"A series of purposes. Yourself?"

"Always only with one."

"And what would that be?"

"Well, you must guess."

"Must I?"

"Oh yes."

"Let me see then. Your pleasure?"

"I am not," she said, "so shallow."

"Is it shallow to seek pleasure?"

"Exclusively, yes."

"I know people who would disagree."

"So do I. May I ask what you're smiling at?"

"The scorn in your voice when you mention those people."

"Well, they are shallow," she said. "This proves my point, no?"

"It certainly proves something."

"You are smiling again."

"I am aware that my mouth is almost all you can see."

"Do you think it is all I need to see of you?"

"I would hope not."

She tipped her head to one side. "Are you flirting with me, sir?" she asked curtly.

"I'm fairly sure I'm trying to," I said. "How am I doing?"

She appeared to think, then moved her head side-to-side, like a nod rotated ninety degrees. "It is too early to tell yet."

Later the music echoing down stairwells and through chambers and corridors we stood in front of a great wall-wide map of the world. It looked reasonably accurate and therefore late, though of course in some ways I would be the last to be able to judge. We stood close, both a little breathless after the last dance. We still wore our masks and I still did not know her name.

"Does it all look present and correct to you, sir?" she asked as I gazed up at the configured continents and cities.

"We return to my ignorance," I confessed. "Geography is not my strongest subject."

"Or does it then look wrong to you?" she asked, then seemed to drop her voice a little. "Or too limited?"

"Too limited?" I asked.

"It is, after all, just the one world," she said calmly.

I looked at her, startled. She returned her gaze to the map. I recovered my composure. I laughed, gestured. "Indeed. A starry vault or two would not go amiss."

She stood still, looked at the map, said no more.

For some time I divided my attention between her and the map while various individuals, couples and groups of people pa.s.sed to and fro, chattering and laughing. Then, in a lull, I reached out to take her gloved hand. She moved away and swivelled. "Walk with me, would you?" she asked.

"Where to?"

"Must it be to anywhere? Might we not just walk?"

"I think you'll find that when you stop walking you'll have arrived somewhere."

She fixed me with a stare. "I thought geography wasn't your strong point."

We collected our cloaks. Outside, in the Piazzetta and then the Piazza, a misty rain was falling, blurring the lines of lights set high on the great square's walls between the lines of dark windows.

She led me north through a succession of narrow, twisting calles and across small bowed bridges over dark narrow ca.n.a.ls, quickly leaving behind the scatter of people in and around San Marco, our steps echoing from overhanging buildings, our shadows unbearably dramatic in our out-belling cloaks dancing around us like ghostly partners, sometimes ahead of us, sometimes behind, to one side, or just a pool of darkness at our feet.

She found a tiny bar off an ill-lit calle which would have been too narrow for us to walk down side by side. The establishment was shady, almost empty save for a couple of workmen sitting near the back nursing beers we were given slightly contemptuous glances and a diminutive blonde bar girl in jeans and a baggy jumper. My companion ordered a spritz and a bottle of still water. I accepted a spritz as well.

Our hostess disappeared into a storeroom, clutching a clipboard and pen. We remained standing at the bar. I took off my mask, faced my pirate captain and smiled expectantly. "There," I said.

She merely nodded, made no move to remove her own mask. She did take off her hat. The moment might have called for a shake of the head, coquettish or not, but she just let her long black curled hair fall about her shoulders without ceremony. The workman facing us glanced up, nodded to his fellow, who turned. Both eyed her for a few moments. She put her head back and glugged half the bottle of water in one go, exposed throat moving. She wiped her mouth with a couple of fingers, then sipped delicately on her spritz, back to ladylike. Dim though the bar was, the angle of a light above the gallery of bottles gave me the best view I'd had so far of her eyes behind the almond-shaped piercings in the black mask. They glittered, hinting at lightness; pale blue or green or a delicate hazel.

"Would it be time for names yet?" I asked.

She shook her head.

"I could tell you mine," I said. "Like it or not."

She put one finger to my lips, very carefully and gently. Her finger was warm and smelled of a dark, oily perfume. I hadn't even seen her take off her glove. The finger pressed my lips very briefly, then withdrew. I might have made to kiss it, equally gently, but there had hardly been time. She smiled.

"Do you know the word 'emprise'?" she asked.

I sighed, thought. "I don't believe I do."

"It means a dangerous undertaking."

"Does it?"

"It does. Do you partake of dangerous undertakings, sir?"

I leant forward, my gaze going to one side then the other. "Am I partaking in one now?" I asked quietly.

She tipped her head forward. "Not yet," she murmured. "No more than you would usually. Less so. You would be off duty now, yes?"

"Off duty?" I asked, confused.

"Not travelling."

"Ah, yes. In that sense, then, I suppose so."

One of the workmen walked up and stood behind her, rapping his knuckles on the bar's wooden surface. The blonde girl reappeared from the back room. My companion seemed to be about to say something, then checked herself. She turned and looked at the workman behind her, who had just asked the barmaid for two beers. His mouth was still open.

