by Geoff Ryman
‘Then maybe prison is what you want.’
‘Watcha.’ Nick made his fingers into a pistol.
You could have been such a handsome devil, Nick. You could have been one of those bitchy stand-up comedians who trade on their whiff of cordite, and who mellow with success. A chat show host? Or a racing car driver, something flash with sporting gear and sponsorship but nothing actually athletic. Anything that required aggression and the common touch. What you will need to become now, is a philosopher.
‘Be yourself,’ said Michael, and cast him down.
The air folded around Nick like a pair of closing buttocks.
The room was still, except for the sweat trickling down Ebru’s forehead.
‘Michael. What was that?’
Michael sat up. He was very weak, but he had been fed and rehydrated. He felt light as if his bones were hollow. Michael felt like a bird.
‘I’ll explain,’ he promised. ‘Excuse me while I dress. There is something I need to do.’
‘You will stay here, Michael,’ said Ebru, folding her arms. A trolley with food came. A cheerful black lady came. ‘I am your nutritionist,’ she announced. ‘This may not look good, but it is delicious.’ It was a kind of pabulum with mashed bananas. Eating it gave Michael stomach cramps, but soothed his throat.
It was night by the time the doctor had examined him, and the discharge papers were filled in. ‘Thank you, Ebru, thank you for helping me. Do you think you could come with me to the lab?’
Ebru took him by the arm and walked him to Goodge Street tube station. Michael was too weak to talk over the noise of the train. It lurched and made him feel queasy.
He thought instead of what he was going to do. He saw himself setting the chicks free in the park. They were nervous at first, clustering around his feet, their down blown in different directions by the wind. Then suddenly they spread out around him, showing against the dark grass as if fluorescent.
As Ebru led him from Lambeth North, Michael told her everything that had happened since the first day of the project.
‘I would not even begin to believe,’ said Ebru. ‘If I had not seen with my own eyes.’ She pointed outward from her cheekbones as if warding off the evil eye.
‘There will come a time, Ebru, when you won’t remember this. All you’ll remember is that I was ill. But you’ll think more kindly of me.’
‘I always thought kindly of you, Michael.’
Shafiq was at the security desk. Ebru called to him. He looked up in alarm. ‘Shafiq, it is only us,’ she said. Reassurance seemed to slim Shafiq down; he grew sleeker. He stood up grinning. ‘Michael. You are all right! They said you were…’ He looked at Ebru, for reassurance. ‘Not well.’
‘I’m OK, Shafiq. I … I would like us to let the birds loose.’
Shafiq and Ebru glanced at each other.
Michael insisted. ‘They can’t die, Ebru. They don’t need to eat.’
‘So, they stay cold and miserable all winter long,’ she said.
‘These are the ones we killed.’
Ebru said, ‘No, they’re not. See for yourself.’
She helped him down the corridor, which was longer than he remembered, to the darkroom door. She swung it open. The light, as he had left it, was on. They would have seen light for a week. Ebru picked one of them up and gave it to him. Already, the creature was bigger, older, than any of their chicks had been. It looked up at Michael with reptilian eyes.
‘They are already different,’ Ebru said.
Michael smiled at himself. ‘So, I could have set free a race of immortal superhens in Archbishop’s Park.’ He saw them chasing children. He saw vermin control gassing them to no effect.
Shafiq tried to help. ‘We thought we might sell them to a chicken farmer.’
‘Yuck,’ said Michael. He thought of someone eating Angels.
There was only one thing to do, really, faced with it.
‘Goodbye, then,’ he said to his children, and he sent them to rejoin their immortal selves. The air throughout the darkroom roiled as if full of evaporating gas fumes. The chicks were gone.
Shafiq gasped and looked round-eyed at Michael. Michael didn’t have to look at him to know that. He kept his eyes averted.
‘It’s just something temporary, Shafiq. It’s just something temporary that I can do.’
And it will be a good sign when it stops, for that will mean the wastes have stopped howling.
