Transition

6

Beyond the beginning, nothing. At the beginning, a torrent of universes in a single timeless blink that is the mother and father of all explosions and is the opposite of an explosion, destroying nothing – destroying nothing but Nothing – but purely creating; snapping into existence the first semblance of order and chaos and the very idea of time, all at once. This takes both the entirety of for ever and precisely no time whatsoever.

After the beginning, all else.

Expansion beyond expansion; an explosion that does not dissipate or slow or lose energy but instead does quite the opposite, bursting out for evermore with increasing power, intensity, complexity and scope.

We were taught to envisage it.

“Close your eyes,” we were told, and we did. I lie here, eyes closed, listening to the sounds of the clinic – a clank of pans, a patient in a distant room coughing, the tinny gabble of the radio at the nurses’ station down the echoing hall – and I think back to that day and that lecture hall, my eyes closed along with those of everybody else in the class, listening, imagining, trying to learn, attempting to see.

From far enough away, it would look like a sphere, like a world with a troubled, ever-changing and expanding surface, or a vast, growing star. Within the limits of our understanding, it was simply the idea of roundness, in as many dimensions as you fooled yourself into thinking you could imagine.

This is the true Universe, the universe of universes, the absolute beyond-which-there-is-nothing foundation of all. Utterly ungraspable, of course, though if you had envisaged it, as above, you had in a sense already transcended it because you’d thought of looking at it from outside, when there is and could be no outside. Which could be seen as a victory of sorts, though the idea of clutching at straws always came to my mind when that was suggested.

Some things mean too much to matter. This was the exemplar of that. For any sort of usable meaning you had to look closer at the surface of that unstoppably burgeoning immensity.

“Keep your eyes closed. Envisage this,” our tutor told us.

We sat in a lecture theatre in the Speditionary Faculty of the University of Practical Talents, in the city of Aspherje, Calbefraques. Our tutor had instructed us to close our eyes, to remove distractions and make the envisioning easier. There were a few giggles, yelps and hisses as those students not taking the matter entirely seriously used the fact that those nearby had their eyes closed to tickle, prod or grope.

Our tutor sighed theatrically. “Yes, my apologies to the rest of you; there may be a delay while the last percentile present mature beyond primary-school behaviour.” She changed her voice, became more businesslike. “Just keep imagining that ultimate roundness,” she told us. “And think yourself closer to it. Imagine a surface: highly complex, wrinkled, ridged, fissured, with continually growing structures like trees, bushes, covered in tendrils and filaments.”

“Ma’am,” a male voice said, already amused with itself, “I’m looking at a giant crinkly hairy ball.”

“You’re looking at a punitive essay if you speak again, Meric. Be quiet.” Another loud sigh. “Keep looking closer,” she told us. “Closer still,” she said, sounding amused and serious both. “Those of you with memories and imaginations beyond the insect stage may wish to invoke the idea of fractals at this point, because that would help. Assuming that you have successfully imagined a maximally complex surface on Mr Meric’s giant hairy ball – ” she paused for a smatter of amusement “ – you need to keep on imagining just more of the same no matter how much further in you zoom. The tiniest hair, the most microscopic tendril reveals, on closer inspection, that it too has a surface composed of ridges and wrinkles and tree shapes and filaments and so on, effectively identical to what you were looking at before you zoomed in. That’ll be your fractals made real, that will. The closer you go, the deeper you look and the higher you turn your magnification, the more of the same you see. Only the scale has changed.”

“I’m struggling to imagine this, ma’am,” said one of the girls.

“Good. If you’re struggling you’re still trying, you haven’t given in. Keep trying. You’ll get there. And do try to keep in mind that this is not really happening just in three dimensions or even four, but many more.”

“How many more, ma’am?” asked one of the boys.

“A lot.”

“Just ‘A lot’, ma’am?”

