Geoff Ryman - Lust Or No Harm Done

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.

Michael went to his father and hoisted up his smooth, thick legs, and he looked into his father's eyes, eyes that in this reality wanted him.

His father's pubic hair was a tight little purse over his pressed genitals. Like so many men about to fucked, he was not erect. Michael touched him. His father's ass was smooth, the crease between the cheeks was smooth, and the pucker of his sphincter was neat and tidy and hairless. To Michael at least, it still smelled of honey. Michael needed neither KY nor spittle to ease the passage; he was luminous with lubrication. He entered his father and looked into his father's eyes, and his father nodded and closed them as if to dream.

Michael saw his own young crouched thighs thick with muscle, his own belly, and his dick gently shifting in and out, lapping like little waves on the shore of a lake. My body isn't ugly, Michael told his father in his mind. My sex is not ugly, it's a gift, it's a gift I wanted to give to you. You didn't have to treat it like something dirty, you could have said no, no gently; no I don't want this. You could have been calm and wise and said, no, you feel like that now because you don't know me, because we've been separated, because I am a man to you, and not your father. You could have continued to love me and care for me and hope I would find myself and someone my own age.

You didn't have to go and kill yourself slowly. You didn't have to try to kill me. You might even have let me do this once out of love, just once, so I could escape you.

Now we've gone and torn the real.

And I don't know if I can get back, and I don't even know if I want to.

Michael rocked back and forth, and felt as if he were moving through curtains. He saw his own body shift – when he blinked it had hair again. He was 38. He had accelerated from one reality to another. Then he flipped back: sixteen. He kept moving back and forth between the two, and that acceleration became part of the ride. We are fucking reality, Dad.

And that acceleration rose within himself, hurtling as if towards a brick wall. And there was a sudden, disintegrating crash, and part of him seemed to fragment and burst apart, scattering inside his father's body. He came in at least two different realities at once.

His father's eyes were round and brown, like a cartoon animal's. He looked trapped, cornered. Then the eyes crumpled into a smile. You really are the most beautiful man, Michael thought.

And Michael rolled away, and settled. This was still the room in California in some kind of 1970s. Michael was still sixteen. Cupped between his arms, his own smooth pectorals swelled. His fingers rippled over his own flat tummy and down his lean thighs. There was a kind of sparking in the nerve ends and suppleness in his joints. He could sense speed and reactivity there.

Michael held up the sheet and looked again at his own sixteen-year-old body. The thought of being in that body, and in this room, in this situation, made him rise again.

This time Michael turned and rolled over and presented. His father now was erect and reared over him, and settled on top of him, as heavy as the sky, as heavy as God, and the thought came: it could go on like this. I could stay here. I could start over again.

I could stay sixteen for ever.

'Oh, Michael,' his father breathed out, and shivered and went still.

They lolled in each other's presence as if they were warm waves. Michael had finally obtained his ends. He slept.

For a while. He woke up when the Oceanside train went past, at 2.30 am.

His mind was clear. He touched his chest, and it was covered with hair. He looked down and saw the slightly greying fur and his plumper stomach. His father still slept beside him, only two years older than he was. Latin, big-dicked, as handsome as Brendan Fraser, and Michael did not want him in the least.

But this was still Oceanside in 1976.

Michael was terrified. He threw off the sheet and stood up, and looked out the window. There over the wall was the vacant lot next to the train tracks. The lot was now a multi-screen cinema, and there was a new train station.

My God, what have I done?

Michael still had to pee. He turned and walked out of the room and there was a sensation as if he were parting shower curtains. Reality billowed and separated and closed shut behind him.

In the dark, he felt his way straight along the landing, next to the stairs.

Michael pulled open the bathroom door in Sheffield. His mother had a 1960s colour sense and the walls were lavender and the door lintel was mauve. And on the toilet, naked, sat himself at sixteen. He was wiping his butt and looked up. His face was thicker and more obstreperous. He looked, curiously, more like his mother.

'Close the door, willya. Get the fuck outa here.' The accent was pure American. He was beefier; the strength concentrated in his shoulders and arms. He can throw, Michael thought. He plays football.

'We need to talk,' said Michael, his arms thinner, hairier, his stomach softer.

'I'll be with you in a second.'

'You're straight, aren't you?' Michael demanded.

'What's it got to do with you, fruit fly?'

Another self, another fantasy.

Michael sat on the edge of the bathtub.

'What happened?'

'Whatja mean?'

'To us. You were straight, what happened to you?'

This other self flushed the toilet. 'I dunno.'

'Go back to that moment in Oceanside when he pulls the car over and starts to cry because he's so happy you want to live with him for a while. So you go and study in San Diego. You play on the football team and you get your degree. What happens after that?'

This other self circled gum round and round in his mouth and looked confrontational, but curiously, he had Henry's puppy-dog eyes. He was bronzed and had a terrible seventies haircut: compromised Beatle with sideburns. He looked Latin.

'I met this girl, you know, in school. So we got married. I got my degree in veterinarian medicine, we moved north to Ventura, where her folks are.' This was still in his future but he knew his future because he was timeless.

'What happened to Dad?'

'He lost his job at forty-eight, but with an NCO's payoff and stuff. I'll help him set up in a window repair business. There's a real call for that in Oceanside. All that salt air on those aluminium French windows. He'll show up looking cool, and all those divorced women, man. He'll get a lot of ass.' This Michael chuckled.

'He doesn't drink?'

'Well, that Latin blood. He knows he suffers for it in the morning, so he'll take it easy.' His head jerked backwards; his face was impassive. This was how a tough guy laughed. 'Man, you look so English.'