Michael sighed and slapped his thigh, as if closing a boot, and he asked Ebru, ‘Well, did we prove anything?’
Ebru paused for a moment, as if asked to cross a chasm on a rope bridge.
Michael asked again: ‘Our experiment. Did we learn anything by killing all those chickens?’
Ebru considered. ‘We prove they learn. But we also prove that what they had to learn was in their brains to begin with.’
‘Is that something worth knowing?’
‘Yes,’ Ebru said, and then again more fiercely, ‘Yes, it is.’
‘Was it worth killing them?’
Ebru sighed. ‘You need to find your own answer for that, Michael.’
Michael rubbed his eyes. Was there a chair? He needed to sit down. ‘I know what the chicken’s answer would be.’
Ebru shook her head. ‘But you don’t, Michael. You can’t know. That is the whole difficulty.’
She took him by one arm, and spurred by her example, Shafiq took the other. They led him hobbling back to the soon-to-be-emptied office where he could sit down.
Michael slumped into his chair. ‘We’re real,’ he said. ‘We can’t undo what we’ve done.’ He surveyed the filing cabinets, the dark PC screens. ‘That’s what makes us real.’
Part III
What do you want for Christmas?
For a while, Michael stalled.
The project wound down. The results were conclusive. The learning process caused a range of chemical changes in nerve cells. The pathway of that chemical change through the brain was common. Some neural pathways for learning about light seemed to be pre-established, at least in chickens.
Michael began work on a small, publishable paper, for a respected scientific journal. He let Emilio go to his new job early. Shafiq was fine; he simply went back to his agency and a new post. Geoffrey Malterton at the Council found another project that could use their facility. He was pleased: he would end up being the lab’s new Director, not Michael. It was left to Michael and Ebru to turn out the lights on the lab one last time, and share a quiet drink at the Pineapple.
Michael still had his teaching once a week, which was a living, not a calling. He explained the basics of neurology to students for whom it was not a calling either. It was a way of increasing their earning potential. They argued with him about each and every mark on their phase tests and worked out from their percentages so far whether or not getting an A on the final test would make any difference to their overall grade. If it wouldn’t, then they would stop studying.
Christmas came, full of tinsel and loneliness. The students left for home, except the ones who had no home. They stayed on in student accommodation playing disconsolate dance music.
Michael went home for the holidays. His mother had gone back to Sheffield ten years ago and lived in a terrace house near where the city ended abruptly in green. She had her garden and her friends. She was 63, an age when it is still insulting to be described as spry.
His mother had come into her own. She made an effort. Her hair was dyed a believable shade of ash; you could see she had once been pretty and elegant, though there was also now something firm around her outlined eyes. She was good with a screwdriver and hard on building contractors. She was confident in life.
She greeted Michael without fuss, kissing him on the cheek and patting his arm. ‘You’ve lost weight. It suits you.’ She didn’t get that stricken ‘are you eating?’ look. She just said, as she would to one of her mates, ‘You fancy something to eat?’
‘Yeah sure, a cheese sandwich
or something. I can make it.’
‘Go on then. You’ll find all the things in the usual place. You can make me a cup of tea while you’re at it.’
When he came back with the tray, she already had the Christmas cards out, ready for signing. She didn’t believe in this nonsense of sending everything months in advance. You did your Christmas cards at Christmas.
‘You forgot the spoons. It’s all right, my turn.’ She stood up and came back with spoons and a white envelope.
‘You haven’t been ringing me, and it turned out you even moved without telling me, you daft pillock. So I knew something was wrong that you weren’t telling me, so I wrote you this.’
She put the letter next to the tray. ‘Go on, have your tea. You can read it later, after the cards.’
There were fewer and fewer cards each year: one to their cousins in New Zealand; one to his mother’s best friend Beryl now in Canada; one to the Blascos in San Diego. They were an isolated family. They only had each other.
