Someone had been found!
The words were like a silvery chant inside his head, repeated with medievally religious reverence. Any moment now, Ahiro, that mysterious jack-of-all-trades Brangwen and Vance had told him about, would appear with the human key that was necessary to breach the barrier that hindered further progress on Damon’s biggest endeavor. He needed to get past his giddiness and pay attention, to concentrate; in fact, Vance was saying something to him now, asking the question that showed in the puzzled set of her long jaw and her frank blue eyes. Damon finally forced himself to pull his mind together and listen to her words.
“So, you want this alien for…?”
Again? “For the music, Ms. Vance. Its music—the pure sound of it.” Was his exasperation showing in his tone of voice? He hoped not. Ordinarily he wouldn’t care; he was used to working alone, doing all of his own recordings and mixes, but this project was so far out of his normal realm that he didn’t dare alienate the only two people who would be working with him on it. He knew nothing about the creature that would theoretically soon be at his disposal, nothing. How to care for it, control it, feed it… did they even eat? Damon had no idea, and he hated being this dependent on others, especially Synsound flunkies, willing or unwilling. This time, however, it was a necessary evil.
“You think alien screams sound like music?” Vance made no effort to conceal her doubt.
For a moment Damon was angry. Then the feeling flashed away, replaced by a rare appreciation for her honesty—now there was something seriously lacking in that bastard Jarlath Keene. He heard no derision in her voice, only bewilderment and genuine curiosity. She simply couldn’t appreciate the potential here, and after all, Damon was the artist, not her. Wasn’t it up to him to show her—and others—the beauty in his art? He was the one responsible for bringing his virtuosity to the rest of the uncomprehending world. A hard task, indeed.
“They sound like… hatred,” he explained. “Fury. Don’t you realize that the scream of an alien is representative of the only things left in the world today to which people, the public in general, can relate? They identify only with violence and anger, hate. Refined to its purest form, the sound of an alien scream is the only thing left in the heart of a human being.”
“Oh, that’s wonderful, Mr. Eddington!” Brangwen broke in, his face lighting up. Vance looked at them both skeptically, but didn’t interrupt as the older bioengineer continued. “Can’t you see how we’re bringing the two fields together, Darcy? I think it’s great—science serving the arts. Especially your art, Mr. Eddington. We’ve got a golden opportunity here to meld the two fields into something completely original, perhaps even create an entirely new genre.”
Vance slipped her hands into the pockets of her lab coat and chewed her bottom lip for a moment before looking again to Damon. “But… you have no desire to study it in any other way, Mr. Eddington? No interest in what its thought processes are, or how it exists in our world despite its obvious differences?”
Damon waved his hand impatiently. Ah, here at last was the truth. Vance was preprogrammed; attempting to or believing he could change her thinking would be nothing but wasted effort on his part. In some fields, the differences were simply too great. “I’m a composer,” he said shortly. “Not a scientist. The science end is yours.” He raised his hands in front of his face and flexed the fingers, first one at a time, then simultaneously. In the movement of his own body he saw and felt the fury inside him even if they didn’t, that never-ending rage that always boiled when he thought of Synsound and Keene, and all those simpleminded, malice-hungry masses who devoured the parent company’s so-called music. “I deal in what is heard and felt by the soul, not in the biological processes of the physical world. Music is the only thing that matters to me. I want this egg to hatch, and this… thing… to be born shrieking in blood,” Damon said fervently. “I want it to fight and kill and scream. And I want to record every sound.” He curled his hands into fists, unintentionally punctuating his words.
Someone had been found!
Before Damon could continue, the door to the apiary behind the three of them slid open with a clang. The trio turned together and for the first time Damon saw the fabled person who must be Ahiro. A tall, lean Japanese man, he had slicked-back black hair and a jagged scar that ran diagonally across his right eyebrow all the way to his cheek.
Deep-set black eyes stared steadily back at Damon, and Ahiro’s movements, smooth and controlled, reminded Damon of a watchful cobra. Walking dutifully at Ahiro’s side was, thank God, the cultist who would hatch the egg—
“Ken?”
