The Dark Symphony

above their heads.
    "Try me."
    I'm scared to death, Guil.
I'm so
scared that food won't stay down, and my gut is on fire all the time, spitting flames up my throat. I can't sleep, because the dreams wake me up screaming and give me chills for the rest of the night So I play and practice things that I don't need to practice and—and do other things until I collapse and am too tired to dream myself awake."
    "You must know you have a better chance than the rest of us."
    "There are some things you don't know about, Guil."
    "Toll me, then."
    For one, short moment, he seemed ready to spill whatever it was that filled him with liquid misery. Then he clamped his lips shut, forced a sigh through them that made them flutter like butterfly wings. The shell had slipped back into place. Rosie was isolated again, a world unto himself. He would suffer alone with whatever it was that made him afraid. "No, you are better off not knowing yet. You'll find out tomorrow—during the rituals."
    "You sure can keep a fellow in suspense," Guil said, dropping to his feet. "And if you don't want to tell me now, then I guess I just have to wait. Besides, I've got to be going. Father says that plenty of good food and sound sleep—and maybe a little of his last minute advice—is what I need to prepare me for tomorrow. I don't want to disappoint him."
    "Tomorrow," Rosie said, turning to the piano and launching into a furious torrent of notes that rattled the walls. As Guil opened the door and stepped into the hall, he thought he recognized the music as part of
Flight of the Bumblebee
from Rimsky-Korsakov's
Tsar Sultan
. Then it took a twist and a turn and was something he did not recognize. As the music faded behind him, he thought about that. If there was one thing he was good at, it was identifying tunes, memorizing styles so that he could at least recognize the composer. In this case, he could come up with nothing.
    On his way home to the Congressional Tower where his father's apartments were, he passed by the neon stone gardens which were dull and almost colorless in the bright daylight. Giving way to an unexplainable urge, he walked into the garden, the pavement humming beneath his feet, for it too was a sound configuration. At the end of the garden where a row of crimson stones (dull pink now) lay as a border, he stopped and looked beyond into the ruins that had once been a city of men. It was there, in those ruins, that the Populars lived. The mutants. The condemned.
    He wondered, as he looked at the tumbled buildings, at the puddles of broken glass, the twisted and melted steel girders, why the Musicians had built so close to ruin, so close to the mutants. Word had come, spreading out through the colonized worlds of the galaxy, that Earth had been destroyed in a war, that the mother planet was reverting to savagery. The council of Musician Elders on Vladislovitch, the Musicians own colony world, had decided to send a ship of Musicians back to reestablish Earth. Other colony worlds with vastly different societies had the same idea. The Elders' dreams of owning Earth were shattered, but this city-state had been set up as, at least, a toehold. Maybe one day the dozens of other city-states sprinkled over the globe would leave or collapse. Then the Musicians would have the honor of owning the mother world. So, when there were so many thousands of other sites, why build the city next to the Populars, the mutants who lived in the ruins?
    True, the Populars bothered no one. They had long ago learned that Musicians were too powerful for them. But there seemed no necessity for building a showplace colony next to these twisted men and women.
    Not for the first time, Guil thought that perhaps he did not know much at all about Musician society. Perhaps, actually, he knew next to nothing, for something in the pit of his stomach and the pit of his mind told him that the Populars were somehow tied more closely to the Musicians than the Congress cared to admit.
    While he watched the ruins, a dark and featureless form crossed the top of a rubble pile, glided along a broken wall on swift, long feet, and disappeared into deep shadows where several buildings had collapsed on one another. Featureless, smooth, faceless it had been. Each Popular was different than the other, and some were naturally easier to look upon. But a faceless, obsidian man…
    He shivered and left the neon gardens, heading back into the city, back toward his home…
    Later, they were