This was on a wide balcony of the Speditionary Faculty main building on the outskirts of central Aspherje. The view led the gaze out across the exquisitely terraced valley beneath to the forested undulations of the Great Park on the far side and then, over the encircling outer reaches of the city – hazily indistinct in the low evening rays – to the misty foothills guarding the still snow-bright peaks of the far Massif. It turned out that from her dacha in the hills you could see the University’s Dome of the Mists on a clear day, though you had to stand on the cabin’s roof to see over the trees.
I didn’t know that on the evening when we first met, of course. Then it was close to sunset, the gold-leafed Dome shining like a second setting sun and the blond stones of the building and the multifarious skin tones of the faculty members, senior students and undergraduates all appearing rouged with that silky light. She wore a long jacket and a high-cut top, ruched but tight across her breasts.
“… like an infinite set of electron shells,” she was saying to one of the surrounding academics as I approached. “The set is still infinite but there are measurable, imaginable and innumerable spaces in between that can’t be occupied.”
She grasped my hand when we were introduced.
“Mr… Oh?” she said, one eyebrow flexing. She wore a small white pillbox hat with an attached veil, which seemed an absurd affectation, though the material was white, light as gauze and showed her face within. It was a face of some beauty; broadly triangular, with large, hooded eyes, a proud nose, dramatically flared nostrils and a small, full mouth. The expression was harder to read. You could have believed it was one of charmingly casual cruelty, or just a sort of amused indifference. She was maybe half as old again as me.
“Yes,” I said. “Temudjin Oh.” I could feel myself colouring. I’d long got used to the fact that my Mongolian-extraction surname could cause some amusement amongst English speakers determined to extract a toll of discomfiture from anybody whose name was not as banal or as ugly as theirs. However, there was something about the way she pronounced it that immediately brought a blush to my cheeks. Perhaps the sunset would cover my embarrassment.
I was no innocent, had known many women despite my relative lack of years and felt perfectly comfortable in the presence of my supposed superiors, but none of this appeared to matter. It was frustrating to feel reduced again, and so easily, to such callowness.
The handshake was brief and firm, almost more of a squeeze. “You must make many a partner jealous,” she told me.
“I… yes,” I said, not entirely sure what she was talking about.
I wanted her immediately. Of course I did. I fantasised about her outrageously over the next year and I’m sure I did significantly worse in my finals because I spent so many lectures distracting myself imagining all the things I wanted to do to her – there, draped over that lectern, against that blackboard, across that desk – when I should have been listening to what she was telling us. On the other hand I tried especially hard to impress her in tutorials with immaculately researched and devastatingly well-argued papers. So maybe it balanced out.)
“Been thinking about this?” I asked her. Her hand, sliding up and down my cock, was just starting to be less than perfectly blissful, becoming too hot and dry. “Reached any conclusion?”
She let go, raised her head, blew hair from her face and said, breathing hard, “Yes. I think you should fuck me. Now.”
Later, we sat at the table, she in a sheet, me in my shirt, sharing some food, drinking water and wine.
“I’ve never asked. Is there a Mr Mulverhill?”
She shrugged. “I’m sure there is somewhere,” she said, tearing bread from the loaf.
“Let me rephrase that. Are you married?”
“No.” She glanced up. “You?”
“No. So… you were married.”
“No,” she said, smiling and sitting luxuriously back, stretching. “I just like the sound of the name.”
I poured her more wine.
She ran her hand – fingers spread – across the candle flame.
Madame d’Ortolan adjusted her cropped lily blossom until it lay just so on her pink-jacketed breast. We paced the uneven flagstones between the gracefully looming tombs and wanly shining mausolea. The parched, faded flowers, left lovingly to adorn vases in front of some of the sepulchres, contrasted with the motley green scrub of vigorously healthy weeds pushing up between the stones.
“Mrs Mulverhill has gone renegade,” Madame d’Ortolan told me. “She has lost her wits and found a cause, which appears to be attempting to frustrate us. She has used that famously imaginative mind of hers to concoct a lunatic theory so deranged that we cannot even grasp exactly what it is. But, at any rate, she thinks we take a wrong course, or some such idiocy, and opposes us. It is irritating, and ties up resources we could employ to more actively beneficial effect elsewhere, but so far she has done little real damage.” She glanced at me. “That might change, obviously, should she grow more aggressive through frustration, or recruit any others to her cause.”
“Do you think that’s what she was trying to do with me?”
“Probably.” Madame d’Ortolan stopped and we faced each other. “Why do you think she would approach you, particularly?” She smiled. Not entirely unconvincingly.
“Why, has she singled me out?” I asked. She just looked at me and raised her eyebrows. “Has she approached other people?” I asked her. “If she has, were they all transitioners?”
Madame d’Ortolan looked up at the sky, hands behind her back. I imagined the chubby fingers clasped awkwardly, tight. “It may not be in your best interest to know the answers to those questions,” she said smoothly. “We would simply like to know if there is any special reason she may have had to choose to approach you.”
