Dean Koontz – The Dark Symphony

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                                      THE ARENA

Of the six who had gone before Guil, only three had made it through the tests. Were the
odds always this grim? Quak-ing, he walked before the bench, bent his neck so he could
see the judge far above.

“Are you prepared to begin your test?” He wanted to shout. No, but he said, “Yes.” He
accepted the three weap-ons from the attendant: the sedative whistle, the sonic knife, and
the deadly sound rifle. He retreated a hundred paces into the Arena, then turned to face the
first test. The hundred-foot monolith that was the judge's bench shim-mered, then an opening
appeared . . . a hole fifty feet across and seventy feet high. Guil shivered, wondering what
within could be so big.

And then the dragon came forth, yellow, with scales as large as shovel blades and eyes as
red as blood.

The test had begun.
DEDICATION:
To Bob Hoskins, without whom . . .
THE DARK SYMPHONY
    Dean R.Koontz

       LANCER BOOKS




        NEW YORK
A LANCER BOOK

THE DARK SYMPHONY

Copyright © 1970 by Dean R. Koontz.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or trans-mitted to any form or by any means, electronic or
mechanical. In-cluding photocopying, recording, or by any Information storage and retrieval system, without
permission in writing from the Publisher.


All the characters and events portrayed in this story are fictitious.

LANCER BOOKS, INC. • 1560 BROADWAY
NEW YORK, N.Y. 10036
“There is a music for Death and a music for Life. Some-how, I find the music of that other
world more interest-ing than that which is played in this one. The music of Death is of peace
and rest and love. It is only the music of Life that is a Dark Symphony.”

                                                                   . . . Vladislovitch writing in
                                                                     The Primary Testament
                                  THE FIRST MOVEMENT:

                                            The Arena


FIRST:
    Loper hung five hundred feet above the street, his twelve fingers hooked like rigor-mortised worms
over the glassy, featureless ledge.
    The wind was brisk but not bully, a piper not a trum-peteer. It chirruped down the canyon of the
street and swept over the facade of the Primal Chord, the genetic engineering center of Musician society,
teasing the birds that lived in the offal and straw nests anchored stickily to the precarious shelves.
    Searching, he could feel no crevice for his fingers, just as he had found none on the previous
forty-seven ledges. And now he had lost his rope and grappling hook. The hook had slipped as he had
pulled himself up, and he had leaped convulsively, catching the last inch of the ledge as the rope and hook
tumbled away into the night. Now he hung as the wind piped the darkness and tickled the hairs on his
thick legs.
    Blinking away perspiration, Loper put all his strength into his arms. He would have to muscle himself
up, rely solely on the corded flesh of wrists, then arms, then broad shoulders. He had done it before,
except . . . But he had not been dead tired before. And now every ounce of his flesh ached and throbbed
dully.
    No sense in delay. Push damn you! he told himself.
    For a moment, the weight of his huge body pulled his sweat-slicked hands over the stone. He was
plagued with visions of dropping, colliding in one bright yet unfelt mo-ment with the cold shimmer-stone
pavement. Then his palms were still, his wrists cording. Soon, his enormous biceps were brought into
play, and he forced himself to waist level with the ledge. He swung a knee up, skinned it, swung again
and got it on the shelf. Then he was up and safe.
    He rested, his legs dangling over the side, and he watched the nine phallic towers of the Musician part
of the city-state, all of them glimmering brightly orange or red or blue or green. It was odd to think of
them as sound waves, as structures constituted of interlatching waves that formed a solid substance. They
looked more like glass. He tore his gaze away from the city and looked down at the streets so far below.
 Now what? he wondered.
    There was no way down but to jump. And though it was five hundred feet to the street, it was
another two thousand to the roof. When the Musicians built, weaving their walls and floors of sound, they
ignored the laws of gravity, the doctrine and dogma of engineering, denying the old lexicon and
establishing their own dictionary of the possible. He had no rope to climb it. His best chance was to enter
a window here and ascend to the floor he wanted through the inside.
    Moving along the ledge, he found a corner window that looked promising. The sheet of slightly
opaque glass hummed and tingled his fingers when he touched it. It too was a creation of sound. Yet
Strong had assured him that it would cut like ordinary glass, would give him en-trance. Loper reached
into the leather sack tied to his breechcloth and took out the diamond. He placed it against the glass,
stroked hard. A thin, frosty line fol-lowed the movement of his hand. Strong was right.
    He made a tape-hinged doorway in the glass, swung it inward, and stepped into the room. He pulled
the tape loose and lifted the cut square out. It vanished from his hands the moment it became unaligned
with the rest of the window, and a new section appeared where it had been. Humming . . .
    Loper's heart thumped despite his avowed stoicism. He was very likely the first Popular to enter a
Musician build-ing, the first mutant on what might be considered holy ground. He saw that this was a
chapel, and that made the excitement all the worse. Up front was a bust of Chopin. He went to the altar
and spat on it.
    Aside from the thrill of the danger of his position, only one thing impressed him here: all the objects in
the chapel were made of common substances. They were not sound configurations, but real objects that
would not cease to exist if the transmitters and generators were shut off. But, of course, this was a
chapel, and the Musicians wanted to make it something special. He spat on Chopin again, stalked to the
rear of the room where the door to the cor-ridor lay. He was a dozen feet from it when it opened. . . .
                                             CHAPTER ONE



     The boy Guillaume, whom everyone called Guil for easily understood reasons, looked to the
white-faced clock, saw that there were only four minutes—only four unbelievably agonizing
minutes!—until the session would be over. In turning his eyes from the piano, however, he missed the last
third of an arpeggio and heard the famil-iar tech-tech-tech of the instructor's tongue as it clicked against
the roof of his mouth. Involuntarily, he shuddered, for he knew that that sound invariably meant trouble.
     He turned his eyes full on the keyboard and concen-trated on his exercise. It would not have been
too horrible to have been a Class IV Musician if only his instructor had been someone understanding like
gentle Franz, someone not so demanding and able to see the boy's side of it when an occasional note
was missed or a chord slurred. But this was Frederic, and Frederic had been known to use the leather
sting-strap on young knuckles when he felt a boy had not been practicing. Guil, not daring to look away
again, approached the next arpeggio with care. He had the span to reach the keys, to do things boys
born with even slightly smaller hands could never do. Indeed, perhaps that was his very problem.
Perhaps the genetic engineers had erred and given him hands too large for the keys, fingers too thin and
long and bony to be graceful or adept on the board. Clumsy hands, he thought. I was born with cows
for hands and big, floppy teats for fingers!
     Despite his teatlike fingers, he made it through the trouble spot without difficulty. Ahead lay easy bars
of music, things he could cope with. He risked a glance at the clock, careful not to move his head from its
bent and proper angle. Two more minutes! In all that infernal, godawful self-inspection and tricky finger
work, had no more time passed than that?
     Suddenly, his fingers stung with the bite of Frederic's strap. He tore them from the gleaming
ivory-white keys and sucked them to draw off the pain.
     “You murdered that chord, Grieg!” The voice was thin, yet harsh, strained through a scrawny throat
and sharp, pointed teeth.
     “I'm sorry, sir,” he said, licking the two fingers that had taken the brunt of the blow. He was sniveling
again, act-ing miserably subservient, and he was ashamed of himself. He longed to wrench that strap
from the old weasel's hands and use it across his face for a while. But there was his father to think about,
all of the things his father ex-pected of him. A word from Frederic to people in the right places, and Guil's
future was so much gray ash. “I'm sorry,” he said again.
     But Frederic was not to be appeased with apologies this time—he rarely was. He stood, his thin,
long-fingered hands folded behind his back, and began pacing behind Guil, reappearing on the right for a
few steps, turning again and stepping out of sight. His face, a bird face, was drawn tight in sour disgust.
Did you get a bad-tasting worm, you old crow? Guil thought. He wanted to laugh, but he knew the
strap would sting neck, cheeks, or head as easily as fingers. “This is perfectly simple,” Frederic said.
“Totally fundamental. Nothing new in this exercise, Grieg. A review lesson, Grieg!” His voice was like a
shrill reed instrument, piercing, somewhat painful to hear.
     “Yes, sir.”
     “Then why do you persist in your refusal to practice?”
     “I do practice, sir.”
     The strap burned a red welt across the back of his neck. “Nonsense, Grieg! Damned, utter
nonsense!”
     “But I do, sir. I really do! I practice even longer than you say to, but it does no good. My fingers
are—stones on the keys.” He hoped he sounded distressed. He was dis-tressed, damn it! He was
supposed to be a Musician, a complete master of sound, a child of universal harmonics, born to
understand and to use sound, to perform the rituals of music in a passable—no, a beautiful—manner.
Though it might make his fingers a trifle too long, the gene juggling chamber should not fail in giving him
the basic oneness with rhythm that was his birthright, the harmony with universal harmony that was his
legacy, the blending with melody that was the core of every Musi-cian's soul and the most basic of things
required to gain a Class. And what the genetic engineering didn't do cor-rectly, the Inundation Chamber
should have compen-sated for. The Inundation Chamber was a huge room in which the Musicians'
Ladies who were pregnant were placed in a weaving symphony of sound that carried subliminal
suggestions even into the developing forebrain of the fetus. That treatment should have smoothed the
rough edges on the genetic engineers' work. It should have made him want desperately to be a good
Musician of a high Class. But, somehow, even that had failed. The only reason he cared to do well in the
gaining of a Class in the ceremonies on Coming of Age Day was so that he would not embarrass his
father—who was, after all, the Grand Meistro, the chief-of-state of the city's government.
     Unfortunately, the piano was a great, ugly, unrespon-sive monster to his touch.
     Frederic sat on the shimmering yellow bench before the shimmering white piano and looked the boy
in the eyes. “You are not even a Class IV Musician, Grieg.”
     “But, sir—”
     “Not even Class IV. I should recommend your disposal as an error of the engineers. Ah, what lovely
lightning that would touch off! The Grand Meistro's son a reject!”
     Guil shuddered. For the first time, he began to think what would happen to him if he were not given a
chance for any Class whatsoever. He would be put to sleep with a sound weapon of some sort, then
taken to the disposal furnaces and burned. Not only his father's pride, but his own existence depended
on his gaining at least a bottom classification in this sink-or-swim society.
     “But I will not recommend your rejection, Grieg,” Frederic continued. “For two reasons. One, though
you fumble monstrously over these keys and have done so for the past thirteen years, ever since you
were four, you show talent elsewhere.”
     “The guitar,” Guil said, feeling a moment of pride that did a little to erase the discomfort of the last
two hours at the piano.
     “A fine instrument in its own right,” Frederic admitted. “An instrument for lesser sensibilities and of a
lower social order, to be sure, but perfectly respectable as a Class IV instrument.”
     “You said there were two reasons,” Guil said, somehow sensing that Frederic wanted him to elicit the
last, wanted him to draw it out so that the saying of it would not be just Frederic's doing.
     “Yes.” The pedant's eyes brightened like those of a craggy eagle spying a succulent lamb left alone in
a field. “Tomorrow your class will be awarded their stations after each has faced the tests and the
Ultimate Sound. I have a strong feeling that you will be dead before tomorrow night. It would be foolish
for me, then, to risk the Meis-tro's wrath when the natural course of Coming of Age Day will weed you
out of the system.”
     It was his last day of lessons under Frederic, and Guil suddenly felt some of the power of his
impending freedom. The strap had lost its fearsome qualities when he realized that it could never touch
him again once he had left this room. And the clock showed that it was five after the hour. He had
already stayed beyond his time. He stood. “We'll see, Frederic.” It was the first time he had called the
teacher by name, and he saw the irritation his familiarity had caused. “I think I'll surprise you.”
     He was pushing open the door to the hall when Fred-eric answered. “You may do that, Grieg. Then
again, maybe you'll get the biggest surprise of all.” His voice, his tone, the gleam in his eyes said that he
hoped this would be so. He hoped Guillaume Dufay Grieg would die in the arena.
     Then the door was humming shut behind.
     Free.
     Free of Frederic and the strap, free of the piano and its keys which had been just a bitter punishment
over the years. Free. His own man. If . . . If he lived through the Coming of Age Day rituals. A great
many ifs wrapped up in that one, but he was flushed with the confidence of youth and it boiled without
consideration within his mind.
     He clicked his heels on the wavering colors of the floor, trying to stomp on a particularly brilliant
comma of sil-ver that spun through the crimson shimmer-stone. It kept dodging his foot as if it were
sentient, and he turned down a side hallway of the Tower of Learning, chasing it and smashing his foot
into it again and again, only to see it spin out from beneath his shoe even before he had struck the floor.
He leaped, came closer to touching it than ever. Then it swam through a rouge-cinnabar swirl and came
out ocher instead of silver, and the game had lost its interest for him.
     He turned to walk back to the main corridor, paying no attention now to the constantly shifting hues
and patterns of the floor, when the glorious reverberations of a well-played piano boomed down the
acoustically perfect corridor. It faded, became more pastoral. He searched through the practice studios
until he found the pianist. It was Girolamo Frescobaldi Cimarosa—Rosie, as the other boys called him.
Gently, Guil opened the door and closed it behind.
     The music was Chopin's Etude in E Major, Opus 10, Number 3, one of the composer's more
beautiful works. Rosie's fingers flitted like insects across the keys as he hunched over the long board, his
shoulder-length, coal-dark hair fluffed magnificiently over the collar of his cloak. The pink tip of one large
ear showed through the hairfall.
     Guil slumped to the floor, back against the wall, and listened and watched.
     The upper fingers of Rosie's right hand toiled with the elegant melody while the lower fingers
articulated an accompanying figure. A difficult thing. An impossible thing for Guil. But he did not take time
to brood on that. He let the music flow through him, stir his mind with ri-diculous fantasies of visual
conceptualization.
     Rosie threw his body at the board, made his fingers bayonets of attack that were determined to rend
from the keys the complete essence of the beauty contained on the sterile, white sheets of music.
     Hair flew as if windblown.
     Then the lyric section was over and the brilliant pas-sage based on extended broken chords was
flashing by expertly under Rosie's large hands. Before he knew it, Rosie was through the curtailed
restatement of the first section and sent the keys pounding toward the rising climax. Guil's heart thumped
and did not slow until the last of the gentle subsiding notes had been played.
     “That was excellent, Rosie,” he said, standing.
     “What are you doing here?” The voice was quick, knife-edged with unassurance.
     Then Guil was conscious of the hunched back that was bent even when the keyboard was not before
the boy, of the two tufts of hair on the edges of his forehead that had been combed inward in an
unsuccessful attempt to con-ceal the tiny horns under them. The stigmata. The mark-ings Rosie carried
with him to show his place. “I just stopped in to listen,” Guil said, speaking a little more quickly than he
had intended. “I heard it from the hall. It was beautiful.”
     Rosie frowned, unsure of himself, searching for some-thing to say. He was a rarity: a mistake of the
genetic engineers, a slip of the gene juggling chamber. When you are toying with thousands of
micro-micro-dots that rep-resent bodily and mental characteristics, you are bound to make a mistake
now and again, turn out something that is, in some small way, a freak. Never before had a deformed child
gained any distinction or even recogni-tion among Musicians. Always, they had died on Coming of Age
Day after thirteen years of impossible fumbling with every instrument and of inability to grasp the
fun-damentals of the Eight Rules of Sound. Rosie, on the other hand, had become the most accomplished
Musician in the entire Tower of Learning. Some said that he was a better pianist than even the Grand
Meistro, Guil's father. Guil thought this was very true, though he knew he was limited in his own critical
capabilities and dismissed his own opinions as irrelevant. But Rosie, despite his achieve-ments, was
touchy. He looked for slurs, for references to his deformities in everything that was said. He was hard to
make friends with no matter how much one valued his friendship, for he analyzed even the words of his
loved ones.
     Now, having analyzed Guil's words and expressions, Rosie answered uncertainly. “Thank you.”
     Guil crawled on top of the shimmering orange piano, dangling his legs only an inch from the floor.
“Tomor-row came fast, didn't it?”
     “What do you mean?” Rosie asked, crossing his hands uncomfortably on the keyboard.
     Ah, yes, Guil thought, the hands. Tiny hooks of bone-hard cartilage jagged upward an inch on the
back of each hand. “I mean, thirteen years and I don't remember what happened to me since I was four.
Frederic and the lessons and the strap and going to bed and getting up and suddenly I'm seventeen. All
too fast.”
     Rosie relaxed visibly. When the conversation was not about him directly, when it was focused on life
in gen-eral, he could manage to suspend a little of his doubt and suspicions. “I hope you make it, Guil.”
     “I hope so too.”
     “I won't.”
     Guil looked up, startled, not certain that he had really heard what he thought he had. Then he smiled.
“Oh, you're kidding, of course.”
     “No.” There was something dark behind Rosie's eyes, something that made Guil want to turn away.
     “That's silly! You're better than the lot of us.”
     Rosie shook his head, setting his hair to bouncing. “I'm afraid, Guil.”
     “Everyone is. Good Heavens, we all might die to-morrow!”
     “You don't understand.” His head hung in the hollow between his gristled shoulders, his piercing eyes
catching the light of the glowing panels above their heads.
     “Try me.”
     “I'm scared to death, Guil. I'm so scared that food won't stay down, and my gut is on fire all the time,
spitting flames up my throat. I can't sleep, because the dreams wake me up screaming and give me chills
for the rest of the night. So I play and practice things that I don't need to practice and—and do other
things until I collapse and am too tired to dream myself awake.”
     “You must know you have a better chance than the rest of us.”
     “There are some things you don't know about, Guil.”
     “Tell me, then.”
     For one, short moment, he seemed ready to spill what-ever it was that filled him with liquid misery.
Then he clamped his lips shut, forced a sigh through them that made them flutter like butterfly wings. The
shell had slipped back into place. Rosie was isolated again, a world unto himself. He would suffer alone
with whatever it was that made him afraid. “No, you are better off not know-ing yet. You'll find out
tomorrow—during the rituals.”
     “You sure can keep a fellow in suspense,” Guil said, dropping to his feet. “And if you don't want to
tell me now, then I guess I just have to wait. Besides, I've got to be going. Father says that plenty of
good food and sound sleep—and maybe a little of his last minute advice—is what I need to prepare me
for tomorrow. I don't want to disappoint him.”
     “Tomorrow,” Rosie said, turning to the piano and launching into a furious torrent of notes that rattled
the walls. As Guil opened the door and stepped into the hall, he thought he recognized the music as part
of Flight of the Bumblebee from Rimsky-Korsakov's Tsar Sultan. Then it took a twist and a turn and
was something he did not recognize. As the music faded behind him, he thought about that. If there was
one thing he was good at, it was identifying tunes, memorizing styles so that he could at least recognize
the composer. In this case, he could come up with nothing.
     On his way home to the Congressional Tower where his father's apartments were, he passed by the
neon stone gardens which were dull and almost colorless in the bright daylight. Giving way to an
unexplainable urge, he walked into the garden, the pavement humming beneath his feet, for it too was a
sound configuration. At the end of the garden where a row of crimson stones (dull pink now) lay as a
border, he stopped and looked beyond into the ruins that had once been a city of men. It was there, in
those ruins, that the Populars lived. The mutants. The condemned.
     He wondered, as he looked at the tumbled buildings, at the puddles of broken glass, the twisted and
melted steel girders, why the Musicians had built so close to ruin, so close to the mutants. Word had
come, spreading out through the colonized worlds of the galaxy, that Earth had been destroyed in a war,
that the mother planet was reverting to savagery. The council of Musician Elders on Vladislovitch, the
Musicians own colony world, had decided to send a ship of Musicians back to reestablish Earth. Other
colony worlds with vastly different socie-ties had the same idea. The Elders' dreams of owning Earth
were shattered, but this city-state had been set up as, at least, a toehold. Maybe one day the dozens of
other city-states sprinkled over the globe would leave or col-lapse. Then the Musicians would have the
honor of own-ing the mother world. So, when there were so many thou-sands of other sites, why build
the city next to the Pop-ulars, the mutants who lived in the ruins?
    True, the Populars bothered no one. They had long ago learned that Musicians were too powerful for
them. But there seemed no necessity for building a showplace colony next to these twisted men and
women.
    Not for the first time, Guil thought that perhaps he did not know much at all about Musician society.
Perhaps, actually, he knew next to nothing, for something in the pit of his stomach and the pit of his mind
told him that the Populars were somehow tied more closely to the Mu-sicians than the Congress cared to
admit.
    While he watched the ruins, a dark and featureless form crossed the top of a rubble pile, glided along
a broken wall on swift, long feet, and disappeared into deep shad-ows where several buildings had
collapsed on one another. Featureless, smooth, faceless it had been. Each Popular was different than the
other, and some were naturally easier to look upon. But a faceless, obsidian man . . .
    He shivered and left the neon gardens, heading back into the city, back toward his home . . .

     Later, they were dining at the low Oriental table in the Chinese Room, sitting on plush pillows of
synthe-foam. Tapestries imitating ancient Chinese threadwork hung about the walls, giving the room an
exotic and at once close and comfortable feeling. The robot orchestra stood before them, its intangible,
swirling color body pulsating with every possible hue and every reasonable shade as the music throbbed
full-bodied from it. To himself, Guil sang the words that went with the tune:

                 Who rides so late through night and wind?
                 It is the father with his child.
                 He holds the boy within his arm,
                 He clasps him tight, he keeps him warm.
                 “My son, why hide your face in fear?”
                 “See, Father, the Erlking's near.
                 The Erlking with crown and wand . . .”

     His father spat out an orange seed that went spinning off the plate, across the table and onto the floor
where the pin-point waves of the sonic-sweeper disposed of it instantly. He swallowed the juicy segment.
He had been dispensing his advice, some useful, some ridiculous, ever since they had sat down to eat.
“Rely on your sound-sedative whistle more than your gun, Guil. That always impresses the judges.”
     “The judges are romantic fools,” his mother said, arguing as she always argued, pouting her pretty
mouth and launching into the start of a disagreement. She knew that his father was the boss, in the end,
but she enjoyed see-ing how far she could push before having to make up to him.
     “Exactly,” his father said, trying to escape bickering this special night. “The judges are romantic fools,
and only an equally large fool would not use that knowledge to his benefit.”
     Guil was paying only half attention to his father, the other half of his mind trying to think of the words
to the song the robo-orc played and wondering what it was that Rosie had planned for the following day,
the thing that was upsetting the hunchback so much that he could not even sleep properly.

                 “Dear son, 'tis but a misty cloud.”
                 “Ah, sweet child, come with me!
                 Such pleasant games I'll play with thee!
                 Such pleasant flowers bloom in the field,
                 My mother has many a robe of gold . . .”

    Could Rosie be giving up without a fight? It was pos-sible to forego the tests completely, to admit
defeat even before you had been tested. You were given a sedative and carted away to the disposal
furnaces just the same— but you didn't have to sweat through the chores in the arena. Was that what
Rosie had in mind? No. That was not Rosie's way. His entire life had been a continuation of proofs of
himself, an effort to show all that he was more than they were, worthier, able to accomplish more. He
would not just give up, throw everything away without a fight—not after all these years of fights.
    “—you would use it against?” his father finished asking.
    He swallowed a lump of cheese and washed it down with wine as he sorted through the half of his
mind that had been paying attention and tried to find what his father had asked. “First my whistle. Then
the sonic-knife. If neither worked, I would use my sound-rifle as a last alternative. The judges frown on
using the heaviest arma-ment first.”
    “Very good,” his father said. “Didn't you think he was good with that one?” he asked Guil's mother.
    “Umm,” she said, nodding, not particularly interested.
    “Now,” his father began, “the next thing—”

                “Oh, father, father do you not hear
                What the Erlking whispers in my ear?”
                “Be still, my child, be calm;
                Tis but the withered leaves in the wind . . “

   “Now, Judge Scarlatti is an egomaniac. If you are chosen a sextuple—”
   His mother shifted, sighed. “The boy told us he was only a Class IV.”
   “Damn it, don't undersell your son! He—”
   “He is a Class IV,” she said, sucking on a plum. “He is a Class IV. Building hopes will only lead
to—”

                “Oh Father, Father see you not
                The Erlking's daughters in yon dark spot?”
                “My son, my son, the thing you see
                Is only the old gray willow tree . . .”

    The robo-orc swirled colorfully with the sinister music of Der Erlkonig, and Guil suddenly realized
that there was something in this song applicable to the Coming of Age Day ritual. Usually, their dinner
music was light, airy, nothing at all like this. So there must be some reason for the change. He
concentrated on remembering the last lines as it drew to a close.

                “I love thee, thy form enflames my sense;
                And art thou not willing, I'll take thee hence!”
                “Oh Father, Father, he grasps my arm.
                The Erlking has done me harm!”

   Strange, Guil thought. It is a very dark vision, this song. The robo-orc swirled on, full instrumented
and misty-bodied.
   His father watched.

                The father shudders, he speeds ahead,
                He clasps to his bosom the sobbing child,
                He reaches home with pain and dread;
                In his arms, the child lay dead!

   Goethe by Schubert.
   Wer reitat so spat durch Nacht und Wind?
   . . . in seinen Armen das Kind was todt . . .
   There was something about the German language that made the words even more sinister.
     Guil shivered, turned to his father and saw the Meistro was watching him expectantly, his mouth now
empty of fruit, his eyes cloudy and unreadable. It was obvious that he expected his son to say something,
though Guil was not exactly sure what would be proper. “Father, the song, Der Erlkonig . . .”
     “Yes?”
     His mother busied herself clearing the table although the sonic-servants could have done the job
quicker and easier. She disappeared into the kitchen with a stack of dishes in her hands. His father
watched her go, then turned back to Guil.
     “It is very strange,” Guil said, “that you should want to program it for tonight—a night when we are
supposed to be having a celebration.”
     “No,” the Meistro said. “It is perfect for tonight. For tonight, there is really no other song.”
     And then he understood. His father knew that it might be hard for him in the arena, knew that there
was a strong possibility that he would not make it. In a way, his father was trying to tell him that he
understood this and that he would be able to accept it if his son were to be sent to the disposal furnaces.
For a moment, Guil felt relief of a sort. His father could accept, could maintain his pride even if he failed
them. Was that not a wonderful thing? Then came a second wave of emotion. Yes, damn it, maybe his
father could accept it, but then it was not his father who was going to die. It was not his father who would
be torn and mutilated in the arena and later fed to the licking flames of the disposal furnaces. The high
spirits that he had just attained sunk quickly into black-ness and despair.
     Later, alone in his room, he fell asleep with the last line of the song still on his lips. Fell asleep into a
dream that he had had ever since he could remember, a dream always the same. Like this:
     Above the bleak banks of the river, there is a barren wall of jutting stone to a shelf of polished black
onyx a hundred feet overhead. It is an indeterminate hour of the night. The sky is neither blue nor black,
mottled in-stead, an odd brown and rotten tan. Where these two colors overlap, it looks much like blood
that has dried and grown flaky. At a bend in the river, the onyx shelf juts completely across the water,
forming a roof, and on this roof is a purple building fronted with massive col-umns that are rimmed with
black stone faces at their tops. There is a great and profound silence that does not just hang upon things
but which radiates from the land-scape. The moon is a motionless gray disc. He seems to be approaching
the shelf and the building—as always—float-ing up from the river on a black leaf, which is strange,
considering the total lack of wind. Then, passing over the columned structure, he again floats down,
down to the river once more. Gently, with a cradlelike rocking, he floats toward a Stygian sea that
engulfs him, towing him toward the lightless bottom where a river of air moves him along the sea floor,
past the same purple building, the same promontory, into the same sea where, at the bottom, he is
greeted by the exact same river, exact build-ing, dark ocean, and . . .
     He woke sweating, his eyes aching as if they had ac-tually looked upon the impossiblity of the dream.
His heart pounded with fear that was at the same moment indescribably delicious and desirable. He had
been hav-ing that dream ever since, as a three year old child, he had been with his father in the arena,
inspecting prepa-rations for a Coming of Age Day ceremony. The Pillar of Ultimate Sound had been
humming darkly in the cen-ter of the floor, the gateway to that land beyond life where everything is
different. He had been very interested in the pillar and, after breaking away from his father, had gone to it
and reached through, had placed his head in-side and had seen the strange land beyond.
     He did not know whether he was afraid or whether he welcomed his meeting with the pillar
tomorrow at the end of the ceremonies.
     Tomorrow . . .
     The arena . . .
     Suddenly, he wondered if he was not going to have a difficult time getting back to sleep.

   At the same moment, in a darkened tower room, glow-ing orangely: a piano.
   There were hands upon the keys like froth upon waves.
   Madly pounding, tossing, whirling, beating the keys with a frenzy of hatred that boiled through his
eyes, the bent figure wheezed breath into the cramped, dry rooms of his lungs, tears on his cheeks.
   He pounded the keys. He could possibly become the ruler of all Musician society in this city-state of
his. Or he might become a corpse. It could go either way in the arena.
     He cursed the keys and his fingers.
     He rammed his feet against the pedals until his toes felt as if they would break.
     And all the while, the piano sang tomorrow . . .
FIRST:
     In the chapel of the Primal Chord, the genetic engi-neering tower, Loper crouched, facing the slowly
open-ing door that he had been about to use himself. His nos-trils widened, seeking odors, telltale
perfumes.
     The Musician who opened the door did not see the Popular where he hunched next to the last pew,
and he closed the door and turned to the altar. In ritual, he touched his fingertips together before his face,
drew them apart into the position from which a conductor might begin the symphony. Then he saw
Loper.
     The Musician opened his mouth to scream. Loper leapt. He crushed the Musician against the wall,
bring-ing all of his three hundred pounds to bear. The Musi-cian, in a moment of concerted effort brought
to a peak by wildly pumping adrenalin, wrenched himself free and took one staggering step. Loper
grasped one fist in the other, making a club of flesh and bone, and swung hard into the Musician's neck.
The man's spine snapped, and he pitched forward onto his face, his head tucked weirdly beneath his left
arm.
     Loper hid the body behind the altar, then went back to the door and risked a look at the corridor
beyond. Ceiling glow-lights highlighted the brown and black swirls within the shimmer-stone green walls
so that it seemed as if living creatures composed these partitions, scrambling over one another like a
swarm of lice, froth-ing in an attempt to break the bonds of the magic mor-tar, gnashing their teeth in fury
as the mortar held. The corridor was empty. He stepped into it, closing the chapel door.
     Clutching his knife, he crept down the gleaming hall-way until he came to an elevator shaft. It was
unlike the inoperative shafts in the ruins of the Popular sector of the city, for it was clean and free of
spiderbats. Also, this lacked any identifiable car or cable lift system. It ap-peared as if one stepped in
and was carried upward by air or fell and was cushioned by air. He did not like it, but he had no choice.
He punched out the number of the floor he wanted and stepped into the tube.
     There was a playing of dissonance and consonance in his bones. Sound swirled through him, crashed
over him like a wind, lifting him up the shaft. Abruptly, he ceased to rise and was floating before the exit
onto the top floor. He pushed against the walls like a man in a gravityless environment, turning into a
standing position, and shoved into the corridor, a little of his terror draining out of him as the elevator
whined to a stop behind.
     He moved down the corridor to the first door and stopped. He held the knife before him, ready to
gut any-one who discovered his presence. He was looking for the nursery, but he did not know what
door it lay behind. Palming the door activator, he tensed as the portal slid open.
     Over a hundred naked women floated in a gleaming metal bowl at least a hundred and fifty feet
across and twenty stories deep. They were held up by coursing, al-most visible sound that gurgled from
rim to rim and mouth to bottom of the incredible structure. They drifted, now with legs wide-spread, now
drawn together in maidenly modesty, now with arms dangling loosely, faces split with axe wound grins of
absolute pleasure as the duple, triple, quadruple, and sextuple-metered con-certos laced their wombs.
They were all pregnant, for this was the Inundation Chamber. Here, after the genetic engineers had done
their work, had helped to fash-ion the fetuses, the women were brought to subject the advance” stages of
their unborn children to the hypnotic Inundation music. The music carried subliminals in primitive picture
concept quantums that “brainwashed” the unborn children, smoothed the rough edges of the genetic
engineers' work by indoctrinating the fetus with a love and respect of music and authority.
     Against his will, Loper looked away from the bird women, suppressing his desire to leap into the
bowl, mount them in flight, fornicate as together they plunged to the bottom of the bowl and swooped
upward again, crescendoing to a climax with the pounding swirl of sound. He should not be thinking such
things, he knew. He hated Musicians and their Ladies. Still, it is not un-common to find a relationship
between lust and hate, and he struggled with a lust so bred. Stepping into the hallway, he closed the door
to the Inundation Chamber, knowing what his dreams would always be from this day forward.
     Farther down the hall, he pushed open another door and found the nursery. Walking hurriedly to the
cradles of the babies born that day, he began checking names. Not just any child would do. It had to be
a newborn babe, fresh from mother's belly that very day, and it had to be the child of a relatively
important Musician, at least a Class II. Finally he came to a tag that caught his attention: GUILLAUME
DUFAY GRIEG. Could it pos-sibly be the blood, in any way, of Johann Stamitz Grieg, Grand Meistro
of Vivaldi, this city-state? He snatched it up. Even if it were only a nephew, its parents should be, with
any luck, at least Class IIs.
     The baby slept. It seemed so small and silly in his hands. He wondered what they would call it for a
nick-name. Guil? He fought down a moment of tenderness. Tenderness could not be permitted at this
stage of the game. Carefully, he slipped into the corridor and found the elevator. Walking into its surging
strings, he fell down the well of noise, clutching the babe to his hair-matted chest.
     When he stepped into the hallway on the ground floor, however, there were three Musicians walking
toward the elevator. . . .
                                             CHAPTER TWO



     The processional, Pomp and Circumstance, gorged the hall. Slowly and in perfect time with the
music, the eight boys of Guil's class marched haughtily into the vast chamber of the Grand Hall, their full
velvetlike shimmer-cloth capes glowing with contained purple flashes as they fell behind their shoulders
like wings. Purple was the color of a boy, of the uninitiated. When the Coming of Age Day rituals were
completed, and if they were then lucky and resourceful enough to still be alive, they would never again
wear that color, but would trade it for the reds and oranges, yellows and whites of adulthood.
     Guil swallowed hard as they walked, finding his throat more and more constricted the deeper they
went into the arena. He had never imagined the Great Hall to be like this! The floor swept away from him
in a slight upward curve that would have been unnoticeable in any lesser chamber. It was, he judged, a
thousand yards long. Far, far away, the judges were only dots in the tiny crimson chairs that topped the
hundred foot vaulting facade of the Bench, which was a blacker black than any he had ever seen. The
floor between here and there was a bril-liant copper, laced with free-form shots of cream and black that
shimmered and intertwined, curling through the almost transparent background of the stone. He turned his
eyes on the floor nearby, careful to keep his head properly erect so as not to break the symmetry of the
formation, and saw that the stone was transparent. Only lightly copper tinted, it dropped for at least a
hun-dred feet, and only this great depth gave it that heavy coppery hue it seemed to possess at a casual
glance—just as a cupful of water is clear but an oceanful is blue.
     He looked to the tiers of spectators next—fully five thousand on a side, stretching up and up to the
nearly limitless reaches of the walls that thrust upward in a slight outward curve and blended with the
ceiling and the shimmering green beams. Each spectator had a comfortable, padded lounge chair on a
swivel base to make his job of watching that much easier. Before each chair was a small television screen
so that the spectator might see the action close up when it strayed to distant parts of the arena during
heated moments of battle.
     “My heart is literally in my throat,” Rosie said next to him, his voice strained and based on a tremor.
     “I'll help you stuff it down once I've swallowed my own,” Guil said, still marveling at the tiers, at the
im-mense spaces, at the lovely transparent floor.
     A wave of cheering moved through the stands as the boys progressed, but they dared not look up
any farther than they could manage by straining their eyes around in their sockets. Heads must remain
front, for the ritual of entrance called for them to face only the judges who would soon decide their fates.
     It was an unbearably long walk considering the ten-sion that was already building in each of the boys
and which would have their hearts thumping by the time they had reached their destination, but it did, at
least, give Guil time to think. Suddenly, his ability with the guitar seemed as nothing. The Grand Hall
stretched to all sides, and the grandeur made him question himself, made him feel small and
insignificant—and doomed to failure. What if he were an inferior product of the genetic engineers and the
Inundation Chamber, worse— in his way—than even Rosie? Would he die today during the tests, or
when he had to face the Pillar of Ultimate Sound—or in the disposal furnaces where the rejects were
carted, shoved through an iron grate door and burned? Maybe Frederic would be right: maybe he would
receive the biggest surprise. Maybe he would die . . . He forced himself out of this useless funk just as the
procession reached the foot of the Bench and spread out in a semicircle before the judges.
     The orchestra performed the invocation using ancient instruments of brass and steel and wood rather
than the modern synthetic instruments. The judges sat solemn and dignified, their white robes shielding all
of their bodies but their heads, the orange ring of the judicial branch encircling their necks. The boys
genuflected to the sound-portrait of Vladislovitch, the First Musician, the Finder of the Way of Sound.
Starting on the right of the semicircle, each boy recited a line of the Coming of Age Day Litany in turn.
   “Vladislovitch, Father of the World, Musician Supreme,” the first boy intoned.
   “Vladislovitch, Finder and User of the Eight Rules of Sound, Opener of the Way . . .”
   “Vladislovitch, Meistro and Patron of All Towers . . .”
   “Vladislovitch who played his cadenza before the very gods of old and brought them tumbling
down,” Guil said breathlessly.
   “Bless us, bless us, bless us,” the next boy chanted.
   The litany spun on to conclusion. The crowd said, “Ah-ah-ah-men.” The tests were ready to begin. .
..

