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 around 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.
“Where’s the music?”
Ken Fasta Petrillo was gone now, dead, but his words lingered in Damon’s mind. What could be in that vial that would make a man with unequaled guitar skills abandon his genius in favor of elusive notes that no one else could hear?
The queen mother’s music… so beautiful.
…Fulfilling me, nourishing me.
It keeps getting more exquisite, more captivating… so much more sublime.
I can do this, Damon thought. I’m much stronger than Ken ever was, much more in control of myself and my destiny. If Ken could try and then kick Ice and StarGazer— and he did—I can do the same with jelly. I am a true artist; my love and dedication to my work is worth the risk, worth the pain of recovery, worth everything.
Perhaps it was the lack of sleep that made him vulnerable and trivialized his fears and the well-known warnings, let him brush aside the human evidence that wandered the streets every day. Most likely it was soul-deep desire that enabled him to reason away his fears as he picked up the jelly vial to inspect it—
—then uncapped it, rolled the delicate vial in his palms, and drank.
He had expected it to be tasteless; instead the inside of his mouth was bathed in the flavor of scorched cotton candy and, strangely, rich red wine…
Awake, Damon dreamed.
No longer did he watch Mozart from the protected side of the apiary. He was Mozart—
In the womb. His first inkling of sentience was the demand to be free, to be out of this hot and confining space, to still the unceasing thudding of its foster-creature’s heart and feed on it—
Birth. Ripping clear of the birth enclosure with wet, red fury, so much energy and hunger, turning it all against the corpse of the being that had hosted him—
Growing. Voracious appetite barely appeased by cold, dead flesh as his body swelled and split his first bloody brown carapace, stretched again and formed legs and arms, magnificent in the sinewy power and brutal strength as they reached far above his sharp-toothed head. A final evolution and he was complete, massive, unstoppable—
And FREE! Charging the flimsy transparent walls that held him, feeling them crack under his blows like so much ancient crystal. The world beyond was like a table prepared for him, and he feasted mercilessly on those fools who had made him beg for the smallest of necessities, his parents, the nightclub owners when he was a youth, Keene and his fat witch of a secretary. Then he moved on and up, to Yoriku, whose company had patronized and laughed at him, ridiculed him under the guise of a helpful sponsor; he reveled in the feeling of the man’s head splitting between his massive jaws, tasted human blood as it jetted between the razored teeth of his double mouths. Not yet finished, he took his rage to the city and its children, vented his unchecked hate as he worked to slaughter thousands amid the cruel, lazy public, all those people too stupid to know what pure sound was, too idiotic to appreciate the beauty of true music. But through it all—
Silence.
Total, maddening. In his rage and his joy, as he reveled in the carnage he created, every time he opened his splendid mouth with its row upon row of sharp and lovely spears, not a scream came out.
Not a hiss, or a cry. Not a single beautiful shriek.
Or a note of music.
* * *
Damon gave his own howl when he came back to himself as the frigid blue light of dawn trickled through the windows of the loft. The perspiration streaming down his forehead felt like ice water, the soaked strands of his hair like sharp icicles against his chilled skin. It would have been so good, if only—If only. The next best thing, he thought acidly as he wadded up the blanket and threw it across the room along with the emptied jelly vial, to someday.
Wasn’t that always the way?
* * *
Vance and Brangwen were already in the apiary, puttering around their equipment and sensors like the dutiful little Synsound laborers they were. Damon ignored them, dismissed the startled looks on their freshly scrubbed faces as he marched to the glass of Mozart’s cage and raised his fists over his head. “I want to hear it!” he roared. “I want to hear the music! Sing for me, damn you—come on!” Damon’s voice rose to a scream and he pounded on the window.
The fire-tempered quartz didn’t so much as vibrate under the composer’s onslaught. Mozart hunkered down momentarily and swung his dark, elongated head from side to side a few times, but the only sound the three humans heard through the speakers was a soft, low hiss. After a few moments the alien turned the spiny expanse of his back to the window and retreated as far as he could go into the shadows at the far end of the enclosure.
Damon whirled, making both bioengineers flinch and step back. The skin beneath his dark eyes looked as though it had been painted with a wash of deep violet; his hair was wild and falling into his eyes. He slapped it away. “Get something for him,” he demanded. “Something he can fight something he can kill.”
Vance frowned. “Like what?”
“I don’t care,” Damon snarled. “Whatever you can get your hands on. Just make sure it’s alive when he gets to it.
“I want to hear him scream with joy when he rips it apart!”