9

Patient 8262

Infinities within infinities within infinities… The human brain quails when confronted with such proliferating vastness. We think we have a grasp of it, brandishing our numbers – natural, rational, complex, real, unreal – in the face of all that’s inestimable, but truthfully these resources are mere talismans, not practical tools. A comfort; no more.

Nevertheless, the doorways into that inexhaustible wilderness of forever multiplying worlds had been opened to us, and we required the means to at least try to understand as much as we could of their hidden mechanisms and how they might be comprehended and navigated.

Learning about the many worlds occurred, appropriately, in layers. One was history. In at least three categories.

There was history that we knew we were allowed to know, history that we knew we were not allowed to know, and history that allegedly didn’t exist but that we – that is, the students of this effectively measureless subject – suspected did exist but was never talked about, not at our level and perhaps not even at the level of the people who taught us.

We were aware from the beginning that the Concern had many more levels than were immediately visible from the lowly strata where we existed in its tortuously convoluted hierarchy, and it was hard even to guess at how far beyond us it extended, given both the irredeemably complex nature of the many worlds themselves and the seemingly quite deliberate opacity of the organisation’s structure.

We knew there were various levels and classes of executives within l’Expédience with, at the apparent pinnacle of this structure, the Central Council itself, composed of people who knew all there was to know about the Concern’s provenance, internal configuration, extent, operational methods and aims, and some of us were of the opinion – always perverse, in mine – that there might be one central authority figure at the head of all this tiered knowledge and power, a kind of organisational autocrat to whom everybody else was obliged to defer. But for all we knew that final, single, near-godlike Emperor of the realities – if he or she did exist – was little better than a foot soldier in a still greater grouping of other Concerns and meta-Concerns extending further and higher out across and through the furiously expanding realities and numbered in millions, billions, trillions… who knew?

For us lowly foot soldiers, though, mere trainees that we were, the centre of our world – the centre of all our many worlds – was the Speditionary Faculty of the University of Practical Talents, Aspherje, on an Earth that – almost uniquely – did not call itself Earth, but Calbefraques.

Calbefraques was the ultimate Open world, the mirror image of one of the numberless perfectly Closed Earths where nobody knew about the many worlds; a place where possibly every single adult soul who walked its surface knew that it was merely one world within an infinitude of worlds, and a nexus at that, a stepping-off point for as much of that infinitude as it was possible to imagine.

And a world, an Earth that was close to unique. Logically there had to be other versions of this Earth that were close to the Calbefraques that we knew, but we seemed to be unable to access them. It was as though by being the place that could act as a gateway to any other version of Earth, Calbefraques had somehow outpaced all the other versions of itself that would otherwise have existed. It seemed that in the same way that the true consciousness of a transitioner could only be in one world at a time, there could only be one world that was perfectly Open, and that world, that unique Earth was this one, called Calbefraques.

It was here that almost all the transitioners lived when they were not on missions to other worlds, and here too that the vast majority of theorists of transitioning, experts in transitioning, researchers into transitioning and experimental practitioners of transitioning both made their home and plied their trade. In its globally distributed factories and laboratories all the multifarious paraphernalia of transitioning was manufactured, and – somewhere, allegedly – the ultimately precious substance we called septus, the drug that made flitting possible in the first place, was brought into being. Exactly how and where this was done and exactly what septus really was, nobody seemed to know. The secrecy surrounding the drug’s creation was of an order more intense even than that associated with the severely security-conscious operations of the Transitionary Corps. Naturally, this meant that the speculation regarding this piece of arcana was, to put it mildly, unrestrained.

There were strict rules about the use and exposure of septus within this world or any other, restricting its use to its flitting-enabling purpose and absolutely nothing else. But it was rumoured that, if one did try to have some of it analysed, in the most advanced laboratories one could find, the sample itself simply vanished, or appeared on inspection – by chemical analysis, mass spectrometry, microscopes working on a variety of wavelengths or any other technique available – to be nothing more complicated than pond slime, or even pure water.