     They were taken to an isolation chamber to await their individual tests so that none might see what
awaited them and thus prepare for it—or collapse from fear of it. Although each boy knew a bit of what
would happen (for the father of each had, surely, recounted the nature of previous Coming of Age Day
rituals), he could not know all, for the exact pattern of the tests was changed every four months, changed
for every Coming of Age Day ritual. One by one, the others left to face their fu-tures. There were only
Guil and Rosie left when the at-tendent in light green robes and a yellow scarf came to the door and said,
“Grieg. You're now.”
     “Wait!” Rosie cried as Guil reached the door, fol-lowing the attendent.
     “What?”
     “Good luck, Guil.”
     “Thanks, Rosie. I'll be waiting to shout for you when it's your turn.”
     But when he stepped outside, he was not so sure he would be around to cheer anyone. Of the six
boys who had gone before, only three had made it. Fifty-fifty chances. Were the odds always this
gruesome? He could think of no time when anyone had mentioned the per-centage of those who survived
and those who were slaughtered or taken off for cremation, and he was abruptly ill. Some of the boys
who had lost had been good musicians, better than Guil. Much better. And what did that mean, he
wondered, trembling.
     The winners sat on golden chairs on a platform above the arena floor, below and to the right of the
judges, ready to watch the misfits—Guil and Rosie. Guil looked for some sign of the three losers, could
find none. No bodies meant that all three must have buckled early, must have been carried away right off.
No, not necessar-ily. A sound creature, after all, did not leave signs of its victims. It engulfed them whole,
negated the molecular vibrations that constituted them, and vanished with them, effectively canceling them
out of existence.
     Quaking, he walked before the towering Bench, bent his neck so he could see the judge called
Handel peering at him from the centermost throne. “Guillaume Dufay Grieg?”
     I want to run, he thought. I want to get out of here, out of here and far away. “It is I, your
honor,” he said.
     “Are you prepared to begin your test?”
     No, no, he thought. I'm not prepared. I'm afraid. I'm more afraid than a baby in the dark. “Yes,
your honor,” he said.
     “Do you have any particular statements or requests to make at this time?”
     Let me out! Let me the hell out of here! This is like the prisoner receiving his last meal, only my
terminal privilege will be to speak a few pieces of wit, of wisdom. But he could not say any of that,
for there was his father to consider. And, besides, they would not let him go as he wished. They would
burn him. “No special requests or statements, your honor.”
     “Very well,” Handel said. He coughed, wiped a hand across his mouth. “Let the tests begin!”
     The orchestra struck the proper note and swept off into a complicated piece written by the
originators of the rituals to stir excitement among the spectators while the preparations were being made.
     It was an oddly eerie tune.
     An attendant dressed in traditional white shimmer-cloth with a pulsating flash-fabric collar crossed to
Guil; the collar threw angelic glare over his face, obscuring his features. All that was visible was his eyes,
bright with reflected throbbings of light. He brought Guil three weapons: the sound-sedative whistle, the
sonic knife, and the deadly sound rifle.
     No longer trying to suppress the tremors that shook him like a dry leaf, Guil strapped the knife to the
waistband of his leotard suit, hung the whistle about his neck by the glistening shimmer-metal chain, and
cradled the rifle in his arms. With a nod to the judges, he took a hundred paces into the arena, turned
back to the hundred foot monolith that was the Bench, braced himself mentally and physically, puffed out
the stale air and took in clean, and nodded once again.
     The music subsided, was gone.
     “You have been chosen Class IV,” Judge Tallis boomed. He was a hawk of a man, wizened, with a
beak nose, his two eyes like the eyes of a predatory bird. His hands appeared out of the robe to push
back at the sides of his hair, then disappeared into the folds again.
     Class IV. The echo of the words throbbed a moment before the soundproofing walls negated their
patterns.
     Father will be disappointed, Guil thought. But there was nothing to say except: “I accept my
station.”
     “Have you chosen an identisong?”
     A phrase from your identisong was recorded on a small lapel badge and had merely to be activated
to allow you the use of all machines used by your station and to give you entrance into all places your
class was permitted entrance. Fourth Class identisongs had to be duple-metered. He realized, as he
scanned what hundreds of tunes he knew, that he should have had one already in mind. Then he thought
of a choice that would please his father with its irony and its connection with Der Erlkonig from the
previous evening. “I chose Schu-bert's Marche Militaire.”
     Tallis confirmed the choice.
     The orchestra began muted music.
     “Let us begin!” Tallis said.
     The wall of the Bench shimmered, opaqued in the cen-ter, then dissolved in part to form a hole fifty
feet across and seventy feet high. For a moment, there was silence that held like smoke in air, as if there
would never again be a noise of any sort. Except for the almost inaudible sweetness of the orchestra.
And Guil wondered, looking at the hole in the Bench, just what could be so damned big! Seconds later,
he got his answer. From the portal came a yellow dragon with white-white teeth, scales as large as shovel
blades and eyes as red as blood with tiny clotted black pupils. Drool collected on the dragon's lips and
slipped down its chin in rivulets.
     The tension in the orchestra's music increased.
     Guil felt the rising urge to flee, but gripped himself with his fear and used it to hold him there. He tried
to tell himself that it was only sound, that it was not real. Not real at all. Not in the sense of flesh and
blood. It was a man-structured sound configuration, a weaving of mo-lecular vibrations to form a false
entity—just like the ten towers and the piano Rosie had played yesterday and, yes, even the cape and
leotard suit he wore. Then his fa-ther's words of the night before fled through his mind: “They will only be
creatures of sound directed by men, brainless on their own. But remember, they can kill you just as surely
as if they were real.”
     He was very much afraid.
     The dragon snorted, blew piercing sound waves from its nostrils instead of the conventional fire of
fairy tales and legends. It looked over the galleries, roaring its defiance. And incidentally putting on a
show for those who expected horror and pain. It waved its mighty head on the top of its thick, scaled
neck, and gnashed its teeth, seemingly pleased with the response of the audience. Then it saw Guil, and
though only a sound configuration directed by technicians behind the Bench, it licked its thick, black lips
in hunger. . . .
     Guil refrained from getting it over with in one quick blast of the sound rifle. It was tempting to level
the big weapon and pulverize the dragon, shatter its arrange-ment of sound patterns and dissipate it. But
if he chose the easy way out and did not prove to the judges' satis-faction that he was the master of
sound and a competent user of the Eight Rules, then they would most certainly not let him out of the
arena alive. Or if they did, it would be only to let the proper attendants take him to the disposal furnaces
and ash him. He slipped the sound-sedative whistle between his teeth, bit down on it until his teeth ached,
waiting for the dragon to make its move.
     But the dragon fancied itself a cat and decided he was a mouse to be played with. It prowled around
the end of the arena, watching the galleries as if it did not see him, as if its confrontation would be with the
spectators. However, he could tell when its eyes flicked for short moments in his direction, gauging the
distance and the chances so the engineers guiding it could know when to leap. It roared at the walls, and
the roar echoed briefly before the walls negated it. Guil waited, weary with waiting and wishing the action
would start. He shifted from one foot to the other, the gun still clenched in his hand, his free arm across
the other, forming a cradle to hold the gun. Seconds passed in an agonizing crawl. Then minutes.
     And suddenly the dragon leaped. . . .
     Guil jumped in surprise despite himself. Sweat popped out on his face, and his nose watered slightly.
At first, it appeared as if the beast were going to cross the distance between them in that single leap. It
hung impossibly in the air, huge, covering dozens of feet with its fall back to the floor. But it did not make
the entire distance and crashed ponderously to the stone twenty feet away. Guil backed hurriedly, for he
could see that the long neck could just about make up for the remaining distance. As he backed, he blew
the whistle until his face reddened and his ears grew hot with rushing blood.
     The dragon snorted again, shaking its massive head in wild fury.
     Guil continued to blow the whistle.
     The sound was almost inaudible.
     The dragon's eyes widened for a moment, then grew heavy. Its floppy ears raised like great tents as if
strain-ing to pick up each shrill note of the sound-sedative, then withered back like dying flowers.
     He blew again, longer this time, holding out until his chest screamed for air and he had to stop and
suck vio-lently for breath before continuing.
     The beast leaped, crashing short again, unsteady. Its massive legs seemed to vibrate like jelly. It tried
to run, wobbled sideways, and fell down clumsily on its rump.
     Guil blew and blew.
     The dragon shook its head again, ears slapping loudly against the sides of its skull, and struggled to its
feet. The process was slow and arduous, but it managed to raise itself again. The engineers fighting to
hold the mo-bility pattern of the configuration must have let out a small cheer at this final rally of their
robot. When it was erect once more, it started after the boy, wobbling drunkenly, obviously on its last
legs.
     This is too easy, Guil thought. Still, he blew the whis-tle, always backing, his eyes fixed to the
tremendous jaws and the saberlike teeth of his adversary—and to the feet that were as big around as the
stumps of felled oak trees.
     The dragon tried to leap once more, but it could not cope with the sound-sedative whistle and fell
onto its side. Ashcan lids slid oily down its gargantuan orbs, and it fell into sleep.
     There was appreciative applause from the galleries.
     Guil was reluctant to believe the monster had really ceased to battle and was not just playing a
shrewd game of possum in preparation for jumping up and gouging Guil's heart from his chest. He
continued to sound the whistle. His cheeks ached, and his eyes felt as if they would pop out of their
sockets and roll across the floor to become lost in the cream and black swirls splashing the copper. An
unwilling Oedipus. He had a fleeting vision of everyone crawling around on the arena floor looking for his
eyes, the tests momentarily suspended until his vi-sion could be restored.
     Finally, the dragon emitted belches that tried to emu-late snores. A touch of comedy by the sound
engineers.
     Guil dropped the whistle from his mouth, let it slap back against his chest, and worked his lips to rid
them of a cramped sensation. Proudly, he turned toward the sec-tion of the tiers where his father would
be seated with his entourage. As he did so, turning his back only frac-tionally on the arena, the crowd
screamed . . .
     Guil whirled, his mouth open, choked, and started to run. Then he remembered that he was in an
arena and that running could take him to no place of safety and could only tire him instead. He stopped
and turned to stare at what had frightened him. The body of the dragon was shredding along the spine,
disfigured now with seven and eight foot slashes as if it were a Chinese paper construction. The skin
flapped open and rustled, curled back and showed dark holes boring away into the body. There was
something innately sinister about those dark tunnels, something ugly and disgusting. He was re-minded of
worm burrows in rancid meat. Then, from these holes came the devils.
      That was the only fitting term he could find for them: devils. They stood four feet tall, were
two-legged, had triple-elbowed arms that dragged on the floor. They were extremely hairy, their heads
warty, greasy, four-eyed monstrosities slashed by wide mouths that had been cram-jammed full of
razor-honed yellow teeth that splayed over green lips and dripped drool. Their chests were barrels under
thick, short necks, and they were powerful runners if their overly-muscled legs were any indication. Guil
thought he could have laughed had the situation not been so perilous. These were creatures out of some
test master's nightmares, not things that could possibly ever exist on their own. He stifled his laughter with
little trouble, however, for he knew these things could kill—laughable or not.
      He counted ten.
      He stuffed the whistle back in his mouth and blew hard.
      Absolutely nothing.
      The devils did not cease in their exit from the dragon's body, did not blink their eyes, did not show a
single sign of weariness.
      Of course, he thought, they aren't going to throw one test at me that is essentially like the last,
even if 1 am battling for a mere Class IV.
      The test masters were shrewd. What would come next would not be anything like what had gone
before. The whistle would not work here. He drew his sonic knife, pointed it at the devils climbing down
the dragon's skull, and made the motion of cutting. One of the devils screamed. The invisible keen edge
of the sonic blade had caught him, sliced him. His stomach suddenly split wide, dumping entrails and
blood over the dragon's chin. The devil twirled slightly as if unable to believe what was happening, as if
wanting to turn away from the scene and collect its senses. Then it fell, twisting its neck on the floor.
      Guil was disgusted with the thousands in the tiers who wanted blood and who demanded it in the
ceremonies, even if it was not real. They cheered and gibbered and waved their arms. Vampires, they
were, thirsting after the forbidden liquor.
      Another roar of approval. Louder. Deep. Guttural.
      He swung the tip of the blade toward another of the animals, sawed off its left hand. The member fell
wetly to the floor, and the fingers convulsed wildly for a few seconds before admitting defeat. Then the
hand disappeared. The engineers had no use for it, no reason to maintain its existence.
      He approached the other eight devils, swinging the blade menacingly. But, of course, he could not
drive them away. They were not real with a fear of their own, could not experience pain, and had been
especially con-structed to kill him. Viciously, he swung the tip of the blade, not really touching them, but
arcing it across two devils. One, cut nearly in half, wobbled a single step, jerked epileptically, and
bounced to the floor in a shower of red that—despite its unreal source—spattered Guil's face. He wiped
it off as best he could when he realized the engineers were going to keep it intact. A bubble of it caught in
his nose, and he blew it free. The second devil, his head split, slid gently to the floor.
      Vomit tickled the back of Guil's throat with its acid fingers. The test masters were a little too careful
with the detail, a little too generous with the sadism for the spec-tators. They splashed gore and pain
around like children with water and sand. Guil wondered whether the real reason they did not want to
see sound rifles used except as a last resort was because sound rifles were clean and left no blood or
mangled remains when aimed correctly. Was the purpose to gain a station and prove manhood— or to
thrill the Musicians and their Ladies with horror by the bucketful?
      The six remaining devils separated and gingerly tried to surround him. They closed in from three
sides, teeth foam-flecked, eyes hideous and wild. But it would not be those teeth, no matter how horrid
they looked, that would kill him. The devils would simply grasp him in a death embrace where their null
waves would negate his positive waves and wipe him off the face of the earth. He arced the point of his
knife and smoothly halved all of them in ten seconds. There was a tremendous amount of blood on the
floor, leaking away in all directions like a thousand-fingered hand with an irregular palm.
     Guil searched the arena for signs of the next test. For a time, as the seconds ticked by, he thought
that it might be over and that he might have won. But the silence of the crowd and the gaze of the judges
told him this was not so. Then what? Was it now a war of nerves, stretch-ing seconds into minutes,
stretching minutes into scores of minutes until he was ready to crack from the stress— then throwing
another horror at him? But he did not have time to follow that course of thought any further. The next test
was upon him.
     Suddenly he saw that the gore from the past battles was shivering, not just as all sound configurations
shim-mered, but with a purpose. The blood from the ten dev-ils began to draw together, defying
gravitational laws, surging up the curved floor like crimson tides, forming a deep, high-sided puddle.
Coagulation occurred rapidly as black clots formed, meshed, tangled to clot more and more of the sticky
fluid. He could almost feel as well as hear the shudders of disgust in the tiers. Still, they loved it with a
savage lust. It was an awful and delicious thrill they would never allow themselves to miss.
     Abruptly, the blood coagulation was fed by gallons of red fluid that erupted from the slashes on the
partially deflated hulk of the dragon—blood stored, saved, wait-ing for this moment. It gushed down the
floor to the pul-sating mass, splashed around it and held to it magically. The jelly-mass quivered, now a
dozen feet high and nine feet thick, a pillar of congealed blood with a strange life of its own. All at once, it
shrank down to six feet, split into two pillars, each stretching back to its original height of twelve feet with
a new thickness of four and a half.
     The crowd roared, thumped the bleachers. Guil could see their faces without even bothering to look:
red, bloated slightly out of normal perspective, perspiring, sa-liva wet in their open mouths and glistening
on their lips, their noses quivering like the noses of wild animals sensing a terminal battle. Eyes wide and
pupils dilated. And why? What was it they had that he lacked? What ugly longing boiled in them that did
not boil in him, that drew them to this spectacle?
     The two pillars trembled as if about to move.
     More noise from the crowd . . .
     Guil waved the sonic knife, slashed them in two, waved it back at a lower level and made eight
pieces. Then he saw the terrible consequences of acting without thinking. Each part still lived, burbling,
slopping, stretching to almost six feet, shrinking width-wise to two feet. They were not dead, but merely
multiplied. They lashed out with pseudopods, all eight of them, closing the gap between test and testee . .
.
     He threw the sonic knife from him in fury, bringing the rifle into play now. Falling to one knee, he
aimed through the glass bubble on the sleek, gray barrel, cen-tered on the jelly-mass, and fired. The thing
vibrated, seemed to flame into a million flecks of seething ash, and was gone, its sound patterns disrupted
and dispersed by the bolt from the rifle. This was good. This was better. No blood, no gore, no ruined
bodies. Simple and clean. He turned toward the remaining seven pillars of blood jelly, grinning.
     While he had concentrated on the first of the crea-tures, the others had moved frighteningly close. He
danced backwards, firing as he went. He blasted two more of them out of existence before he suddenly
slipped and fell backwards in a tangle of legs and arms. The gun tumbled out of his hands and rattled
across the floor, spinning to a stop a dozen feet away. . . .
     His head spun as the gun had spun, aching with brushburns where flesh had skidded over stone.
Every nerve in his body tensed and began screaming, for this was, just possibly, the end of Guillaume
Dufay Grieg. He launched himself dizzily after the rifle, rolling across the floor and clutching it, losing it in
his panic and hav-ing to clutch it again. Turning to stand, he found a blood beast towering over him. The
clots churned through it as it gurgled even closer to him. A pseudopod snaked out and wrapped around
his leg, stung and tightened there.
     The crowd moaned.
     He felt the tingling as his natural molecular patterns were disturbed. He swung the rifle up, heaving
frightful sobs from his chest, and blasted point blank at the blood beast. There was a rich humming as
sound pattern can-celed sound pattern, and the blood beast was gone. The tingling sensation in his leg
was gone too, but it left be-hind a dull aching as his molecular patterns protested the near obliteration.
But the blood beast was gone!
     The other four were not.
     And they were closer.
     Reaching out . . .
     Clutching the sound rifle, he rolled sideways until he slammed against the arena wall. Still dizzy, he
stood and braced his back against the low barrier of cool shimmer-stone. His ribs ached, as did his leg
and the side of his head. He fought to clear the multiple images from his mind while panic boomed in him
and warned him that he didn't have time to straighten himself out, didn't have enough time at all . . .
     The crowd was roaring again, and the sharp bellow of noise seemed to help flush away the dizziness.
He felt his breathing return to some semblance of normality, though the slamming of his heart against his
chest wall did not decrease. He brought the gun up and played it on the four blood beasts. They could
not move as fast as he could shoot. They sank rapidly into nothingness.
     The screams of the crowd indicated a knowledge of what was coming next.
     But his head ached and his vision was now blurred by sweat and blood and he could not, for the
moment, see anything. Through the watery haze, the arena seemed empty, save for the body of the
dragon and some scat-tered members of the devils he had cut with the sonic knife. Hugging the wall, he
started back toward the Bench so that there might be room behind him for run-ning when the next
challenge was thrown at him. He felt as if he would have to run, for there was so little energy left to fight
with.
     His legs did not hurt. Contrariwise, they held no feel-ing whatsoever. They were like dull, senseless
hunks of steel that had been welded to his hips and moved on some distant, involuntary robot control
mechanism. Up and down, up and down . . . He realized that he could not even feel the slap of his feet
against the floor. He was so very, very tired. Only the pumping of his natural sup-ply of adrenalin was
keeping him going, and that seemed perilously close to exhaustion. He searched again for an opponent as
the crowd screamed and had its millionth paroxysm of horror-filled joy, its millionth orgasm of ter-ror. He
blinked sweat out of his eyes, raised an arm to wipe away some of the blood. His hands were still alive,
but he realized the half paralysis that had invaded his legs was creeping down his arms in an effort to turn
him into a complete zombie. He knew that, if he were to sur-vive, the next test would have to come soon
while he still had some energy, still a droplet of strength. Then he saw it . . .
     . . . wriggling in the paper skin of the dragon . . .
     . . . crawling in there . . .
     Something . . .
     The dragon was a Pandora's Box filled with night-mares. This one was a snake—a giant of a snake.
It reared its truck-sized head with washtub green eyes, rose from the carcass of the Lizard, its forked
tongue hissing in and out of its mammoth jaws. How many coils laid in the dragon? How many feet could
the dragon possibly contain? Then he realized the test masters could make as many feet of coils as they
wished come out of the dead dragon. Logic played no part in all of this. Logic and physical laws had
been set aside. This was their night-mare they were sharing with him, and they could dream anything they
liked. A thousand feet of snake could come boiling out of there. Two thousand. Ten thousand. They
could fill the arena wall to wall with it and smother him with its scaly body.
     And how many other things might follow the snake, out of the carcass—assuming he could kill the
snake? Could not countless terrors be swarming inside? Enough to keep him fighting here until he
dropped and was de-feated?
     Then he saw it clearly and simply. The one thing he was supposed to grasp. The first rule of sound
was to un-derstand the simplicity of all the other rules. Sound con-trol was easy, almost within the
powers of an idiot. Pandora's Box was the answer. If he destroyed the drag-on's carcass, the Pandora's
Box would be smashed to splinters. He had ignored the corpse in his wariness of active adversaries.
Now he saw that the dragon was the source. He could afford to ignore all else and destroy the dragon.
     The snake focused phosphorescent green saucer eyes on him. . . .
     Wearily, he raised his rifle.
     Raised it up and up and up . . .
    Coil after coil unwound as the snake reared above the dead dragon, weaving and bobbling, coming
out of it like a slow jack-in-the-box, out of it and out of it and out of it.
    He sighted on the dragon's body, ignoring the menac-ing snake that was only a secondary adversary.
    The snake was fifty feet above the dragon's body now, great fangs bared and dripping.
    He destroyed the dragon.
    The snake crashed onto the floor like a limp rope, now only half a beast. The part that had still been
coiled in the dragon had not survived, and only fifty feet of the monster now writhed in the arena. Kicking
without legs, screaming without a voice, it wriggled in its death strug-gle toward him. The giant jaws
opened. He saw small, sinister forms within the throat, grublike things that were rolling toward the mouth
in an attempt to fall out and take over where the snake had failed. The test mas-ters were clever—and
mad. Without hesitation, he destroyed the snake with a prolonged bolt from the sound rifle, thus
demolishing the test, dissolving the slugs and whatever else had been in that throat.
    The Great Hall was quiet. The arena floor was empty —save for him.
    Suddenly the crowd bellowed like a mighty animal, applauded, shouted, jumped up and down. The
cheer, like a mighty wave, swept into the arena and bore him toward the Bench. . . .
FIRST:
     Loper stopped a few feet from the elevator, holding the child he had kidnapped, watching the three
ap-proaching Musicians and wondering, desperately, what he could do. A fat Musician on the end of the
trio saw Loper first, and he shouted, started running. Loper looked for doors. At the farthermost end of
the corridor, away from the Musicians, four huge, milky glass panels waited like cataracted eyes.
     The Musician reached him, his arms extended as if he would grope for the child. Loper swung his
dagger, plunged it through the man's neck, ripped it loose. The Musician wobbled sideways, his eyes
suddenly very large, and collapsed to the shiny floor, leaking all over the beautiful tile.
     One of the others reached for his sound-sedative whis-tle.
     “No whistles!” Loper shouted, holding the baby above his head with one hand, showing his intent to
kill at the drone of the sound-sedative.
     The Musicians stopped, faces suddenly milky white like the doors, threatening to dissolve here and
reappear on some oddity shelf as porcelain figures of rare perfec-tion.
     Slowly, Loper backed away. A dozen yards later, he turned and ran, his wide, six-toed feet slapping
loudly against the tile. His leg muscles snaked under his skin like steel cables, thrusting him on. He burst
through the doors, smashing one outward against a pillar, shattering it. It hummed in fragments, then
disappeared. By the time he had reached the bottom of the steps and was in the neon stone gardens, the
sirens were wailing and out-raged shouting had erupted behind.
     The baby was awake and screaming. He held it against his chest to dull its outcries.
     Neon stones glowed on all sides, casting up auroras that nearly blinded him when he strayed from the
regu-lar pathways between them.
     Bursting blue ashimmer: a sea afire . . .
     Red, red, crimson, rouge, cinnabar: blood . . .
     He raced from the gardens, stopped to look back. A sound rifle beam sang into a tree next to him,
puffed a huge limb out of existence. Then a Musician shouted an order not to shoot for fear of harming
the child. Loper turned and—loped.
     When he reached the Popular Sector, he discovered he was still not safe, for the Musicians snapped
on their brilliant amber sound shields and came on. He turned into a litter-strewn alleyway, turned again
and again. Suddenly, panic-stricken, he realized he had made a cru-cial blunder. He should have sprinted
directly into the ruins where reinforcements lay; he should not have tried to lose them. Here in the
alley-maze, they could divide to surround and finally corner him. That was something he could not allow
to happen, especially since he had the child and it had been to steal a child that everything had been
risked in the first place.
     He would have to act now, before they retrieved the child and the chance of substituting Strong's
perfect baby, his unmutated baby, was lost. He held the baby at arm's length and was struck by the
gentle, soft lines of it, the pink coloration, the tiny features. . . . No! He had to hurry, had to act. This
baby must never be found.
     He reminded himself that it was this babe's great-great-great-multigreat grandparents and every
relative on down who had made the postwar Earth what it was. In the future, this child would perpetuate
the wrongs of his ancestors. With anger for what the Musicians had made the Populars, Loper snapped
its thin neck between three fingers, turned and stuffed the raglike corpse into a drain pipe where the
patter of rat feet echoed scratch-ily. . . .
                                           CHAPTER THREE



     There were four on the winner's platform now, and the arena was settling down, the crowds making
less and less noise as the time drew near for the start of the final test. Guil felt the bandage on his head,
decided it was too small to worry about, and grinned. He had made it! At least through the first stage,
through the arena chal-lenges. There remained only the Pillar of Ultimate Sound, the courting of Death
Himself. But he could not envision anything worse than the arena, more trying than the dragon's Pandora
Box, more horrifying than the blood beasts—or the forms that had attempted to slither from the snake's
throat. The Ultimate Sound would only be a formality; he had beaten the Erlking! While he re-joiced that
his life was now set and molded and without further complications, Rosie approached the Bench,
shoulders hunched. He remembered the boy's words from the previous day, and he turned to watch
carefully for whatever startling thing Rosie had planned.
     Rosie stopped and looked up.
     “Girolamo Frescobaldi Cimarosar?” the judge asked.
     “It is I, your honor.”
     “Are you prepared to begin your test?”
     “No, your honor.”
     No.
     No! It took time to register and have meaning. The mind was prepared for the standard reply, the
reply given by all boys, and now something different had been uttered; it required a mental adjustment. A
mumble of astonishment went through the thousands in their tiers as neighbor turned to neighbor to
confirm what they thought they had heard—but could not believe. Guil hunched forward though he could
see and hear perfectly Well.
     “Before we go any further,” the judge said, obviously perplexed as anyone in the audience, “I should
tell you that you have been recommended by your instructor for a Class I station.”
     The audience gasped. Half came to their feet, and the other half followed suit. The situation
demanded a direct view of the Bench no matter how much better they could see it on their individual
televisions. Guil had expected Rosie to place high, but had not been anticipating a full Class I status. He
had been limited to a Class IV chiefly because of his rebellious nature and his innate musical inability, not
because he was any more incompetent at using the Eight Rules than any of the other boys. Simi-larly, he
had expected Rosie to be named for a low class simply because of his stigmata. But now the judge had
offered the highest place in society.
     “I do not accept,” Rosie said. He did not say it with disdain or in fear. There was something else in
his voice —pride, perhaps.
     “You do not accept?” the judge croaked, furious now, his hands flitting out of his voluminous robes,
his scrawny neck stretching out of the orange judicial ring on his collar.
     Rosie stood, waiting, a pathetic figure on the vast floor, alone and very small before the Bench.
Realizing the boy was waiting for the continuation of the traditional ques-tions, the judge cleared his
throat and said, “Do you have any particular statements or requests to be made at this timer
     “I do.” Rosie seemed suddenly to stand straighter, to break some of the twisted grip of his bones and
muscles. Guil had never seen him effect a similar posture.
     “That is?”
     “I wish to forgo the tests of the Four Classes in order that I may try for the Medallion of the
Composer.”
     The roar of unrestrained excitement that coursed through the tiers was far greater than anything the
Musi-cians and their Ladies had loosened during the tradi-tional tests that had preceded this moment. It
rebounded from the walls, shook the stands with its tumultuous booming and proved too much even for
the thirsty acoustical walls to drink in and negate. Guil felt swal-lowed by it, like a morsel of food
dropped into a giant's throat. Somehow, he felt more alive under its pounding echo. He was exhilarated
as he had never been. Not only his own success, but now this! Did Rosie really think he could make it?
Only fourteen had tried in four hundred years, and only Aaron Copeland Mozart had made it. That had
been—how long?—two hundred and twelve years ago. And I know him, Guil thought. And no matter
whether he makes it or not, he will go down in Vivaldi's city history.
     The gigantic key orchestra was brought into the arena after a delay of some minutes. The audience
quieted as the hunchback approached the instrument, drew the stool before it, ran his hands over the
hundred and twenty keys, drifted feet over the eleven pedals, and cast his eyes up and down the three
rows of blue and red toggles stretched twenty to a line above the keys.
     Rosie sucked in his breath and befit over the board like a nearly blind man over a book. The
audience took its seats with a whump! like the wings of a huge bird thumping in heavy air. Guil realized
he had not been breathing. He breathed. And Rosie began his original composition. . . .
     The opening theme was proud and chivalric. It was piano only, but promising more later. The octaves
for the left hand approached the limits of what a piano could do. It seemed as if only the full orchestra
with its trum-pets and drums could do justice to the marvelous con-ception. Then, abruptly, as he threw
toggles and pumped pedals, there was a full orchestra.
     Lull . . .
     An interminably long lull. Finished? Guil wondered. Finished already?
     No! An artless tune, much like a folksong, was played by a solo bassoon andantino and
capriccioso, happy-go-lucky. The Great Hall was tomb-silent except for the music. The people might
just as well have died or faded away into some other continuum.
     Tension began to increase in the middle of the move-ment. There were tremolos on the strings and
ominous pronouncements by the trombones and trumpets . . . Vi-olins . . . Then a repetition of the theme
by cellos and woodwinds.
     Sound coursed magnificently through the Great Hall, whirlpooled the recesses of Guil's mind, stung
his teeth with irresistible vibration, forced him through the womb-waves of its theme and countertheme as
instrument was played against instrument, hand against hand, shadow orchestra against main orchestra,
dissonance against con-sonance—for one thing is nothing without the other.
     Strings, strings, a wire waterfall of strings. Violins, viola, violoncello, contrabass playing legato,
staccato, now legato again. Suddenly a piccolo cadenza without lessening the plunge toward climax . . .
bugles, bugles, brass challenges at midnight . . . whirling, flashing, crashing, bone-rending and. . . silence.
     Guil stood, panting, his entire body shaking, his fingers gripping the platform railing as if he would split
it be-neath his grasp. His legs felt like rockets that would send him shooting into the ceiling, flame trailing
behind. He started to shout a bravo, but the crowd beat him to it, tearing his own voice away in the flux
of the greater roar. Still he cheered and waved his arms madly, tears on his face as Rosie stood, those
damned hunched shoulders nonexistent in the face of this absolute and resounding triumph. The years and
years of the mutants battling had terminated in this, a final reward that more than compensated for the
rigors of his childhood. Guil, vision blurred, turned to the Bench and saw that the judges too were
overwhelmed. Handel was pounding his fists on the Bench top, pounding and pounding until they must
have been bruised, pounding in joy, not in a call to order. The boom sounded even above the cheering as
his flesh ham-mers struck squarely, unheeding of their own condition. Just when Guil was certain the
sound configuration of the Great Hall must be disrupted and fade into nothing-ness, Rosie drew himself
up and turned, bowing to the audience. The shouting doubled, tripled impossibly, quadrupled as ten
thousand pairs of lungs wrenched themselves apart to congratulate. The sound blasted Guil until his ears
ached. Nevertheless, the screaming contin-ued and would continue until lungs were afire, throats
cracking. Rosie was a Composer. One of the greatest of all time if this selection was any indication. And
he was theirs!

