Michael was reluctant to admit it, but Darcy was right about Damon Eddington. Sure, he had tried to defend the composer and trivialize Darcy’s idea that he was on jelly, but Michael hadn’t really believed that a man with such a fine mind would let himself be dragged down the road to chemical insanity. Now, however, the evidence could not be denied. The musician was taking something, and it probably was jelly; while Michael dearly wanted to attribute the ups and downs of the musician’s disposition to how well his Symphony of Hate was coming along, the drastic changes in personality were too apparent to be explained away by that. Now Eddington barely talked to the bioengineers, and Michael was sorely and constantly disappointed about that. At first Eddington had been fairly open with him, maybe a little flattered that his music was known to Michael; Darcy hadn’t made any points by not being familiar with Eddington’s work, but it hadn’t been a prerequisite for the position either. He wished that Eddington would involve him more in the process of his composition, ask for his thoughts, let him listen to a segment or two and offer encouragement. But Michael didn’t have the nerve to ask for any of that—after all, he was a man of science who, while he liked to listen to music and had plenty of ideas, possessed no real-world knowledge of how to combine the notes, how the instruments worked, or of what might sound good mixed with something else. In the reality of Eddington’s Symphony of Hate, Michael Brangwen was nothing.
Jelly junkie or not—and Michael was somewhat mollified by the impression that the younger man had deteriorated only a little—watching Eddington work on a day-to-day basis was a fascinating thing, a privilege for the uneducated. Totally dedicated, Eddington worked as though the music were a physical thing into which he could submerge, drowning himself with whatever exquisite vibrations were being fed into his eardrums through the headphones. At other times it seemed as though the sounds that played in his headphones could be shaped by those fine, long-fingered musician’s hands, sculpted into something that all could see as well as hear. Eddington worked his way methodically through all six tapes of the alien’s sounds, using everything—even the one that contained only the noise from Mozart’s short-lived episode with the cat and the dog and the hot hiss of the alien as they were destroyed. For some reason, those sounds stuck in Michael’s head above all the others; in those, he believed Eddington had been correct; it was easy to imagine he heard Mozart’s total disdain for all of them. Eddington was fitting every sound Mozart had ever made into the structure of his masterpiece, and Michael shuddered when he thought of hearing Mozart’s insulting, steamlike tone at the base of some obscure piece of fine classical music.
While Damon stayed at his recording console, Darcy tended to Mozart. From his perspective, Michael was content to handle the paperwork and import the data that was constantly being jotted down on Darcy’s computer pad. The young woman was a working machine, and reports were generated by the dozens. The laser printers ran almost constantly, their quiet hum sometimes undercut with the sharper metallic ring of the dot matrixes as they replicated simple bio readouts for distribution amid the myriad Synsound channels.
Darcy’s devotion to Mozart captivated Michael nearly as much as Damon’s commitment to his music; obviously she had been serious about the theories of attachment they had talked about while waiting for the embryo to grow inside Ken Petrillo. They were back to offering the creature normal food now, and she insisted on feeding the alien herself, shoving everything from thawed cloned turkeys to heavy slabs of nutrient-injected meat substitute through the slanted feeding tube. Her nimble fingers pumped out dozens of analysis reports every day outlining what she perceived to be Mozart’s reactions to her presence as her soft voice droned through the speaker that she kept in the on mode every time she was near the cage and she continued to direct smiles at his eyeless face. It frightened Michael inexplicably to see the Homeworld life-form uncoil itself and move to the glass every time Darcy walked within two feet of the cage, regardless of whether it was time to be fed or whether the speaker was on or off. Everything they knew about these creatures suggested they couldn’t see, at least in the way that mankind understood sight and optical recognition to work. The aliens did not think; they ate, they reproduced, and they killed, pure animalistic instinct in alien form. Why then, if the alien had no sight or sense of familiarity, did Mozart always know when Darcy was close?
Brangwen checked the wall calendar for the second time in less than ten minutes. It had been nearly three full days since Ahiro had promised Eddington a new animal for Mozart to fight. What would he bring back? A bit of a computer hack, Darcy had told him about an unsigned memo she’d come across in the data files that hinted the next creature might be a polar bear or something like it. The idea of a polar bear worried Michael; an immense creature, a polar could top twelve hundred pounds or more and would be nearly three times Mozart’s mass. It might die in the process, but what if it managed to crush Mozart? A grizzly might be worse; it was well known that a wounded grizzly was one of the most dangerous animals on earth. It was doubtful that Mozart would be able to kill it with one blow, and an injured grizzly bear could very well go mad and rip the alien to pieces despite exposure to the creature’s acid blood. And weren’t Alaskan brown bears even bigger? Beyond some kind of bear, Michael just couldn’t imagine what Ahiro had in mind, and that, perhaps, was the most terrifying thing of all.
