The Dark Symphony

scope of his future vision made any act done to him only a petty thing of the moment and unworthy of ire.
    This is my boy, Gideon. In a week, we begin."
    The gray eyes brightened. "I'll be careful, Strong."
    "I know you will, Gyp. Just a week. Just don't look for your personal future for seven days. After that, you can get suicidal if you want."
    They left, then, closing out the ceiling-sea. When they were halfway down the hall toward the arc in the rim, Guil would have sworn he heard the hollow booming of flesh thrown against glass, flesh against glass, again and again with sickening regularity.
    As they walked, turning into less habitable corridors to save steps on the way back to Blue and Tisha, Guil thought of the Populars he had met in the last few hours. Gypsy Eyes with his swollen head, his ability to tell the future. Redbat, a tiling that had once been a man. Tar, the obsidian figure without eyes… Blue and her webs… Strong with his impossible musculature…
    At last, as they passed a place where the corridor wall had been blasted out, Guil sat on the crumbling rubble and looked down at the remains of a once mighty civilization, at the littered beach a few yards beyond that, at the same ocean he had seen from the window in Gypsy Eyes' place. He twisted his neck out of the hole, located the glass bubble of Gypsy Eyes' port a quarter of a mile back along the cliff and up another three hundred feet.
    "What is it?" Strong asked, moving to him when he saw he had stopped. "Tired?"
    "No."
    "What, then?"
    "The message tape," Guil said. "It told me that the Musicians had made you what you are. It said that the Musician had warped the survivors of the nuclear war, had made them into Populars."
    "This is true."
    "But the radiation from the bombs would do that."
    "Not like this. Random radiation would produce monsters worse than any of us. Heavy radiation of the random form would produce, largely, nonfunctionals, creatures incapable of sustaining their own life. The thing that mutated us, that messed into our genes, was sound waves."
    "But how could you know that It's been four hundred years since the war, since the first Populars."
    "In the beginning," Strong said, making it sound like a narrative catch-phrase leading into a sermon, "just after the war, we had begun to struggle back onto our feet Or the men of that time had. They were piecing things together. Then the Musicians came. You know, of course, that the Musicians, and many of the other groups that colonized the other worlds in the galaxy, were outcasts. They were bidden good riddance when they originally left Earth. Perhaps, when they came back, it was with a determination to prove something. Their own worthiness, maybe. The World Science Control had banned their researches, had labeled them unstable and dangerous to life as it was then known. They were coming back to prove they were better. When they came back, it was not to help reconstruct the planet, but to assume dominance over it They waged a short war against the Earth-men who were now chiefly weaponless. All of this had been recorded. It is hidden here and there in the ruins to assure its safety from Musician hands: we must keep our history, if nothing else."
    "Even if the Musicians won," Guil said, "that does not explain the mutations."
    "The Musicians," Strong continued, "did not eradicate nearly all of the Earthmen survivors. They drove them deeper into the ruins and left them psychologically whipped. Then, over the next few years, the first Populars were born, babies with strange, inhuman features. As the births continued (all of them functional to one degree or another) the few men of science left from the two wars became convinced that the mutations were not accidental, and not the result of the bombs. They were too subtle, too—well, clever. With what limited resources they had, they began research into the situation. Nothing was ever conclusively proved, but they learned enough to satisfy them. The Musicians were broadcasting shaped molecular sound waves with a tropic characteristic. Tropic to DNA and RNA."
    "But why?" Guil asked. "Why do this to other men? They had beaten them. Surely that was enough."
    "Perhaps it was the final step. They had come back to show us that they survived and we did not. Next, they displayed their superiority by conquering us and driving us into our self-made ruins. Finally, they had the means to, in effect, strike us from the records of existence. We were