“Thanks, boss, but I think I’ll pass,” McGarrity said. “Hey—where’re you going?” he asked in surprise as Rice pulled on his guidepole, hauling the alien in a semicircle that turned him back toward Central Park and MedTech. “I thought we were headed toward downtown.”
“Another time,” Rice said grimly. “I haven’t given up the hunt, but right now we’ve got to get Blue back to MedTech before somebody videos us.” He jerked his head back in the direction of Forty-sixth and the other two men saw people starting to gather at the mouth of the alley halfway down the block. “Nobody’ll complain much about those two, but we can’t let this happen again. Too many people on jelly—next time it might be someone who’ll be missed.” He scowled. “I’m going to have to work a little on the control aspect of this harness. Let’s go, and try to act normal.”
Morez gave Rice a look that said he was crazy for suggesting such a thing, but McGarrity laughed heartily. “Oh, yeah, Phil. Who’s going to notice? I take my pet bug for a walk every night about this time, just like the rest of the dog owners. Say…” He grinned mischievously at his teammates. “Did either of you remember to bring the pooper scooper?”
Morez rolled his eyes and Rice groaned. “That’s disgusting, McGarrity.”
McGarrity opened his mouth to reply, but Morez cut him off. “Of course it is, Chief. And it’s a perfect example of why this fool’s here with us, instead of on a supposed date with some mythical lady.”
“Mythical, my ass. I told you,” McGarrity said with a sulky expression, “I had one all set up.”
“I’ll believe that when I see it,” Rice said. “Come on, you bastard,” he snapped at the alien as it tried to twist in the opposite direction. “Another time—stop trying to go backward.”
“Look who’s talking, loverboy.” McGarrity fought with his guidepole and finally got ol’ Blue going in the direction Rice wanted. For the time being, the return trip to MedTech looked okay.
“At least I’ve got prospects,” Rice said smoothly.
“I think all this stuff about dates and prospects is nothing but dream talk from both of you,” Morez said. “And I’ve got a hundred credits—on each of you—that says you can’t each bring a date to my house for dinner.”
“Say what!” Phil demanded in astonishment.
“Uh-oh,” McGarrity muttered.
“I’m giving you two a chance to put your money where your big mouths are,” Morez challenged. “My wife and I make a fine pot of spaghetti—”
“With real meat sauce?” McGarrity’s eyes were suddenly shining. He looked ready to drool.
“For you, Irish, we’ll splurge.” Morez sent McGarrity a mock scowl. “But you have to bring a date. No date, no spaghetti. And no excuses.”
Phil chuckled. “You’re in trouble now, McGarrity. We’d better schedule this for five or six months from now.”
McGarrity said nothing, but Morez’s eyes narrowed intelligently when he glanced past the alien’s dark rib cage and locked eyes with Rice. “Well, I don’t know, Chief. Being familiar with the both of you, I really have to wonder which one of you is going to have to pull a magic trick here.”
“And what’s that supposed to mean?”
This time it was McGarrity who laughed. “Maybe he’s suggesting you’d better learn the word abracadabra!”
9
Darcy Vance spent a lot of time in the lab staring at the egg. There wasn’t much else to do at this stage of the project, not until Ahiro showed up with a subject to host the alien hatchling. She knew that Michael came in late at night and used the elaborate equipment setup to play the newest of his ever-expanding collection of syndiscs. It was too bad she didn’t have a hobby like that to occupy her free time; she’d probably be a lot less miserable if she did.
