“Is he dead?” Damon demanded. “What about the alien? What…”
“Be patient!” Vance snapped. “I told you, it’s coming!”
Indeed it was. There was a final convulsion and the hatchling ripped through Ken’s chest and the flimsy, dirty clothes he wore. Lying on the floor, the bones of his rib cage splayed jaggedly from top to bottom, nothing remained of Ken Petrillo but a depleted husk—
And food for the infant alien.
The newly born creature’s cries were shrill and loud, sharp enough to pierce through the exhaustion that tried to dull the senses of the three people who watched it with horrified, wide-eyed fascination. The bloodstains painting the shiny brown carapace and mouth seemed to add a curious bubbling sound to the life-form’s birth melody, a ringing din that only increased as the creature twined the segments of its legless, elongated body around Ken’s corpse and began to feed.
As Vance wrote frantically on her computer pad, Brangwen turned away with a shudder, his face gone the pale gray color of oatmeal. Of the three, only Damon was transfixed by the raw beauty of the alien’s nativity music. He saw nothing but heard everything—everything he’d hoped for and more, a wail of hunger and want that equaled the unrealized dreams deep within his own shredded soul. “Beautiful,” he breathed as his fingers danced over the slides and dials of the recording console. Tears of gratitude and appreciation gathered in his eyes and finally leaked down his face. All of it had been worth it—Ken’s life, everything. “So very lovely, so unique. No one else will equal your song, no one else can!”
Hours passed without rest as Damon manned the recording console and watched the alien grow, never fully comprehending that the nourishment it ingested had once been a living man he had called a friend and partner. “Yes,” he told it gleefully, “eat and grow big, and strong, my little prodigy.” Damon’s eyes were ringed with shadows of exhaustion but he dared not leave the console. Everything here was new, every sound priceless—he couldn’t take the chance of missing the smallest one. The smile he sent toward the glass cage was dark with yearning and allegiance. “My little Mozart,” he said breathlessly. “So young and talented… so hungry.”
Across the room, Vance and Brangwen charted the alien’s rapid growth as the full circuit of the LED clock’s display chronicled the demise of all facets of the newborn phase of the life-form. Before being cast aside, the brown, cockroach-colored shell deepened to blue-black and cracked apart to allow the emergence of the first of the coming three stages. The creature that crawled its way to freedom was as dark as its last husk and armed with an undersized but fully evolved set of teeth. A mere eighteen hours later it had long, limber legs to go with its arms, a half set of the customary bony crests along the sleek, reverse arch of its spine, and the smooth sweep of its head had begun to lengthen and compress at equal intervals as the separated from its back.
Seventy-two hours—only three days—and Damon stared across the apiary at the fully grown Homeworld creature he’d wanted for so long. Seven feet tall without straightening, Damon could feel its rage, see the fury in every jerking movement the life-form made. They were so alike, creator and child, linked by spirit and Damon’s experience, each condemned to a life of unwilling imprisonment and servitude. Damon knew what it was like to be an alien in this world, to be unappreciated and misunderstood, to be condemned for his very existence in a society that had no place for him. Separated from him by clear quartz was the physical manifestation of everything Damon had weathered, all the suffocating frustration and overwhelming wrath, the embodiment of his life.
Mozart.
It was a perfect name for a perfect being, a thing of deadly magnificence with a voice like combined black gold, Scriabin’s Poem of Ecstasy and Poem of Fire made flesh to stand before Damon and the world.
Finally, as the creature’s feasting ended with the last of Ken’s remains, Damon left his post at the recording station and stood by the glass wall, palms resting lovingly against the cool quartz surface. “This is what you gave yourself for, Ken,” he whispered. “Isn’t he beautiful? And it was worth it, wasn’t it? Oh, God, yes.” Watching Mozart pace restlessly around his cage, Damon felt the last scraps of guilt fall away. This was not a life or a friendship sacrificed to fulfill the greed of an audience or the mere hunger of a musician, oh, no. It was something so much more, so immense in the way it had given everything that Ken had wanted. The culmination of Ken’s life stood in Mozart, breathing and hissing, the source of Ken’s music and his god. As had been the guitarist’s paramount aspiration, Ken had become a part of the life-form, the god… had helped it come to be in a way no one else could ever claim. For his part of it, at the end Damon had done all right by his late comrade Ken Petrillo.