    In time, the fury died.
     Rosie received the Medallion of the Composer which could change the vibrations of any mechanism
or any portal to allow him use or entrance. It did not merely key locks, it effectively dissolved doors for a
moment to let him pass, set machines in tune with his own patterns so they worked for him as if they were
a part of him. He had only to render the products of his talent in return. Finally, when all the rituals
demanded by the situation had been run through to completion, the judge asked if Rosie had any requests
to make now that he had been freed of the tests and the Pillar of Ultimate Sound.
     Then came the bombshell. . . .
     He asked that his sister be allowed to try for a station in the arena.
     It was a preposterous request. Women were Ladies. Women were never Musicians. It was a thing
that had never been, a thing that had no place in their ordered so-ciety. It was like asking a
twentieth-century man to ac-cept a porpoise for his President simply because science had proved that
the porpoise was intelligent. Vladislo-vitch, the Father of the World, had seen the function of women as
procreation and nothing more. He had made it explicitly clear that women were to be the bearers of
children, those who carried on the race and the immor-tality of Vladislovitch's own name, but that they
were never to be stationed. Never. The station was a sign of masculinity, and a stationed woman would
destroy the very basics of the order of things.
     Still, though the request was preposterous, so was the situation. They had their first Composer in two
centuries. The histories told of the glory of the age of the last Com-poser, of the magnificence of the
society he had inspired during his lifetime. The rise of a Composer acted as an inexplicable aphrodisiac
on society, turning it on to itself until it blossomed colorfully. There wasn't a soul in the Great Hall who
did not long for another such Golden Era. Rosie, therefore, was nearly a god to them. Indeed, after his
death, he would eventually be canonized and then proceed from sainthood to godhood as the years
passed. Tomorrow, they might feel a bit less sure of the move, but today they were exuberant, and they
agreed to his request.
     Besides, what woman could possibly survive in the arena? There was almost no chance of her
success. So there would be no problem later on. Would there?
     The crowd, jabbering, found seats again. Guil sat down as Rosie climbed the platform stairs and sat
beside him. “I didn't even know you had a sister,” Guil said, trying to suppress his awe so that he might
talk to Rosie as a friend, as he would have before the bestowing of the Medallion.
     “Oh, yes, Guil. A sister.” Rosie grinned broadly. “You'll see. Here comes Tisha now.”
     Guil squinted, trying to make the girl out from his po-sition across the vast arena. Her instructor came
to the left and slightly behind her, hobbling a bit. It was white-haired Franz! The gentle face, calm
manner, and proud carriage told him that it was the old man who had trained him on the guitar, who had
been so patient with his fumbling (unlike Frederic) and who had shown him that he did have at least the
minimal talents of a musi-cian. He fought down an urge to wave and looked back at the girl. He
swallowed hard, felt his Adam's apple bobble in his throat like a trapped animal. Had he been expecting
a hunchback like Rosie? A warped mutant, an-other error in the gene juggling chambers? But she took
his breath away with her beauty, burned his already sore throat with a strange longing he could not quite
define.
     She is magnificent, Guil thought.
     Rosie smiled.
     Beautiful. Five foot three, slight but awe-inspiring. She was dressed in a wine-colored leotard suit and
matching slippers. The suit clung tightly, too tightly to the sweet contours of her body. Long and stunning
legs for so short a girl, flaring hips of perfect breadth, a tiny waist that looked as if hands might encircle it,
pert and upthrust breasts, and her neck, a hand-carved polished curve of nut brown. Her face was
delicate as fine Chi-nese embroidery, framed with a burst of black hair and punctuated with two eyes as
blue-green as those of a cat Even from across the arena, her face shone with a radi-ant loveliness that
stirred his nerves into a frustrated dance. Surely, the genetic engineers had been perform-ing contrition
for past mistakes when they had formed this stunning girl-woman.
     “She's . . . she's . . .”
     “Isn't she?” Rosie chuckled.
      The duo reached the Bench and halted—Tisha with her feet drawn together, her back arched, very
pert and very pretty, old Franz stooped and looking weary but game nonetheless. The litany progressed,
and the crowd sucked in a collective breath that must have drained half of the air from the room when
Franz said that—being her tutor and being proud of what she had accomplished under him—he
recommended her for a Class I. It had been daring enough a request on Rosie's part, but to ask for Class
I seemed to be pushing it further than the bounds of decency.
      The judges looked skeptical too.
      However, Guil thought, it would probably be better to win a Class I than a Class IV, He could see
that if Tisha won a Class IV station, the ridicule heaped on other Class IVs from those higher in the social
order would lead to much unrest and bad feelings: “Why, even a woman can win one of your damn Class
IVs!” So it had to be the top or nothing. Reluctantly, the judges agreed to let her try for it. They had
committed themselves to Rosie. Besides, there was the almost positive assumption that she could only
fail.
      But she did not die.
      She performed perfectly against more horrors than Guil had had to face, using her weapons
expertly—an array of fourteen that a Class I had to understand and master. For half an hour, she calmly
took whatever was thrown at her, using bolo-sonics, sound rifles, and sonic tropic dart systems. It was
plain that the judges intended to balance the weight against her, that the test masters behind the Bench
would force her to confront twice as many spectres as any other Class I candidate would have to endure.
      She slew the wolfmen that spewed from a shower of wriggling worms.
      She disposed of the scorpion-tailed dragonflies that rose from the corpses of the wolfmen.
      When at last the test masters could not decently con-tinue tests without publicly admitting they were
stacking things against her, and when the tests were finished, she received a shallow spatter of applause,
mostly from the Ladies in the stands. The men were too busy ruminating on what all of this would mean
to them. She was es-corted to the platform where she hugged Rosie and kissed Guil on the cheek
because Rosie had called him his only friend.
      At last, it was time for all but Rosie to face the Pillar of Ultimate Sound. Guil led Tisha from the
platform, chest puffed a bit at having her arm for even this brief moment.
      Then, moaning from a sudden break in the floor, came the Pillar of the Ultimate Sound. . . .

     As the swirling, umbrageous column towered above them, humming with a bleak and ugly steadiness,
a thou-sand submelodies intertwined among a million synco-pated rhythms playing against one another in
near ca-cophony, he knew without a doubt that the Pillar of the Ultimate Sound was worse than the tests
in the arena. He tried to argue himself out of that viewpoint by re-minding himself that he had stuck his
head into the pil-lar that day he had been with his father, had experi-enced the eerie world that the pillar
was a gateway to. There should be nothing frightening now about the pillar, should there? Yes. Yes there
should. When he had been a child and had looked into the realm beyond, he had been too young to
understand what it was, what it meant. Now, older and with the benefit of stories about researchers who
had ventured beyond and had never re-turned, he knew that the land beyond the pillar was Death.
Knowing made a great deal of difference. His stomach churned madly, anxious to empty itself.
     The pillar played hymns.
     But black and malevolent were their themes. . . .
     The order of challenge was settled on by the drawing of lots. Guil was to be last, Tisha just before
him. He felt his ice hands contracting, cracking the bones of his fingers as his flesh tried to crawl in on
itself. The people in the stands felt the terror too. They were quiet, solemn, perhaps a bit nervous. An
invisible graveyard breeze swept through the place, rattling the spectators like ten thousand teeth in the
jaws of the Great Hall.
     The judges peered over the bench, watching intently.
     The doctor came onto the floor, followed by two assist-ants. He was a psychiatrist; the assistants
were medical doctors. The chief doctor's function would be to examine each boy—or girl—after he—or
she—had come out of the pillar, then pass judgment on his emotional stability. Some of the contestants
would be broken by the experi-ence. Others would pass it without much trouble. It de-pended on
whether one was still a child, holding onto the beliefs of his immortality.
     The first boy stepped forward at the direction of the doctor and entered the pillar. He was inside for
only moments, and came out looking chipper enough. The psychiatrist attached the sensitive bands of his
scanner to the wrists of the boy, slipped the mesh cap over his head. In seconds, the scan had been
completed, and the psychiatrist announced that this one had passed the test, had not built up an undue
amount of pattern instability in his thought waves.
     A second one followed the first, entered the pillar hesi-tantly. When three minutes had passed and the
boy did not emerge, the psychiatrist went forward and stepped partially into the pillar, found him and
brought him out. His lips were loose, slimed with drool, and his eyes were vacant. The boy had slipped
into a schizophrenic state so deep that there would be no getting him out, ever. An-other body for the
disposal furnaces.
     Then, after several more tests, it was Tisha's turn. She stepped forward without a moment's pause,
slid into the humming brown wall of sound. Guil wanted to reach out for her, to stop her, but he could
not. This was her fight. A minute later, she came out, smiling, and approached the psychiatrist. It was
obvious that the experience had not deranged her, that her mind was capable of accepting the
atmosphere beyond the pillar without losing control of itself. She was able to die for a short moment and
come back with us living and not lose her sanity.
     But the psychiatrist proclaimed her disturbed.
     She protested, turned to the judges and demanded to be cross-checked by another psychiatrist with
another scanning machine.
     The judges only nodded.
     The psychiatrist stated that it would not be necesssary for her to be relegated to the disposal
furnaces, for the instability was not that serious.
     “Why, then, is it serious enough to keep me from gain-ing a Class?” she asked, placing her hands on
her hips and facing him with all the determination she could muster.
     “I have made my statement,” the doctor said. He turned away from her.
     “Dismissed,” the judge said.
     “You can't do this to me,” she said.
     “Yes,” the judge said. “Dismissed.”
     Guil watched her walk off the floor, back into the rooms beyond the arena where she would change
and leave. Rosie had been influential enough—in the heat of the moment, at least—to get her a chance to
try for a Class, but his influence had not lasted. He was a Com-poser, but it would take more than a
future saint and god to change the order Vladislovitch had established. The judges had seen their mistake,
had realized this could open the door to more women seeking Class, and had found a way to slam that
door in her face.
     He was next.
     For a moment, he considered the wisdom of refusing on the grounds that the girl had been cheated.
Then he decided that would be decidedly unwise, stupid even. Who was he, after all, to dispute with the
judges? And who was he to say that the ways established by Vladislo-vitch should now be overturned?
Ahead of him lay a peaceful life within this pleasant society. There was no reason to strike out and
demolish his future. He could not singlehandedly change the masculinist policy, and he would succeed
only in bringing his own ruin. He stepped forward.
     The pillar hummed, pulsated from dark brown to light brown and back to dark again.
     He had faced it as a child. He must remember that.
     He stepped into the pillar, through the gate into an-other world, the world of Death from which the
re-searchers had never returned. . . .
     There was before him a raven sky, black from horizon to horizon, stung with faint brown stars. To his
right was a row of chocolate-hued mountains cut by a gem-glis-tening river that was very dark green and
terribly wide. Abruptly, he thought of his dream:
     Above the bleak banks of the green river there is a barren wall of stone jutting to a shelf of polished
black onyx a hundred feet overhead. It is an indeterminable hour of the night. The sky is clear, but it is
not blue. As he watches, it threads from black to lighter shadows, an odd brown and a rotten tan that
approximate the color of dried blood where they overlap. At a bend in the river, the onyx shelf juts
completely across the water, forming a roof, and on this roof is a purple building of massive columns
rimmed with black stone faces at their tops. Drifting on a leaf, he approaches the building . . .
    Then he elaborated on the dream, took it one step fur-ther:
    Within, he sees for the first time, what seem to be ca-vorting, dancing figures which . . .
    Then he realized he was standing too long in the col-umn. It was best to get out in the normal time
length, to give the psychiatrist and his machines no chance what-soever to ban him from adulthood. He
stepped back into the Great Hall.
    For a moment, he was struck with a melancholy, al-most overwhelming sense of loss. The
psychiatrist came forward, slipped the bands on his wrists and the mesh pick-up cap on his skull. He was
not found wanting. He had passed the final test. It was over. Done. But a sick-sweet feeling within told
him that it was far from over, a long, long way from done. Single file, they left the Great Hall, the totem of
the pillar roaring a siren song behind.
    In the rooms behind the Great Hall, he found a dress-ing and shower cubicle. He tossed off his cape,
grabbed his chest and hugged himself. He thought of the Pillar of Ultimate Sound, of the throbbing desires
to return there, and he vomited over the pretty blue floor which had been programmed—due to past
experience with testees on Coming of Age Day—to sound-annihilate just such a vile fluid. . . .

    The sound shower, activated by his identisong medal, “washed” away his perspiration, pelleted him
with tune-ful cleansing. But it could not reach wet fingers down through the muck of him and cleanse his
soul. And that was the thing that was dirtied, much more blackened than his skin. In just one day, so
many things had hap-pened and the world seemed so suddenly wrong. First, he had seen the savage
blood lust hidden just below the surface of the Musicians who claimed to be the height of civilized
existence. That frightened him as much as the pillar. He no longer felt that he knew those people he had
lived with all these years. Suddenly, they had taken off masks and had shown jackal faces underneath.
Then, too, there was the pillar and the indescribable magnetism of that landscape. He wanted to go back.
Part of his mind longed for the brown-black sky and the ethereal, dusky landscape.
    “You were very brave,” a voice said behind him.
    A little voice, little and soft.
    Her voice.
    He turned, shocked at her nakedness, frantically won-dering what he might grab—and from
where?—to cover his own body. She seemed unconcerned, however, as if mutual bathing were a thing
the two of them had shared a thousand times. And his thoughts went to her beauty, to the curves and
prominences of the body that matched in every degree the loveliness of that indescribable face.
    She stepped under a second shower broadcaster. “Rosie was afraid for you.”
    “I was afraid for Rosie,” he said, then laughed, his ten-sion draining just a little.
    “I know what you mean. Rosie doesn't need pity. I've always known that.”
    “You were rather brave yourself,” he said, searching for some way to keep the conversation going so
that there was not as much awareness of her body.
    “Not really.” She took his medal and lifted it to her shower head, turning it on as the bars of Marche
militaire played.
    “You were cheated,” he said.
    She shrugged her shoulders. Her breasts bounced.
    He turned his face to the shower speakers, closed his eyes. Invisible fingers squeezed new
persipiration out of his skin, and he needed to have it sung away.
    “Do you think this will encourage other girls?” he asked.
    “How?”
    “I mean to apply for a station.”
    “What's to encourage them?” she asked. “It will be ru-mored all over the city how thoroughly I was
humiliated and turned away. And no other girl will have a brother who is a Composer to get her even as
far as Rosie got me.”
     “I guess so.”
     “You were different,” she said, turning more toward him.
     His eyes traveled down the front of her. He pulled them back up to her face, blushing. “What do you
mean?”
     “You were hoping I would win.”
     “Of course.”
     “No one else was. Except Rosie. They were all waiting for me to be killed in the arena or crack up in
the pillar. They wanted me to end up in the disposal furnaces.”
     “I don't know if you can make that sort of generaliza-tion.”
     “It's true, and you know that it is.”
     He stood for a moment, trying to find something to say that would not deny the honesty of the society
of which he was now a part. But there was nothing but the truth. “You're right,” he said.
     She laughed, teeth sparkling, then cut it short “You saw the black and brown sky?” she said.
     “Which became especially distorted and mottled over the chocolate mountains,” he said. He turned
to the shower and closed his eyes again.
     “And the ichorlike river.”
     “All of it,” he affirmed, filled with horror and delight at the same time. The feeling of sick-sweet desire
flooded back.
     “Guil,” she said, putting a finger on his left eye and prying the lid open. “I came to you because you
were the only one that wanted me to win. You cared about what happened. And because I'm afraid that
they may have me marked now that I have tried to upset things.”
     “Afraid? You?”
     She looked at him, shook her head.
     And with the sound playing prestissimo falls upon their singing flesh on the shimmer-stone floor, they
found an epiphany of soul, moving together in time, giving to each a moment for cadenza. . . .
FIRST:
    Loper had disposed of the child's body just in time, for a moment later, the pursing Musicians entered
the far end of the alley. He turned, started to run the other way. Suddenly, Musicians blocked that
entrance too.
    He drew his knife, tossed it. It bounced off the yellow shield as he knew it would. He turned,
searching the wall behind. A window ledge and a shattered window lay fifteen feet above. He leaped,
caught hold of a hole where a brick had once rested, kicked his feet against the wall, brought a foot up to
share the hole, raised a hand, grasped the window ledge, and pulled himself up.
    “He doesn't have the child!” someone shouted.
    Yellow light danced on the dull crimson walls.
    He slashed his hand on the fragments of glass sticking out of the bottom of the sill. He hooked
bleeding fingers over the rotting wood.
    “Don't let him—”
    “Stop him or—”
    “Someone shoot the goddamned—”
    His foot burst like an over-ripe fruit under the knife of the cold sound beam. Every bone reverberated
like tun-ing forks set end-to-end. Desperately, he pulled over the sill and sprawled on the floor of the
abandoned building. The voices outside subsided to murmurs.
    A musty odor hung in the air. Reaching to examine his foot, he found only a stump. He wouldn't think
about that. Gritting his broad teeth, he struggled out of his breechcloth, used it to make a tourniquet to
stay the worst of the flow. Although he was resigned to dying for the cause, he didn't want to cash in his
chips before he absolutely had to. He pushed up, moving on both hands and one leg, the wounded
member held out so that he looked like a dog searching for a place to make its water. His head spun,
toppled, climbed back to clarity, boiled, bubbled, ached.
    The building was a warehouse, long abandoned now, the floor rotting in places. Indeed, he felt sure if
the Mu-sicians crowded in after him they would all plummet to the cellar. Grimly, he made his way across
the room to a set of stairs leading to a platform that ringed the main chamber and gave access to second
floor doors.
    The wall adjoining the alley erupted in a shower of brick and dust, yellow light filtering in as Musicians
shoved through, pulled others after them.
    He doubled his efforts, holding to the rickety railing that could collapse at any moment, hopping from
step to step on his good leg. The Musicians came onto the main floor just as he swung onto the platform.
    “Up there!” And they were after him.
    But the floor gave way beneath them. Five of the twelve plunged through the rotting wood,
screaming, even their shields unable to absorb the shock of a thirty foot fall onto old rusted beams, trash,
and rail posts. But seven remained.
    The survivors strung themselves out and approached the stairs from several directions to distribute
their weight. They saw Loper moving along the rail towards one of the doors, and they raised their rifles.
    “Just wound him!”
    Loper felt three fingers tear loose of his right hand. He faltered, wobbled, balancing on one leg, and
crashed through the railing and the rotten floor below, breaking his bull neck in the spokes of a rusted
bicycle lying on the basement floor.
    At least, he thought in that very last instant, the plan will be initiated. We will get our substitute child
into the Musician towers in place of the real Guillaume Dufay Grieg. Then there was only blackness.
    The seven Musicians searched the alleyways for the child, but their search here was a fruitless one.
The rats were very hungry that night. . . .
                                            CHAPTER FOUR



     When Tisha had gone from the cubicle, Guil dressed slowly, still stunned by the relationship that now
existed between them, trying to sort out what it meant. She had said many things to him. She had said
that they were two of a kind, two rare ones in this society, misfits of a sort, and the rare ones that had a
capacity for tenderness toward other human beings. Rare Ones . . . She said that Rosie had some of it.
That she and Guil had it. That old, white-haired Franz was compassionate. But that she could not recall
having ever met anyone else who cared for anyone other than himself.
     “No,” he had said. “You're wrong.”
     “Am I?”
     “Of course.”
     “I rather think it's a case of your not noticing what the world is really like. You must lead a somewhat
conserva-tive and sheltered existence as son of the Grand Meistro, after all. Name me one person who
has a genuine com-passion for others—aside from the four already men-tioned. Go on.”
     “My father,” he said.
     “Present for examination one instance when this com-passion showed.”
     He started to speak, then realized there was no instance that he could recall. He had always been
aware that his father thought first of his own interests, of his own image. They had never been close, and
now he saw why. It was not merely because they were of different generations, but because they were
totally different types. Tisha was right.
     And now, as he left the rooms behind the Great Hall and went out into the early evening air, his mind
ram-bled over the other faults he had recently begun to see in this supposedly Utopian world. The blood
lust of the spectators in the arena. The crookedness of the judges in their handling of Tisha—and the
ready acceptance of such crookedness by the audience. The cruelty of the rit-uals themselves, the
barbarous percentage of healthy young boys who were fed to the disposal furnaces. And, for some
reason, he also connected the ruins of the Popu-lar Sector with the string of failures of Musician society.
He did not know exactly why this should be. The Popu-lars were mutated Earthmen, twisted and warped
as a result of their own foolish wars. And yet . . .
     He turned away from the streets that led deep into the Congressional Tower and his father's
apartments, walked instead toward the ring of the neon stone gardens that marked the boundary between
Musician city-state and Popular Sector. The first ring of stones was white, just beginning to shimmer in
these first minutes of semi-darkness. The next ring was pale green, then darker green, then blue, then
purple, then deep yellow, orange, and last of all, fiery red. He paused at the last ring and looked at the
ruins as he had the day before on his way home from his lessons.
     This was a different section of rubble. There were three buildings standing within the mounds and
piles of debris, three weary sentinels. Two of them, buildings of plastic and steel, had melted slightly and
now leaned against each other like drunken comrades, offering mu-tual support without which both
would have cracked and fallen to join the mangled mess of mortar and materials at their feet. The third
building, one of stone—he vaguely remembered that these square, red blocks were called bricks—stood
almost unscathed. There were even a few windows still intact, though they were crusted with grime. As
he concentrated on one of those windows, he saw that there was something inside, looking out at him. . .
.
     He could not distinguish any of its details, for the dirt on the pane was too thick. Then, as he
watched, it disap-peared
     The thought returned that the Musician society was somehow responsible for the Popular Sector.
Why didn't they rebuild it? Why didn't they offer civilization to the Populars, the mutants? Oh, he knew
the reasoning. The mutants were savages. They could not be civilized. The radiation had done things to
their minds as well as their bodies. The Musicians were being merciful by not exter-minating them
altogether. Yet . . . Yet . . .
    He caught a blur of movement on the roof of the in-tact structure. He shifted his gaze to see what it
was. On the roof, staring down and across at him, was the black figure without a face.
    It's the shadows, he thought. I just can't see any face because of the shadows. It really has a
face; it has to!
    Or did it have to?
    He shuddered.
    There were no rules that proscribed the limits of di-versification in the Populars. He had seen some
examples of things that had once been human but no longer re-motely resembled a man. There were the
slugform muta-tions that bore a human face at the end of a pulpy, seg-mented body. This faceless man,
certainly, was no stranger than that.
    He tried to look away. He could not.
    And the faceless man waved to him.
    Involuntarily, he waved back.
    Then the faceless man was gone.
    A while later, he turned away and walked back through the neon stone gardens, back from the rich
col-ors to the primary border of white, beyond that into the shimmer-stone pavement of the streets.

     When he got home, he had to suffer through a celebra-tion staged by his father, a mammoth,
nothing-lacking extravaganza with one of the highly expensive primitive orchestras that used real relic
instruments instead of moog machines. The robo-orc had been stored in a closet somewhere. There were
two hundred well-wishers and freeloaders present, all wearing partial or full false faces of sequined
shimmer-cloth that stretched snugly over their features and was somehow unable to conceal (for Guil, at
least) the beastiality that lurked on the true ex-pressions that had leered from the tiers of the Great Hall
only hours earlier.
     His father grasped him by the arm, just above the elbow, his fingers digging into Guil's flesh. Thus
chained, he was dragged about the room from one guest to an-other, here to be congratulated, there to
be slapped on the back. “And here,” his father said, “you must know who this is, even though he is
wearing a mask.”
     It was Frederic. Guil knew that even without a clear view of the bird face. The eyes were unveiled,
and that would have been enough by itself. They glistened, red-rimmed, and bored into him, searching for
his vital areas. But it was not the eyes, first of all, that told him this was his old instructor. It was the
sting-strap. Even now, away from lessons, in a social situation, the vicious pend-ant carried the leather
sting-strap looped through the belt of his robe. It dangled next to his left hip, much like the gun of an
ancient cowboy.
     “Congratulations,” Frederic said, though it was obvious that he did not mean it. Insincerity
literally dripped like venom from his words.
     “Thank you,” Guil said.
     “The Pillar didn't frighten him at all,” Guil's father said. He grinned, pinched Guil's arm even tighter.
“He walked into one when he was just a child. Did you know about that?”
     “No,” Frederic said.
     “Walked right into it. Didn't bother him then either.”
     “It was just my head,” Guil amended.
     “What?”
     “I just put my head in, Father.”
     “Still,” the Grand Meistro said. “Still, for a mere child of—”
     “What do you intend to do with your life now that you've earned it?” Frederic asked.
     “I haven't thought much about it.”
     The eyes shone brighter, bored more deeply. “Teaching is out, of course. Unless you teach guitar.
But that is a limited field. You could go into maintenance.”
     Guil's father choked.
     “Keeping the Towers and all the other configurations in form and operative is a noble enough task,”
Frederic amended, shifting his gaze to the Meistro.
     “I had thought the boy might go into a biological area,” the Meistro said. “He was always keen on
sciences outside of sound science. We need good biologists to track down the new developments in
Popular mutations, to dissect them.”
     “Or he could go into entertainment,” Frederic said. “He could work with the filming crews who do
those fea-ture lengths on the Populars.”
     “I don't think so,” Guil said. “I have a year to think, by custom. I'll take my time.”
     “Certainly, certainly,” his father said.
     “Certainly,” Frederic echoed. Guil noticed that the teacher's hand had strayed to the sting-strap. His
bony fingers stroked it as if so doing brought him some pleas-ant stimulation.
     Then it was over, and he was alone with his father, standing against the mantle of the simu-fire
fireplace where sound-flames wavered behind the shimmering brasslike grill.
     “Der Erlkonig,” Guil said, swallowing some of the green wine that had flowed freely throughout the
eve-ning.
     “Just a song,” his father said uneasily.
     “No.”
     “Just a song!” The Meistro's face was a livid, ugly mask like a corpse frightened even after death.
     “Vladislovitch didn't understand the ninth rule of sound, I guess,” Guil said.
     “That's heresy.” The Meistro forced down his rage and sipped the wine, the tensed muscles of his
neck denying his front of calm. “There is no Ninth Rule.”
     “The pillar? The land beyond?”
     “A sound configuration. Nothing more. Like the other sound configurations.”
     The unreal flames sputtered, throwing off cold. “Do you know the history of the pillar, father?”
     “Created as a final test for the Coming of Age Day rit-uals so that—”
     “No. I doubt all that.”
     His father swallowed the wine, picked up another glass that was half empty and rimmed with blue
lipstick. “Created as a final test by some test master who thought—”
     “By Vladislovitch. He created it, but that is a carefully concealed fact, forgotten through the
centuries—or nearly so. I think that is the real truth. Vladislovitch was trying to conquer the Ninth Rule of
Sound, the Ninth Rule of Everything. Call it immortality. But he could not beat Death. It defeated him
instead.”
     “You better just shut up. Just keep quiet about it.”
     “What about the researchers who never came back?”
     “There weren't any researchers. That's a fairy tale. There isn't a world beyond the pillar, just the
illusion of one.”
     “The legends say the researchers were real.”
     “Just fairy tales.”
     “Why don't we send more researchers? Why are we afraid of what is beyond there?”
     “You'll have your own room,” the Meistro said, trying to change the subject.
     “And so we have to prove we respect Vladislovitch's courage—even though he failed to conquer the
Ninth Rule—by imitating, in some small way, what he did. Be-cause he was one of those who never
came back from the other side of the pillar, one of those researchers who—”
     “You'll have your own room and your own sensonic.” Some of the blue lipstick had rubbed off the
glass and now lined his lips with a grotesque trim.
     “Sensonic?” Guil had heard the term always used in a mystic sense before, always as a subject
denied existence in the presence of children. But he was no longer a child in any sense of the word.
     “You'll see. You'll see shortly. It makes all of this worthwhile, Guil. It really does.”
     “Even knowing of the Erlking?”
    The Grand Meistro crossed the few feet between them, smashed an open palm across Guil's face.
“Shut up! Shut up!” Saliva seemed to have clogged his throat so that he could hardly speak, could only
make frus-trated burbling and gurgling sounds like a drowning ani-mal. He grabbed the boy by the frock
coat he wore and shook him until both could hardly see for flying hair, until both were red faced. He
tossed him against the shimmer-stone wings of the fireplace and stalked across the room. He opened a
bottle of wine, filled a glass. When he turned, his face was void of anger, filled in-stead with a
conspiratorial grin. “Come on. I'll show you your new room.”

