upon people trained to take it, and theorising regarding the metaphysical laws governing the many worlds and the composition of whatever context they might be said to exist within. Until about two hundred years ago, interventions were rare, much argued and agonised over, heavily monitored and subject to extensive subsequent analysis.”

“So what happened two hundred years ago?”

“Madame d’Ortolan happened,” Mrs Mulverhill said, with a sour smile. “She discovered how a transitioner could take somebody else with them between the realities and that opened up a whole new set of opportunities for l’Expédience; the numbers of worlds investigated soared. Then when she was on the Central Council she pushed for a far more aggressive policy of interference and a still wider spread of influence. She also proposed that the practice of allowing Central Council members to shift down to a younger body when their own body approached advanced old age become the default for all rather than the extraordinary privilege for the most-honoured few, and that the limit of this being allowed to happen only once be lifted.”

“I thought that was still just a proposal.” It was a rumour throughout the Concern, indeed across Calbefraques, that this might be the case, but there had been no official pronouncement.

“In theory it is,” Mrs Mulverhill conceded. She turned and looked out at the nearby peaks starting to shine like vast pink teeth all around them. “But it’s being done piecemeal. As each of the other Council members approaches the age when they might start to think that such a proposal does make sense after all – when they have often spent their careers until then decrying and opposing it – the good Madame suggests they might like to reconsider. To my knowledge only two of the Council have resisted her so far, and they might still be persuaded.” She looked at him and smiled. “The steps to the grave grow steeper the closer you approach. A degree of urgency can grip people. She might have those two Council members too, in time. And besides, with them gone and with effective control over the Central Council, she can make sure the replacements are more amenable. She has all the time she wants, after all. She can play the longest of games.”

“So now the Central Council just goes on for ever?”

“As an entity, it always expected to.” She shrugged. “Well, bureaucracies always do, but this one really might, of course. The difference is that in theory the individuals of the Council can now go on for ever. The point is not that the Central Council will never cease to be, the point is that the Central Council will never cease to be exactly the same. It will never change.”

“They’ll still get older. Their minds will.”

“Yes, and it will be an interesting rolling experiment in how much information a healthy and relatively young mind can contain without having to overwrite some of it when it’s inhabited by a relatively ancient one, and of course the Council members are quite convinced that they will only get wiser and wiser the older they get in lived years, and that this can only be a good thing. But I think any rational outsider would and should be appalled at the prospect. The old and powerful never want to let go. They always think they’re both profoundly indispensable and uniquely right. They are always wrong. Part of the function of ageing and dying is to let the next generation have its say, its time in the sun, to sweep away the mistakes of the previous age while, if they’re lucky, retaining the advances made and the benefits accrued.” The sunlight was stronger now, picking out her strange dark eyes with their slit pupils. They narrowed, glittering as though frosted.

“It is an insane conceit. Power always drives to perpetuate itself, but this is a phenomenal extra distillation of idiocy. Only people already riddled with the internalised special pleading and self-importance that too much power brings could even start to imagine that this might be in any way sustainable.”

He rested one forearm on the parapet, side on, gazing at her. Even bundled so, made comically rotund by the warm clothes, she somehow contrived to appear slim, slight and full of a specifically sensual energy. He had a sudden flashback to the sight and feel and smell of the body contained within all those insulating layers. They had been here for most of a day and had spent a lot of that time fucking. His muscles felt tired and heavy and his legs still felt shaky from their latest bout half an hour earlier, standing, her wrapped around him in the airlock while they waited for the pressures to equalise.

Thinking about her, he half expected some sort of stirring from his cock, but nothing happened. It certainly wasn’t the cold so he guessed that this time he really was all done. He had wondered when she had first suggested they come out here onto the balcony if it was some sort of final spectacular site for sex. A risky one, he thought. A chap could risk frostbite. But they had fucked in the airlock instead. He hoped she wasn’t expecting more, not for a while – he felt a little sore and absolutely drained.

“You do know so much about it all,” he said.

“Thank you. In particular I think I know Madame d’Ortolan,” she told him. “I think I know how her mind works.”

“I can certainly vouch for how some of her other organs function.”