“Yes. For now, just ‘A lot.’” She paused. You might almost have called it a hesitation. “This is one reason that extremely wise, intelligent and knowledgeable people like myself bother to teach unutterably ignorant and callow people like yourselves when we could be happily feet-up in front of a big log fire reading a book, or talking urbanely amongst ourselves about the latest exciting idea or faculty gossip. There is, despite all the many, many appearances to the contrary, just a sliver of a chance that one of the better minds in this class might answer one of the questions that no one of my generation – despite the aforesaid wisdom, intelligence, et cetera – or any previous generation has been able to answer definitively, like why is Calbefraques unique, why is a transitioned soul unique, where is everybody, where did septus come from originally and precisely how does it work? That sort of question.”

A few people quietly went, “Ooo!”

“Yes, do let it go to your heads,” she said drily. “You’re not here to learn how to memorise stuff, you’re here to learn how to-”

“Think!” a few voices chorused.

You could hear the smile in her voice. “Well memorised,” she said, then raised her voice. “Of course, if you’re really smart, you’ll be imagining all this complexity that you’re looking at zooming out to meet you as you zoom in to meet it, the surface growing explosively, exponentially, all the time.”

“Excuse me, ma’am, I was already imagining that.”

“And I imagine your handwritten essay on, oh, the history of fractal theory will contain spelling mistakes, Meric. In fact, probably the closer I look, the more I’ll find.”

“Aw, ma’am…”

“Aw, ma’am, nothing. Fifteen hundred words. On my desk by tomorrow morning. What do we say, Meric?”

“We say thank you, Mrs Mulverhill.”

“Just so.”

Scotland is wet and dreary. Don’t let anybody tell you different. Even the hills are mostly just big mounds, not proper mountains like the Alps or the Rockies. People will tell you it’s all romantic and rugged but I’ve yet to see the evidence. Even when it’s nice it’s covered in a cloud of these bastard little insects called midges so you have to stay inside anyway. Plus it’s full of Scots. Case rested.

I endured the week we spent in Glen Furquart or whatever it was called. That’s what I did, I endured it. I did not enjoy it. Even the shooting was a bit shit. I don’t know why but I thought we’d be shooting rifles at deer or moose or Highland cattle or something, but no, it was shotguns, at birds. Shotguns. Like we were in a fucking Guy Ritchie movie or something. They were very nice shotguns with scrolling or whatever and engravings and stuff and they were heirlooms and blah blah blah, but still just shotguns. Shooters for the hard of aiming. And we were shooting them at birds. Lots and lots of birds. Pheasants. If there’s a stupider bird on the fucking planet I wouldn’t like to see it. Pig shit would get an honours degree by comparison.

When we were driving up there we saw a pheasant standing on the grass on our side of the road, halfway up a long straight on the A9. Few hundred metres ahead of us. There was this long stream of cars heading the other way towards us, just coming level with the bird. Suddenly the pheasant ran across the road, almost like it was aiming for the front car. We were all convinced the silly fucker was going to get hit. Miraculously, it didn’t. Maybe the driver braked – though he couldn’t brake hard, not with that line of traffic behind him – but anyway the bird got across to the other side with about a millimetre to spare. When it skidded to a stop on the grass verge on the far side you could see it get rocked sideways with the slipstream of the car passing. Then once the first car had whooshed past it the stupid fucker of a bird changed its mind and started running back across the road in the direction it had just come! The third or fourth car in the big line of traffic hit it full on and the thing exploded in a cloud of feathers. Everybody just drove on, obviously. But I mean. How stupid can you get?

Anyway, they breed them just to shoot them, which also seems a bit shit, though whether they do the same with the deer too I don’t know. Can’t imagine the deer are as stupid as pheasants, though.

I’d taken plenty of coke with me for the week but I was actually trying to pull Barney off it. I was wanting to get well in with Mr Noyce senior and being his boy’s dealer maybe wasn’t the best long-term position to be in. Barney wasn’t a cunt but he was a bit of a fuckwit, know what I mean? Sooner or later he’d have used my dealing him stuff against me. Threaten to tell his dad on me, basically. I couldn’t be having that. I had plans. Mr Noyce was part of them. Barney wasn’t.