For a moment Mozart registered Damon’s presence and paused, cocking his massive, eyeless head as though trying to discern exactly what a human being was. A silent ten seconds and the alien turned and slunk away.
The only thing that had bothered Damon earlier, and still abraded at his peace of mind, was Ken’s final, coherent question.
“Where’s the music?”
13
“Mr. Eddington?” Darcy touched the dark-headed musician gently on the shoulder, trying not to startle him. “He’s fully grown now.”
When Damon turned his gaze from where he’d been sitting at the recording console, his eyes were blank and rimmed with red. She heard the bones in his neck crack with movement as he reached up and removed his headphones. “Huh-what?”
“The alien has achieved its maximum growth potential,” she explained patiently. “It won’t do anything now unless we arrange it. Why don’t you go home and get some rest?”
For a moment Darcy thought he was going to refuse. She wondered how could he stay here like this, night after night, living on the fat-loaded fast food substitutes that they had delivered. Personally, she longed for a freshly cooked meal, something actually put hot on her plate directly from the stove. She’d had way too much of cold and greasy over the last five days. Finally though, Damon stood. “All… all right.” His concentration seemed to be off-kilter, then he brightened. “And I’ll get the master soundiscs, too. For my composing.” The musician rubbed a hand over his face and looked surprised at the uneven growth of stubble there, usually so carefully clean-shaven around the double points of his sculpted goatee. “You’ll feel better after you manage some real sleep,” Darcy said as she offered him his coat.
“Yes, yes,” Damon agreed absently. He took the coat and squinted at it as if he didn’t know what it was, then blinked and draped it over his shoulder. The corner of his mouth turned up as if he’d finally realized how far gone he seemed. “I guess I’m pretty well burned out.”
“We’ll see you in the morning,” Darcy said, intentionally turning toward the door that led out of the apiary. Damon followed her lead unconsciously, but stopped and looked back when the door slid open. “Take good care of him,” he instructed her and Michael solemnly. “Of Mozart.”
Darcy and Michael both nodded, and after another second of hesitation, Damon stumbled out the door and was gone.
Neither of the bioengineers said anything for quite a while as they moved around the apiary, finalizing the computer data and organizing the mass of paperwork that had been generated by the phase of the project. “So,” Darcy said eventually. After all those hours of alien screeches and Damon’s chatter, the unaccustomed silence was getting to her. “Do you think he’s crazy?”
Michael shifted his attention from the last of the data he was inputting into one of the computers. “Crazy?” He took a moment to eject a disk from one of the floppy drives, labeled it, then slipped it carefully into a storage case. “No,” he said at last. “I don’t think so. He’s dedicated to his music, that’s all. That dedication requires methods that are somewhat out of the ordinary, but…” Michael shrugged and gave her a small smile. “He’s… intense. I believe that’s what the school generation calls it these days.”
&n
bsp; Darcy slid her hands into her pockets, then drifted to the glass and watched the creature inside for a few seconds before replying. “But it seems like such a waste,” she said distantly, “using the alien like this. We have a spectacular opportunity to study its behavior, yet all we’ve done is lock it away and fill its cage with a bunch of microphones. I’ve always wondered if these things are capable of… attachment.”
“Attachment?” Michael stood and stretched, then walked over and stood beside her to peer at the alien. Inside its cage, Mozart shifted into a jittery crouch, as if the unseen presence of the two humans posed a threat.