“She has self-belief raised almost to solipsistic levels. It’s her weakness. That and a kind of fanaticism for neatness.”

“Neatness? Neatness will bring her down?”

“It could be part of it. Having effective control of the Central Council will not be quite enough for her, I think. Even though as a whole it will entirely do her bidding it will annoy her that there are still people on it who disagree with her, just on principle. She will want everybody on it to agree with her. It’s just neater. And that self-belief, it makes her think that she can do no wrong just because she is who she is. For all her clear-headed cunning and guile and utterly ruthless rationality, there is a kernel of something like superstition in her that tells her any given stratagem, no matter how risky, will work in the end simply because she is destined to triumph; that’s just the way the world works, the way all worlds work. And that’s how we bring her down, Tem.”

“Do we?”

“We keep annoying her, keep opposing her, keep nudging her to riskier and riskier tactics, until she overreaches herself and falls.”

“Or keeps winning.”

She shook her head. “The longer you keep gambling everything the more certain you are to lose it.”

“So don’t gamble everything.”

“Rational. But if you’re absolutely convinced that it is your destiny to triumph, that your victory is inevitable, and gambling everything gets you there quicker than taking it in small steps, why shuffle to glory when you can get there in a few boldly heroic leaps?”

“What if you’re wrong?”

She smiled ruefully. “Then we’re fucked.” She took a deep breath and stared out across the pillowed skyscape of clouds towards the dawn. “But I’m not wrong.”

“Something deep inside tells you that, does it?”

She glanced sharply at him, then gave a small laugh. “Yes, quite. Point taken. But we all need to have the courage of our convictions, Tem, if we’re not to be just the playthings of the powerful; hordes of falling, clicking balls batted this way and that at their whim in some vast game. And you have yet to say whether you’ll help or not. You need to choose which side you’re on.”

“Mrs M, I’m still not entirely sure what the sides are.”

She looked down towards the layer of cloud two kilometres below. “You know,” she said, “people at the top of any organisation like to think that they are, metaphorically, on the summit of a mountain in perfect visibility. They’re wrong, of course; in fact there’s mist all the way down. Organisationally, you’re lucky if you can see clearly into even just the next level down. After that it’s pure murk, as a rule.”

She left a pause, so he said, “Really?”

“Of course, with the Concern it gets even more difficult to see what’s going on.” She turned to look at him. “There are levels most of us don’t even know exist. I was on the level just beneath the Central Council. If I’d kept my nose clean I’d probably be there now; certainly in a decade or so, assuming that one of the hold-outs sticks to their guns and dies rather than keeps going on for ever. You’re a level down for that, Tem, fast-tracked for success but, I’d guess – ” her eyes narrowed again and her head tipped “ – not knowing it. Would that be right?”

“I thought you had to do a lot of committee work and politicking back on Calbefraques. I enjoy working in the field too much. Also, it has been noticed amongst the lower orders that the turnover in the Central Council has slowed down a lot over the last fifty years or so.”

“All the same, you’re one of the potential chosen ones.”

“I’m flattered. Is that why you’re trying to recruit me?”

“Not directly. They must see something in you. I do too, though perhaps not exactly the same things. I see a potential in you that I don’t think they know is there. And I think you might choose the right side.”

“So do they, I suppose. But this brings us back to the issue of sides. You were about to explain just what they were, I think. I did ask you to.”

She moved closer to him, placed one snow-soft white mitten on his. “The Central Council has become obsessed with power before and beyond anything else. The means has become the end. If they are not opposed they will turn l’Expédience into something that exists only for its own aggrandisement and the pursuance of whatever secret purposes the individuals on it choose to dream up. I think that is unarguable. Plus I believe that – at the behest of Madame d’Ortolan – there is something else, some already hidden agenda they’re working to – the uniqueness of human intelligent life and the singular nature of Calbefraques itself may well point to the nature of that secret – but I never got close enough to the centre of power to find out.”

“What, and I am supposed to?”

“No. It’ll take too long for you to be elevated to the Council, if you ever are. It’ll be too late by then.”

“Too late?”

“Too late because soon Madame d’Ortolan will have the Council exactly as she wants it; full of people who think just as she does and who will do everything she wants them to do, and who will never die, because they will keep repotting themselves into younger bodies as their older ones approach senescence.”

