The Dark Symphony

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 IV’s!" 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 specters 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 continue 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 escorted 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, dust 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 thousand submelodies intertwined among a million syncopated rhythms playing against one another in near cacophony, 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 reminding himself that he had stuck his head into the pillar that day he had been with his father, had experienced 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 returned, 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 assistants. 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 experience. Others would pass it without much trouble. It depended 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