Transition (29 page)

The burning oils quickly covered most of the bowl’s curtain wall and started to pool on the surface of the water at the foot,
spreading slowly towards the low island of dry stone in the middle where the now-fearful group of guests huddled, beginning
to wonder if something had gone wrong with one of the various mechanisms – large parts of the university had been closed for
months while all this had been set up and there had been rumours of cost overruns, technical problems, project delays and
last-minute panics – or if it was all some horrendously complicated and involved plot directed at them personally and they were
to be cruelly put to death for some real, exaggerated or entirely imaginary crime.

Just when the guests could feel the heat from the wall of flame around them starting to become uncomfortable and were genuinely
beginning to fear not just for their costumes but for their lives, the vast wall of slate covered in spilling water ahead
of them cracked vertically to reveal itself as a pair of enormous doors which began to open with a crushingly ponderous grace,
their burden of water still crashing down their faces undiminished while a broad tongue of stone levered smoothly down between
them to provide a bridge over the encircling noose of fire.

Servants dressed as ghosts and the risen dead – a few of them equipped with fire extinguishers, just in case – beckoned the by
now usually highly relieved and indeed cheering partygoers over the stone bridge and into the throat of another dark tunnel
which led via almost disappointingly conventional cloak- and restrooms into the main body of the Great Hall, where the ball
was to be held under a vast black tent of a roof studded with high and distant lights arranged in starlike constellations.

A short walk away down a corridor lined with skulls gleaned from catacombs across the continent another only slightly smaller
hall held a collection of circular drink, food, drug and smoking bars around which people milled like magnetic particles ricocheting
within some colossal game. Further away, up some wide steps turned into an uphill slalom slope by dense wavy lines of antique
funeral urns, the way led to the great circular space underneath the Dome of the Mists itself.

This space too had been waterproofed and filled with a little artificial sea a metre deep; a circular lake over a hundred
metres across was covered with fragrant floating plants and dotted with tiny islands covered in food and tinkling fountains
of wine. Skiffs, rowing boats and barges rowed by exotically uniformed children plied the placid waters while, above, tumbling
and high-wire acts were performed, surrounded by make-believe shooting stars composed of great fireworks raining sparks and
running on lines suspended across the darkly glittering lake. An orchestra on the largest island, situated in the centre of
the waters, filled the space with music while the wildly decorated lantern-lit vessels sailed serenely around.

A porcelain coracle rowed by a preposterously dressed dwarf bumped very gently into the rushes-bundle fenders lining the wooden
quay near the hall’s entrance. The miniature man toked on a tube sticking out from a frill on one of his sparkling concentric
collars. “Mr Oh?” he asked in a helium-high voice.

“Good evening.”

“Madame d’Ortolan awaits, sir.” He nodded at the other man’s shoes. “Boat’s a bit delicate, squire. You’ll have to take those
off.” Oh undid his shoes. He had dressed conservatively in his old Speditionary Faculty dress uniform, having no particular
intention of joining in the ball and – slightly to his own surprise – no desire to dress in a fancy costume. “You can leave them
with the quay master, sir,” the dwarf said when Oh went to take his shoes with him. “You won’t be needing them on the barge.”

Oh handed his shoes to the cadaverously dressed man in charge of the little pier. He stepped carefully into the fur-lined
interior of the bizarrely fragile craft. The ceramic hull was so thin that, where the furs did not cover it, you could see
the shadow of the waters lapping around its waterline from inside. The dwarf took a breath from a different tube and said
in an unfeasibly deep voice, “Off we go, sir. Please do sit still and don’t touch the sides.”

Oh sat patiently where he was, legs and arms crossed, and let the dwarf row him slowly out over the gently chopping water
towards the most extravagantly decorated vessel on the whole lake. It was made of ice and glided unhurriedly across the waves
in its own surrounding skirt of curling mists. It was sculpted to look like an ancient royal barge: its carriage-like superstructure
was covered in gold leaf and it bore at its centre a great square sail on which was projected a filmed performance of a famously
sensual and erotic ballet.