      His room was a hundred feet long, eighty wide, the walls lined with empty bookshelves waiting for
discrimi-nating fulfillment. The ceiling was a planetariumlike re-production of the night sky of early June.
Even with the lights off, the unreal stars were refracted in the black crystal walls so that the room was
bathed in melancholy gray light.
      “And your sensonic—now that you are a man.” His fa-ther, clearly intoxicated now, waved the bottle
of wine toward the bed.
      “Just a bed?”
      His father grinned, but there was something in that grin that was a scream of agony. Guil looked
away.
      “I'll leave you to see if it is just a bed or something more,” he said, backing out of the room like a
slave be-fore a king, bowing slightly, head nodding. The door slid shut like a guillotine, chopping the head
from view if not —in reality—from the shoulders.
      Guil surveyed the chamber briefly, then succumbed to his exhaustion. He undressed in the
pseudostarlight, vi-sions of a soft body against hard shower tiles fleeing lark-like through his mind. The
bed was soft, downy smooth against his weary flesh. He lay looking at the stars for a time before he saw
the red console embedded in the headboard. He rolled to it, punched the first button. The bed revolved
to the left. The second button moved it to the right. The third stopped it. The fourth button brought the
dreams. . . .
      An orgy of sexual sensation filmed his body, seeped into every crevice and brimmed him with fierce
joy. Vague shapes began to take form as mist entities. Then from mist to fog . . . From fog to a thick
cloud . . . From thick cloud to the haze of a memory and from there one step further to reality . . . Reality
. . . Huge-breasted women, lusty and naked and eyes almost mad with what seemed to be desire, came
from nowhere, eager to satisfy . . . Sound configurations . . . They were only sound configurations like the
buildings they lived in and like the beasts he had fought in the arena. But like the beasts, they could affect
him. The beasts could kill. The sound women could stir him to desire and culmination. They pulled him
down and smothered him with mountains of flesh, swept him down skin-surfaced rivers toward the ocean
that lay dark and waiting so that he thought it was the land within the pillar until he plunged into it and
discovered it was the womb instead and that slipping wetly across it spiraled him toward an orgasm of
physical and psychological self that would drain him of all semen for millenia. . . .
      Choking, he struggled toward the headboard, punched the fifth button, cutting off the warm and
sensuous sound configurations before they could lead him to climax and shut themselves off. The women
disappeared in stages, their breasts and mouths hanging grotesquely in the air after all else had vanished.
      The brown nipples swelled, burst, and left holes in the pendulous breasts. . . .
      Then the breasts were gone too. . . .
      Only the mouth, hungry tongue licking sharp teeth, curling and uncurling, curling and uncurling,
beckoning to him. . . .
      Then he was alone again and unfulfilled, the wine forcing a bitter trail up his throat. With an effort he
did not think he could possess in his utter weariness, he forced it down. Sensonic! So this was it. The
great mysti-cal experience, the thing that made life worth living—as his father had assured him not very
long ago. Electronic lust. This was why there were separate bedrooms for mother and father—so that the
reality of the spouse did not intrude on the id-satisfying plunges into the sonic whore bodies. It was as
sad as it was disgusting. Guil felt an unbearable despair that welled up in his bones and geysered into
every cell, despair that would nevertheless have to be borne.
    Electric sex. Procreation was just a duty, a thing to be done now and again to replenish the race. And
had Vlad-islovitch been able to conquer the Ninth Rule, had he gained the means to immortality through
sound manipu-lation, then procreation would not have been necessary either. Indeed, taking the logical
next step, real women would no longer be necessary. If no one ever died, there could be no use for
births. The race could always remain steady and powerful without resorting to biological func-tion.
    For the first time, he realized the position of the woman in Musician society. Not much above that of
the Popular. She was a useful tool, something to insure racial continuation, nothing more. Now, too,
Tisha's danger was more relevant. When the judges and the congress-men realized that a breasted and
vaginaed creature had attempted—and almost successfully—to enter their do-minion, they would take
steps to see that such a danger-ous, ambitious creature was eliminated. Most assuredly, she would not
be permitted to live for long. They would not dispose of her immediately. That would be too suspi-cious.
But in a week, or two weeks. In a month . . . A year. . . The furnaces . . .
    His heart thudded. He wanted to find her and warn her. But she would be asleep, after all, and he
could not know where. And the tests, the pillar, the love-making in the shower, the party, and lastly the
sensonics, had taken too much out of him. Despite panic, he found the arms of sleep . . .
    And still more dreams . . .
    Somewhere in his brain, a message tape, implanted long ago, decided that the proper number of
years had passed. The chemical restrictive bonds dissolved, and it spieled its message to him as he slept .
..
    YOU ARE NOT GUILLAUME DUFAY GRIEG. YOU ARE NOT THE NATURAL SON OF
JOHANN STAMITZ GRIEG. YOU ARE GIDEON, SON OF STRONG THE POPULAR. YOU
ARE A POPULAR. YOU WERE BORN UNMUTATED. A POPULAR NAMED LOPER . . .
    And so on.
    Much later, he woke up screaming. . . .
                              THE SECOND MOVEMENT:

                                          The Decision


FIRST:
     Strong sat in the ruins of the west wings, tossing stones into a pond that had once been a well-used
swimming pool when the normal, prewar and preMusician men had existed, back four hundred years
when the differences of the twenty-second century were many and wondrous,
     A pebble skimmed the water, touching four times.
     Now the pool was a blue eye in the white marble ruin of the pavilion that had once housed it. Its only
patrons were a few yellow and green lizards. Its majesty had slipped from it as it had become, chiefly, a
place for mos-quitoes to breed in the summer when they found their way through the cracked ceiling to
the wet rubble pock-ets of damp shade.
     Three times this one touched water, sinking with a bullup . . .
     Strong examined the lamps in the ceiling. They burned four hundred years after the war, for the
power source of this section had not been damaged. It ran on and on, perhaps endlessly, giving light even
when the building the light illuminated was a debris-strewn disaster area. Men had built well in those days
with a science that was now just so much magic to Strong's kind. Almost as well as the Musicians built . .
.
     One, two, three, four, five, bullup . . .
     Could they, in all honesty, believe that the Musicians could be overthrown? If they could not even
begin to conceive of what made these lights work, or what made the still operative robo-doc treat
illnesses, if these things were such a mystery, how could they fathom and topple the mighty towers of the
Musicians? Could they over-throw all this through just one boy?
     One, bullup . . .
     Yes, damn it, they could! Loper had not died without cause. When they got their boy into the towers
...
     “There you are,” Dragon said, twisting his lightly scaled head around the corner from the broken
hallway. “You hide in the darndest places!”
     “If I wanted to hide, you wouldn't find me.”
     “What, then?”
     Tossing stones in the water. What does it look like?”
     “Oh, thinking, huh?” Dragon sat next to the bigger man, his squat legs drawn up against his chest,
clawed feet dug into the rubble, glistening arms folded on his knees. He picked up stones and began
lobbing them. He snorted. “Well, if you're just sitting here being morbid and melancholy and like that,
there isn't much use in it. I might as well tell you what I came to tell you.”
     Strong waited, finally said, “What's that?”
     “Blue,” Dragon said casually. “Old lady Sparrow says her time has come.”
     “What!”
     “She's ready to give birth. I was trying to make it anti-climactic, but you wouldn't play along.”
     Strong stood, scrambled up the slope of powdered and broken marble, his thick arms rippling even
more vi-brantly than those of his dead brother Loper had when he had climbed the Primal Chord. The
child was on its way. And none too soon. Any longer, and it would have been too late to let the
Musicians think they had recap-tured the child Loper had kidnapped.
     Dragon tossed a handful of stones into the pond and ran after him.
                                           CHAPTER FIVE



     He could not get to sleep until almost dawn, and he woke only six hours later, just before noon. The
inside of his mouth tasted as if something small and furry had crawled inside and died while he slept. His
entire body ached, and his thoughts were strangely muddled. He got out of bed and padded into the
bathroom, looked into the three dimensional mirror at his drawn, swollen-eyed face.
     I am Guillaume Dufay Grieg, he thought. I am Guil.
     The three dimensional image looked back at him, seeming to be another person rather than a
reflection. And it seemed also to be saying: You lie. You are not Guil. Guil died last night. You are
Gideon. You don't even belong here. You are a Popular.
     He looked away from the reflection then and decided not to pay any attention to it. He went on with
his morn-ing toiletry, then dressed and went into the kitchen for breakfast. His father was downstairs
somewhere in the offices of the Congress, attending to the affairs of the city-state. His mother was at a
meeting with other women, discussing their sensonics. The club was called The Experience Sharers.
Now, after all these years, he understood clearly what the purpose of the club was. Women got together
to exchange their ideas for sexual experiences so that their individual sensonic programs could be as
varied as possible. He had a meager breakfast, for he was not particularly hungry. At least the food
chased away the sour taste in his mouth. The only prob-lem was that it left behind a sweet, cloying taste
that was almost as bad.
     After breakfast, he did not know what to do. He sat at the table, staring at the changing patterns of
the shimmer-stone wall, and he was suddenly thinking of his new name. Gideon. . . A Popular . . .
     Again, he tried to suppress the thoughts, tried to deny that they even existed. But it was a losing
battle. At last, when he realized there was nothing to do but face up to the situation, he moved into the
main living room, slumped into a contour chair that shimmered and re-molded to fit him, and he rambled
over what he had learned last night.
     Seventeen years ago, a Popular by the name of Loper, a big, burly brute of a creature, had managed
to gain en-trance to the Primal Chord, the tower that housed the genetic engineers, nursery, and sound
research laborato-ries. Once there, he had kidnapped a newborn child. That child had been the Meistro's
son, the real Guil. He had killed the child, then had been killed by Musicians pursuing him. But the
Musicians had not known that the baby was dead. They thought other Populars had it. They searched the
ruins. They found a baby that was human, unmutated, and they brought it back, rejoicing that it had not
been injured. But the baby had not been Guil. It had been the son of a Popular: Strong's son named
Gideon. Months before Gideon's birth, the robo-doc reported the child would be human, and the plan
for substituting him for a real Musician baby was hatched on the instant. So the fake Guil had grown up
thinking he was a Musician. Now a message tape (surgically im-planted by the robo-doc) had gone off,
had told him that he was a Popular, and had stated that he (Guil-Gideon) must help the Populars
overthrow the Musicians. The message tape claimed that the Musicians had caused the Earthmen who
had survived the war to mutate and were responsible for the Populars.
     If that was true, then the Musicians were every bit as sinister as he had suspected. Yet, why would
they create mutants of the survivors of the nuclear war? And why hide the fact that they had created
them?
     Even if it were not true, it should be enough that he was the son of a Popular. With that knowledge
alone, he should go to them and arrange the details of the sabo-tage and espionage they expected of him.
     But Populars were not intelligent. And not sane. They were savages.
     No, that was quite obviously a Musicians' lie.
     He sat thinking for a while longer, realized that he was only poring back over these few facts and
assump-tions. He had only so much information, only so much to judge by. Of course, he could not go
running off to lay out plans for a revolution.
     Was he a Popular by birth? Yes—but a Musician by environment. He could not that easily throw
away the last seventeen years. Besides, his future was set. He had reached manhood. Why throw it away
for strangers, warped and twisted half men? And yet he could not ignore the Populars any longer. Not
only was there his natural curiosity about his true parents, but a need to find out more about the message
tape's assertions that the Musicians had caused the mutation of Earthmen into Populars. He had begun to
suspect that the foundations of this city-state were somehow unnatural, that this society was sick, rotting
behind the thin veneer of shim-mer-stone. This was his chance to find out. When he had gone over the
situation half a dozen times, he pushed out of the chair and left the apartments. If he chose the proper
area of the neon stone gardens, he could pass into the ruins of the Popular Sector without being seen.
     Twice, as he wandered along the fringe of the neon stone gardens, he was ready to trot across the
weeded, strewn no man's land between cultures, but was drawn up short when he encountered another
Musician wan-dering through the stones and the trees. At last, when he had stationed himself where he
could see all ways for a sufficient distance to know he could cross over unob-served, he stepped out
beyond the crimson stones and into the waist-high weeds. Moving quickly, stumbling over broken chunks
of concrete and sheets of twisted plastic, he made for the cracked and partially de-demolished facade of
a building whose other three walls had collapsed. Once behind that, he could move without fear of being
seen by any Musicians. The Popular Sector was strictly off limits, and intrusion there was punishable in
the Musician courts. Only licensed biologists and filmsters could penetrate the ruins.
     He was halfway toward the wall when he saw the black figure standing half in the shadow the
partition threw. It was waiting for him, its arms folded across its chest. He drew up, stopped.
     The figure beckoned to him.
     After a moment, he continued, more hesitantly this time. He kept telling himself that this was one of
his peo-ple. This was more his brother than any Musician. Then he wondered if this were Strong, his
father. The thought jolted him as severely as if he had been struck with a sound rifle beam. Then he
whisked it out of his mind. The Populars got their names according to their physical characteristics.
Strong would be a huge, hulking man— or half man. This black figure was thin and wiry, tawny like a cat.
He was thirty feet away now, and he stopped. This close, and he could still not see any features on the
obsidian face.
     The black man beckoned again, more insistently this time.
     He took half a dozen more steps. Stopped again. There were no eyes. He could not see the shine of
teeth. There was no hump of a nose.
     The figure hissed at him. The sound was low and hoarse.
     He strained to see better.
     He could still see no face.
     No face at all.
     The creature hissed.
     He took another step.
     The creature started forward, reaching out its hands.
     Without thinking, Guil turned and fled, back over the broken concrete, the weeds lashing at his legs,
stinging them through the black leotards he wore. He tripped over a tangle of cable and steel beam, went
down hard. The wind was knocked out of his body as if a hammer had slammed into the pit of his
stomach. He did not think he could move, not for minutes. Then he heard the approach of the faceless
mutant, heard its light catlike steps in the high grass. He sucked in air so fast that his lungs ached even
worse, pushed up, and went on. When his feet slapped onto the neon stones, he felt an inde-scribable
wave of relief.
     Twenty feet into the garden, back among the light or-ange stones, he turned. The faceless Popular
stood half-way across the no-man's-land, facing his way. He knew it was looking at him, though he also
knew it had no eyes. After a few long seconds, it turned and slunk back into the ruins, leaving him alone
with his fear. . . .
     For a time, he contented himself with wandering through the city, exploring parts of it that he did not
know well and rediscovering the sections he was famil-iar with. It was as if, by losing himself in the
inanimate, he could forget the pressures being placed on him by other men. Still, he avoided lonely
places, stayed with the citizens who used the main concourses. Those few times that he did find himself
without companionship, he felt as if he were being watched by something sinister, something waiting for
the proper moment to leap out of hiding and pounce on him. He tried to imagine what this fictitious enemy
would look like, tried to kid himself out of his paranoia. But every time he tried to envision this fantasy
assailant, he came up with a faceless, dark figure with long arms and thin but powerful fingers, fingers like
steel tongs. Then he would have to shift his chain of thoughts to something very commonplace that was
not associated with his terror.
     An hour of this wrestling with himself was plenty. He had always been one for action, one for taking
the initia-tive. Indeed, it was this propensity that had gotten him labeled as a rebel quite early in Me. He
thought it must be the Popular blood in him, for Musicians were mostly passive. When he had almost run
out of places to walk, two hours later, he found himself before a ground en-trance to the main commerce
tower. He pushed through the singing doors into a foyer where a chart hung from the ceiling on long,
brasslike chains, listing the hundreds of stores in the tower. He located what he wanted, found the sound
elevator, and ascended to the eighty-second floor and the toto-experience theater.
     At the theater entrance, he used his medal, his identisong, to get inside. He pressed it against the
activator on the theater door and waited while the few bars played to a finish. The guard mechanism
listened, recorded the piece, checked it against the credit files in the city's main status-tap credit
department in the Congressional Tower. When it was satisfied that he was financially solvent either
through private accounts or parental accounts, it swung open the door and allowed him to enter.
     He walked through into the dark theater, stood in the back until he was able to see well enough to
continue down the aisle. Fifteen rows from the back, and thirty-five rows from the front, he moved in to
the fourth seat and slipped into one of the heavily padded chairs. Al-most before he touched the fabric of
the seat, he felt the nerve-tapping needles of sound stinging into him. He slipped on the mesh sensitizor
cap and drew it tight to his skull by means of a small drawstring on the left side. Now, he was ready.
     For fifteen minutes, nothing but soft music drifted through his flesh, carried by the sound needles and
the mesh sensitizor cap until it seemed as if he were floating in a pool of sound—no, pleasantly drowning
in it. As he relaxed, he thought about the toto-experience film. It was not exactly like the sensonics,
though related. For one thing, the toto-experience theater did not concern itself with sex. Adventure,
patriotism, suspense, and horror— yes. Sex, no. For one thing, the toto houses could not possibly
compete with the sensonic sexual experience available to every adult in the city-state. Secondly, the
theaters catered largely to children, boys not yet at their manhood, girls not yet married into the status of
Lady. But for pure escape when sex was not enough—and there were many times, many cases where
Musicians needed something more than an orgasm—the theaters were a welcome diversion.
     Slowly, the music began to fade.
     It was time for the feature.
     Guil tensed as the soundtrack of the film replaced the intermission music, and his palms grew sweaty.
He knew what he had come to see. Today's film was the latest re-sults of the researchers who poked
through Popular ruins looking for new mutations. He wondered, briefly, if the Stygian phantom would be
in the feature. . . .
     Then the vast cinerama screen lit up, and figures came on in colors brighter than they should have
been, colors so bright that they stung at his eyes so that he was forced to squint to see at all. The sound
rushed by him like a great flock of birds, an endless, flapping parade of them stirring the air and making
his eardrums rever-berate. Although he knew that he did not move from his seat, and that his seat did not
remove from its place on the shimmer-stone floor, it felt very much as if he were rising, drifting across the
other seats and toward the screen itself. The colors and sounds grew more real,
     He noticed, for the first time, that there was a cut-out spot on the screen, a white blank in the film in
the shape of a man. The other researchers addressed it, explaining to it what they were hoping to
discover by the dissection of the creature on the operating table. Then he was mov-ing through the
screen, passing through the thin molecu-lar compression of the screen, farther back into the real-ity of the
film itself. He swept in toward the nothingness spot, the white man-shape, and filled it. Toto-experience
now. He was in the film as well as watching it.
     There were also smells. Antiseptics, mostly. But some-thing else, too. He sniffed, caught it good this
time. It was the odor of the first stages of tissue decay. For the first time, he looked at the thing on the
table; the Popu-lar the doctors were dissecting, and his stomach did som-ersaults.
     It was one of the hideous slugforms that had devolved from Man. There were not too many of this
species, and each individual worm differed slightly from others of its sort. This one was a cherry red and
pulsated with post-mortem muscle spasms, so that it looked almost like the primary stages of a clot
forming in the bloodstream. Only, this clot was four feet long and weighed in at a hundred pounds. Its
body was bristled with sharp spines that jutted out on both sides and from its segmented back. Halfway
up each of these spines was a bulbous projection, light blue in color and apparently only thinly shelled
with a rubbery, wet, glistening membrane.
     Though the slugform was dead, one of the doctors in-formed Guil (who now understood that he was
taking the part of a visiting Congressman inspecting the facili-ties of the researchers), it was still possible
to display, for the Congressman, what the purpose of the blue ten-nis ball-sized spheres was. The doctor
turned back to the slugform and used a scalpel to slice away putrid slug meat from the base of a spine.
When he found what he wanted, he beckoned Guil—or the Congressman, which-ever way one looked
at it—to him.
     “This is a nerve trigger that receives impulses both from the brain and from the point of this spine. If
some-thing attacks the slugform, the points pick up the sensation, relay it to the nerve. The nerve trigger
breaks the internal shell of the poison sac (the blue bulb) and sends the toxic liquid up through the interior
of the spine to leak out the pin-point holes in the end. Or, if the enemy has not yet attacked, but the slug
sees that he will shortly, the slug can send impulses from the brain to trigger the nerves and be ready for
its assailant.”
     “Fascinating,” Guil said.
     “We think so.”
     Then he was retching. He could not help himself. He was gagging, trying to stifle the vomit and trying
to scream at the same time.
     The next instant, he was dissociated with the film and was sitting in his seat. The monitoring
computers had sensed his great revulsion and had kicked his cir-cuits open. Tired now, his entire frame
shaking, he un-tightened the mesh cap and dropped it onto the seat, stood up, swaying. The sound
needles withdrew from his nerves, stopped tapping his sensitive centers. He stum-bled up the aisle and
into the corridor of the immense shopping tower. In the light and the fresher air, he felt somewhat better.
He shoved his hands in the slit pockets of the short cloak he wore over his leotards and walked to the
elevator shafts.
     As he fell to the ground floor and left the building, the questions began arising again. Was the nuclear
war responsible for the Populars—or were the Musicians the culprits? But how could the Musicians be
responsible? They surely didn't have the power to warp thousands of—
     Then he remembered the genetic engineers and the gene juggling chamber in the Primal Chord. Still,
that explained nothing. The men from the ruins would not, surely, willingly submit to such atrocities. They
would not willingly amble into the Primal Chord of their own free will and come out monsters. Some
would escape, hide, evade. . . .
     It made no sense, none at all. And now, hours and hours after the message tape had been triggered,
he was no closer to a solution of his dilemma than he had been moments before the end of the tape when
the first awe and terror had swept into his mind.
     What was the solution then? Run away? To another of the city-states that dotted Earth? But he could
remember times when representatives from those other city-states had been to Vivaldi. From what he
heard and read, their own cities were patterned after the social order of Vi-valdi, on a gladiator rite of
passage and on a strict class system. More than likely, he would fight his way across vast distances to
another city-state and find it as bad or worse than this one.
    What, then?
    He needed someone to discuss the situation with, someone to garner an opinion from. If he could
gather new insights, perhaps the problem could be easily solved. But he could not imagine whom he
could tell of his Popular origins without getting himself shipped to the disposal furnaces. Anyone he told
would have him carted away within the hour. Except . . . Except, Tisha.
    He went to the directory at the nearest vidfone station and located the address of her parents. This
time, buoyed by his distinct purpose, he found that the walk-ing was even enjoyable. He thought about
Tisha, about her face, her full body, the way she talked and moved. She would help him. She would
prove his balm to salve the tensions in him.
    Though he could not know it, the path of action he had chosen and would continue to choose would
lead him directly to the featureless black man who waited in the ruins, watching . . .
First:
     Strong burst into the Healing Room with Dragon close behind. He crossed quickly to Blue. Blue . . .
It was a fitting name. Truly, other features came to mind when one caught sight of her—such as her
breasts (now high and distended with milk), her lovely, smooth brown legs, her feet like tiny feet on
porcelain figurines—but two things were most impressive: first, the eyes blue and pen-etrating; second,
the fine, semitransparent web mem-branes between the fingers, the stigmata that kept her from passing as
an exceptionally beautiful Musician's Lady.
     “I thought you wouldn't make it,” she said, reaching for his hand.
     “Dragon plays games—a treacherous reptile.”
     “Out of the way,” Sparrow snapped, moving bird-fashion before the prone girl-woman. “It's time.
The pains. I know when it's time.”
     As if on cue, Blue convulsed with labor pains, her face so twisted that it frightened Strong to look at
her. But her nails dug the callused flesh of his palms, and he was forced to look.
     Sparrow pushed them to the door, then turned to the audio receptors of the giant robo-doc computer
system embedded in the wall. “She's with child, doctor. Can you heal her?”
     “An abortion will require—”
     “No! No, abortion is out. Can you deliver it?”
     “May I be presented with the patient?” it asked in its husky, no-nonsense voice.
     Sparrow slid the operating table into the slot in the robo-doc's middle. Blue was gone from sight
now.
     “I can do it,” the computer said.
     “Well?” Strong asked Sparrow.
     “Well what?” she asked in return, her black eyes ringed with hairlines of weariness and age, the
chitinous, beak-like rim that replaced her lips faded from black of youth to gray of age.
     “Well, what do we do next?”
     “We sit on the floor,” Dragon said. “And we just wait.”
     They sat.
                                               CHAPTER SIX



     Guil searched her eyes, trying to find some hint of what her true thoughts were, and he wondered
whether he had any right dragging her into this. After all, it was his real father who had given him away to
foster a revolution, his past that needed discovery, and his problems that needed solutions. The world
had turned topsy-turvy in a single day, had whirled and left him upside down and gasping for breath. The
Musicians were, he now knew with a certainty, a warped and disgusting lot; however, might not the
Populars who could so easily give away a son and then just as easily upset his new life seventeen years
later be worse than the Musicians? Did not this basic callous-ness shed some light on an ugly side of the
Popular char-acter every bit as foul as that of the Musicians? Well, whatever the case, whether the
problems were his own or merely the focal point of larger problems for society in general, he had had to
tell her, had had a duty to tell her and include her in his plans. They had shared, so rapidly, bodies and
souls and minds that they had be-come a gestalt with the sum equaling more than either of the parts. In
the end of his explanation, he said, simply, “I'm not necessarily asking you to get involved in a
revo-lution—though you well may. Chiefly, I just want to have you next to me.”
     “Of course,” she said.
     He sighed, cupped her chin in his hand, was going to kiss it when he thought that might be too cheap
a move-ment. Instead, he said, “I thought you'd be afraid.”
     “Neither of us has anything to fear since the pillar,” she said.
     “The Erlking,” he said, tangling his fingers in her hair.
     “The what?”
     “Schubert's Der Erlkonig. The Goethe poem set to music.”
     “I don't think I understand,” she said.
     “The Erlking is Death.”
     “Oh,” she said. “In my case, it was Night on Bald Mountain.”
     “That would do.”
     They reached the neon stone gardens and lost them-selves in a copse of trees so that they would be
out of sight of any casual passers-by. When they seemed to be alone and unnoticed, they stepped across
the last row of stones, the crimson glow just beginning to pulsate in these first hours of evening, and into
the barren waste between the city and the ruins. Here, they could yet hesi-tate, could turn as Guil had
turned earlier in the day, turn and run, run back to the safety of the neon stones and the ordered society
they represented. But they did not turn, hardly even hesitated.
     They entered the ruins, hand-in-hand, wary for the slightest movement, the barest whisper of sound
beyond the functions of their own bodies. The night was very dark among the broken buildings, brick
dust and the stench of rotting food heavy on the air. Guil turned to look back over the ten gentle hills and
ten towers where the descendents of Vladislovitch laid in their sensonics, sterile and pale as the black
grip of passion tore their loins in false sensation. Too much wrong there. As he watched, he could not
understand how he could ever have failed to understand his lack of compatibility with Musician society.
He was not a good Musician (small m or capital M) simply because his blood was not of their culture, his
genes not subject to their manipulation. He had never even known the smoothing finish of the Inundation
Chamber.
     “Maybe we'd better use our shields,” Tisha said.
     “They're expecting me,” he said. “They must be. We aren't in any danger.”
     “But the Populars are—”
     “Supposed to be savage,” he concluded the statement. “But we have been taught wrong. They must
be friendly, intelligent, and civilized in their own way. Come on, the night's going to go by fast enough as it
is.”
     They advanced into the ruins, stepping across the frame of the metal glider sofa, rusted and twisted
over the centuries but still a recognizable skeleton. They had gone no more than a hundred feet when the
faceless Popular stepped in front of them, his hands out-stretched in what he obviously hoped was a
friendly gesture.
     Tisha jumped. Guil held her arm and kept her beside him. He had insulted this poor creature earlier
by run-ning from him in panic. He did not intend to be so grossly ill-mannered again. Besides, the
phantom was obviously waiting to escort him somewhere.
     “I'm Guil,” he said to the creature. He felt somehow absurd, like a man talking to the wind or to a
tree.
     “I'm called Tar,” the black figure said.
     “Tisha,” she said, her voice somewhat uneven.
     “If you'll follow me,” Tar said, “I'll take you to your people.”
     Guil nodded.
     The phantom turned and glided off through the de-bris. They had to push themselves to keep up with
him. He took them across almost unimaginable ruins: colossal piles of stone and mortar and metals,
sprouts of fungus and mushrooms that had welled up from rotting timbers, puddles of glass (some of
different colors, some that was not transparent). There were mashed unrecognizable things, some
standing obviously upside down, others squashed against the sides of still standing buildings as is they had
been crawling insects beaten with a gargan-tuan flyswatter.
     In time, they moved under the demolished city, down into the underground thoroughfares that still
contained a few scattered lighting panels aglow in the frosted white ceiling. It was by this dim but
sufficient illumination that Guil saw the phantom's face close up for the first time. He had been partially
right about what it must look like—but also partially wrong. There were no eyes as a normal man would
think of them, though there were two lighter shades of black where eyes should have been, smoother
textured than the rest of his facial tissue, re-sembling taunt, black drumheads. The nose was a mere slit in
his face, his mouth a lipless affair without teeth— only dark, homy-looking gums. For some reason, he
was no longer afraid of the phantom. It was not just because Tar had seemed friendly (in point of fact, he
had seemed more cold and withdrawn than anything), but because he was faced with the minute pores of
the reality here, where he had only seen the vague outline of the phantom on his earlier attempt to cross
from city to ruins. With some of the mystery gone, the fear drifted off too.
     They went from the corridor to a shabby blue door upon which the phantom Tar knocked. The door
buzzed, slid open, and they went inside. Tar left them. A hand reached out, grasped Guil's hand, its
surface thrice as large as his. The face beyond the arm was as large as the mouth of a bucket. A big
bucket. “Son?”
     Guil stared a moment before comprehension came. He had been expecting to meet a Popular that
was his father, and he should not have been shocked. Yet, somewhere in the dregs of his mind barrel,
there lingered a hope that this wasn't true, that his father would be normal, un-mutated. “Yes,” he said at
last. “I'm Guil. Or—Gideon.”
     “And this?” Strong asked, indicating Tisha.
     “Tisha Cimarosa,” Guil said. He was about to go on to say that her brother had won the station of
Composer at the rituals the previous day. Then he remembered that these were Populars. Even if Strong
did understand Musician society enough to fathom the meaning of the Medallion of the Composer, it was
almost a surety that he would not therefore think highly of Tisha. He might be able to accept her as a
girl-not-yet-a-Lady, but he would never look favorably on her if he knew she had connections high within
the city-state.
     “Tisha,” Strong said, swallowing both her hands in one of his.
     There had been a time, years ago, even before the birth of Guil-Gideon, when Strong had come
across the seven volumes of the Universal Church. At the time when he uncovered these books in the
ruins, he was at a par-ticularly depressive slump in his manic-depressive per-sonality. He was looking for
something, then, something to give shape and meaning to things. When he found the holy books, he
knew, if only subconsciously, that these held the answer, these held a dogma and doctrine that made the
injustices of life bearable.
     The Universal Church had come into being some eighty years before the final war that wiped out
tradi-tional civilization on Earth. For centuries, the religions of the world had been seeking to establish
linkages; at last, they founded their individual ways into a conglom-erate religion that encompassed most
of the main beliefs of Mankind. The Universal Church had perished in the war with everything
else—though a fragment of it now lived in Strong. He raised up the old banners, read the old words, and
somehow only managed to take the spit and the fire and the brimstone and the vengeance. He left the
mercy and kindness behind.
     Now, it seemed almost divinely appointed that he should play a major role in the destruction of the
city-state of Vivaldi. And then, perhaps, of all the other city-states that had come back from the stars to
throw chains around the mother planet. He was the father of the one who would bring about the changes.
He saw it as a holy, divine, preordained situation. It was his paranoia. The completion of the plan was
good. Anything that stood in its way was, of necessity, evil. And any sort of romantic entanglement
between the boy and this Tisha person was bound to affect Gideon's fighting powers, his wit, his
ingenuity. Indeed, might it not be possible, in the pe-nultimate hour, for this Lady-to-be to persuade him
to turn against his real people and work against the Pop-ulars?
     Should he kill her now? Instantly? There was a prob-lem in that the boy had been raised in the
Musicians' world. He would not understand that Strong's purpose was divine. After all, Gideon had been
taught to worship Vladislovitch. He was a pagan. No, the killing of the girl would have to wait for a more
opportune time, for a time when Gideon was so involved in the revolution that he could not withdraw his
support. Then, when Strong killed her, he could explain to Gideon-Guil that the boy's pur-pose was
divine, that he must not filthy himself with women. It was that way in the Seven Books of the
Com-pendium; all the great prophets were chaste.
     Later, he would get her. She was very slight. She would crumple easily between his fingers. He
realized, suddenly, that he had been quiet for too long, that they were look-ing at him strangely. “She's
beautiful,” he said, trying to smooth over his hesitation.
     Tisha did not blush. She knew she was beautiful, and she could see no benefit in denying her
self-awareness. “Thank you,” she said.
     “My—my mother?” Guil-Gideon asked.
     Strong looked startled. “Oh, of course! She's sleeping. She waited for over a day. We expected you
sooner. But then I guess you couldn't just up and run away at the first moment.” He led them through
another sliding panel, a yellow one this time, and into a room where a woman lay on a clean but rickety
cot. “Blue,” Strong called, shaking her shoulder. “Blue, he's here.”
     His mother was the second most beautiful creature he had ever seen, only a shade less stunning than
Tisha though she was at least fifteen years older than the girl at his side. Had they been of equal age and
health, he mused, Tisha would have had to take second place to this genuinely lovely woman. He saw the
webs under her arms, for she wore a sleeveless toga affair now, and he saw them, also, between her
fingers. They may have contributed to her name, but the chief reason she was called Blue lay in her eyes
which were as brilliant as neon stones. They shone.
     For a moment they stood awkwardly, looking at each other, like small children deciding whether or
not to make friends. Then Blue almost floated into Guil-Gideon's arms, crying and hugging him, kissing
him wetly. He didn't like it, but he held her too and tried to find some-thing in all of this to sort things out
and show him the way, show him why they could twice disrupt his life and seem to feel so little sorrow
over it. The Musicians con-signed their children over to the arena, not too disturbed if half of them died.
And these people, similarly, had given over their son to a cause, also unconcerned about what he would
feel and what it would mean to him.
     The history of Man, what little he knew of it, was studded with philosophers that said individual lives
were not as important as certain ideals. They had helped to cram the ideals down the throats of their
young soldiers, had sent them marching off to war in colorful uniforms like a bunch of bespangled
monkeys. And when the sol-diers didn't come back, the same men who had urged them off in the first
place (and who had stayed behind their desks, writing more of their toilet slop propaganda prose) wrote
eulogies for them and praised their names and talked some more about ideals. But what did a
god-damned ideal mean to any one of those soldiers? Lying there in the mud, rotting, maggots eating out
the insides of their gray husks, how could they feel a lofty pride in their ideals? Would an ideal even let
them see a movie again? Not with their eyeballs burst and running down their faces. Would an ideal, then,
help them to eat a holi-day dinner? Not with their teeth cracked and their tongues halfway down their
throats and colored like dung. Would any ideal let them, help them, give them one more chance to make
love to someone? You're damn right it wouldn't. There had never been, in the history of Earth, an ideal
worth dying for. Because men always corrupted the ideals anyway. Now and then, there might be a good
concrete reason having to do with economics or subjugation. But not even that very often. Only life was
worth dying for, and there was no sense in that.
     Standing there with his mother embracing him and his father behind her, beaming at him, he felt very
cold, re-mote. He suddenly saw that no child owed anything to its parents. Children were the end
product of passion, of carelessness during that passion—or, if the child was a planned child, the result of
a desire for immortality, for your name and reputation to go on one or two more generations—and in the
Musicians' case, duty. A passion, carelessness, or duty could not repay debts even if there were debts.
Confusion boiled in his mind again. The walls of the room were alien and distant, seemed to sway slightly,
as if this were a ship on a rough sea. The woman drying her tears before him was only a statue that had
come to life with all the attitudes and desires of a human being—except for true mother love. Blue lacked
that.

