* * *
“What’s taking so long?” Damon Eddington demanded. He leaned on the secretary’s desk, seeing her pull back nervously. “I thought the purpose of an appointment was to schedule time to talk to someone, and Keene said he would see me, damn it!”
“And so he will, Mr. Eddington.” The woman’s voice was honey smooth, utterly professional. “Please, just wait. I’m sure he’ll be ready any minute.”
“Fine.” Damon spun and strode back to the fake leather couch, resisting the urge to kick at the fancy coffee table in front of it. The thing was metal and glass, and he could picture the surface shattering and magazines flying everywhere, another temper tantrum traceable to the not-so-legendary Damon Eddington. Instead of lashing out, he flounced onto the couch, watching the secretary for any sign that Keene was calling for him.
When nothing happened after another ten minutes, Damon dug his flask out of one of the pockets of his vest and took a small swig of sweet blackberry brandy, let it roll over his tongue and momentarily take his mind off how insulted he felt. This was a game to Keene, he was sure, but for what purpose? Synsound—with Jarlath Keene at the reins—already led him around by the proverbial nose; as far as Damon was concerned, forcing him to sit out here like a fool showed that among other things Keene was possessed of a deep and despicable streak of meanness. The secretary—he couldn’t remember her name—had probably been told to stall him for as long as she could. For all Damon knew, she might have been told to keep him out here until he gave up and went away. His lip curled; not likely.
Damon took another swig of brandy and screwed the top back on the plastic flask, then tucked it back into his pocket and forced himself to relax against the softness of the couch. As always, his mind was full of music, a dark composition of his own making that had been in the process of a slow and painful birth since the reviews of his last small concert had been printed on the newsdiscs. After a few more minutes he dug inside another pocket and pulled out his portable recorder; if Keene was going to waste Damon’s entire day by making him wait outside his office door, then Damon would try to use the time as best he could. After all, the secretary was a built-in audience.
He hummed a few notes, then a few bars, letting them swirl like discordant shadows in the air as he warmed up his vocal cords. Already the woman was frowning at him but he paid her no attention; what did her opinion matter when the rest of the world seemed to hate his creativity more? In the scheme of Damon’s life, Keene’s secretary was nothing.
“Hm-mm-Mm-mM-mm—” Stretching his voice and losing himself in the sounds and tones, the pitch of his voice rising and falling until it flowered in full song, not words, but a sort of drawn-out vibration that was as true as he could make it to the original source, the dying wails of jelly junkies in detox centers. Now the secretary’s face was scrunched up in revulsion, her head sinking low on her shoulders like a turtle trying to escape an attacker. As Damon’s voice, a decent baritone in itself, grated the next experimental lyric into the microphone embedded in the recorder, he saw her snatch up the telephone receiver on her desk and punch repeatedly at a button on the intercom. He smiled to himself; he didn’t have to stop singing to know what she was saying. When she got up and came over to where he sat on the couch, her back was rigid and there were beads of perspiration high on her forehead, just under the line of burnt orange curls. Damon was pleased that his music had affected her; it didn’t matter that she didn’t like it. He’d take whatever results he could get.
“Mr. Keene will see you now,” she snapped as Damon paused and looked at her questioningly. “You know the way.”
That made Damon grin outright. The way? Oh, yes— he sure did. Keene’s way, Synsound’s way… the way of trash as far as Damon was concerned. But it was useless to argue, especially with this nothing little woman, so he nodded and stood, putting away his recorder and ignoring her audible sigh of relief. She didn’t bother leading him to Keene’s door, and Damon didn’t expect her to.
Keene’s office was expansive and as tastefully furnished as the man himself was dressed. Damon didn’t follow fashion much, but the Ricci Matté suit Keene wore was impossible to disregard, and no doubt the matching shoes were just as expensive. His glistening, steel-gray hair was impeccably styled, his exquisite hand-painted tie an insult to Damon’s own well-cared-for but only moderately expensive Danforth padded vest. The man was obviously bathing in credits—Synsound was clearly making more money than it knew what to do with. Why then did they fight for every credit on his contracts and make it so hard for Damon to draw a simple advance?
