“There is another view?” I asked.

“There might be,” she said, each breath a gasp now. I was impressed that she could still concentrate on speaking at all. “With sufficient knowledge, if we were able to delve deeper into matters.”

“One should,” I said, swallowing, “always explore as thoroughly as possible.” I cleared my throat. “You taught me that.”

“I did,” she agreed. Through her hanging fringe of hair, I could just make out that her eyes were tightly closed. “We do some good,” she said, her voice raw now, her words clipped, bitten off, “but do we do as much as we might? Is not some of any good we do merely… collateral benefit created as we follow – unwittingly at our level, perhaps… perhaps quite deliberately by those in possession of more knowledge and power – some other and greater… greater… greater agenda?”

“Such as?”

“Who knows?” she said. “The point is… that by now we might be blind to such subterfuge. We trust our own forecasting techniques so fully that those in the field charged with doing the… doing the dirty work… blindly obey orders without a second thought, even though there is no obvious immediate or even medium-term benefit to be observed, because they have come to trust that genuine good will always accrue in the fullness of time; that’s what’s always happened and that’s what they’ve been taught to expect, so it’s what they accept and what they believe. Thus they do less than they think but more than they know. It is, if I am right, an astonishing trick; to conjure the symptoms of zealotry from those who believe they are being merely pragmatic, even utilitarian.”

(When I first saw her, she was half sitting on a stone parapet, one slim trousered leg extended in front of her, the other drawn up beneath her rear, her face and body turned to one side as she talked to one of a group of men all but surrounding her. She held a glass in one hand and was in the act of laughing as she raised her other palm towards the chest of the tall man standing, also laughing, by her side. She was slim, compact and still seemed – even sitting, seemingly cornered, her back to the drop beyond the terrace edge – to dominate the company with a confident ease.

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.”