The Dark Symphony

furiously and tried to pass the invisible barrier that vaporized them without vapor, burned them without flame or residue, crushed them without blood or bone remaining. The Masters had come up against something new, something unexplained and unplanned for. While their minds labored for a solution, they acted like normal rats in a frenzy, trying to overcome and push aside the immovable.
    Then as he swung the sound-beam back and forth in machinelike smoothness, the wave began to recede, fluctuate, recede a bit more. Suddenly, the Master rats perceived the hopelessness of the situation and began retreating at top speed, galloping like dogs chasing a rabbit, pushing beyond their charges and leading the rout. Guil followed them from hall to hall, the vengeful executioner, driving them eventually to a hole in the wall of a rubble-strewn corridor.
    The rats piled up at the hole, frothed and fumed, chittered and tore at each other to escape the sound beam. He stood at a safe distance, playing the beam on them, watching them fire and disappear. A group of perhaps a hundred rats turned from the hole—most likely by order of the Master rats—and charged him. He lowered the beam and fired at them, back-stepped hastily and brought the last one down only inches away from his feet.
    When he looked up, the last of the other rats had slipped into the darkness of the hole in the wall. He crossed to the spot and fired for a few minutes into the space beyond to make certain they had been driven far enough away not to contemplate another attack through the same crevice—at least in the immediate future. Trembling and wobbly-legged, he walked back to the others.
    Tisha ran to him and hugged him, and he returned the affection. She was very warm and soft, and he let some of his horror drain out of him through the perfect conductor of her body.
    The Populars were busy loading the dead rats in Dicker baskets as Strong intoned a series of short prayers from the Seven Books, thanking the Lord for their good fortune. Guil supposed they had been lucky not to be killed, but he was not sure that a near disastrous battle with crazed mutant rats was a thing to be thankful for— no matter what the outcome. He stifled any such thoughts, knowing they would not be welcome in Strong' company. "Here," he said instead, producing the sound pistol. "You don't have to dispose of them. I can do it quicker and easier."
    "No, no!" Strong said, cutting his last prayer a bit short. He had a twenty pound rat draped over each arm, and he plopped them into a large basket. They bounced once, they lay still. "We aren't disposing of them. Not yet."
    "But why—"
    The giant hefted another rat in one hand, stroked the lifeless body as if it were a favorite pet. A dart had sunk through its nose and penetrated its brain. Its eyes stared like polished marbles, its mouth open, its lips drawn back from its ugly teeth in a snarl so fierce it seemed the creature
must
be alive. Strong pinched the bloated sides of the beast, grabbed a handful of its shank and twisted it. "This is food, boy!" He grinned.
    "Food?" Guil's stomach rumbled louder, felt as if it were devouring itself.
    Strong nodded, still grinning.
    "I don't understand." Or was it, Guil wondered, that he did not want to understand?
    "Our only source of meat," Strong said.
    Foam and blood freckled the yellow rat fangs.
    "I don't believe it!"
    "Nothing to believe. That's the way it
is
."
    "But—"
    Strong shrugged. "You ate half a roast rat for supper tonight. It was tasty enough, wasn't it?"
    Yellow teeth.
    Dead red eyes.
    Foam-flecked…
    Morning lay two hours from the horizon as they stepped from the shadows of the Popular Sector into the neon stones. All of the Musicians, save those on duty in the Primal Chord and the few engineers maintaining all the sound generators, were asleep in the towers, writhing in their sensonics, unconcerned with the dangers and horrors of eating rats—and of being eaten by rats. Just this thin line between rubble and neon stones made all the difference. Guil shivered; Tisha shivered too, matching the tempo of his flesh. They stopped and sat on a broad blue neon stone.
    She was blue-toned before him. The light, cast up from beneath her and accenting some features while nearly obliterating others, gave her a supernatural, mysterious look.
    He had told himself earlier in the evening that all he needed was one more thing to make him sympathetic toward the Populars, one event to arouse