Stepping outside the cage, Damon watched through the glass as the two bioengineers carefully positioned Ken so they would see him immediately when he woke, then moved out the chair, the table, and the equipment that had been used to stimulate the egg. For the first time, Damon became aware of the moist, nearly tropical breeze from the opened cage door as it bled into the cooler air of the outer apiary; with it came the smells of mustiness and high-strength, industrial plastic. After a few minutes Brangwen and Vance backed out of the cage a final time and closed it securely behind them.
“How long will it be?” Damon asked moodily.
“It could be hours, it could be days,” Vance answered absently as she peered at a computerized checklist, then made a couple of notations with an electronic pen. Something in her voice made him glance at her; there was no denying the eagerness shining in her eyes as she looked from her checklist to the unmoving man inside the cage and back again. So much for the moment of imagined empathy.
Brangwen was breathing hard from the exertion of helping Darcy move the hatching apparatus. “We’ll have plenty of advance warning. Why don’t you try to get some rest?”
“I can’t leave,” Damon began. “It’s too far to travel back and forth. I might not get back here in time if something goes wrong, or it starts to hatch—”
“That’s what the cots in the other room are for.” Vance made a final note on the tablet, then dropped it next to one of the computer consoles. “Amazing,” she said unexpectedly. “that he could be so dedicated to a strange creature, a different life-form, that he gave his life to father its child.”
“That’s technically incorrect,” Brangwen said reproachfully as Damon looked at her in surprise. “There’s no breeding proce—”
Vance shot him a reproachful look. “I’m not talking about scientific methodology here, Michael. That part of it is as predictable as the theory of gravity… and about as dull.” Damon turned to watch the two bioengineers, fascinated enough by Vance’s startling deviation from her normal demeanor to pull his attention away from Ken. “I’m talking about the philosophical end of it. We have used science as the means to justify a man’s willingness to die so that an alien might be birthed from his remains.”
“What’s the difference between that and the saints of Catholicism in the first millennium?” Brangwen asked.
“That which is seen, and that which is not,” Damon said, leaving his post at the glass to join the conversation. “They never saw their God, but Ken could see his.”
“You think that’s it? Somehow I doubt he ever saw a real alien,” Vance commented.
“But he heard it,” Damon reminded them. In his pocket his fingers rolled around the vial of royal jelly, warmed to the temperature of human flesh by his hand. “Constantly.”
“He thought he did,” Vance shot back just as quickly. “No one else heard anything. I think Michael’s right in that respect—it comes down to belief. Faith—which comes in countless forms. New scientific experiments are conducted on the concept that something about the individual research will turn out differently, even if no one is sure what the result will be. And what’s faith but a feeling inside you that doing something is right?”
Damon turned his back and headed toward the room and a waiting cot, smiling to himself. He was sure she hadn’t meant to, but Darcy’s words had vindicated every aspect of Damon’s involvement on this project. His final word was barely audible.
“Exactly…”
12
Exhaustion didn’t matter. The sleeping room that had been set up off the apiary was barely the size of a closet but far enough away from the apiary to dull the sounds of Brangwen and Vance’s preparations to muffled bumps and murmurs that reminded Damon of being put to bed as a child while his parents watched the vidscreen in the living room. While his childhood hadn’t been stimulating, it had been reasonably secure, and Damon had thought that the faraway murmurs would enable him to sleep, at least lull him enough to get him a nap. He had collapsed onto the army-style cot with relief and welcomed its cradle of metal bars and rigid canvas. The pillow beneath his head was of considerably better quality than the cot, the balancing factor that kept the bunk’s occupant from giving up entirely. Soft pillow and softer noises be damned, Damon found he could only doze; any would-be rest was fragmented by past recollections and the shattered life of the man in the cage within the apiary, a man who’d once been one of his closest friends.