“Yes.” Darcy bit her lip absently, then rubbed her temples. “Attachment in a nearly one-on-one situation like this, born from simple familiarity. This isn’t a med lab filled with chimps and rats and a couple dozen scientists working under genetic managers and research assistants. The three of us—and maybe Ahiro once in a while—are the only people this alien will know. Perhaps there’s a chance it would begin to recognize us, to accept us.”
Michael ran his fingers over his chin and frowned. “And then what?” he asked pointedly. “Do we try and train it? Even if the study was successful in the form of actual results, what would humankind do with the information? We’re dealing with a life-form that has a brain with functions we aren’t even close to understanding. Your interest in this is high, so I probably don’t need to tell you that the military has poured millions into attempts at cloning sterile replicas for warfare purposes. So far, they’ve gotten zilch; the aliens’ biological makeup is so convoluted we can’t duplicate it yet. Plus I’m sure there’s a whole underlying branch of the government that we’ve never heard about that exists just to keep tabs on other countries around the world and make sure that if we can’t replicate them, they can’t either.”
“I know all that,” Darcy said. “I’m quite up-to-date on my alien research, thank you.” Still, her words weren’t biting and she inclined her head toward the creature in the cage. “Don’t you find it at all interesting that the woman who originally discovered these things claimed she and her crew were responding to a beacon sent by a derelict ship? We’ve always assumed these things are instinctive beings with no thought but to kill and procreate, but what if such a ship had actually existed? The government still maintains that her story was a myth and that she died of natural causes on a prison planet where she was incarcerated for military negligence. But what if it’s the government that’s lying, Michael? Others claim she wasn’t sent to the prison planet at all, but was a refugee from yet another disastrous encounter with the aliens on her escape craft. If her claims were true, it could mean they possess at least enough intelligence to use space travel as a means of transportation.”
Michael shook his head. “I don’t buy that at all. You don’t have to know how to pilot a vehicle to jump in it when it starts to move. Anyway, that spaceship thing is speculation only. Her story was never proven.”
“It was never disproved either. Instead—so they say— she was thrown in prison on charges that most people still find extremely questionable. Surely I’m not the only scientist to look at these aliens and notice that in captivity they seem to be significantly underdeveloped. Some of the eggs laid in the pseudo-nests now have three petals rather than four, as though they’re regressing genetically. Why is this happening? If it was once possible for them to build a ship and travel through space, why can’t we communicate with them on some level?”
“There’s no proof they can build anything,” Michael insisted again. “And even if they could, why would we want to communicate with them? You’re not looking at these creatures objectively. These aren’t civilized beings, Darcy. If what’s-her-name—”
“Ripley.”
“Okay. Darcy, don’t you see all the holes in your theory? You claim that Ripley says she responded to a beacon from an alien ship, but I distinctly remember that she never specified it was an alien ship, just a derelict. You’ve rearranged the facts to support your case, but they’re inconsistent. No one ever said that the aliens used the beacon to draw her ship down to the planet surface—if there was such a beacon, it was probably a help signal sent by the space jockeys from the derelict.” He looked at her and shook his head. “You’re acting like there’s probably a whole planet of these things somewhere besides the place we’ve always believed they originated.” Michael waved a hand toward the cage. “Jesus, Darcy. These Homeworld creatures are the scariest, most dangerous things the inhabitants of Earth have discovered to date. Do you actually think we’ll ever be able to control them? No wonder the government wants to squash any notion that a whole world of the things exists somewhere else.”
Darcy’s expression twisted into a sneer. “Because it’s frightening, we should ignore the possibility that it’s true? Now there’s an intelligent way to deal with something.” She glanced toward the cage. “And control them? God, no, Michael.” Darcy’s mood abruptly changed and she chuckled as the alien suddenly reared to its full height and swung its head, as if it had heard her voice through the soundproof quartz window. Then the creature flipped lazily on its back and stared upward, no doubt inspecting the roof of the cage in its own unknown way for a nonexistent path to freedom.
Darcy’s laugh made her coworker raise his eyebrows. “What’s so funny?”
