He turned his attention back to Darcy Vance and watched her without speaking, feeling his pulse jump nervously. Preoccupied with Mozart, she appeared to have forgotten Damon was still in the apiary with her—as usual—and he watched, enthralled, as she slowly held up one hand to the glass directly in front of Mozart and rotated it. Inside his cage, the alien tilted his head thoughtfully as if he were aware of her experiment, his sharp white grimace never wavering. Was it processing her movements? Memorizing them? How? Perhaps the bioengineers and bioscientists and yes, even the warfare units of the armed forces had been wrong in their declaration that the aliens couldn’t see. This creature’s cage was soundproof unless they turned on the two-way speaker, and safety necessitated that the air supply from the rest of the building be completely neutralized before it entered the enclosure. No smells got out—thank God—and no smells got in except through the feeder cage doorway. How, then, did Mozart know— always—the exact location on the glass surface at which he could reach out his claw-tipped fingers to mirror Vance’s? It was eerie how every time she brought her fingertips to the glass, never quite touching the surface, the alien’s were always on the other side.
Keeping carefully silent, Damon drew one of the vials of jelly from his pocket and broke the seal, downing the contents in one gulp. The physical reaction was nearly instantaneous: every one of his senses shifted into overdrive at the same time as his mind spun ahead to that maddening if only speculation. If only I could make the alien scream for the loss of something it values. Of all the sounds that existed in the known universe, that was the if only that Damon needed to finally complete his Symphony of Hate, to fulfill him and his dark musical child.
The second phase of the jelly’s reaction made him relax, instilled him with confidence and a feeling of serenity when he should be anything but. On the other side of the apiary, Vance had rearranged her position to settle Indian style in front of the glass just to the right of the feeder cage; Mozart crouched on the other side, somehow, as always, sensing her presence. A glance at the speaker showed Damon that the red light was glowing; Vance had hit the Toggle button so that Mozart could hear the small world that existed just beyond his glass barrier. Her whispery voice floated across to Damon, the jelly expanding his hearing ability until every word was as clear as if she were speaking to him from a foot away. Soft, slightly lisping, the sound of her voice—
“I’m sorry, Mozart. I haven’t been feeding you lately, have I? I haven’t had to.”
—unaccountably erotic. There it was again, as Damon watched with wide eyes… that human hand to alien hand against the glass, a mankind to alien life-form bond that no one could explain. What was Mozart feeling, right now, as his deadly fingers stroked the quartz glass? Did the huge, carapace-covered creature feel desire? Or were his movements nothing more than an often-repeated “scratch test” of the glass as he continued his search for a weak spot in the walls of his prison?
As the glow of the jelly in his system reached its peak, Damon stood and walked soundlessly to the small group of instruments next to the recording console, his steps slow and precise, measured for efficiency in every way. There weren’t many instruments down here—a few guitars, a double bass, a small keyboard—but they were all cabled to the amplifier on Damon’s sound console. The keyboard, he decided after a quick study of the array, would serve his needs as well as anything else. Keeping his mind purposely focused on what his actions would ultimately achieve rather than the steps necessary for him to get there, Damon quietly disconnected the instrument and drew it free of the tangled web of electronic cables and plugs. As he silently carried it across the apiary and stopped behind Vance, his pulse stuttered crazily when Mozart shifted without warning, as though he could see Damon coming up behind his mentor but could do nothing about it. Did the creature have a sixth sense? Did he know what Damon was about to do? But the alien only rocked back on his haunches and was again still.
Almost panting, Damon squeezed the plastic warily a final time before he raised it over his head. Countless sacrifices had been made throughout the ages in the name of the arts, and just because this was the twenty-second century didn’t mean that all the offerings were over. In a way, Darcy Vance was like Ken Petrillo. The former brilliant guitarist had given himself completely to bring life to one of the creatures that helped to create his life drug and bring unheard melodies into his mind; Vance would soon have the ultimate opportunity to test her own theories and find out if Mozart did, indeed, feel an attachment for her. The keyboard’s case was hard, but not, Damon hoped, hard enough to kill.
