“My dear Professore,” Madame d’Ortolan said, sighing, “we might greet anarchy with an open door, garland its brows, hand it all the keys and skip away whistling with nary a care in our heads, compared to what this might lead to, trust me.”

Loscelles sighed. “What do you think we might do, then?”

“Use all our weapons,” she told him bluntly. “He wields a new kind of club; well, we have some unusual clubs of our own.” The lady glanced to the window. “I can think of one in particular.” She watched clouds drift past in a silver-grey sky before turning back to the Professore’s frown. “We have been too cautious, I believe,” she told him. “It may even be to the good that something’s forced our hand at last. Left to ourselves we might have hesitated for ever.” She smiled suddenly at him. “Gloves off, claws out.”

The Professore’s frown deepened. “This will be one of your special projects, I take it?”

“Indeed.” Madame d’Ortolan’s smile went wide. She put one hand out to his face again – he flinched, almost imperceptibly, but she only smoothed and patted his right cheek, affectionate as though he were a treasured cat. “And I know you will support me in this, won’t you?”

“Would it prevent you if I did not?”

“It would prevent my adoring respect for you continuing, Professore,” she said, with a tinkling laugh in her voice that found no echo in her expression.

Loscelles looked her in the eyes. “Well then, ma’am,” he said softly, “I could not allow that. It might serve to put me with Obliq, and Plyte, and Krijk, and the rest. There have been… narrow squeaks reported; abnormal events.”

Madame d’Ortolan nodded, her expression a picture of concern. “Haven’t there?” She tutted. “We should all be very careful.”

Loscelles smiled wanly. “I believe I am being.”

She smiled radiantly at him. “Why, I believe you are too!”

“What is it that we do? What are we for and what are we against? What are we for?”

“This again? I have a feeling that if I say what anybody else in the Concern would expect me to say, you’re going to tell me I’m wrong.”

“Give it a go.”

“We help societies across the many worlds, aiding and advancing positive, progressive forces and confounding and disabling negative, regressive ones.”

“To what end?”

He shrugged. “General philanthropy. It’s nice to be nice.”

They sat in a hot tub looking out across a polished granite floor towards a starlit sea of cloud. She scooped a handful of the warm water and bubbles and let it fall over her left shoulder and upper breast, then repeated the action for her right side. Tem watched the bubbles slide. Mrs Mulverhill, even here, wore a tiny white hat like piled snow, and a spotted white veil. She said, “How do we define the different forces?”

“The bad guys tend to enjoy killing people, preferably in large numbers. The good guys – and girls – don’t; they get a buzz when infant mortality rates go down and life expectancy goes up. The bad guys like to tell people what to do, the good guys are happy to encourage people to make up their own minds. The bad guys like to keep the riches and the power to themselves and their cronies, the good guys want the money and power spread evenly, subject to the making-up-your-own-minds thing.”

In this world, there had once been an Emperor of the World. He had caused this palace to be built, levelling the top of the mountain that was variously called Sagarmatha, Chomolungma, Peak XV or Mount Everest (or Victoria or Alexander or Ghandi or Mao, or many, many other names). The palace was vast, enclosed by great glass domes which were pressurised and warmed to mimic the conditions of a tropical island. Now, though, after a catastrophe caused by a gamma-ray burster happening relatively nearby by cosmic standards, the world was devoid of humans or almost any other living thing, and was in the slow, eons-long process of changing profoundly as all the processes associated with life, including carbon capture and even most of its plate tectonics, started to shut down.

The Concern had first discovered the world a few years after the catastrophe and had repaired and restored the palace. It had become a place where privileged officers of the Concern could holiday. Mrs Mulverhill, who now seemed to be able to go anywhere and do anything as long as she stayed away from the Concern proper, had found a version – indeed, a whole unshuffled deck of versions – where this had been done but nobody had yet come to visit. For now at least it was her private world. She had brought him here. This time, she had only needed to hold his hand.

“What is the point,” she asked him, “of trying to do any good in the many worlds when there will always be an infinite number of realities where the horrors unfold unstopped?”

“Because one ought to do what one can. Good is good. Specific people and societies benefit. That not all people and societies benefit is beside the point. That a finite number of lives and worlds are better as a result of the actions of the Concern is all the justification that is required, and refusing to do a finite amount of good because you cannot do an infinite amount of good is a morally perverse position. If you feel sorry for a beggar you still give them money even though doing so does nothing for the plight of all other beggars.” He let himself slide under the steaming water and the islands of bubbles, resurfacing and wiping water from his face. “How am I doing? I’m paraphrasing here, but it’s sounding pretty good to me. I should probably write a paper or something.”

“Extremely well. You’re a credit to your teachers.”

“I thought so.” He pushed his fingers through his hair like a rough comb. “So. Tell me where I’m wrong and what the Concern is really up to.”

She nodded once. There were times when he thought she lacked any sense of humour, irony or sarcasm. “I think now that the Concern,” she said, “exists for a much more specific purpose than simply acting as a multiversal niceness-enforcement agency. It does do some good, but it’s incidental, a cover for its true purpose.”

“Which is what?”

“That is what I hope you will agree to help me find out.”

“So you still don’t know?”

“Correct.”

“But you suspect they’re up to something.”

“I know they are.”

“How do you know?”

“I feel it.”

“You feel it.”

“Indeed. In fact I feel certain of it.”

“You know, if you’re going to convince anybody else about this, including me, you’re going to have to do better than just telling them you’re certain. It’s a little vague.”

“I know. But consider this.”

Of course, she had a slyly refined sense of humour and appreciated ironies that entirely passed him by. Sarcasm was generally beneath her, but even so.

“I am,” he told her, “sitting comfortably.”

She put one hand up to the side of her head, so that one rosy nipple surfaced briefly from the white bubbles. She took the little white hat and the veil off, laid them on the black granite at the side of the tub. Slitlike pupils in amber irises narrowed fractionally as they regarded him.

“We have access to an infinite number of worlds,” she said, “and have visited some very strange ones. We suspect there are some so strange that we are unable to access them just because of that strangeness: they are unenvisageable, and because we cannot imagine going to them, we cannot go to them. But think how relatively limited is the type of world we do visit. For one thing, it is always and only Earth, as we understand it. Never the next planet further in towards or further out from the sun: Venus or Mars or their equivalents. This Earth is usually about four and a half billion years old in a universe just under fourteen billion years old. Usually, even if it supports no intelligent life, it supports some life. Almost without variance, it exists as part of a solar system in a galaxy composed of hundreds of millions of other solar systems, in a universe composed of hundreds of millions of other galaxies.”