The workman and the barmaid looked straight at each other. Then she shivered and he twitched. And that was that; they were changed. Their bodies and their faces appeared identical, but were not. Their stance, balance, body language what you will; that changed, in an instant and almost more than I'd have believed possible, as though every muscle in their bodies had flicked instantaneously to a completely different setting, carrying their skeletons and organs with them.

I was still in the process of realising what had just happened when my pirate captain stepped back, away from me, the bar and the workman, just as the barmaid grabbed at something under the bar and the workman kicked out savagely. My companion folded back from the man's kick, which roundhoused past and would have caught me on the thigh if I hadn't jumped away too.

The sword was in her hand with a noise like the wind through a fence, flashing in the light as she lunged forward. The workman was still turning from the momentum of his kick; the sword's blade seemed to slip into his neck and his own rotation opened a line across his throat in a pink spray as his booted foot finally connected with the bar. His right hand started to go up to his throat as the masked girl swung one leg to knock both of his from under him. He started to fall to the floor, clutching his neck.

The barmaid brought the club up only a little too late. A scything stroke from the thin sword caught her laterally across both b.r.e.a.s.t.s and one arm, making the baggy jumper flap like wet rags as her face screwed up with pain and she thudded back against the gallery, bringing bottles crashing down. My pirate captain, meanwhile, was stamping one heavy heel into the groin of the workman, who had just hit the floor, shoulders first. She barely glanced at him as he rolled into a ball. She did glance at the other workman, who was sitting where he had been all the time, open-mouthed. She peeked over the bar where the barmaid was lying, also curled up, blood spreading from an arm slashed to the bone, bottles and gla.s.ses still falling and crunching and settling around her.

I had stepped back from all this mayhem, closer to the door. My pirate captain glanced again at the remaining workman, who looked like he was trying to decide whether to rise from the table or not. I was guessing he'd decide not. She sheathed her sword and went to take me by one arm. "Time to go, sir."

I moved to take her by the arm instead and started to move with her to the door. Then I was. .h.i.t by a sudden feeling like a kind of sideways vertigo, a sensation instantly identifiable to any transitioner as slew slew, the result of one's consciousness having been dragged into a fractionally different world. Nothing visible had altered and the fragre of the place seemed the same, but something had effectively changed around us, something small but concentrated, hard and important. During my field training I'd been particularly bad at identifying slew, but it was one of those skills that had improved with experience and I'd never had it as strongly as now. Something told me that whatever it was had changed, it was behind us. I felt the hairs on the back of my neck start to rise. My little pirate captain stiffened and jerked as though she had felt the same thing. Her hand darted to her sword as she began to turn.

The shot filled the small room in an instant, ending all other sound but for ringing in the ears. The flash, from the table where the other workman sat, seemed almost to come after the noise. My pirate captain was spun round, thudding into my chest. She started to go limp as I went to hold her. I tried to grasp the pommel of her sword, glancing at the man who had shot her. The workman who had been sitting in the back all this time carried himself quite differently now. He held a small, flat-looking gun and was rising from the table, his free hand spread out to me as he shook his head.

"Hunting in packs now," the dying girl in my arms muttered. "Motherf.u.c.kers." I looked down into her eyes. She was a dead weight now and her sword was unreachable as the workman started towards us. Weakly, she brought one hand up and for a moment I thought she was about to remove the mask. It looked as if moving that arm and keeping her head from flopping forward was taking all her remaining strength. Then I saw that she held something like a tiny gun in her hand. She put it under her jaw near her neck. "Another time, Tem," she murmured. The second workman had almost reached us.

"Don't-" I had time to say. Then something clicked and hissed and a second later she went perfectly slack, sagging in my arms.

"f.u.c.k!" the second workman said, kicking the tiny device from her hand.

I caught the heel of his boot and swung him round and down so that he whacked into the floor even more heavily than his comrade. I rolled the pirate captain's body on top of him, unsheathing her sword as I stood. I had one foot on her b.l.o.o.d.y back, so pinning him beneath her, and the sword's tip just breaking the skin of his wrist on the hand still clutching the gun, ready to skewer him to the floorboards if necessary before he got his breath back.

"Cavan!" he gasped. "Your name is Mark Cavan. We're on your side! We're Concern!" The bar girl made a sound that might have been meant to be a confirmation of this. The other man, foetal on the floor, just moaned. "We're Concern!" the man with the gun repeated. "L'Expedience! We were sent!"

My little pirate captain or whoever's body she had inhabited for the evening bled to death on top of him while I thought about this.

Perhaps inspired by such memories, I squeeze the little ormolu box just so, releasing a tiny white pill. I swallow it with the last of my G&T and promptly order another, for the sport of seeing whether it'll arrive in time for me to take a first sip.

I look down, watching for more breaks in the cloud going dark as the horizon seeps to oranges and reds above the sinking sun now but the cloud is unbroken. I start to slip into the transitioning trance, already half disconnected from this world. The steward is approaching with my gin and tonic when I feel the sneeze coming on. I ach-oo! ach-oo!

When I open my eyes my first thought is, I was in seat A4: that is a type of paper in Europe, a cla.s.s of steam locomotive from mid-twentieth-century Britain and as far as the white player's queen's rook's p.a.w.n can travel on its first move, though it blocks an obvious diagonal for the queen or the queen's-side bishop to apply pressure on the centre of...

