“The alien?” Morez said in surprise.
Rice’s black eyes glittered in the crystallized beams thrown by the reception lights as they stepped into the stark black and white decorating of the Security Center’s lobby. “Your alien,” he said softly.
“My bloodhound.”
4
Damon Eddington thought there couldn’t be a drearier time or place in the world than Manhattan at dawn on the day after Christmas.
It made him think of his long-dead grandmother. At first he didn’t know why, as it’d been years since he thought of her or his parents. Then memories from decades earlier surfaced, and he recalled that for a few years when he was a kid, before his grandmother died, his parents had shipped him off to her for the holidays. He’d thought he would hate it—she was a dried-up old woman who lived in a four-room apartment in the Bronx, a convenient holiday babysitter for his mother—but after the first year he’d wanted to go. Christmas itself was always a disappointment, a flashy holiday that held no religious implications for him or his family, and certainly less gratification from the childish viewpoint of gifts. His grandmother had little money to buy toys or soundiscs for her strange grandson, and Damon’s mother and father seldom troubled themselves with anything other than the necessary clothes. A couple of pairs of socks and some underwear usually, once a small gift certificate to the Synsound Circle Store that made his mouth drop open in surprise. That pretty much summed up the history of Christmas gifts during the childhood of Damon Eddington.
But at Grandma Sheridan’s he’d felt… okay. Not as though he belonged—never that—but that it was all right with her if he was different. She wasn’t trying to hide him from her friends or coworkers, and if she had someone else against whom she was comparing him, the grandchild of someone in her building or perhaps a card-playing companion, she never showed it or mentioned anything. He had worked enough odd jobs to buy himself an inexpensive disc player and a decent set of headphones a long time ago— headphones were the only way his parents would tolerate his music—but Grandma Sheridan waved the headphones away and told Damon he ought to be listening to the music the way it was meant to be heard—floating on the air in front of his ears, not reduced to a bunch of unseen electrical impulses forced through wires. “Damon, my boy,” she’d said in her shaky, ancient voice, “I’m half-deaf anyway. Unless you turn it up so loud it puts cracks in the walls, I probably won’t pay any attention.”
Dawn on Christmas morning… that’s what had brought the memories back. Looking out the soot-smeared window of his sixth-floor loft, he could see the rooftops of a few smaller buildings scattered down the block, like crumbling mushrooms struggling amid the high-rises that were inexorably infringing on the neighborhood. Post-Christmas then had looked pretty much the same as it did now—gray, damp, sometimes with dirty snow piled against the curbs from the plows. About the only things that made it visually any different now that Damon was an adult were that there were more high-rises—always—and no cars around here, because nobody drove the old clankers in the poor neighborhoods anymore. Everyone around here stuck to air-cycles and express rides on the monorails.
If Damon closed his eyes and concentrated, he could still bring the sounds and smells back clearly in his mind: on December 26 and with barely enough light to see by, his grandmother would get up, make a pot of strong coffee for herself, and as she did every year, pull from the refrigerator the carcass of the small turkey she’d cooked the day before. With a full-length apron in place to protect her housedress, Grandmother Sheridan would sit at the table and patiently poke and prod the bones of the turkey until they were stripped clean of meat. That done, she would carefully divide the leftovers into small piles, wrap and label them in her unsteady, spidery script, and store them in her freezer. She always set one packet aside to be made into a tried and true recipe of homemade turkey tetrazzini for dinner that night. How many times had Damon spent the day after Christmas just listening to his favorite music on the disc player and waiting for that wonderful dinner, not to mention the creamy, semisweet chocolate pie that always followed?
Only three. Damon hadn’t smiled much when he was growing up, but he remembered being twelve years old and smiling at Grandmother Sheridan the morning his parents came to pick him up from her place the final time. He could still feel the smile on his lips as he waved goodbye to her the last time he saw her alive, a stretch of his mouth as it adjusted to something odd and poorly fitted but still so very special. “See you next year!” That’s what he had said, and she had smiled in return, her sagging, wrinkled face pulling up as she nodded. Standing at his window now, three decades and some odd years later, Damon wondered if the old woman had possessed any inkling that there wouldn’t be a next year for her. Had she known that late on a rainy night in March of the following year her lungs would simply get too tired to work? Some times Damon thought about the look on her face and wondered.
She was the only person he’d ever loved, and he still missed her.
