Lust Or No Harm Done

by Geoff Ryman

Nick blinked at him.

  'You don't,' said Michael.

  Michael went to work and sat down in his office to look at reports.

  He heard a peeping sound.

  He nipped out of his office to the warm and darkened, red-lit chamber. It was full of chicks. He had a single moment of profound confusion. Michael stood in the circle of his own self, which is timeless. For a moment he thought that these were the last batch of chicks without quite understanding why he felt so shocked. Then he remembered: we killed them.

  Michael gathered himself in, and feeling delicate walked into Ebru's office rocking like a table with uneven legs. 'Ebru. Why did we order more chicks?'

  She looked up. 'I… ah. Sorry, Michael. I don't understand you.'

  'When did we order more chicks?'

  She looked at Emilio.

  Michael could feel sweat on his upper lip. 'If we need them for more data, you should have asked me. We need to control expenditure.'

  Ebru went very still. Her eyes widened and she looked worried, and she said extremely carefully, 'Michael. What are you talking about?'

  'The darkroom is full of chicks, how did they get there?'

  'Michael. I cleaned the darkroom out yesterday. There is nothing there now.'

  'It's full of chicks. Come and see.'

  Ebru rolled her eyes, but they stayed wide. She looked like someone whose boss has finally gone mad, and is beginning to wonder if she herself has not helped drive him over the edge.

  The eyes got wider as she heard the sound, the sound of need driving new life: chicks peeping.

  Ebru followed Michael through the double sets of doors, which stopped all light entering. The room was thick with the smells of straw and faeces. Ebru took her head into her hands, and saw in the red light. In their warmed cages were 24 chicks.

  'This, this was empty, Michael. I did not do this. Maybe… No. No, I don't think anyone would do this without consulting.'

  And Michael understood: I did this. I've restored them. He picked up one of the chicks and felt it shivering. I need, the shivering pleaded. I need food and warmth. I need to be held. I need my mother. I need to live.

  I restored them because I love them. And that means the miracle is not for lust. It's for love as well.

  Lust, love, driving life.

  You were dead, Michael thought at the chick. We killed you. And so, I brought you back. He lifted the chick to his lips and kissed it. 'Angel,' he pronounced it. He looked at it in the red light. Murder undone. Restitution.

  He came up with an explanation that would appear logical. 'We… probably ordered these some time ago, and they just arrived.'

  'But who hatched them? Who put them in the cages? Who brought the cages back, Michael?'

  Michael shrugged. 'Hmmm. Who knows? Somebody who was doing their job. But Ebru, I don't want these chicks killed, all right?'

  'Absolutely not, Michael, certainly, certainly. No.' Ebru was fierce; something had gone wrong and she was mortified.

  'Nobody is to blame, OK Ebru?'

  'What will we do with them?'

  'Feed them. We still have some feed left over, don't we?'

  'Yes. I was going to throw it all out.' Ebru made a desperate gesture, with her hands in her hair.

  'Don't worry, Ebru. It's fine. It's all fine.' Michael still cradled the little chick to his bosom.

  Ebru stood still. Her cheeks were outlined in the red light, but he could not see her facial expression. After a moment she said, 'You love them, don't you Michael?'

  He sighed. 'Yes. Yes I do.'

  She chuckled, nervously. 'That is not a scientific attitude.'

  'Oh, I don't know. It just depends on the kind of science you're talking about.' He thought of life, of how it extended to wherever Angels came from. And if you could make Angels out of chicks, what did that mean for humans?

  She stepped forward and lightly touched his arm. 'When the project is over, we will talk, OK?'

  He nodded.

  'There is a mystery here, Michael.'

  'Yes,' he said. 'There certainly is.' Ebru left, and alone in the dark, he began to think.

  Dominion over the animals. Over the fish, over the fowl, over the cattle. We never knew what that meant.

  Responsibility. We are responsible for them. They are our children too.

  Michael sat on the floor of the darkroom, and held up the chicken to look at it.

