Lust Or No Harm Done

by Geoff Ryman

  'The rules are simple. Whenever he goes back to wherever it is he comes from, everything he has done in this world will vanish.'

  Mr Miazga rifled through the pages. 'It… really is him.'

  He looked at Michael with something like horror. Then he crossed himself. 'Is this some kind of miracle?'

  'I don't really know. We could talk about it all afternoon and still not understand it. Can you believe me, Thad?'

  Mr Miazga went back to the photographs. He gave a nervous laugh. 'It is remarkable.' His eyes said: is it God or the Devil who has done this?

  'If you do this I will tell him what you are doing. If it's a choice between his work surviving or Marta, I imagine your wife will be safe.'

  Mr Miazga chortled, ducked and smoothed down his impeccable hair. 'A man might prefer to have his wife back for other reasons.'

  'I… imagine she still loves you. I imagine she will be grateful that you are still there to pick up the pieces… And…'

  OK, here comes the second impossible thing.

  'Can I promise you something, Thad? When he goes, she will have no memory of him. Neither will you. It will be as if he never existed.'

  It was all beginning to be a bit too much for Mr Miazga. He expelled air and pulled his hair back even flatter.

  'I imagine that you are aware of the value of his work. And that, whatever the personal situation, you can see that there is value in making sure the work survives?' It was a question, left for him to answer.

  Mr Miazga covered his face with his hands, and appeared to wash his face with them as though they were flannels.

  'OK, I will do it,' he said, snatching his hands away. Then he seemed to crumple. 'Oh, I am a weak man.'

  'You are in control of your emotions, Thad. Whatever the situation with your wife, you are still able to see clearly. And you are a normal man who wants his marriage to survive.'

  Mr Miazga looked round at him slowly, his face more creased than usual, in folds. 'And you do well, too. You get him back.'

  'I don't have him, Thad. And I'm doing this so that I can send him away.'

  Mr Miazga looked at him for a few moments and said, 'For you I will do this. Not for him.'

  Michael returned to work elated. He boomed hello at Shafiq and Tony, and bounced so effectively at Ebru that she had no time to say anything about his absences. He kissed her on the cheek, talked to her about her trip to Turkey, and asked her to run a report on their data using different variables.

  Then he slammed into his in tray and got a fair way through it. He saw from the papers that it was too late to agree to speak at the American conference. Well, OK, you can't do everything. He tore up the correspondence, threw it in the wastebin and e-mailed an apology. At 6.00 pm, he tapped all the remaining, older papers into a neat pile and put them in a folder. He was the last to leave.

  Michael wandered in a circuit around Archbishop's Park. It was the day before the clocks went back and it was nearly dark. There was no one else there, though it was still warm and the trees had all their leaves. Michael's feet began to drag, as if he had forgotten to drink any water during the whole of the day.

  Michael avoided going home. He finally took the tube and ended up in the Camden bar. The red-faced, bearded men ignored him. He watched other laconic, unfearful souls play darts.

  It wasn't enough to have love. You needed to have power. The two were so much alike. Love and power only exist between people. Both come from inner liveliness. Perhaps they were the same thing, since to fail at one seemed in some way to be bound up with failure in the other.

  Michael finished a pint of Becks and finally went back to his flat.

  'This flat, it is mine,' Michael said. 'I bought it.'

  'Hmph,' said Picasso from his computer. He turned and glowered a warning.

  'You're welcome to stay. If you still need to. You can sleep in my bed or on my sofa. But please stop bringing women back.'

  Picasso smiled. 'You are jealous.'

  Michael smiled. 'Not at all. It is inconvenient to come back and find my bed occupied.'

  Picasso seemed to swell and darken like clouds. 'Do not threaten me.'

  'How have I threatened you? I have asked you to keep strangers out of my bed.'

  Picasso said, 'You will make me angry.'

  'Why? Because I ask for good behaviour?'

  'Yes. It is bourgeois.'