We drank well. I was letting Mr N teach me about wine, and I did develop a taste for single malts, properly watered. So at least something good comes out of Scotland. We ate well, too. Not too much pheasant, thank God. The house was a sort of fake castle, a Victorian take on what they thought the Scots ought to have been building, with decent plumbing and no-nonsense central heating. I was definitely with the Victorians there.

Once again I hadn’t brought Lysanne, the girl friend, along. She’d have hated it. All that rain and no shops. Dulcima, Barney’s girl, hated it too, but I think she just wanted to keep close to Barney. At the time I thought it was cos he might be having second thoughts about her and his eyes had started roving again but later I decided she just liked that he always had lots of drugs and never asked her to help pay for them.

Dizzy bint even tried it on with me once in the back of a Land Rover coming back from a shoot, can you believe it? Hand on me tackle through me moleskin plus fours or whatever they’re called and whispered did I want her to come to my room that night after Barney had conked out, her wearing a pair of waders and nothing else?

I mean, she’s a gorgeous girl, and I’d certainly had thoughts about her, and my cock definitely liked the idea – this was towards the end of the week and it was getting to know my palm like the back of my hand, know what I mean? But fuck me, really. Dangerous ground. Too dangerous. A complication I devoutly didn’t need. I told her I thought she was the most humpable thing I’d seen all year and if I wasn’t such a good friend of Barney’s… She took it pretty well, all told. Maybe just after a bit of reassurance that she was still lusciously fuckable. Some girls are like that.

Long week, but worth it. We escaped eventually, back down the long long road to civilisation. I’d got on extremely well with Mr N. I’d dropped a hint that I was looking to take on a proper job, something serious, like what Mr N did. Nothing too obvious, but still a hint.

Next time I saw Mr and Mrs Noyce I took Lysanne. We went up to his family’s place in Lincolnshire on the coast near Alford. The place was called Dunstley but they called it D’unstable because it was right on the edge of the sea, standing at the end of a road on a sort of sandy cliff above a wave-washed beach. They were on their third garden fence because the other two had disappeared into the North Sea during storms and the garden had shrunk by two-thirds – nearly ninety feet, according to Mr Noyce – in the last forty years.

This time Barney and Dulcima weren’t there. Other things to do. So it looked like I’d made it to friend, not just friend of son. En route to protégé, with a bit of luck. Excuse my French.

Mr N thought Lysanne was a laugh, which was a relief. I could see her weighing him up soon as we arrived and could almost spot the point at dinner on the first night when she looked from him to Mrs N and realised that there was no opening there for her to exploit. That was a relief, too. No play that a girl like her could have made for a guy like him could have lasted longer than a night, but she could have messed things up for me. Mrs N exchanged a look with me over coffee that made me think she’d had pretty much the same feeling re Lysanne as I’d had.

The house was young compared to Spetley Hall; Edwardian, built at the turn of the last century. Whitewashed brick and painted wood compared with mossy stone and polished panel. Great big salt-streaked draughty windows instead of tiny little leaded draughty windows. Very light by comparison, full of morning sunshine coming in from the sea and sparkling.

“It’s all about confidence,” Mr N told me. We were standing in the garden after dinner looking at the latest fence while the waves breaking on the beach below glowed in the last of the evening night. Lysanne and Mrs N were further down the garden. I could hear Lysanne shrieking with laughter at something Mrs N had said. Mr N was slurring his words just a little and at first I thought he’d said “conference” but actually it was “confidence.”

“What, like a trick?” I asked.

Edward laughed. “Maybe. A little harsh, but maybe. Confidence is what keeps the whole show on the road. You need confidence – faith, even – to keep putting one foot in front of the other. Arguably, if you just stopped the whole edifice would collapse.” He glanced at me. “It’s also about value, but there’s the rub. What is value? Value is what people think it is. A thing is worth what somebody will pay for it. But then somebody pays what everybody thinks is an outrageous price for something, a price everybody ‘knows’ is idiotic, and yet if they can offload it for even more to somebody else then it really was worth at least what they paid for it, wasn’t it? The profit is the proof. Though of course if they get caught with it, when it becomes horribly clear that it wasn’t worth anything like what they paid, then they were wrong and everybody who ‘knew’ they were wrong gets proved right.” He sipped his whisky. “The difficult thing is to spot reliably who’s right and who’s wrong by buying in before a stock gets too expensive and get out before it becomes clear it’s actually like somebody in a cartoon who’s just walked over the edge of a cliff and only doesn’t fall because they haven’t realised yet. You know, like Tom and Jerry.”