  'What shall I call you, eh?' he asked it. The beak was stretched wide open, hungry for everything. 'I could call you Ali, or Bottles. I could call you Johnny or Mark. Maybe I could even call you Nick.'

  Michael stood up, and gently tipped the chick back onto straw. 'Learn,' he told it. And he went and turned on the lights. Light flooded the room. Experiment ruined. No reason to kill them a second time. He left the lights burning, to make the point.

  Michael finished his day's work well. He was determined that the lives and deaths of the previous batches would not be wasted. They would be wasted if the evidence were not in order, or the results without meaning. He melted through the reports. He saw what the stains meant. The stains went into incredibly convoluted patterns.

  Patterns, he saw, that were already there.

  We are born with our potential.

  Even chicks, their brains extend beyond this world back, forward, wherever it is we come from. Silent as settling snow, experience falls on prepared ground.

  At the close of that day, the world made sense for Michael. He went into the offices and said good night to them, Ebru, Emilio, and they said good night back, as if pleased to have him return.

  He walked back to Waterloo station, his feet crossing in front of each other again, but not from exhaustion, but from a kind of joy.

  When Michael got home there was a mass of pink flesh mewling on the carpet. It looked a bit like an unshelled crayfish only it was the size of an Alsatian.

  Nick leaned against the wall all sweaty, and pale and ill. 'I nearly did it,' Nick said. 'Not quite what the porn market demands right now. But I'll get better.'

  Michael paused. 'That was meant to be a copy of me, wasn't it?'

  'Yeah.' Nick's laugh was a shiver. 'Serve you bloody right mate, let you know what it's like.'

  Gently, Michael waved it out of existence.

  Nick's eyes. They were metallic, like the heads of drills that were somehow pointed inwards. 'I'll keep going. I'll keep going till I do it.'

  Michael sighed. 'Not while I'm here, you won't.'

  There was something in the air and in Michael's head at the same time. Something like a tentacle, or an arm… a member shall we say, and it rose up and tried to touch Michael or rather Michael's power. Michael grabbed hold of it, felt it twist and turn in the air, and he wrestled it to the ground, and pushed it back and down. Nick even, involuntarily, made a swallowing sound.

  Nick was covered in sweat. 'I'll go cook dinner,' he said. He stumbled into the kitchen. He cut up an onion. He started to sing 'Zippity do dah!' He left the knife on the counter top. The onions sizzled. Michael sat down and took off his shoes. He had a corn on his right toe and it was twitching. 'I'll give you a hand,' he said, out of habit. He went to the kitchen counter. 'Can I do anything?' he asked. Nick turned and drove the knife into Michael's heart.

  Michael didn't feel anything, except a kind of inconvenience in the chest. Breathing had become choked and unnecessarily difficult. The knife was lodged deeply, and blood was pouring down his shirt into his trousers. It'll be hell to clean up, Michael thought.

  'So,' said Nick. 'I guess you won't be here then.'

  There was very little time left, no time to be afraid. Everything closed around Michael in a rush. The floor felt like a bed, cushioned and soft, and there was a reassuring sound like rain on a roof, a sizzle like onions, the hiss of white noise on a stereo.

  Michael floated as if in a warm bath somewhere up towards a corner of the kitchen. Nick and Michael, their little drama, seemed further and further away. He saw Nick lean over M
ichael. He saw the fat glisten on the wooden spoon. He saw the eyes go still and dry. Nick knelt next to Michael, almost as if he were going to help. The emotions Michael felt were the same. Poor boy, he felt for them both.

  Dying was delicious, like lying in late, like being on the beach at twelve years old, when you wanted nothing more than to be. It was as if all work had ceased, and everything been done to perfection.

  Death was like deciding, just this once, not to take out the garbage or not to do the ironing. It was like all the times when need is not strong enough to make you move. Death was like fulfilment: desire was no more.

  There really was no longer any need to look at anything. So Michael ceased to see.

  Vision was blotted out by direction. Michael felt a tug and looked inward. All he could see was a tunnel of light.

