The Dark Symphony

wetly across it spiraled him toward an orgasm of physical and psychological self that would drain him of all semen for millennia…
    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 mystical 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 Vladislovitch been able to conquer the Ninth Rule, had he gained the means to immortality through sound manipulation, 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 function.
    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 congressmen realized that a breasted and vaginaed creature had attempted—and almost successfully—to enter their dominion, they would take steps to see that such a dangerous, 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 suspicious. 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 mosquitoes to breed in the summer when they found their way through the cracked ceiling to the wet rubble pockets 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