I’d been thinking Road Runner myself, but I knew what he meant. We both watched the waves for a moment. “Is that the Invisible Hand holding them up, then?” I asked.

Mr N laughed again. “The Invisible Hand. Well, that’s just an article of faith. That’s another myth. Like we’re a twenty-four-hour society. No, we’re not; the markets aren’t. They close at teatime every day in whatever city they’re in, there’s nothing between New York and Sydney and they’re shut the whole of the weekend. And holidays. Just as well too or I’d never get any time off. What do you think of the whisky?”

I shook my head, frowned. “I’m not sure. It’s quite sweet and a bit peaty. I sort of want to say an Islay but I don’t think it is. Could be a Talisker that I haven’t had before but I’m still thinking about it.” I shrugged and looked bashful. “Leave it with me?” Mr N grinned and nodded, looking almost proud of me. This uncertainty was all bollocks by the way. It was a Highland Park from the Orkney Islands. I knew cos even though Mr N had poured it while I wasn’t looking I’d spotted the bottle on the sideboard with the dribbly bits running back down the inside when he’d handed it to me, so I knew. But I needed to go through the charade to make it look good, didn’t I?

“It is a confidence trick,” Edward said, staring out to sea again. “All banks are technically insolvent and all PLCs are one-way bets, or they bloody should be if you handle them right. If they work you keep the profits and if they don’t you close them down and the money they owe to other companies or other people is just left hanging. You don’t go bankrupt, not if you’ve arranged things right. Shareholder, director, MD. That’s what the Limited bit of Public Limited Company means, you see? Limited liability. Not the same as a partnership, or being a Name at Lloyd’s.” He waved his arm at the waves, spilling a little of the whisky. There had been quite a few G &Ts and bottles of wine before the whiskies.

“Really?” I said. I wasn’t sure this sounded right. I guess I must have looked dubious.

“There you are, you see?” Edward said. “A civilian, a very naive person, might think that if a group of people got together, borrowed a lot of money to start a business, ordered lots of plant and equipment and raw materials without paying for them and then made a complete mess of it and lost everything they would somehow still owe all that money, but they don’t. If what they started was a PLC then the company becomes a sort of honorary person, do you see? It owes the money, not them. If it goes under then it goes into administration and its assets are sold off and if those don’t cover what was owed then that’s too bad. As long as they stayed within the letter of the law throughout you can’t touch the directors or the shareholders. The money’s just gone. Of course, if it’s all a great success, then hurrah. All shall have prizes. See what I mean? One-way bet.”

“Jesus, Edward, you’re starting to sound like a commie.”

“Right-wing Marxist, Adrian,” Mr N said briskly. He nodded once, still staring out to sea. “As a matter of fact I did flirt with Socialism, in my youth.”

“That when you were at university, was it?”

He smiled. “Yes. University. But then I saw how much more comfortable life could be as one of the exploiters rather than one of the exploited. Plus I decided that if the proles were so stupid as to let themselves be exploited, who was I to stand in their way?” He smiled at me, his sparse, sandy hair ruffled by the wind. “So I went over to the Dark Side. Cheers.” He drank.

I laughed. “That must make Barney Luke Skywalker.”

He shook his head. “I’m afraid I don’t know Star Trek well enough to say who he’d be. Not Doctor Spock, that’s for sure.”

I almost didn’t correct him. But it was such an obvious one he might say it to somebody else who would and then I’d look like I was being what do you call it? Obsequious or something. So I said, “You’re getting your stars tangled” and explained.

