The Dark Symphony

long in the column. It was best to get out in the normal time length, to give the psychiatrist and his machines no chance whatsoever to ban him from adulthood. He stepped back into the Great Hall.
    For a moment, he was struck with a melancholy, almost 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 Lad 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 dressing 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 tuneful 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 happened 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 wondering 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 tension 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 perspiration 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 rumored 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 generalization."
    "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