He didn’t want her dead.
21
Occasional free passes to some of the concerts at Presley Hall were one of the few things left that Brangwen liked about his job. At first he’d been thrilled—well, mostly—to be involved with Damon Eddington’s Symphony of Hate project, and if he didn’t exactly agree with the motivation behind the composition, well… that wasn’t his decision to make. He could live with the Ken Petrillo part because that decision really had been Petrillo’s—the cultist hadn’t been kidnapped or forced into submission. He hadn’t been murdered. But the five others… their deaths were heavy on Michael’s conscience. He hadn’t really been truthful when he’d told Eddington that he, too, hated the music of the Helltones, but it was better to be diplomatic than intentionally annoy people, and he really did believe it was vital to keep your mind open. Eddington had looked insulted and Michael had almost apologized, then had changed his mind. After all the things that Eddington had been a party to over the past weeks, Michael shouldn’t have to apologize to the composer for anything. Besides, Michael had jumped at the chance for passes to the concert when he’d seen the notice in the local employees’ newsletter. The three of them were still under corporate orders not to leave the building until the Symphony of Hate was completed, and the concert was a prime opportunity to get away from the project without stepping on his employer’s toes. He’d never really expected Eddington or Vance to accept his invitation, and the truth was, he was tired of Eddington and his alien screams, of Ahiro and his dark, ominous eyes. Even Darcy, with her obsessive observation of Mozart, was starting to get on his nerves. They’d gotten so deep into this assignment that Michael was hearing Mozart’s hissing and screaming in his sleep and waking up in cold sweats with the shrieks of the creature’s victims echoing in his brain. Tonight, if only for a couple of hours, Michael could let the Helltones drive it all away.
A veteran employee, Michael had ceased to be impressed with Presley Hall’s construction the second year after it was built, over a decade ago. He’d spent too many hours in its back rooms, basement laboratories, and employee lounges where the staff bitched all the time about how hard it was to keep the cheap white tiles clean and get up the stains of God-knows-what left by the maniacs who had attended the previous night’s concert. He didn’t know why he’d decided to eat his dinner with Eddington tonight; frankly, musician and murderer didn’t follow the same path in his logic and Michael had been unable to think of Eddington as anything but a cold-blooded accessory to murder since that MedTech executive had been thrown to the alien. The disappearance had been in all the papers but Eddington was too wrapped up in his composition to care and Darcy was too involved in her part of the project to keep in touch with the outside world anymore unless it related to alien research. Michael wasn’t stupid and it didn’t take a doctorate in physics to know that Ahiro was Keene’s— or someone’s—corporate hit man; no doubt he’d known everything from the start, including the exact identity of the man he and his team had dragged from a car in front of the World Trade Center late one night. In a way Michael still felt a reluctant sort of pity for Eddington; he’d once told Darcy he didn’t think the man was crazy, but after all this, he’d reconsidered that opinion. How far could you— should you—go to immerse yourself in a dream? And how much should a man be allowed to do to see it to reality?
Michael frowned as he fed his pass into the ticke
t reader at the front door. He shouldn’t be thinking about the Eddington project tonight; he didn’t want to. Tonight was supposed to be a break from work, a much needed sweeping out of the brain cells by something that had nothing to do with the Symphony of Hate or Eddington or his infernal alien. As part of trying to push it out of his thoughts on his way up to his second balcony seat assignment—not bad for an employee pass—Michael stopped and bought a soft drink and a bag of candy to munch on during the show.
By the time he climbed into his seat, the Helltones were already onstage and starting to hammer out their first song. The view from the balcony was pretty good—in fact, Michael preferred it to a ground-floor seat—and there was a fifteen-foot vidscreen to the right of the group on the stage to give the audience close-up shots of Synsound’s latest hit group. The vidscreen itself was a pretty fancy job that had been customized to match the sculpted flesh of the lead singer, and the first thing that filled the screen was a top-to-bottom shot of the singer that made Michael shudder. So much for getting away from Eddington and his damned alien; Michael had never thought about it before, but the face of the Helltones’ top android star was a synthesized amalgamation of human and Homeworld alien, right down to the elongated jaw and the mini-mouth that snapped from between his lips toward the microphone clutched in one wired-up fist. The only difference was that the android had eyes where aliens had none, and those same eyes bulged from their sockets at appropriate times during the band’s flamboyant performance.