The alien part of the Eddington project though… that had promise. Finally, something besides MedTech’s frogs and bacteria, and endless experiments trying to find a more economical way to provide the inoculation serum that was given to newborns to protect them against HIV, ebola, measles, and the rest of the long list of diseases that had been wiped out at the end of the twenty-first century. Darcy had taken the job here at Synsound a year ago, lured by their offer to promote her to bioengineer and increase her salary by twenty percent. Unfortunately, her pay as an entry-level bioscientist at MedTech had been nothing to crow about, and the twenty percent didn’t make a dent in her student loans and all the charged credits she’d run up during her years at school. She and her father had gone their separate ways when Darcy had first entered college, and now, without family to help bail her out, Darcy was stuck with the bills; the HUD/Education Dept, was authorized by law to take forty percent of her salary until the bills were paid. Not much was left over to devote to entertainment… or a hobby that required tangible materials. Things like rent and food tended to take priority.
The Synsound job was a major disappointment. While it meant more money in her paycheck and toward her bills, the word was dull, dull, dull. The Synsound recruiter had contacted her, not the other way around, and Darcy now believed the woman had been nothing more than a Synsound shark whose sole purpose was to steal away the competitor’s employees. Darcy had been led to believe that she would be working with the genetics engineering department, designing new clones for the shows, finding ways to reengineer existing ones when the paying crowds had grown tired of them. No wonder she’d jumped the MedTech ship—who wouldn’t have? Instead, Darcy had become a sort of android repairperson, and the tiny lab and tinier office to which they relegated her and her work was filled with spare parts, growing cultures of android flesh, and the oily smell of the lubricating fluid that was used in the mechanical compartments of android bodies. Rather than searching for a cheaper way to manufacture inoculation serum, now Darcy spent her days tracking down obsolete machinery parts and hunting for a way to make android skin more rubbery and resistant to tearing.
After a few months of this, Darcy had swallowed her pride and decided that earning a little less money wasn’t so bad if in the long run it paid off with steady promotions and job security, but when she checked back with MedTech she discovered that in its eyes, she’d committed the ultimate sin. Synsound was, oddly, MedTech’s largest thorn, something about the music company being responsible for having to construct the force field that had cost the company nearly a billion dollars. Had she been a Synsound employee first, MedTech would have happily stolen her away just as Synsound had done. As an employee who had “defected,” however, Darcy found she wasn’t wanted back.
A surreptitious job hunt among the smaller companies proved fruitless; no one would give her uninspired academic record and short work history more than a cursory review before saying, “We’ll call you, Ms. Vance.” She had shot herself in the foot by leaving MedTech, and now she was stuck; MedTech couldn’t even be persuaded to give more of a job reference than the legally required confirmation that she had once worked there.
Suddenly Damon Eddington’s dreams had shone into her drab world, breaking through the murky haze her workdays had become like a red laser beam. Darcy had always wanted to work with animals or alien life-forms, and most of her classes in college had been geared toward that field. Unfortunately, she was seriously lacking in the concentration and application department; a dreamer at heart, Darcy spent far too much time thinking about all the radically experimental things she could do if she were a high-level bioengineer instead of applying herself in the classes required to really get that degree. Things hadn’t changed much in that respect; here she was again, watching the egg do nothing in the physical world but envisioning with perfect clarity the thing it would someday become. She knew Eddington was disappointed about her lack of a musical background, but she couldn’t—and wouldn’t have, had she had the funds—change that for him. She and her coworker had agreed from the outset that coddling Eddington was to be Michael’s responsibility; Darcy had no patience for such emotional frivolity, and chronicling the existence of the alien
that would be born was to be her duty.
An alien… Could something like that be controlled? Perhaps trained? Common sense reminded her that they weren’t exactly dealing with a friendly puppy here. Compassion? Attachment? Ludicrous concepts all, yet they represented the exact things Darcy had wondered about for years, since the first news that the creatures had been discovered during the colonizing expedition to Homeworld. After all the years of dreaming, she finally had a chance to find out if the situations she’d concocted in her head, exaggerated theories really, held even the most remote grain of truth. How many people had been in the position that would soon be available to her? She would be here to watch it grow from a hatchling, from the moment of implantation to birth—
Well, that part bothered her. Darcy could play the dispassionate scientist on the outside, but inside she was horrified that they were going to use a human being to host the alien hatchling. To see Eddington’s ambitions become a reality, someone was going to die… and with her hunger to be a part of this assignment so strong, was she any less a guilty party? Michael had stubbornly pointed out that the… “donor” would be someone who wanted to do it, an addict so dedicated to the sensations created by royal jelly that he would donate his body to the continued existence of the alien species. But those people were… demented, so overtaken and mentally enslaved by their addiction to jelly that they barely knew which way was up anymore, much less the worth of their own lives. Was it really scrupulous to take advantage of that?