    They came to an end of the corridor where a bomb pocket had opened a mouth into caverns beneath
the old city. The darkness in the caverns was all but impene-trable, so thick it seemed as if it could be
touched and poured into a pitcher. They had left Tisha behind with Blue, had come this far alone. Guil
was glad of that, for he did not want her to see him shaking. His hands trem-bled, and his lips twitched.
He was, somewhat, afraid of this man who claimed to be his father.
    It had not taken long for him to find that Strong was a religious fanatic, for the big Popular was
constantly spouting off homilies and prayers from some source he called the Seven Books. It seemed to
have been a world religion sometime before the holocaust, but Guil could not be certain. He had never
heard of it, but then again he was not particularly well-schooled in Earth history.
    All he knew was that Strong wanted him to fight for an ideal. He had not said as much yet, but the
trend of his discussion headed in that direction. He was going to ask Guil to fight for something in those
Seven Books, to take up weapons for a religion four hundred years dead. And he did not think he could
do it. It would be the same thing as if he had joined the Musicians in a bloody war against the
Populars—supposedly under the blessing of Vladislo-vitch. No, he would not risk everything for a mere
ideal. Some practicality, yes. If Strong made the point that the Populars had been hideously treated,
deserved a right to a place of power—then, he might join battle. Even that, however, was not a certainty.
It would have been so much easier, he thought, if he had liked them immensely. But he did not.
    Strong led the way down through the hole in the floor, clutching at projecting rocks and beams, came
out on a level area again. When Guil was beside him, he stepped forward and disappeared. There was
the sound of skin and cloth scraping over sand.
    Guil went to the edge where the plain dropped abruptly, could see for a few inches. It seemed like a
long slope of sand that could not be traversed any way but by crude tobogganing. If he tried to stand and
run down, the steep slope would probably pitch him forward onto his head just as he reached a more
solid-flooring. He held his breath, pushed off from the edge, and went slithering down five hundred feet of
fine-grained earth. He was glad that he had a leotard suit on that covered most all his body, and he briefly
wondered how Strong had been able to withstand the brush-burning without screaming.
    Strong was waiting for him, grasped his shoulder and squeezed it affectionately. He turned then and
led the way over more rubble toward the two luminous moth-like eyes that shone in the darkness and
gave off a little light to their left. In the backwash of the ocular glow, Guil could see a man hanging upside
down from a beam, his toes gripping some precarious perch in the shadows above. Guil and Strong
stopped at an out-cropping of cement barely visible in the gloom, sat down facing the specter.
     The hanging man flapped leathery wings, wrapped them around himself and surveyed the man and
boy, his lantern eyes washing them with green light. There was a haughty air about him, a mild look of
disdain on his wizened, ugly features. “Him?” he asked.
     “Yes,” Strong said. There was pride in his voice, and he was purposefully accentuating it to let the
manbat know that he thought Guil a fine specimen of a son.
     “You're certain?” the manbat asked.
     “Positive. He is my son.”
     “They could have found out, could have switched someone on you.”
     “I know my son!”
     The manbat fluttered, and his clawed toes scraped as he readjusted his purchase on the rusting steel.
     Guil coughed, wondering how long it would take one of them to think of including him in their
conversation. After all, he was the focal point of this whole business.
     “Oh,” Strong said, “Gideon, this is Redbat.”
     “Redbat,” Guil said courteously.
     “An oddity,” the upside-down half-man said, blink-ing slow, furry lids over his magnificent eyes. He
smacked his thin lips together and made a sighing sound. “For some reason, I'm red-skinned and
red-furred. Doesn't really matter to some bats, cause some of us mutated to a point where we see in
black and white or in radar blips. But I have radar and my human sight, and I saw that I was red and
different. And I knew.”
     “Knew what?” Guil asked.
     The manbat showed fangs as large as thumbs. In the light wash from his eyes, they too were green,
though a softer shade. “I was meant to lead, of course! I knew that right away.”
     “Lead what?”
     “Manbats!'' Redbat exclaimed, fluttering all over with consternation, his eyes even a little wider than
they had been.
     Strong pinched his son's arm between his thick fingers to warn the boy. One such admonition was
enough, Guil decided. He had a single, snapshot-clear vision of thumb-sized fangs sinking to the gums in
a vein, tearing flesh, foam-flecked and crimson. . . .
     “Redbat,” Strong said, turning the manbat's attention away from Guil, who was relieved to see the
mutant's green gaze shift from his face, “we came to meet with your council. The Day is only a week
ahead.”
     “So soon?”
     “The boy has already told me that what I want can be done quite easily.”
     True, Guil thought, but I did not say I would do it.
     “They won't suspect him of sabotage,” Strong con-tinued. “He can go freely almost anywhere he
wants. And where he cannot go is of no consequence to our plans. So we might as well begin
coordinating things.”
     The manbat was silent for a time, thinking. Guil tried to imagine what the workings of such a mind
would be like, what patterns the thoughts would follow, what prej-udices would exist, what memories. It
was a little too much for him. He could accept the Populars on a physi-cal level, but could never
extrapolate from that to a thought process pattern that might be typical of them. “Come on,” Redbat said
at last.
     Redbat disengaged his claws and flopped to the floor, managing to come to a standing position
before he hit. He turned, scrambled over the ruins, farther back into the darkness, half flying and half
walking through the narrow passage whose sides were formed of broken chunks of concrete, broken
glass, twisted wires, and oddly intact ceramic tiles.
     “Father,” Guil said, the word thick and bad-tasting on his tongue, much as if a fat insect had flown in
his mouth, “why didn't you use Redbat instead of Loper to steal the real Guillaume from the Primal
Chord?”
     Strong clambered over stone and plastic and metal, reached back and helped Guil over the hillock.
“It's 2,500 feet to the top of the Primal Chord. True, manbats can fly, but they are still men. Their bone
structure is not completely adapted to flight. A real bat's bones are nearly hollow, but manbats have to
walk on the ground and support their weight, so hollow bones are out. Therefore, they can only get up
about two hundred feet. And even if they would have flown up the Primal Chord that far, they would not
have had well-developed muscles to scale the rest of the distance in a conventional manner.”
     Darker it got.
     And colder.
     They came to another slope that was negotiable only . by sliding down it. Redbat was fortunate in
that the ceiling here was high enough to allow him to fly to the bottom. Strong went first. Guil looked at
what he could see of the slope, listened to his father's descent. This one was not made of sand. He could
hear heavy material rolling here. But, again, it was too steep to permit walk-ing. He tensed, pushed off. . .
.
     Rocks and skin on a toboggan ride. The rocks came out the better for it. Guil grimaced as the tip of
his little finger rasped over another rock. Then he was sliding down a long stretch of loose stones, kicking
and squeal-ing as the dust rose to choke and blind him. When he came to the bottom, he lay still a
moment, then pushed up before Strong (always motherly in fear his divine tool would be damaged) could
come running to assay his wounds.
     “You're certain he can do it?” Redbat asked, fluffing his wings in the gloom, his face screwed into an
almost comic scowl. But Guil remembered what that same face looked like with fangs splitting the lips
and could suddenly see nothing remotely comic about it.
     “He can do it,” Strong said. “But we have to remember that he was raised by Musicians. He isn't
prepared for the kind of life we lead.”
     Guil wondered how these two would have fared in the arena. Probably would have dropped under
the dragon, been sung out of existence by a sound creature or, if not that, carted off to the disposal
furnaces beneath the arena. Still, what Strong said was true. He was not out of his element. It seemed,
recently, as if he were always and forever out of his element. . . .
     “Still—” Redbat tried to argue.
     “You would not have survived in his world, in the city-state. You would not have learned their sound
rules and would have died in the arena.”
     Redbat looked angry for a moment, then shrugged his shoulders. “Maybe so,” he said. “Come on.”
     The endless tunnels twisted and retwisted, rose and fell through the dusty dimness of the rubble
stacks into mo-ments of absolute pitch that pained the eyes with its in-tensity. Rubble sometimes filled the
way so that they had to turn sideways and press their backs against the rugged wall to squeeze by. Other
times the floor rose slowly until they finally had to struggle on their stomachs between ceiling and ruins.
Redbat seemed to have the least diffi-culty, his wiry, leathery form able to shrink to startling compactness
whenever the situation demanded. Guil decided that there was more than likely another way and that this
one was being used to show him how rough this life could be. Because of this suspicion, he refused to
groan or complain, but took the punishment with admi-rable stoicism—although an occasional mutter
would involuntarily escape his lips. Finally, in one of the black-est places, they stopped. This was a room
again. The walls swept away to either side, and the ceiling was ten or eleven feet high. Guil was aware of
the presence of other creatures, heard the faintest thin whisper of rattly breath-ing.
     “He brought the boy Gideon,” Redbat said.
     There was a rustling that echoed thinly in the damp chamber. A row of four huge eyes appeared and
was immediately broken by a staggered line of four more as the manbats turned completely around on
their perches to face him.
     “I don't like his looks,” a thin voice whined, sandpaper over glass.
     “Of course you don't,” Redbat hissed. He fluttered his wings in annoyance. “You don't like him
because he looks like a Musician.”
     “Redbat's right,” another of the four said. His voice was so gentle and kind that Guil was immediately
reminded of the tender gentle Franz who taught him the guitar. Lacking the bat's real name, and so he
would be able to think of the creature as something with a personality, he named him after the old
teacher. Franz cleared his throat, made a scratching, dry sound. “We must not let our prej-udices
influence us. If we do, we're liable to lose the only chance we have.”
     “Well said,” Redbat answered. “I don't like him either.” He turned to stare at Guil. His fangs
appeared for a mo-ment, curled over his lower lip, then withdrew to the stinking hole of his mouth. “But
he's the best chance we've got.”
     Strong's hand was on Guil's arm again, applying a somewhat painful pressure as a warning to be quiet
and accept. Guil did not need a warning.
     The bat that had first stated his dislike for the boy scrambled around on his perch, still upside-down,
and faced the other direction. Now there were only six eyes before them.
     “Tell us what you would have us do,” Franz said to Strong.
     “Gideon will go back to the Musicians as if he did not know his true nature, and he will carry on this
act for another week. He does not need that much time to do his part, but we will require it to ready our
forces for the Day. Then a week from tonight he will see to it that the generators which maintain the
sound configurations of the towers are destroyed—all except the Meistro's Palace and the Congressional
Hall in the administrative tower. We will keep that structure intact in order to start our own government
from there—a symbol, if you will, of our power. The other buildings will fade. When the deterioration
begins, we will attack and kill any Muscian left alive and in the open. Your part will be to attack from the
air. As I see it, this sort of attack will be espe-cially effective as it will come as a surprise.”
     “They will have their sound rifles,” another bat said.
     “We can't wait for perfect conditions,” Strong argued. “We expect to have our share of casualties.
We had long talks on the matter, if you remember correctly, and we decided casualties would be worth it
if we had a chance for success. And now we have such a chance.”
     “Hummpphh!” the bat with his back turned said.
     Everyone ignored him.
     “And whistles?” Franz asked. “The sound-sedatives?”
     “Whistles can't have any effect on you unless you are within fifteen yards. You can swoop down
before they can effectively use them,” Guil said, talking chiefly to make it known that he was not
completely a tool that they could lay back on the shelf any time they wished. Besides, he had not said he
would do any of this. He was not yet sure. And the longer he was around these people, the more
intimately he came to know his father, Strong, the less sure he became. . . .
     The three pairs of eyes shifted to him, watched him a moment, then moved back to Redbat. It was
impossible to read anything from those eyes, impossible to tell what they thought of him—how deep their
hatred ran.
     “It's settled then?” Redbat asked.
     Three blinks.
     “How many can you provide?” Strong wanted to know. There was a keen edge of excitement to his
voice, and his breath came faster and in shorter, more gasping in-halations.
     “Four thousand for Vivaldi,” Redbat said. “Later, if it is decided to move against other city-states, we
will have to rely mainly on what is left of this primary force.”
     “Four thousand is enough,” Strong said. “With Gideon and whatever sound rifles and sonic knives we
can cap-ture, it will be more than enough.”
     Guil listened to the battle plans with a part of his mind, while much of his consciousness still tried to
deal with the choice he would soon have to make. Either he would continue the status quo, maintain the
Musician society from sheer refusal to participate in a revolt against it, or he would have to lead that
revolt, step with it out of the ruins and carry its vengeance through the neon stone gardens to the very
corridors of the Congressional Tower. Once, he thought that he heard something behind him, movement
of some sort. He turned, could see nothing but darkness. Looking back to Redbat and the others, he
tried to return to his contemplations. It was then that he felt hot breath on his neck and heard the rattle of
claws scuttling across stones. . . .
     Later, he would wonder which he had actually sensed first: the humid breath or the sound of the
claws. It would seem logical that the scuttling noise should come before the breath, and it very likely had.
But in those micro-seconds when his animal cunning innately knew some-thing was wrong, his sensory
impressions blasted into his cortex in such rapid succession that he had no time to sort them out.
     Screeching, shouting, rattling, flapping, the very dark-ness swam over him, punctuated with green
discs, swal-lowed him, spat him up, wallowed him between its thick lips. . . .
     For a moment, he thought he was smothering. Some-thing fouled his nose and head and cut off the
cool air from the cavern. He gagged repeatedly, felt the soft tissues of his throat beginning to bum, felt his
chest swell and his lungs begin to ache. He flailed, struck something. He struck it again, feebly, before he
thought to feel it and test for the source of his afflictions. The nerves on the tips of his fingers relayed the
message to his fogging brain: there was a leathery wing about his head.
     He struck out again, viciously this time, managed to free his face for a moment, just long enough to
expel a short burst of stale air and suck in something more palat-able. Then the wing was back, tighter
now, the little hand on the end of it hooked into his cloak. He struck out twice again before he
understood that flailing like a windmill was doing absolutely no good. His blows bounced off the rubbery
wing flesh without inflicting any damage—and probably damned little pain. And his lungs were tired
again, surging up in his chest cavity as if they would take the initiative in gaining air for themselves. Shifting
his tactics, he bit into the wing that covered his face, tore a chunk of the membrane loose and spat it out.
It tasted like bad cheese, but he had gained the desired effect. The manbat screamed, fluttered, and
released him.
     “The boy! The boy!” Strong was shouting. But what he was really thinking, Guil knew, was: the plan,
the plan!
     “Nasty!” Redbat shouted. His reedy voice slithered and fizzed off the rocks. “Let him go, Nasty!”
     Nasty, Guil thought. And what an appropriate name it was. This must be the bat, he reasoned, that
had turned away from him earlier. But he had been busy while the rest of them had talked. He had turned
his back and had quietly left his perch, had sneaked around the room and had come in from behind.
Maybe “Nasty” wasn't the best name for him, Guil thought. Maybe “Treacherous” was better.
     Claws raked his chest, harsh, hot needles. He felt the fine lines of pain on one level, the blood
breaking through in tiny rivulets on another. The claws sank deeper, twisted viciously back and forth.
Nasty called wildly, cheered himself on with the most hideous array of dissonant notes Guil had ever
heard.
     Guil struck upward with a fist, smashed it just below the green eyes. The blow felt solid, and
something had given under it. Nasty's head snapped back and to the side. The claws tore loose, taking
slivers of flesh with them and freeing more blood. For a moment, Guil thought he had broken its neck,
and relief began to quiet his panic.
     Then Nasty shrieked, flapped onto Guil's back and sunk claws into the boy's shoulders from the
bronc-buster position.
     For a while, Guil tried whirling about, hoping to get his hands on the tip of a wing or a foot, anything
that would give him leverage against the beast so that he might cause it pain and pry it loose. But the
manbat was more naturally the fighter, and he kept himself cunningly out of the boy's grasp, allowing
himself to be brushed by Guil's fingertips but never conceding more than that.
     Eventually, Guil stopped, realizing he would tire and the manbat would finish him. The fangs and the
claws would rip into him, open him up. His mind spinning swiftly through alternate courses of action, he
did the only prudent thing. He fell backwards, crushing the bat's thin chest under him. Still, the manbat
would not re-treat. Nasty foamed and screeched his hatred, sank fangs into the boy's shoulder in a
misdirected try for his neck.
     Guil's head spun madly merry-go-roundish, pumped up and down, slid, slipped, galloped in place.
Pain shot through his chest like an electric current, and his shoul-ders seemed close to paralysis. He
fought against the im-prudent desire to get to his feet and try to run. There would be no place to go—just
as there had been no hid-ing place in the arena in the Coming of Age Day—and that would free the
manbat to claw and bite anew. In-stead, he pressed back hard, rolled to the left and right, listening to the
crunch of cartilage and light bones.
     Blood gurgled in Nasty's throat. He ripped his fangs loose and tried once more for the boy's throat.
There, he knew, the pounding mainline of blood flowed. But he missed and merely scraped the flesh, his
own pain and weakness now defeating him. His breath was foul with rotting meat fragments and the
stench of his own gore.
      Guil rolled and rolled a long while before he realized the manbat was dead. The chest had crumpled
inward, and the ribs had punctured its heart and other organs, setting a bubbling blood fountain to
gurgling life. Wear-ily his clothes soaked with blood and caked with dirt, little sobs of exhaustion
escaping from his throat despite his iron determination to hold them in, he stood and wheezed for air.
      “I would have killed him anyway,” Redbat said. “He disobeyed me when I told him to stop. That
would not have been tolerated.”
      “But,” Guil croaked, his sides and shoulders throbbing and hot where the bat had clawed him, “I
fought him for . . . you. Now, Redbat . . . you owe me . . . a fa-vor. The time will come when I will want
. . . you to pay it back.”
      “That is honorable,” Redbat said. “Fine. Now you had both better leave. We must prepare to
marshal our forces for the Day.”
      He turned, Strong's arm about him, and struggled up the stony incline back toward the cave where
they had first met Redbat, unable to refuse his father's aid this time, even though he wanted to, even
though he detested looking weak before this man.
      “Your wounds,” Strong protested.
      “I'll be fine.”
      “We'll take you to the robo-doc in this area—before we continue with the preparations. We'll get
you fixed. And those stinking clothes laundered.”
      “Well,” Guil said reluctantly. “If you insist.” He topped the rise. “Maybe a bandage or two is
necessary.” Then he pitched forward onto the rubble, into an even deeper dark. . . .
FIRST:
     The operating table slid out of the robo-doc, bearing Blue.
     Strong knew that the time was near at hand and his head was full of quotations from the Seven
Books to bol-ster his Dream and give it flesh. His body literally shiv-ered with pious joy. But his Dream
was a vision of final judgment, retribution, and justice, and his mind was filled with this: “Then shall the
lame man leap as a hart, and the tongue of the dumb sing: for in the wilderness shall waters break out,
and streams in the desert. And the parched ground shall become a pool, and the thirsty land springs of
water: in the habitation of dragons, where each lay, shall be grass with reeds and bushes.” He was the
father of the prophet. And the prophet would become the Saviour.
     Another slot opened in the computer physician's belly, and a cradle containing the baby hummed out.
“It's true,” Strong said when he saw it, his voice a reverential whisper.
     “The doctor doesn't lie,” Sparrow said. “It is a great being who—”
     “Yeah, yeah,” said Dragon. “Now give him the boy.”
     She handed the baby to Strong. He thought: Ye shall not labor in vain, nor bring forth for
trouble, for ye are the seed of the blessed of the Lord.
     . . . THE SEED OF THE BLESSED OF THE LORD . . .
     “What will the name be?” Dragon asked. “We can't wait to see what he'll look like when he grows.
We can't wait to give him a trait name.”
     “Gideon,” Strong said.
     “What is that?” Sparrow asked, tending to Blue who still lay sleeping.
     “In this book,” Strong said. He handed over one of the seven volumes of the Universal Church.
“Gideon was a great prophet. In three separate religions before the Uni-versal Church—and highly
regarded after the amalgama-tion.”
     “A prophet,” Dragon said. “But the name is funny.” He started to laugh his rasping, hoarse laugh, but
stopped abruptly when he saw the look on Strong's face. He guessed it was insanity. . . .
                                           CHAPTER SEVEN



     Mummified in spray-on, clear bandages, clothes clean and dried and containing a faint odor of some
cleansing fluid, he tramped the corridor behind Strong. His wounds did not hurt very much, for the
strange com-puter-doctor left over from prewar days had healed them and had laced them with pain
killers. Stitches had been required in four places, the robo-doc had said, but they were self-removing and
would dissolve in five days when the wounds would be completely healed. It even guaran-teed that there
would be no scars. But for the moment, wounds or not, they moved on with preparations for the Day.
     “Who is this Gypsy Eyes we're going to see?” he asked as he caught up with Strong who was setting
a relatively fast pace with his longer, more muscular legs.
     “Just wait. You'll see.”
     “I'm tired of being told to wait and that I'll see!”
     Strong, never breaking pace, gave him a perplexed look and then a half-smile of uncertainty. He
wanted a docile puppet to maneuver, not someone given to out-bursts of individuality. Guil's sharp tone
made him slightly ill-at-ease, but he managed to contain his anger that had seethed to the surface at the
seeming insubordination. “It's just that it is difficult to explain Gypsy Eyes until you meet him. He explains
himself bet-ter than I ever could. You'll see.” He realized his faux pas with the last sentence, but it was
too late to retract it now.
     Guil chose to ignore it.
     They went on.
     For a time, the corridors were untouched by destruc-tion, so perfect, indeed, that they seemed an
impossibil-ity in the midst of the utter ruin that he had seen every-where else. The old apartments here
had been made into living quarters for the Populars, and they had kept the place well. The overhead
lights seemed to fulfill the du-ties of sunlight, encouraging snaky vines and pale flowers to grow in the
carefully tended, well-weeded black earth that filled the long troughs that lined both walls and broke only
for the doors to the various apart-ments.
     Then the hallway sloped upward like a ramp, leaving the general living areas, troughs, and flowers
behind, turning in a wide arc as if they were traveling about the outer rim of a wheel and the living
quarters had been spokes. There was no rubbish or rubble here either, though the walls were
undecorated and painted a mo-notonous white that made the eyes seek every tiny fleck or stain for some
relief. At the top of the ramp, Strong palmed a door open and led the way into a ten-sided room with a
wall of glass and a ceiling where the ocean danced wildly blue-green.
     Guil felt his mouth open involuntarily in that age-old reaction to anything awesome. He stood in the
middle of the room and stared up at the sea. It was as beautiful as anything he had ever seen in the
Musician world. In fact, the Musicians would rarely to in for designing some-thing this beautiful.
Aesthetics, for them, dealt with sound, not with form and color. The colors of their build-ings and clothes
and fixtures were only incidental to the patterns that made up those things. But this was far more beautiful
than their sounds.
     Above, the sea danced blue-green.
     “And the Lord said, 'Do not the waters of the sea show forth the face of God?"' Strong smiled a
self-satisfied smile. The quote had so easily rolled from his tongue that Guil was certain he could not have
felt anything emotional from it, could not even have appreciated its poetic tone. It was habitual and ugly
the way the scrip-ture verses slid out of his mouth, like the sterile products of an automated factory
sliding into the finished bin.
     Guil went to the glass wall and looked out, surprised by what he saw. He had expected water and
ocean bot-tom, for he thought they were beneath the ocean. But they were above it! This bubble wall
curved away from the face of a great cliff, a hundred feet from the top of the sea. He looked down and
was caught up in a vertigi-nous moment when he saw that the lip of the window melted into the floor and
that he was standing on the thick glass with nothing (nothing visible) separating him from the water.
     He hung there.
     Ahead, the ocean stretched forever into gray, moving mists that eventually obscured it. Now and
then, light-ning played through the higher layers of the fog, pul-sated in reflection across the water. Guil
wondered, seeing this magnificence for the first time, why the Musicians had not chosen to build Vivaldi
here, only a mile or two away from where it was placed. Here, they would have the sea and the mist.
Vaguely, he knew that the sea was associated with death. It was eternal. It pro-duced life and claimed it.
It went on. And would go on even after the Musicians had passed. Perhaps that was it. Though the
Musicians were strangely fascinated with death, they were not willing to be faced with a constant
reminder that death was eternal and not just a mortal en-tity like themselves.
     He looked down, away from the fog and lightning.
     Below, the sea dashed itself violently against the rocks that looked like craggy brown teeth. It
sprayed dozens of feet into the air, foaming up the cliff face but never quite touching the window. He
could faintly hear the dragon roar of it seeping through the glass. Far out, a gull swooped down out of the
clouds, glided toward the cliff and disappeared into a dark aperture just above the foam line and just
below the window.
     Guil turned and looked at the ceiling again. It ap-peared to be a slab of glass which supported the
unbear-able weight of an ocean, yet the ocean was below them. “How is that done?” he asked, too
curious to contain the question, not particularly caring whether his ignorance made Strong feel smug.
     But Strong did not answer. A voice deep and smooth as water-licked limestone spoke up. “Mirrors.
They re-flect the scene from a pipe that opens on the ocean floor at the base of the cliff. It channels the
reflection from mir-ror to mirror and throws it on the ceiling through a pro-jector in the head of that statue
of Neptune.”
     He swiveled, searching the green- and blue-toned shadows for the lips that had spoken those words.
He saw the man, lean and dark in the far corner next to a fish tank where thin, yellow darts swam through
frond-split crystal water. A cascade of white hair, each strand thin and frizzy though the whole appeared
thick, poured over his extra-large head and withered away just above shaggy white eyebrows and two
gray eyes.
     “Who—” Guil began, stepping away from the window.
     “Mirrors, mirrors, mirrors. Oh, they were damn clever, those prewar Earthmen! They could pervert
reality to their whims. But they were not clever enough. Little pieces like these are all they left behind.”
     “Gypsy Eyes?”
     Strong stood silently by the door. He nodded.
     The fish swam unconcerned.
     Outside, the mists formed ghost bodies that dissolved in passionate embraces.
     “Mirrors are wonderful things,” the white-haired one continued, oblivious to Guil's questions—or just
not car-ing to answer them. “They show you what you could not know otherwise. How could you know
your own face without a mirror? Hmmmm? Could we have any idea what we are without mirrors to tell
us? Did men, before there were mirrors, think themselves insects or look-alikes for ferocious animals?
No, I guess not. They could see one another and have some idea of their own visage. But what about
self? They could have a general idea about their facial appearance, but what about the in-dividual face?
Hmmmm? How could they know self? How could they ever be really certain that they were not different
from others? They couldn't. All their miserable lives, they could never be sure. But with mirrors . . .”
     “If you are Gypsy Eyes—” Guil began unsuccessfully.
     The old Popular stood and walked slowly through the colored shadows toward the window. “Still,
mirrors have their faults. We can't use them to look ahead. We can look behind or look at the now, but
we can't look ahead with them. Turn them front to reflect what's ahead, and you can't see them anyhow.
So they're not really valua-ble, all these mirrors.”
     Then, with a sudden fury, he threw himself past Guil, into the out-thrusting balcony, crashing against
the thick glass. He bounced off, crumpled to the floor. For a mo-ment, Guil almost laughed. It had
seemed like some slap-stick stunt, some routine to gain laughter. Then he was able to remember the
force with which the mutant had skimmed against the window, remembered the stunning reverberation of
the collision. It must have hurt. Yet, like a moth to the flame, Gypsy Eyes rose and heaved himself at the
pane once more. Again, he toppled backwards. And, yet again, he rose.
    The hollow boom of flesh against the unbreakable shield filled the room. Guil turned to Strong, but
though concerned, the big man did nothing to stop Gypsy Eyes' attempts at suicide. He had seen it all
before. Maybe many times.
    “Stop him!” he called.
    Strong did not make a move.
    Because, Guil thought, that glass will hold, and this is just some crazy ritual, something we must
watch, some-thing he must do.
    In the tank, fronds waved. Fishes swam. Outside, waves roared off the rocks.
    In time, Gypsy Eyes collapsed onto the lip of glass, staring down through the transparent floor at the
rocks and the water. He was weeping; tears moved along the glass, glistening blue-green. . . Blue-green .
..
    “I asked you not to do it,” Strong said, lifting the old man by his arms and helping him into his chair
next to the fish tank. “Not until after the Day. That's only a week from now. We need you badly, Gypsy
Eyes.”
    The Popular straightened in his chair, trying to regain his dignity. He seemed less melancholy.
    “What did it look like?” Strong asked.
    “At this point, I saw a seventy-eight percent chance of death if I accompany you on the revolution
into the Mu-sician Sector.”
    “That bad?” Strong lost some of his control, let his fea-tures slide down his face in a great frown.
    “Worse for me,” Gypsy Eyes said. “I suffer a ninety-eight percent probability of death if I remain
behind and do not accompany you.”
    Strong looked puzzled. “Why?”
    “Because, without my assistance, you'll fail. And then the Musicians will come in here and teach us a
lesson by wiping out half of us. Me included. The seventy-eight and ninety-eight are percentages for my
success, remem-ber. The revolution may fare better.”
    Strong turned to Guil who stood dumbly watching and listening to the exchange. “Gypsy Eyes sees
the future,” he said.
    “No,” the old man corrected him. “I see all possible futures. Countless futures. There's a difference.
I can re-view the majority of possible futures in seven to ten sec-onds and determine the likelihood of the
success or failure of most any event. I can't give you a detailed pic-ture of anything. I'm a mirror with a
crack in it. No, hun-dreds of cracks so that, in the little undamaged frag-ments, you can only see a tiny
fraction of what you're looking for.”
    Strong sank into another chair, motioned Guil to a couch. “But Gyp gets too personal. He looks
ahead too far, and he can't help looking ahead for his own fate. And every time, the fate is somewhat
different, for the possible futures change as what happens in the present changes. He is constantly
barraging himself with visions of his possible deaths, though thus far he is alive and healthy. I'm trying to
keep him from searching into per-sonal things, because if it's too gruesome at any given moment, he
gets—what would you say, Gyp?”
    “Suicidal, I guess.”
    “That's it. We just saw it happen again. Now, I asked you to promise to only look ahead at the
chances of the revolution's success, not your own.” He turned to Guil. “See, if I wondered whether a
particular piece of strat-egy would get the results I sought in the battle in ques-tion, I would ask Gyp.
He'd tell me the percentages. I'd either go ahead as planned or change strategies ac-cording to his view.
He's invaluable. Unless he gets hung up on his own fate.”
    “What did you come for?” Gypsy Eyes asked cu-riously, not angrily. There seemed to be no anger in
the man, as if the scope of his future vision made any act done to him only a petty thing of the moment
and un-worthy of ire.
     “This is my boy, Gideon. In a week, we begin.”
     The gray eyes brightened. “I'll be careful, Strong.”
     “I know you will, Gyp. Just a week. Just don't look for your personal future for seven days. After
that, you can get suicidal if you want.”
     They left, then, closing out the ceiling-sea. When they were halfway down the hall toward the arc in
the rim, Guil would have sworn he heard the hollow booming of flesh thrown against glass, flesh against
glass, again and again with sickening regularity.
     As they walked, turning into less habitable corridors to save steps on the way back to Blue and
Tisha, Guil thought of the Populars he had met in the last few hours. Gypsy Eyes with his swollen head,
his ability to tell the future. Redbat, a thing that had once been a man. Tar, the obsidian figure without
eyes . . . Blue and her webs . . . Strong with his impossible musculature . . .
     At last, as they passed a place where the corridor wall had been blasted out, Guil sat on the
crumbling rubble and looked down at the remains of a once mighty civili-zation, at the littered beach a
few yards beyond that, at the same ocean he had seen from the window in Gypsy Eyes' place. He
twisted his neck out of the hole, located the glass bubble of Gypsy Eyes' port a quarter of a mile back
along the cliff and up another three hundred feet.
     “What is it?” Strong asked, moving to him when he saw he had stopped. “Tired?”
     “No.”
     “What, then?”
     “The message tape,” Guil said. “It told me that the Musicians had made you what you are. It said that
the Musician had warped the survivors of the nuclear war, had made them into Populars.”
     “This is true.”
     “But the radiation from the bombs would do that.”
     “Not like this. Random radiation would produce mon-sters worse than any of us. Heavy radiation of
the random form would produce, largely, nonfunctionals, creatures incapable of sustaining their own life.
The thing that mutated us, that messed into our genes, was sound waves.'”
     “But how could you know that. It's been four hundred years since the war, since the first Populars.”
     “In the beginning,” Strong said, making it sound like a narrative catch-phrase leading into a sermon,
“just after the war, we had begun to struggle back onto our feet. Or the men of that time had. They were
piecing things to-gether. Then the Musicians came. You know, of course, that the Musicians, and many
of the other groups that colonized the other worlds in the galaxy, were outcasts. They were bidden good
riddance when they originally left Earth. Perhaps, when they came back, it was with a determination to
prove something. Their own worthi-ness, maybe. The World Science Control had banned their
researches, had labeled them unstable and danger-ous to life as it was then known. They were coming
back to prove they were better. When they came back, it was not to help reconstruct the planet, but to
assume domi-nance over it. They waged a short war against the Earth-men who were now chiefly
weaponless. All of this had been recorded. It is hidden here and there in the ruins to assure its safety from
Musician hands: we must keep our history, if nothing else.”
     “Even if the Musicians won,” Guil said, “that does not explain the mutations.”
     “The Musicians,” Strong continued, “did not eradicate nearly all of the Earthmen survivors. They
drove them deeper into the ruins and left them psychologically whipped. Then, over the next few years,
the first Populars were born, babies with strange, inhuman features. As the births continued (all of them
functional to one degree or another) the few men of science left from the two wars became convinced
that the mutations were not accidental, and not the result of the bombs. They were too subtle, too—well,
clever. With what limited re-sources they had, they began research into the situation. Nothing was ever
conclusively proved, but they learned enough to satisfy them. The Musicians were broad-casting shaped
molecular sound waves with a tropic characteristic. Tropic to DNA and RNA.”
     “But why?” Guil asked. “Why do this to other men? They had beaten them. Surely that was enough.”
     “Perhaps it was the final step. They had come back to show us that they survived and we did not.
Next, they displayed their superiority by conquering us and driving us into our self-made ruins. Finally,
they had the means to, in effect, strike us from the records of existence. We were reduced, in their
opinion, to something less than men. And, I sometimes think, they discovered in the new mutations a
source of entertainment.” '
    “There are theaters,” Guil admitted.
    “Everyone,” Strong said, “needs something to make him feel superior, some group he can look down
upon. The Musicians in Vivaldi have a class system which al-lows this. I have learned this much. Your
Class Is can look down on your Class IIs, your Class IIs on your Class IIIs, and the IIIs on the IVs. But
where do the Class IVs go to find someone to feel superior to? The Populars, of course. So, aside from
revenge, aside from entertainment value, and aside from a simple sadistic streak that cuts down the
middle of their society, they needed us to provide the logical final rung in their social order.”
    They sat for a time, watching the beach. Several crabs scuttled out of the water and wobbled around
the sand for a few moments, looking for something only they could define. It was growing darker. And
colder. The mists were thicker, reaching fingers even into the hole in the wall where they sat.
    “Are you ready?” Strong asked.
    “Yes,” Guil said, standing. “Let's go.”
    As they finished their trek home, maintaining silence by unspoken agreement, Guil tried to decide if,
after ab-sorbing this ugly detail, he was finally committed to the Populars in this coming war. All he found
was that he was on the thin line between sides, balancing. And he was a good balancer. He would not fall
one way or the other. He tried to make himself ashamed of his wa-vering. The evidence balanced against
the Musicians. He should already be deep into the Popular struggle. Yet . . .
    Yet he liked the comfort of the society in which he had been raised. He could not give it up easily. If
he foiled this attempt at revolution, the Populars might never be able to rise again. And he would be safe.
He knew it was not a heroic stance he now occupied. In many ways, it was gutless, cowardly, and
revolting.
    One more piece of sympathy for the Populars, he thought, and he would accept his role as a leader
of rev-olution. If just one more thing would happen to make him pity them and feel more deeply for their
plight. Then he would be their champion. But it was highly un-likely that anything else would happen to
persuade him. Highly unlikely . . .
FIRST:
     Strong hunkered in the piles of brick and steel, hold-ing his infant son in his huge arms. The robo-doc
had placed a chemically time-triggered, micro-miniature mes-sage tape in the child's brain. It would go
off seventeen years from now, hopefully just after the boy had gained manhood in Musician society. He
had no doubts that the boy would reach a Class. His son, after all, was a prophet. And prophets were
nearly omnipotent.
     There had been a moment when Blue had tried to dis-suade him from the plan, just after she had seen
the child that had come from her belly. To sooth her, he had sought a phrase from one of the Seven
Books, had found it: “Wherefore didst thou marvel? This shall make war for the Lamb and the Lamb
shall help him to overcome them, for he is the Lord of Lords, the King of Kings, and they that are with
him are called, and chosen, and faith-ful. Such is your luck, such you are called to see, and let it come
rough or smooth, you must surely bear it.”
     YOU MUST SURELY BEAR IT . . .
     Somehow, he did not think Blue had gotten the solace from those lines that he had.
     Now, crouched in the tumble-down walls of his city, he watched the yellow shields of the Musicians
as the search party came across the nightmare landscape, prying into pockets of deep shadow, details of
them breaking off to enter tunnels down into the Popular Sector. When he judged the moment to be the
most dra-matic, when the enemy was dangerously close at hand, he leaped up, ran away from them, the
baby slung under his arm so that they might spot it immediately.
     There were shouts behind.
     A sound rifle beam sang into a marble slab as large as a house that lay at a forty-five degree angle to
his right. The marble fizzed into thousands of fireflies whose light lasted only an instant, was gone.
     Then another bolt. Much closer. Too close, in fact. He stopped and put his child down on an old sofa
whose vinyl-plast covering had kept it from serious rot, then turned and ran faster than he had ever run
before in his life.
     The Musicians fired after him.
     But, soon, the chase was over. They had found the baby, and they were, temporarily anyway,
satisfied. Whether they would visit reprisals upon the Popular community in the days to come, or whether
they would just strengthen their security over their own buildings, he did not know. All he could consider
now, as he fell into a cave entrance and waited to watch the Musicians take his son away with the
assumption he was one of theirs, was the future, the glorious future. He had divine power. He had a
divine command to propagate this com-ing insurrection. His son was a prophet. What else could he be
but a prophet? What else could ever explain the birth of a perfect child to Popular parents? A statistical
law just now coming into actuality, deemed necessary by mathematics? No, that was the wrong thought
train. He prayed that the gods would give him strength to over-come evil thought. He prayed that they
would give him strength to live until the time for the revolution arrived, and to carry it out on the proper
day.
     And he prayed for patience to wait out the next seven-teen years.
                                            CHAPTER EIGHT



