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 voic
e 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 fin
ished, 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.