Pressure. Yes, pressure. I feel pressure. Pressure on my knees and on each shoulder.

The interior of the plane is darker and it is full night; the windows are all either black or closed by plastic shutters. The airy s.p.a.cing of first cla.s.s is gone; I am crammed in with ranks and rows of people, mostly sleeping in slightly reclined seats. A baby is crying. The engines sound a little noisier and I have a lot less leg room, my knees touching the tilted seat back in front. I look to each side, already knowing that something is wrong. The pressure on my shoulders is coming from two very large tanned Caucasian men, one on each side of me, each half a head taller than me and much broader. They both have crew-cuts and wear dark suits over white shirts. The one on my right encloses both my wrists in one gigantic hand. Under his grip, I am wearing handcuffs.

"Gesundheit, Mr Dise," the other one says. "Welcome to wherever you think you are." He reaches into my jacket pocket and removes the little ormolu pill case before I can do anything about it.

"What the-" I splutter.

"We'll take that," he tells me smoothly, sliding the pillbox into a shirt pocket.

My wrists remain crushed inside the other one's locked fist. I try to lift my arms, even though I would still be handcuffed. To no avail; I am strong, but I feel like a small child gripped by an adult.

"Who the h.e.l.l do you-" I have time to say, before the one who has relieved me of my pills brings an absurdly ma.s.sive fist sailing up into my face.

6

Patient 8262

Beyond the beginning, nothing. At the beginning, a torrent of universes in a single timeless blink that is the mother and father of all explosions and is the opposite of an explosion, destroying nothing destroying nothing but Nothing but purely creating; snapping into existence the first semblance of order and chaos and the very idea of time, all at once. This takes both the entirety of for ever and precisely no time whatsoever.

After the beginning, all else.

Expansion beyond expansion; an explosion that does not dissipate or slow or lose energy but instead does quite the opposite, bursting out for evermore with increasing power, intensity, complexity and scope.

We were taught to envisage it.

"Close your eyes," we were told, and we did. I lie here, eyes closed, listening to the sounds of the clinic a clank of pans, a patient in a distant room coughing, the tinny gabble of the radio at the nurses' station down the echoing hall and I think back to that day and that lecture hall, my eyes closed along with those of everybody else in the cla.s.s, listening, imagining, trying to learn, attempting to see.

From far enough away, it would look like a sphere, like a world with a troubled, ever-changing and expanding surface, or a vast, growing star. Within the limits of our understanding, it was simply the idea of roundness, in as many dimensions as you fooled yourself into thinking you could imagine.

This is the true Universe, the universe of universes, the absolute beyond-which-there-is-nothing foundation of all. Utterly ungraspable, of course, though if you had envisaged it, as above, you had in a sense already transcended it because you'd thought of looking at it from outside, when there is and could be no outside. Which could be seen as a victory of sorts, though the idea of clutching at straws always came to my mind when that was suggested.

Some things mean too much to matter. This was the exemplar of that. For any sort of usable meaning you had to look closer at the surface of that unstoppably burgeoning immensity.

"Keep your eyes closed. Envisage this," our tutor told us.

We sat in a lecture theatre in the Speditionary Faculty of the University of Practical Talents, in the city of Aspherje, Calbefraques. Our tutor had instructed us to close our eyes, to remove distractions and make the envisioning easier. There were a few giggles, yelps and hisses as those students not taking the matter entirely seriously used the fact that those nearby had their eyes closed to tickle, prod or grope.

Our tutor sighed theatrically. "Yes, my apologies to the rest of you; there may be a delay while the last percentile present mature beyond primary-school behaviour." She changed her voice, became more businesslike. "Just keep imagining that ultimate roundness," she told us. "And think yourself closer to it. Imagine a surface: highly complex, wrinkled, ridged, fissured, with continually growing structures like trees, bushes, covered in tendrils and filaments."

"Ma'am," a male voice said, already amused with itself, "I'm looking at a giant crinkly hairy ball."

"You're looking at a punitive essay if you speak again, Meric. Be quiet." Another loud sigh. "Keep looking closer," she told us. "Closer still," she said, sounding amused and serious both. "Those of you with memories and imaginations beyond the insect stage may wish to invoke the idea of fractals at this point, because that would help. a.s.suming that you have successfully imagined a maximally complex surface on Mr Meric's giant hairy ball " she paused for a smatter of amus.e.m.e.nt " you need to keep on imagining just more of the same no matter how much further in you zoom. The tiniest hair, the most microscopic tendril reveals, on closer inspection, that it too has a surface composed of ridges and wrinkles and tree shapes and filaments and so on, effectively identical to what you were looking at before you zoomed in. That'll be your fractals made real, that will. The closer you go, the deeper you look and the higher you turn your magnification, the more of the same you see. Only the scale has changed."

"I'm struggling to imagine this, ma'am," said one of the girls.

"Good. If you're struggling you're still trying, you haven't given in. Keep trying. You'll get there. And do try to keep in mind that this is not really happening just in three dimensions or even four, but many more."