     They returned to Strong's apartment and exchanged small talk with the women and each other over a
dinner composed chiefly of three succulent, small roasts that tasted nothing like what Guil was used to
eating in the city, tasted spicier and finer in some indefinable way. The talk of revolution was slight, almost
nonexistent. It seemed as if they had never even considered such violent political action. But the halcyon
hour was interrupted even before they reached the final course, which was hard, yeastless bread and
some sort of rich butter. Shouted alarms boomed down the corridors outside like cannon balls fired
down a muzzle, and the meal was abruptly forgotten.
     Strong got quickly to his feet, surprising Guil once more with the agility that lurked in that mammoth
frame, hurried to the door and palmed it open, pressing against it as if he could not even bear to wait the
short moment it took the mechanism to withdraw the portal into the wall. Beyond the door, a mangy
head, scarred and quite hideous, appeared, the mouth working agita-tedly, though nothing seemed to be
coming out of it. At last, the owner got control of his body. “Breakthrough!” he said almost hysterically.
“Corridor F. Won't be long. Four—maybe five or six minutes.”
     “You stay here,” Strong said to his son.
     “What is it? What's going on?'
     “It's too dangerous. Forget it.”
     But being denied information only made his curiosity sharper. “I'm not a woman,” he said.
     “You mustn't be hurt,” Strong argued. “You are too valuable to us!” There was definitely nothing
sentimental about that last statment; it was delivered coldly, sharply, and with the same evenness a
businessman might employ when talking about his inventory. Strong could just as easily have been
speaking of a valuable work animal or a piece of machinery now long out of production. That was
exactly what he was, Guil thought, a machine, a tool, a valuable trained animal upon which all the dreams
of this Popular were constructed, upon which Strong's immortality depended.
     “I can handle myself,” Guil said.
     “Remember Nasty?”
     “Yes,” Guil said. “And I won that fight”
     “You were chewed up pretty badly.”
     “But I won.”
     Strong sighed. This was no time for argument. Guil could see that, even though he could not
determine what was causing all the excitement.
     They left the apartment, running, turned three times into other corridors, and came to a place where a
steel mesh net had been strung across Corridor F and sealed tightly to the walls with heavy staples. They
had come to a complete stop before the net, when they realized Tisha was with them. She jerked to a
halt, her long hair flying all around her head. “I'm not about to sit and wait for you to come back with
more wounds,” she said.
     “You don't belong here!” Strong bellowed, eyeing the net, then the girl, then the net again.
     “He's right, Tish,” Guil said.
     “Stuff it,” she said sweetly. “You want to fight me to prove whether or not I belong here?”
     He grinned. “No.” He could remember her in the arena, the way she had disposed of sound minster
after monster in an almost back-of-the-hand manner.
     Strong shrugged. The other mutants eyed the girl cu-riously, the first real Musician they had seen who
was fighting for and not against them. Guil, after all, was not a true Musician.
     “What's happening here?” Guil asked Strong.
     “Rats,” Strong said simply.
     “Rats?” Cold boiled over him like dry-ice steam.
     “They live in the uncharted corridors, the bottom-most layers. Millions and millions of humans lived
here before the war and the Musicians, and we only occupy a minute portion of the tunnels that are
usable. Aside from that, miles of tunnels have caved in and filled partially or completely with water,
making them undesirable even if we did wish to use them. The rats run these unham-pered. How many
there are, we don't know, but it is easy to visualize hundreds of thousands of them. Occasionally —no,
quite regularly, in fact—a small pack will break through into our section.”
     “Why?”
     “For food,” Strong said. “There's a limited supply of things down there to eat. Other mutated animals,
that's about all. But up here—there's us.”
     “What mutated animals?” Guil asked.
     “The war's radiation, maybe the Musicians' radiation— maybe both—have changed things like frogs,
lizards, cats, dogs, snakes, some insects (especially the worm forms).”
     They're coming!” A cyclops Popular called.
     Guil looked through the fine but sturdy steel mesh. On the other side, a thousand red pinpricks
glared, resolved into eyes that were followed by furry gray bodies that shuffled and jostled for the front
ranks. They were a hid-eous army, more frightening than a man with a weapon could ever hope to be.
     “Here!” Strong said, handing them small, hand-sized crossbows designed to hold a clip of steel
needles much like a machine gun bullet belt. “Forty shots to a clip. And try to make every clip count.
Though, with the net in the way, that's more of a meaningless cliche than an order,”
     The chittering of the rats grew louder.
     Tisha fired six shots in rapid succession. Three tangled in the net or bounced off the mesh onto the
floor where they were equally useless. Three others sped through the loops in the net and brought down
a trio of the beasts. It was not excellent marksmanship that accounted for this score, but the wall effect of
the enemy. There were so many of the rats that one was assured of taking them out of action if the darts
made it past the mesh.
     “You'll do fine!” Strong shouted.
     Then there was no time for talk.
     It seemed as if the hallway were too full of needles to allow even for the passage of air. Darts spun in
glittering clouds, choked continually from the self-loading barrels of the crossbows. Rats fell by the
hundreds as they leaped onto the net and tried to chew at the tiny links, to fray them away and gain
passage to the delicious looking men who fired on them. And to the delicious looking girl with the dark
mane of hair . . .
     At first, the beasts paused to tear at the corpses of other rats, rending the flesh from the bones in a
bloody fury, satiating the hunger that drove them. Guil saw one rat holding the entrails of a dead
comrade; the rodent turned and tried to fight the wave to get away with its prize, but it went down under
the claws of the others. But cannibalism wasn't to last. The stampede had triggered something deeper
than hunger, a psychological lemminglike drive that brought them straining at the net to the exclusion of all
else, even the hunger pains that must be lacing them even as they rushed.
     It seemed as if they had once had a taste of human flesh and could never again be truly satisfied on
any lesser diet.
     Darts sank into the gray fur.
     Blood spouted, drenched the net, filming the loops be-tween the strands of mesh.
     Guil saw one of his own shivs lance an eye. The rat kept climbing the mesh for a moment as if
completely oblivious of the fatal wound. Its body had been told to press forward no matter what, and it
was still heeding that primary directive, even though its ability to function had been severely curtailed.
Then, after a long and ardu-ous struggle up the net toward the top where it must have fancied it would
find a gap, it turned in dizzy cir-cles and fell into the teeming hordes behind it.
     Clip after clip of darts . . .
     Blood gurgled beneath the net and stretched in rivers under their feet, curled into pools and lakes
behind them.
      Guil thought of the arena while he fired the darts. The Musicians would enjoy this. There was so
much horror. He realized that, while the Populars killed other living things out of absolute necessity, the
Musicians killed friv-olously for sheer delight. And killed their own sons, not mere rats.
      Then the net went down . . .
      One rat, hidden in the shadows and concealed by the shiny film of blood that swathed the mesh, had
climbed near the ceiling where the net was stapled the most hap-hazardly, had settled into its little nook,
and had worried a staple loose from the plaster of the corridor ceiling. It must have had a great deal of
satisfaction when it was not caught, but it did not trust to luck and did not let it-self waste time with
self-congratulations. In that respect, it would have made a great soldier if it had been a man. It went on to
another staple and took that one out too. One corner of the net drooped. Only one, but that was enough.
      The rats swarmed up the net on a flesh ladder, pulling over one another in a mad scramble to be the
first, and poured through the opening. As the main body of the wave concentrated in reaching the gap at
the top, their weight began ripping the other staples out . . .
      “Master rat!” a cyclops with a bald head shouted.
      Then it was plural. “Master rats, master rats!” The call echoed through the confusion.
      Guil had no difficulty seeing what they were talking about. Rats as large as small dogs, perhaps fifteen
or twenty pounds apiece, foamed around the bend in the corridor and followed the smaller slave rats
who had died to bring down the nets. Their cluttering was less screechy, more guttural. This appearance
of a plan seemed to indicate intelligence of some degree in the larger rats, but Guil did not think he
wanted to dwell on that sort of thought.
      It also seemed as if the guttural rumbling of the Mas-ters had a pattern, a detectable raising and
lowering, a varying of sound lengths that could be a sign of verbal communication above the level of mere
animal-instinct grunting. But that was a nasty thought too. He kept firing, grabbing clip upon clip from the
basket of a three-armed dwarf who was acting as ammunition bearer. The dwarf kept shouting, “Shoot!
Shoot! Kill!” at Guil every time he brought him dart clips.
      But Guil did not have to be told.
      The master rats knew what they wanted. It was not the flesh of their slave rats or of each other. Guil
could not see a single case of rat cannibalism now that the Masters were leading the charge. With
red-eyed fury, they hustled on, dying in frightening numbers, clawing over their fellows as they
fell—gaining, gaining . . .
      A scaly Popular with orange eyes like chips of some sweet frozen confection went down under the
enemy when he tripped and could not regain his feet in time. A number of rats converged on him, but the
main force continued its drive.
      “Fall back!” Strong shouted.
      They moved backwards to the end of the corridor, firing continuously, aware that even a momentary
lull in their barrage would afford the mutant rats the opportu-nity they desired to sweep forward and
overwhelm them. Guil risked a glance at Tisha, saw her biting her lower lip, the gun extended to the end
of her stiffened arm as she fired again and again with a fury born of panic. She was accounting well for
herself, and she made Guil even more proud of her.
      Then, for a brief but terribly lucid moment, he per-ceived her as a corpse covered with rats, her flesh
sheared away from her face by sharp, yellow teeth. She was almost dead, in this vision, but not
quite—just alive enough to know what was happening and to be driven stark raving mad by it. Also, in
the dream, one rat stood in the hole of her gaping mouth and worried her nose . . .
      He gagged, dispelling the dream, and was burdened down with the realization that he, as her man,
should make certain that nothing of this sort befell her. Abruptly, he remembered the sound pistol in his
jacket which he had brought with him in the event the Popu-lars proved unfriendly.
      “Strong!” he shouted, waving the gun. “Move the men back. I can handle them alone.”
      “You're insane!”
      “I know that, but I have a sound pistol.”
      “I can't allow it,” his father said.
      “You haven't any choice!”
      Reluctantly, Strong made the order. The other mutants fell away from Guil, most happy to retreat. He
turned to the gray horde now surging unchecked down the pas-sageway, chilled by the increase in their
maniacal chat-tering now that they felt confident of their victory. He raised the gun and fired.
      Rats hummed, vibrated flesh against bone, were flung apart in fiery flourishes that ashed glowing and
were gone. Blood showered through the air but became a flaming fall of ashes and then evaporated into
nothing-ness, the molecules whining away from one another, the patterns of the atomic constructions
negated by the sound weapon. There seemed to be thousands of them now, pouring as if from the mouth
of a cornucopia. The wave stood still almost as if it were a single organism, though the rats still struggled
furiously and tried to pass the invisible barrier that vaporized them without vapor, burned them without
flame or residue, crushed them without blood or bone remaining. The Masters had come up against
something new, something unexplained and unplanned for. While their minds labored for a solution, they
acted like normal rats in a frenzy, trying to over-come and push aside the immovable.
      Then as he swung the sound-beam back and forth in machinelike smoothness, the wave began to
recede, fluctuate, recede a bit more. Suddenly, the Master rats perceived the hoplessness of the situation
and began re-treating at top speed, galloping like dogs chasing a rab-bit, pushing beyond their charges
and leading the rout. Guil followed them from hall to hall, the vengeful execu-tioner, driving them
eventually to a hole in the wall of a rubble-strewn corridor.
      The rats piled up at the hole, frothed and fumed, chittered and tore at each other to escape the sound
beam. He stood at a safe distance, playing the beam on them, watching them fire and disappear. A group
of perhaps a hundred rats turned from the hole—most likely by order of the Master rats—and charged
him. He lowered the beam and fired at them, back-stepped hastily and brought the last one down only
inches away from his feet.
      When he looked up, the last of the other rats had slipped into the darkness of the hole in the wall. He
crossed to the spot and fired for a few minutes into the space beyond to make certain they had been
driven far enough away not to contemplate another attack through the same crevice—at least in the
immediate future. Trembling and wobbly-legged, he walked back to the others.
      Tisha ran to him and hugged him, and he returned the affection. She was very warm and soft, and he
let some of his horror drain out of him through the perfect con-ductor of her body.
      The Populars were busy loading the dead rats in wicker baskets as Strong intoned a series of short
prayers from the Seven Books, thanking the Lord for their good fortune. Guil supposed they had been
lucky not to be killed, but he was not sure that a near disastrous battle with crazed mutant rats was a
thing to be thankful for— no matter what the outcome. He stifled any such thoughts, knowing they would
not be welcome in Strong' company. “Here,” he said instead, producing the sound pistol. “You don't
have to dispose of them. I can do it quicker and easier.”
      “No, no!” Strong said, cutting his last prayer a bit short. He had a twenty pound rat draped over
each arm, and he plopped them into a large basket. They bounced once, they lay still. “We aren't
disposing of them. Not yet.”
      “But why—”
      The giant hefted another rat in one hand, stroked the lifeless body as if it were a favorite pet. A dart
had sunk through its nose and penetrated its brain. Its eyes stared like polished marbles, its mouth open,
its lips drawn back from its ugly teeth in a snarl so fierce it seemed the creature must be alive. Strong
pinched the bloated sides of the beast, grabbed a handful of its shank and twisted it. “This is food, boy!”
He grinned.
      “Food?” Guil's stomach rumbled louder, felt as if it were devouring itself.
      Strong nodded, still grinning.
      “I don't understand.” Or was it, Guil wondered, that he did not want to understand?
      “Our only source of meat,” Strong said.
      Foam and blood freckled the yellow rat fangs.
      “I don't believe it!”
      “Nothing to believe. That's the way it is.”
      “But—”
   Strong shrugged. “You ate half a roast rat for supper tonight. It was tasty enough, wasn't it?”
   Yellow teeth.
   Dead red eyes.
   Foam-flecked . . .

    Morning lay two hours from the horizon as they stepped from the shadows of the Popular Sector into
the neon stones. All of the Musicians, save those on duty in the Primal Chord and the few engineers
maintaining all the sound generators, were asleep in the towers, writhing in their sensonics, unconcerned
with the dangers and horrors of eating rats—and of being eaten by rats. Just this thin line between rubble
and neon stones made all the difference. Guil shivered; Tisha shivered too, match-ing the tempo of his
flesh. They stopped and sat on a broad blue neon stone.
    She was blue-toned before him. The light, cast up from beneath her and accenting some features
while nearly obliterating others, gave her a supernatural, mysterious look.
    He had told himself earlier in the evening that all he needed was one more thing to make him
sympathetic toward the Populars, one event to arouse more pity in him. Then, he had decided, he would
step off the thin line and take their side. He had been confident that no such event would take place. The
conservative part of him rested comfortably with the knowledge that he would soon resume a normal life
as a Musician. But— fortunately or unfortunately—that event had transpired. The thought of men (or at
least the descendents of men) having to rely on slaughtered rats for their chief food supply made him
agonizingly ill.
    “The only one I felt even slightly akin to was Gypsy Eyes,” he said, watching the stones crackle
imperceptibly from one shade to a fainter or slightly brighter blue. He had told her about Gypsy Eyes on
their walk back from the Popular Sector.
    “I understand,” she said, her blue face solemn.
    He looked at the ten majestic towers jabbing their points at the night sky. “And yet I can't go back
and live in the city. I know what Vladislovitch was and what he started. Not only what he made the
Musicians, more than that. It was Vladislovitch who established the con-ditions that force the Populars to
eat rats. Oh, I know Vladislovitch was dead centuries before the colony ship returned to Earth and built
the city-state. But Vladislo-vitch is responsible for the psychological structures of these Musicians'
minds—and was therefore indirectly at fault with regard to the fate of the Populars. Because of his
teachings arid his social order, the Musicians are cold, self-centered, sadistic. They keep the Populars in
abject poverty by forcing them to remain in their ruined com-pound, by not giving them land to farm and
raiding all independent farming efforts made by the mutants out-side their compound. And then there are
the sensonics.”
    “I smashed the console the first night,” she said.
    Without her having said so, he knew that she had not liked the sensonics either. But it was good to
hear her say it, to make it a certainty beyond dispute. He felt a longing to protect her while at the same
time he knew she needed no protection. “We're trapped. I can't go on knowing my pleasure as a
Musician will bring pain to others in the Popular Sector. Yet I can't live in the Popular Sector or in the
Popular-dominated city that would follow a breakdown in the present system. I can't find my place or
purpose, and I can't bear to be purpose-less as they are.”
    “There's always—” she began.
    “Der Erlkonig,”
    So there it was. There were not two lands, but three for them to choose from. There was the
city-state, the Popular Sector, or the land beyond the pillar. Death. The place from which no researchers
had ever returned. It was impossible to say, at this moment, that the land be-yond the pillar had been
chosen, for there was still enough fear of it to keep them from talking about it openly. But was Death a
hideous place? Or was it merely another plane of existence beyond this one? And maybe the researchers
had never returned simply be-cause they did not want to—or because travel was one way. Their
disappearance did not necessarily indicate that the land of Death was an unpleasant one.
    “Then will we help them?” she asked.
     “It would make things right again, even if we fit no-where in the order that follows. In time, without
the gene-warping broadcasts, they may breed human again, rebuild the parks and restore the prewar
cities to the glory they once knew.”
     “We'll help despite the Erlking?”
     He grinned an odd, half-formed grin. “Not despite the Erlking. Because of the Erlking.”
     She pulled him down onto the flat blue stone into the glowing warmth of the neon-spattered night and
held him there in softness, blue-toned before him.
     And he held her too.
     And morning was coming. . . .
     The preparations for the revolution had begun.
                                THE THIRD MOVEMENT:

                                  Revolution and Beyond


FIRST:
     As a boy living in the Popular Sector, Strong (even then a fine specimen of a superman, with muscles
that rippled beneath the sheath of his dark brown skin like live animals with purposes of their own) had
been part of a close-knit family group. His father was Shell—an odd creature with a carapace and other
horny platings protecting various regions of his body—and his mother was Fingers (she had an
abundance of them). Both Shell and Fingers loved their children and raised the three boys—Strong,
Loper, and Babe—in an environ-ment that encouraged the boys to be as concerned with their brothers
as they were with their own well-being.
     It seemed, therefore, that Babe, being the youngest of the trio of children (and he would always look
young, it appeared; he had stopped growing when he reached four feet, and although there were enough
indications of his blossoming manhood to assuage fears that he might be a throwback and not just a
mutation, his countenance, casually examined, was that of a sweet and innocent baby) should be the most
protected. After all, there was Strong to look after Loper and Babe, and Loper to con-centrate on Babe
alone. Yet, one day, when things seemed to be going along every bit as peacefully as pos-sible, they
discovered that Babe was missing.
     They searched the ruins carefully, afraid that he might have fallen into some pocket or shaft in the
debris, might now be trapped and unable to free himself.
     But he was not there.
     That left, as far as Strong could see, only one other place where the child might be found. This was
the week of the Festival, that yearly time when the Musi-cians gathered in their halls and in their streets
for cele-brations in honor of the one they called Vladislovitch. As an integral part of some of these street
fairs, Populars were brought into the city to entertain the spectators. The games played were cruel. The
Populars did not al-ways return of a piece—or return at all.
     Although only fourteen, Strong felt sufficiently power-ful and clever to skirt the edges of the
city-state—per-haps even venture inside—and try to locate his brother. He had long felt that he had been
meant to strike back and destroy the Musicians. What other reason for his tre-mendous size? Now,
perhaps, he would have a chance to do just that. Against the advice of his father, he left the ruins and
worked across the no-man's-land to the edges of the neon stone gardens. . . .
                                             CHAPTER NINE



    A week passed quickly, and the day before the revolu-tion was at hand.
    The days since his visit to the Popular Sector had been troublesome ones for Guil as he wrestled to
come to grips with himself and with the purpose of the years that still lay ahead of him. It would have
been so nice to be old, old like Franz and content to know that there was not much more to be borne.
He knew his future was aligned with the pillar and the land beyond that he had only glimpsed twice, and
both of those times for only brief moments. He knew he should be afraid of Death. The Musician
concept—indeed, a major concept all through history as far as he could tell—held that Death was
permanent and dark and a vast nothingness. The reason he felt no fear was because he did not hold with
this concept; he had seen the land beyond the Pillar of Ultimate Sound. There was some form of
existence there.
    To prepare himself for what was soon to come, he slept through the last afternoon, dreaming of a leaf
boat that carried him down a green river toward a promon-tory where a purple, column-faced building
stood invio-late. In this dream, silence was awful and deep, though he had an odd recollection that he
had been to this building before when there had been a hint of singing and the leaping shadows of
dancers. . . .
    Afternoon faded into evening, though the night sky with its stars remained on his ceiling the entire
time. After a time, sleep was fitful and came in patches separated by minutes when he was half-awake
and when visions of the future and different but beckoning dreams fused to add a third dimension to his
mind, another plane somewhere between the conscious and unconscious wherein scenes were acted out
that did not wholly belong in either of the other two. Somehow, his un-spoken pledge with Tisha had
released the agony of his burden. He was no longer a man in the middle, for there was a third alternative
which both realized would keep them together, yet would not subject them to living in a tower, ridden by
their guilt, or in a rat-infested world of Populars. First: the revolution, the guns, and the fires. Then, when
they were certain the self-centered Musician empire had fallen, he and Tisha could be off to their own
world, their own society, to the place where they be-longed if they belonged anywhere at all.
    If only he could stifle his remaining fear. . . .
    Self-centered . . . The word struck him again and again as he tumbled in and out of sleep. It was the
per-fect modifier for the Musicians' world, for their heritage and their future. Self was their god. Yes, they
managed to masquerade it in the form of the great composers and Vladislovitch. But these were
figureheads. No, maybe even false gods, and he saw now that the Musicians must know this as well as
he did. But his pledge with Tisha, the decision to reject this society, removed him from any burden of
shame at having been a part of it. There was still a gram of disgust, but nothing more. Self was their god.
Witness the center of their lives, the focal point around which their world revolved: sensonics. Each
Mu-sician spent at least eight, usually ten hours a night under the sensonics. Holidays were often devoted
to “re-treats” which were nothing more than escapes into the fleshy, unreal desire world of the sound
configurations, a prolonged electric orgy. Much better and much easier than real sex, for in real sex every
experience may not be perfect. And every experience may not involve multiple orgasm as the sensonics
produced. Besides, in real sex, you had to deal with another human being. You had to worry about
pleasing someone, about another individu-al's feelings and his or her self-respect. That was an awful lot
of bother when there was this much easier method.
    Also, there was the Vladislovitchian precendent to fol-low. Something had always seemed strange
about that placid, white face seen in photographs and reproduced in the great altars. At times, Guil
thought it resembled the face of a moron, loose and silly and vaguely pathetic. At other times, he could
trace lines of intelligence in the face and corrected his judgment to the decision that this was merely the
visage of an unimaginative, lifeless man. But neither of these impressions meshed with what Vladislovitch
had accomplished. Now he realized that it was something more subtle, something infinitely more pressing
that had given Vladislovitch the drive to master sound and vibration, to forge a new society, to set out
with it and colonize another world. Simply: the man had not been heterosexual.
     Oh, perhaps it was just that he could not make it with women and therefore denounced them except
indirectly through sensonics and as procreators of other men. Somehow, Guil felt certain that if
Vladislovitch's sen-sonic machine could have been tested during the man's lifetime, the tests would have
discovered that his own sound configurations were not those of bosomy women with satiny skin, long
legs, and questing tongues, but of young boys. Young, smooth, virile boys with flawless skin and vaguely
sweet faces. . . .
     Sterile, smooth, and soft, the face of Vladislovitch pitched impotently through his dreams . . .
     Self-centered, impotent, it must surely fall. He could only be doing the right thing by hastening its
collapse. But were not all of Man's societies self-centered and im-potent? How could he know the
preMusician world, the prewar world, had been any different? Indeed, to listen to Strong's quotes from
the Seven Books, it could be argued that societies had always been self-centered and impo-tent as they
were constantly warring against one another, or splitting apart in their own guts, eventually falling to yet
another social form that would fall in turn and be re-placed by another that would . . . so on and on and
on . . .
     At least there was Tisha and the Erlking. The latter would not be so difficult to face with the former at
his side. The pillar hummed darkly in the arena floor, wait-ing. . . .
     He was in the shallow between dream crests when the door opened and closed, and there was
someone else within the room. . . .
     He struggled to sit up, squinted.
     Above, the false stars glittered in the fake night.
     “Who's there?” he asked.
     Silence.
     “Who is it?”
     Still silence.
     He was suddenly bowled from the bed, clutching at the sheets and pulling them with him and
whatever it was that had struck him! In the dim light and with sleep matting the corners of his eyes, he
could not see well.
     “Wait a minute,” he said.
     But there was no reasoning with whoever had at-tacked him.
     He struck upward with a fist, felt it caught in a vise-like grip. He tried to wrench himself free, but his
shoul-ders were pinned to the floor and a heavy body prevented him from twisting away. Whoever this
was, he was a strong bastard—and he was determined.
     “Who is it?” He demanded to know, though he felt foolish making any demands from his present
position.
     “I won't let you do it.” The stranger's voice was harsh and breathless, but Guil thought that he
recognized it.
     “Rosie?”
     “You can't!” Rosie applied more pressure with his knees. “You can't go ahead with it.”
     “You're hurting me.”
     “Good.”
     “Go ahead with what?” he asked, hoping a change of tactics would bring relief. If he tried to calm the
Com-poser, maybe he could free himself.
     “You know,” Rosie said.
     “No, I don't!”
     Rosie made a sound like a snarl.
     “Damn it, that hurts!” Guil was beginning to see small points of color in the darkness, though he knew
they were seen behind his eyeballs and did not really exist.
    “Good,” Rosie said again. But that wasn't like Rosie.
    “Rosie, listen to me. I—”
    Rosie pressed even harder with his knees. Guil's shoul-ders began to tingle with the first signs of
muscle separa-tion. Nasty's wounds, almost healed, would open under the pressure, burst the stitches.
Carefully, desperately but slowly, he slid his right leg up, pointing the knee and measuring the possibility
of swinging the foot in a tight enough arc to smash it into the head that was now visi-ble as his eyes
adjusted to the gloom and blinked away the blurredness of sleep. “Rosie, what the hell is it?” he asked to
distract the Composer's attention from the movement of the leg.
    “Seventeen years, Guil. I tried for seventeen years. I worked and sweated and polished. You haven't
the faintest idea how much I worked over those years, not the slightest glimmer. You won't destroy it all
now for some warped monsters that think they want the world,”
    “I don't understand what you're saying. Let me up.” Carefully, raising the leg . . .
    “Tish told me.”
    “Told you what?”
    “Don't fool with me!”
    “What have you done with her?”
    “Nothing.”
    “If you've hurt her—”
    “I haven't hurt her. She was little-girl excited about it. She thought I would be too. You see, she
knows that I think very little of our city-state, of the social order here. But she forgot that I must now
conduct myself as an in-tegral part of it, for that is the only advantageous thing for me to do. She said she
wasn't supposed to tell but that she knew I would be excited too. I pretended to be. No need to harm
her. Killing you is all I need to do.”
    “Look, wait a moment—”
    “You won't topple the Musicians. Not now that I've made it.”
    “Rosie, there are people out there beyond the city who—”
    “Freaks!”
    “People who—”
    “I don't want to hear it,” the Comoposer shrieked.
    Guil swung his foot and connected with Rosie's back, sent the hunchback crashing over him. The
pressure on his shoulders broke, allowed pain to sweep in and take its place. Guil twisted, kicked out
from under the Com-poser and sprang to his feet, dizzying clangs of cymbals exploding in his head.
“Rosie, stop it!”
    “I have to kill you.”
    “You can't do it, Rosie.” He backed off as the hunch-back crouched and came at him, his hands
twiddling, vibrating like plucked strings, blood lust in every cell, jus-tified by his purpose.
    “Couldn't I?”
    “Damn it, I know you, Rosie! I love your sister. You once said I was your only friend. Remember
that? In the arena on Coming of Age Day—”
    “None of that.”
    “But—”
    “None of that because it doesn't matter. Friendship, love . . . they're high on the priority list, but they
don't mean good goddamned if you aren't whole yourself, if you are only half a man.” His words were
thick with saliva.
    “Then what does matter anymore, Rosie? I just don't see what else could really matter.”
    “What matters, Guil, is that I'm not a freak any longer. I've made it. They accepted me. They worship
me—or will after I have been dead sufficient years. The whole of life, Guil, is getting up there, getting to a
point where you aren't a tool or a tapestry. That's what most every-one is, you know. One or the other.
The tapestries are for entertaining, to amuse. They shamble through life so other people will have
something to talk about. They are the dregs. And it may not be because they can't make it —it may be
because other people keep them from making it. Then others are tools for the real workmen of this world
to wield and even break if necessary in order to screw, bolt, nail, and brace themselves to a higher ledge.
Now, I am a toolmaster. I can command the tapestries to be unfolded or hung in a closet or burned and
forgotten. I can screw myself to the highest ledge there is and never feel the workman's blade in the slot
of my own back. That is what the hell matters, Guil. But you could never see that and adapt to it. You
aren't the type to see that, Guil.”
      “Thank God, I'm not,” he said.
      “Yes, you would look at it that way. Perhaps, if your stigmata had been more pronounced, if you had
had to fight your way despite horns on your head and clawed hooks on the backs of your
hands—perhaps then you would have understood the tool-toolmaster relationship.” “But we can talk
about this,” Guil said. “You're talking about it right now. Let's sit down and—”
      Rosie moved faster than Guil had thought he could, still crouched, grostesque in his postured
animalism.
      “I wouldn't let the Populars kill you, Rosie.” He backed behind a chair, grasped it in preparation for
lift-ing and throwing it.
      “No, perhaps not.” There was madness in his voice. “But don't you see what it would be? How
dense are you —you, Meistro's son? I would be a Musician in a Popular world—a freak!”
      “The Populars have hunchbacks of their own. Many stranger things than horns and claws.”
      “But I'll be a Musician, and there will be no changing that. I won't be able to compose. I'll have no
apprecia-tive audience. I'll be a Musician, deformed or not, in a world that does not appreciate
music—indeed, in a world that will have reason to loathe it!” He gasped as if breathing was a torturous
process. “I'll be as good as dead.”
      “And you will kill me to stop me, tool that I am.”
      “I will.”
      Guil threw the chair.
      It caught Rosie on the shoulder, though he tried to duck it, knocked him backwards and down. But
he was up again faster than Guil expected. He came over the chair in a leap and hit the floor running. Guil
ran too, stopping behind a waist-high bookcase breaking the cen-ter of the room. Rosie didn't stop. He
jumped over the case and came down on Guil, tumbling both to the floor.
      Guil swung a fist, smashed it into the boy's lips, felt blood spurt over his fingers as he mashed the
delicate flesh between the hunchback's teeth. He drew back on the punch just in time to keep from
hurting his own hand. He struck again in hopes the whole thing could be ended quickly and without
death. But Rosie replied this time, bounced the other boy's head off the floor. Bells bonged majestically in
Guil's head, and blackness rang up at him between the ding and the dong. But blackness had to be
denied. It was inviting and would give relief from all this pain, but if he let unconsciousness claim him,
Rosie would guarantee his death in the short mo-ments that followed.
      Guil drew his left knee up, fighting a headache that was a razor-nailed lizard in his brain, smashed it
into the hunchback's crotch. Rosie howled, rolled sideways, gasp-ing for air, and retched. Vomit spread
across the floor. His face had gone ghost white, but still he tried to fight. He made it up on his knees
despite the heaving spasms that wrenched his stomach, was hit by another fierce wave of pain as his
manhood protested what had been done to it.
      “Rosie, please,” Guil pleaded. “This is ridiculous. We are supposed to be friends. To hell with your
tool-toolmaster relationship.”
      But Rosie was not to be appeased. It was too late for his pride to accept defeat, even if he might
have decided that he could survive well enough after the revolution. And, of course, he had not even
made that decision. He gritted his teeth and stood, staggered toward Guil with his hands reaching to
clutch.
      But his hands never made it. Guil smashed another fist into the hunchback's chest, again denying him
air and sending him backwards to fall into his own mess, blood smeared across his face, his horns
unconcealed and glit-tering bluntly.
      “Rosie, stop it!”
      For a moment, it seemed as if he had balled up the proverbial towel and was ready to toss it in. He
stood, swaying from side to side but apparently oblivious to his condition. Shaking like a man with a
tropical fever, he removed the Medallion of the Composer from round his neck and held it by the center
of the two foot chain. He sucked in his breath and sniffed away the bubbly fluid that had gathered at the
ends of his nostrils. Then, mov-ing his feet farther apart in a stance that was meant to give him a firmer
base, he began swinging the Medallion like a morning star mace.
     “Put that down!”
     The air sung with its passage.
     Guil was terrified now. He felt that he had a better than average chance when it came to defending
himself with his hands, but he could see no escape from a deadly weapon of this sort which allowed
Rosie a much greater reach than he would have had bare-handed. “Rosie, this isn't any good. You know
it isn't.”
     But Rosie had no breath to talk, to answer, to refute or agree. He was worn, but he was committed,
and he con-centrated all of his energies on the Medallion. He whirled it faster and faster, its sharp edges
catching the meager light and glinting wickedly with the reflection. The edges were beveled to a relatively
thin knifelike blade. With the speed the hunchback had given it, it was as deadly as a sonic knife, the only
difference being that this blade must physically connect where a sonic knife could kill at a distance. Guil
had only to remain out of its reach. If he could. If . . .
     He backed.
     In a way, he was fortunate that Rosie had come here in the manic, wild peak of emotion he had.
Otherwise, he might have thought to bring a sound whistle to put Guil to sleep before killing him. Then he
would have had no chance. Not even the slim one he now enjoyed.
     Enjoyed?
     That was not the word, not the word at all.
     He backed a little faster.
     And Rosie jumped, swinging the brilliant trinket.
     Guil dodged, ducked. The Medallion swung over his head, pulling a detectable cool breeze after it.
     Rosie lowered his arm to correct his aim and catch his quarry.
     Guil fell, for there was no other way to avoid the weapon. The Medallion sliced the air inches above
his head, just about where his stomach would have been . . .
     Rosie screamed in frustration, his face a fierce mask of desperation that turned Guil's insides around
and around as if they were on a phonograph turntable. This was surely the face of someone he had never
seen before. It was a demon mask, a madman's vision of the denizen of Hell. Guil rolled, grabbed the
Composer's feet, jerked as hard as he could, and toppled him. Lunging onto him, he tore the Medallion
from the struggling fingers and tossed it away. It clattered across the floor, the echo ringing back as it
came up against the bookcase.
     This should have been enough. Rosie was disarmed. The fight could not continue, for Rosie had no
strength to use his fists. It really should have been enough. But it wasn't. Guil threw fist after fist into the
hunched shoul-ders . . .
     Rosie gurgled, choked, and shrieked, sounded as if he were a hundred small animals running in fright.
     Guil felt pain in his sides, realized the mutant was bringing the spurs on the backs of his hands into the
game. Springs of blood welled up where they dug in, and crimson rivulets followed the scorching paths
they made down his flesh. He grabbed both of the other's arms and muscled the wicked hands away
from him. Panting, he felt a great thrill of triumph pour down through him.
     Then, as he held the hands of the hunchback away where they could do no harm, he realized nothing
had been won yet. As soon as he released the hands, they would come back, gouge even more deeply
into him. For a moment, he gave way to panic, then realized what he had to do. Letting go of the left arm,
he grabbed the right with both hands. Hissing breath between his teeth with the force required, eyes
bloodshot and stinging, he rammed the hand back against the floor again and again, over and over until
the spur crunched audibly and dan-gled loosely from the flesh, no longer a valid weapon.
     Rosie's free hand had raked his thigh three times, though only the last had been serious. Still, he bled
from all of them, and bleeding had never been recommended as a healthy exercise. But the pain in his
chest and on his sides was not what concerned him. He had a great fear now that, in this last few
moments, the hunchback would put on a burst of energy and go for his eyes. The spur that remained
would tear easily through such soft tis-sue . . .
     Again, he had to muscle the other arm away from him, though he found it easier now that he had both
hands to work with. He pushed it away, swung it down, smashing the spur on the floor. Over and over . .
. It seemed as if it would never break, but when it finally did, it tore the skin around it and broke cleanly
with the bone to which it had been anchored.
     Rosie heaved, trying to toss him off.
     Guil threw more punches into the other's shoulders, liking the way they felt as they bounced off him
and left bruises behind. A part of him looked out of a barred window in his mind and cried and screamed
at what he was doing. But that part of him was no longer in control. A little fragment from some dark
nook of his soul had clambered into the driver's seat and was calling all the shots now.
     When the mutant would still not surrender, he drove his fists ruthlessly into the face, sweat bathing his
skin, his heart beating like the heart of a rabbit. His mind clattered and rattled as the jailed part of his
psyche strained at its bars. The horrible realization had come that he, as all the Musicians and Populars,
had a barbarous base to him, though it might have lain deeper and might have required a stronger trigger
to release it. He struck gleefully, without reservation. As blow after blow set a savage rhythm against the
other boy's body, Guil began screaming again and again: “You goddamned violent bastard!”
     It bubbled mindlessly from his lips in a dull, monotonous chant while the imprisoned part of his mind
tried to analyze it and in this manner see from where it came and what was meant by it. “You violent,
goddamned bastard!” Who? Who was the bastard, the barbarian? Rosie? Himself? Or neither? Was he
screaming against just one man or against a way, a society, a manner of doing things? Did his rejection of
society, then, roll back his rejection of Rosie and eventually his rejection of him-self?
     When he was physically drained and Rosie's face was a mass of bruises and cuts, and when the
hunchback was weeping and clutching piteously at him in a plea for mercy, for friendship, Guil fell upon
him weak and weeping too, the questions that plagued him still unan-swered.
     Together, they stained the blood and the vomit with their tears. . . .