“No human being has ever survived a face-to-face weaponless encounter with an alien without being cocooned as a future host. The ones who have later turned out to be already impregnated with the embryo of a drone or queen. Control them? Face it, Michael.” Darcy’s tone was cynical, her eyes wide but faraway as she gazed at some imaginary situation beyond the one that existed on the other side of the quartz wall. “A person could spend years working with one of these things, and I sincerely believe there would be recognition between the alien and the researcher. A bond between scientist and subject… perhaps. That’s what I’d like to find out. But they’ll never be truly trainable or controllable. No matter how much time is invested, I think the most you could ever hope for would be for it to pause a moment before it kills you.”
14
Damon set the vial of jelly on his nightstand reverently, then sat on the edge of the bed and stared at it for a while. When he’d been a child, he had done the same with the infrequent gifts his parents had given him. It was such a rare thing for his parents to buy him anything beyond the obligatory item or two at Christmas and a card on his birthday that the unwrapped boxes sat there for days before he would open them. He didn’t shake them or inspect them, or try to peek beneath the wrapping paper, preferring to build up the anticipation to a point where it became nearly unbearable. Looking back, he realized that he’d driven his parents to distraction over this—“What the hell is the matter with you, Damon? Just open it, for God’s sake!”—and more than likely had inadvertently narrowed his chances of receiving more. But once it was opened and no matter how good it had been, the surprise was gone forever—never again would a magical moment be waiting for him inside this particular box, and it might be a year or more before the next one. Instinctively he believed that moments that came so infrequently should be savored, extended. Treasured.
Freshly showered, his beard trimmed and with some real food in his belly, if it hadn’t been for the bone-deep exhaustion creeping through him, Damon thought he might feel almost normal for the first time since Jarlath Keene had called him in the middle of the night. A full eight hours sleep would round everything off and clear his head for his work with Mozart tomorrow. Sighing, he pulled his gaze away from the vial and crawled beneath the blanket, tucking it snugly under his chin. The loft was cold tonight and he could hear the drafts soughing through the cracks around the window frames and pipes, but under the covers his body heat built quickly; it wasn’t long before he stopped shivering and felt quite comfortable.
Damon’s eyes opened of their own volition and he found himself looking at the vial of jelly again, Ken’s final gift to him. There were too many large windows ar
ound the flat for it to ever be dark in here; changing neon lights from the electronic billboards erected on the roofs of the buildings across the street spilled in his place like a cold, muted rainbow, a living snake of color that cycled unceasingly around him. Despite his bleariness, Damon’s mind found the pattern right away: the colors made a full circuit every six seconds, bathing the jelly vial in luminous yellow and combining with its natural blue color to make the fragile glass tube glow like a wide spot of green laser light. The first time Damon saw it happen, it was beautiful enough to take his breath away, and it wasn’t long before he started anticipating the sequence. When he finally fell asleep, the jelly’s glow was the last thing he saw, implanted into the optic sensors of his retinas and carried brightly into his dreams.
* * *
But rest was an elusive concept. Damon’s sleep was broken apart like a child’s jigsaw puzzle with pieces that refused to fit; every time his consciousness pulled him out of darkness enough to know who and where he was, Damon would invariably find the vial of jelly in his sight, radiant with the lights of the neon-coated night beyond his windows. Hour after hour, until he became convinced that it was jelly he was missing; that was the thing that would mysteriously pull it all together for him, fill in the deep and hideous hole that had always been present in his life. Turning away from the sight and sweating despite the cold air against his face, shivering under the heat of the thin blanket, twisting and fighting against the rough weight of his own pajamas until he sat up in frustration and lowered his head to his cupped hands.
From the world on the other side of the fragile panes of window glass, Damon could hear the ceaseless growl of Manhattan traffic—people, out at all hours, aircycles, buses, even the faraway roar of the hypertrains in the tunnels, the new vehicles so loud that the newspaper vendors routinely sold earplugs. Beyond that… nothing.
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