Damon heard his own voice squeak out the man’s name as though it were something else, a strange new sound synthesized from rubbing a tangle of wires together.
The face that swiveled toward him was a lifetime removed from the man Damon had known in college as Ken Fasta Petrillo—“Ken Faster” for short. Most of the man’s once-lush auburn hair was gone, and what was left encircled his skull in overlong whitish strands that were matted with dirt. Royal jelly had done its work on Ken: while Damon knew that the man was the same age as himself, he looked decades older. The eyes, though… they were still the same. Blue and faraway, lost as he always was in the daydreams and rhapsodies of his own making.
Druggie or not, there was nothing wrong with Ken’s memory or the connections his mind made. When he saw the composer, his mouth stretched into a long, dry-lipped smile that was painful to see. “Why… hello, Damon.”
“You know this man?”
Damon glanced at Brangwen and saw the bioengineer’s look of horror: he had no choice but to nod. As usual, Vance’s expression was watchful, but indifferent. “He was… is the best guitarist I’ve ever heard.” He glanced at Ahiro, but the Japanese man remained stone-faced. “I… want to talk to him,” Damon said uncertainly. Ahiro nodded and tilted his head toward the table at the far end of the outer apiary area that the team sometimes used for breaks. Damon sucked in a breath and motioned at Ken. “Come over here, okay? We’ve… lost touch.”
Ken obeyed without comment and settled onto a chair at one end of the table, seemingly much more comfortable than Damon. Damon wanted to stare at his onetime friend, but at the same time he found the eye contact unbearable. “Ken,” he finally began, “do you… do you know why you were brought here?”
Ken smiled again, that same chapped stretching of his mouth. “Oh, sure, Damon. Your man explained everything on the way.” He nodded, as to confirm the words.
Damon tried to swallow and found his mouth dry. “But what you’ve volunteered for—I mean, how did you get this way?” Too blunt perhaps, too prying; it was simply the way it came out. He had to know, though; how much easier it would have been had Ahiro brought back a total stranger!
Ken didn’t seem at all offended at Damon’s inquiries. Instead, he did his best to explain, his expression sincere. “I started with the jelly, Damon. You know how I always was when we were in school—I wanted to try everything, and I did. It didn’t matter what: Ice, StarGazer, jelly. If it was out there, I wanted to do it at least once, and I didn’t believe the stories about jelly being instantly addictive. Hell, the feds claimed the same thing about Ice and I’d pulled through it without a hitch, remember?
“At first the jelly wasn’t that different, a new kind of high, but that was all. I did it a couple of times and was ready to move on. I don’t think you ever knew I was using. At the time, I—we had stuff planned… a couple of gigs set up, advertising posters set out, remember that?”
Damon nodded reluctantly. “Yeah, I do.”
Ken grinned with pleasure and leaned forward. “Well, there you go. Then all that stuff in my personal life changed and everything went in different directions, you know, at the end of college. At first I was freaked out about it, but then… Damon, I started hearing the music.”
Damon frowned. “Music? What music?” A dozen yards behind Ken’s chair, Damon saw Ahiro move into the waiting alien encl
osure; he punched in a code on the keypad that was wired to the glass and steel box that cradled the alien egg inside the cage; with a barely audible whoosh, the airlock released and the box’s hinged top eased open. Damon knew he should stop him before things went too far, but a part of him wouldn’t allow his limbs to move. If Ken noticed Ahiro’s movements or the sounds behind him, he ignored them all.
“Oh, Damon,” Ken said wistfully, “you should’ve heard it. If you had, I don’t think you would have gone out on your own. I’d take a hit of jelly and then I’d play the guitar, play like I’d never been able to play before.” Ken’s smile was shy and vaguely boyish, as though he were proud of himself and wanted to say so, but was afraid he’d be accused of bragging. “Some people said I played worse,” he confided, “but I heard it as better and I knew that they just couldn’t hear—their ears were crippled, blocked by the noisy mess of this city. Oh, no, my playing was definitely better, much better.” The addict stared at his fingers for a moment, seemingly bemused. “So,” he said finally, “instead of quitting, I took more of the stuff.”