     “I'm sorry, Rosie,” he said, his hand on the door palmer.
     The Medallion was wrapped around Guil's neck now, a necessary plunder if he were to keep the
Composer from leaving and spreading the alarm as he should have done in the first place. If he could not
leave the room after Guil locked it, there was no way he could summon help. A private room in a
Musician Tower was perfectly private, as good as a cell.
     “Sure, Guil. Go on.” There was no bitterness in the voice, only resignation. Rosie, in all his talk of
tools and toolmasters, had forced Guil into playing by the same rules, into degenerating to the
hunchback's own philoso-phy. Or, perhaps, as sensitive as he was, he knew the phi-losophy was an ugly
one to live by. Perhaps there had been doubts in his own mind whether going on in this way was
worthwhile. In the end, Guil had fought better under this philosophy than he himself had.
     Guil stood, looking at the bloodied Composer, and he was stunned by the sour knowledge that he
had scarred the man. It took something more out of him than the strenuous battle had. To have
fallen—even this briefly— into the mold he had seen in the Musicians and found disgusting, was a very
unpleasant event. It was well known, of course, that environment played a large role in the development
of any individual's personality. He had thought he was different. The truth was bitter.
     But Rosie was right. There were tools and toolmasters. It was a good analogy. The toolmasters
jammed their blades into the slots in other people's backs, twisted and used everyone and got away with
it. The only hope any-one could have in this world was to become one of them, to take up the skills of a
toolmaster and brutally use oth-ers to your own ends, to fulfill your own desires. No, an-other part of his
mind said, there was another way to avoid what they wanted to do to you. Withdraw, leave, find your
own way outside of society.
     He thought about that. All through history, judging from what little he knew of Earth's past, there had
been segments of society that wanted out of the social mold, that did not care to be either a tool or
toolmaster. Gypsy bands were among them. He could recall the greatest movement, one that supposedly
had changed Earth soci-ety for centuries before a normal tool-toolmaster setup could be restored. It had
started as a movement called the Hippy. The name had evolved over the years until there were literally
millions involved with it.
     But there was a problem. Here, on this postwar Earth, there was nowhere to run. The other
city-states would be just as hostile. And he would have to bear the additional burden of being a stranger.
If he went into the ruins, the natural, or artificial mutants would eventually do him in. If he went to the few
areas that were still wild and un-touched by either city-states, city-state farms, or ruins, he would also
die, for he was a creature of civilization, not of the forests.
     There was only one place, then, that offered refuge. It hummed darkly, spun, hissed beneath the floor
of the arena, sustained by its own generator buried beneath it. . . .
     “Rosie—” he began, then realized there was nothing he could say.
     He had destroyed a world. He had reached out and pulled down Rosie's reality. There were no
words to phrase an apology for an act of that magnitude.
     Quickly, he opened the door, went out and closed it behind, locking it with his identisong medal.
Forcing his shame and confusion from his conscious to his subcon-scious so that he might be able to
operate intelligently through the crucial hours ahead, he hurried to the eleva-tor and dropped to the
ground floor. Moving warily, as if everyone could see he was a revolutionary and was out to get him, he
made his way to the concrete core of the tower, the part that was not a sound configuration, ac-tivated
the door and stepped inside.
     “Hello, Guillaume. What brings you here of all places?”
     The Musician tending the generators this shift was Franz! He had known but forgotten that the old
man had mastered many occupations and amused himself by going from one to the other when he grew
bored with any particular endeavor. Agony pricked every convolu-tion of Guil's brain. His hands tingled
with the memory of the thin twanging of guitar strings. Someone, it seemed, had nailed his feet to the
floor; he could not act.
     He thought of Rosie and what he had done to the Com-poser, and he told himself that he had made
the choice whether he liked it or not. There was Tisha to think of. And the Populars who ate rats. And
the children of the Musicians who needlessly died in the arena. And, too, there was himself to think of.
He knew he was not so selfless as to be able to exclude personal motivation. The revolt had to progress.
And because of all these things that were wrong with this society, Franz would have to suffer.
     Abruptly, he brought up a hand, chopped down, again, and a reluctant third time. He had tried to
make the blows as soft as he could without making them totally ineffectual. Franz toppled to the floor,
unconscious, the last waking look on his face one of disbelief and hurt that froze there and denied
unconsciousness' eraser.
     Guil bent to the generators and looked them over. This was the main broadcasting station here in the
Congres-sional Tower. Each building was maintained by these thrumming machines. There were ten of
them, and ten lines ran across the floor, all but one disappearing into other machinery, then through the
concrete core. Those nine went to the other towers, he knew, came to rest in the huge, black amplifiers
that pulsed out the intricate, multi-billion patterns that made each of the structures. Each amp would be
regulated by computers and back-up computers that threaded the emanations that came from the cable,
separated and directed them into proper conductors located about the building frame. Each gen-erator
was labeled, though he did not need to read the inscriptions to know that they were prayers to various
gods and to Vladislovitch himself. Moving to the other nine generators, he opened access plates in their
sides and placed nine small bombs, each no larger than a pair of thumbs held side-by-side.
     They didn't even tick.
FIRST:
     Strong had circled approximately one half of the city, keeping to clumbs of brush and some black
slag piles of melted debris so that he would not be seen by any Mu-sicians, and he had not yet found any
clue to Babe's whereabouts. At last, he stopped, crouched behind an ancient truck cab, looking through
the windows, across to the neon stones. The glass had been smashed out years earlier, of course, so
there was nothing but the skeleton of the driver to obscure his view. On the other side of the truck, there
was a short stretch of waste, then the neon stones and a clear avenue along them to the smaller buildings
and the towers that comprised the city. If he expected to find Babe—assuming Babe was in there—he
could not do it by hanging back. When he was certain there was no one near, he rounded the truck and
loped across the grass and stones, onto the neon stones, down them toward the relative obscurity of the
alleyway ahead.
     As he ran, he wondered how many years it had been since a Popular had dared to cross into this
territory. Decades upon decades. Probably more than three cen-turies. The Musicians had quickly
displayed their lack of love and friendship with the mutants. He came into the alley where the sun was
blocked by a walkway roof between the two small buildings. He waited there, won-dering what his next
move should be, while he regained his breath.
     He could hear the sounds of revelry echoing from some distance, perhaps three or four blocks. Some
part of the festival was playing there, something that produced a good deal of laughter. Whether or not it
involved Babe, it was the only trail worth following.
     He darted out of the alleyway, across the street and into another covered passage that led toward a
large square. He squinted and saw that there was a crowd out there, apparently gathered around
something, watching. This was where the laughter came from.
     As he started forward, down the alley, two Musicians entered at the far end and walked rapidly in his
direc-tion, talking loudly and laughing hoarsely. . . .
                                              CHAPTER TEN



      Four neon stones in two heads: a pair of manbats.
      And, of course, Strong. His voice was heavy and un-natural as he strove for what he imagined were
stirring tones. “Let the angel of the Lord chase them, let them be as chaff before the wind.”
      They stood beneath the Primal Chord, obscured by its black shadows, Strong with a hand-sized
crossbow and a dozen clips of steel darts pinned over a loud vest of al-ternating panels of bright cloth
and fur. The manbats had no weapons other than their claws and fangs.
      Which were enough.
      Guil found it hard to imagine that this night had been conceived over seventeen years ago. Seventeen
years ago, Loper had struggled up the side of the Primal Chord, fighting impossible chances and
incredible odds to steal a child and kill it. Guil's stomach turned yet again as he realized for the first time
that he had been partly respon-sible for the real Guil's death. His existence had led to the Dream, the
Dream to Loper's murder of the baby. He would forget that. There was too much else fo feel guilty about
to start digging up new things.
      “The bombs?” Strong asked.
      “All ready.”
      “Then let's move to those trees,” Strong said. His voice was almost the voice of a child. The dreams
of seven-teen years had started to reach fruition. Soon, he felt confident, all that which God had
promised him would be his. The air was sown with gnats among the hoary willows, warmer than it should
have been. Strong silently said the prayers which had become a part of him for so long. He thanked his
Lord for what had been sent him and prayed that they might succeed with that which they had
undertaken. He had prophetic visions of seven gleaming white archangels dressed in brilliant golden robes
lifting him to a bejeweled throne. It never occurred to him that he might be quite insane.
      Guil fixed his eyes to the towers and waited for Tisha. A moment later, he saw her, sleek in black
leotards, a powerful sound rifle in one hand. He called softly to her, and she joined them in the willows as
the towers of vis-ible sound glowed around them. Guil took her free arm in his, said, “They should be
going off—”
      “Now,” Redbat finished for him.
      It was true. From the Congressional Tower came the muffled thuds of the tiny explosives as they
wrecked the machinery in which they were planted. Then the Tower of Learning began to dissolve. It
was an altogether awe-some sight. The reaction began at the top of the build-ing, far up at the glowing
peak. It was not a simple fade-out, for the power could not be cut instantly. What was stored in the
reserve batteries of the computers was used, moderately, to sustain the illusion-buildings. Since the points
highest up were the hardest to sustain, they were permitted to go first. The red-cream-white ripples of the
structure continued, sweeping from top to bottom as al-ways. Near the top, however, the red ripple
faded to pink, the cream to white, and the white misted com-pletely out of the visible spectrum. Then the
process slowly worked its way down.
      Every time a white ripple reached the lower peak, an-other few floors disappeared. The color ripples
began flushing outward at a faster rate as if frantically trying to counteract the decay and restore the
tower to its previous majesty. But as they moved faster, the decay also moved faster, and the tower
rapidly disappeared as if an eraser had been rubbed over it.
      Those things that had not been sound configurations, the contents—in specific—of the various
chapels and some of the private furniture, rained down on the lawn, smashing to pieces on the cement or
merely crumpling apart on the grass, showering up in color-suffused frag-ments among some decorative
neon stones.
    Guil saw a pew slam into a running Musician and split him as neatly as a sharp knife would cut
through pud-ding. Together, the man and the pew fell apart. It had all occurred in silence, for the victim
had not even had time to scream.
    He thought that he should feel revulsion at this death that was of his making, but he had seen so much
death and violence recently that he could not bring himself to really care. And, by this time, the Musicians
had meta-morphized (in his mind) into evil, sadistic creatures to-ward which he could feel little pity.
    Turning to the other towers, he could see that much the same thing was happening. The great walls
that had hummed for four hundred years now faded, shrunk, and were gone altogether, leaving their
builders without shelter, alone and lost and confused on the bleak face of the earth. With a strange,
distant horror (it seemed as if the events of the last week had rendered him incapable of feeling terror or
horror as anything but a vague, misty entity clinging to the outskirts of his emotions) he saw what was
happening to the people who had been in the towers. He supposed he must have realized this before he
planted the bombs, but he had supressed it, pretending it would not happen. As the walls dissolved
around them, the floors under their feet, the people shot through the air like the pews and furniture had in
the deserted building. They struck the ground with cruel force, died in-stantly, leaving only fragments of
bone and flesh to mark the point where each had left this life.
    Fascinated too much to turn from the horror even though he realized his interest was equivalent to the
black and animal urges that had made it possible for him to defeat Rosie, Guil watched as a Musician and
his Lady fell through a dissolving floor, holding hands. They struck another one that still remained solid,
were gravely injured. Then down and down, passing through some levels and bouncing off others.
Eventually, they parted and fell alone. When they struck the pavement, he could hear their impact. A
leg—he could not tell whether it was male or female—stood separated from its body for a long moment,
then fell and ran crimson. . . .
    “God,” Guil breathed, holding Tisha.
    “I want away from here,” she said. “Please!”
    Strong was laughing, breaking his uproar with lines from the Seven Books, nearly foaming at the
mouth, eyes glazed with excitement.
    He knows he will be a toolmaster after this, Guil thought. Here again was Rosie's analysis of men
and their social motivations. Strong was going to be a tool-master, and he was already experiencing the
joy of plan-ing and scraping and gouging and screwing, bolting and plastering human beings as if they
were equipment, tools, or raw materials to be molded. Men were always inter-fering in the lives of other
men, usually for the worse. Men could not leave men alone. They had to be using, twisting, forever
hustling for whatever they could get to fulfill their own twisted view of the world. He was right. He could
never belong here.
    The night was dark.
    Over the tops of the trees, whistling like a flute, came an air sled culled from the prewar warehouses.
Gypsy Eyes was driving it, and he shouted as he saw them, brought the craft to settle three feet above the
grass on its gravity cushions. Pressing the hold bar, he climbed into the back seat, leaving the controls to
Strong who mounted the machine and took them in his hands, fon-dling them as if they were women.
“Chances?” he asked as Guil and Tisha climbed into the three person rear seat beside Gypsy Eyes.
    Gypsy Eyes made a face that drew all his wrinkles in toward his nose. “They will see this group and
counter-attack in five minutes if we stay here. There is one hun-dred percent probability in that.”
    “So we move,” Strong said.
    “Yes.”
    Strong turned to the manbats. “Redbat, you know what to do next?”
    “Perfectly,” Redbat said somewhat disdainfully.
    “Then do it,” Strong snapped, pulling the hold bar up and slamming feet into acceleration pedals. Up
they went —and fast.
    Wind rushed darkly around them, and the plain of battle was spread in a panorama of wonder
beneath them. All the towers had disappeared by now, except for the Congressional Hall which was
under heavy guard by Populars to prevent it from being used as a Musician ref-uge. Only one other
sound configuration remained of any size larger than weapons: the Pillar of Ultimate Sound. The tower
around it had died. The Great Hall was a nothingness. The arena was only a bad memory—and maybe
even that could be disposed of. Still, the ponder-ous black and brown pillar, throbbing with unidentifiable
yet strangely recognizable tunes, lived on, sustained by its own generator, spinning the colors of its voice.
     Commando teams of Populars dashed through the neon stone gardens, brandishing their crossbows
and, here and there, a captured sound rifle. The Musicians were so taken by surprise that they ran about
in stupid circles, waving at each other, shocked into disbelief, the disbelief giving birth to the madness of
refusing to be-lieve. And as they tried to recover and act, the Populars cut them down as if they were
animals, darting them heavily or puffing them into nonexistence with the sound weapons.
     “Chances!”
     “Wait,” Gypsy said.
     “Now! I want them right now!”
     “Fifty-fifty.” Gypsy Eyes clutched the railing that rimmed the craft, bumping up and down on his seat
as Strong shot them first one way, then another in order to see every aspect of the great conquest.
     “Fifty-fifty? No better than that?”
     “Fifty-fifty,” Gypsy Eyes confirmed, though he looked as if he wished he could give better
percentages.
     “But we haven't even suffered a casualty yet!” Strong insisted.
     “We will.”
     “How?”
     Gypsy eyes squinted, his eyes clouding. “There are two major possibilities. Two different groups are
forming to mass counter-attacks. Either might succeed, though neither group is actually large.”
     “You're seeing this in the future?”
     “In the possible futures, yes. Of course.”
     “Where will they attack from?” Strong asked, hunching over the controls as if the statistics had struck
him a blow to the gut.
     “Too difficult to give an answer to that,” Gypsy said. “Each group has three possible directions from
which to swoop in upon the Popular forces. That would mean ana-lyzing all six possiblities for
probabilities, and that much figuring I cannot keep track of, considering the billions of shadow
possibilities that also exist. As things develop, I'll have a clearer view.”
     Strong snorted. “Then keep looking and tell us as soon as you know anything.”
     Tisha huddled next to Guil.
     The sled slid on.
     Guil wished they had struck right for the pillar, had not waited to see how things would go. They had
chosen the land beyond as theirs, and they should not have hesi-tated.
     Below, a group of cornered Musicians, their backs to a stone wall that was left over from
pre-Musician days and had been polished and carved as a work of art, had brought out whistles and
sound rifles and were making a valiant, if futile, last stand. For the moment, they might seem to be
winning, but superior numbers could only wear them out and set them up to be picked off one at a time
with more leisure.
     Strong, concerned anyway, brought the sled down above them, keeping it a hundred feet up and out
of sight in the darkness. He leaned over the side to watch. There was nothing for the rest of them to do
but watch also. After all, it did not really seem as if people were dying but as if dolls, under some magic
electric control, were playing out a violent puppet show on a very realis-tic stage.
     Seven Populars ashed into glow bits and disappeared before they could open fire on the Musicians.
The Musi-cians cheered each other and waved their guns in tri-umph. A second wave of mutants swept
toward them, heedless of the sound weapons. They were fifty Populars with dart guns, and they must
have been figuring on the sudden, careless rush to carry them over their enemy be-fore any of the
Musicians understood what had happened. There was a madness in their zeal that sent cold shivers
through Guil.
     Populars flicked out like bad bulbs and were gone for-ever.
     Still, the wave did not fluctuate or threaten to turn tail and run. They came on despite the bursts of
light that were their comrades suffering total negation. Four of them reached the Musicians and managed
to fire point blank with their crossbows. But they only brought down their own number before they were
gone too, nulled, dissipated, ashed. . . .
     For a second, everything seemed to freeze. There was no action.
     The fighters were like wax dolls.
     Only their clothes moved slightly, stirred by the wind.
     Then a third wave of Populars under the direction of a shouting, gesticulating little dwarf at their rear
ap-proached the Musicians. They held boards before them as protection against the sound beams. Some
crouched behind rolling barrels brought from the ruins of the Pop-ular Sector to provide just such cover.
The dwarf, over-sized head bobbling excitedly, wiped his running nose on the sleeve of his coarse shirt
and directed the charge with expertise, pausing only to cough now and then into a yellow piece of paper.
The Musicians picked him off first, right in the middle of a cough. Then, turning to the roll-ing barrels and
the shielding planks, they began firing.
     Barrels sparkled and were gone.
     The men behind the barrels, startled, were gone before they could manage to stand erect.
     The Musicians turned to the board-bearers and buzzed the thin shields out of the way. Some of the
Populars, re-alizing the sudden desperation of their situation, threw their boards into the air and charged
with a strange elec-tric hopelessness that currented their bodies so that their muscles seemed to twitch as
if repeatedly shocked. Shielded, they could not advance as fast as the dying wave before them, and, at
any rate, the shields were use-less to begin with. Even running, they did not make it. The last was
sound-killed a dozen feet from the Musicians, his arms thrown wildly into the air at the last mo-ment, his
dart weapon rattling across the pavement in a surrender the enemy would never accept. And which, Guil
thought sarcastically, the Popular would not have accepted had the circumstances been reversed.
     Strong was worried. The power of the Musicians was frightening. Guil had underestimated the city's
counter-attack capabilities under the prevailing conditions. And if he had underestimated, Strong, in his
fanatic self-confi-dence, had surely even guessed lower.
     “Blessed be the Lord my strength, which teacheth my hands to war, and my fingers to fight: My
goodness, and my fortress; my high tower and my deliverer; my shield.”
     Certainly, they would need a deliverer and shield if more Musicians shook their grogginess and took
up arms, laden with their superior fire power. Guil had noticed that the remaining Musicians in the corner,
backed against the wall, had destroyed the weapons that had be-longed to their fallen comrades. They
seemed deter-mined to keep as many weapons as possible from falling into Popular hands if they
themselves should some-how be brought to ruin.
     Which they would be, of course.
     Another wave hit them, fanning darts . . .
     The Musicians sustained heavy wounds this time, five of the eight mortally struck. They pitched
forward, darts prickling their bodies in countless places, blood oozing here, gushing there, pooling about
the feet of the remain-ing three.
     But those three, despite their unfamiliarity with the horrors of combat, had grouped and rallied with a
de-fense system that seemed to be working. They stood in a triangle, facing one to the left, one to the
right, and one directly front. They fanned their weapons, the humming beams crossing and magnifying one
another so that where they hummed alone they burned Populars, and where they crossed they even
destroyed the darts in midflight. With a single bark of command, the leader who faced front could shift
the triangle slightly to meet any new angle of attack that seemed dangerous. It was a deadly, impenetrable
wall of negating vibrations, and the Pop-ulars were forced into a retreat minus two-thirds of their original
numbers.
     Strong was praying. Very loudly.
     Then salvation came . . .
     . . . for the Populars: the manbats.
     They swooped down from above, three bats for three men. The Musicians fell, their weapons
skidding away from them, spinning across the street into the waiting hands of the ecstatic mutants. The
manbats battled with fangs and claws, tore at the enemy flesh with maniacal glee. Even from the sled, Guil
could see that the bats' eyes burned with a potent flame more savage and prim-itive than anything Nasty
had possessed when he had attacked Guil. This was sheer bloodlust, the rending of flesh and blood and
bone for the pleasure of it, and it reached its slimy hands toward Guil's stomach and petted him toward
illness.
     Guil wanted to throw up, but he couldn't. Rather, he felt that he should puke. It was an obligation,
was it not, for the sensitive to physically rebel at such a sight? But rebellion at this crude man-against-man
spectacle was something no longer in him. When had that sensitivity utterly died? With the first
understanding that his parents had been willing to give him away, to use him, to sacri-fice him for a
cause—then to warp his life twice? No, it had not died then, but it had begun to. Had it died with the
realization that the Musicians had warped other men into grotesque freaks in order to complete the chain
of their society, in order to give their lowest class an object to which it could feel superior? No, but it had
sickened severely with that knowledge. Had it died with the carnage below? Had that sapped his
compassion for man-kind? Perhaps, though it would seem to be a slow deterio-ration rather than a
sudden death, with each of these things contributing to the weakening of its structure.
     The death of compassion had been an outgrowth of the understanding that the man who was abused
this moment would as likely abuse someone else the next. Show com-passion upon a beggar and make
him into a rich man, and he will eventually turn upon you and compete with you to win your own riches.
He will leave you a beggar for your kindness, refusing to stop and return the favor owed you, possessing
the knowledge that if you were made rich out of his pity, you would break him and make him a beggar
again.
     Guil told himself that not all men were this way. In-deed, he argued, he was not. But he could
remember a week earlier when Rosie had won his Medallion—and all Guil could think of was that Rosie
would go down in history and that he would have known him. A touch of selfishness? Perhaps. The
system broke even the good men. The system was bigger than all, and the system used people. It was the
toolmaster of toolmasters, using even those who fancied themselves as users.
     The system would not allow a man the privacy of his soul and the pleasure of living life as he saw fit.
The sys-tem forced the toolmasters to use him, and to avoid the masters and live his life in his own way,
he must pull strings, use people—in short, be a toolmaster himself. He was not, therefore, living life as he
wanted. It was not really a vicious circle; it was a set of concentric circles, all madly whirling through even
more sets. No place was still or quiet. No place of peace. Save one . . .
     “That's more like it!” Strong laughed as the manbats shredded the Musicians with electric, jolting,
screeching glee, then pulled away, their bloody grins punctuated with specks of what had been their
enemies, their green eyes greener than ever before.
     The pillar, Guil thought. That was the one place . . .
     “I have it,” Gypsy Eyes shouted.
     “What?” Strong had become so enthralled in the raging slaughter below the sled that he had
momentarily for-gotten all else—even, it seemed, the prayers from his Seven Books.
     “Those two groups of Musicians,” Gypsy Eyes said.
     “And?”
     “One has been destroyed by a commando team. I can tell, because they have totally vanished from
the possible futures.”
     “Let the angel of the Lord chase them, let them be as chaff before the wind!” The prayers were back
now.
     “The other group is concealed by a stand of oaks a hundred yards west of the Congressional Tower,
at least, that's where they are in most of the immediate probabilities.”
     “Chances?”
     “Still fifty-fifty,” Gypsy said.
     Strong didn't like that. His face contorted into a hard, angular mask of anger. “Which way will they
attack?”
     Gypsy Eyes concentrated a moment, leaned against the railing and clenched it tighter as if he would
gather strength from the hard steel of the craft. “They'll come around the perimeter of the West Neon
Stone Garden and attack from the rear, the direction of the major ruins. It is all slated as a surprise, and I
imagine they think themselves extremely clever. There is a ninety-two per-cent probability that this is the
avenue of attack.”
     The anger in Strong's face subsided as he dealt with this positive piece of prediction. “Good enough.
We'll sneak behind them with a force of manbats and drop unawares.” He kicked the accelerator with a
massive foot, bucked the sled, and plunged them on, stopping only to confer with a manbat and have the
creature relay his orders to Redbat. Then they were on to the stand of oaks, gliding silently like a large
moth.
     There were approximately eighty Musicians in the group that waited in the oaks, all robed in
shimmer-cloth, file brilliant fabric that would always remain intact once its basic patterns had been
generated, its own innate energy charge holding the patterns in countless coils. From what Guil could see
as they drifted on their moth through the night above the mob, all eighty were armed with sound rifles,
some with sonic knives as well. The initial burst of destruction had caught them off-guard, surely, as the
other Musicians who had already died or had not yet rallied, but these were more quick-witted and had
come to terms with the situation in surprisingly short order. And these, if any, would be the ones to come
out of this alive. They were toolmasters, leaders. And, considering the fact that everywhere battles raged
Musi-cians destroyed the weapons of their dead allies, this counter-attack mounting among the oaks was
better armed than any of the Populars.
     They might just have a chance.
     “Chances!” Strong hissed.
     “Still fifty-fifty,” Gypsy Eyes whined.
     Tisha tried to snuggle even closer.
     “Something has to break,” Strong said. “Something just has to!”
     Then Redbat was there with his legions.
     They filled the air, flapping, gliding, making shrill sounds to one another as they jockeyed for position.
They dived with such speed and in such a vertical angle that Guil thought they must surely smash into the
earth and shatter themselves to pulp. But, at the last feasible mo-ment (no, the moment was not feasible;
they were be-yond the brink of disaster; it was of the nature of a mira-cle that they could recover in so
short a distance) they thrust their wings out, breaking their fall, and were on the Musicians.
     The night was a shattered mirror.
     The screaming reached them where they sat on their lofty sled like spectators at a game.
     Bats fell on half the Musicians, tore into them with unrestrained fury. The landscape was a bubbling
froth of combat that exploded and steamed and whirled. The excitement was too much for the winged
Populars; their bladders could not hold up in the fury and confusion.
     Guil saw Redbat strike a Musician's neck, rip upward with claws. He flapped madly to gain height,
pulling the Musician's ruined neck away from the rest of him. Satis-fied, Redbat dropped back into the
skirmish.
     “Let the angel of the Lord chase them . . .”
     Malignant, awful angels: bat-winged and fanged . . .
     A new element was added to the scene now. The Musi-cians had recovered from the surprise. Of
the thirty left alive after the initial attack, eighteen now wore the yel-low sound shields. Some had been
carrying or had thought to grab their shield generators, had stuffed the wallet-sized affairs into their
voluminous robes and had affectively rendered themselves, now that their wits were again with them,
indestructable.
     Almost as if to testify to this invulnerability, one of the manbats swooped upon a shielded Musician,
smashed legs first against the glow and rebounded, screaming in agony, his legs ruined, shattered beyond
repair. Another Musician mercifully gunned him out of existence.
     Or was it out of mercy?
     Guil could not decide. It might have been anger. Or worse. It might have been simply a desire to kill.
     “Attack only those without shields!” Redbat was shouting, his voice a loud, ghostly hiss that carried
well in the cool night air despite the uproar of conflict.
     The manbats heeded their general, striking the unprotected with a vengeance too brutal to watch
closely. They gutted, flayed. They went for eyes and genitals. But that sort of macabre joviality could not
be sustained without casualties. The animal side was dominating their reasoning—and that could prove
disastrous.
     Now that the Musicians did not have to worry for their lives (the shielded ones, that is), they raised
sound rifles and sonic knives and were calmly and with disturbing accuracy cutting and dissolving the
manbats. Dozens of the winged mutants fell off their victims as they chewed overlong at a face or worried
at the crotch of a dead man. Sonic knives denied them their wings. Sound rifles popped them into glow
ashes. Some Musicians simply pointed to the sky and waved sonic knives at enemies they could not see
but whom they knew were nonetheless there.
     Strong pulled the sled back out of range of the knives. They continued to watch. In fact, they could
not look away. Here hinged the whole crusade. Gruesome as it was, it would either put meaning to the
previous deaths or make all those who had died fools who gave up life for a pointless cause.
     If there was any cause that wasn't pointless, Guil thought. He had not fought for this cause, really. He
had merely acted as a catalyst for a change that was about to come some day—with or without him. He
liked to think that, anyway. It made him more detached, less personally involved with the blood.
     “Lord God, to whom vengeance belongeth; O God to whom vengeance belongeth, show thyself!”
     Guil was not certain whether Strong was looking for a holy sign to mark his campaign with godly
grace and to assure him victory, or whether he was, literally, expect-ing God Almighty (in one of the
many forms authorized by the Universal Church) to come forth from the stars and set foot on the battle,
crushing the Musicians, saving the manbats by letting his foot land so that the spaces between his toes
brought the manbats and other Populars a favored safety. As Strong looked skyward with the phrase on
his lips again, Guil thought this latter thing must be true.
     But would not the Musicians be shouting the same things to their gods? Would Chopin and Grieg and
Rimsky-Korsakov and Vladislovitch come streaking from the heavens in a thunderous symphony,
wrench the vile manbats from the face of the earth and cast them into the airless void beyond the sun? Of
course not. Neither side would witness the arrival of their divinities. Gods, Guil saw now, were part of
the toolmaster-tool concept. The users made them up to satisfy the used. Gods were as grease and oil,
making the tools work bet-ter and longer and with less friction.
     He realized that he had never really believed in gods, but that he had never analyzed religion to
understand his lack of faith. Or to understand why other men needed gods. It was a far deeper thing than
superstition. Gods, as men interpreted them, were nothing more than pana-ceas, candies to pacify the
people.
     His head spun with his discoveries of this night, these new perceptions so rapidly gained. Tonight, not
that day in the arena, he had come of age.
     At length, all the Musicians without shields were dead, strewn hideously across the ground. The battle
had pro-gressed toward the great courtyard in the center of the neon stone gardens, and it seemed as if
the Musicians might quell the rebellion yet.
     “Chances?”
     “Only a thirty percent chance of success,” Gypsy Eyes reported.
     Strong's fingers danced nervously over the controls without pulling or pushing any of them. His gods
seemed to have abandoned him to his own fate. The night was incredibly dark. But he knew this could
also be a test to see whether he was still faithful. The Seven Books were full of tests. “We're going down.
Gideon, can those shields be broken with sound rifles?”
     Guil thought a moment. “Yes. It takes a longer hold on target, but it can be done. There's a danger
the shield might strike back along the rifle's beam and negate the gun as it is negated itself. You might run
out of captured sound rifles pretty quickly.” When he was finished, he wondered if this bit of advice had
increased the degree of his guilt.
     “We'll have to risk that,” Strong said.
Pulling back on the controls, the big Popular took the sled down toward the battle. . . .
FIRST:
      Strong stood in the dark, covered alleyway watching the two Musicians come toward him. They
were silhou-etted in the light from the courtyard behind them, and he would have been able to pick them
off quite easily if he had thought to bring a crossbow. Then he realized that he, too, must be outlined
against the light from his end of the corridor, and he danced sideways against the cold wall of the
building.
      The Musicians had not noticed him. They came on, still laughing and slapping at each other in high
good humor. He tried to find some place to go, an indentation, doorway, anything to conceal him—but
he had no luck. Just as he tensed for the inevitable battle that must come, one of the men stopped and
exclaimed that he had for-gotten something or other that he had meant to bring home from the Festival.
They argued a moment about the advisability of going back, then turned and went back into the
courtyard and out of sight.
      Strong sighed, realized he had been trembling, and was angry at his fear. He moved slightly away
from the wall and hurried to the end of the alley and the courtyard beyond. He crouched at the mouth,
just at the edge of sunlight, and looked about. There were booths and pennants and games. Musicians
wandered here and there, amusing themselves as best they could, considering the terrible heat of the
summer day.
      In a way, the heat was a blessing. If the courtyard had been crowded, his chances of finding Babe
would have been about nil—and his chances of being apprehended would have been astronomically high.
      The group of young Musician boys who stood in the center of the courtyard, ringed about something
they found highly amusing, was still there. He tried to see what it was that caused so much laughter, had
little luck. He was about to give up and look elsewhere when the boys shifted to make room for
whatever they encircled, and he got a glimpse of Babe.
      They had done something to the young mutant, though Strong could not guess what. There was a
mesh cap of shimmering sound material over his head, and the device made a low warbling sound.
Babe's face was slack, loose, like the face of an idiot. Strong could see that he was drooling, his tongue
lolling. The boys had made him a mindless hulk, and they had placed a bitch hound in the circle with him,
had encouraged him to rollick with her. . . .
                                          CHAPTER ELEVEN