Here, in the university that was a city within a city, within its piled pyramids, ziggurats, towers and colonnades, and in the profusion of outlying buildings distributed all across the greater city – an ever-multiplying number, in a fit image of what was studied within them – millions of students like myself had, over the years, learned as much of that proportion of the truth as it was thought appropriate for us to be allowed to comprehend. What some of us really wanted to know, naturally, was the size of that proportion, and what was concealed in the fraction of it being denied us.

The Transitionary

It was the septennial Festival of Death in Aspherje, Calbefraques, and the Central Council of the Transitionary Office had arranged a particularly extravagant party and ball to celebrate both the formal cultural event and the latest expansion and reconstitution of the Council.

Guests arrived on a specially constructed narrow-gauge railway which ran in a loop round the closed city centre, picking up guests from a variety of temporary stations – manned by servants dressed as ghouls – which were dotted around the periphery of the cordoned-off area, where the guests’ own transport had deposited them. The track was lit by tall, smokily guttering torches and by burning braziers hanging from gibbets and made to look like ancient roadside punishment cages, the skeletons of starved miscreants visible through the smoke and flames inside.

At the Final Terminus, the station – seemingly made entirely of dinosaur bones – where the guests were deposited, a wide moat had been dug across the park in front of the entrance to the University’s Great Hall. Beneath the water lay a system of pipes which fed marsh gases and flammable oils to the surface, where they were lit or detonated by floating bundles of burning rags containing clockwork mechanisms that made them jerk and move and appear briefly human.

Guests proceeded across a bridge bowed out across this waste of sporadic conflagration and entered the Great Hall through a recently constructed ill-lit tunnel of soot-blackened stone. Enormous iron doors creaked open to admit guests to a tall circular space containing another, near-circular moat of unpleasant-smelling water lying at the foot of a great steep bowl of curved walls running with liquids. Across a bridge ahead stood a great wall of what appeared to be slate, its slick surface running with water cascading down its imperfectly vertical surface in fast, hissing waves. Beyond the far end of the bridge, where one might have expected to see a door, there was only this wall of water, nothing else.

The great iron doors behind swung shut on each batch of two dozen or so guests, leaving them looking nervously round, unable to see a way out. Streamers of fire appeared twenty metres above them, all around the top of the vast bowl they found themselves trapped within, while the small bridge that had led them from the tunnel behind was drawn quickly back up to clang and echo against the rust-pitted surface of the doors.

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.”

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.

I met with some ill feeling from a few of my new colleagues in the police force at first, perhaps because I had been brought in at a relatively senior level. However, I like to think that I soon won the respect of almost all of them, though of course there will always be those in any organisation who will find something to be resentful about and one simply has to live with that fact.

I found myself in the civilian police, albeit the more senior and serious national police force, at a moment in time when the full extent of the Christian Terrorist threat was just beginning to become clear even to those, not least our own government, who had persuaded themselves that such people could be dealt with effectively by negotiation and the occasional slap on the wrist.

I think the first airport massacre ended that policy of folly. The CTs sent in a small suicide team of big, well-trained men who simply overpowered one of the two-man armed police teams who patrolled our ill-defended airports at the time. The two officers stood no chance; they were bundled to the ground by three or four fanatics of substantial physical size, their throats were cut without mercy and their machine guns and ammunition clips taken from them and turned on the nearest check-in queue. The members of the suicide team not firing the guns set about slashing at as many of the screaming, fleeing holidaymakers as they could, chasing down women and children and slitting their throats too, without mercy. Nearly forty innocent people of all ages were butchered in this orgy of violence.

When the machine guns ran out of ammunition everyone in the team was meant to kill themselves but two of them were overpowered by angry citizens before they could take that coward’s way out. One did not survive their summary justice but the other did and it was on him that I had what I will freely confess was the pleasure of working subsequently, with the aim of discovering as much as possible about the organisation and aims of the CT organisation.