Keene sat behind an immense maroon Plexiglas desk cleared of almost everything, but there were too many gold and platinum soundiscs framed on the walls to maintain an illusion of a man with a multitude of leisure time on his hands. Row after row hung in expensive teak frames, with one wall almost covered. And Keene himself: smug, sleek, and ever-patient, he had the look of a man who had resigned himself to the tedious chore of dealing with another annoyance in his life and had dubbed himself a martyr for his tolerance. Even his voice was carefully modulated, without the slightest hint of inflection. “What is it now, Damon?”
The old Damon Eddington, the man he’d been before being suffocated by Synsound for so many years, would have turned and walked out… after telling Keene to sit on it and spin. No—the old Damon Eddington would have walked out of the waiting room three quarters of an hour ago.
The present Damon Eddington walked in with his head bowed as if deep in thought with his hands crammed into the loose-fitting blue jeans that were his everyday uniform, watching his feet work their way across the perfect carpet as though the sight were the most important thing in the world. He sat on the chair in front of Keene’s desk without comment, and when he finally looked up, his dark eyes were soft, his vision focused on something faraway that only he could see.
“I want… an alien.”
The double take Damon expected never came; Keene didn’t even blink. The executive’s hands remained folded calmly on the desk’s highly polished surface, the reflection below his fingers making him look like some double-handed android built to play a newly invented hellrock instrument. “You want an alien,” Keene repeated. Damon squelched the impulse to remind Keene that this wasn’t a psychiatric bull session where the doctor repeated everything the patient said to make sure he had understood it clearly. “Let’s see,” Keene continued. “You’re not into weapons, so that’s out. You’re not into medicine or drugs, either. That puts those out of the picture. So exactly what do you need an alien for, Damon?”
Damon spread his hands, unconsciously willing Keene to understand, to show the slightest trace of empathy. “For the sound.” The last word carried on the filtered air of the office like a drawn-out whisper, a sibilant floating in the air that teased both of them. Finally, a reluctant crack in Keene’s disposition as the older man unwillingly bonded with Damon’s dreams for an instant, hearing as the eccentric artist did the alien singing from its steel throat and screaming with a tongue of acidic flame.
Damon’s words faded away as he and Keene stared at each other.
Bitter memories flash-danced in Damon’s head as he waited for Keene’s decree, and he remembered the first time an alien’s screams had ever found their way into his ears. It had been on a vidscreen in a store window, a NewsVid item from Channel 86 about an infestation in the Long Island Incarceration Colony, sensationalist crap designed solely to grab the passersby and glue them to a vidscreen. And it had worked on Damon, though not for the reasons the media planners might have anticipated. The footage had shown a clot of aliens bunched in a subbasement of the LIIC’s main prison, on the defensive against an army troop wearing suits constructed of the same material labs used to store acid and bearing flamethrowers loaded with long-burning jellied napalm. To Damon the creatures’ screams had translated to one thing, unadulterated or diluted: hate.
And Damon hated so very, very much…
H
ow many reviewers had slammed his work as “tiresome,” or “obscure,” or, worst of all, “boring”? The reviewers detested him, the public ignored him, Synsound humored him. All the while he struggled on, trying desperately to reach a public that seemed to want only hellrock or bloodrock, or—God help them—android singers and performers so mutated that they had four arms, multiple heads, and mouths coming out of their mouths in a twisted parody of aliens. The closest John Q. Public came to exposure to the gentler sounds of the past was, again, in recreated androids; before dwindling into ambiguity, Elvis Presley’s duplicate had piqued enough interest to gain a hall named after it, and Caruso’s fabricated double sang for the upper class every night at the NewMet Opera House. A steady trickle of credits from the older generation supported Synsound projects like “Buddy Holly Sings Garth Brooks III” and thousands of other re-recordings of centuries-dead artists—androids of Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Kurt Cobain, Charlie Parker, Clifford Brown, Richie Valens, Dwayne Allman, John Lennon, Patsy Cline, and others regularly belted out new hits.