‘In the old days, people didn’t move about so much, I suppose. There were more of you around it seemed. Are you on this e-mail? Because I was thinking it’s probably a good way for me to keep in touch. Could you set me up on it?’
That would indeed be something good to do with the long and sometimes pointless days of Christmas. ‘Sure could.’
In fact, it would be great fun, and it solved the problem of what to buy his Mum for Christmas instead of a scarf or chocolates.
They did the cards, and she brought out the roast chicken, with its clogged brand-name stuffing, and both of them ate hardly anything.
‘So are you going to tell me what’s wrong? You’ve broken up with Philip.’
‘Broken up with everything. I um, forgot to apply for the grant, so the project ended.’
‘So you’re at a bit of a loose end. Shall I tell you what the letter says, save you reading it?’
‘OK.’
‘It goes like this. The worst things that happen to you in life turn out to be the best things. Like your father. He left me on my own and I thought, I’ll never cope. But look at me now. And then I got that phone call from him telling me that you were gay and you’d done something terrible. But he wouldn’t say what it was, except that he was plainly going to blame me. Well, that gave me the chance I’d been waiting for. I finally stood up to the man. I just told him. It isn’t your fault; and it’s not mine either so don’t go putting all the blame on me. It’s just who our Michael is, and what of it? I’ve known for ages, it’s no news to me. And you should have known too, if you had your eyes open.’
Michael chuckled. ‘What did he say?’
‘Nothing he could say; it was all true. He said, You’re right, Mavis. I felt sorry for him by the end of the conversation.’
‘I sometimes think I killed him.’
Mavis wiped crumbs off her knee, sniffed and said, ‘So what was it then? This terrible thing you did?’
Michael thought, then answered, ‘I made a pass at him.’
His mother nodded once, downwards. ‘People don’t die from having a pass made at them, Michael.’
That tickled Michael and he chuckled. ‘No, I guess not.’
‘He didn’t have himself sorted. He was all front.’ Michael saw his father’s face, big and needy. ‘I look at it this way. Because of all that, you knew that I knew. You didn’t have to spend twenty years screwing up your courage to tell me. I could just ask you straight out if Phil was your boyfriend and make up the double bed. Speaking of which, have you found yourself someone a bit more down to earth now?’
‘No. No one.’
‘Sorry for prying. Mother’s prerogative. Anyway, you’ll be all right, Michael. You’re smart. You work hard. You’re a kind person. I’ve known you since you were born. You’ll be fine, love.’
That was indeed what the letter said. That night in bed, Michael read the letter over and over. When he was young, his mother was always telling him to be careful. Now she was telling him to be brave.
How could I tell you, Mum, about the miracle? Could I say: I have the power to generate flesh from dream? Would you think I was crazy? Or am I just underestimating you again? What would you say?
Michael’s head unconsciously adopted the slightly sideways bolshiness of her enquiring position, and his eyes took on her slow burn.
And he knew she would say: ‘So how is all that any different from wanking?’
He thought and answered her: ‘You can touch them. And they have minds of their own.’
‘So how is it any different from the real thing?’
Michael thought again and said, ‘It’s safer.’
He saw Mavis chortle, just before she stood up to take out the tea things. ‘You mean like trainer wheels on a bicycle. They’ll have to come off sooner or later, love.’
Finally, Michael folded the letter away and snuggled down under the duvet that smelled of fabric conditioner. He felt safe and warm, like a child, which is what Christmas is for. He leaned across and snapped off the light. ‘Goodnight, Mavis,’ he said to her eternal and developing spirit. He slept.
Until something in the night stirred. There was a smell of talcum powder and liniment, and the sheets parted, and someone huge and smooth and naked slipped next to Michael. Biceps and forearms as big and wholesome as loaves of brown bread enveloped him. ‘Hello, Mikey,’ his father said, his voice low and hot and close to his ear.
‘Jesus Christ!’ hissed Michael in panic, and threw off the bedclothes and spidered backwards, away from him.