  Yes, it was the optic nerve closing down. That was evident to Michael as soon as he saw it. It looked like a scan for glaucoma, when light is flashed deeper and deeper into the eye, shifting from yellow to red as it penetrates.

  You had to understand, as Michael did, what the optic nerve was. It was a flow of time. Light triggers electrochemical pulses, which flow along the nerve in the current of time, deep into the head. It is broken apart like a sentence into a thousand grammatical parts. These are sent to a thousand different parts of the brain.

  Now I am the light, Michael realized.

  And he travelled, in time in one direction only, up the nerve, into the self.

  Michael was read, like grammar.

  Every cell in his brain that had ever been fired was fired at once. And he felt the whole lifted up, like a giant tangle of Christmas tree lights, lifted up as one final shape.

  And it moved outside of time, to where time was not, and nothing more could happen. It preceded Michael, entered eternity, and froze. Its final frozen shape, spangled with light, seemed to be like a giant illuminated flower, in reds and yellows, sparkling with dew.

  And Michael dying, still barely in time, was able to survey it. He was without location, without volume. He was a centre of gravity contemplating his life, able to think of something new one last time. Able to call for salvation, able to regret, able to feel joy.

  In that eternal life there was Michael flinging snow in the High Sierras, there he was toting his bag to school, there he was in the Rialto cinema, Oceanside watching The Sting. There was Michael on a small funfair ride with his Dad at La Jolla. He had forgotten that.

  There was little Michael taking a bath in a washing-up bowl, and his mother blowing bubbles at him. There was Michael, in his bedroom at night memorizing lists of endocrines. There he was pumping weights, there he was in Thailand, there he was bicycling in France with Mark sipping calva outside a bar tabac. There he was, making love to a 24-year-old from Brooklyn whom he had forgotten. There he was, staring down a microscope into the stained patterns of a chicken's brain. There he was on the platform at Waterloo station, cursing himself, cursing life.

  And there were the dreams. They were real to the self. There were dinners of dogs' heads in his mother's kitchen. There were missed trains that turned into scarves trapped in car doorways. Michael's mind, saying to itself while consciousness slept: wake up Michael, you're forgetting something. Wake up Michael, you're walking the wrong way. Michael, look at me, I am here.

  Michael saw something under the petals of light.

  It snagged them, held them, twisted them, shook them.

  It was dark, like a shadow, and it still lived, and it heaved and it dragged.

  Michael saw all the parts of his brain that had never been fired.

  They had been there before he was born. They were waiting for his birth, to become real. He had lived a life and never used them.

  They were the wastes. They howled, these wastes. They were enraged. They shook the flower of light, wanting to be born as light.

  The wastes were desire. And desire did not want to die.

  There in that desert, Michael was not.

  There was Michael not loving Mark.

  There was Michael not travelling to India or China. There he was not, not riding a Jeep over the mountain terraces of Yemen. There he was not, failing to hold his own children. There he was not, bringing meals to his sick, dying brothers. There he was not, omitting to call his Mum. There he was not, never an actor on a stage. There was Michael without the brothers and sisters he never had. There was Michael not with his father for the last ten years of his life. There they were not hiking the length of the John Muir Trail. There was the Michael who had not known his father as a little boy. There was the Michael who had never known true love.

  And above all, there was Michael, who had not slept with his father.

  Dad, Dad, Dad, Dad, Dad…

  Hello Mikey, a voice seemed to say. Hello my beautiful boy.

  Dad, Dad-dy…

  I picked you up when you were born, all wet, and I held you up to the light and I said Please Jesus, let this one live, let him be all he can be.

  Michael wanted to be held and to hold in return. It was too late for that.

  And I left you.

  We carry our dead around with us as patterns we have learned. Love injects them into us. Semen is only the faintest physical mirroring of it. The patterns are as alive as we are.

  The voice of Michael's living father told him, You don't want to die, Mikey. Nothing happens after you die.

  The shadow wastes howled forever mourning. That howling would sear like sand blown in wind. It would burn like fire. And it would never cease. Desire was immortal and continued after death. And that was hell.

  Heaven was what had been achieved.

