Transition (30 page)

She looked at him unsteadily, as though dazzled. “I do hope you’re not trying to be
too
gallant, Tem,” she said, her voice quite firm. “There’s nothing you need spare me.”

He was sure that Madame d’Ortolan had either read the transcript of what he’d told the Questionary Office or seen a recording
of his interview. At the very least she would have had full access to any records so could have learned all she needed to
know from those.

“Mrs Mulverhill,” he began, and instantly sensed the three faces nearest to them flick their attention in his direction. He
brought his mouth closer to Madame d’Ortolan’s ear and lowered his voice accordingly, “said that you would lead the Concern
to disaster and ruin,” he told her. “And that you – or some part or faction of the Central Council – might have a hidden agenda.
Though she was not sure what that might be.”

Madame d’Ortolan was silent for a moment. Beyond her feet, two of the other Council people, who had not overheard what he’d
said earlier, were sharing a hookah mouthpiece and a joke. The two men laughed suddenly and uproariously in a spluttering
cloud of grey-pink smoke. “You know,” Madame d’Ortolan said quietly, and there was a steely edge to her voice that made him
think that she had not been drunk or stoned in the least, “we have tried so hard to protect you, Tem.” She looked steadily
up at him. He chose to say nothing. “We have watched you so very, very carefully, and surrounded you with so many people charged
with making sure that you come to no harm from this woman, and put our best people onto the job of monitoring all your flits,
and every world you go to and everything you do there. We have been so impressed with everything you’ve done, but so disappointed
that we seem unable to stop this woman finding you, or prevent her taking you wherever she wants once she has, or backtracking
where you’ve been with her subsequently. I find it almost unbelievable that she can do that all by herself. Don’t you think
it’s unbelievable?” She played with a strand of her curling black hair, twisting it round one finger, again looking up at
him wide-eyed.

“No, Theodora, I don’t,” he told her. “It happens to me. I take no part in it, but it happens nevertheless. So I find it perfectly
believable. You would too.” He drank from his fishily inhabited glass.

She took the mouthpiece of the water pipe and used it to stroke his leg lightly, from upper thigh to mid-calf. “I believe
you, Tem, of course,” she said absently, as though not paying attention to herself. “However, there are those who feel that
we may be being a tad too lenient in all this. It does just seem so very strange that she can do what she can so terribly
easily, and all without any help or cooperation from you. Perhaps we need to check how… how easy it is to flit with you like
that.”

“You mean, so embraced, so contained?”

“Well, yes.” She was still watching her hand holding the hookah mouthpiece.

He waited until she brought the mouthpiece back up and then took it from her and sucked on it. “If you are saying what I think
you are, Theodora, then it would be both a pleasure and an honour.”

She looked up with an open, vacant expression. “I do beg your pardon, what was it you thought I was saying?”

“I may have misinterpreted, ma’am,” Oh said on an in-breath, waving the mouthpiece through a grey-pink cloud. “Perhaps you
ought to say what it was you were actually saying, to spare the blushes of us both.”

She looked at him knowingly and took the mouthpiece back, sucking daintily on it. “I think you know exactly what I was saying,
Tem.”

He bowed as best he could, given that he was reclining. “Ma’am, I am at your disposal.”

She smiled. “You are amenable, Temudjin? You consent?” She reached out and took hold of one of his hands. “You see, I ask
your permission rather than just take you. I think to do that is simply rude. A violation, even.”

“I am entirely amenable, Theodora.”

She gave a little tinkling laugh. “Still so formal!” She squeezed his hand. “Come then. Let us do this.”

Without further ado they were suddenly somewhere else. She was dressed just as she had been. He was not. Now he wore fancy
dress; some sort of blue-and-silver-striped puffed-out outfit with shoes whose toes turned up and a giant hat shaped like
an onion. Everything else felt very similar. Same fragre, same languages. They appeared to be lying on a collection of pillows
and cushions similar to those they had just left, but situated on a little circular island surrounded by a wide pool of water
lit from below by slowly changing lights of green and blue. The walls and ceiling were dark or invisible. The air was warm
and smelled of strong, heady perfumes. There was nobody else within sight.

