The Dark Symphony

the gaining of a Class in the ceremonies on Coming of Age Day was so that he would not embarrass his father—who was, after all, the Grand Meistro, the chief-of-state of the city's government.
    Unfortunately, the piano was a great, ugly, unresponsive monster to his touch.
    Frederic sat on the shimmering yellow bench before the shimmering white piano and looked the boy in the eyes. "You are not even a Class IV Musician, Grieg." ' "But, sir—"
    "Not even Class IV. I should recommend your disposal as an error of the engineers. Ah, what lovely lightning that would touch off! The Grand Meistro's son a reject!"
    Guil shuddered. For the first time, he began to think what would happen to him if he were not given a chance for any Class whatsoever. He would be put to sleep with a sound weapon of some sort, then taken to the disposal furnaces and burned. Not only his father's pride, but his own existence depended on his gaining at least a bottom classification in this sink-or-swim society.
    "But I will not recommend your rejection, Grieg," Frederic continued. "For two reasons. One, though you fumble monstrously over these keys and have done so for the past thirteen years, ever since you were four, you show talent elsewhere."
    "The guitar," Guil said, feeling a moment of pride that did a little to erase the discomfort of the last two hours at the piano.
    "A fine instrument in its own right," Frederic admitted. "An instrument for lesser sensibilities and of a lower social order, to be sure, but perfectly respectable as a Class IV instrument."
    "You said there were two reasons," Guil said, somehow sensing that Frederic wanted him to elicit the last, wanted him to draw it out so that the saying of it would not be just Frederic's doing.
    "Yes." The pedant's eyes brightened like those of a craggy eagle spying a succulent lamb left alone in a field. "Tomorrow your class will be awarded their stations after each has faced the tests and the Ultimate Sound. I have a strong feeling that you will be dead before tomorrow night. It would be foolish for me, then, to risk the Meistro's wrath when the natural course of Coming of Age Day will weed you out of the system."
    It was his last day of lessons under Frederic, and Guil suddenly felt some of the power of his impending freedom. The strap had lost its fearsome qualities when he realized that it could never touch him again once he had left this room. And the clock showed that it was five after the hour. He had already stayed beyond his time. He stood. "Well see, Frederic." It was the first time he had called the teacher by name, and he saw the irritation his familiarity had caused. "I think I'll surprise you."
    He was pushing open the door to the hall when Frederic answered. "You may do that, Grieg. Then again, maybe you'll get the biggest surprise of all." His voice, his tone, the gleam in his eyes said that he hoped this would be so. He hoped Guillaume Dufay Grieg would die in the arena.
    Then the door was humming shut behind.
    Free.
    Free of Frederic and the strap, free of the piano and its keys which had been just a bitter punishment over the years. Free. His own man. If… If he lived through the Coming of Age Day rituals. A great many it's wrapped up in that one, but he was flushed with the confidence of youth and it boiled without consideration within his mind. -
    He clicked his heels on the wavering colors of the floor, trying to stomp on a particularly brilliant comma of silver that spun through the crimson shimmer-stone. It kept dodging his foot as if it were sentient, and he turned down a side hallway of the Tower of Learning, chasing it and smashing his foot into it again and again, only to see it spin out from beneath his shoe even before he had struck the floor. He leaped, came closer to touching it than ever. Then it swam through a rouge-cinnabar swirl and came out ocher instead of silver, and the game had lost its interest for him.
    He turned to walk back to the main corridor, paying no attention now to the constantly shifting hues and patterns of the floor, when the glorious reverberations of a well-played piano boomed down the acoustically perfect corridor. It faded, became more pastoral. He searched through the practice studios until he found the pianist It was Girolamo Frescobaldi Cimarosa—Rosie, as the other boys called him. Gently, Guil opened the door and closed it behind.
    The music was Chopin's Etude in E Major, Opus 10, Number 3, one of the composer's more