Transition (17 page)

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.