“Yes, well,” he said airily, waving his glass again. He turned to me. “And which side are you on, Adrian?”

“I’m on me own side, Mr N. Always have been, always will be.”

He looked like he was studying me for a moment. “Best side to be on.” He nodded, and drained his glass.

It began with Dr Seolas Plyte. The good doctor was asleep in the withdrawing room off his study in the Speditionary Faculty of the University of Practical Talents in Aspherje when it happened. His favourite mistress, still lying on top of him on the chaise longue in a haze of post-coital torpor, jerked once, exactly as she might have had she too been in the act of falling asleep. She reached down, took him purposefully in her arms and before he could properly wake they were both gone.

Ms Pum Jésusdottir was hiking in the Himalayan Hills when they came for her. A long-laggard world this one, where the Indian subcontinent had barely begun its slow crash into Asia. Here, the highest point in the Himalayas was tree-covered and less than thirteen hundred metres above sea level. She was walking alone along a recently blazed trail beneath tall plane trees dripping from a recent shower, stepping from side to side of the track to avoid the stream of water that it carried, reflecting that if you made a path in an environment of high precipitation without also making ditches then really you just made a stream bed, when she saw the girl sitting – hunched, hugging her knees, staring ahead – a short way up the path.

She couldn’t have been more than thirteen or fourteen; one of the native tribal girls, dressed conservatively ankle to neck in a black caftanne, her hair gathered in a net, fingers glittering with rings. The girl didn’t look at the older woman as she approached. She just sat staring straight ahead, across the path. From a few metres away, Jésusdottir could see that the girl was shaking, and had been crying.

“Hello?” she said. The girl looked at her, sniffing, but did not reply. Ms Jésusdottir tried Hindic. The girl’s expression changed. She rose, standing, unfolding herself, and smiled at the older woman, who only then felt the first pang of fear in her gut. “Oh, Ms Jésusdottir, I have some bad news.”

Brashley Krijk disappeared from his yacht while cruising in the Eastern Middlearthean, off Chandax, on the isle of Girit.

Der Graf Heurtzloft-Beiderkern heard somebody come into the opera box behind him. He assumed it was one of his sons returning; they had both left earlier to indulge their cigar habit in the corridor outside and to flirt with any young ladies they happened to encounter. Whoever it was, they slipped in while the coloratura soprano was just launching into her final and most heart-rending solo. But for that, he might have looked round.

Commandante Odil Obliq, peril of the Orient as an admiring enemy had once described her, was dancing with her new lover, the admiral of her ekranoplan assault squadron, in the moonlit ruins of New Quezon while a blindfolded orchestra did their best to out-voice the Howler Orangs that were ululating from the tumbled stones and twisted metal frames of the most recently destroyed buildings. Across the plaza, from which the wreckage had been cleared by chain gangs of defeated Royalists, came a waiter carrying a tray with their champagne and cocaine.

They stopped dancing, both smiling at the fat old eunuch waddling towards them with the tray.

“Commandante,” he wheezed. “Admiral.”

“Thank you,” Obliq said. She picked the silver straw from the tray. At the ends of her long ebony fingers, her nails were painted in swirling green camouflage, as a joke. She handed the straw to the admiral. “After you.”

“We shall never sleep,” the admiral sighed, bending slightly to the tray and the first two lines of powder, glowing white in the moonlight.

She handed the straw to the commandante, who had taken the opportunity to sip some of the champagne. Then the admiral’s expression changed. She gripped Obliq’s hand and said, “There’s something wrong…”

Obliq stiffened, her hand dropping the silver straw and going to her holstered pistol.

Her earpiece crackled. “Commandante!” her ADC radioed, his voice desperate.

The eunuch waiter hissed, twisted his hand under the tray so that it began to fall, taking the champagne flutes and the rest of the cocaine with it while the pistol revealed underneath pointed straight at the commandante. Obliq had already started to drop, going limp in the admiral’s arms and falling as though in a faint, but it meant only that the chest shot the eunuch had aimed at her became a head shot. The admiral stared on blankly as the first shot was followed by two more before the nearest guards finally woke up and started shooting.