And Synsound, owner of practically every piece of music and musician in the world—including Damon—sat above it all with people at its helm like Jarlath Keene, a man with virtually no imagination, no vision. As far as Damon was concerned, the stages of Presley Hall were the Manhattan home of hell on earth, filled with appalling reengineered mutadroids that were half android, half mutated instrument, surrounded by the dregs of humanity who flocked to listen to the groups. Few people appreciated Damon’s careful live recordings of serious music, the darker blends from wonderful classic composers like Beethoven, Paganini, Mozart, Vivaldi, Bach, so much beautiful music recorded on rare twentieth-century instruments—violins, harps, dulcimers—all expensive and a struggle to come by. Synsound again, indulging him, using him as a pawn to show the world how it sponsored and supported what remained of the “arts” while it survived—prospered—on the ridiculous, discordant trash for which the people of this century constantly clamored. He hated Synsound almost as much as he detested the concertgoers who appreciated only torture and terror, responded only to the grotesque, frightening androids cavorting and screaming on the stage. If what they wanted was hate, and pain, and the repulsive, Damon decided, he would give them exactly that.
The press conference he’d called was only a stage for him to announce to the country and every place the NewsVid would carry the story how much he hated— John Q. Public, Synsound, everything. His tirade against Synsound and its customers had gone on for as long as he dared before he feared the media would turn away in boredom. “For you all, for Synsound,” he’d railed into their microphones, “I will write the ultimate composition… a Symphony of Hate!” Afterward, his employer smiled its corporate face and nodded, pleased at the attention its pet artiste had generated and shrugging off Damon’s anger with a humorous attitude. He was an artist after all; they were supposed to be temperamental, angry, excitable. It was those very feelings that made them creative.
Damon’s work on his masterpiece had carried him everywhere. No place was too dark or dangerous: he visited madhouses, prison wards, even execution chambers where he watched killers leave this world shrieking in rage. A favorite haunt was the downtown government detox center where the screams of jelly junkies bruised the eardrums and forced the workers to wear hearing protection.
But it was the news item that made Damon search the sound library for VidDiscs from the Homeworld War of ten years ago. The poor quality and low fidelity of the military recording devices didn’t matter; the screams of the aliens as they fought and were destroyed blasted through Damon’s senses like electricity, burning his mind, stealing his breath. No one and nothing else in the world sounded like an alien, nothing. And nowhere else did the creatures’ shrieks of malevolence belong more than in Damon Eddington’s Symphony of Hate.
And here Damon sat, once again at the mercy of Synsound’s whim.
* * *
“Why don’t you use the sound from the VidDiscs? It’s the obvious answer.” Keene sat back and studied Damon Eddington. While he was tall and medium built instead of skinny and starving, Damon still unwittingly fit Synsound’s policy of how one of their stable of unorthodox musicians should look. His receding hair was as black as crude oil and pulled back from his high forehead into a thin ponytail. Dark eyebrows arched sharply over darker eyes and his long face ended in a double-cut goatee that grew to a good two inches beyond the end of his chin. Keene already knew what the musician’s answer would be and he kept his expression carefully bland while he waited for Damon’s words.
“Because it’s crap,” Damon said in disgust. “Don’t you realize what the army battalions were using? We’re talking about the government here—they had handheld recorders, for God’s sake. Obsolete magnetic tape and microphones with plastic screens over them to keep the battleground dirt out of the electronics, plus every recording is undercut with tank and weapons fire, explosions that muddy up everything. I can’t re-record that rubbish—I need clear, crisp sound. Presence, Jarlath. I want it to sound like the alien itself is standing in front of the mike and roaring at it.”
Keene rubbed his cheek and tried to look thoughtful. Damon was such an easy toy, up and down, like those ancient yo-yos twentieth-century children had played with. “Then we’ll synthesize it for you.” As he’d expected, Damon looked horrified.