He almost felt relieved when he heard the apiary’s entry door slide open. Eddington was out of his chair in a flash and striding eagerly toward Ahiro, then he paused and took a step back. Curious, Michael and Darcy moved to his side and saw the reason for Eddington’s hesitation. Ahiro had been sent to bring back a beast that would provide a battle for Mozart, but instead of a single covered cage like the one in which he’d brought the panther, five wooden crates, solid but not that large, were lined up along the outer hallway wall. Waiting silently next to each was one of Ahiro’s men, ready to push them aside.
“What’s in them?” Eddington asked excitedly. “Can we look inside?”
Rather than answer, Ahiro lifted one end of the nearest crate. It came free easily, obviously not held in place by nails or catches. In an unhurried move, he pulled the side piece free and set it against the wall.
Inside, unconscious and nearly naked, was a man.
“This is the first of five,” Ahiro said without preamble. “They have all been sedated and fitted with shunts through which the required tranquilizer dosage is automatically being led. The drug will keep them asleep until they are needed.”
Eddington’s face went white below the widow’s peak on his high forehead, throwing the ebony of his hair and the darkness of his eyes into startling relief. “You’ve got to be joking!” he exclaimed. “You’ve seen what Mozart is capable of—how can you expect a man to survive a battle with a thing that can kill bulls and panthers within minutes?”
Ahiro reached into the space between the two front crates and pulled something out. “With this,” he said flatly.
Michael felt like he was going to choke. He recognized the weapon in Ahiro’s hands from the NewsVids; the National Guard used Electrostun rifles regularly on looters in disaster areas, and it was a favorite for riot control. Before he could protest, Darcy beat him to the punch, though obviously for different reasons.
“Absolutely not,” she said heatedly.
“It will not produce enough electricity to kill or permanently injure the alien,” Ahiro assured her as he set the rifle down. “But it will cause it great pain and make it very angry. And it will even the odds… somewhat.”
Michael finally found his voice. “Wait a damned minute here! Never mind the alien—these are people we’re talking about throwing into that enclosure. Where did these men come from? You—you kidnapped them, didn’t you?” The older man felt dizzy from shock.
Eddington cleared his throat nervously. “Well, look at this one. He’s a mess—obviously they… uh, came from the worst bars and drug clubs in the city. They certainly aren’t model citizens.”
“Obviously nothing. We can’t just go around abducting people,” Michael insisted as a vein began throbbing nastily in his temple. He looked around the lab area desperately, wishing Darcy would back him up. As usual though, his needs and stark reality were at odds; she stood off to the side, her face professionally neutral now that she’d been reassured that the Electrostun rifles weren’t set to kill. What were the men in these crates to her but larger lab animals, made available simply for scientific use? Her empathy was only for her project and Mozart. “We’re still talking about human beings.”
“You were not so sensitive about Ken Petrillo’s wellbeing,” Ahiro said pointedly. “Now you have become the shining wellspring of humanity?”
“Petrillo was a cultist,” Michael said stubbornly. “He wanted to die, remember? Hell, you found him in The Church of the Queen Mother. You told him ahead of time what we wanted, and he came here of his own free will. No one dragged him.”
Ahiro’s black eyes didn’t waver. “And these men are drunkards and addicts and criminals.” One hand sliced through the air in the direction of the crates in a dismissive motion and he folded his arms stoically. “Left on their own, most of them will be dead within the year anyway. They will expire unnoticed, and their demise will have no objective and serve no one. The city and mankind will be that much better off. At least here, their ends can serve as research.”
“Perhaps.” Darcy’s gaze flicked thoughtfully between the Electrostun rifle and Mozart. “But do we really need them? We have the technology that will make the alien scream in and of itself. Why must we sacrifice human life, too?”
Damon hesitated, but Ahiro laughed. “A creature that screams for no reason does so without passion, Ms. Vance, like a petulant child throwing an impulsive temper tantrum or a primate that beats its chest in the jungle simply to hear the sound that announces its territory. Motivation is the driving force behind any true experience. Is that not so, Mr. Eddington?”
