Aliens Omnibus 4

by Yvonne Navarro

  Ahiro had never seen her again, but he spoke to her often and knew she was treated well. Sometimes he wondered what she looked like; she never told him that or any of the finer details of her life, nor did she ask about his. It would be inappropriate for Ahiro to ask; like him, she owed Yoriku everything. In life their father had been a criminal and a drug dealer, but he had also been a traditionalist— and as was customary with ancient Japanese heritage, honor was everything. Yoriku had asked for and received a sworn oath of lifelong loyalty in return for their lives; at ten years old, Ahiro had fully understood the magnitude of what he gave. Neither he nor his sister had ever seen their mother again, and both assumed she’d been killed. That was another thing that Ahiro did not bring up; to do so would be to tarnish his promise, disgrace his word. Such a thing was unthinkable.

  Brought to America soon after his father’s death, Yoriku had seen to it that Ahiro was privately tutored in those areas that the older man believed would be the most useful to him and to the boy in the future. English, reading and writing of course, basic mathematics. Beyond that the schooling turned to more down-to-earth subjects; Yoriku was not raising a corporate executive—those were available by the hundreds. Instead he wanted someone who could do nearly anything that might be required in a day-to-day world filled with jealous and dangerous competitors—work with his hands, defend him, obtain things for him that might be difficult for someone else. Ahiro learned to work with wood and metal and plaster, and how to supervise those who could construct the things he did not know how to construct himself, such as electrical and mechanical systems. Above all, he learned to be that ultimate of Japanese servants for Yoriku: a ninja.

  In the years since then, Ahiro had never questioned the things he did for his savior. Again, it simply wasn’t done. Nothing mattered but Yoriku’s wishes—legal or illegal, fair or unfair—those were concepts that applied only insofar as Yoriku chose to apply them. The training Ahiro had received in the years after his father’s demise had irrevocably reinforced this thinking. He had become Yoriku’s personal soldier, and nothing could distract him from his duties. As part of a most unorthodox teaching method, his martial arts instructor had insured that the one thing that held so much danger for any developing warrior—women would remain forever out of Ahiro’s reach; at age twelve, just after his voice had deepened, Ahiro’s manhood was irreversibly eliminated.

  Now he was an adult, and all that remained for Ahiro was Yoriku. He had no friends and, for the most part, no family. He lived in an expansive but sparsely furnished apartment above a dojo in the East Village that was owned by but untraceable to Yoriku. He spent the majority of his time there, training constantly and always ready to walk out the door; no matter what he was doing, Ahiro could be dressed, if necessary, and headed down the back stairs of the dojo in under three minutes.

  Next to Yoriku, the dojo was the only thing to which Ahiro devoted any attention, and over the years he had made sure that his dojo gained a reputation for being among the best in the city but also the most selective and difficult. The students who applied were always illegal immigrants, honorable young men who had trained in Japan from down-on-their-luck but good families, and who were looking for a new start in America. Their minds were pliable and they desperately sought hard training and discipline, preferring a way of life closer to what they had left in Japan than the difficult-to-understand American lifestyle. Ahiro chose only those who did not speak English, and the number of applicants who spoke only Japanese was more than most people thought. While English was routinely taught in urban Japanese schools, there were still the poorer rural areas where schooling was a second priority to farming and making a living; it was from these areas that most of Ahiro’s students came.

  Now Ahiro was the commander of his own small, personally trained strike force, recently down by three but with replacements already undergoing, special education. As he himself had been raised to serve Yoriku, these men would be raised to serve him… and by serving him, they would exist, in turn, for Yoriku.

  No order or spoken thought that came from Yoriku’s mouth was a whim to Ahiro—it was a necessity. Charged now with guarding this apiary, the unhatched egg, and with seeing that the strange musician had anything and everything he needed to see this project to fruition and thus humiliate MedTech, Ahiro would not fail. It was not Damon Eddington’s desires or Symphony of Hate that mattered, but the desires of Ahiro’s savior. Every breath Ahiro drew, every sensation on his tongue, every color his eyes processed and sent to his brain, he owed to Yoriku. He would do anything and everything needed to see this assignment finished simply because it was what Yoriku wanted.