“So what do you propose, Mrs Mulverhill?”

Her smile looked defensive. “Ultimately, that the Central Council either ceases to exist or is severely reined in and radically reconstituted. Certainly that it is subject to some sort of democratic oversight. They can even keep their serial immortality, as long as they resign in perpetuity from the Council itself. Long life for long service. An incentive to serve but not to entrench.”

“All the same, you’re asking a lot of them.”

“I know. I don’t see them giving up what they have at present without a fight.”

“And is the other side just you and your bandit gang?”

“Oh, there are plenty of people who feel the same way, including a few people on the Central Council itself.”

“Like who?”

That smile again. A little wary, this time. “First tell me if you’ve betrayed me, Tem,” she said softly. She lowered her head a fraction as she gazed up at him.

“Betrayed?” he said.

“We’ve talked before. I’m an outlaw. If you were playing by the book you ought to have reported our meetings.”

“I did,” he said. “Is that betrayal?”

“Not by itself. What else, though? What did they suggest you do?”

“Keep meeting you, keep talking to you.”

“Which you have done.”

“Which I have done.”

“And reporting back.”

“Which I have also done.”

“Fully?”

“Not quite fully.”

“And have you agreed to help catch me?”

“No.”

“But have you refused ever to help catch me?”

“No. They did ask. I told them that of course I’d do what was right.”

She smiled. “And do you yet know what is right?”

He took a long deep breath of the pure gas and the stunningly cold air. “I think I would find it very hard to help them catch you.”

She looked pleased and amused at once. “Is that gallantry, Tem?”

“Perhaps. I’m not entirely sure myself.”

“Sexual sentimentality, is what Madame d’Ortolan would call it.”

“Would she now?”

“She is a very unsentimental woman. Well, apart from her cats, maybe.” Mrs Mulverhill was silent for a moment, then said, “Do you think they’re using you to try and catch me even without your consent?”

“I’m sure they are. I’ve always assumed that when we meet you’ve taken care of that.”

“I do what I can.” She shrugged. “I think I’m still ahead of them.”

“You think they’re in hot pursuit?”

She nodded. “Theodora keeps at least two tracking teams on the lookout for me at all times. And she has her special projects, her wild cards, randomisers whom she’s tormented and bent until they form specialist tools for seeking out people like me. She thinks they might be able to work some magic and both find me and then disable me when I’m traced. I suppose I ought to feel flattered to be the object of such obsessive attention.”

She looked away at the startlingly bright point of the rising sun. The surrounding peaks shone a bright yellow-white now, the level of illumination dropping down their snow and rock flanks as the sun continued to rise, casting jagged shadows across the steeply sloped snowfields and glacier heads. Just in that moment he thought she looked small and vulnerable and hunted, even afraid. The urge to reach out and take her in his arms, to shelter and protect and reassure her was very strong, and surprising. He wondered for a moment how much of this was deliberate, if he was being manipulated, and in that hesitation the moment passed and she turned back to him, smiling, raising her face. “You need to take care, Tem,” she told him. “You can only postpone making up your mind for so long. Perhaps no further, after this. You can seem to cooperate with them and listen to me for now, but sooner or later they’ll insist you do something that settles it. You’ll need to decide.”

“I thought you were trying to get me to decide.”

“I am. But I’m not threatening you.”

“They’re not threatening me.”

“Not yet. They will. Unless you take the hints that will be put before you, if they haven’t been already, and obviate the need for explicit threats.” She looked down towards the ruffled blanket of cloud far below, still in shadow. “The Central Council prefers implied threats, the threat of threats. It’s more effective, leaving so much to the individual imagination.”

“You’re not going to tell me who the people on the Central Council are, are you? The ones who might think the way you do.”

“Of course not. You could probably make a fairly accurate guess, anyway. And it’s not as though I have signed contracts from them, swearing to rebel when the time comes. I haven’t even talked to all of them, I’m just making assumptions. But feel free to tell the Questionary Office that you asked the question.”

“I shall.”