  'Oh please. It would be bourgeois to sit by helplessly while you turn me out of my own house. If you want to make a mess and fill a flat with whores, go find one of your own.'

  Picasso finished keying in with a musical flourish. 'I will do so.' He turned and challenged Michael, his jaw thrust out.

  'Good,' said Michael.

  That night Picasso noisily made up a bed downstairs. For the first time in months, Michael slept in his own bed alone. He felt the separation, like scar tissue from his sternum down to the top of his penis. It's over, he realized. It really is over. There was sadness like a story ending, and another sensation that was like fear.

  Trepidation we'll call it. Unease. Michael knew that it was a necessary unease. It was the unease you feel when you lose a tooth, or change jobs. It was the unease of learning.

  I love you, Michael accepted, and it will have to end. He wept one long slow hot unwilling tear, and that was all.

  In the morning Michael went downstairs and Picasso was making coffee. He looked smaller. He turned and smiled and said good morning and pushed an empty cup in Michael's direction.

  'You have set me free, haven't you?' Picasso said.

  'Yes.'

  'You will let me live.'

  Michael nodded. Picasso chuckled and gave his head a funny shake. 'You have become tired of me, but you don't threaten me. That is good,' he said. 'It is economical.' He made a fist to emphasize the last word.

  Michael allowed himself to be drawn. 'Economical how?'

  'Toh!' said Picasso and spread his hands out over the self-evident, empty table. 'One should never give everything. It is wasteful. It tries too hard.'

  His eyes said: I am going to live. I am going to live without conditions.

  Two weeks later Picasso stood at night on the doorstep. He had a new leather jacket slung over one shoulder and a shaved bristly head and a stud earring. He had started to sell pictures; his agent had found him a flat. He was in an expansive mood.

  'I am going to live!' he said, rocking on his heels.

  'Indeed,' said Michael, smiling with him.

  Picasso took his hand. 'And the work. It will live too?'

  'For as long as you do. When you go… the paintings, the sculptures will disappear.'

  'Like the flowers,' said Picasso, and his face was impossible to read. It was regretful but happy.

  'Except for your computer pieces. Uh… I have not told you this. Mr Miazga. I made a deal with him.'

  For some reason, Picasso threw his head back and laughed aloud.

  'He is keying in all your work again. So it will remain. It will stay.'

  Picasso was still laughing. 'Poor Miazga. Regard! There is a man who gives everything!'

  'The deal is that you stop screwing his wife.' It was terrible, but Michael was grinning too, without knowing why, and he suddenly spurted out a laugh.

  'He can have her!' declared Picasso, with a wave of his hand, dismissing her, it, everything. He did his little dance in place. His eyes looked at Michael, brimming with affection.

  'You,' Picasso said with one finger, 'Are.' Two fingers together made a sign like a blessing. He gave Michael a hug and whispered in his ear, 'But I really hated screwing you.' The words broke apart like rocks with laughter.

  'Liar,' said Michael. 'You were in me all night.'

  Picasso stepped back. 'True,' he proclaimed. He spun around and held up a hand to wave goodbye. 'True!' he bellowed as he walked away without looking back.

  And Michael for some reason felt a wild unaccountable joy. It was as if there were a giant tiger lily flower all red, span
gled with yellow, and it was just beyond the sky, filling it, invisible. I am going to live, Michael repeated. He watched Picasso's retreating back with love and gratitude and relief.

  What am I looking for?

  Michael finally cleared his in tray and saw in it a reminder: Deadline for grant proposals. He lightly thought: why have they sent me this? The answer seemed to thump him in the heart.

  Because you didn't do the application.

  No, I must have. Didn't I? Michael couldn't remember not doing it, but then you don't remember not doing something. He was sure he had done it. Well, or rather, it felt as if he had.

  But his only memory of application forms was, he realized, from last year, for the six-month initial grant. He opened up My Documents, he did a Find, and there was no file called application or council form or any other likely name on either the server or his hard disk. He must have sent it out, he couldn't have been so stupid. He sorted all his e-mails by address and looked at everything he had sent to the Council. Only one had an attachment, and that was simply the first progress report.