On the other hand, they couldn’t work or function in normal society any longer, and they would never heal. Did the justification for using someone to hatch the alien egg rest in the concept that the donor was a walking dead person anyway?
Darcy simply had no answer.
10
So many possibilities…
Ahiro walked the streets at about twenty minutes to midnight. Few areas in Manhattan were dark at night anymore; pockets here and there—most of the interior of Central Park, of course—and Third Avenue was no exception. His target was in Midtown, two doors in on the southwest corner of East Forty-ninth and Third Avenue, but Ahiro was too cautious, too distrustful to go straight there. Instead, he wound his way from Synsound’s West Side corporate offices through the Theater District, then carefully doubled back into the maze of buildings that made up the Garment District and beyond, turning east into Murray Hill to finally get to his Midtown destination.
The Church of the Queen Mother.
No aircycles or big money mechanical escorts here— mostly derelicts and down-on-their-luck bums looking for a way to pass the time with a cheap, temporary diversion. The ‘temporary diversions’ strolled the streets in the form of underdressed prostitutes and jelly dealers, all ready to duck out of sight at the first sign of a cop jalopy. Tonight was cold and damp, a hint of more stagnant rain about to fall on the city rather than January snow, but that didn’t seem to bother the hookers; the women wore short, strapless dresses and dirty high heels with worn metal tips that shot sparks off the street grates, and the males on the take kept the jock T-shirts and denim jeans as tight and scanty as possible.
The building that housed the church was easily over two hundred years old. In a more prosperous time in the neighborhood a century and a half ago, it might have been an elegant restaurant or a quaint antique shop, but any evidence of its original purpose or the way it must have looked as new construction was long gone. Now warped and cracking boards were nailed over exposed layers of rotting insulation and mortar in a haphazard effort to keep the place from literally spilling its guts onto the sidewalk. Bent and rusty nails jutted everywhere from the mildewy walls that ultimately led to the entrance—a triple set of double doors that consisted of more boards criss-crossed and impossible to close, useless against the New York elements. Those, perhaps, had once been floor-to-ceiling show windows.
It was absurdly easy for Ahiro to slip into the place, and no one noticed him despite his clean, dry clothing or well-bathed skin. This was his first visit, and the inside was bigger and better lit than Ahiro expected, but it didn’t matter. No one paid him any attention, and he supposed that was because jelly junkies came in all kinds—bums, clerks, bankers, executives—a lot of them still grasping strings that led tenuously back to the normal parts of their lives. Not for long, though; royal jelly tempted them all and, once it had them, never let go. Fools, all, for invariably believing themselves to be the stronger.