Up and down.
“You’ve got to be joking!” Damon balled his fist and held it up. “You know I hate synthesis. It’s got to be live. I won’t put any of that electronic mishmash into my music!” He looked at his fist and relaxed his fingers, as if just discovering his own hand. Keene could see the composer visibly trying to calm down. “Listen, Jarlath. This is my masterpiece, the epitome of everything I’ve ever done. I want to do it all myself, even down to recording the alien screams. And for that I need one of those creatures alive, a real alien.”
“I… see.” Keene let Damon dangle for a moment, then gave him a narrow-eyed stare. “What you’re telling me, Damon, is that you want Synsound to spend vast amounts of money to illegally procure an alien for you so that you can use that same creature to create a musical work that will show the world how much you hate us.”
Damon wasn’t fazed. “Exactly. But you’ll do it anyway, won’t you?” He folded his arms and leaned back. “You have to admit that I’m a constant source of advertising even if you and your company don’t appreciate my hard work.”
Ah, such smugness from a man who was too arrogant to realize he was nothing more than a child under Synsound’s disciplinary lash. Keene leaned back himself and waved a hand. “Spend vast amounts, Damon? Hardly. As a reminder, we have an advertising department with budgets and corporate mandates, remember? Forgive me for pointing out that they can handle publicity far more pleasantly than you can. In the end, I’m afraid you’re a low-priority item. I’m limited as to how much I can spend to indulge your inventive aspirations, no matter how far-reaching you… believe they will be. The methods by which we can obtain for our little pet—you—his own little pet are severely curtailed by budget factors.” He was rewarded by the insulted scowl that spread across the musician’s face. “Funding an expedition to Homeworld is certainly out of the question,” Keene continued, ignoring Damon’s offended expression. “Bribing the military is always possible, but again, far too expensive—too many hands in the financial pie would have to be filled. Still,” he said slowly as the image of a taller building surrounded by the bright beauty of jagged electrical flashes a few miles away filled his mind, “there may be a way.” He smiled for the first time since Damon had come into his office. “I’ll see what I can do.”
Knowing the meeting was over, Damon stood and spread his hands. “It just won’t work otherwise. I need it, Jarlath. The Symphony, it will be a big hit. You’ll see.”
“Good-bye, Damon.” Keene folded his hands on the desktop again, a clear signal that his patience was at the breaking point. For a second he though
t Damon would protest—would he actually beg this time? But no, while the musician looked like he wanted to, eventually he turned his back and walked out, his angry footsteps making muffled thunks against the carpeting.
As soon as the office door closed behind Damon, Keene swung to the VidPhone on his desk. He gave it about thirty seconds—enough time for Damon to walk through his secretary’s area and turn into the hallway leading to the elevators—then buzzed Marceena.
“Yes?”
She sounded as worried as she looked on the monitor, as though he might send her after Damon with instructions to bring him back. Keene liked to hear the note of anxiety in her voice; it kept her respectful. “Get me Yoriku,” he said simply. He didn’t wait for a reply before snapping off the connection.
Twelve minutes. Keene tapped his fingers on the desk and counted each movement of the LED clock display, one by one, as they flashed by. Amazing. How could he forget the time he failed to answer a summons from Yoriku’s assistant for a half hour? Keene had been in the midst of a delicate contract negotiation with one of the country’s hottest new stars and felt it was unwise to give the woman and her agent time alone to pick through the contract undisturbed. Everything he’d done back then had been for the good of Synsound, every waking hour was spent contemplating ways to better the company and his position in it, and increase those corporate profits to the parent. How bewildered he’d been to subsequently find himself with instructions to proceed to a tiny city called Black Lake in the Canadian province of Saskatchewan. Once there, he was ordered to personally supervise the relocation of a Canadian lyric writer to Manhattan—Keene, a so-called high-level vice president, was being used by Yoriku as a damned travel escort!
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