I felt intense pride that I had been chosen to conduct this interrogation. I took it as a compliment both to my technical skills but also to my reputation for the measured and considered application of my techniques. Such was the national outrage at the attack at the time that a more hot-headed operative might have botched the assignment. It is a myth that the police and other security personnel are immune to emotion, both their own and that of the law-abiding populace at large. We may be trained to combat the deleterious effects of acting on such emotions, but we are not inhuman.

I too felt a cold fury towards the wretched individual who had carried out such a cowardly attack, but I would not let that emotion, however understandable, cloud my professional judgement regarding the task in hand or allow any rashness or overreaction so caused to effectively offer this animal of an extremist an overly quick escape from the torments he so richly deserved.

The specific operational details of the interrogation need not detain us here. The desire to know of such things can be almost prurient at times, in my opinion. My colleagues and I are paid to do such things and are trained to cope with the psychological fallout of our actions and there are good reasons why a veil is drawn over such matters to protect the general populace, who do not deserve to have to confront the realities that we have to face every day to keep them safe.

Suffice to say, despite the subject’s attempts to convert me to his bizarre, perverted and cruel religion with its emphasis on martyrdom, cannibalism and the alleged ability of their holy men to forgive all sins no matter how horrendous and barbaric, I did not reconvert to become a Christian! And let me just say that I do not even concede that he was displaying any real bravery or strength of will in trying to do so. Fanatics are driven purely by their own fanaticism, and anyway it is a common technique used by subjects trained to resist interrogation to try to turn the resultant discourse back upon the questioner, not so much in any realistic hope of altering their views or causing them to cease or go easier in what they are doing, of course, but simply as a way for the subject to take his mind off the process itself.

In any case, I am satisfied that while the cell system of the terrorist organisation sadly protected the identities of its other members apart from the six in the suicide team itself, I, along with my colleagues, extracted all that there was to be extracted from the subject and, thanks to our restraint, we were able to deliver him alive if not intact, and certainly not unbroken, to the Justice Ministry for his trial and subsequent (well-deserved in my opinion) execution.

Adrian

I made a lot of money for Mr Noyce. Not like that dingbat son of his. Barney lost Mr N a lot of money. Soaked it up, pissed it away and snorted it. He would reappear from his bar in Goa every couple of years and announce he was coming back to stay in London and do something useful but he never did. Always ended up going back to the bar. He thought his dad ought to bail him out by giving him a job with his own firm, but Mr N wasn’t having it. Blood might be thicker than water but it’s no match for liquidity, know what I mean? Money is serious. You fuck about with it at your peril.

Barney was always at Mr N to give him the bar, too, to turn it over to him legally but Mr N was too clever for that as well. He knew Barney would just sell it or lose it in a poker game or use it as collateral to fund some shitwit scheme that he’d make the usual unholy fucking mess of and be back at Mr and Mrs N’s with the begging bowl shortly after.

Frankly, I think Ed found his boy a bit of an embarrassment. He was glad he was mostly arm’s length away in sunny Goa. Barney and me weren’t getting on so well any more either. I found him a bit of a moaner, always on about how tough things were for him when this was clearly a load of bollocks. Little cunt had had a charmed life with all the advantages, hadn’t he? Not my fault or his dad’s that he’d fucked it. And I mean, running a bar on a beach? That’s the fucking jackpot prize for most people, that is, that’s what your average geezer would regard as a brilliant retirement. Hard done by, my arse.

And he had the nerve to blame me for this, at least partly. Good as told me this when we were drunk together once during a weekend at Spetley Hall. Like it was all my fault because I’d replaced him in Mr and Mrs N’s affections. So what if I had? I was a better friend to them than he was a son. I mean, the soft git.

But I was the golden boy, wasn’t I? Never mind that the Noyces were like a second family to me, Mr N’s firm was like the first national bank of AC. I made a fucking mint. Most of it went to the firm but a lot came back to me in the way of a decent salary but especially in bonuses. Mr N and I had some heated discussions on the subject of bonuses on a few occasions but we always came to an agreement in the end.

I suppose we both always knew I’d be leaving and going elsewhere eventually, but in the meantime the good times rolled with no hard feelings.