“And you got hooked,” Damon said hoarsely. On the other side of the quartz wall, Ahiro had carefully lifted the egg from the glass box and was carrying it over to a different table, one with four infrared stimulators built into it. He set the egg precisely at the center point of the sensors, then rotated it so that the bottom part of each slit in the egg’s top faced a sensor. In a moment things would have gone beyond recovery, but Damon couldn’t move. His legs felt filled with lead and he could barely get his words to squeeze out.
“But that wasn’t the point, Damon. Don’t you see? After a while, I didn’t need my guitar at all, so I sold it for cash to get more jelly. If I needed to play, all I had to do was move my fingers and I could hear it. The music, Damon. The queen mother’s music… so beautiful. What did it matter that no one else heard it? I did, and it followed me everywhere, fulfilling me, nourishing me. That’s what counted.” Poor foolish Ken, with his hallucinations and mystical music that only he could hear. He sat, utterly clueless, as Ahiro carefully unlocked the clamp that sealed the egg’s occupant from the rest of the world. Now Damon knew that the point of no return had finally been passed, but that it was okay. With the sensors going and the clamp released, the sacrifice must be made. And Ken was already dead.
Damon cleared his throat, knowing that he had to ask the one question that would determine the sincerity of the addict’s faith. “Ken,” he said hesitantly, “did you ever consider… that maybe the music wasn’t really there? That it was in your mind, caused from taking jelly?”
Unexpectedly, Ken laughed. “So what? If it is, the queen mother put it there, and it keeps getting more exquisite, more captivating. It’s become church music, Damon, like Bach but so much more sublime. A choir of thousands, right here.” His former friend raised shaking hands and rubbed his forehead, smoothing the skin back as though the abundant hair of his early twenties hadn’t been slowly destroyed by the chemical components of the massive quantities of jelly he’d consumed through the years. “Finally,” he continued, “I realized that I had to worship at the source, in The Church of the Queen Mother. But even that isn’t enough. To truly experience it, I have to give myself to it. I must become one with it.”
Damon’s mouth felt like it was filled with sand. “So you’re willing to really join with the egg? Let it…?”
“Exactly.”
The stimulation sensors on the egg table began to glow as they reached their peak. In another second the air in the entire apiary took on a visible vibration as delicate lines of scarlet light shot from the sensors and grazed the egg just below the bottom of each slash. Damon wanted to tell Ken to wake up—You’re going to be killed, you idiot!—but he couldn’t; this was what Ken wanted to do. “But, Ken… to die like that…” Those were the best words Damon could offer.
Ken’s eyes fluttered briefly, as if the man were contemplating a quick nap, then he gazed vacantly at the ceiling. “Not death, Damon. You’ve never been there and you just don’t understand. I’d live on, in my God. Live on and be the music.”
Damon rubbed his beard, willing his fingers not to tremble. This was Ken’s choice, after all. He’d asked all the right questions and gotten the wrong answers, and it wasn’t Damon’s responsibility or obligation to tell another man, friend or foe, what he could or should do with his life. As Ken had emphatically pointed out, he’d made his own choices, had used jelly despite knowing the risks. He was an addict by choice… a cultist by desire. “And you have no doubts?” Damon asked softly. “No regrets?”
Ken started to shake his head, then hesitated. One shoulder moved the tiniest bit, a barely perceived shrug. “I’m maybe… a little afraid,” he admitted. “But that’s to be expected, don’t you think?”
“Certainly,” Damon agreed. “I—”
“It is time.”
