NEW YEAR’S DAY, 2124
In his dream, Damon was more than the musician, the composer, or the conductor. He was all of those things, and more; he was the… Creator. A god, the Supreme Being, the Master of All Things Musical. He stood not at a podium but on a beautiful Greek pedestal made of majestic black marble and carved with regal faces and wings. His face was proud and passionate and his arms were poised over an orchestra of thousands; a hundred violins fanned as far as he could see to his left, every one an exquisite, fabled Stradivarius even though the last of the Italian master’s instruments had disappeared in 2064. Cellos, violas, double basses, and English horns, all thundering out Mussorgsky’s classic Night on Bald Mountain in its bold original version. Two dozen grand pianos and twice that many harps, and at the far left rear, a row of tubular bells and xylophones added exquisite accents to the magnificent ocean of sound cascading toward him, a waterfall of notes trimmed with melodious ringing and ringing and ringing—
Damon sat upright, rubbing the backs of his knuckles against his grainy eyes and eyebrows. God, he thought blearily, what a helluva dream! He could still hear the bells—
Ringing.
“Oh, Jesus,” he said aloud in disgust. He wasn’t still hearing his dream; it was the damned phone. His fingers scrambled for the VidPhone amid the junk on the bedside table, but when he hit the Receive button all he got was voice-over and the screen stayed black. Not for the first time, he wanted to pick the device up and hurl it against the wall; phone calls in the middle of the night were always bad, not that he had any family or friends to worry about, but being jarred from sleep by someone who didn’t have the courtesy to show his face was fucking harassment. “What?” Damon demanded in as surly a voice as he could manage. “Who the hell is it?”
“Merry Christmas, Damon. A week or so belatedly.”
“Keene—is that you?” Damon struggled to pull his sleep-stiffened body into a sitting position, fighting off the sheets twisted around his legs and waist. Christ, he thought, I must have been conducting in my sleep. “Jesus,” he said again. “I was up working all last night, Keene. What time is—God, I’ve been in bed less than an hour. What the hell were you thinking to call this late?”
“Just thought I’d call and give you a little present, but—”
Damon sat up straighter, moving more toward wakefulness. Unwillingly, his fingers clutched at the bedsheet and closed in a fist. “Present? What present? Do you mean—”
“Come on, Jarlath,” he said. He had to stop himself from screaming; one wrong word and this bastard would enjoy hanging up on him. “No more games, please. You woke me up and scared the hell out of me besides. Let that be enough.”
“Actually,” the faceless voice of Keene continued as if he hadn’t heard, “I can’t honestly call it a Christmas present, can I? It’s more like an… Easter egg… waiting for its daddy.” The man laughed suddenly, and the cheap speaker in Damon’s VidPhone turned it into a sort of unpleasant croaking, as if there were a swollen frog on the other end.
Now Damon’s feet slid over the side of the futon to the cold floor and he started feeling gingerly for his worn slippers with his toes. “An egg? Really? Oh, my God, Keene! Where did you get it?”
On the other end of the line, Keene chuckled a little more quietly. “Don’t ask a question like that, Damon. I wouldn’t answer anyway. Just be at Presley Hall inside of an hour to meet your fellow celebrants.”
“I’ll be there, no problem.” Having successfully found his slippers, Damon had the receiver jammed between his chin and his shoulder and was already yanking on his trousers. “Presley Hall, you said?”
“Right. And one more thing.”
Damon frowned and paused, looking automatically at the VidPhone as a change came over Jarlath Keene’s voice. Still nothing; he wished he could see the man’s face on the screen, but Keene obviously had the video setting on the other end locked out. “Yeah, what’s that?”
“Don’t look for me to be anywhere near Presley Hall until your project is completed, my friend. I’m out of the loop on this one from now on. No matter what happens, it didn’t come from me. Understand?”
Damon nodded solemnly, then remembered that Keene couldn’t see him. “Yeah, right,” he said hastily. “I understand your point completely. But what if—”
“Good-BYE, Damon.”
Damon started to say something else but was rewarded by the dial tone of the VidPhone instead. Damn! What if he needed supplies? More assistants? Well, Keene had said something about “fellow celebrants” waiting at Presley Hall. He’d have to go there and see for himself, make sure these people knew who he was and the personal vision and motivation behind this project. God help everyone if Synsound had tossed a couple of their lower-level hack-’em-up bioscientists on this project. Out of the loop? Damon would scream so loud that Keene would hear the racket outside his freakin’ bedroom window all the way on the post East Side.