Street lights shone through the curtains. Michael saw his father’s big and handsome face, and the light reflected in his eyes. The eyes shone with yearning.
‘You know what this is, now, Mikey.’ It was a statement. ‘You know what this means.’
‘Sssh!’ Michael was frightened to shock his mother. Yes, he knew what this was. He had reached down into the darkness, and pulled something back like a plum.
What he had really wanted, outside time. All this time.
‘So what’s different?’ his father asked, rumbling deep as if out of the springs of the bed.
What will be different is that this time you will want me. His father looked young now, almost like a teenager. He and his father were now nearly the same age. Their hands were the same size. Louis’s hand enveloped his, and coaxed him back towards him.
‘No,’ said Michael. ‘She’ll hear.’ Mum is real and you are not.
Michael pointedly rolled over and turned his back. The bulk of his father shifted closer to him. It was the smell that was the most powerful; indescribable and immediate, his smell, the smell of his body, still vaguely like honey, the smell of this breath tainted from too much exercise, a bit sharp, even vinegary. The smell of American soap, different from English.
Those ripped muscles, when pressed all around him, were soft and smooth and gentle, as if a giant baby were holding Michael. Not a 40-year-old Marine sergeant who could kill automatically on demand.
‘Merry Christmas,’ Sergeant Blasco murmured.
And Michael let himself be held. Yes, Dad, this is what I wanted, yes Dad, this is what I dreamed of, night after night, morning after morning.
But you know something, Dad? Big and beautiful as you are? I’m not sixteen now, and though it might be easy to slip into this, I’m not going to do it. I’m thirty-eight and it’s been too long, and this is my mother’s house.
Michael resisted. But Michael let himself be held. He settled into sleep.
He had a dream which mingled his father with Santa. He was a child and under the white fake beard, his saw his father’s eyes.
Then Michael had to get up to pee. He stood up and rammed the front of his foot into his bookshelf. How could he forget the bookshelf? It was where all his records were kept. Outside, beyond the slatted Venetian blind, there was still the warm murmuring of the surf. Michael walked on towards the door, and walked into a wall. The door was on the left not the right. He fumbled through i
t, advising himself to remember: the stairs are just in front of this door.
There were no stairs. And the bathroom, instead of straight ahead along the landing, was right, and then left again.
And Michael’s eyes started wide open, and he stared and saw: this was not his mother’s house in Sheffield. This was the condo in Oceanside.
Michael looked down at his legs. They were thicker, and ice-blue in the light. He stroked them. They were hairless.
Michael was sixteen and smooth. There was no hair on his chest, and his nipples were sore and swollen from too much sunlight. He looked down at his own chest with desire and stroked it. Himself at sixteen. The dream was always of being someone else in a different situation. In the end, at root, all the fantasies had been this fantasy.
Michael’s dick started to creep downwards. This situation was that he was young, only almost a man, and that his father in the last days of his sexual power wanted him.
This was no dream.
Michael was awestruck. I’ve really done it now.
He’d wrenched and pulled bodies out of nothingness, and now the need had wrenched round everything else. It had wrenched the whole universe around him.
This was the right miracle, now. This was the miracle he had really needed.
He had become someone else – Michael at sixteen again, back home, home in California. Without any Viagra at all, his dick was twice the size it had ever been, and it was slammed straight up against his stomach, reaching all the way to his belly button.
Michael was wide, wide awake, as wide awake as he would be if he were walking barefoot across broken glass. He remembered the flower of his self, the flower of cobwebs and light and areas of dark. It would not be thwarted, that flower. If even he himself blocked it, it could wrench other realities into this one. If thwarted sufficiently, it could, evidently, pull him, instead, into another reality. Into this one.
Michael at 38 could resist, but not Michael at sixteen. He felt the old white carpet under his bare feet, and he felt the lining of his stomach seethe. And Michael started to weep as he walked, out of relief and fear and joy. He knew he would do it now. It was really, finally going to happen.