“Perhaps she finds me attractive,” I suggested, smiling. It was, if nothing else, a more sincere smile than Madame d’Ortolan’s.
She leaned closer. A swirl of breeze brought a hint of her perfume to my nose; something flowery but cloying. “Do you mean,” she said, “sexually?”
“Or just attracted to my sunny character in general.”
“Or attractive in the sense that she thought you one of those more likely to go over to her cause,” Madame d’Ortolan suggested, smile gone now, head tipped to one side, evaluating. Her expression was not unkind, but it was intent.
“I can’t imagine why she would have thought that,” I said, drawing myself up. In her heels, Madame d’O was as tall as me. “I would not expect or appreciate to be under any sort of suspicion just because that lady chose to approach me.”
“You can’t think why she did?”
“No. For all I know she’s working her way through whatever group she’s chosen alphabetically.”
Madame d’Ortolan looked to be about to say something, then didn’t. She snorted and turned. We resumed walking. For a while, nothing was said. A jet stroked a double strand of white across the sky, ploughing heaven.
“You are one of the first,” she told me as we approached the landing stage where the Palazzo Chirezzia’s launch waited. “We think she is targeting transitioners alone. We have people and techniques able to predict her movements and we have, we believe, been able to prevent her doing any real mischief so far. We shall need the full cooperation of all concerned to propagate that fortunate trend onwards into the future, as I’m sure you are entirely able to appreciate.”
“Of course,” I said. I left a pause, then said, “If the lady’s cause is so arcane and her threat so trifling, why is it necessary to oppose her with such force?”
She stopped suddenly and we turned, facing each other. Our eyes never truly flash, of course; we are not the luminously grotesque inhabitants of the deep sea (well, I certainly wasn’t. I wouldn’t vouch for Madame d’Ortolan). However, evolution has left us primed to notice when somebody’s eyes widen suddenly, showing more white, due to surprise, fear or anger. Madame d’Ortolan’s eyes flashed. “Mr Oh,” s
he said, “she opposes us. Therefore she must be opposed in return. We cannot let such dissent go unchallenged. It would look weak.”
“You could try ignoring her,” I suggested. “That might look more confident. Stronger, even.”
An expression crossed her face that might have been exasperation, then she smiled briefly and patted my arm as we resumed walking. “I dare say I could tell you more of the lady’s corrupting theories and you would be both more horrified at her and more understanding of our position,” she told me, with what sounded like forced amusement. “Her accusations are more alarming and damaging than it is necessary to reveal, but centre, as far as we can gather, on the whole course and purpose of the Concern’s activities. She fantasises some vast ulterior motive in all we do, and so takes issue with us existentially. Such madness absolutely requires treatment. We cannot let it pass. Her charges against us must be defended, her argument broken.” She flashed, this time, a smile. “You must trust us, as your superiors – those with a broader, more knowledgeable and encompassing view – to do the right thing in this.”
She was watching me as we walked. I smiled at her. “Where would we be,” I asked, “if we did not trust our superiors?”
Her eyes might have narrowed a tiny fraction, then she smiled in return and looked away. “Very well,” she said, sounding like somebody who had just made her mind up about something. “There may be another debriefing.” (There was not.) “You may be under moderately enhanced surveillance for a short time.” (It was occasionally highly intrusive enhanced surveillance and it lasted a long time; a couple of years at least.) “Your career, which we are happy to note has already met with some success – precocious success, in the eyes of some of my more conservative colleagues, though I hope we may dismiss their opinions – is still at its beginning. I hope and would expect that this incident has not harmed it in any way. It would be such a tragedy if it did.” (It was harmed. I harmed it. Still I became the best and most used of my peers.)
We reached the jetty, coming out of the shadow of the island’s encircling walls. Madame d’Ortolan accepted the hand of the boatman as he helped her into the launch. We sat down in the open rear well of the launch. “We hope that our trust in you is both well-founded and reciprocated,” she said, smiling.
“Entirely, ma’am,” I said. (This was a lie.)
As the boat gunned away from the isle of the dead, Madame d’Ortolan detached the flower from her lapel. “They say these things are unlucky, outside of a cemetery,” she said, and let the gelded blossom fall into the restless waters of the lagoon.
7
Patient 8262
We change things. For the better, we would hope, obviously. What would be the point of trying to change things for the worse? We do what we can. We do all that we can. We do our very, very best. I cannot see how anyone could disagree. And yet still we encounter disagreement. People take issue with us. Our views and prescriptions are not accepted as being definitive, and correct, and desirable, by certain people.
This has to be regarded as their right, and yet it does seem also to be their conceit, perhaps even their indulgence.
I suppose we have to take these things and these people and their views into account. We are not, however, obliged to indulge them.
We work to make the many worlds better.
There. That’s the official line.
