“Of course not. You could probably make a fairly accurate guess, anyway. And it’s not as though I have signed contracts from them, swearing to rebel when the time comes. I haven’t even talked to all of them, I’m just making assumptions. But feel free to tell the Questionary Office that you asked the question.”

“I shall.”

She was silent again for a while. The wind roared on, picking up in strength while the weathervane apparatus creaked and moaned and swung the glass barricade round to face the onrushing torrent of air. “You should take all this more seriously, Tem,” she said, her tone gently chiding, close to hurt. “These people are slowly making monsters of themselves. Madame d’O is already full-fledged. Under her, if they haven’t already, they’ll come to countenance anything to avoid what she sees as contamination. Anything. Encouraging world wars, genocide, global warming; anything at all to disrupt the slow progress towards the unknown.”

“Don’t let my defensive flippancy deceive you,” he told her, pulling her to him, enfolding her. He hesitated.

“Deep down you still don’t take it seriously either?” she suggested, looking up at him with with a small, wan smile.

“There’s that flippancy again.” He squeezed her. “I take it as seriously as I’ve ever taken anything, including my own survival.”

She looked unimpressed. “I was hoping for better.”

“Leave it with me. I’ll see what I can do.”

She turned in his arms, staring out over the nearly lifeless waste of rock, ice and snow towards the faltering dawn.

“We may not be able to meet like this again,” she said quietly. “I’m sorry.”

“Then I’m glad,” he said, “that we were able to put so much effort into this meeting.” She looked back to him with an expression on her face that he was unable to read, and he felt a real gut-stirring emotion, something between a kind of recidivist lust and an entirely unexpected regret at the potential loss of somebody who only now, belatedly, he realised was and had always been a soulmate. He would never now, never again, call it love.

She pushed herself away from him a little, then reached out and patted his gloved, mittened hand again, layers upon layers separating them. “I’ve enjoyed everything about the times we’ve spent together,” she told him. “Would that there had been more.”

He gave it a while, then said, “So what happens next?”

“Immediately, trivially? You go back to Calbefraques and I disappear again.”

“If I do need to contact you, if I do decide-”

“I’ll leave a note of places, times, people.”

“And beyond that?”

“Over time, more to the point, I think Madame d’Ortolan will eventually move against the people on the Central Council who disagree with her. She’ll try to isolate them, perhaps even kill them.”

“Kill them? You’re not serious.” This was not the sort of behaviour the Central Council was known for. There had been one or two suspicious deaths on the Council centuries before that might have been due to some judicious poisoning, but nothing untoward since. Stolid and boring were the words most people associated with the Council, even after the ascendancy of Madame d’O; not danger, not assassination.

“Oh, I’m as serious as she is,” Mrs Mulverhill told him, eyes wide. “Madame d’Ortolan is one of those people – civilised on the surface, brutish underneath – who think themselves realists when they contemplate their own barbarism, and ascribe the same callousness to others. Making the assumption that everybody else is as ruthless as she is helps her live with her own inhumanity, though she would justify it as simple prudence. She knows how she would deal with somebody like herself: she’d kill them. So she assumes those who oppose her must be planning the same, or shortly will. Obviously, then, by her demented logic, she needs to kill them before they kill her. She will think through this psychotic escalation without any evidence that her opponents actually do intend her harm and she’ll pride herself on her disinterested practicality, probably even persuading herself that she bears those she has marked for death no personal ill will. It’s just politics.”

Mrs Mulverhill smiled briefly. “She will move against them, Tem; decisively as she would see it, murderously as anyone else would.” She put one mittened hand on his arm. “And she may think to use you to do so, as you are still her promising boy. Discover and test your loyalty and commitment by ordering you to make the cull. Though she will undoubtedly have alternative means set up if you decide not to cooperate.” Her gaze fastened on him. “If you do decide against her, you will be making yourself an outlaw too, or at best symbolically leaping behind a barricade with others, like myself. And, unless we succeed, the full force of the Central Council and the Concern itself will be turned against you, against us, in time. We have to persuade the waverers, who are probably the majority, that we are right, and we need to survive long enough to do that. If we can resist the Council successfully they will look weak and be seen to lose authority. Then negotiation, compromise might be possible.”

“You don’t sound very hopeful.”

She shrugged. “Oh, I am full of hope,” she said, though her voice sounded small and faint.

He went to her and put his arms around her. She pressed gently against him, her head against his chest. Moments later, almost together, a series of beeps announced that their oxygen cylinders each only held enough gas for a few more minutes.

I think I have to leave. I cannot stay here. Or maybe I can. I’m not sure.

It is comfortable here. All is not perfect; I still worry that somebody might try to violate me again, and there remains the disturbing incident with the broad-shouldered lady doctor and her dolls, when things seemed to slip aside from reality and it felt like I could only escape through fainting, but, even so, my existence here is relatively calm and unthreatened. Maybe I should stay.

I am trying to spend less time asleep or snoozing or just with my eyes closed. I am trying to discover more about where I am: about this society and the clinic and about myself. This has met with mixed results so far. However, I feel it is necessary no matter whether I stay here or leave. If I stay I need to know where it is that I am staying, so that I am prepared for what may happen. (Suppose I am only here for as long as some sickness fund or medical insurance settlement lasts and then get thrown out regardless, for example.) If I am to leave then I need to know into what sort of world I would be venturing.

So I have, albeit reluctantly, especially at first, been spending more time in the day room, watching television with the slack-jaws, droolers, mumblers, random shouters and nappy-wearers who inhabit the place. (There are one or two of its denizens who are not irredeemable, but they are very much in the minority.) It is amazing, though, how little one can glean from the sort of broadcasts these people choose to watch. I have tried finding news or current-affairs channels, but this always causes protests, even from the true slack-jaws who you’d have sworn might as well have been sitting watching a turnip rather than a functioning television.

They like cartoons, mostly. They will watch programmes with lots of shouting and movement and colour, but anything that might actually engage the brain’s higher functions, beyond the sort of stimulus on a par with a chain of plastic toys stretched across an infant’s cot or pram, that they cannot cope with. I have learned a little more of the local language, that’s about all. I persist only because the very distracting nature of the programmes sometimes lets my higher functions disengage more easily from the here and now, freeing me to think.