Bought a bigger flat in delightful Docklands and a succession of less and less practical cars. Thought about a yacht but decided they just weren’t me – you could always charter if you really needed to. Took me hols in Aspen, the Maldives, Klosters, the Bahamas, New Zealand and Chile. Not to mention Majorca and Crete, doing a bit of old-fashioned raving in the big hot loud clubs.

And the girls. Oh, bless their little cotton gussets, the girls: Saskia and Amanda and Juliette and Jayanti and Talia and June and Charley and Charlotte and Ffion and Jude and Maria and Esme and Simone. There were lots of others, but those were the non-casual ones, the ones I took the trouble of remembering their names and was happy to have stay over more than once. I loved them all in my own way and I guess they returned the favour. Most of them wanted to take things further but I never did. There’s no “us” in commitment, I’d tell them, there’s just a “me.” They couldn’t complain. I was generous and if there were ever hard feelings then it wasn’t my fault.

And every month that 10K in US greenery appeared in my main spending account, and every time I saw it on the statement I got a little leap of the heart, remembering what had happened or what had seemed to happen that night in chilly Moscow, at the Novy Pravda.

After our visit to the room with the black furniture and the amber light, Mrs M and I went back to the table where Connie Sequorin was chatting to two large Russian guys. They didn’t look very pleased to see me and Mrs M, especially me, but they left their cards and a bottle of Cristal and fucked off soon enough. We ate more blinis and caviar, drank more champagne and Mrs M and Connie both danced with me. I was still in a daze, though, not really paying attention to very much at all. Soon enough Mrs M paid the bill, we got our coats and walked straight to the waiting Merc that had brought us here. Snow was swirling from the orange-black sky. We went to this massive, very bright and warm hotel and I was handed the key to my own room. Mrs M said she’d be in touch and pecked me on the cheek. Connie said the same and did the two-cheek pretend-kiss thing. They had a suite and I wondered, as I padded down a very broad tall corridor to my room, if they had something going together.

I slept till mid-afternoon the next day and found an envelope had been shoved under my door with a thousand roubles in it and a first-class BA ticket to Heathrow on a flight leaving four hours later. The room had been paid for. Mrs M and Connie had checked out hours earlier. A note left behind reception by Mrs M just said, “Welcome abroad. Mrs M.” Welcome abroad. Not Welcome aboard. Welcome abroad. I couldn’t tell if this was a mistake or a bit of cleverness.

I went back. Back to Moscow and back to the club, the following month. I made friends with the manager guy Kliment (after a bit of suspicion – he didn’t really remember me or Mrs M or Connie Sequorin and probably thought I was police or a journalist or something) and got to have a look round the place one day. I found the room, the bedroom where Mrs M had taken me and we’d seemed to go on the weirdest of weird trips to a marshy wasteland where there was no Moscow, just ruins.

It hadn’t occurred to me at the time to bring back a flower or a pebble or something – I’d been too fucking freaked out, I suppose. Not that that would have proved anything anyway. I knew something bizarre had happened but I didn’t know exactly what. I had the use of the room and the run of the place for the afternoon, until the staff arrived in the early evening to make the club ready for the night’s fun, and I had a good look round the room, the rooms on either side and even the cellar underneath and the little private bar directly above but it all looked plain and kosher, just slightly seedy in the cold strip light of day and I couldn’t see how the trick, assuming it was a trick, obviously, had been pulled. Drugs, I supposed. Or hypnosis. Suggestion and all that, know what I mean?

No, I didn’t know what I meant either. It had just been too fucking real. I left the place no wiser than when I’d arrived and even turned down the offer of VIP entry, a nice table and a free bottle of bubbles from my new friend Kliment. Tired, I said. Some other time. Flew straight back to dear old fuck-off Blighty that night.

I looked into travelling back to the Zone, around Chernobyl, but it was properly difficult to arrange and I never really felt happy with the whole idea. The more I thought about it the more sure I was I’d go back, at some risk to my future health, find the place where Mrs M had been hanging out and discover, oh wow, it was empty and deserted and it was as if it had all never been. No office, just an old supermarket or warehouse or whatever the fuck.

