The Dark Symphony

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. Because 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 frustrated burbling and gurgling sounds like a drowning animal. 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 instead 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 discriminating fulfillment. The ceiling was a planetariumlike reproduction 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 father, 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 before 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, visions 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