“Wonderful!” It was all Damon could do to keep from rubbing his hands together. He scanned the room but didn’t see what he was looking for and a tiny spot of worry began to prickle in his stomach. The only people present were himself and the two assistants. Damon swallowed with difficulty. “Then where’s… the donor clone?” Vance and Brangwen exchanged meaningful glances and Damon’s niggling feeling of apprehension burst into outright fear. Immediately his stomach began to burn in protest. “What’s the matter?” he demanded. “Why are you two looking at me like that?”
When Brangwen still kept silent, Vance finally took the initiative and spoke. “We don’t have one.”
“What!”
The young woman spread her hands in a helpless gesture as Brangwen’s expression changed into something resembling a distressed puppy’s. He began to nod rapidly as she explained. “The fact is, the support systems that Synsound had built to maintain the egg and house the alien were astronomically expensive, not to mention the… ah… expedition costs in obtaining the egg to begin with. I mean, look at this place.” She waved at the recording and monitoring equipment in the room and at the reinforced space spreading into darkness beyond the high glass wall. “Two months ago, this was nothing but unused basement storage. Surely you realize that none of this was here. The containment area, the quartz wall, all this was custom constructed for your project, the egg was obtained for you, and Michael and I were transferred to work with you. With all these expenses, adding the price of a clone was out of the question. We were told that a single clone costs more than all of this put together, and that the money just isn’t there.” Damon felt like someone had whacked him in the chest with a hammer and was still happily beating away at him. “No money? After all this, they’re saying that there’s no more money? That’s what they always say, don’t you realize that? But what the hell is it supposed to mean?” His voice was escalating dangerously toward a shout.
“Mr. Eddington, I assure you, it’s not up to us,” Vance said hastily. “None of the construction decisions were shown to us for approval or comments. We’re transferees, not new hires. Our salaries aren’t even competitive with normal market rates. They’re only giving us enough money to get by on because they… know we want to work with you on this.”
Brangwen placed a sympathetic hand on Damon’s shoulder. “She’s right, Mr. Eddington. It’s Mr. Keene and Mr. Yoriku who make the budgetary decisions—mostly Keene, I think. Like Darcy told you, he said that the setup was so expensive—the cage, the equipment especially procuring the egg—that there wasn’t any money left for a clone.” His expression was grave.
“I mean, think about it. Clones are medically engineered life-forms with a market value of well over a million dollars apiece. Not only are they meticulously regulated by the Life Engineering Administration, there are at least a half-dozen nationally advertised organizations that constantly monitor the number of clones manufactured and the uses to which the life-forms are put. Plus they have informants everywhere—we’d never be able to get one legally. Then there are the religious groups that blame every bad thing that happens in society today on clones. All these groups are typical; they’re always vocal, vying for media attention and ready to do anything to get it. All the horrible red tape notwithstanding, Synsound would never chance so much negative publicity—controversy is one thing, screwing around with the federal government something else again. Finding out that Synsound had taken an illegally procured clone and used it in a fatal experiment involving an alien…” Brangwen’s voice trailed away. “God, I can’t even imagine the implications.”
For a moment Damon felt his knees try to buckle. Not far from where they stood was one of the rolling console chairs and he stretched out a hand and grabbed at it in time to keep his balance. “So what do we do?” he asked hoarsely. He pulled the chair around and sank onto it gratefully. “We have all this—an outfitted recording studio, a huge room with a cage, and probably more equipment and monitors than any of us have ever seen in one room—but we have an egg that we can’t hatch. What do we do?” He searched Brangwen’s face and the older man dropped his eyes, but when Damon looked to Darcy her gaze was even and clear.
“We’ll have to use a live subject.”
Damon gaped at her. “You mean kill someone?” When she folded her arms and said nothing, Damon covered his face with his hands and shuddered. He had a sudden inkling that the hands he lifted to his face felt exactly like a face-hugger would, and he let them drop rather abruptly back to his lap. All the fury and disappointment of a moment ago abruptly dissipated, leaving in its wake a deep, unaccustomed dread. “No, oh, God, no. I don’t want that.”