Michael opened his mouth again, but Ahiro’s sharp wave of a hand and next statement effectively stifled his protests. “But the decision, after all, is Mr. Eddington’s. If he feels that to make use of this resource is unwise, improper, or… useless, then we will return these… animals to the precise locations where they were found.”
Michael’s neck joints felt like they were trying to turn through hardening concrete as he looked to Eddington. Surely, he thought, the musician would not go this far, even for his art. Surely—
But the look in Damon Eddington’s sienna-colored eyes clearly proclaimed his decision.
* * *
“This all has to be changed,” Eddington announced after the first crate had been resealed and all of the boxes carefully brought inside and stored against the wall of the apiary farthest from Mozart’s cage. “I want Mozart’s cage made bigger, more complex. Right now it’s nothing but a big carton—he runs around in it like a rat in a shoe box. It needs to have places where someone can dig in and defend himself decently. No one will fight for long if there’s no place they think they can escape the alien.” He opened his arms as if he were going to hug Mozart’s enclosure. “I need these fights stretched out to a more appropriate length of time. I don’t have to see the battles, and I don’t care if I can. As long as I can hear what’s going on, down to the remotest detail, I’ll have what I need.” Sensing the crowd gathered outside his cage, Mozart shifted restlessly, then stood, his long tail unfurling behind him like a huge, overly fast anaconda. Eddington frowned. “But how are we going to do it? Somehow I doubt Mozart will sit back and let us redecorate his house.”
“We can use nerve gas,” Darcy said.
“I never heard of such a thing.”
Darcy looked thoughtful. “It’s something new, just developed by the army.”
Eddington raised one eyebrow. “The army? How did we get it?”
Darcy gazed at him, her eyes unreadable. “Probably the same way we obtained the egg, Mr. Eddington. I wouldn’t know the details, and they don’t pay me to ask questions about anything that takes place outside of this laboratory.” When the musician said nothing, she glanced back toward the cage. “In an area that tightly sealed it will be easy to incapacitate him,” she continued. “Once he’s totally under, I’ll suit up and go in to custom fit a ventilation mask over his mouth that will keep the gas supply going only to him. He’ll stay out until about two hours after he inhales the last of the stuff.”
Michael scowled at her but she ignored him; he’d known nothing about the nerve gas either—Darcy was much more heavily into alien research than he—and until now he’d had some hope of making the project so unlikely to succeed that the prisoners would be released back into whatever hell Ahiro had pulled them from. Now that Eddington knew there was a way that the alien could be disabled, Michael’s last hope of abandoning this crudest of phases had disappeared.
And forge ahead he—they—did. Shortly after Ahiro had arrived with the man-crates, another unsigned data memo had come down from the executive floor, this time directing them all to stay within the apiary continuously until the completion of the project. That any one of the people involved with this project might have lives outside of Synsound was not a corporate consideration, and now even Ahiro and his men were with them almost twenty-four hours a day. Michael found more than a thing or two strange about the setup, and the fact that Ahiro and his team could work with raw steel and operate welders represented barely a fraction of his discomfort. The rest of it centered on the so-called “budget” that governed the Eddington Symphony of Hate undertaking. It was odd bookkeeping indeed that included exotic animals and equipment, massive amounts of steel, and unlimited overtime for bioengineers and service workers—or whatever Ahiro and his team were called—but not a single simple clone. At first Keene’s assertion that a million-dollar clone was too expensive in light of the apiary’s construction costs and the expenses of obtaining the egg had been a reasonable one, but that was before imported Indian guar and reconstruction, and certainly before the abduction of five men. Did their budget include jail bond for all of them if something went awry? Michael doubted it; it was far more likely they would all… disappear if the project and its horrible actions were exposed. Or worse, there would be some kind of paper trail that completely exonerated Synsound and its executives—and probably Ahiro—from any wrongdoing; he, Darcy, and Eddington would be the corporate sacrifices, the puny scapegoats for all the wrongdoing.
But ultimately Michael went along with it, because he must. Sometimes he felt like Mozart, trapped in the belly of the Synsound beast, being slowly digested by the hungry corporate machine. While Mozart slept soundly in one corner, the silent Japanese men worked with admirable speed and efficiency, putting up steel walls and welding slick metal tubes as they followed a blueprint that Michael and Darcy carefully laid out using a DesignCad program on the one freestanding computer in the apiary. The subbasement was extensive beyond the original walls of the alien’s cage, and in Michael’s opinion the steel walls that they requisitioned were manufactured and delivered with outlandish speed, then installed with a skill that seemed out of place in men also trained to perform such tasks as hijacking alien eggs and kidnapping men. Perhaps some of the men’s swiftness in the renovation had to do with the alien slumbering not-so-peacefully at one end of the room; like a dog chasing a rabbit in its sleep, the creature periodically twitched and hissed and made the workers jerk with nervous fright.