She was silent again for a while. The wind roared on, picking up in strength while the weathervane apparatus creaked and moaned and swung the glass barricade round to face the onrushing torrent of air. “You should take all this more seriously, Tem,” she said, her tone gently chiding, close to hurt. “These people are slowly making monsters of themselves. Madame d’O is already full-fledged. Under her, if they haven’t already, they’ll come to countenance anything to avoid what she sees as contamination. Anything. Encouraging world wars, genocide, global warming; anything at all to disrupt the slow progress towards the unknown.”

“Don’t let my defensive flippancy deceive you,” he told her, pulling her to him, enfolding her. He hesitated.

“Deep down you still don’t take it seriously either?” she suggested, looking up at him with with a small, wan smile.

“There’s that flippancy again.” He squeezed her. “I take it as seriously as I’ve ever taken anything, including my own survival.”

She looked unimpressed. “I was hoping for better.”

“Leave it with me. I’ll see what I can do.”

She turned in his arms, staring out over the nearly lifeless waste of rock, ice and snow towards the faltering dawn.

“We may not be able to meet like this again,” she said quietly. “I’m sorry.”

“Then I’m glad,” he said, “that we were able to put so much effort into this meeting.” She looked back to him with an expression on her face that he was unable to read, and he felt a real gut-stirring emotion, something between a kind of recidivist lust and an entirely unexpected regret at the potential loss of somebody who only now, belatedly, he realised was and had always been a soulmate. He would never now, never again, call it love.

She pushed herself away from him a little, then reached out and patted his gloved, mittened hand again, layers upon layers separating them. “I’ve enjoyed everything about the times we’ve spent together,” she told him. “Would that there had been more.”

He gave it a while, then said, “So what happens next?”

“Immediately, trivially? You go back to Calbefraques and I disappear again.”

“If I do need to contact you, if I do decide-”

“I’ll leave a note of places, times, people.”

“And beyond that?”

“Over time, more to the point, I think Madame d’Ortolan will eventually move against the people on the Central Council who disagree with her. She’ll try to isolate them, perhaps even kill them.”

“Kill them? You’re not serious.” This was not the sort of behaviour the Central Council was known for. There had been one or two suspicious deaths on the Council centuries before that might have been due to some judicious poisoning, but nothing untoward since. Stolid and boring were the words most people associated with the Council, even after the ascendancy of Madame d’O; not danger, not assassination.

“Oh, I’m as serious as she is,” Mrs Mulverhill told him, eyes wide. “Madame d’Ortolan is one of those people – civilised on the surface, brutish underneath – who think themselves realists when they contemplate their own barbarism, and ascribe the same callousness to others. Making the assumption that everybody else is as ruthless as she is helps her live with her own inhumanity, though she would justify it as simple prudence. She knows how she would deal with somebody like herself: she’d kill them. So she assumes those who oppose her must be planning the same, or shortly will. Obviously, then, by her demented logic, she needs to kill them before they kill her. She will think through this psychotic escalation without any evidence that her opponents actually do intend her harm and she’ll pride herself on her disinterested practicality, probably even persuading herself that she bears those she has marked for death no personal ill will. It’s just politics.”

Mrs Mulverhill smiled briefly. “She will move against them, Tem; decisively as she would see it, murderously as anyone else would.” She put one mittened hand on his arm. “And she may think to use you to do so, as you are still her promising boy. Discover and test your loyalty and commitment by ordering you to make the cull. Though she will undoubtedly have alternative means set up if you decide not to cooperate.” Her gaze fastened on him. “If you do decide against her, you will be making yourself an outlaw too, or at best symbolically leaping behind a barricade with others, like myself. And, unless we succeed, the full force of the Central Council and the Concern itself will be turned against you, against us, in time. We have to persuade the waverers, who are probably the majority, that we are right, and we need to survive long enough to do that. If we can resist the Council successfully they will look weak and be seen to lose authority. Then negotiation, compromise might be possible.”

“You don’t sound very hopeful.”

She shrugged. “Oh, I am full of hope,” she said, though her voice sounded small and faint.

He went to her and put his arms around her. She pressed gently against him, her head against his chest. Moments later, almost together, a series of beeps announced that their oxygen cylinders each only held enough gas for a few more minutes.