  And to Ahiro, Yoriku was everything.

  6

  NEW YEAR’S DAY, 2124

  In his dream, Damon was more than the musician, the composer, or the conductor. He was all of those things, and more; he was the… Creator. A god, the Supreme Being, the Master of All Things Musical. He stood not at a podium but on a beautiful Greek pedestal made of majestic black marble and carved with regal faces and wings. His face was proud and passionate and his arms were poised over an orchestra of thousands; a hundred violins fanned as far as he could see to his left, every one an exquisite, fabled Stradivarius even though the last of the Italian master’s instruments had disappeared in 2064. Cellos, violas, double basses, and English horns, all thundering out Mussorgsky’s classic Night on Bald Mountain in its bold original version. Two dozen grand pianos and twice that many harps, and at the far left rear, a row of tubular bells and xylophones added exquisite accents to the magnificent ocean of sound cascading toward him, a waterfall of notes trimmed with melodious ringing and ringing and ringing—

  “What!”

  Damon sat upright, rubbing the backs of his knuckles against his grainy eyes and eyebrows. God, he thought blearily, what a helluva dream! He could still hear the bells—

  Ringing.

  “Oh, Jesus,” he said aloud in disgust. He wasn’t still hearing his dream; it was the damned phone. His fingers scrambled for the VidPhone amid the junk on the bedside table, but when he hit the Receive button all he got was voice-over and the screen stayed black. Not for the first time, he wanted to pick the device up and hurl it against the wall; phone calls in the middle of the night were always bad, not that he had any family or friends to worry about, but being jarred from sleep by someone who didn’t have the courtesy to show his face was fucking harassment. “What?” Damon demanded in as surly a voice as he could manage. “Who the hell is it?”

  “Merry Christmas, Damon. A week or so belatedly.”

  “Keene—is that you?” Damon struggled to pull his sleep-stiffened body into a sitting position, fighting off the sheets twisted around his legs and waist. Christ, he thought, I must have been conducting in my sleep. “Jesus,” he said again. “I was up working all last night, Keene. What time is—God, I’ve been in bed less than an hour. What the hell were you thinking to call this late?”

  “Just thought I’d call and give you a little present, but—”

  Damon sat up straighter, moving more toward wakefulness. Unwillingly, his fingers clutched at the bedsheet and closed in a fist. “Present? What present? Do you mean—”

  “—if you don’t want it…”

  “Come on, Jarlath,” he said. He had to stop himself from screaming; one wrong word and this bastard would enjoy hanging up on him. “No more games, please. You woke me up and scared the hell out of me besides. Let that be enough.”

  “Actually,” the faceless voice of Keene continued as if he hadn’t heard, “I can’t honestly call it a Christmas present, can I? It’s more like an… Easter egg… waiting for its daddy.” The man laughed suddenly, and the cheap speaker in Damon’s VidPhone turned it into a sort of unpleasant croaking, as if there were a swollen frog on the other end.

  Now Damon’s feet slid over the side of the futon to the cold floor and he started feeling gingerly for his worn slippers with his toes. “An egg? Really? Oh, my God, Ke
ene! Where did you get it?”

  On the other end of the line, Keene chuckled a little more quietly. “Don’t ask a question like that, Damon. I wouldn’t answer anyway. Just be at Presley Hall inside of an hour to meet your fellow celebrants.”

  “I’ll be there, no problem.” Having successfully found his slippers, Damon had the receiver jammed between his chin and his shoulder and was already yanking on his trousers. “Presley Hall, you said?”

  “Right. And one more thing.”

  Damon frowned and paused, looking automatically at the VidPhone as a change came over Jarlath Keene’s voice. Still nothing; he wished he could see the man’s face on the screen, but Keene obviously had the video setting on the other end locked out. “Yeah, what’s that?”

  “Don’t look for me to be anywhere near Presley Hall until your project is completed, my friend. I’m out of the loop on this one from now on. No matter what happens, it didn’t come from me. Understand?”

  Damon nodded solemnly, then remembered that Keene couldn’t see him. “Yeah, right,” he said hastily. “I understand your point completely. But what if—”

  “Good-BYE, Damon.”

