He looked at me for a while longer. “I am unable to answer any of those questions at this moment in time,” he told me. It didn’t even sound like he was trying to keep the tone of satisfaction out of his voice.

Madame d’Ortolan and I walked amongst the tombs and tall cypresses crowding the walled cemetery isle of San Michele, in the Venetian lagoon. The bright blue sky was strewn with ragged clouds, in the south-west already turning pale red in the late-afternoon sunset.

“Her name is Mrs Mulverhill,” she told me.

I sensed her turning her head to look at me as she told me this. I kept my eyes on the path ahead between the rows of marble tombs and dark metal grilles. “She was one of my tutors,” I said. I tried to say it as matter-of-factly as I could. Inside, I was thinking, It was her! Something sang within me.

“Indeed,” Madame d’Ortolan said, pausing to pick a lily from a small vase attached to the wall of one of the tombs. She handed the flower to me. I was about to say something grateful but she said, “Remove the stamina, would you?” I looked at her, puzzled. She pointed into the heart of the flower. “The stamens. Those bits with the orange pollen. Would you pinch those out for me? Please? I’d do it myself but this body’s fingers are so… chubby.”

Madame d’Ortolan was inhabiting the body of a middle-aged lady with bright auburn hair and a tall, powerful body. She wore a two-piece suit of pink with purple edging and a white silk blouse. Her fingers did look a little thick. I reached into the bell of the flower, trying to avoid the pollen-laden ends. Madame d’Ortolan leant in, watching this intently. “Careful,” she said, almost whispering.

I removed the stamens. Two of my fingertips were turned orange by the operation. I presented her with the flower. She snipped the stem with two long fingernails and inserted the bloom into a buttonhole in her jacket.

“Mrs Mulverhill has been many things in the Concern,” she told me. “An unAware enabler, an arrangements officer, a theatre-logistics supervisor, a transitionary, a lecturer – as you have pointed out – a transitioneering theorist in the Speditionary Faculty itself and now, suddenly, a traitor.”

No, I thought, she was always a traitor.

“What is it that you think we do, Temudjin?” she asked me quietly, stroking my belly with one slow and gentle hand.

“My God,” I breathed, “is this a heavily disguised tutorial?”

She pulled at one of the light brown hairs that grew in a fluted line beneath my belly button. I drew a breath in through my teeth, smacked at her hand. “Yes,” she said, raising one dark eyebrow. “Do answer the question.”

“Okay, then,” I said, and stroked the stroking hand. “We are fixers.” I was talking very quietly. The room was bathed in shadows, lit only by the embers of a near-dead fire and a single candle, still burning. The only sounds were our voices and the soft susurration of rain on a window slanted into the ceiling. “We fix what is broken,” I said, trying to paraphrase, trying not to repeat what she had told me, told us, told all her students. “Or stop things about to break from breaking in the first place.”

“But why?” She tried to smooth down the hairs on my belly.

“Why not?”

“Yes, but why? Why do this?” She slicked her palm with saliva and attempted to make the hairs stay flat like that.

“Because it’s worth doing,” I said. “Because we feel it’s worth doing and we can act on that feeling.”

“But, all else aside, why is it worth doing when we are only so many and there is an infinitude of worlds?” She rubbed my belly as though it was a puppy and then gently smacked it.

“Because there might be an infinitude of people like us too, an infinite number of Concerns; we just haven’t met them yet.”

“Though the further we expand without encountering anybody else like us, the less likely the chances of that being true become.”

“Well, that’s infinity for you.”

“Good,” she said drily, and traced a circle round my belly button with one finger. “Though you skipped a bit. Before that, you are supposed to say that it is still worth doing some good rather than choosing to do none simply because it seems of so little significance.”

“‘Futility is self-imposed.’”

“Ah, so you weren’t asleep after all.” She cupped my balls. Very gently, she began to knead them, working her hand round them in a soft, continuous, curling motion.

“Ma’am, you always had my full attention.” It had been an enjoyable if strenuous few hours, here in her dacha. I’d thought we were finished for the evening, and I’d have guessed so did she, but maybe not; under her hand’s caress, I began to feel the first stirrings, once again.

“There is a grain to the fabric of space – time,” she said. “A scale on which there is no further divisible smoothness, only individual, irreducible quanta where reality itself seethes with a continual effervescence of sub-microscopic creation and destruction. I believe there to be a similarly irreducible texture to morality, a scale beyond which it is senseless to proceed. Infinity goes in only one direction; outward, into more inhabited worlds, more shared realities. In the other direction, on a reducing scale, once you reach the level of an individual consciousness – for all practical purposes, a single human being – you can usefully reduce no further. It is at that level that significance lies. If you do something to benefit one person, that is an absolute gain, and its relative insignificance in the wider scheme is irrelevant. Benefit two people without concomitant harm to others – or a village, tribe, city, class, nation, society or civilisation – and the benefits are scalable, arithmetic. There is no excuse beyond fatalistic self-indulgence and sheer laziness for doing nothing.”

“Absolutely. Let me do this.” I reached over the golden scoop of her back and slid my hand down between her legs. She shifted, bringing herself a little closer so that I didn’t have to stretch. She opened her legs a little, scissoring across the crumpled bedclothes. My thumb pressed lightly on the tiny dry flower of her anus while my fingers caressed her sex, already half lost in its moistness and heat.

“There you are,” she said, sounding amused. “I am experiencing some benefit already.” She became quiet for a while, moving her backside rhythmically up and down a little and pressing back against my exploring hand. She brushed some hair from her face, shifted up the bed to kiss me, fully, luxuriantly, one hand behind my head, cupping, then settled back again, her head down, hair veiling her face as I worked my fingers further into her. Her other hand closed round my cock, thumb stroking its glans, side to side.

“The question,” she said, a little breathless now, “is who determines what is done, and to whom, on whose behalf, and precisely why; to what end?”

“Perhaps,” I suggested, “we are working up to some sort of climax, a consummation.”

Her body trembled, in what might have been a silent laugh. Or not. “Perhaps we are,” she said, then caught her breath. “Ah. Yes, do keep doing that.”

“That was my intention.”

“Who benefits?” she murmured.

“Perhaps more than one group does,” I suggested. “Perhaps those producing the benefit for those most in need also benefit. Why should it not be mutual?”

“That is one view,” she said. She brought the hand not supporting her upper body, the one that had been stroking me, up to my mouth, half cupped. “Spit,” she said through her dark fringe of hair. I drew more saliva into my mouth, raised my head and let it dribble into her palm. She brought the hand carefully down to her own mouth and did the same, worked the fingers into the glistening fluid on her skin – just seeing that made me harder still, when I’d have thought I couldn’t be – then she set her hand around my cock once more, gripping it more firmly, moving her hand more forcefully now. I did the same, watching the sweet mounds of her buttocks shake as my fingers moved in and out of her.