The Dark Symphony

brought it back, rejoicing that it had not been injured. But the baby had not been Guil. It had been the son of a Popular: Strong's son named Gideon. Months before Gideon's birth, the robo-doc reported the child would be human, and the plan for substituting him for a real Musician baby was hatched on the instant. So the fake Guil had grown up thinking he was a Musician. Now a message tape (surgically implanted by the robo-doc) had gone off, had told him that he was a Popular, and had stated that he (Guil-Gideon) must help the Populars overthrow the Musicians. The message tape claimed that the Musicians had caused the Earthmen who had survived the war to mutate and were responsible for the Populars.
    If that was true, then the Musicians were every bit as sinister as he had suspected. Yet, why would they create mutants of the survivors of the nuclear war? And why hide the fact that they had created them?
    Even if it were not true, it should be enough that he was the son of a Popular. With that knowledge alone, he should go to them and arrange the details of the sabotage and espionage they expected of him.
    But Populars were not intelligent. And not sane. They were savages.
    No, that was quite obviously a Musicians' lie.
    He sat thinking for a while longer, realized that he was only poring back over these few facts and assumptions. He had only so much information, only so much to judge by. Of course, he could not go running off to lay out plans for a revolution.
    Was he a Popular by birth? Yes—but a Musician by environment. He could not that easily throw away the last seventeen years. Besides, his future was set. He had reached manhood. Why throw it away for strangers, warped and twisted half men? And yet he could not ignore the Populars any longer. Not only was there his natural curiosity about his true parents, but a need to find out more about the message tape's assertions that the Musicians had caused the mutation of Earthmen into Populars. He had begun to suspect that the foundations of this city-state were somehow unnatural, that this society was sick, rotting behind the thin veneer of shimmer-stone. This was his chance to find out. When he had gone over the situation half a dozen times, he pushed out of the chair and left the apartments. If he chose the proper area of the neon stone gardens, he could pass into the ruins of the Popular Sector without being seen.
    Twice, as he wandered along the fringe of the neon stone gardens, he was ready to trot across the weeded, strewn no man's land between cultures, but was drawn up short when he encountered another Musician wandering through the stones and the trees. At last, when he had stationed himself where he could see all ways for a sufficient distance to know he could cross over unobserved, he stepped out beyond the crimson stones and into the waist-high weeds. Moving quickly, stumbling over broken chunks of concrete and sheets of twisted plastic, he made for the cracked and partially demolished facade of a building whose other three walls had collapsed. Once behind that, he could move without fear of being seen by any Musicians. The Popular Sector was strictly off limits, and intrusion there was punishable in the Musician courts. Only licensed biologists and filmsters could penetrate the ruins.
    He was halfway toward the wall when he saw the black figure standing half in the shadow the partition threw. It was waiting for him, its arms folded across its chest. He drew up, stopped.
    The figure beckoned to him.
    After a moment, he continued, more hesitantly this time. He kept telling himself that this was one of his people. This was more his brother than any Musician. Then he wondered if this were Strong, his father. The thought jolted him as severely as if he had been struck with a sound rifle beam. Then he whisked it out of his mind. The Populars got their names according to their physical characteristics. Strong would be a huge, hulking man— or half man. This black figure was thin and wiry, tawny like a cat. He was thirty feet away now, and he stopped. This close, and he could still not see any features on the obsidian face.
    The black man beckoned again, more insistently this time,
    He took half a dozen more steps. Stopped again. There were no eyes. He could not see the shine of teeth. There was no hump of a nose.
    The figure hissed at him. The sound was low and hoarse.
    He strained to see better.
    He could still see no face.
    No face at all.
    The creature