  Damon started to say something else but was rewarded by the dial tone of the VidPhone instead. Damn! What if he needed supplies? More assistants? Well, Keene had said something about “fellow celebrants” waiting at Presley Hall. He’d have to go there and see for himself, make sure these people knew who he was and the personal vision and motivation behind this project. God help everyone if Synsound had tossed a couple of their lower-level hack-’em-up bioscientists on this project. Out of the loop? Damon would scream so loud that Keene would hear the racket outside his freakin’ bedroom window all the way on the post East Side.

  * * *

  Even at six-thirty A.M. on New Year’s Day there was human garbage on the streets. Damon walked the twelve blocks to Presley Hall in the cold dark, his thoughts bouncing between what waited at the concert building and idly wondering what this city had been like two hundred— no—three hundred years ago. Surely things must have been cleaner, safer, prettier then. His heavy, rubber-soled hiking boots were impervious to the unidentifiable trash that was strewn across the streets on the first day of the year 2124—paper, discarded food for the rats and the homeless, disease-riddled men and women, jelly junkies who might have been twenty years old or sixty. Heated sidewalks installed citywide more than a hundred years ago had eliminated the threat of hypothermia for the homeless and the addicts, and now both seemed to flourish as easily as the fist-sized cockroaches that scuttled around the sidewalks and reared in attack stances before they were kicked aside. When Damon got to Presley Hall and climbed the shallow steps to the private employee entrance, he passed a sexless, gray-garbed figure hunched over something shiny and brown that squirmed and clacked in his hands. Damon shuddered and quickened his step, turning his face aside as he went by but not moving fast enough to avoid hearing the nasty crunch of the insect’s shell; he’d heard people talk about the vagrants preying on the giant roaches for food but had never seen it before tonight.

  A quick press of his open palm against the Hand-Print Scanner and he was inside Presley Hall. As the metal door slid closed behind him, Damon thought the place was deserted. Not a normal morning person, he had never been in the building at this time of the day, and it was an eerie feeling; although he was standing in a smaller side foyer, the hall still gave off the impression of vast emptiness, and the smallest noise—a tiny screech of the sole of his boot across the floor tiles, for instance—set off a chain of soft, unpleasant echoes. There was something terribly lonely about a building that was designed to hold tens of thousands of people being empty, a desolate, looming feeling—

  “Mr. Eddington?”

  Damon whirled in surprise. “What—!”

  The white-haired man standing behind him looked almost as startled as Damon felt. “I’m so sorry,” the man said hastily. “I didn’t mean to sneak up on you. My name is Michael Brangwen, Bioengineer Level Three.” He rushed on, his white mustache bobbing in a nervous smile as he thrust a pudgy hand almost into Damon’s stomach, forcing the musician to accept the handshake. “We were told to meet you here, and I thought you’d be expecting us. This is Darcy Vance, Level One.”

  A long-faced young woman with streaked blond hair and steely blue eyes nodded at him but kept her hands in the pockets of her lab coat. Above the collar of the magenta-colored blouse she wore under her jacket, her face was as pale as an eggshell, her expression as serious as Brangwen’s was enthusiastic. “Pleased to meet you,” she said. Her voice was much prettier than she was; clear and even, it reminded Damon of a firmly played clarinet. “Didn’t someone tell you we’d be waiting?”

  Damon cleared his throat, trying to work air around the leftover swirls of surprise in his stomach. “I, uh, was told to meet people here, but not really where they would be.”

  Brangwen began walking—ambling, actually—across the main waiting area of the hall and Damon followed reflexively. He’d been in here a thousand times before but apparently Darcy hadn’t. Despite his anticipation of what was to come, watching her was like having a fresh perspective on the old Presley Hall. She was clearly taken with the fake marble floor tiles and the marbleized columns that were easily six feet around and gave an illusion of support to the soaring domed ceiling by the main entrance. Almost everything in the entry sections was white—the floor, the pillars, the walls, even the ridged metal ceiling—to further the impression of clean stone and Romanesque space. Damon thought it was too bright and outright painful on the eyes, and he found the transition to coal-black inside the concert hall itself too abrupt. Nevertheless, he could understand why someone who had never seen it before would be impressed. It was quite an engineering masterpiece.

