SPRING, 2125
The warmth of the changing seasons and the promise of spring had done nothing to relieve the chilly interior of the building that sheltered The Church of the Queen Mother. The old wood that was haphazardly nailed across its broken windows and yawning doorways absorbed the dampness rather than the weak sunshine, drew the gray drizzle into itself and tried to squeeze it through the cracks to the molding walls on the inside. The street grates embedded in the sidewalks in front of the church rattled now and then as the surge of runoff in the sewers below swelled and ebbed with the spring rains, and in the filthy tides that moved below the metal covers the jelly junkies heard the sweet songs of their craving.
Inside, huddled together for warmth on the floor along the walls, the addicts waited dully for the next scheduled fix, their eyes trained on the door from which the preacher always came; at one time or another every one of them had surreptitiously tested its strength, only to discover that the barrier that looked like worn wood was really painted steel. Now, halfway into the first week of May, they dressed as warmly as they could, their clothes foraged from the trash bins and charity houses, their bodies’ temperature gauges reversed by the jelly’s strange biological influence.
With no clean place to sit, other junkies, more carefully clothed in their business suits and expensive designer dresses, milled about in the center of the well-lit room. They kept their heads down, intentionally avoiding the gazes of others like themselves for fear someone would recognize them—or worse, they would recognize someone whom they knew or cared about. Shuffling quietly, sidestepping the mutated cockroaches that darted between their shoes and grimacing as the more ill-fated people snatched at them for food, they stared vacantly into the darker shadows where the rats darted along the rotting baseboards and slipped in and out of the holes in the exposed plaster.
All this was home to the woman who had once been Darcy Vance.
She had been all right until the night Michael had gone through his presentation of Damon Eddington’s “Rage Symphony.” Recuperating at home with her school and medical expenses paid by Synsound and full disability as well, her life had been acceptable if not exactly fulfilled. She had thought that interest in the real world and all its normal affairs—eating and sleeping, among them—would return now that the alien portion of the Eddington project was over, but she’d been wrong. She ate enough to quell the hunger pains but that was all, and she slept only as long as her mind allowed; neither function was anything more than a necessity. With the recital’s music ringing in her mind, the rest of the world slipped out of focus, like an outdated vidscreen that no one watched anymore.
Darcy had been up and around again a week after the recital, finally, dragging herself on errands and planning without any enthusiasm her return to work in Synsound’s android repair lab the following Monday. She was still on crutches but not as dependent on the props when a man on the street said something bizarre to her—
“I know what you need and where to find it.”
Such a strange, simple line… with so many possibilities.
Shabbily dressed below a bony face and long, wispy red hair, the man reminded her uncomfortably of Ken Petrillo, the addict who had sacrificed himself so that Mozart could be created.
Mozart…
Having the dead alien’s screams fill her ears again at the hands of Michael Brangwen had sent longing through her, fierce, unforgettable, nearly unendurable. Mozart stalked her thoughts relentlessly, memories of his long, blue-black fingers reaching to meet hers on the other side of the glass, his loping gait around the enclosure as he attacked, the way his head had tipped sideways when she’d been thrust into the cage with him. Her job with Synsound had at its peak been intriguing, her life interesting, her hours alone at home limited only to time needed for personal hygiene and clean clothes. Compared to the hellish nothing that had come before it, the time she’d spent with Eddington, Michael, Ahiro, and Mozart had been an excellent existence, the pinnacle of her life so far.
Following the stranger could mean literally tossing that same life carelessly into the hands of the unknown, exposing herself to the whims of a stranger, possibly to a madman. But she had done all that before and survived, and now…
Now, again, she was left with nothing.
“I know what you need and where to find it.”
At first Darcy had thought he was a jelly dealer, but her heart was tied to the aliens in a way that could never be satisfied by the drug, and she had no desire to end up like Ken Petrillo or Damon Eddington. No, she wanted to be alive and aware—sharp when the right opportunities, whatever they might be, came around again. Something had steered her in this direction… but what? Fate? Chance? Or someone? Desperation made her shove her doubts to the background when the slender man had led her up to the front of the room close to the altar, then guided her into the line of addicts filing toward the preacher and the rations he so carefully gave out.
“In nomine Matris Reginae.”
When her turn came, she balanced on her crutches in front of him but did not hold out her hand, shook her head at the vial he proffered anyway. “That’s not what I want,” she said in a voice soft enough so that only he could hear. “I was told you could give me… something else.”
Up so close to the preacher, she could see the shrewd glint in his clear eyes and the softness of his well-cared-for skin; nothing about him seemed truly suited to this place, this self-proclaimed church for the masses of dirty, destitute junkies. Caught in their own hellish desire, the others in line would never notice the details, the fine capped teeth behind his smile, the hair painstakingly cut to look perpetually tousled.
“Yes,” he said. His voice was a smooth, rich baritone, cultured and mesmerizing, trained for things of which his motley parish members would never envision or resist. “I believe I can do exactly that.” He indicated the carefully camouflaged door with a tilt of his head. “If you will wait for me there, I will talk with you immediately after the service.” In that soothing, singsong voice, the preacher’s gaze went to the person behind her and the ceremony continued as if they had never spoken.
“In nomine Matris Reginae.”
And give her something he did, and thus began the death of Darcy Vance—
—and the birth of Jariah, the first female preacher in the Manhattan branch of The Church of the Queen Mother.
Behind the locked steel doors Darcy née Jariah found fulfillment. She neither knew nor cared who her benefactor was, only that he or it or they somehow, in ways that were never quite clear and became increasingly nebulous as the weeks went by, fulfilled the longing in her for the sounds of alien screams. She found hope and a future, even if she had no clear vision of what that future held or what it was she truly hoped for. Training as a church disciple, she let everything in her old life go, right then, simply… left it and never returned. The junkies who surrounded her accepted her constant presence and learned to trust her, calling her by the new name or, more reverently, The Limping Woman. She often heard them whispering among themselves about the ragged patch of scar tissue that ringed her ankle below a dark, circular tattoo that looked oddly like teeth, inventing far-fetched tales that were closer to the truth than any of them dreamed.
At night in her simple room, her duties for each day completed and her heart serene, MedTech’s newest trainee burned incense to the image of the queen mother and dreamed dark and impossibly musical dreams about a long-dead creature called Mozart.