The assassination teams sent after Mrs Mulverhill could find no recent trace of her anywhere.

When I wake, I am in some pain and tied to a chair. Altogether, this is not a satisfactory turn of events.

I underwent some training to cover such situations, and know enough to wake slowly without, one would hope, giving any sign of having woken. This is the theory. In practice I have never been convinced that this is really possible. If you’re unconscious you’re unconscious – so by no means in full control of what your body is doing – and if you’re unconscious you’re probably unconscious for a good reason, like some gorilla in a suit smacking you so hard in the face that your nose seems to be broken, you cannot breathe normally, you have bled copiously down your naked chest, two of your front teeth feel loose and the whole forward portion of your face feels swollen and suffused with bruised blood.

I am hanging forward in the seat as far as my bonds will allow, my chin nearly on my chest, my gaze falling naturally on my own lap. I’m naked. My thighs are bloodstained, brightly lit. I become more fully aware, wallowing my way to consciousness like a nearly waterlogged lump of wood rising slowly to the surface of a cold and sluggish stream. I have taken the most immediate and rudimentary stock of the situation and am just starting carefully – without giving any outward signs of movement – to flex the appropriate muscle groups to test precisely how tightly I am tied to the chair, when a male voice says, “Don’t bother, Temudjin, we can tell you’re awake. And don’t waste your time testing the wires and the chair, either. You’re not going anywhere. We know what you’re doing because it was us who taught you to do it.”

I think briefly about this. My captors seem to know exactly how I am trained to react in such a situation, and they appear to be claiming that they are my own people, or at least that they helped to train me. The individual addressing me is probably not of first-rank education.

I bring my head up, stare into the darkness between a pair of lights pointed at me from a couple of metres away and say, with all the fluency I can muster, “It was we who taught you to do it.”

I’m expecting a “What?” or a “Huh?” but he just pauses and then says, “Whatever. The point is we’ll know what you’re trying to do at every stage. You’ll save us both a lot of time and yourself some pain if you drop the tradecraft stuff.”

An ominous phrase. “At every stage of what?” is the obvious question. I can see nothing beyond the lights. As well as the two to each side of straight ahead there are two more I can see, one level with each shoulder, and from the shadows beneath my chair I guess there are another two behind me. I am encircled with brightness. The voice talking to me is male and I do not recognise it. It might be that of the wide-shouldered man who talked to me on the aircraft, but I don’t know. His voice is coming from directly behind me, I think. Listening to it, I get the impression that I am in a large room. I don’t seem to be able to smell anything, except my own blood: a sharp, metallic scent. The fragre of the place, the information from that extra sense that people like myself have, indicates a world I have not visited before, and a place which feels confused somehow, full of clashing, competing historical and cultural sensations. I check my languages. English. Nothing else.

That is unprecedented. I do not have even the language of my home or my base reality in the house in the trees on the ridge looking out over the town with the casino, where my original self wanders round the place dead-eyed and monosyllabic.

Now I feel fear.

“At every stage of this interrogation,” the man’s voice says, as though in reply to my earlier thought.

“Interrogation?” I repeat. Even to my own ears it sounds as though I have a heavy cold. I try to snort back some of the blood blocking my nose but succeed only in producing a sensation akin to somebody having just stuck a large metal spike in the centre of my face.

“Interrogation,” the man confirms. “To determine what you know, or what you think you know. To discover who is controlling you, or who you think is controlling you. To find out what it is you think you’re doing-”

“Or what I think I think I’m doing,” I offer. Silence. I shrug. “I was spotting the pattern,” I tell him.

“Yes,” he says, sounding tired. “Be clever about it, give cheek, be defiant and even insult the intelligence of the interrogator, so that when you are put to the question your collapse will be all the more abject and your apparent degree of cooperation all the more complete. As I said, Temudjin, we did train you, so we know how you’ll respond.”

I let my head drop so that I am looking at my bloodstained thighs. “Ah, the infinite cowardice of the torturer,” I mutter.

“What?” he says. I did mutter very quietly.