At last the new cage was completed. The men withdrew and Darcy removed the mouthpiece she’d fitted over Mozart’s face; forty-five minutes later—a significant miscalculation regarding the sedative’s projected time frame that made Darcy scribble furiously on her computer pad—Mozart stirred. When he was fully awake, he hunkered down and swung his head to and fro, testing the smells and sensations of his new home.
“Some studies claim the aliens use an echolocation system that resembles that of Megachiroptera,” Darcy said thoughtfully as the four of them watched the life-form maneuver into one of the larger tunnels.
“What’s that?” Ahiro asked. It was the first time he seemed curious about anything.
“Bats.” Darcy flipped a switch near the feeding entrance and sound, painstakingly recognizable, began coming through the speakers—Mozart, hissing and slipping along the smooth, round walls of the corridors that now branched in several directions from the main compartment of his enclosure.
Michael stared into the cage, waiting for Mozart to reappear at the mouth of a corridor that appeared to lead to an escape, but in reality circled around and ended up back at the center chamber. “Wouldn’t that require projected noise?” he asked.
“It would explain why they hiss constantly,” Darcy pointed out. “The same noise, all the time, even when they rest. While the human ear can’t normally hear the alien’s at-rest sound unless leaning practically into the alien’s mouth, our microphones easily pick it up. Surely you’ve noticed how exaggerated Mozart’s hissing becomes during a conflict.”
“I’ve noticed him doing a number of things,” Michael said dryly.
“Yeah, well,” Eddington cut in impatiently, “he screams, too. And that’s what counts.”
“Anyway, it’s just another theory,” Darcy said softly, more to herself than anyone else.
Eddington pressed against the glass, trying to peer farther into the cage. “These tunnels,” he said for the tenth time, “you say he can’t get into all of them?”
Michael answered him… again. “Positive. As you specified, we set them up so that there are several places inside where someone can squeeze into and be out of Mozart’s reach. At seven and a half feet tall, it’s physically impossible for the alien to get into them. None of those areas are permanent solutions, of course, because they’re all dead ends. Eventually thirst, hunger, or the belief that they’ll find an escape route will bring them out. False hope,” he finished bitingly. “It seems rather cruel to me.”
The others ignored his comment. “I was worried about disorientation, but Mozart looks like he feels quite comfortable with the changes,” Darcy said, her gaze sharp as she watched the alien explore. “No hesitation whatsoever.”
“Then we should be ready, right?” Eddington was so excited he sounded like he was in danger of losing his voice.
Eddington turned to look at Ahiro, but he had already gone to the first crate and was wheeling it toward them on a small dolly. Reluctantly, Michael put his back into helping Ahiro lift the drugged man and place him inside the newly reconstructed feeding cage to Mozart’s enclosure. Sitting inside a garishly painted red square on the floor and slouched against the door before the glass box lowered, the captive looked absurdly like one of a dance club’s human decorations gone too far over the edge, now nothing but a drunken, nearly naked male performer on display inside a small glass elevator. When they were certain he was balanced against the back of the area, Ahiro reached down and tore the shunt from the back of the man’s bare shoulder. In a better life, their prisoner had been a redhead with a thick, enviable mustache and a thousand freckles spread over his skin; now it was hard to distinguish the blood blisters raised by the shunt’s removal from the freckles and the dirt ground into his flesh. If nothing else, he had not yet joined the ranks of the malnourished; while the man was clearly sliding toward the inside edge of slender, his frame was still sturdy enough to be considered fairly healthy.
“The pain of removing the shunt will make him start to wake up,” Ahiro said matter-of-factly. He dropped the bloody piece of plastic to the floor, then absently kicked it aside and pulled the lever that would lower the glass cage over the groggy man. “It is a powerful but short-lived tranquilizer, and he will be fairly cognizant within five minutes.”
As Ahiro had predicted, the redheaded man’s eyes began to flicker almost immediately, and it wasn’t long before he was trying to pull himself upright. When the captive looked like he could concentrate, Ahiro relayed his instructions, his tone even and, in Michael’s opinion, obscenely serene. “The weapon at your side is an Electrostun rifle,” Ahiro told him calmly. “It is effective only within three feet of the creature you will encounter when the door behind you opens.” The prisoner’s eyes widened and Michael saw that they were a bizarre shade of reddish-brown that almost matched his hair. Once this had been a handsome young man.
