“The Concern use you, and others, to do this sort of thing more and more these days, Tem. You still get to kill the genuine bad guys now and again, but that’s become little more than cover now, not the main focus of their activities. They’ve even started going after people who’re just thinking about what humanity’s true place in the cosmos might be. There’s a guy called variously Miguel Esteban/Mike Esteros/Michel Sanrois/Mickey Sants who keeps cropping up across one batch of worlds. All the poor fucker wants to do is make a film about finding aliens but they’ve started kidnapping him too now. That’s one of the few examples we know about. I’m betting there are hundreds of others.”
“This is all back to Madame d’O, isn’t it?” he said, gripping the rim of the tub and flexing his shoulders to ease his hips forward, closer to her, so that her legs spread a little more, glistening knees appearing out of the surface of the gently bubbling water on either side while her soles and toes still grasped his cock.
“Madame d’Ortolan continues to believe in her imbecilic theories and pursue her sadistic research,” Mrs Mulverhill agreed graciously.
“It just always seems more personal,” he said, “this thing between her and you.”
“I’ve no particular desire to personalise any of this, Tem, it’s just that when you follow the relevant trails she’s always what’s waiting at the end.”
“No doubt.” He reached forward, took her ankles in his hands. “And now I think you should come over here.”
She nodded. “I think I should, too.”
The dawn began to break across the teeth of the eastward mountains, a yellow-pink stain slowly spreading. They stood, bundled in pillowed layers of high-altitude, four-season clothing, on a high circular balcony situated on the summit of the highest dome of the great empty palace. They were in the open air, beyond a small airlock, sucking oxygen from transparent masks over their noses, leaving their mouths free.
Small oxygen tanks in their outer jackets kept them supplied with the life-giving gas and a back-up system of valves dotted round the balcony stood ready to replace those if something went wrong. Even so, one could not simply step from the scented sea-level warmth of the palace into the open air of nine and a half kilometres above the ocean; the pressure difference was so great that a period of adjustment was required in the airlock to prevent discomfort. Before dawn, when the air was most likely to be still, was the best time to be here. Nevertheless, a strong, thin wind was blowing from the north. A movable glass screen linked to a man-high tail of a blade like a giant weathervane had positioned itself to deflect the worst of the blast over the balcony. Glowing figures on a small screen set into the parapet indicated that the temperature was forty below. The air, felt on the lips and the few square centimetres of exposed skin around the eyes, seemed powder-dry, sucking up moisture as much as warmth.
She said, “People will generally make whatever compromises with the world they think necessary still to convince themselves that they are the most important thing in it. The trouble with what we’re able to do – specifically the trouble with unfettered access to septus and through it to the many worlds – is that it abets and encourages this delusion to the point of naked solipsism.” Her voice, carried over the steady roar of wind, sounded calm and strong, unaffected by the thin air.
“All the same,” he said, “it’s still an illusion. The world exists without us, whether we like it or not.”
She smiled. “A hard-line solipsist would dismiss your words as mere wind,” she said. “The point is that to a true solipsist there is no distinction between objective and subjective truth. Subjectivity is all that matters because it is effectively all that exists. And to be a member of the Central Council of the Transitionary Office is to exist in a state that positively encourages such a state of mind. It is not healthy, not for the Office, l’Expédience, or for anything or anybody.”
“I’d have thought it was very healthy indeed for those on the Council itself.”
“Only in the trivial sense that now they need never die.”
“I bet it doesn’t seem trivial to them.”
“Well, quite.” Mrs Mulverhill sat back against the balustrade, its curved top fitting into the small of her back within the puffy layers of insulation. Her outer wear was white. The slowly increasing light to the east washed it with a chilly pinkness. “But one has to ask what this has done to their outlook.”
“I cannot wait for you to tell me,” he told her.
She smiled. “Unless we have been lied to even more comprehensively than even I suspect, the Concern has existed for a thousand years. In that time, certainly for the first eight centuries, it spent its time investigating the many worlds, researching the properties of septus and the abilities it confers upon people trained to take it, and theorising regarding the metaphysical laws governing the many worlds and the composition of whatever context they might be said to exist within. Until about two hundred years ago, interventions were rare, much argued and agonised over, heavily monitored and subject to extensive subsequent analysis.”
“So what happened two hundred years ago?”
“Madame d’Ortolan happened,” Mrs Mulverhill said, with a sour smile. “She discovered how a transitioner could take somebody else with them between the realities and that opened up a whole new set of opportunities for l’Expédience; the numbers of worlds investigated soared. Then when she was on the Central Council she pushed for a far more aggressive policy of interference and a still wider spread of influence. She also proposed that the practice of allowing Central Council members to shift down to a younger body when their own body approached advanced old age become the default for all rather than the extraordinary privilege for the most-honoured few, and that the limit of this being allowed to happen only once be lifted.”
“I thought that was still just a proposal.” It was a rumour throughout the Concern, indeed across Calbefraques, that this might be the case, but there had been no official pronouncement.