Damon turned away from the window. His home was a room in a warehouse-turned-apartment building off West Thirty-eighth, something the artists and musicians down in Greenwich Village insisted on calling a loft. In reality it was cold, crawling with the smaller breed of building cockroaches that did everything but carry off his sheet music, and had four leaky spots in the roof and the decrepit outer brick wall. He couldn’t decide if the biting cold of winter was worse, or the dampness of spring when he had buckets all over the apartment to catch the water that dripped from the ceiling. Each spring was a crap shoot of trying to guess where the leaks would turn up and if more would appear, plus there was always the question of whether or not this would be the season that the rotting ceiling would finally give way. Getting his cheap-ass landlord to send up heat in the winter was likewise a constant battle, and as far as the summer months went… in a word, Damon cooked. Personally, he was disgusted with the idea of being a “starving musician.” He was tired of being hungry for better food than vegetables from the Five Boroughs Genetic Hothouse and the soyburgers that the manufacturers swore tasted just like beef—he thought they tasted like dry, mashed beans with beef-flavored salt; he wanted to taste the real vegetables that were still freshly grown in pockets of South America and try the experimental fruits that were coining out of the irrigated portion of the Mojave Desert. Somehow he doubted that Jarlath Keene ate soyburgers and tuna meat farmed from aquatic clones four nights a week like Damon did; the executive looked far too well satisfied for that.
Damon shivered and stepped away from the multipaned window and its profusion of drafts. This is it, he thought bitterly as he wandered back to the unfolded futon that served as both his couch and bed and lowered his shivering body onto it. My life. After a few moments he crossed his legs and pulled the blankets around his shoulders, watching vacantly as his breath misted in front of him in the nearly frigid air. His landlord lived in the larger apartment two stories down, and if nothing else, today was still part of the holiday weekend; in a couple of hours the greedy bastard would be up and moving around, and Damon would get some heat—if the old man hadn’t gone out of town to visit relatives. Occasionally he pulled that shit and no one could get in touch with him for days. Heat generally rose, and by all rights Damon’s apartment should have been the warmest in this piece of crap called a building; that it was always freezing fed Damon’s suspicion that the landlord had run electric baseboard heaters in his own place to cut down on the overall bill for the building. Damon had considered buying his own but ultimately couldn’t afford it or the higher electric bills that would result.
Speakers and crude recording equipment surrounded Damon’s futon, stacked against the walls in a jumble of wires, plastic cases, labeled and unlabeled soundiscs, and old cassette tape machines, his testing ground for new music and a self-critic’s hell for the old. None of the electronic equipment he had here was good enough to generate recording-quality stuff, of course, but he could work with it enough to start
projects, even output a few demo tapes to offer to the state-of-the-art mixer, digital recorder, and signal processor that the corporation let him have constant access to, flaunted at him at every opportunity. Someday, he thought, I’ll be able to—
“Knock it off,” Damon said out loud.
So far this morning nothing else had broken the silence and his voice was shockingly loud in the chilly loft. He hated that word. Someday. Someday I’ll do this, and someday I’ll do that. As a boy, he’d always thought like that, in terms of that elusive something that was going to happen at any time, as though all those things, those wonderful accomplishments, were close enough to reach if he only managed to stretch enough. It wasn’t as though there was anyplace but Synsound to which he could offer his creative output; the company had swallowed up its competition long before Damon was born. New music companies popped up, of course, but Synsound’s business plan worked—quite aptly—on the greed factor: when a tiny new competitor popped up, the megacorporation bought them out by offering them too much money to refuse, under-the-table deals made to avoid the federal monopolization laws.
Someday… always that.
Someday I’ll make my parents proud of me had, over the course of a decade and a half, evolved into someday I’ll make them notice me. But they’d never done either, and it didn’t matter that his music grew more despondent or dark or strange. Nothing Damon did made him anything to his parents but what he was: a nuisance, a slipup in birth control that they were bound by governmental laws to look after for eighteen years, a continuing, quiet embarrassment because of his strangeness. They probably hated him all the more because of his unpredictability: he hadn’t acted like a “normal” teenager, hadn’t been into whatever syndrugs happened to be on the street at the time—and there was always something available—hadn’t even gotten into the usual adolescent trouble with girls and VR gangs and bloodrock music. He was a shadow in their lives, a shadow over their lives.
Damon had started working longer hours as soon as he could. Unemployment be damned; there were plenty of shit jobs available if you were willing to wash dishes, bus tables, and haul trash—plenty of dirty and usually illegally run restaurants tucked between buildings in the neighborhoods. As a teenager he’d scrubbed trash bins, gutted fish, and scraped thousands of layers of grease off stoves and griddles to pay for his guitars. As much of an outcast as he was, he’d still met others like himself during high school, music lovers and rockers, pickers, a few singers. He’d come a long way from being a zit-faced, gangly kid with dark hair, white skin, and a guitar that seemed as much a part of him as one of his arms.
And look at him now. He’d advanced into manhood determined to make his mark on the world with his music, convinced he could reintroduce forgotten classical forms to a public saturated with industrial discord, mutated androids, and screaming synthesizers. Back then, he’d even had a partner and friend, although that relationship had died when Damon had gone in his own direction. What a fool he’d been, and his continued failures turned ultimately into depression, and that turned into still darker tunes. All those years passing by, listening to bleak and brooding music and feeling a kinship with it that gradually evolved into a fierce and undeniable loyalty, letting those emotions bleed soft, inescapable blackness into his work. Now that music, his work, had surrounded him and forced out everything else in his life, had enslaved him.