Brangwen cleared his throat and touched him tentatively on the shoulder again. As he spoke his next words, he kept ducking his head lower and lower. “Well, it’s not like murder, you know. You can’t be blamed for killing someone who wants to die, remember? There are people who actually want to hatch alien eggs. Religious nuts—fanatics—who spend their lives trying to find a way to be a host.”
Damon rubbed the back of his neck, trying desperately to concentrate on the situation. It had all been so simple: go to Keene and say what he wanted, and he would get it. That’s how it had always been, yet now he was expected to beg. Too many people thought pleading for your needs was either an art form or a rare sort of verbal parrying. If he understood Brangwen correctly right now, the man was telling him that there were people who wanted to die, who would stand by and allow the creature waiting inside the egg—an eight-legged nightmare that he thought looked vaguely like a cross between a thick-bodied scorpion and a wasp as big as a man’s head—to wrap around their face, then penetrate—
It was too awful to contemplate further.
He swallowed again, this time with difficulty. “And where do we find these… people?” Damon managed in a raspy voice. “These… fanatics?” Damon suddenly felt exhausted, already overwhelmed by this project of his own making and the unthinkable acts it seemed to be spawning. The concept that Synsound would destroy a human being rather than pay to sacrifice a clone was mind-boggling.
Darcy Vance stepped forward. Her arms were still folded across her chest and her expression was calm and cold, the perfect bioengineer and researcher-in-training. If she had any qualms about what they were doing, she certainly didn’t show it; rather, now that Damon had hinted he might go along with it, she seemed to have all the answers and to be in a good mood besides. How courteous of me to cooperate, Damon thought sourly.
“I’ve already asked Mr. Keene about that part,” she said crisply. “He said that if you agreed to the idea of using a live subject, all we had to do was ask Ahiro and it would be taken care of.”
Damon raised his head. “Ahiro?”
“He works for Keene,” Brangwen said. The older man looked nervous and exhilarated at the same time; his gaze kept darting back to the empty cage, as though visually testing it for strength. “And now that you’ve given the go-ahead, he’ll work for us.
“Whenever we want him.”
7
Darcy had finally gone home, as had Damon Eddington. At last Michael Brangwen had the apiary and sound lab all to himself, and he intended to make full use of it. He’d been waiting for this quiet time all day, and now he dug into the crumpled paper bag that had contained his supper—two microwavable mini-cans of pseudo-beef stew and a bag of trendy blue potato chips—and pulled out the last thing inside. As Michael held the syndisc up to the console’s light and squinted at the fine print on the label, the technology that made it possible for something so small to hold such wonderful melodies stunned him, as it always did. His field was bioengineering—complicated, vast, life. For others to take inert materials like metal, plastics, and ceramic and turn it into music… that, to Michael, was sublime creation. Bioengineering? Bah; they worked with the materials that were already there, already alive, changing, replicating, healing. It was as though science had the supreme copy machine, complete with-to
uchpads for quantity, size, color, and alterations. Geneticists had yet to discover the secret of bringing life to lifeless flesh, but Synsound… the company brought the breath of music to inanimate and inorganic materials every day.
So much to learn, to memorize, Michael reflected as he carried his new syndisc to the testing console. He could barely keep track of all the steps needed just to have a minimum sound demonstration—anything more was Damon’s field. Knowing that Damon might have started setting up his recording preferences, Michael couldn’t risk fiddling around with too much. He could have taken the syndisc home—he’d actually created a fine setup that wasn’t too complex—but this seemed a more appropriate place for the music he was about to hear. The syndisc was used and quite rare, and Michael swore to his soul that the store clerk, a gum-chewing teenager with a half-buzzed haircut who couldn’t find his own zipper much less a laser tag replacement for the missing sticker on the case, had really screwed up by shrugging and saying carelessly, “Five credits.”