  Michael went out and asked Ebru if she still kept a record of all outgoing and incoming white mail.

  'Mmmm hmmm,' she said, and handed him the register.

  'Good girl,' he said wistfully, looking at her brisk, pinched face. And she was a good girl, better than he was, to record each outgoing item of post. It wasn't as if she were a secretary; she was a postgraduate researcher.

  Michael went though the list line by line for all of August and September: there was nothing, no conventional mail whatsoever to the Biological Research Funding Council.

  'Do we have a record of courier dispatches?'

  Her eyes said of course we have. 'Yes; that what you were looking for, Michael?'

  Ebru's gaze was upsettingly direct and unfriendly. She was plainly fed up with him. There was nothing in her manner to encourage him to tell her what had happened.

  Michael lied. 'I sent back some faulty software, I need to know when.'

  'If you'll tell me where you sent it, I could find it for you.'

  'Well, I know roughly when and I know it was sent by ordinary post, so it'll be easier if I just scan for it.'

  Her grey eyes rested on his, and then she shrugged, and then she passed the dispatch courier receipts in silence.

  There were only three dispatches in August and none of them was for the Research Council.

  Michael slowly closed the register and found that his limbs did not want to move.

  There would have been no funding after September. They should have enough to finish the light learning experiment, but that wasn't the point. The point was to use the current study as a benchmark to see how other learning activities produced different results. They'd talked about it, the team expected it. Michael could not believe he had done it, that he had fucked up that badly, that he was so stupid, so incompetent. His flesh seemed to crawl nervously all over his bones. Part of him was trying to take action, or perhaps, escape himself.

  He rang the Research Council. The conversation left his heart shrivelled with shame. The neurology contact was a man called Geoffrey Malterton; he was, as ever, pleased to hear from Michael. Geoffrey sounded ebullient and efficient – nothing out of place in his life, then. 'Whoa, you're weeks too late, months too late. It's all been snatched up, I'm afraid. I'm sorry, but you know how fierce the competition is for grants. What, is your project still unfinished?'

  'No, no, not at all, it's just that we've had some new ideas.' Michael tried to sound bright and alert.

  'Well, then you can always apply next year. The answer is no for this year's money, I'm afraid.'

  Michael asked Emilio for the project accounts. He avoided asking Ebru. As soon as he saw the spreadsheet, their situation was so obvious that he wondered why the staff weren't talking about it. Simply there had been no income except interest since April 1. It was now late October.

  Did they have enough to continue? Michael had supposed he would be able during the year to raise more money from other sources. They had roughly one month of money left. He recalculated their budget, remembering extras like stationery and an unpaid water bill, and had a moment's panic. Then he remembered: interest was compounded quarterly and that would be paid in at the end of November. He had to track their steadily decreasing principal and try to calculate the interest. It was all back-of-an-envelope stuff, but the interest made the difference. They would be OK. OK meant that there was enough money to give all the staff their contractually required one month's notice.

  It could all be made to seem deliberate. They had enough basic data for this particular project. Michael could just ignore the idea they had of following it up. They should make sure that all the data were entered and correct and then run the reports. There would even be time and money if they needed one final trial, one more order of chicks, to fill any gaps in data or design.

  There was always a problem with staff near the end of • research projects. You tell them the project will end just when their work must be at its most meticulous. Yes, they had known all along it would come to an end, but yes, they have living expenses, so they have to look for the next contract or post. They often leave before finishing, especially when the end of the project is unexpected and they have not been able to plan.

  He went to the cold store. They had done a good job while he was going crazy. The slides were all in order and labelled. The salami wafers had all been stained and stored. With something numb and slow, part way between dread and relief, he saw: the project had been well done.