Madame d’Ortolan moved herself closer to him. “There. We are just beneath the floor of the Dome of the Mists. Our vacated
selves are floating somewhere just overhead. This seems agreeable to you?” There was a kind of slightly delayed natural amplification
behind her voice that made him suspect they were right in the centre of a perfectly circular space, her words echoing off
the totality of the circumference around them.

Oh felt round the perimeter of his giant hat. “I’m not sure about this,” he said, and took it off. His voice, too, sounded
strange, the echoes overemphatic, lagging behind his words just enough to clash with them. “But otherwise, yes, it’s perfectly
agreeable.”

She smiled, smoothed a hand over his hair. “Let us make it more agreeable,” she whispered, and slid to him, embracing him,
bringing her mouth up to his.

He had wondered if this would prove awkward or difficult, but it did not. He remembered Mrs Mulverhill asking him if he’d
fucked Madame d’Ortolan yet (or had she even expressed it as her fucking him? – he couldn’t recall) and deciding at the time
that his pride would not let that happen. Even that he ought to feel some sort of loyalty, some fidelity to Mrs Mulverhill,
both sexual and – what? ideological? – despite feeling even at the time that this was preposterous, almost perverse. At the very,
very least, he’d thought over the last few minutes, he would be cold, or difficult to persuade or rouse, or perfunctory and
hinting at contemptuous.

But, faced with such flattering attention from on high, confronted with such a powerful regard from somebody who had taken
such trouble to make themselves so formidably if ostentatiously attractive, there was no part of him that was not responding
enthusiastically. There might, he supposed, have been something in the drug smoke or the drink, but probably, he admitted
to himself, not.

Madame d’Ortolan was a highly capable lover; dextrous, smooth and with a sort of restless, almost impatient touch, forever
moving her hands and mouth and attention from one place on his body to the next, as though, while never exactly dissatisfied
with what she had uncovered already, she was still searching for something even better.

Both their costumes seemed to have been designed to provide easy sexual access without having to take any part of them entirely
off. When he entered her, she let out a great satisfied sigh and hugged him tightly to her with all four limbs, throwing her
head back to expose her long white neck and giving a sort of growling laugh. “Ah, now,” she said, half to herself. “Just there,
just there.”

There was a virtuosic skill in what happened a few minutes later, when they both achieved orgasm at once. This was such a
cliché in itself, and so relatively unusual, that Oh found, even in the course of it, time to be unashamedly impressed. As
the sensation was beginning to ebb – the echoes of his cries and hers starting to fade around them – she took him, transitioning
them together into another pair of coupled bodies. Then, moments later, into another, and another, and another. He had no
time to evaluate each passing body and world, was barely aware of more than a riffling sequence of fragres, glimpses of different
amounts or qualities of light – eyes open or not – and the feel of larger or smaller spaces around them. Cooler air, warmer air,
varying smells of perfumes and bodily musks, even their physical state in the shape of different sexual positions; all flickered
past him in a strobe of elongated ecstasies.

He did recall, despite the pulsings of such concentrated, extended pleasure, that there were people who existed in a state
of perpetual sexual arousal, coming to orgasm continually, through the most trivial, ordinary and frequent physical triggers
and experiences. It sounded like utter bliss, the sort of thing drunk friends roared with envious laughter over towards the
end of an evening, but the unfunny truth was that, in its most acute form, it was a severe and debilitating medical condition.
The final proof that it was so was that many people who suffered from it took their own lives. Bliss – pure physical rapture – could
become absolutely unbearable.

Mrs M was right; in everything a leavening.

But it finished, the final few transitions into other heaving, sweating, trembling bodies taking longer and longer in each,
each time, and synchronised so that it was just the last few spasms on each occasion, then the exhausted dregs of climax that
were experienced, and finally a long, extending afterglow, the sum of it like some absurdly exaggerated romanticised ideal
of perfect physical and spiritual lovemaking.

When it was finally over and Oh was able to open his eyes, clear his head and take stock of his surroundings, he was still
inside her, and they were sitting together, facing each other in some sort of tall V-shaped love seat, its velvety components
and cut-outs arranged just so to offer the occupying lovers access, support, purchase and leverage.