The air grew noticeably colder as the dainty coracle approached the ice barge; the dwarf used one oar to prevent his frangible
craft hitting the larger vessel’s hull. Servants dressed like skeletons helped Oh up to the deck and the dwarf rowed slowly
away again. The barge’s deck covering looked like some form of dark skin, and felt as warm.

Madame d’Ortolan reclined with a few other members of the Central Council in a nest of glistening blood-red cushions inside
the main cabin of the craft, surrounded by canted gilt poles holding furled curtains of gold-threaded purple material. The
tented ceiling of the enclosure appeared insubstantial, made from thousands of little black and white pearls threaded on silver
wires.

The raised, airy cabin afforded views out across the lake, its tiny jewel-like islands and the flotilla of slowly swirling
vessels. Oh recognised the others of the Council who were present and greeted them individually: Mr Repton Bik, Madama Gambara-Cilleon,
Lord Harmyle, Professor Prieska Dottlemien, Comptroller Lapsaline-Hregge, Captain Yollyi Suyen and of course Madame d’Ortolan
herself, who, with the latest changes to the Council, was now its acknowledged if unofficial head.

She was dressed in some ancient wildly complicated costume, all frills and ruffles and floaty films of material, the outer
layers of which which seemed barely heavier or less transparent than the air. Jewels glittered on the lacy extremities of
her pooled skirts and on her fingers, ears, throat, forehead and nose. She had lately been accorded the privilege of moving
from her earlier, aged body – already her second since she had been invited to join the Council – and was now a curvaceously beautiful
white-skinned creature, raven-haired, with icy blue eyes and fabulously near-spherical breasts which she had chosen to reveal
in all their considerable glory. Her extravagant costume stopped at her amazingly thin waist and only resumed again at her
shoulders, where a little lacy thing like a voluptuary’s idea of a bed-jacket covered her shoulders and arms.

A ruby nestled in her belly button and her breasts were strung with lines of tiny diamonds. A diamond choker encircled her
long, slim neck.

“Young Mr Oh,” she said, patting a plump of pillows beside her. “Do come and sit.”

Two other Council members – like the others, fabulously attired, though in no case as opulently or as revealingly as Madame
d’Ortolan – adjusted themselves where they lay to accommodate him. Oh kissed her hand when she offered it. “Madame, I feel underdressed,”
he told her.

“To the contrary,” she said. “I am so, and you are positively swaddled in your schoolboy uniform. Ah. I see your feet are
naked. That is something.” A tray held outstretched by one of the skeletally dressed servants appeared between them. Madame
d’Ortolan waved her hand at it and Oh lifted a globular glass with a double skin and several tiny fish swimming in the watery
space surrounding the drink itself, which was warm and highly spiced. “I am some opera costumier’s version of a slave girl,”
she told him, looking down at herself and spreading her arms. “What do you think?”

“It’s very spectacular.”

She cupped her diamond-rashed breasts in her hands as though weighing them. “I’m particularly pleased with these.”

“I imagine everybody else is too, ma’am.”

She looked up at him and smiled exasperatedly. “Mr Oh – Temudjin, if I may – you sound like an old man. Listen to yourself!” She
nodded at the globular glass. “Drink up. You obviously need it.”

He drank.

Oh wondered at Madame d’Ortolan’s startlingly young and vivacious new body. It was generally held that one had a physique
one had grown up with and grown accustomed to and that trying to stray too far from this template when transitioning – or, even
more so, when re-embodying, as Madame d’Ortolan had done – was both difficult to accomplish and disagreeable to maintain, especially
over extended intervals.

He knew from his own transitions that unless he made a particular effort to avoid doing so he tended to end up in quite plain,
rather averagely sized bodies, whereas his own real body, this body, the one that stayed in Calbefraques in the house on the
ridge overlooking the town of Flesse, was taller, more pleasingly proportioned and altogether better-looking than those he
naturally gravitated towards in the course of his missions for the Concern.

Of course, expressing oneself into quite plain, unremarkable forms was a positive benefit in his line of work as it made it
easier to slip in and out of situations and worlds without attracting undue attention, but he had always wondered why his
transitionary selves always seemed to be so short and bland without him intending them to be so. Maybe deep down that was
just his physiology of choice, though he could not see why.