Michael turned the plasticized case over reverently and scanned the list of titles on the back. The syndisc was a rerecording of a 1989 CD titled “Chiller,” performed by Erich Kunzel and the Cincinnati Pops Orchestra, and some of the individual titles were familiar—“March to the Scaffold” from Symphonie fantastique, “Pandemonium” from The Damnation of Faust, the Overture to The Phantom of the Opera—all fitting selections to prepare him for the work ahead with Damon Eddington. Others, like “Three Selections from Psycho” and “The Light from Poltergeist” eluded Michael, despite his intense interest in music and extensive collection of syndiscs. After a few moments of study, he slipped the syndisc from the case and placed it on the player. A quiet whirring sound and a press of the ENTER key was all it took to start the computerized sound commands.
The booklet accompanying the syndisc was missing, of course, and there was nothing to forewarn Michael about the forty-eight-second “Opening Sequence.” Escalated high enough in volume to vibrate his teeth, the piece turned out to be a storm re-creation containing peals of thunder and cracks of lightning realistic enough to make his heart hammer. Hands still shaking from the shock, Michael grinned and found the volume control, dialing it down to something more reasonable before a security guard or some other mope came running. Wow! he thought. Now this was music—strong, cell-shaking sound. Still smiling, he sat back on one of the chairs, folded his hands behind his head, and let himself be swept away.
* * *
The “Chiller” syndisc was over in slightly under an hour— long by today’s standards, but nowhere near enough to satisfy Michael. Still, he pulled the syndisc out and put it carefully back in its case, then neatened up his work area and cast a last glance around the apiary. He had to go; if he didn’t cardkey out pretty soon, someone in Human Resources would look at his time log at the end of the week and start screaming about unaccounted for overtime. Obviously he wouldn’t put in a requisition for the time he’d just spent using the company’s equipment to listen to his music, and frankly, Michael didn’t care about getting paid for the overtime he put in on this project anyway. He was elated to have the job, thankful that his employment was going to last another few weeks or a month, or maybe more. And after that…
Michael pulled his coat out of the closet and shrugged it on, feeling suddenly very old. How much longer before he got that cheerful gold notice tucked into the envelope with his pay slip—We’re happy to announce your retirement! He was already six months past the corporation retirement elective age enacted by Congress in year 2113, and the only reason he was still in Synsound’s employment was because no one else had stepped forward and offered to work with the difficult Damon Eddington and the alien. Sure, the offer hadn’t been corporate-wide, but enough people had known of its availability that the company finally made it known to someone like Michael… who felt he didn’t dare refuse. Face it, old man, he thought sourly. It’s almost time to cut you out of the herd. You can barely keep up.
Michael sighed aloud and began making his way out of the building. Hearing his own plaintive sound made him alternately lonely and angry at himself—what good would it do to indulge in self-pity? People who did were perpetually angry, mean-spirited, and hated everything around them—Damon Eddington was a prime example. Speaking of Eddington, both he and Michael had seen the way Darcy ogled the hall’s construction and size. Eddington might not appreciate her awe, but Michael could understand perfectly the way she felt—sometimes he was still amazed at it, too. He just hid it better, thinking it would look silly for someone his age to gape like a child at the building’s architecture.
So many changes to keep up with in everyday life, much less in the field of bioengineering. Christ, sometimes the information seemed to fluctuate by the hour, like the hypermutant viruses it was rumored MedTech played with all the time. Everything moved too fast for Michael— viruses mutating, genetic engineering exploding into new realms, space exploration, and now alien experimentation— new information always popping up and needing to be memorized. The human race’s voracious appetite for knowledge would never be satisfied; as a young man, he would have thought that was a good thing. Now he wasn’t so sure.