No friends, male or female, anymore. For a short while in his early twenties there’d been a woman in his life, a six-month period during which he’d tried, unsuccessfully as it turned out, to devote some of his time and life to something other than composition. That he could no longer remember her name shamed him; he had loved her and told her so, but his feelings were absentminded and weak, unnourished by the attention a relationship like that needed and deserved. She’d had red hair and hazel eyes… or was it strawberry-blond hair and green eyes? More useless remorse and self-reproach.
So today, in the here and now of his life, what was left?
Obsession.
Rage.
And hate, of course. Damon hated the public, hated Synsound, hated Keene… but most of all, he hated himself, for his undeniable love of this most obscure subgenre of music to the exclusion of everything sane, everything normal. So many wasted hours spent in supreme self-loathing, asking that most treacherous of questions…
Why could he not have loved something more… marketable?
5
Ahiro checked on the egg once every quarter hour.
He knew the workmen on the apiary project thought he was obsessive, but that did not concern him. Yoriku’s apiary was going to be completely different from the Alien Research Laboratory at MedTech from which he and his men had stolen the alien egg, and Ahiro was amazed at the variations and committed to seeing that it was built correctly. While it was true that the end goals were nothing alike, there were a few essential things they would—or should—always have in common. Containment was the prime factor, with safety following as an equal second. Depending on your point of view, it might even be the other way around.
At the MedTech lab, everything had been made of steel coated in acid-resistant plastic. MedTech’s bioscientists must have watched their creatures with hidden video cameras; here at Presley Hall the preferred viewing method was going to be an eighteen-foot length of double-paned quartz windows that started at the floor and went two thirds of the way to the twenty-foot ceiling. Steel I-beams reinforced the glass halfway up and at six-foot vertical intervals. Beyond the glass wall extended a huge cage of titanium bars sheathed both inside and out with that same laboratory-quality plastic, pushing back a good thirty feet into an unused portion of the empty third-sublevel warehouse. The only way in was a switch-controlled door in the middle section of the glass. Soon an alien, a creature uncontrollable by humans, would pace within that windowed space. What would it think as it did so? Thoughts of freedom, no doubt, much like the dreams that Ahiro didn’t dare let multiply in his own mind.
In the meantime, within the larger cage the unhatched egg was encased in a glass case of its own that was barely large enough to contain it. With the computer clamp still closing it off and the two Synsound bioscientists monitoring it constantly, the sealed egg was again kept safely within a temperature-controlled environment anyway, incubated. There it waited, motionless inside its tiny, quiet world, lulled into dormancy by two layers of sound-insulated glass and the intensely filtered, scentless air surrounding it. Anticipating.
Work on the apiary proceeded at a steady pace, well within the schedule that Keene had outlined in his final two-hour teleconference with Ahiro and Yoriku. Technically Ahiro was on the site as a supervisor, although he wouldn’t have known a metric bolt from a piece of soldering material if any of the workers had asked him. His presence there was vital on a more subjective level: whether the laborers who hammered and bolted and welded knew it or not, it was Ahiro’s instinct that guided everything, his opinion that mattered after looking at a completed section as to whether it would serve its purpose in safely holding a fully grown alien. A single shake of his head and the entire project would grind to a halt until the problem was corrected and they could move on.
The work was completed on December 31. Only one other person in the world knew that it was Ahiro’s birthday, and other than a telephone call, no one acknowledged it. That was fine by him, and he thought the completion of the apiary was a fine gift. Ahiro did not think of it so much as a gift from Yoriku that he would be allowed to work with this off-world creature, or with the eccentric musician called Damon Eddington; Ahiro cared nothing about either. The gift was that he, Ahiro, was to be allowed to do this for Yoriku, in service to the man who had saved not only his life but that of his infant sister two decades ago and cared for them both ever since.
Most people thought that the fabled Yakuza had ceased to exist in Japan in the last years of the twenty-first century, when the sixteen largest finance and manufacturing corporations in Japan had merged
into a single megacorporation. The resulting entity had narrowly missed going to war with the Japanese government over the right to self-control, avoiding a military confrontation only by neatly strangling almost all of the illegal import/export and drug operations in their country as a show of supposed honesty and good faith. Caught in the conflict because of their father—a high-powered man who trafficked in cocaine, opium, and the rarer forms of synthetic Ice—Ahiro was ten years old when he held his eleven-month-old sister and saw their father nearly cut in half by a spray of bullets. When the man wielding the machine pistol turned toward Ahiro, whose face was already split across his right eye by exploding glass, the boy hugged his baby sister tightly and stared the masked assassin full in the eye, refusing to look away from the man about to murder them.
Yoriku had saved them. There was nothing flashy about Ahiro’s memory of the man or his actions; a single soft word “No”—and the soldier had lowered the barrel of his weapon and stepped aside. Twenty years ago Yoriku had been thin and fit, and had boasted a thick head of gray hair where now there was only thinning white. To this day, Ahiro could still hear the man’s voice and the words that had changed the course of his life and that of his sister’s forever.
“You are both too young to die.”
Aliens Omnibus 4 Page 5