The hours dragged by, turning into two-hour shifts that were traded with Brangwen and Vance. Nothing Damon did while he waited—slept (sort of), ate, or stared at the insensate man, stopped the flow of forgotten memories, flash scenes of an earlier and somewhat happier Damon, himself as a young man whose face was not so thin and twisted by a mask of bitterness. Ken, too, a meatier-framed man with auburn curls that drove the women in the audiences wild, clear, sparkling eyes the color of the ocean at sun-splashed midday. They’d blasted through the final year of college together, Ken’s oh-so-talented fingers easily keeping up with Damon’s complicated compositions, coaxing spectacular rhythms and innuendos from every piece. There was the drug thing, of course— with Ken there always had been—but it was no big deal, a little experimentation by someone eager to test it all; Ken’s earlier guess that Damon hadn’t known about his experimentation with jelly was right on the money. A few gigs, some advertising, and suddenly there they were, the two of them, with a few more messages on the answering machine than they could handle. Private parties and weddings had turned into nightclubs that wanted them to play for two- and three-week Friday and Saturday stretches, Manhattan and New Jersey radio stations that hinted at interviews and a live song performance or two to go with it, and…
Synsound.
The message from Synsound had been specifically addressed to Damon, so he had returned the call without thinking anything of it. After all, he was the managing end of the duo, he set up the gigs, kept their schedule, wrote the music, balanced it all between the last four classes that would give him his bachelor’s degree in musicology. Synsound’s offer had at first shocked him, then insulted and angered him; after two weeks of thinking it over, Damon accepted it. It was Synsound that made him realize that Ken was too heavily into drugs, and Synsound wanted nothing to do with the part of the duo who had a taste for chemicals.
Ken, Damon had thought, could be replaced. Three weeks to the day after he’d received the telephone message, Damon moved out of the rent-controlled apartment he shared with Ken in Spanish Harlem and into the loft that would be his home for the next decade and a half. He’d thought the new place was temporary and romantic and part of the “dues” he would have to pay as he made his way to the top. That apartment was the same, luxury-filled rat hole he still occupied.
Damon started and shook his head, trying to clear out the disturbing old memories. He rolled over and squinted hopefully at the LED display on the wall clock, but only an hour and a half had passed—it felt like years. Burying his face in the pillow, he tried to sleep again, succeeded only in another half doze that mixed remnants of reality and recollection into a barely decipherable collage that ran through his head with amazing speed and the worst possible clarity.
Ken Petrillo—Ken Faster—had not been at all replaceable. Not once during the ensuing years did Damon encounter anyone with a fraction of the amazing dexterity, the instinctive feel for a guitar that his old college roommate had possessed. Damon’s exquisite compositions suffered immensely at the hands of lesser artists, until in desperation he began performing the pieces himself, working at them stubbornly month after month while he stayed in near poverty and his career dripped along like a faulty faucet. While his pieces would never fulfill their true potential—losing touch with Ken Petrillo had ensured that—if he worked hard enough at it, and long enough, they at least met Damon’s rigid standards.
And sometime soon the man who could have filled in the missing piece needed to make Damon everything he’d ever wanted to be a million
years ago, the same man who was now locked inside an unbreakable cage and impregnated with the seed of an alien monstrosity, would die.
Eyes open and staring at the black void of the ceiling, Damon finally gave up on sleep. Hate had a way of robbing a man of rest, and right now Damon couldn’t decide if he hated Synsound or Ken Petrillo more. The same old fears were back, thoughts and terrors he’d overcome— or so he’d believed—years ago. Once again his career and his future rested on Ken, only this time its direction had veered drastically. Once he had been afraid that he would never be anything successful without the former guitarist, would never progress beyond his own cloak of hostility. But progress he had, to new and greater heights of loathing, and here again, he was dependent on Ken Petrillo. Sometimes, during quiet times when he had no choice but to contemplate his own existence, Damon could almost see his life spread out before him like pieces on an enormous game board. His mistakes—and God, there were so many!—were twisted, unrecognizable lumps amid the quieter beauty of an occasional success. Tonight he fancied he could see Ken trapped within his own square on that huge board, a broken and irreplaceable game token, too far gone to repair.
