So many possibilities…
Ahiro walked the streets at about twenty minutes to midnight. Few areas in Manhattan were dark at night anymore; pockets here and there—most of the interior of Central Park, of course—and Third Avenue was no exception. His target was in Midtown, two doors in on the southwest corner of East Forty-ninth and Third Avenue, but Ahiro was too cautious, too distrustful to go straight there. Instead, he wound his way from Synsound’s West Side corporate offices through the Theater District, then carefully doubled back into the maze of buildings that made up the Garment District and beyond, turning east into Murray Hill to finally get to his Midtown destination.
The Church of the Queen Mother.
No aircycles or big money mechanical escorts here— mostly derelicts and down-on-their-luck bums looking for a way to pass the time with a cheap, temporary diversion. The ‘temporary diversions’ strolled the streets in the form of underdressed prostitutes and jelly dealers, all ready to duck out of sight at the first sign of a cop jalopy. Tonight was cold and damp, a hint of more stagnant rain about to fall on the city rather than January snow, but that didn’t seem to bother the hookers; the women wore short, strapless dresses and dirty high heels with worn metal tips that shot sparks off the street grates, and the males on the take kept the jock T-shirts and denim jeans as tight and scanty as possible.
The building that housed the church was easily over two hundred years old. In a more prosperous time in the neighborhood a century and a half ago, it might have been an elegant restaurant or a quaint antique shop, but any evidence of its original purpose or the way it must have looked as new construction was long gone. Now warped and cracking boards were nailed over exposed layers of rotting insulation and mortar in a haphazard effort to keep the place from literally spilling its guts onto the sidewalk. Bent and rusty nails jutted everywhere from the mildewy walls that ultimately led to the entrance—a triple set of double doors that consisted of more boards criss-crossed and impossible to close, useless against the New York elements. Those, perhaps, had once been floor-to-ceiling show windows.
It was absurdly easy for Ahiro to slip into the place, and no one noticed him despite his clean, dry clothing or well-bathed skin. This was his first visit, and the inside was bigger and better lit than Ahiro expected, but it didn’t matter. No one paid him any attention, and he supposed that was because jelly junkies came in all kinds—bums, clerks, bankers, executives—a lot of them still grasping strings that led tenuously back to the normal parts of their lives. Not for long, though; royal jelly tempted them all and, once it had them, never let go. Fools, all, for invariably believing themselves to be the stronger.
Rumors on the street claimed the building had once been a church rather than the restaurant or store that Ahiro suspected was closer to the truth, but if this building had ever housed a real place of worship, it bore no signs of it now. There were no pews or altars, and certainly nothing so conspicuous as confessional booths. The walls looked as if they might have once been paneled, but time, insects, and moisture had destroyed all but the faintest resemblance to the out-of-date decorating method. Other doorways branched off the main room—leading to unused closets, maybe to a basement no one dared explore, and all except one were blocked by the telltale chaotic pattern of nailed-in-place boards. The exception was a heavy, worn-looking door at the far rear that was firmly shut; Ahiro had to peer fixedly at it to confirm that the sign of deterioration and chipped paint were nothing more than a craftily applied makeup. Ahiro grinned to himself; no doubt a closer inspection would reveal that the door was not only locked, but hardened steel under its painstaking camouflage. Beyond that barrier was an entirely different world from the one the jelly addicts saw, a side of their quiet, misery-filled church that they would never believe existed. No doubt their preacher, a bald-headed man in his mid-thirties with a baby face and calculating eyes who was in reality a highly clandestine MedTech employee, enjoyed all the comforts he desired as he passed out minuscule, carefully distilled measures of jelly with equally rationed doses of experimental drugs and medicine. To hear him tell it, the preacher was the only person ever to kick the jelly habit; in the real world, this self-proclaimed messiah had never put the taste of jelly on his tongue and had learned his evangelist skills by training in a class filled with hundreds of false preachers-to-be just like him.
Keeping carefully in the back, Ahiro watched as the preacher doled out the vials of jelly, each time pronouncing “In nomine Matris Reginae” in a monotone voice. Not for the first time, Ahiro wondered how the man could keep a straight face as he mouthed those ridiculous Words. It was the scientist thing, no doubt, like Darcy Vance and Michael Brangwen, The man behind the flowing pseudo-holy robes no doubt viewed these pathetic wrecks that were once human beings as no more than test subjects, lab monkeys, dogs, and rats with human skin and burned-out souls. And dozens of them shuffled quietly forward with heads bowed, an endless line of disciples to a chemically induced vision they could no longer live without, eyes closed, mouths in their gaunt, dirty faces open to receive the rapture, and repeat after me—
“In nomine Matris Reginae.”
Idiots, every one. This place was a farce, a testing ground for MedTech’s most controversial and covert drugs and medicines and one of thousands like it around the world. The antiqued miniature image of an alien queen that squatted on a pedestal next to the spot the preacher stood was manufactured specifically by a secret division of Med-Tech, and the company made them by the hundreds. All these destitute men and women—
Ahiro’s mind cleared suddenly as his searching gaze fell on one man in line. He recognized the man instantly from the graphics file Keene had downloaded onto the data terminal that Ahiro linked into the Synsound mother system each morning—this was the man Keene wanted Ahiro to take back to Damon Eddington, the same person who would host the alien hatchling.
He just didn’t know it yet.
Ahiro watched him take his turn with the preacher and receive his token taste of jelly. He downed it and drifted back outside with the others, gazes heavenward as they stared at things that only they could perceive. The buildings, the air, living creatures in unseen dimensions— in the normal world, who knew what really went on in the minds of the jelly addicts?
This particular man had curly, too-long gray hair that had receded far beyond the crown of his head. His eyes were so sunken that their shade was indeterminable; the shabby red coat draped loosely around his shoulders as protection against the weather only enhanced the pallid color of his vein-mapped skin. The faintest trace of what the man had once looked like showed in the still-thick, jet-black eyebrows and the melancholy set of his mouth as he turned when Ahiro tapped him lightly on the shoulder.
“One moment, brother,” Ahiro said mildly. The Japanese man gave the junkie the calmest, most serene smile he could manage, reminding himself not to smirk because when it came right down to it, this man had only hours to live and should be treated with respect because of it. “You’re a very lucky disciple tonight, my friend.”
“I am?” There was a sense of childish wonder in the man’s voice, of desperate, unfulfilled longing. His stare was unfocused and annoyingly dreamy, distressingly trusting.
“Oh, yes.” Ahiro slipped a hand around one of the man’s thin elbows and squeezed it reassuringly. “Tonight,” he said with a confident smile as he turned the man in the direction of Presley Hall, “you will fulfill your destiny.”