* * *
Even at six-thirty A.M. on New Year’s Day there was human garbage on the streets. Damon walked the twelve blocks to Presley Hall in the cold dark, his thoughts bouncing between what waited at the concert building and idly wondering what this city had been like two hundred— no—three hundred years ago. Surely things must have been cleaner, safer, prettier then. His heavy, rubber-soled hiking boots were impervious to the unidentifiable trash that was strewn across the streets on the first day of the year 2124—paper, discarded food for the rats and the homeless, disease-riddled men and women, jelly junkies who might have been twenty years old or sixty. Heated sidewalks installed citywide more than a hundred years ago had eliminated the threat of hypothermia for the homeless and the addicts, and now both seemed to flourish as easily as the fist-sized cockroaches that scuttled around the sidewalks and reared in attack stances before they were kicked aside. When Damon got to Presley Hall and climbed the shallow steps to the private employee entrance, he passed a sexless, gray-garbed figure hunched over something shiny and brown that squirmed and clacked in his hands. Damon shuddered and quickened his step, turning his face aside as he went by but not moving fast enough to avoid hearing the nasty crunch of the insect’s shell; he’d heard people talk about the vagrants preying on the giant roaches for food but had never seen it before tonight.
A quick press of his open palm against the Hand-Print Scanner and he was inside Presley Hall. As the metal door slid closed behind him, Damon thought the place was deserted. Not a normal morning person, he had never been in the building at this time of the day, and it was an eerie feeling; although he was standing in a smaller side foyer, the hall still gave off the impression of vast emptiness, and the smallest noise—a tiny screech of the sole of his boot across the floor tiles, for instance—set off a chain of soft, unpleasant echoes. There was something terribly lonely about a building that was designed to hold tens of thousands of people being empty, a desolate, looming feeling—
“Mr. Eddington?”
Damon whirled in surprise. “What—!”
The white-haired man standing behind him looked almost as startled as Damon felt. “I’m so sorry,” the man said hastily. “I didn’t mean to sneak up on you. My name is Michael Brangwen, Bioengineer Level Three.” He rushed on, his white mustache bobbing in a nervous smile as he thrust a pudgy hand almost into Damon’s stomach, forcing the musician to accept the handshake. “We were told to meet you here, and I thought you’d be expecting us. This is Darcy Vance, Level One.”
A long-faced young woman with streaked blond hair and steely blue eyes nodded at him but kept her hands in the pockets of her lab coat. Above the collar of the magenta-colored blouse she wore under her jacket, her face was as pale as an eggshell, her expression as serious as Brangwen’s was enthusiastic. “Pleased to meet you,” she said. Her voice was much prettier than she was; clear and even, it reminded Damon of a firmly played clarinet. “Didn’t someone tell you we’d be waiting?”
Damon cleared his throat, trying to work air around the leftover swirls of surprise in his stomach. “I, uh, was told to meet people here, but not really where they would be.”
Brangwen began walking—ambling, actually—across the main waiting area of the hall and Damon followed reflexively. He’d been in here a thousand times before but apparently Darcy hadn’t. Despite his anticipation of what was to come, watching her was like having a fresh perspective on the old Presley Hall. She was clearly taken with the fake marble floor tiles and the marbleized columns that were easily six feet around and gave an illusion of support to the soaring domed ceiling by the main entrance. Almost everything in the entry sections was white—the floor, the pillars, the walls, even the ridged metal ceiling—to further the impression of clean stone and Romanesque space. Damon thought it was too bright and outright painful on the eyes, and he found the transition to coal-black inside the concert hall itself too abrupt. Nevertheless, he could understand why someone who had never seen it before would be impressed. It was quite an engineering masterpiece.
“It’s such an honor to help you with this project, Mr. Eddington,” Michael Brangwen said excitedly as they turned into the first of a series of twisting hallways that Damon had never known existed. Brangwen spent half his time walking backward so he could look at Damon while he spoke. “I love your work. My music collection is extensive, and I have your entire works, you know, even your first recording.”
Brangwen glanced conspicuously at Darcy and she blinked, as if suddenly realizing it was her turn to talk. “I’m afraid you’ll have to be lenient with me, Mr. Eddington.” Her face, so pale beneath its tied-back mop of wavy hair, looked pained as a faint blush spread across her nose and cheekbones. A single, small curl fluttered against the worry creases in the high expanse of her forehead. “Like you, I’m very involved in my work. I don’t watch movies or listen to music very much, so I’m not familiar with your achievements. I—I’m sorry.” She brightened. “But I am delighted at the prospect of working with an alien, so you can be assured that I’ll be giving my best efforts to your project. You’ll never find anyone more dedicated.”