     Populars lay everywhere, battered and dismembered by the sonic knives. They gave mute testimony
to the fact that for every one that was dead here, another three had been nulled by the sound rifles.
     As they went down to the battle, Guil wondered how the toolmaster-tool relationship could continue
from the dawn of society to the sunset of Earth. Didn't others realize that the system devoured and never
produced? Did people not see what was so crammed beneath their noses? No, certainly he wasn't the
first to see the scheme of it. Rosie had helped him along with his understanding, and therefore Rosie had
seen it first. Most likely, everyone saw it. But the system would go on because of two things. First, many
of those who saw the scheme and recognized it for the deadly, sapping, spiritless thing it was would not
think to change it, but to become a part of it, to try for the toolmaster position in life where some peace
could be attained. Thus, the constant struggle between individuals for various kinds of power would
never cease. And that explained the wars of the past, why one civili-zation had fallen to another that
became just like it. It wasn't that the tools had been disgusted with things and had essayed to change
them. Simply, another toolmaster had been trying to gain power and more tools—and to do that meant
war with other toolmasters. Secondly, there were those who did not want to become a part of the
system, did not want to use or be used. But the system was always bigger, and their realization always
came too late. When they understood, they were trapped. Often, they became the easiest tools of all for
the masters to use, for they discovered that absolute submission to the mas-ters (the presidents and kings
and ministers and generals, the senators, councilmen, lobbyists and priests) brought them peace from
harrassment and punishment, brought them at least a few moments to live as they pleased.
     Of course, there had been those who had taken a way out similar to that which he and Tisha had
chosen.
     Strong set the sled down in the center of a great plaza, moved among the Populars, commanding and
receiving attention. The counter-attack was proceeding this way, he told them, and things looked bleak.
He was quick to clarify that this did not mean they should quit—only that they should fight all the harder.
He delivered a brief prayer which some of them listened to, but which many ignored. When that was
done, he sent a detail to draw together their scattered forces, ordering them to return to the plaza as two
separate units. He ordered the man-bats out of the battle completely and explained what had to be done
against the shields.
     The front row of their defense was strung shoulder-to-shoulder across the courtyard. A second row
of mu-tants stood directly behind them, a third row after that. The third string had the few sound rifles
that had been captured. Guil saw that the first two rows were nothing more than a fleshy barrier to stop
sound beams, to hold the Musicians up a minute or two until the sound rifles in the third row could
engage and disrupt the enemy shields.
     Nothing more than sacrifices.
     Not even that.
     Cannon fodder.
     Surely they knew it! Still, they stood calmly as the gunners in the third line laid barrels between their
heads, stretched across their shoulders. Guil and Tisha had sound rifles, but surrendered them to
Populars more anxious to use them. It was a useless gesture, Guil thought. If they were not condemned
to damnation now, they never would be.
     The Musicians appeared and began fighting their way across the plaza against the camouflaging front
of disor-dered Populars that had concealed the three rows. Now these disorganized troops, having
suffered heavy losses, fell behind the prepared defense. The Musicians, realiz-ing that the battle had
slackened to give clear way to the three lines, raised their rifles and began picking off Popu-lars in the
first row, puffing them to nothing, swinging the barrels, puffing, swinging, puffing . . .
     But they had not even begun on the second row when the Populars opened fire on the dazzling
yellow shields and split the night with their banshee screams.
     Amber flickered and blazed.
     Darkness receded beneath the hands of a false day.
     The air crackled, snapped, hissed.
     Guil stood behind a cyclops who manned one of the firing positions. He could almost feel the tension
build-ing along the beam as the humming tones of the shield and weapon met and fought. The air seemed
to stir like a sentient creature just now coming to life. Abruptly, the shield of the cyclops' target blinked
twice and was gone. The tension went with it. The sentient air died. The beam now centered on the
unprotected Musician blew him into a cherry dust.
     The cyclops swung his gun slightly and sighted on an-other shield. The beam lanced out, coursed
over the Mu-sician's armor. The atmosphere grew tight again. Sec-onds passed, and the shield remained
intact. The cyclops was beginning to perspire. He knew that there was a chance both the gun and the
shield would go, and no one had told him what that would do to him.
     The air sang.
     Guil stepped back a few feet.
     A bolt of pure orange light snapped back in an arc from the Musician's shield, exploded in the innards
of the gun. The shield had been destroyed, but so had the sound rifle. And the Popular who had been
firing it. Guil turned away from the body.
     Here and there, the disaster was repeated as both shield and gun were wiped out in the backlash of
the beam. But wherever this happened, some other zealous Popular would step into line with a new gun
and resume the battle. Clearly, the greatest threat to the revolution's success had been met and
surmounted. Only triumph could follow in this night of sound and fury.
     “Chances!” Strong's voice boomed among the thunder of the weaponry.
     “Ninety-four percent for success,” Gypsy Eyes shouted back.
     Guil dropped back from the firing line as the last of the shielded Musicians was brought down. A
desperate attack of unshielded Musicians had begun to the east end of the plaza. The Populars were
happily swarming there, certain of their eventual triumph, fired by fanati-cism, foamed into battle frenzy
by Strong as he called scripture to them with supposedly holy words that promised divine blessings upon
their actions and their souls.
     No matter that those words were written for ancient, long dead soldiers in distant battles in time.
     Grabbing Tisha's arm, Guil dragged her to the fringe of the war zone and to the west end of the plaza
near the neon stones that still glowed, maintained by their own generators buried deep in the earth. “The
pillar,” he said.
     “Rosie?” she asked.
     “What about him?”
     “We can't just leave him here!”
     “He tried to kill me,” Guil said.
     “He was upset.”
     “He upset me, that's for sure.”
     “He's my brother.” There was an unrealistic feeling to the argument, for he did not really want to
leave the mu-tant behind. Neither was he pleased with the prospect of trying to take him along. Rosie
might still feel combat-ive, might still feel that he could salvage the city-state by murdering Guil. Tisha was
arguing the other side just as unsurely. “He's my brother,” she repeated weakly.
     “Okay. Let's go. But we'll have to hurry.”
     Hand in hand so they would not get separated in the push and shove of the action, trying to stay as
much to the shadows and the clear areas as possible, they made for the Congressional Tower. When
they got there, they found five guards at the doors with rifles. They had probably scored massive kill
tallies as panic-stricken Mu-sicians, seeing this structure still erect, tried to rush the entrance. Of course,
with the sound rifles, there were no remains.
     Fortunately, one of the guards was the Cyclops who had fought the rats in Corridor F a week earlier.
He re-membered Guil and Tisha, or they otherwise might have been negated themselves. “What do you
want?” he asked, his voice not as friendly as Guil might have ex-pected.
     “Strong said I could have the pleasure of killing my false father, Grieg,” Guil said. He did not know
how transparent his deception was, but he hoped the line would seem logical enough to this brute.
     “We aren't supposed to—”
     “Strong ordered it!”
     The cyclops looked him over carefully. “Okay. But be careful. They won't know anything inside
about what is going on out here. We don't want to alarm them.”
     “I'm the one who told you that,” Guil snapped, push-ing through the milky doors into the tomb silence
of the main foyer.
     In here, the Musicians that had apartments slept peacefully, lusting in their sensonics, oblivious to the
uproar outside. Guil stopped at the central core to check on Franz. The teacher was still unconscious.
Guil did not know why he worried for the old man's safety; the Popu-lars would have him in the end, just
as they would have all the others.
     They went to the elevator, throbbed upward on the sound currents. For a moment, Guil had visions
of the building fading as the others had, of Tisha and himself flailing helplessly on the long, long fall,
bouncing from floor to floor . . .
     They found the hallway that passed Guil's room, though it now seemed alien and strange to him. He
could scarcely believe that he had ever lived here now that the end of it was so close. As they walked
briskly toward the door, he felt like a prowler. No, more like a patron of the arts walking through a
musty museum, for this was a museum of sorts, the last artifact of the Musi-cian colony on Earth.
     He used his identisong to unlock the door, palmed.
     The panel slid back on darkness cled by false stars.
     The sensonic lay round and sinister in the corner.
     And in the center of the room was Rosie . . .
     . . . hanging by the neck from the exercising bars . . .
     For a moment, they stood disbelieving, unable to ac-cept it. Then Tisha began to cry. Guil quickly
closed the door behind them and walked to the corpse. The neck stood straight, the head high from the
shoulders for the first time in the hunchback's life. His neck was clearly broken.
     “Why?” Tisha asked.
     He had told her, briefly, of the confrontation earlier in the night. Now, so that she might always
understand Rosie's motives, he told her the story in detail, careful to phrase things as the hunchback had
phrased them, inci-dentally telling her of the influence the Composer's phi-losophy had had on his own.
     “We can at least cut him down,” she said at last.
     Guil got a sonic knife from his things and severed the cord, stepping back as the heavy body crashed
to the floor, bounced, and lay still. “Don't cry,” he said.
     “But—”
     “We have things to do. He did what he wanted.”
     He took her and forcibly turned her from the scene, went with her to the door, out into the hall,
leaving Rosie behind as a fixture of this grand museum, the last Composer of the Musician world, refusing
in the only way he knew to become a tool. They dropped down the elevator shaft to the ground floor,
embraced as they fell and found some solace in the circles formed by their arms.
     Outside, they could see that the battle still raged. It was also evident that the Musicians would lose.
     “The pillar?” Tisha asked.
     He saw, and was happy that her tears were gone. “We're going to have to pass by some of the
fighting to get there.”
     “Let's go.”
     They went into the plaza, trying to stay close to the edge where neon stones glittered but where the
battle did not rage. Ahead lay the humming, swirling pillar. They were halfway to it, at the rear of the
present skir-mish, when Guil saw Strong striding from the uproar, face lit with sweat-lathered insanity.
“The girl, Gideon,” Strong said. “The war is won, and the girl cannot be a part of it.”
     “What are you talking about?” Guil asked.
     “You're the prophet. You know you're the prophet. And she is of the enemy you helped us slay. And
she's a woman. The books report that prophets are chaste, Gid-eon. Prophets are chaste. They abstain,
you see.” While he spoke, he came closer, reaching out for her.
     Before the madman's words could fully unfold in Guil's mind, he had Tisha, thick fingers closing about
her neck . . .
     “Stop it!” Guil shouted.
     “You are a prophet, Gideon. You were named for a prophet—”
     Guil leaped on the Popular, raked his hands over his face.
     Strong shook him loose as if he were a flea.
     Then he found the sonic knife in his hand, the same one with which he had cut Rosie down from his
self-made gallows. He sliced with it, careful to keep it out of Tisha's way.
     He's my father! Guil thought. The thought was a silent scream inside his head.
     But he could not stop.
     Strong screamed, twisted, still holding the girl but for-getting, for the moment, to continue to choke
her.
     Guil sliced again.
     Strong fell.
     Tisha screamed, was free.

     The faces above Strong were swimming in and out of a strange dream mixture that now and again
contained some of them, often contained none of them. Who? Where? He tried to focus his eyes, but
could not clear away the growing haze. Then the haze rippled, and he was looking into the past.
     He saw Babe in this past. Babe was in a circle of Mu-sicians, lying on the ground with a bitch hound.
...
     Strong screamed and ran toward his brother. . . .
     Then everything rippled again, the haze cleared, and he was looking back up at the ring of people that
stood about him, watching him die slowly, die completely. He stared around the circle, looking from face
to face. Most . of them were mutants. Most of them did not look too concerned, only mildly interested.
Didn't they know who he was? Didn't they know he was the father of the prophet?
     The prophet? He looked, found the boy. He could not understand the expression on the boy's face.
It was not sorrow either. And yet it was more than mild interest. He tried to pry off the face of the boy
and see what worked in his mind, but he could not do it. The boy's mind was too alien to him.
     Then one head became clearer than the others in the circle, came bobbling out of the dozen faces and
grew sharper, larger. It was a black face, hooded in black cloth. It seemed to expand and expand until it
filled the entire sky, until it stretched from horizon to horizon, the features of it as big as mountains and
valleys. He knew the black face for what it was, and he cried out wildly, seeking to escape but unable to
move. His legs had been cut off, of course. There was no escaping Death. But he could not be consoled
by the inevitability of it. He could think of but one thing to mutter hatefully in an agonized, withered voice:
“My God, my God, why hast thou for-saken me?”
     There wasn't any answer.

     Guil turned from the body as its screams ceased. Would the whirlwind of this night never die down?
He almost laughed, then checked himself, though what he now had come to understand was ironic
enough to provoke laughter. Why did toolmasters exist? Why did men scramble to control one another?
The answer was not difficult to find. In fact, it was deceptively simple, just as the solution to the problems
in the arena had been de-ceptively simple. Answer: they were all afraid of Death, the Erlking, and they
grasped desperately at immortal-ity. Vladislovitch had not been able to bring that; if he had, perhaps
being a toolmaster would no longer be nec-essary. With immortality, each man could be himself and to
hell with domination and submission. But without a real immortality, the only way a man could hope to
live forever was through the memories he left behind in other people. If a man was a Grand Meistro, he
could count on immortality of this stripe. He would never be completely forgotten. With intangible fingers,
he could reach from his grave rot and stir his memory in the minds of men. A common man's immortality,
on the other hand, lasted only as long as his family survived after him. Ah, but if a man could rule, could
bring pain to some and joy to oth-ers, could use people to assure himself of a place in his-tory, then he
would never die. Never . . . Ever . . .
     Finally, Guil did laugh. He could hold it back no longer. He saw that he had been born too soon. He
would have fit perfectly into a world of some distant future when Man had finally produced physical
immor-tality, in a world where there was absolutely no need for toolmastering and where men would be
free at last—the Ninth Rule conquered and used. Born too soon.
     “What is it?” Tisha asked.
     “It's just that,” he said, wiping tears from his eyes, “what he feared the most is exactly the thing we
don't fear at all. He fears Death. And Death is the only immor-tality, the thing he wanted all along.”
     She took his hand and held it tightly. “Come on. Hurry. They're looking at you funny. The pillar.”
     He turned with her to run the last few hundred feet, and they collided with Redbat. The mutant's eyes
were hot, the green like strange, bubbling lava. “You aren't deserting us for the enemy, are you?” Redbat
asked.
     “We—” Tisha began.
     “We aren't on anyone's side anymore, Redbat,” Guil said. He felt flushed, exultant. “Strong tried to
kill Tisha. He was a fanatic. You know that. We aren't de-serting anyone. We're just leaving.”
     “Not yet,” the mutant said, scuttling back a step and fluffing its wings, then drawing them in tight
again.
     Green eyes glowing . . .
     “What?” Guil asked.
     Redbat blew air out of his nostrils, blinked his mam-moth eyes. “These men. They'll look to you as
their new leader now that your father is gone.”
     “They won't,” Guil said. “I don't have the stigmata. I don't fit in.”
     “They will. They'll look to you. I want that leadership, and I don't think you should have it after what
you've done.”
     “Fine,” Guil said. “The leadership is yours. All yours. My blessings. Come on, Tish.”
     “Wait!” Redbat pushed a claw against Guil's chest. “We will have a fight.”
     “You're crazy!”
     “The winner of the fight is the leader. The power goes to him.”
     “I give the power to you. Don't you understand that?”
     “They will not believe you surrendered it,” Redbat said. “They will not trust in my authority.”
     Guil frowned, looked around to the other Populars, back to Redbat. “That is not true. You have
witnesses.”
     “Fight!” Redbat stiffened, claws extended.
     “It's more to you than just leadership, Redbat. You know they would believe you and accept your
authority. You owe us a favor, you know. You owe me a favor for killing Nasty for you. You said so that
day in the cave.”
     Redbat said nothing.
     “Let us go now without a fight. That is the favor I ask. Let us depart in peace.”
     “Glory, my dear boy,” Redbat said, his voice thinner than usual, “is a thing not easily attained. There
will be a history of this one day. They will tell how Strong con-ceived the plan and how it was Redbat
who led forth the new nation. How Strong perished is already settled. But how Redbat came to power
must be a dramatic story, not a diplomatic coup hardly worth the telling and cer-tainly not memorable. I
hereby state my intentions of revenging the murder of Strong. Besides, I don't like the way you look.” He
grinned, thumb-sized fangs curving over his lips. “Fight!”
     “We should leave together,” Tisha said. “Otherwise, we might not cross at the same point. We might
not find each other on the other side. And that means we both have to use the pillar.”
     “I've killed one like him,” Guil said. “I guess I can damn well handle another.”
     “Nasty was a weakling,” Redbat said.
     “We'll see,” Guil answered.
     “Yes, I guess we will.”
     And, circling, they began their minor battle while the larger combat roared behind.
     Redbat knew the boy's strength. He did not go flap-ping in on his neck as Nasty had done. Instead,
he cir-cled warily, waiting, waiting either for an opening or for the boy to tire of the game and leap first.
And that was exactly what happened. Guil jumped, hands latching onto the wings of his opponent when
they had been aimed for the neck.
     Guil felt claws sink wickedly into his flesh, seeking knowingly for the spots where Nasty had sunk
claws and fangs the week before, tearing and scratching. Flesh sliced like ripe fruit and peeled away
beneath them. Guil threw his fists in windmill flurries, caught Redbat in the face. The light cartilage of the
mutant's nose snapped, crunched backward and released a jet of blood. But the manbat only opened his
mouth and gasped breath that way, holding on, twisting the claws and seeking an open-ing to tear at the
boy's jugular vein.
     Guil battered at the fragile wings as the noise and lights galloped about them. But he could not seem
to land another decent blow. Redbat's head slipped back and forth, in and out, up and down like a snake
bobbling to the tune of a flute.
     The manbat suddenly found an opening and sank teeth into Guil's arm.
     But he had to let go, for he had no nose with which to breathe and needed his mouth to suck air.
Fangs were out. Still, the claws could and did slash murderously.
     Mercilessly . . .
     Pain as real as ice.
     Pain as real as fire.
     Then the manbat leaped against him, toppling both to the ground.
     Guil was on the bottom, pinned by claws and wings. Redbat ripped his claws loose from the boy's
sides, hissed and spattered blood and saliva over Guil's face. His eyes were a madman's eyes—the eyes
of a man who sees immortality before him and knows he must seize it before it moves on and loses him in
the stream of eter-nity.
     Guil thought of all the murderers who had killed with-out reason—or a noticeable reason, at least.
Prewar Earth history was full of them. So was some Musician history. Assassins. Mass murderers. All
were hungering for immortality. And so it was; they received it. The infa-mous lived as long as the famous
in the journals of men. Kill a hundred people and someone, somewhere, will be talking about you a
thousand years from now, using you as an example of some mental instability, but talking about you
nonetheless. Kill a leader, a chief, and the same is true.
     And why did men let the killers live on? Why give them the immortality they sought? Because, Guil
thought, most men wished they too could have gained an historical niche for themselves equal to that of
the killer. We are fascinated by the fact that they not only became toolmasters themselves, but that they
used toolmasters (as opposed to the common people who are tools) to gain their immortality.
     “Now you'll die,” Redbat said, bringing claws up to rake down Guil's face and gouge out his eyes.
“And I will start living!”
     But Redbat had spoken prematurely. The claws never connected with Guil's face. Suddenly, the
manbat pitched forward, eyes glazing, crashed full length over his intended victim. Dead . . . Guil rolled
from beneath the furry corpse, and waited till his vision settled. He saw Tisha standing over him, the butt
of her sound rifle glistening with Redbat's blood.
     “I had to,” she said.
     He could feel his own blood seeping from his sides. He nodded, took her hand, and led her toward
the pillar that shimmered powerfully before them. As they grew nearer to the brown column, a fragile sort
of peace de-scended on them . . .
FIRST:
     Strong looked out from the alleyway to where Babe lay with the dog, to where the others laughed,
where the sun beat unmercifully upon a scene that he wanted to strike completely from his mind, burn out
with a hot poker and leave only cool scar behind. But there was no way to deny the memory now. He
had seen how they had degraded Babe for their own fun, and the picture would haunt him forever.
     Without thinking what he was doing, without bother-ing to plan, to gauge distances, to outline a
course of ac-tion, he charged from the alleyway into the plaza, toward the Musician boys that had done
this thing. He reached the edge of their circle before they saw him, ripped into them with his massive
hands, punching, pounding, slamming them down and kicking them hard, over and over in the neck and in
the ribs.
     For a long time, he moved like an automaton, a mind-less construction programmed only to destroy.
He tore at them, made them bleed and cry and slobber on the pave-ment. He was aware that some of
them had escaped, would be bringing back help, but he did not let that deter him. When he had finished
with the half dozen he had beaten, when none of them breathed or moved or had hearts that fluttered, he
went to Babe and took the mesh cap off him, tossed it aside.
     He took Babe in his arms as if the mutant truly was yet an infant, ran with him back through the
covered al-leyway, back across the adjoining square into the second alleyway, on farther until they were
moving through the neon stones, beyond the dilapidated truck and into the ruins they called home.
     Later, when it became clear that whatever the sound cap had done to Babe's brain was permanent
and not temporary, Strong tried to go back into the city. Shell, his father, restrained him, and eventually
his fervor cooled enough so that he could be trusted to remain in the ruins. But he remembered how the
Musicians had bled. How their bones had broken. How they had died . . . And he began to feel that
there was something spe-cial about him. Perhaps he had been chosen to strike back at the oppressors.
     As the days went by and he saw more and more of the mindless Babe (drooling, mumbling, staring
vacantly) the feeling was fortified. The Dream began to flesh out. He knew he had only to wait until the
proper time, and he would be given a chance to wash the streets of Vi-valdi with Musician blood.
                                         CHAPTER TWELVE



     Guil was thinking of the song that had been played at dinner that night before Coming of Age Day . . .
     See Father, the Erlkings near . . .
     The Erlking with crown and wand . . .
     They reached the pillar just as several of Redbat's chiefs found his battered corpse and garnered the
story of the fight and of Tisha's treachery from the few nonbat Populars who had seen it. They looked
after Guil and Tisha, chattered excitedly among themselves as the two tried to gain a few more precious
feet.
     “They'll follow us,” Tisha said. “They'll stop us.”
     “Give me your rifle.”
     She watched as he braced the gun in a statue of Cho-pin standing in the plaza. He tilted it so that the
barrel aimed at the pillar. “What are you doing?”
     “It will engage the configuration of the pillar,” he said, turning it on. “A few minutes after we're
through, it'll ne-gate the whole thing.” He took her hand and started for-ward with her.
     Behind, there was a flapping of wings . . .
     A manbat ahead of the rest of the pack crashed against Guil's shoulders. The boy whirled, threw it
from him into the pillar. Shrieking, it disappeared, its screams so quickly choked off that one would have
thought a knife had been drawn across its throat.
     Carefully avoiding the thin, humming beam from the sound rifle that was working on the patterns of
the pillar, they stepped into the pulsating column and were swal-lowed by the smooth convolutions of its
buzzing, whin-ing, throbbing, countless melodies . . .
     in seinen armen das Kind war todt . . .
     Before them, the sky was black from horizon to hori-zon, stung with faint brown stars. To the right
were the chocolate mountains. To the left, an ocher plain . . .
     Silence seemed to radiate from the land.
     They walked forward, but as they walked, they seemed to flow with the land. The black
grass grew through their feet and tangled in them, withered when it could not hold them. Ahead stood
the manbat Guil had thrown through the pillar.
     “There's something wrong,” Tisha said. “Do you feel it?”
     “Yes,” he said. “If this is Death, where is everyone? There should be others. Many others. We're not
the first to die.”
     “Guil!” she said.
     “What is it?”
     “The stars! Look at them! They form Rosie's face.”
     And he saw that it was so. But when they tried to speak to the hallucination, it did not seem to know
they existed. They could not reach out to Rosie.
     Next, Guil saw that the moon was Redbat with his wings folded into a circle. He had no fangs now,
and nei-ther were his hands marked with claws.
     They called out to him, but he did not respond—as if he did not know they were present.
     They came to an obsidian tree, onyx leaves glistening with the strange moon's light. When Guil
reached to touch it, his hand moved through it and felt nothing.
     “I'm afraid,” Tisha said. “It isn't working out right. It is as if this isn't real, like a dream.”
     “Hallucinations,” Guil said, referring to Rosie's face in the stars and the form of Redbat in the moon.
     Then, before any more could be said, the sound rifle Guil had left propped in the statue of Chopin
finally suc-ceeded in negating the molecular patterns of the column. The walls of this world seemed to
close in upon them. Their bodies erupted into millions of fireflies, into a bright shower of white dust that
glowed and glimmered. Each of them felt energy leaving his body—and a strange new vibrant force
seeping in.
    The bright dust particles settled, congealed, and be-came their bodies again.
    “What happened?” Tisha asked.
    “Simple,” a voice said beside them.
    They turned and found Rosie, grinning.
    When they looked to the stars, his face was no longer there. And Redbat was no longer the moon.
    “You were in the land of Death,” Rosie explained. “But you were not dead. You had not died to get
here. That makes you an anachronism. You could not really be a part of Death until you had shucked
your life energies adapted to the world outside the pillar. When the pillar collapsed, you were killed. Thus
the hallucinations dis-solved, and you found the reality. Death is the next plane of existence, and now you
are adjusted to it.”
    Guil took her arm in his.
    He saw other people now, each engaged in other tasks.
    “The nearest city is this way,” Rosie said.
    They followed him toward the rise as the night moved rapidly toward day in this new world. The stars
came down, marking the sky with umbrageous streaks that punctuated the constant rhythm of the
booming surf that edged some vast, uncharted sea beyond . . .
                      THREE FASCINATING JOURNEYS
                       INTO THE STRANGE WORLDS
                            OF THE UNKNOWN

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