Transition. Part 16

This s.p.a.ce 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 s.p.a.ce with music while the wildly decorated lantern-lit vessels sailed serenely around.

A porcelain coracle rowed by a preposterously dressed dwarf b.u.mped 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 b.r.e.a.s.t.s 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 b.u.t.ton and her b.r.e.a.s.t.s 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 gla.s.s with a double skin and several tiny fish swimming in the watery s.p.a.ce 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 b.r.e.a.s.t.s 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 gla.s.s. "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, pa.s.sed the mouthpiece to him. "Do, do do be careful," she told him archly, putting one ring-heavy hand on his knee and leaving it there. "It's frightfully strong." 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 c.o.c.ktail 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 b.r.e.a.s.t.s.

"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 gla.s.s 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 too gallant, Tem," she said, her voice quite firm. "There's nothing you need spare me." 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 gla.s.s.

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 n.o.body 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 s.p.a.ce, her words echoing off the totality of the circ.u.mference 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 f.u.c.ked Madame d'Ortolan yet (or had she even expressed it as her f.u.c.king 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 s.e.xual 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 s.e.xual 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 o.r.g.a.s.m at once. This was such a cliche 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 pa.s.sing 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 s.p.a.ces around them. Cooler air, warmer air, varying smells of perfumes and bodily musks, even their physical state in the shape of different s.e.xual 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 s.e.xual arousal, coming to o.r.g.a.s.m 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 n.o.body 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 rea.s.sure 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 f.u.c.king 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 sh.o.r.e, 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 ma.s.sacre 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 a.s.signment. 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.