Well, Damon thought resolutely, despite Vance’s Level One rating, at least they were both bioengineers and not fledgling bioscientists, new hires that Human Resources had decided should cut their teeth on a project the department considered unimportant. And Michael Brangwen was familiar with and appreciated Damon’s music, even if Vance didn’t. Considering Damon’s track record with the critics and the public, being a hit with one out of the two assistants—fifty percent—wasn’t bad. Besides, what really mattered was his music—the Symphony of Hate—not the past work history of these two. Enough of the courtesy crap. “Show me the egg,” he said simply.
“Oh, yes—of course!” Brangwen’s hands fluttered in the air as the group turned down a final hallway and stopped at what looked like a freight elevator. The older man gave the button a series of impatient pushes, as if he could make the elevator arrive faster by sheer will. “I guarantee you’ll be impressed. This is unlike anything else that exists in our environment. Few people have ever seen an alien egg in the real world, much less handled one and lived to talk about it.” The elevator doors slid open and the three of them stepped inside, with the senior bioengineer talking the entire time. When the elevator stopped, Damon followed the other two down more corridors, feeling numb from Brangwen’s constant chatter, bewildered at the turns and twists; by the time they had stepped off a third elevator and descended a final flight of stairs, his entire sense of direction was blitzed. The thought of memorizing the route was daunting.
“Such a fantastic idea to use the sound of the alien in your Symphony of Hate, Mr. Eddington,” Brangwen was saying. “It would have been great in your Fourth Symphony, too, the Maestro de Santana.”
They went past an orange door, then Darcy Vance stepped to the side and let Damon pass as Brangwen used a cardkey to open another door, this one made of sliding steel. Then they filed into the outer chamber of what looked like a huge apiary. Twelve feet to Damon’s left rose an unbreakable glass wall crosshatched by steel beams; the room stretched another dozen feet to his right, where an extensive sound mixer console swept around the corner. Farther down from it were more consoles covered with dials and screens that Damon didn’t understand— equipment for nurturing and hatching the egg and, Damon assumed, monitoring the alien once it was born.
“—you know, in the third movement when the explosions came?” Brangwen paused, apparently expecting an answer.
Damon barely heard the man. There, separated from the human world by only a few square inches of glass, rested the alien egg. It was hideously beautiful: an elongated gray oval of moist, lumpy flesh that held the key to his life’s masterpiece… so close! Damon pressed his fingers against the outer glass of the cage and smiled, wishing that all these glass barriers would bend in and let him stroke the shell; he felt giddy, breathless—as though he were experiencing that once-in-a-lifetime feeling of his first public performance all over again. “When can we hatch it?”
“Oh, anytime.” Brangwen’s voice came from just over his left shoulder and Damon stood, reluctantly moving away from his view of the modest-looking glass box that housed the egg. “Everything is here and ready. Containment, medical monitoring equipment, the sound equipment you’ll need on your end—everything.”
“Wonderful!” It was all Damon could do to keep from rubbing his hands together. He scanned the room but didn’t see what he was looking for and a tiny spot of worry began to prickle in his stomach. The only people present were himself and the two assistants. Damon swallowed with difficulty. “Then where’s… the donor clone?” Vance and Brangwen exchanged meaningful glances and Damon’s niggling feeling of apprehension burst into outright fear. Immediately his stomach began to burn in protest. “What’s the matter?” he demanded. “Why are you two looking at me like that?”
When Brangwen still kept silent, Vance finally took the initiative and spoke. “We don’t have one.”
“What!”
The young woman spread her hands in a helpless gesture as Brangwen’s expression changed into something resembling a distressed puppy’s. He began to nod rapidly as she explained. “The fact is, the support systems that Synsound had built to maintain the egg and house the alien were astronomically expensive, not to mention the… ah… expedition costs in obtaining the egg to begin with. I mean, look at this place.” She waved at the recording and monitoring equipment in the room and at the reinforced space spreading into darkness beyond the high glass wall. “Two months ago, this was nothing but unused basement storage. Surely you realize that none of this was here. The containment area, the quartz wall, all this was custom constructed for your project, the egg was obtained for you, and Michael and I were transferred to work with you. With all these expenses, adding the price of a clone was out of the question. We were told that a single clone costs more than all of this put together, and that the money just isn’t there.” Damon felt like someone had whacked him in the chest with a hammer and was still happily beating away at him. “No money? After all this, they’re saying that there’s no more money? That’s what they always say, don’t you realize that? But what the hell is it supposed to mean?” His voice was escalating dangerously toward a shout.