But the music was… intense, the beats were strong and true, and it didn’t take Michael long to lose himself in the massive double set of drums on which a four-armed female android was enthusiastically pounding. Two other androids, one with long hair and spidery silver fingers that skimmed like metallic lightning across the lead guitar strings and another whose tongue ran all the way to the bass strings for voice/note transference, added to the turbulent noise pulsating from the speakers. Before he knew it, Michael was stomping his feet and smacking the arms of his chair in time with the music and the other people around him. In some ways he felt silly to be here, listening to this kind of music at his age, but at least he didn’t need any help to enjoy himself like those idiots in the audience who openly guzzled blue vials of jelly. As the Helltones ground out the first song of their set, Michael could barely make out the words. It didn’t matter; the vidscreen was a nearly perfect visual representation of the things they sang about—
Violence…
and love…
and death.
Smiling ruefully, Michael sipped his cup of soda and tapped his feet in time to the music. Violence? Love? Death? Why, he hadn’t gotten away from work at all.
* * *
Damon brought the small keyboard down on the back of Darcy Vance’s neck with enough force to crack the plastic casing and break out the last three keys. She didn’t make a sound as she pitched forward and hit the floor, then slowly rolled on her left side. She gave a small groan and for a moment Damon thought Vance was going to get up, that he hadn’t hit her hard enough to knock her out; then her eyes, which had still been open enough to give him a glimpse of surprised blue, closed the rest of the way and she was still. Standing over her with the broken keyboard still clutched in one hand, Damon saw a small puddle of blood, shockingly red against the industrial gray floor, begin to spread from somewhere under her chin. Droplets of it were splashed around her head and on her clothes, and bits of plastic and the broken keys were scattered around her.
“Now,” Damon said softly, “I will hear it.” All of it… the subtlety, the ambivalence, the intimacy that was missing from every other musical kill that Mozart had given him and which Damon had captured on syndiscs—it would all come to pass with this final, ultimate offering, this kill. And yes, Mozart would kill her—he must. That was his nature, his life; but this one would not be like the others the alien had destroyed, with their useless battles and struggles to survive pitted against Mozart’s vicious victories and superior size and strength. Surely, after all the time and effort that Vance had expended on the alien’s part, the attention and crooning, the feeding—surely slaying her would cause the creature pain. After all, she was the only human Mozart had ever known—as much as he was able— and depended upon. Slaughtering her would terminate the only shred of familiarity that existed in his world. The alien would self-inflict the ultimate psychic pain… the last, climactic expression of emotion that Damon needed.
Damon bent and grabbed the back of Vance’s coat, tugging until he managed to get her into a wobbly sitting-up position. As quickly as he could, he dragged her inside the red square that denoted the area of the feeder cage. From his awkward position behind her he could see the purple and green lump that had risen from the point of impact at the base of her skull, but she was breathing steadily so he was fairly certain she was going to be all right.
Propping her carefully against the door to Mozart’s enclosure where she wouldn’t stop the feeder cage as it lowered around her, Damon swiftly backed away and pressed the button that lowered the glass booth. For a moment the ramifications of what he was about to do hit him, hard, and his mind began to spin in doubt and fear. I’ll tell Brangwen that I wasn’t here, he thought irrationally. How hard would it be to believe that she had taken her “communication” experiments too far? After all, she spent every waking moment talking to the alien, charting his progress, putting down hundreds of observations about his behavior, dozens of preposterous speculations on how he might act in hypothetical situations. It would be easy for them to believe she’d gone too far and let herself into the alien’s cage to test her theories; and easier to guess that she’d probably thought she had enough time to get back in the feeder cage and close the door. Then all Damon would have to do was concoct a story about how his keyboard got broken—he’d clean it up and claim he dropped it… and, of course, why the cage door was locked from the outside. That might be the hardest thing to cover, but he’d think of something, and frankly, those things weren’t very important in his world right now. The ultimate in symphony productions was hanging just over his head, and all Damon had to do was turn on the equipment and run with it. And oh, it was going to be so beautiful!