Damon and Ken both jumped at Ahiro’s flat, cold voice. When Ken looked up at the oriental man, Damon was struck by how young the addict suddenly looked, in spite of the gray-white hair drooping on the dirty shoulders of his jacket. He’d been wrong in thinking jelly had turned the guitarist into an old man; rather, it had given him a strange, childlike innocence. Ken glanced back at Damon. “J-just a little—”
“This way, please.” As if suspecting that Ken was on the verge of changing his mind, Ahiro deftly pulled the cultist to his feet and led him away from where Damon still sat at the table, head bowed. I should stop this, Damon thought again, but he felt utterly powerless. It didn’t matter that it was Damon’s project; he was not in control of this part of it and had absolutely no right to tell Ken what to do or how to die. But Ken had said himself that he was afraid…
Damon looked up in time to see Ahiro guide Ken into the cage where the egg waited. Once inside, he steered the addict onto an elongated chair at the front of the sensor table on which the egg sat. The stimulation sensors were at full charge now, speeding up the egg’s awareness of human flesh and suffusing it with heat, and the knobby gray flesh of the egg’s surface had begun to ripple instantly in response. “No—wait,” Damon heard Ken rasp as the petaled top of the egg suddenly split into four sections with a noise that sounded like crackling plastic. “I—” Both he and Damon gasped together as Ahiro yanked Ken backward without warning and flicked a lever on the back of the chair; in response, metal shoulder braces sprang from the sides of the chair and with a flick of his wrists, Ahiro had locked them—and Ken—solidly in place. With eerie speed, the Japanese man was across the cage and by the door, out of the face-hugger’s immediate range.
There wasn’t even time for Ken to gasp.
Predictably, the parasite went for the host directly in front of it. When Ken opened his mouth to scream, the embryo’s three-foot tail whipped around Ken’s neck and nearly cut off his air. At the same time, it wrapped its limbs around Ken’s face and the fleshy implantation tube shot down the addict’s throat and halted his cry before it could start. The chair fell over with a crash and the shoulder brackets retracted automatically; inside of four seconds, Ken Petrillo was comatose on the floor, his mucus-coated skull encircled by the infant offspring of a life-form barely overpowered by mankind. The career of a once brilliant guitarist was forever ended.
Heart hammering, Damon’s gaze danced among the other people in the room.
Brangwen was a mess, clearly the worst among them. Damon hadn’t expected such a reaction from the man who had pointed out that this was exactly what someone like Ken wanted. Perhaps seeing it actually take place so close to all of them had made Brangwen feel a little too physically involved in the act. Sweating profusely, the older man’s eyes were bulging and his hands were clamped over his mouth as though he might be sick at any time. Damon didn’t know why, but he was gratified to see that for a change Vance was frowning and seemed a little pale around the edges; finally, Damon thought caustically, we find something beyond the scientist inside of her. He didn’t know why she bothered him,
except that she was even more out of reach than the festering, rabid masses that clamored for the endless menu of hate and violent music. At least the music touched them; for her, it did nothing, it meant nothing, it changed nothing, like screaming and waving your arms at a person who was blind and deaf. And there was Ahiro, of course, and Damon could read him like a VidDisc. A man of backbone and concrete, a machine; he had no feelings for the man that Ken Fasta Petrillo had once been and never would be again. Of all the people in this room, Ahiro cared less than anyone about Damon’s dreams other than to do Keene’s bidding and draw his monthly pay slip. Bah—all of them were losers, unworthy of the supreme sacrifice that Ken Petrillo had made.
For a few minutes the four of them stood over Ken’s motionless figure inside the cage, staring down at him. Finally, Vance spoke. “We should move the equipment out of the cage now. He may hurt himself on it later.” Her voice had returned to its crisp and businesslike tone; whatever processes her brain had undertaken to accept the situation and put the unpleasantness behind her had been completed. She glanced at Brangwen and he nodded jerkily, perspiration still dribbling down his temples, then obediently positioned himself at the former guitarist’s head. He bent and slipped his hands under Ken’s armpits, then lifted the guitarist’s torso clear of the floor with a grunt, his face showing a combination of revulsion and fear at being so close to the face-hugger. As Vance struggled to hoist Ken’s limp legs, no one but Damon noticed the tiny blue vial that slipped from Ken’s pocket and clinked to the floor. A quick glance placed Ahiro on the other side of the glass and already on his way out of the apiary, and as Brangwen and Vance lugged Ken away from the overturned chair and closer to the quartz window, Damon swept Ken’s final vial of jelly from the floor and into his own pocket in a single fleeting motion. It felt unaccountably large, as though he were trying to hide something the size of a softball.
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