“In theory it is,” Mrs Mulverhill conceded. She turned and looked out at the nearby peaks starting to shine like vast pink teeth all around them. “But it’s being done piecemeal. As each of the other Council members approaches the age when they might start to think that such a proposal does make sense after all – when they have often spent their careers until then decrying and opposing it – the good Madame suggests they might like to reconsider. To my knowledge only two of the Council have resisted her so far, and they might still be persuaded.” She looked at him and smiled. “The steps to the grave grow steeper the closer you approach. A degree of urgency can grip people. She might have those two Council members too, in time. And besides, with them gone and with effective control over the Central Council, she can make sure the replacements are more amenable. She has all the time she wants, after all. She can play the longest of games.”
“So now the Central Council just goes on for ever?”
“As an entity, it always expected to.” She shrugged. “Well, bureaucracies always do, but this one really might, of course. The difference is that in theory the individuals of the Council can now go on for ever. The point is not that the Central Council will never cease to be, the point is that the Central Council will never cease to be exactly the same. It will never change.”
“They’ll still get older. Their minds will.”
“Yes, and it will be an interesting rolling experiment in how much information a healthy and relatively young mind can contain without having to overwrite some of it when it’s inhabited by a relatively ancient one, and of course the Council members are quite convinced that they will only get wiser and wiser the older they get in lived years, and that this can only be a good thing. But I think any rational outsider would and should be appalled at the prospect. The old and powerful never want to let go. They always think they’re both profoundly indispensable and uniquely right. They are always wrong. Part of the function of ageing and dying is to let the next generation have its say, its time in the sun, to sweep away
the mistakes of the previous age while, if they’re lucky, retaining the advances made and the benefits accrued.” The sunlight was stronger now, picking out her strange dark eyes with their slit pupils. They narrowed, glittering as though frosted.
“It is an insane conceit. Power always drives to perpetuate itself, but this is a phenomenal extra distillation of idiocy. Only people already riddled with the internalised special pleading and self-importance that too much power brings could even start to imagine that this might be in any way sustainable.”
He rested one forearm on the parapet, side on, gazing at her. Even bundled so, made comically rotund by the warm clothes, she somehow contrived to appear slim, slight and full of a specifically sensual energy. He had a sudden flashback to the sight and feel and smell of the body contained within all those insulating layers. They had been here for most of a day and had spent a lot of that time fucking. His muscles felt tired and heavy and his legs still felt shaky from their latest bout half an hour earlier, standing, her wrapped around him in the airlock while they waited for the pressures to equalise.
Thinking about her, he half expected some sort of stirring from his cock, but nothing happened. It certainly wasn’t the cold so he guessed that this time he really was all done. He had wondered when she had first suggested they come out here onto the balcony if it was some sort of final spectacular site for sex. A risky one, he thought. A chap could risk frostbite. But they had fucked in the airlock instead. He hoped she wasn’t expecting more, not for a while – he felt a little sore and absolutely drained.
“You do know so much about it all,” he said.
“Thank you. In particular I think I know Madame d’Ortolan,” she told him. “I think I know how her mind works.”
“I can certainly vouch for how some of her other organs function.”
“She has self-belief raised almost to solipsistic levels. It’s her weakness. That and a kind of fanaticism for neatness.”
“Neatness? Neatness will bring her down?”
“It could be part of it. Having effective control of the Central Council will not be quite enough for her, I think. Even though as a whole it will entirely do her bidding it will annoy her that there are still people on it who disagree with her, just on principle. She will want everybody on it to agree with her. It’s just neater. And that self-belief, it makes her think that she can do no wrong just because she is who she is. For all her clear-headed cunning and guile and utterly ruthless rationality, there is a kernel of something like superstition in her that tells her any given stratagem, no matter how risky, will work in the end simply because she is destined to triumph; that’s just the way the world works, the way all worlds work. And that’s how we bring her down, Tem.”
“Do we?”
“We keep annoying her, keep opposing her, keep nudging her to riskier and riskier tactics, until she overreaches herself and falls.”
“Or keeps winning.”
She shook her head. “The longer you keep gambling everything the more certain you are to lose it.”
“So don’t gamble everything.”
“Rational. But if you’re absolutely convinced that it is your destiny to triumph, that your victory is inevitable, and gambling everything gets you there quicker than taking it in small steps, why shuffle to glory when you can get there in a few boldly heroic leaps?”
“What if you’re wrong?”
She smiled ruefully. “Then we’re fucked.” She took a deep breath and stared out across the pillowed skyscape of clouds towards the dawn. “But I’m not wrong.”
“Something deep inside tells you that, does it?”
She glanced sharply at him, then gave a small laugh. “Yes, quite. Point taken. But we all need to have the courage of our convictions, Tem, if we’re not to be just the playthings of the powerful; hordes of falling, clicking balls batted this way and that at their whim in some vast game. And you have yet to say whether you’ll help or not. You need to choose which side you’re on.”