I raise my head again. I try to sound tired and world-weary. “How easy it is to be so confident and to sound so in charge when the person you’re talking to is tied down, utterly helpless and at your mercy. None of that annoying freedom of action for the other party that might let a person fight back, or just leave, or speak as they want to speak rather than as they hope – in their desperation and terror – you want them to speak. Does all that make you feel good? Does it give you that sensation of power people always denied you in normal life, so unfairly? Does it give you what you always missed when you were growing up? Did the other children bully you? Did your father abuse you? Overly strict potty training? Really, I’d love to know: what’s your excuse? What aspect of your upbringing fucked you up to the point that doing this seemed like such a promising career? Do tell.”

I didn’t really expect to get to the end of this speech. I thought he’d appear out of the shadows and start laying into me. That he’s done no such thing may be a very good sign or a very bad one. I have no idea. I’ve somewhat gone off-piste here.

“Oh, Temudjin, you must have made that bit up yourself,” he says, sounding amused. My heart sinks. “Are you trying to get beaten to a pulp?” He gives a snorting laugh. “What in your past made you such a masochist?”

It may be time for a change of tack. I sigh, nod. “Hmm. I see your point. Serves me right for extemporising.”

“That’s another thing we’re going to be asking you about.”

“Extemporising?”

“Yes.”

“Ah ha.”

I have not been entirely open with you, I suppose. There should be a way out of this. A way that they don’t know about, a way that this faceless, unseen interrogator doesn’t know about. But I think it might have been taken from me. I have hardly dared to make sure until now, and it has not been as immediately obvious as it would have been had I not been punched so hard in the face. I put my head down again and move my tongue around in my mouth, probing.

There is a hole in my lower left jaw where a tooth has been removed. It feels gaping, and very fresh. That would be my last hope of escaping with a single bound, gone.

“Yes,” the man says. I suppose he saw some movement about my mouth or jaw. “We took that too. Thought we didn’t know about it, didn’t you?”

“So did you know about it?”

“We might have,” he says. “Or maybe we just found it.”

It was a partially hollowed-out tooth, the space within concealed beneath a tiny hinged ceramic crown. I kept one of my little transitioning pills in there; an emergency dose of septus in case I ever miscounted and ran out of them, or had the little ormolu box stolen, or it failed to make a transition with me. Or I found myself in a situation like this.

Well, so much for that.

I lift my head up. “Okay. So, what do you want to know?”

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 bump into; late arrival, maybe.” We were back in the Palazzo Chirezzia, the black and white palace overlooking the Grand Canal.

“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 fuck me, of course.”

“There is no need for coarse language, Mr… Cavan.”

I sat back and put my hand over my eyes. “Oh for fuck’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 canal a minute away where the launch that had brought them sat idling, its engine loud in the narrow spaces 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 Canal.

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 sex,” 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! 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 buttonhole 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 God,” 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 button. 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 button 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 balls. 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 space – 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, class, 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 shifted, 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 anus while my fingers caressed her sex, 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, shifted 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 cock, 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 cock once more, gripping it more firmly, moving her hand more forcefully now. I did the same, watching the sweet mounds of her buttocks 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 astonishing 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 glass 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 Massif. 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 shining 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 breasts.

“… like an infinite set of electron shells,” she was saying to one of the surrounding academics as I approached. “The set is still infinite but there are measurable, imaginable and innumerable spaces in between that can’t be occupied.”

She grasped my hand when we were introduced.

“Mr… 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 amusement amongst English speakers determined to extract a toll of discomfiture from anybody whose name was not as banal or as ugly as theirs. However, there was something about the way she pronounced it that immediately brought a blush to my cheeks. Perhaps the sunset would cover my embarrassment.

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 cock, 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 fuck me. Now.”

Later, we sat at the table, she in a sheet, me in my shirt, 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 shining 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 pushing 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.”

“Perhaps she finds me attractive,” I suggested, smiling. It was, if nothing else, a more sincere smile than Madame d’Ortolan’s.