  “It’s such an honor to help you with this project, Mr. Eddington,” Michael Brangwen said excitedly as they turned into the first of a series of twisting hallways that Damon had never known existed. Brangwen spent half his time walking backward so he could look at Damon while he spoke. “I love your work. My music collection is extensive, and I have your entire works, you know, even your first recording.”

  Brangwen glanced conspicuously at Darcy and she blinked, as if suddenly realizing it was her turn to talk. “I’m afraid you’ll have to be lenient with me, Mr. Eddington.” Her face, so pale beneath its tied-back mop of wavy hair, looked pained as a faint blush spread across her nose and cheekbones. A single, small curl fluttered against the worry creases in the high expanse of her forehead. “Like you, I’m very involved in my work. I don’t watch movies or listen to music very much, so I’m not familiar with your achievements. I—I’m sorry.” She brightened. “But I am delighted at the prospect of working with an alien, so you can be assured that I’ll be giving my best efforts to your project. You’ll never find anyone more dedicated.”

  Well, Damon thought resolutely, despite Vance’s Level One rating, at least they were both bioengineers and not fledgling bioscientists, new hires that Human Resources had decided should cut their teeth on a project the department considered unimportant. And Michael Brangwen was familiar with and appreciated Damon’s music, even if Vance didn’t. Considering Damon’s track record with the critics and the public, being a hit with one out of the two assistants—fifty percent—wasn’t bad. Besides, what really mattered was his music—the Symphony of Hate—not the past work history of these two. Enough of the courtesy crap. “Show me the egg,” he said simply.

  “Oh, yes—of course!” Brangwen’s hands fluttered in the air as the group turned down a final hallway and stopped at what looked like a freight elevator. The older man gave the button a series of impatient pushes, as if he could make the elevator arrive faster by sheer will. “I guarantee you’ll be impressed. This is unlike anything else that exists in our environment. Few people have ever seen an alien egg in the real world, much less handled one and lived to talk about it.” The elevator doors slid open and the three of them s
tepped inside, with the senior bioengineer talking the entire time. When the elevator stopped, Damon followed the other two down more corridors, feeling numb from Brangwen’s constant chatter, bewildered at the turns and twists; by the time they had stepped off a third elevator and descended a final flight of stairs, his entire sense of direction was blitzed. The thought of memorizing the route was daunting.

  “Such a fantastic idea to use the sound of the alien in your Symphony of Hate, Mr. Eddington,” Brangwen was saying. “It would have been great in your Fourth Symphony, too, the Maestro de Santana.”

  They went past an orange door, then Darcy Vance stepped to the side and let Damon pass as Brangwen used a cardkey to open another door, this one made of sliding steel. Then they filed into the outer chamber of what looked like a huge apiary. Twelve feet to Damon’s left rose an unbreakable glass wall crosshatched by steel beams; the room stretched another dozen feet to his right, where an extensive sound mixer console swept around the corner. Farther down from it were more consoles covered with dials and screens that Damon didn’t understand— equipment for nurturing and hatching the egg and, Damon assumed, monitoring the alien once it was born.

  “—you know, in the third movement when the explosions came?” Brangwen paused, apparently expecting an answer.

  Damon barely heard the man. There, separated from the human world by only a few square inches of glass, rested the alien egg. It was hideously beautiful: an elongated gray oval of moist, lumpy flesh that held the key to his life’s masterpiece… so close! Damon pressed his fingers against the outer glass of the cage and smiled, wishing that all these glass barriers would bend in and let him stroke the shell; he felt giddy, breathless—as though he were experiencing that once-in-a-lifetime feeling of his first public performance all over again. “When can we hatch it?”

  “Oh, anytime.” Brangwen’s voice came from just over his left shoulder and Damon stood, reluctantly moving away from his view of the modest-looking glass box that housed the egg. “Everything is here and ready. Containment, medical monitoring equipment, the sound equipment you’ll need on your end—everything.”