“Mrs M, I’m still not entirely sure what the sides are.”
She looked down towards the layer of cloud two kilometres below. “You know,” she said, “people at the top of any organisation like to think that they are, metaphorically, on the summit of a mountain in perfect visibility. They’re wrong, of course; in fact there’s mist all the way down. Organisationally, you’re lucky if you can see clearly into even just the next level down. After that it’s pure murk, as a rule.”
She left a pause, so he said, “Really?”
“Of course, with the Concern it gets even more difficult to see what’s going on.” She turned to look at him. “There are levels most of us don’t even know exist. I was on the level just beneath the Central Council. If I’d kept my nose clean I’d probably be there now; certainly in a decade or so, assuming that one of the hold-outs sticks to their guns and dies rather than keeps going on for ever. You’re a level down for that, Tem, fast-tracked for success but, I’d guess – ” her eyes narrowed again and her head tipped “ – not knowing it. Would that be right?”
“I thought you had to do a lot of committee work and politicking back on Calbefraques. I enjoy working in the field too much. Also, it has been noticed amongst the lower orders that the turnover in the Central Council has slowed down a lot over the last fifty years or so.”
“All the same, you’re one of the potential chosen ones.”
“I’m flattered. Is that why you’re trying to recruit me?”
“Not directly. They must see something in you. I do too, though perhaps not exactly the same things. I see a potential in you that I don’t think they know is there. And I think you might choose the right side.”
“So do they, I suppose. But this brings us back to the issue of sides. You were about to explain just what they were, I think. I did ask you to.”
She moved closer to him, placed one snow-soft white mitten on his. “The Central Council has become obsessed with power before and beyond anything else. The means has become the end. If they are not opposed they will turn l’Expédience into something that exists only for its own aggrandisement and the pursuance of whatever secret purposes the individuals on it choose to dream up. I think that is unarguable. Plus I believe that – at the behest of Madame d’Ortolan – there is something else, some already hidden agenda they’re working to – the uniqueness of human intelligent life and the singular nature of Calbefraques itself may well point to the nature of that secret – but I never got close enough to the centre of power to find out.”
“What, and I am supposed to?”
“No. It’ll take too long for you to be elevated to the Council, if you ever are. It’ll be too late by then.”
“Too late?”
“Too late because soon Madame d’Ortolan will have the Council exactly as she wants it; full of people who think just as she does and who will do everything she wants them to do, and who will never die, because they will keep repotting themselves into younger bodies as their older ones approach senescence.”
“So what do you propose, Mrs Mulverhill?”
Her smile looked defensive. “Ultimately, that the Central Council either ceases to exist or is severely reined in and radically reconstituted. Certainly that it is subject to some sort of democratic oversight. They can even keep their serial immortality, as long as they resign in perpetuity from the Council itself. Long life for long service. An incentive to serve but not to entrench.”
“All the same, you’re asking a lot of them.”
“I know. I don’t see them giving up what they have at present without a fight.”
“And is the other side just you and your bandit gang?”
“Oh, there are plenty of people who feel the same way, including a few people on the Central Council itself.”
“Like who?”
That smile again. A little wary, this time. “First tell me if you’ve betrayed me, Tem,” she said softly. She lowered her head a fraction as she gazed up at him.
> “Betrayed?” he said.
“We’ve talked before. I’m an outlaw. If you were playing by the book you ought to have reported our meetings.”
“I did,” he said. “Is that betrayal?”
“Not by itself. What else, though? What did they suggest you do?”
“Keep meeting you, keep talking to you.”
“Which you have done.”
“Which I have done.”
“And reporting back.”
“Which I have also done.”
“Fully?”
“Not quite fully.”
“And have you agreed to help catch me?”
“No.”
“But have you refused ever to help catch me?”
“No. They did ask. I told them that of course I’d do what was right.”
She smiled. “And do you yet know what is right?”
He took a long deep breath of the pure gas and the stunningly cold air. “I think I would find it very hard to help them catch you.”
She looked pleased and amused at once. “Is that gallantry, Tem?”
“Perhaps. I’m not entirely sure myself.”
“Sexual sentimentality, is what Madame d’Ortolan would call it.”
“Would she now?”
“She is a very unsentimental woman. Well, apart from her cats, maybe.” Mrs Mulverhill was silent for a moment, then said, “Do you think they’re using you to try and catch me even without your consent?”
“I’m sure they are. I’ve always assumed that when we meet you’ve taken care of that.”
“I do what I can.” She shrugged. “I think I’m still ahead of them.”
“You think they’re in hot pursuit?”
She nodded. “Theodora keeps at least two tracking teams on the lookout for me at all times. And she has her special projects, her wild cards, randomisers whom she’s tormented and bent until they form specialist tools for seeking out people like me. She thinks they might be able to work some magic and both find me and then disable me when I’m traced. I suppose I ought to feel flattered to be the object of such obsessive attention.”