The Dark Symphony

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 overthrow 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 damdest 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-climatic, but you wouldn't play along."
    Strong stood, scrambled up the slope of powdered and broken marble, his thick arms rippling even more vibrantly 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 recaptured 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 morning 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 problem 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 remolded 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 entrance to the Primal Chord, the tower that housed the genetic engineers, nursery, and sound research laboratories. 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