“Mr. Eddington, I assure you, it’s not up to us,” Vance said hastily. “None of the construction decisions were shown to us for approval or comments. We’re transferees, not new hires. Our salaries aren’t even competitive with normal market rates. They’re only giving us enough money to get by on because they… know we want to work with you on this.”
Brangwen placed a sympathetic hand on Damon’s shoulder. “She’s right, Mr. Eddington. It’s Mr. Keene and Mr. Yoriku who make the budgetary decisions—mostly Keene, I think. Like Darcy told you, he said that the setup was so expensive—the cage, the equipment especially procuring the egg—that there wasn’t any money left for a clone.” His expression was grave.
“I mean, think about it. Clones are medically engineered life-forms with a market value of well over a million dollars apiece. Not only are they meticulously regulated by the Life Engineering Administration, there are at least a half-dozen nationally advertised organizations that constantly monitor the number of clones manufactured and the uses to which the life-forms are put. Plus they have informants everywhere—we’d never be able to get one legally. Then there are the religious groups that blame every bad thing that happens in society today on clones. All these groups are typical; they’re always vocal, vying for media attention and ready to do anything to get it. All the horrible red tape notwithstanding, Synsound would never chance so much negative publicity—controversy is one thing, screwing around with the federal government something else again. Finding out that Synsound had taken an illegally procured clone and used it in a fatal experiment involving an alien…” Brangwen’s voice trailed away. “God, I can’t even imagine the implications.”
For a moment Damon felt his knees try to buckle. Not far from where they stood was one of the rolling console chairs and he stretched out a hand and grabbed at it in time to keep his balance. “So what do we do?” he asked hoarsely. He pulled the chair around and sank onto it gratefully. “We have all this—an outfitted recording studio, a huge room with a cage, and probably more equipment and monitors than any of us have ever seen in one room—but we have an egg that we can’t hatch. What do we do?” He searched Brangwen’s face and the older man dropped his eyes, but when Damon looked to Darcy her gaze was even and clear.
“We’ll have to use a live subject.”
Damon gaped at her. “You mean kill someone?” When she folded her arms and said nothing, Damon covered his face with his hands and shuddered. He had a sudden inkling that the hands he lifted to his face felt exactly like a face-hugger would, and he let them drop rather abruptly back to his lap. All the fury and disappointment of a moment ago abruptly dissipated, leaving in its wake a deep, unaccustomed dread. “No, oh, God, no. I don’t want that.”
Brangwen cleared his throat and touched him tentatively on the shoulder again. As he spoke his next words, he kept ducking his head lower and lower. “Well, it’s not like murder, you know. You can’t be blamed for killing someone who wants to die, remember? There are people who actually want to hatch alien eggs. Religious nuts—fanatics—who spend their lives trying to find a way to be a host.”
Damon rubbed the back of his neck, trying desperately to concentrate on the situation. It had all been so simple: go to Keene and say what he wanted, and he would get it. That’s how it had always been, yet now he was expected to beg. Too many people thought pleading for your needs was either an art form or a rare sort of verbal parrying. If he understood Brangwen correctly right now, the man was telling him that there were people who wanted to die, who would stand by and allow the creature waiting inside the egg—an eight-legged nightmare that he thought looked vaguely like a cross between a thick-bodied scorpion and a wasp as big as a man’s head—to wrap around their face, then penetrate—
It was too awful to contemplate further.
He swallowed again, this time with difficulty. “And where do we find these… people?” Damon managed in a raspy voice. “These… fanatics?” Damon suddenly felt exhausted, already overwhelmed by this project of his own making and the unthinkable acts it seemed to be spawning. The concept that Synsound would destroy a human being rather than pay to sacrifice a clone was mind-boggling.
Darcy Vance stepped forward. Her arms were still folded across her chest and her expression was calm and cold, the perfect bioengineer and researcher-in-training. If she had any qualms about what they were doing, she certainly didn’t show it; rather, now that Damon had hinted he might go along with it, she seemed to have all the answers and to be in a good mood besides. How courteous of me to cooperate, Damon thought sourly.
“I’ve already asked Mr. Keene about that part,” she said crisply. “He said that if you agreed to the idea of using a live subject, all we had to do was ask Ahiro and it would be taken care of.”
Damon raised his head. “Ahiro?”
“He works for Keene,” Brangwen said. The older man looked nervous and exhilarated at the same time; his gaze kept darting back to the empty cage, as though visually testing it for strength. “And now that you’ve given the go-ahead, he’ll work for us.
“Whenever we want him.”