Rumors on the street claimed the building had once been a church rather than the restaurant or store that Ahiro suspected was closer to the truth, but if this building had ever housed a real place of worship, it bore no signs of it now. There were no pews or altars, and certainly nothing so conspicuous as confessional booths. The walls looked as if they might have once been paneled, but time, insects, and moisture had destroyed all but the faintest resemblance to the out-of-date decorating method. Other doorways branched off the main room—leading to unused closets, maybe to a basement no one dared explore, and all except one were blocked by the telltale chaotic pattern of nailed-in-place boards. The exception was a heavy, worn-looking door at the far rear that was firmly shut; Ahiro had to peer fixedly at it to confirm that the sign of deterioration and chipped paint were nothing more than a craftily applied makeup. Ahiro grinned to himself; no doubt a closer inspection would reveal that the door was not only locked, but hardened steel under its painstaking camouflage. Beyond that barrier was an entirely different world from the one the jelly addicts saw, a side of their quiet, misery-filled church that they would never believe existed. No doubt their preacher, a bald-headed man in his mid-thirties with a baby face and calculating eyes who was in reality a highly clandestine MedTech employee, enjoyed all the comforts he desired as he passed out minuscule, carefully distilled measures of jelly with equally rationed doses of experimental drugs and medicine. To hear him tell it, the preacher was the only person ever to kick the jelly habit; in the real world, this self-proclaimed messiah had never put the taste of jelly on his tongue and had learned his evangelist skills by training in a class filled with hundreds of false preachers-to-be just like him.
Keeping carefully in the back, Ahiro watched as the preacher doled out the vials of jelly, each time pronouncing “In nomine Matris Reginae” in a monotone voice. Not for the first time, Ahiro wondered how the man could keep a straight face as he mouthed those ridiculous Words. It was the scientist thing, no doubt, like Darcy Vance and Michael Brangwen, The man behind the flowing pseudo-holy robes no doubt viewed these pathetic wrecks that were once human beings as no more than test subjects, lab monkeys, dogs, and rats with human skin and burned-out souls. And dozens of them shuffled quietly forward with heads bowed, an endless line of disciples to a chemically induced vision they could no longer live without, eyes closed, mouths in their gaunt, dirty faces open to receive the rapture, and repeat after me—
“In nomine Matris Reginae.”
Idiots, every one. This place was a farce, a testing ground for MedTech’s most controversial and covert drugs and medicines and one of thousands like it around the world. The antiqued miniature image of an alien queen that squatted on a pedestal next to the spot the preacher stood was manufactured specifically by a secret division of Med-Tech, and the company made them by the hundreds. All these destitute men and women—
Ahiro’s mind cleared suddenly as his searching gaze fell on one man in line. He recognized the man instantly from the graphics file Keene had downloaded onto the data terminal that Ahiro linked into the Synsound mother system each morning—this was the man Keene wanted Ahiro to take back to Damon Eddington, the same person who would host the alien hatchling.
He just didn’t know it yet.
Ahiro watched him take his turn with the preacher and receive his token taste of jelly. He downed it and drifted back outside with the others, gazes heavenward as they stared at things that only they could perceive. The buildings, the air, living creatures in unseen dimensions— in the normal world, who kne
w what really went on in the minds of the jelly addicts?
This particular man had curly, too-long gray hair that had receded far beyond the crown of his head. His eyes were so sunken that their shade was indeterminable; the shabby red coat draped loosely around his shoulders as protection against the weather only enhanced the pallid color of his vein-mapped skin. The faintest trace of what the man had once looked like showed in the still-thick, jet-black eyebrows and the melancholy set of his mouth as he turned when Ahiro tapped him lightly on the shoulder.
“One moment, brother,” Ahiro said mildly. The Japanese man gave the junkie the calmest, most serene smile he could manage, reminding himself not to smirk because when it came right down to it, this man had only hours to live and should be treated with respect because of it. “You’re a very lucky disciple tonight, my friend.”
“I am?” There was a sense of childish wonder in the man’s voice, of desperate, unfulfilled longing. His stare was unfocused and annoyingly dreamy, distressingly trusting.
“Oh, yes.” Ahiro slipped a hand around one of the man’s thin elbows and squeezed it reassuringly. “Tonight,” he said with a confident smile as he turned the man in the direction of Presley Hall, “you will fulfill your destiny.”
11
Someone had been found!
Damon tried to keep his end of the conversation going, tried to concentrate on Michael Brangwen’s words—after all, the man was asking about his dreams and his music, his life—but Damon was having a difficult time keeping the thoughts and questions straight.
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