She leaned closer. A swirl of breeze brought a hint of her perfume to my nose; something flowery but cloying. “Do you mean,” she said, “sexually?”

“Or just attracted to my sunny character in general.”

“Or attractive in the sense that she thought you one of those more likely to go over to her cause,” Madame d’Ortolan suggested, smile gone now, head tipped to one side, evaluating. Her expression was not unkind, but it was intent.

“I can’t imagine why she would have thought that,” I said, drawing myself up. In her heels, Madame d’O was as tall as me. “I would not expect or appreciate to be under any sort of suspicion just because that lady chose to approach me.”

“You can’t think why she did?”

“No. For all I know she’s working her way through whatever group she’s chosen alphabetically.”

Madame d’Ortolan looked to be about to say something, then didn’t. She snorted and turned. We resumed walking. For a while, nothing was said. A jet stroked a double strand of white across the sky, ploughing heaven.

“You are one of the first,” she told me as we approached the landing stage where the Palazzo Chirezzia’s launch waited. “We think she is targeting transitioners alone. We have people and techniques able to predict her movements and we have, we believe, been able to prevent her doing any real mischief so far. We shall need the full cooperation of all concerned to propagate that fortunate trend onwards into the future, as I’m sure you are entirely able to appreciate.”

“Of course,” I said. I left a pause, then said, “If the lady’s cause is so arcane and her threat so trifling, why is it necessary to oppose her with such force?”

She stopped suddenly and we turned, facing each other. Our eyes never truly flash, of course; we are not the luminously grotesque inhabitants of the deep sea (well, I certainly wasn’t. I wouldn’t vouch for Madame d’Ortolan). However, evolution has left us primed to notice when somebody’s eyes widen suddenly, showing more white, due to surprise, fear or anger. Madame d’Ortolan’s eyes flashed. “Mr Oh,” she said, “she opposes us. Therefore she must be opposed in return. We cannot let such dissent go unchallenged. It would look weak.”

“You could try ignoring her,” I suggested. “That might look more confident. Stronger, even.”

An expression crossed her face that might have been exasperation, then she smiled briefly and patted my arm as we resumed walking. “I dare say I could tell you more of the lady’s corrupting theories and you would be both more horrified at her and more understanding of our position,” she told me, with what sounded like forced amusement. “Her accusations are more alarming and damaging than it is necessary to reveal, but centre, as far as we can gather, on the whole course and purpose of the Concern’s activities. She fantasises some vast ulterior motive in all we do, and so takes issue with us existentially. Such madness absolutely requires treatment. We cannot let it pass. Her charges against us must be defended, her argument broken.” She flashed, this time, a smile. “You must trust us, as your superiors – those with a broader, more knowledgeable and encompassing view – to do the right thing in this.”

She was watching me as we walked. I smiled at her. “Where would we be,” I asked, “if we did not trust our superiors?”

Her eyes might have narrowed a tiny fraction, then she smiled in return and looked away. “Very well,” she said, sounding like somebody who had just made her mind up about something. “There may be another debriefing.” (There was not.) “You may be under moderately enhanced surveillance for a short time.” (It was occasionally highly intrusive enhanced surveillance and it lasted a long time; a couple of years at least.) “Your career, which we are happy to note has already met with some success – precocious success, in the eyes of some of my more conservative colleagues, though I hope we may dismiss their opinions – is still at its beginning. I hope and would expect that this incident has not harmed it in any way. It would be such a tragedy if it did.” (It was harmed. I harmed it. Still I became the best and most used of my peers.)

We reached the jetty, coming out of the shadow of the island’s encircling walls. Madame d’Ortolan accepted the hand of the boatman as he helped her into the launch. We sat down in the open rear well of the launch. “We hope that our trust in you is both well-founded and reciprocated,” she said, smiling.

“Entirely, ma’am,” I said. (This was a lie.)

As the boat gunned away from the isle of the dead, Madame d’Ortolan detached the flower from her lapel. “They say these things are unlucky, outside of a cemetery,” she said, and let the gelded blossom fall into the restless waters of the lagoon.