“Mr. Eddington? Wake up. It’s time—Ken’s coming around.”
Damon sat up too quickly and got a head rush for his trouble, wondered fleetingly if the dizzy spell was at all reminiscent of a jelly high. What could be so special about the drug that men would go beyond the wreck of their physical lives and give themselves spiritually to a creature with no compassion or love, and which had acid for blood and killing teeth? Against the flesh of his thigh, the vial of jelly hidden in the pocket of his pants was strangely warm, soaked with the heat of his body.
What, indeed?
Damon swung his legs over the side of the bunk and steadied himself as Vance hurried back into the apiary. He could hear the equipment’s humming and buzzing all the way in here, needles swishing across the surface of graph paper—old-fashioned methodology but dependable—and the whine of laser printers competing with the cricketlike workings of computer disk drives. Pulling his thoughts together, he stood and found enough coordination to go back into the apiary. Part of him dreaded what he was about to see; the other couldn’t wait for the hatchling to rip its way into being and start the treadmill moving toward Damon’s dark concert.
Vance had her ever-present computer clipboard clutched tightly in hand as she stood in front of one of the medical computers, comparing data on the clipboard to the output scrolling across one of the eighteen-inch monitors. Brangwen worked diligently at one of the keyboards, inputting and sorting selected bits of information almost as fast as they came out on a line printer that was hooked to another computer about three feet away. More data spewed out of two laser printers in a font far too small and full of medical symbols for the old dot matrix to handle; Damon stared at it uncomprehendingly for a moment, then gave up. He could read music, not scientific hieroglyphics.
All three of them jumped when Ken began to wail inside the cage.
“Sweet Jesus,” Brangwen said in surprise. He flipped frantically through screens of information on his terminal, his chubby fingers punching hard on the keyboard. “He can’t be hatching already—he just woke up.”
“Then what’s the matter with him?” Damon strode to the glass wall and pressed against it, but Ken didn’t seem to notice him. “Is he in pain? Already? Can’t you give him something—gas or a spray of anesthetic?” The crying didn’t stop.
“He shouldn’t be in any pain yet,” Vance said with a scowl. “Victi—er, subjects generally claim to feel better than normal during the incubation period. Chemical analyses routinely indicate exceedingly high levels of endorphins and adrenaline during the growth period, and a total cessation of the body’s immune system.” She tapped her lower lip thoughtfully. “He was out for about fourteen hours, but that’s well within the normal range. I really have no explanation for this behavior.” She glanced sideways at Damon and seemed vaguely amused. “And no, Mr. Eddington, there’s nothing we can give him that will decrease the, ah, impact of what he will experience when the alien hatches.”
“Well, something’s making him crazy,” Eddington said softly. “Are you even sure he was impregnated? Maybe it didn’t take.”
Vance and Brangwen exchanged glances. “There’s never been a known instance where a hatchling failed to implant an embryo inside the human host,” Vance said flatly. “This is an extremely hardy and adaptable life-form. It doesn’t even require its host to be in particularly good health.”
“Oh,” was all Damon could think of to say. He waved at Ken through the glass, but the guitarist continued to ignore him. On the other side of the wall, Ken Petrillo had finally stopped yelling; now he was stalking erratically around the cage. At the times when he was close to the glass, Damon was surprised to see that Ken looked healthier than he had when Ahiro had first brought him in. Finally, the guitarist stopped and tilted his head against the back wall, as though he were listening for something they couldn’t hear. That was impossible, of course; there were enough microphones and recording devices in there with him to capture the sound his blood made when it flowed through the arteries in his body.
Without warning, he registered Damon’s curious face and rushed to the glass where the composer stood. “Where’s the music gone?” Ken screeched. “Where’s my music?”
“What?” Damon said stupidly, flinching away from the palm Ken slapped against the window.