  You can't make up for things. You can't make anything right. Nothing can happen.

  This, thought Michael, is the wrong time for me to die.

  He saw his desire formless and aching and true to itself. He saw it trying to twist the flower even in death.

  Desire tried to twist the nothingness. Like gravity it tried to wrench being from nothing. Desire reached out in rage and thrashed and seized and shook.

  It was as if the shadow cast the light and not the other way around. The darkness was the spider that spun the cobweb on which the dewdrops hung.

  Michael had always had a talent.

  He could absorb people into his bones out of love, and could make his bones and mind move like they did.

  If he were thwarted enough, he could wrench the molecules of the air and make them move and leap and think.

  Michael knew, then. He had made the Angels himself of headaches and grief and rage.

  Desire made Michael want to live. Right, thought Michael, and desire blossomed in him like a dark flower blooming out of his heart.

  Right, he said, prising open reality, forcing it like an arsehole to accept him, the wrong way through the valve.

  Right, and Michael tore reality.

  He saw.

  Nick was propping open one of Michael's eyelids. Nick contemplated this stare, quizzically, as if it were a painting of his own that he was judging. Poor Angel, thought Michael.

  Michael saw again what he had seen the night before: the potential in the translucent skin. Again, it was the waste that Michael saw. It's what a parent sees and aches for and forgives. And punishes.

  Out of love, Michael called up his living father.

  His avenging father wore mirror shades and his Marine uniform and stood six foot four. He put a hand on Nick's shoulder. Nick spun around and gaped in terror. Michael's father hauled him to his feet and held him and bore him off.

  Michael sent Nick back up the nerve into eternity to Nick's own unilluminated self. The air closed shut over them all.

  Did we learn anything?

  Michael woke up in crisp white sheets. He smelled them first, and then opened his eyes, and saw pale blue walls. Ebru was sitting on a small hard chair, legs crossed, reading a magazine.

  Michael wanted to ask her the time. He couldn't talk. Something harsh and foreign was stuck
into his nose and down his gullet and it was long and slithering, and he thought it was some kind of worm. He cried aloud and tried to hoist it out of him.

  Ebru's head snapped up. Inshallah, she murmured and launched herself beside him, grabbing his wrists. 'No, Michael, no. It's OK, Michael.'

  'Awwww!' was all he could say. His throat was unbelievably parched. He could feel these things reaching all the way down into his belly. My God, what were they?

  'Sssh. Rest, Michael. You have been sick. You are in hospital. Sssh.'

  He calmed down, panting. He ached in all his joints, and his feet felt huge and his knuckles looked swollen – swollen and gnarled at the same time.

  'Do not try to talk, Michael. OK? OK Michael, you just nod your head, OK. I am going now just to get the doctor. Leave those things, OK.' She ran out of the room and her sneakers on the linoleum made noises like mice.

  Michael looked around. Hills and valleys of sheets rippled over him. There was a drip feed into one of his arms. The skin on his hands had gone scaly, and his wrists and forearms were the same width. There was tape, like a very thick moustache, on his upper lip.

  He tried to think, but it was as though his brain was elsewhere, huge and fiery and unwilling to cram itself back into his tiny skull. It waited, half-unsure that it wanted to be there.

  Nick tried to kill me. That's why I'm here. In sudden alarm, his hands skittered down the hospital cloak, to his chest. There were no bolts and stitches, no swollen tissue. The knife wounds were gone.

  The door thumped. Ebru stood in the doorway holding it open as if remembering her manners, her eyes round with something like fear. A male nurse bustled in around her. He was small, neat, pale, friendly, cold. He reminded Michael of Nick.

  'All right, Mr Blasco, let's have a look at you.'

  'What day is it?' Michael sounded like Donald Duck.

  The nurse chuckled. 'I wouldn't try to talk if I were you.'

  Ebru still clung to the lintel of the door. 'It's Thursday, Michael.'

  He'd been out of it for several days.

  The nurse leaned over and propped open one of Michael's eyes and shone a light into it. 'Do you feel dizzy or weak?'

  Michael nodded his head.