The Dark Symphony

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    Should he kill her now? Instantly? There was a problem in that the boy had been raised in the Musicians' world. He would not understand that Strong's purpose was divine. After all, Gideon had been taught to worship Vladislovitch. He was a pagan. No, the killing of the girl would have to wait for a more opportune time, for a time when Gideon was so involved in the revolution that he could not withdraw his support. Then, when Strong killed her, he could explain to Gideon-Guil that the boy's purpose was divine, that he must not filthy himself with women. It was that way in the Seven Books of the Compendium; all the great prophets were chaste.
    Later, he would get her. She was very slight. She would crumple easily between his fingers. He realized, suddenly, that he had been quiet for too long, that they were looking at him strangely. "She's beautiful," he said, trying to smooth over his hesitation.
    Tisha did not blush. She knew she was beautiful, and she could see no benefit in denying her self-awareness. "Thank you," she said.
    "My—my mother?" Guil-Gideon asked.
    Strong looked startled. "Oh, of course! She's sleeping. She waited for over a day. We expected you sooner. But then I guess you couldn't just up and run away at the first moment." He led them through another sliding panel, a yellow one this time, and into a room where a woman lay on a clean but rickety cot. "Blue," Strong called, shaking her shoulder. "Blue, he's here."
    His mother was the second most beautiful creature he had ever seen, only a shade less stunning than Tisha though she was at least fifteen years older than the girl at his side. Had they been of equal age and health, he mused, Tisha would have had to take second place to this genuinely lovely woman. He saw the webs under her arms, for she wore a sleeveless toga affair now, and he saw them, also, between her fingers. They may have contributed to her name, but the chief reason she was called Blue lay in her eyes which were as brilliant as neon stones. They shone.
    For a moment they stood awkwardly, looking at each other, like small children deciding whether or not to make friends. Then Blue almost floated into Guil-Gideon's arms, crying and hugging him, kissing him wetly. He didn't like it, but he held her too and tried to find something in all of this to sort things out and show him the way, show him why they could twice disrupt his hie and seem to feel so little sorrow over it. The Musicians consigned their children over to the arena, not too disturbed if half of them died. And these people, similarly, had given over their son to a cause, also unconcerned about what he would feel and what it would mean to him.
    The history of Man, what little he knew of it, was studded with philosophers that said individual lives were not as important as certain ideals. They had helped to cram the ideals down the throats of their young soldiers, had sent them marching off to war in colorful uniforms like a bunch of bespangled monkeys. And when the soldiers didn't come back, the same men who had urged them off in the first place (and who had stayed behind their desks, writing more of their toilet slop propaganda prose) wrote eulogies for them and praised their names and talked some more about ideals. But what did a god-damned ideal mean to any one of those soldiers? Lying there in the mud, rotting, maggots eating out the insides of their gray husks, how could they feel a lofty pride in their ideals? Would an ideal even let them see a movie again? Not with their eyeballs burst and running down their faces. Would an ideal, then, help them to eat a holiday dinner? Not with their teeth cracked and their tongues halfway down their throats and colored like dung. Would any ideal let them, help them, give them one more chance to make love to someone? You're damn right it wouldn't. There had never been, in the history of Earth, an ideal worth dying for. Because men always corrupted the ideals anyway. Now and then, there might be a good concrete reason having to do with economics or subjugation. But not even that very often. Only life was worth dying for, and there was no sense in that.
    Standing there with his mother embracing him and his father behind her, beaming at him, he felt very cold, remote. He suddenly saw that no child owed anything to its parents. Children were the end product of passion, of carelessness during that passion—or, if the child was a planned child, the result of a desire for