“Bring it back! Bring back the music—PLEASE!” Ken was howling now, bouncing off the walls in the cage as if he were wearing one of the rubber supersuits that were so popular among the kids nowadays. He staggered past the hatchling’s discarded shell, then abruptly bent and picked it up, holding it at face level and staring into the tangled, drying flesh of its underside. “Where is it?” In the apiary, the three of them heard his whisper as though he were standing in their midst rather than segregated safely in the confines of the cage. “It’s not in my head anymore,” he murmured piteously. “Or in my… heart. Is it in here?” He pressed the dead, brittle flesh of the embryo against his ear like a seashell, his face rapt; after a few moments Ken’s face crumpled in disappointment and he flung it aside. Startling Damon again, the guitarist at last locked gazes with him through the glass. “You never said you were going to steal my music, Damon,” he said sadly. His expression was condemning and made Damon want to hang his head in shame. “You never told me that. Where’s my music?” Ken buried his face in his hands and sobbed as Damon started to say something, but he turned away before Damon could get the words out… a relief, because the musician had no idea what would comfort Ken Petrillo now.
Ken stayed away from the glass for the next two hours; sitting with his back against the far wall of the cage, he seemed content to stare into space and hum to himself, his own melancholy attempt to replace the songs in his head that were gone forever. Damon felt like a thief, the thought that he had robbed the guitarist of his wonderful music somehow far worse than the fact that Petrillo would soon die. Computer tablet in hand. Vance tried futilely to get Ken’s attention, wanting desperately to ask him technical questions. At times the man was barely cognizant of his surroundings; at others, his eyes were sharp and quick, following the movements of the trio around the outer lab with a strangely calculating awareness.
At the start of the third hour that Ken had been awake, Vance’s fingers began flying over the dials and keys on the consoles, “His vital signs are through the roof,” she told Damon and Brangwen. “Look at the sensors. I’ve never seen anything like this.”
“The birthing process has got to start soon,” Brangwen said as his gaze flicked from monitor to monitor. “There’s no way his body can survive much more of this. His heart rate is up to one-sixty bpm and his blood pressure has tripled. Much more of this and he’ll end up with a cerebral hemorrhage.”
“He could die before the alien is born?” Damon paused and looked up in alarm from where he was rea
dying the settings at the recording console.
Vance shook her head. “I doubt it. I’ve read all the records associated with alien-implanted subjects and there’s never been an instance where a hatchling died in the host’s body or during the birth process—a still-birth, in human terms. At this point the embryo would survive anyway.” Her face was grim. “I do have to warn you that your friend in there—”
“He’s not my friend!” Damon said sharply. “He’s just someone I used to know!”
“Fine.” Vance’s voice was flat. “Your acquaintance is going to run out of endorphins very shortly. He’s going to experience a lot of pain, and as I told you earlier, there’s nothing we can do to alleviate that.”
“That’s… most unfortunate.” Damon turned back to the console and adjusted the recording levels again. “But he made his choice.”
Vance looked at him impassively as Brangwen ducked his head, then all three of them jerked when something whacked into the interior glass of the cage. Vance and Brangwen leaped to the VidDisc that was suspended overhead and swung it down and forward, aiming the huge metal camera directly at the cage. Ken was up, finally, and staggering around the cage like a drunken man; his mouth was twisted in surprise and sweat coated his face and head. “Hurts!” he squawked. “Please—” His words became garbled as the front of his chest suddenly convulsed and swelled. Damon hit the Record button and gritted his teeth; was that a cracking sound coming from Ken’s chest?
In the glass enclosure, Ken’s cries choked off and he fell to his knees. He tried to crawl forward and retched, once, then twice; a third spasm sprayed black-red blood from between his lips into a puddle on the floor. One arm reached behind him as though searching for something, then his balance gave out and he slid all the way to the floor, eyes staring at the ceiling, mouth working soundlessly.
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