The saying goes that Aspherje would be a great city even without the University of Practical Talents, but then so would the UPT without Aspherje. To me, coming from the background I came from, it looked like a crunched, piled-together collection of several dozen cathedrals; all domes, spires, elongated windows and flying buttresses, with the great central dome – extravagantly clothed in gold leaf so that even in dull weather it seemed to shine like something not entirely of that or any other world – plonked on the rough summit of the whole chaotic frozen storm of brick, stone, concrete and clad steel like a gloriously irrelevant yet sublimely triumphant afterthought.
There we learned our trade. First, though, we had to learn ourselves, discover where the mother-lode of our talent truly lay. The Transitionary Office had developed its techniques for detecting likely candidates for training at the UPT over many centuries, and one of the talents that it found most useful was that of rapidly and reliably identifying those with any sort of talent that might prove of subsequent use to itself.
So spotters, as they were generally called, travelled amongst the many worlds, looking for those who might be recruited to the cause. A few could take themselves there; the vast majority could not.
The most widespread talent, or at least the one that it was easiest to find, was the ability to transition, that is, to shift oneself, preferably with a high degree of willed accuracy, between the many worlds. It was unheard of to find somebody already doing this; only the signs of a potential future proficiency were obvious to somebody attuned to such indicators, not naturally occurring instances of the applied talent itself. As far as we knew, that came only once the subject had been trained generally in the techniques of transitioning and instructed specifically in the use of the drug septus.
Beyond that extraordinary but in a sense basic skill, the most useful additional talent was that of being able to take somebody else with you when transitioning. A tandemiser could do that. This meant that the ability to flit became separated from any other talent that it might have been deemed would be useful on the target world.
Rumour had it that the ability to take another with oneself between realities had been discovered fortuitously, if not perhaps entirely accidentally, when a certain transitioning adept had willed the standard transitioning process while in the act of coition with their lover. Adept and lover both discovered themselves in the bodies of another sexually joined couple on another world entirely. This was a shock, obviously, but allegedly not so great a one as to prevent the couple from being able to return successfully to their home world, or complete the act they had been engaged in. Nor was this pioneering transitionary shy about exploring the possibility that they alone had caused the event, rather than it being a function of the specific combination of qualities embodied by that specific first couple.
Further gossip insists that it was some time before our adventurous virtuoso informed the Transitionary Office of this innovation, the individual concerned claiming that they wanted to ensure this novel ability was not the result of some freak, one-off stroke of luck. They had carried out further research and established that the ability was controllable and the process both repeatable and, probably, transmissible: a teachable skill rather than a unique and freakish abnormality.
Allegedly, that same adept discovered how to bring an act of sexual congress to a fully successful conclusion in one world and then transition to another world to experience the whole thing again (in some versions, with or without their partner in the first world).
Most strands of these rumours hold that it was Madame d’Ortolan who discovered this ability, and that she did so some two hundred years ago, thereafter using the influence and power that the discovery of this innovation provided her with both to fulfil her ambition of being elevated to the Central Council of the Transitionary Office and to gain the particular privilege the Central Council granted its most distinguished and illustrious members: that of being allowed to skip back a generation or two every now and again when one’s original or presently occupied frame grew old, so that – re-emplaced in a succession of younger bodies – one might never grow truly old, or – save by violent chance – die.
It is said that for those perverse souls for whom the prospect of travelling throughout an infinitude of worlds is somehow not incentive enough to undergo the training that the Transitionary Office requires, the rather more base promise of serial sexual transitioning makes all the difference, even if the practice is both frowned on and made difficult by the Office’s tightly controlled monopoly of septus. Equally, for those for whom power stretching across unnumbered realities is not enough
, effective immortality helps provide an extra spur to aspire to a place on the Central Council.
Subsequent research has revealed that for most people capable of the technique it is not necessary to penetrate or be penetrated; a tight hug over as much of the body as possible, with a minimal amount of skin-to-skin contact, preferably about the head or neck, is all that’s required. A few blessed individuals need only encircle or nearly encircle both wrists, or just one, and an even tinier number need only hold the other person’s hand.
Foreseers are those who can see into the future, though usually only for a brief moment as they transit from one world to another, and hazily. It is a highly limited skill, the least well understood of those we know about and the least reliable and consistent of those of interest to us, but it is the most highly prized nevertheless, for its rarity apart from anything else.
Trackers may or may not be a specialised form of foreseer (the foreseers claim this, the trackers deny it). Trackers are those who are able to follow individuals or – more unusually – specific events or trends between the worlds. They are spies, essentially; a semi-secret police force that the Transitionary Office uses to keep its transitionaries under some sort of control.
That the trackers’ services are required to the degree that they undeniably are is due to a quality of character shared by most transitionaries. The people who turn out to be capable of flitting amongst the many worlds are almost without exception selfish, self-centred individuals and individualists, people who think rather highly of themselves and exhibit or at least possess a degree of scorn for their fellow humans; people who think that the rules and limitations that apply to everybody else don’t or shouldn’t apply to them. They are people who already feel that they live in a different world to everybody else, in other words. As a specialist from the UPT’s Applied Psychology Department expressed it to me once, such individuals are some lopsided distance along the selfless – selfish spectrum, and clustered close to the latter, hard-solipsism end.
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