Tried asking Ed about it but he claimed he knew nothing. Never met or heard of a Mrs Mulverhill. Connie S was just a woman he’d vaguely heard of recently at the time when she asked to be introduced to me. He swore he’d never heard of anything called the Concern and he certainly wasn’t getting any mysterious dosh every month, eight and a half K or otherwise. I’d have pushed further but he was just on the edge of getting annoyed with me, I could tell, and I was pretty sure I knew when Mr N was telling the truth by now. I hadn’t told him any more than I’d needed to but he was obviously intrigued just from the little I had said and started asking me questions. I stonewalled him, told him he didn’t want to know any more.

Connie herself seemed to have disappeared off the face of the fucking Earth. Phones disconnected, business address a briefly rented office in Paris, unheard of by anybody who might have known somebody in her line of work.

Checked the account, saw the money, waited for the call that never came. All that happened was that a couriered letter arrived from a C. Sequorin in Tashkent, Uzbekistan with a bunch of weird-looking names that were codes, apparently. I was to commit them to memory if I could, otherwise just keep the letter safe for future reference. I put it in my safe. (I hired a private eye in Tashkent, because you can do that sort of thing these days in the wonderful new globalised world, providing only that you have access to piles of dosh. Nothing. Another deserted office. No joy tracing the source of the funds in the Cayman Islands either. Well, of course not. If governments can’t trace anything in tax havens, how the fuck was I supposed to? When I thought about this it was actually highly fucking reassuring.)

A week after the letter with the codes, a padded envelope arrived with something the size and weight of a brick inside. It was a black box of thick plastic and inside that was a steel box with a sort of dial on the top made of seven concentric rings of different metals arranged around a very slightly concave button in the centre. These rings circled round and back with a sort of smooth clickiness, if you know what I mean, and if you looked carefully they had lots of little patterns of dots on them but they didn’t seem to do anything. There was a thinner-than-hair fine line around the middle of the box, like it was meant to open, maybe if you got the dials on the top arranged just right, like a combination lock on a safe, I suppose, but with the box came a note from Mrs Mulverhill saying I was to keep this metal box safe, guard it with my life and only give it to somebody who knew the codes from the letter.

I tried having it X-rayed via a pal who works in airport security at City, but the box wasn’t having it. In fact, my mate thought his machine must be broken cos the thing didn’t show up at all. How fucking weird is that? If you could make a gun out of this stuff you could saunter onto any plane in the world totally tooled up. My guy pointed this out and I told him it’d be very unhealthy indeed for both of us if he breathed so much as a syllable about it. I’d barely finished telling him this when I got a very terse text message on my mobile telling me never to X-ray the box again or even think about trying any other method of looking inside.

Keep it hidden, keep it safe. That was all.

How the fuck had they known?

Anyway, I lobbed the fucker into the back of the safe with the letter and did my best to forget about both of them, quite successfully.

Months, years passed. Left Mr N’s firm when he retired in 2000, became a hedgie working out of an ultra-smart property in Mayfair with another dozen or so guys, left NYC the day before the towers came down and was never sure if I’d had a narrow escape or had missed something it would have been worth being there for, despite all the nastiness of it, just to be able to say I’d been there, know what I mean? Anyway, I was on a beach in Trinidad so it didn’t matter. Didn’t see much of the Noyces after Ed retired, though they kept inviting me to Spetley Hall for years afterwards.

Made more money. Lost some of it opening a restaurant with a couple of mates when each of us thought one of the others must be the one who actually knew what he was doing. Still, live and learn, eh? Me and half a dozen other guys broke away from Tangible Topiary (that was the name of the hedge fund) and started up a new one a few doors down from our old office. We called it FMS. It was registered at Companies House and in the Cayman Islands as just FMS Ltd with no further detail though we told people who insisted on knowing that the letters stood for Financial Merchant Securities or Future Market Superstars or some such tosh, but really it stood for Fuck Me Sideways. As in Fuck Me Sideways, Look At The Amount Of Money We’re Making.

