The Dark Symphony

hissed.
    He took another step.
    The creature started forward, reaching out its hands.
    Without thinking, Guil turned and fled, back over the broken concrete, the weeds lashing at his legs, stinging them through the black leotards he wore. He tripped over a tangle of cable and steel beam, went down hard. The wind was knocked out of his body as if a hammer had slammed into the pit of his stomach. He did not think he could move, not for minutes. Then he heard the approach of the faceless mutant, heard its light catlike steps in the high grass. He sucked in air so fast that his lungs ached even worse, pushed up, and went on. When his feet slapped onto the neon stones, he felt an indescribable wave of relief.
    Twenty feet into the garden, back among the light orange stones, he turned. The faceless Popular stood halfway across the no-man's-land, facing his way. He knew it was looking at him, though he also knew it had no eyes. After a few long seconds, it turned and slunk back into the ruins, leaving him alone with his fear…
    For a time, he contented himself with wandering through the city, exploring parts of it that he did not know well and rediscovering the sections he was familiar with. It was as if, by losing himself in the inanimate, he could forget the pressures being placed on him by other men. Still, he avoided lonely places, stayed with the citizens who used the main concourses. Those few times that he did find himself without companionship, he felt as if he were being watched by something sinister, something waiting for the proper moment to leap out of hiding and pounce on him. He tried to imagine what this fictitious enemy would look like, tried to kid himself out of his paranoia. But every time he tried to envision this fantasy assailant, he came up with a faceless, dark figure with long arms and thin but powerful fingers, fingers like steel tongs. Then he would have to shift his chain of thoughts to something very commonplace that was not associated with his terror.
    An hour of this wrestling with himself was plenty. He had always been one for action, one for taking the initiative. Indeed, it was this propensity that had gotten him labeled as a rebel quite early in life. He thought it must be the Popular blood in him, for Musicians were mostly passive. When he had almost run out of places to walk, two hours later, he found himself before a ground entrance to the main commerce tower. He pushed through the singing doors into a foyer where a chart hung from the ceiling on long, brasslike chains, listing the hundreds of stores in the tower. He located what he wanted, found the sound elevator, and ascended to the eighty-second floor and the toto-experience theater.
    At the theater entrance, he used his medal, his identi-song, to get inside. He pressed it against the activator on the theater door and waited while the few bars played to a finish. The guard mechanism listened, recorded the piece, checked it against the credit files in the city's main status-tap credit department in the Congressional Tower. When it was satisfied that he was financially solvent either through private accounts or parental accounts, it swung open the door and allowed him to enter.
    He walked through into the dark theater, stood in the back until he was able to see well enough to continue down the aisle. Fifteen rows from the back, and thirty-five rows from the front, he moved in to the fourth seat and slipped into one of the heavily padded chairs. Almost before he touched the fabric of the seat, he felt the nerve-tapping needles of sound stinging into him. He slipped on the mesh sensitizor cap and drew it tight to his skull by means of a small drawstring on the left side. Now, he was ready.
    For fifteen minutes, nothing but soft music drifted through his flesh, carried by the sound needles and the mesh sensitizor cap until it seemed as if he were floating in a pool of sound—no, pleasantly drowning in it As he relaxed, he thought about the toto-experience film. It was not exactly like the sensonics, though related. For one tiling, the toto-experience theater did not concern itself with sex. Adventure, patriotism, suspense, and horror— yes. Sex, no. For one thing, the toto houses could not possibly compete with the sensonic sexual experience available to every adult in the city-state. Secondly, the theaters catered largely to children, boys not yet at their manhood, girls not yet married into the status of Lady. But for pure escape