As his predicament began to sink in, the man gasped and began slamming his hands against the front of his small prison. “No—please!” he cried. Twisting futilely within the small glass enclosure, the Electrostun rifle seemed to be the last thing he wanted to find. “Let me out—I won’t tell anyone, I swear to God!”
“The harder you fight,” Eddington interrupted, “the longer you’ll stay alive. It’s your choice.”
Disgusting, Michael thought belligerently as he crossed his arms, how easily Eddington falls into his new role as Executioner in the Name of Music. Look at him, relaxed… safe on this side of the world while someone on the other side faces death. The fool—he doesn’t have any idea what that really means. And Darcy—he didn’t know whether to shake her or slap her—but he thought the chances were good that neither would bring her back to her senses. In the scientific realm, she was as much into this endeavor as Damon Eddington was on the musical end. At this point, if there was anything in the world that she wouldn’t consider doing so that it would enable her to continue working with the alien, Michael couldn’t imagine what it was.
Eddington pressed a button and a whine of hydraulics warned them that the feeder door was about to open. While Eddington hurriedly strode to his recording console, no one else on the outside of the cage moved. Inside, the redheaded man dropped into a crouch and whirled, eyes bulging as the door began to pull open. Barely two feet away, Mozart already waited on the other side, head cocked like a trained guard dog listening for someone to come into the house.
Eddington’s voice came clearly through the overhead recording speakers, deep and pleasant as it was reproduced on the higher quality equipment. “If you remain in the small cage,” he said clearly, “the alien will kill you instantly. Leave, and you may survive.”
Liar, Michael thought sourly. The poor schmuck in there had no chance, and he would die fighting solely on the belief that freedom lay just down one of the tunnels. Already the redhead was clutching the Electrostun rifle and—
Finger on the trigger, the prisoner plunged out of the cage and faced the alien. Mozart reared on his hind legs and hissed, reminding Michael of a fully grown praying mantis he’d once seen in the aircycle garage here in the building. The bioengineer had wanted dearly to catch it—they were so rare and to find a live one in the midst of Manhattan! but he’d had nothing with which to trap it. His attempt to pick it up with his fingers had resulted in a miniature version of the thing that now faced off with a human being on the other side of the glass wall.
* * *
“Come on, come on, come on,” Damon urged breathlessly from the mixer console. Surely the man would fight— anything else was unthinkable. To let the alien just kill him outright—
With a bellow of desperation, their prisoner fired his weapon and lightning leaped from the muzzle of the rifle. One hundred fifty thousand DC volts turned the interior of the custom-built cage—and Mozart—a bright, sizzling white, the color of the outside world during the most charged moments of a vicious electrical storm.
Mozart rocked back on his feet and screamed as they had never heard him before. For a moment Damon literally lost his air; the sound boiled through them all like the soundtracks of the old NewsVids from the Homeworld War, raw footage shown on public stations to satisfy the public’s never ceasing demand for bloodshed. In the alien’s cry Damon heard the pain wails and curses of all the men wounded by fiery lead and cold steel, and the shrieking agony of a thousand women damned to be childless by mankind’s careless wartime use of chemical warfare upon its own brethren. It was timeless and indescribable, the frenzied souls of millions screaming at God from the heated depths of a hell they’d never believed existed.
As the redheaded man vainly fought for his life, Damon heard Mozart’s shriek again, and again, and again. Like a hard-headed dog that refused to learn its lesson, the alien would pause for a ten- or twenty-second interval, sway in place like an enraged baboon, then try to attack anew. His prey was weak and slow, his movements dulled by drugs or booze or whatever his addiction of choice had been; there was no strategy to the Electrostun hits he gave the creature, no attempt to herd it in one direction or another. Shocked, exhausted within minutes, and nowhere near either of the tunnels where if he would not find escape, he might at least rest, the doomed man managed a final two-second blast before Mozart leaped on him and tore him apart.
The alien’s final scream was everything Damon had ever wanted: agony and fury, the instinctive roar of a beast’s victory and revenge over a detested foe. It was dark and evil and fresh, and it pounded through him and everyone else in the room, giving of itself to them all, offering everything Damon had sought and everything he’d needed…
But never enough…