Our Mayfair office was even grander than TT’s, deliberately. We had a pool put in in the basement, a gym in the attic, and a games room with wraparound monitors for driving and shoot-’em-up games. Oh, and a flotation pod each. All tax-deductible, as you’d expect. Even the computer games were there to help us work off all that testosterone and aggression, weren’t they? The place usually contained more people there to advise us or tutor us on stuff than it did us actual hedgies. We had personal trainers, an in-house masseur, fine-wine advisers, bespoke personal-scent consultants, grooming and presentational experts, lifestyle and diet gurus, yacht brokers, fencing instructors and personal shoppers arriving from Harrods or Jermyn Street every couple of hours or so with stuff they thought would suit us (no time or inclination to actually go to the shops or mix with the plebs).

Not to mention an account with a very discreet top-of-the-range escort service based a couple of streets away for when all that testosterone needed another sort of outlet. We had a special room for that too that we called the canteen, though the joke was some guys took it at their desk. I was slow to start using that particular service. Never paid for it before, so it was like a pride thing? Only there’d be times when you’d be sitting there in front of the screens and feeling suddenly horny and knowing a fabulous-looking girl who needed absolutely no chatting up or dining or alcoholic lubrication or talk of Where do we think this is going? or even cuddling was only a phone call and maybe ten minutes away and even though it was a week’s wages for some wanker it was only petty cash given what we were making. Daft not to really, know what I mean? Like fast food, only really quality fast food.

Lot of toot taken too. Not so much by yours truly but the other guys got wired into it. I was like the sommelier of the office, though, know what I mean? We had very good contacts though mostly the dealers weren’t people I’d mixed with, the turnover being what it is in the industry, but I was always the one they came to to check it was good stuff, which it almost always was. Stamp of authority, me. I should have issued certificates, charged.

When Chas, the other senior guy from TT who’d left with me to set up FMS in the first place retired to raise kids and thoroughbred racehorses I realised I was actually the oldest of the people in the office, and I was only in my early thirties. FMS indeed.

And we had our own financial advisers, believe it or not. We could make it and we could spend it (with a bit of help – see all the above), but putting it to best use, saving for a rainy day, that was another area of expertise. I mean, obviously we had a pretty good idea what to do with the loot, hundred times better than your average Joe Mug in the street, but there were people who specialised in that sort of stuff, so you listened to them. Tax shelters, write-offs, offshoring all you could, putting stuff in trusts which in theory were controlled elsewhere and just doled out what you needed if you asked nicely (ha ha). Cayman Islands, Bahamas, Channel Islands, Luxembourg, Liechtenstein, Switzerland…

In the end we were paying less tax than our Paki cleaners. I’d drive through the clogged and teeming streets of west London and look at all those passing faces thinking, You mugs, you fucking mugs.

Some of us were genius mathematicians. Not me, obviously. We split into two lots, really. There were the instinctive hedgies like me who just had a feel for what was going on and put ourselves about, keeping eyes and ears open and calling in and doing little favours here and there, and the Quants, the pure numbers guys, the mathematics wizards who in another stupider age would have been mouldering away in some ancient pile of stones in Oxbridge, inventing new numbers and burbling on about fuck knows what and doing nothing useful for society. We put them to work and paid them more money than even they could count. Then there were the programmers. They were a sort of subset of the maths guys, working on stuff that none of the rest of us even started to understand but that made everything work even more efficiently and let us make even more money.

The lease on the property next door came up. We bought that, knocked through, upped the numbers. Place became a computer centre. Had to install industrial air-conditioning plant to get rid of all the heat that the machines produced.

Guess what? Made even more money. Cars, flats, Mayfair townhouse, a nice little eight-bed new-build in Surrey, lots of hols, and girls girls girls. Still no call to make me start earning that 10K a month. Not that I needed the money, of course, but it was sort of a tradition by now, know what I mean?

Still, it always gave me an ever so slight funny turn whenever I saw it on the statement.