So here Michael was, facing the end of his career with no particular specialty—bioengineers weren’t really all that rare—or body of work to leave behind except an apartment filled with thousands of syndiscs and a hodgepodge of sound equipment strung together with old-fashioned electrical tape and blind luck—and don’t forget the well-thumbed and expensive bioscience textbooks that were out-of-date almost as quickly as they saw print. No wife or girlfriend, no family. If he died today, not a single person would know or remember that he had possessed an insatiable appetite for all kinds of music—hellrock, classical, alternative, even the twangy country that was slowly dying out—everything. Again, he hated to let self-pity get to him, but Jesus! Sometimes he couldn’t help it.
And tomorrow would bring another day of the Eddington project. Exciting, different… terrifying. The thought of nurturing and raising an alien hatchling scared the hell out of Michael, but what choice did he have? He couldn’t refuse the assignment, or Synsound was sure to force him into retirement; the company—Keene—did not tolerate employees who bucked orders. A future with no job terrified him far more than the Eddington dilemma, which itself had implications reaching much further than the stolen egg and illegal hatchling. Retirement would mean a total upheaval of life as he lived it: he was already crammed into a small apartment, but he would have to move into one of those tiny retirement complexes on the far West Side, full of cockroaches and nosy, doddering neighbors who had nothing more to do than meddle in everyone else’s business. What would they say when he blasted music from the Dead Visuals or Webster’s Family Dummies at two in the morning?
On the other hand was the Symphony of Hate project. Michael himself had provided the supposed justification for the next step. But to sacrifice a person, religious fanatic or not, so that a creature that was little more than a wild, enormous insect could live… could their actions ever be absolved?
And there was Damon Eddington, of course, with whom Michael couldn’t help but sympathize. Still young and inflamed, filled with self-pity or not, Michael saw Eddington as Synsound’s victim, a man driven to the edge of sanity by uncontrollable creative impulses and Synsound’s nasty policy of dangling its support always just out of reach. That was only the beginning, too, because in the younger man’s music Michael heard everything missing from so many of the pieces recorded today— brilliance, passion, fury—all those wonders denied. No wonder Eddington was a dark and tormented soul.
But… what would be unleashed if Synsound continued to coddle its eccentric pet artist?
8
“Here you go, Chief Rice, the final results of the tests performed as a result of the Alien Research Lab theft.”
Phil Rice looked up to see Tobi Roenick, the lab supervisor for MedTech’s Coroner’s Investigations Division, as she dropped a
folder into the in-basket on the corner of his desk. The folder was red—a death investigation code— and pitifully thin. That pretty much said it all.
“Any results?” Rice asked, just to keep her in his small office for an extra minute. Tobi was a beautiful woman with caramel-colored skin, golden eyes flecked with brown, and a tightly cut cap of highlighted brown hair feathered around her face. Her movements were fluid and controlled, like a dancer’s, the smile she gave him full and framed by red-glossed lips. For a moment all he wanted in the world was to ask her out to dinner and hear her say yes. But rumor had it that she was sharp-witted and could cut a guy down to size before the appetizer arrived if he said the wrong word; reluctantly, Phil decided to stifle his urge to issue the invitation for now. He liked living dangerously but he wasn’t into masochism. Then again, she certainly was pretty…
In response to his question, Tobi picked the folder up again and held it sideways, then fanned its contents to emphasize the fact that there were probably only three or four pieces of paper in it.
“What do you think?”
Rice shrugged and leaned back against his chair. “There’s always hope.” He gave her what he thought was a winsome smile and their eyes locked for a moment.
“Nice try.” She dropped the folder back on his desk and headed out. He was still reaching for it when she poked her head back around the door frame, a small smile playing across her mouth. “Hey, Rice.”
He looked up in surprise. “Yeah?”
“You need to update those lines, you know. You sound like you’ve been watching reruns of Dating Game 2100.” Rice opened his mouth to retort, but Tobi was already gone, and the fading sound of her heels in the hallway outside told him he’d have to raise his voice to be heard. No way; there was no telling who might be in the hall and listening. “Fine,” he muttered. “If you don’t like my lead-in, buy your own damned dinner.”
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