Broken keyboards and a locked feeder cage door were inconsequential. Right now all that mattered was Darcy Vance—and Mozart, of course, hunched on the other side of the glass with the snout of his massive, shelled head batting lightly against its surface whenever it sensed Damon walking back and forth. Perhaps it wasn’t Damon’s movements that attracted it at all, and Damon eyed the creature and gave it a dark smile; for so long now it had seemed to know every move that Vance made. Could it tell right now that she… wasn’t moving?
“Soon, my black-shelled friend,” Damon told it as he hurried to the recording console and began adjusting the settings. “Soon you will finally meet your friend in the flesh.” He thought he could feel all those doses of royal jelly inside his system, pushing his perceptions once more into overdrive, turning him into a human sound system wired for the ultimate reception. Lights glowed in readiness on the equipment while inside the enclosure Mozart rose and began to pace the length of the glass in loping strides; the alien’s head turned toward the ceiling, neck stretching in anticipation as he felt the electronic pulse of the overhead microphones and knew that soon he would be fed. From where he stood at the console Damon could see the creature’s massive mouth and sharp teeth part in expectation, the thick, faintly green saliva thinning as it stretched from upper to lower teeth in glistening strands.
Finally, after what felt like eons, Vance began to stir inside the feeder cage and Damon let himself grin as he pushed the volume slides higher, adjusting them to capture everything—the sound of a drop of blood striking the floor, the sweet tones of Darcy Vance’s voice as she screamed, a sound not so long ago that he’d likened to a skillfully played clarinet. The console humming with readiness, Damon got up and strode over to the cage, waiting with his finger pressed against the b
utton for the two-way speaker so he could speak to her when she was fully cognizant.
A few moments later she opened her eyes. Blinking, she steadied herself against the floor with one hand while the other went to the back of her neck and gingerly felt the lump there; when she brought her hand back to her face, it was covered in blood. Then, as Damon shuffled impatiently, she finally realized where she was.
“What hap— my God!”
“Now its your turn, Darcy,” Damon said gleefully. He gestured to Mozart, forced to wait patiently at the door to the feeder cage. She couldn’t see the alien, of course, but she’d been through this enough times to know where he was. “My grand finale awaits, and I have to hear Mozart sing as he kills his favorite little friend.” Damon’s mouth was pulled in a smile so wide he could feel spit leaking from the corners, but he didn’t care. He was far beyond caring what others thought of him, his appearance, his mental stability; besides, in five more minutes, this woman would be dead.
Inside the cage, Vance tried to stand but made it only to her knees. “You bastard,” she hissed. “You’re crazy—a maniac. I always knew you couldn’t be trusted! You can’t do this—it’s murder, Eddington. Don’t you see what this project, what your jelly, has done to you? Please—think about what you’re planning to do!”
“Oh, I have, believe me. Murder?” Damon tilted his head back and laughed. “We’re all murderers here, my dear. Do you think because you never personally pushed the feeder cage button that you’re any different from me, or Brangwen, or Ahiro? Spare me your moralistic speeches.” His hands were cold with excitement and he couldn’t help rubbing them together, as much for warmth as from anticipation. She stared at him through the glass, blood leaking down her forehead where it had run across her scalp while she was unconscious, a lovely scarlet splash across her pale skin. “Besides,” he continued, “you don’t have to die, remember? You have the same chance as everyone else. The second Electrostun rifle that Ahiro gave the last subject is still in there with Mozart, practically right outside the cage door. If you stay calm and move slowly, you can… probably… get to it.” Damon grinned again at her dull, disbelieving look. “We all know how Mozart hates those quick moves, don’t we?”
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