They were in a great flat desert of pale golden sand, beneath a plain black canopy flapping in a steady wind, the air warm
as it flowed across their entirely naked bodies. There was nobody else around that he could see. Beneath them, his feet were
just touching the surface of a thick abstractly patterned carpet. A small table nearby held some decorated ceramic pots and
a tall elegantly worked jug. A pile of their clothes lay folded on a wide footstool. A short distance away, a couple of large
tawny-pelted animals that he didn’t recognise lay asleep on the sand. Little fragre to sense. Languages as before. This body
was leaner and more muscular than his own. Thinking about it, they all had been. Looking down, he saw that he was as shaved
as she was.

Madame d’Ortolan yawned and stretched. She smiled at him. She looked just as she had, though bereft of her clothes and jewellery.
She ran a hand through his hair, her gaze flicking about his face.

“So, Tem,” she said lazily, and gave a little shiver, squeezing him inside her.

“Your investigations are complete, I take it,” Oh said. His words sounded a little more cold than he’d meant.

She gazed levelly at him. “I suppose they are, Tem.” It was hard to read her voice. She stroked his face. “And very pleasant
they were to perform, too. Wouldn’t you say?” Her smile appeared engagingly tentative.

He took one of her hands and kissed it gently with dry lips. “I would,” he said, but stalled there, and could not even look
her in the eye. Confused, he felt a need to say more, to make light of this, or, perhaps, instead, to behave in an overtly
and overly romantic, grateful manner, to reassure her even, to compliment and flatter her and declare his admiration and appreciation,
yet at the same time he wanted to dismiss her, deflate her, hurt her, just get away from her.

He felt caught, poised between these conflicting urges, as balanced on their cusp as he was on this absurd fucking chair.

“I trust something of the lady’s spell might now be broken, yes?” she asked, bringing her mouth close to his ear as she stroked
his cheek with the back of her fingers. “I’m sure she has her own naive charms, but further experience offers us greater richness,
don’t you think? It offers us some extra perspective. We compare, contrast, measure and judge. Initial impressions, however
enchanting they may have seemed at the time, are evaluated again in the light of something more accomplished. What might have
seemed matchless becomes… re-valued, hmm?” She levered herself away a little and smiled, her hand still stroking his cheek.
“The young wine serves its purpose and seems well enough when one knows no better, but only the fine wine, brought patiently
to the summit of fruition where it may reveal all its complexities and subtleties, satisfies all the available senses, wouldn’t
you say?”

He stilled the stroking hand, folding it in his own. “Well,” he said, forcing himself to stare into her eyes. “Indeed. There
was no comparison.”

He felt her gaze pierce him, and knew immediately that the remark, which had been meant to deceive, which he had thought cunning
and which was supposed to mean one thing to her and another entirely to him, had failed to mislead her.

He felt something in her change. She pursed her lips, said, “We’ll go back now.”

And they were back, back to the ice yacht and the corpuscular landscape of pillows and cushions they shared with the others,
she just letting go of his hand and looking away, her expression bored. She lifted the mouthpiece for the hookah and drew
deeply on it, then glanced back at him. Her face looked closed, composed. “Fascinating, Mr Oh,” she said. She waved one hand
dismissively. “I’ll let you get back to the party. Good night.”

He felt silenced by his own clashing emotions as much as by her. He hesitated, then decided that there was nothing he could
say or do that would not make the situation worse. He nodded, rose and left.

A drunk, singing dwarf in a spun-sugar dinghy rowed him back to shore, breaking off a bit of gunwale as they approached and
offering it to him. “Tastes of rum, sir! Go on! Try it! Try it! Try it!”

The Philosopher

I must concede that I was lucky in a sense. On my return from abroad and my quitting the Army I found employment immediately
during a time of high unemployment, having been recommended to the national police force by one of the special-forces liaison
officers I had worked with overseas. My skills and abilities had been recognised at quite high levels and I will not pretend
that I did not feel a degree of pride on realising this.