  Michael went into the soft, dark, red-lit room. There were the chicks, his chicks, peeping out of need and hunger. They were warm and feathery in his hands, as light as dust, kicking and struggling for life. They would be the last batch to be killed.

  And suddenly Michael saw them afresh; they were like his Angels, all his beautiful Angels alive and hungry and here for such a short time. He was surprised by a sudden welling up of tears. He loved them. He was going to lose them. He loved them and he didn't want to kill them. He stood transfixed by confusion, torn by irreconcilable emotions, for the chicks, for his research, for his old life with its mild addictions to science, order, and shots of whisky and of semen. He had no desire or idea of what to desire. Simply, he was unmanned, meaning he had lost a self. He could not answer the question, what do I do next? He stood in the dark, cradling a little chick, weeping for it, making peeping noises himself.

  Please God, make it stop. Please God, just take it away! I'll be good. Just tell me what to do, and I'll do it.

  The world is not to be seduced by words. The world stayed the same, waiting for him to act.

  Michael remembered the first day they had moved into the arches. Ebru, Emilio, Hugh inspected their well-resourced lab, running around the cold room and the darkroom and the emergency generator like kids. Ebru had kept deferring to him: Michael, where do you want this? She had called him Hoja, which meant teacher or master in Turkish. She would never call him that again.

  Michael took a deep breath. A parental voice from somewhere said, Do it, Mikey. Get it over with.

  Shafiq was in his box. Ebru and Emilio were together in the front office. Hugh was hunched over the camera. Michael asked to see them in his office in fifteen minutes. He spent those fifteen minutes rehearsing what he was going to say, with his fingers spread out across the top of his desk as if they were roots drawing strength from it.

  Their body language alone was enough to wrench his gut. Ebru slouched in, her arms crossed in front of her, her mouth pushed to one side with sour suspicion. Shafiq stood like Prince Charles, erect, his hands clasping each other behind his back as if to stop him hitting someone. His plump face was turned upwards as if absorbing a blow. Emilio looked bored, irritated, impatient. I spent so much time building them up into a kind of family, Michael thought. I've destroyed it.

  'There's no good way to say this, so I'll be brief. We've collected enough data which thanks to all your effo
rts is in super shape, really, it's all recorded, the data entered, everything in cold store… well done… really.'

  They were as frozen as the samples. They knew what was coming.

  'Which means that the project is entering the home stretch. We still have some slides to photograph, which I see Hugh has well in hand. What we need to do now is just make sure we have enough data, all in order, and then try to turn it into some kind of information. Which I reckon we can do before the end of the calendar year.'

  Ebru flicked hair out of her eyes.

  'Um. That means the project will end and that I'll be giving you formal notice today. You've been a terrific team, and I wanted you to have the news as soon as I did.'

  'You forgot to apply for the grant, didn't you, Michael?' Ebru said it.

  'No. I uh took advice from the Research Council. They said it was probably best if we tried to wind the project up as a second grant was highly unlikely.' Michael wiped his mouth.

  Was she going to call him a liar as well as incompetent? Ebru hovered for a moment like a hawk over a motorway bank. Then she shrugged and went silent. She couldn't be bothered.

  'Any questions?'

  There was a beat. Ebru shook her head and murmured, 'No.'

  'Well, if you have any, just ask. Ebru, you and I will need to go over all the contracts and make the nuh-non-renewals official. Hugh, there is the photography to continue. Emilio, you and I will need to get going on the data processing.'

  Silence.

  'I uh, was wondering if people wouldn't like to get together today for a lunch. My treat?'

  Never had words of his sounded so much like a creek running dry.

  'I would like to say thank you.'

  The team glanced at each other. Ebru said it. 'Maybe later, Michael. When the project ends, the last day or something.'

  'OK,' said Michael. His hands did something awkward in mid-air. 'OK, thanks, gang.'

  They started to file out.

  'Oh. One other thing. Um. We really have a lot of data. And I was wondering if we really need, need any more. Which would mean… I want us to set this last batch of chicks free.'