They did say that for those with transgender issues, transitioning into bodies quite different from that one had grown up
within was a positive boon, almost a treatment and solution in itself.

Madame d’Ortolan had always been a slightly dumpy if still elegantly turned-out lady, according to both gossip and the photographic
records of the Concern; to have chosen the body she was displaying so luxuriantly before him now must indicate she was prepared
to make a considerable sacrifice of her own future comfort – taking on that very feeling of not being happy in one’s own skin
that sufferers found so objectionable – for the sake of looking like she had obviously convinced herself she ought to look.
It indicated a single-mindedness and determination that many people would find admirable, Oh supposed, but also a sort of
ruthlessness against the self that did not speak of a wholly healthy and untroubled personality.

She made an all-embracing gesture with one arm. “What do you think of the party?”

He made a show of looking all around. “I have never seen anything quite like it,” he told her truthfully. “I can’t imagine
what it must have cost. Or how long it must have taken to arrange.”

“A fortune,” she told him, smiling broadly. “And for ever!” She produced a corded mouthpiece joined to a giant water pipe
situated some metres away and carefully tended by another of the skeletally dressed servants. She took a little sip of the
smoke, passed the mouthpiece to him. “Do,
do
be careful,” she told him archly, putting one ring-heavy hand on his knee and leaving it there. “It’s frightfully strong.”

Oh put his lips to the mouthpiece. She had left it a little moist. He drew in a mouthful of the grey-pink smoke, which smelled
and tasted like a cocktail of different drugs. He let the fumes touch just the top of his lungs and then blew them decorously
out again rather than hold them in and get too stoned. He got the impression that Madame d’Ortolan had already smoked quite
a lot. She was still smiling fixedly at him. One of her hands played with one of the strings of diamonds curved over her breasts.

“I do hope you’re here quite determined to enjoy yourself, Tem,” she told him. “It would be such a terrible waste of time
and resources otherwise.”

“Madame, I feel entirely obliged to.”

“Please, call me Theodora.”

“Thank you, Theodora. Yes, I intend to enjoy myself.” He held up the half-drained glass of warm liquor and presented the hookah
mouthpiece back to her. He did his best to smile with all the warmth he could command. “Indeed, I have already begun to.”

She tapped his knee. “So,” she said, for a moment slightly more businesslike. “How did the Questionary Office treat you after
your meeting with Mrs M?”

Oh had told the Concern about his encounter with Mrs Mulverhill at the casino in Flesse, their subsequent flit and something
of their conversation.

“Quite humanely, Theodora.” There had been a lot of questions and they had – hilariously, he thought – tried to hypnotise him,
plus he was sure they had people listening and watching him while he answered their questions who would be attuned to any
degree of falsity or evasion. But there had been no threat of unpleasantness and he had been as open as he felt he could.

“And Mrs M herself,” Madame d’Ortolan purred. “Did she treat you humanely?”

“She certainly treated me like a human.”

Madame d’Ortolan tapped his knee with one ringed finger. “I heard,” she said, seemingly addressing his knee or her finger,
“that she took you to another world while you were inside her.” She looked up at him, wide-eyed. “Is that true?”

“It is, Theodora.”

“Ah,” she said, with what sounded like wistfulness. “The transport of delight.”

“Just after, actually.”

“I hope it was worth it.”

“That would be impossible to judge,” he said, aware he was being gnomic. Still, it seemed to satisfy her.

She stroked his knee. “Tell me, Tem, what did she say about me?”

“Well, Theodora, I can’t entirely remember.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

“Are you sure you’re not just trying to be gallant?”

“Fairly sure.”

“I think you are. You are trying to be gallant.” She brought herself confidentially closer to him, leaning so close that one
of her nipples pressed gently against his jacket, level with his heart. “You are trying to be gallant!”

“Well, it’s just that, having talked about it all at such length with the Questionary people, the recollection feels worn.
Stripped out, if you like. As though I have the memory of a memory, not the memory itself.”