The Dark Symphony

more pity in him. Then, he had decided, he would step off the thin Una and take their side. He had been confident that no such event would take place. The conservative part of him rested comfortably with the knowledge that he would soon resume a normal life as a Musician. But— fortunately or unfortunately—that event
had
transpired. The thought of men (or at least the descendents of men) having to rely on slaughtered rats for their chief food supply made him agonizingly ill.
    "The only one I felt even slightly akin to was Gypsy Eyes," he said, watching the stones crackle imperceptibly from one shade to a fainter or slightly brighter blue. He had told her about Gypsy Eyes on their walk back from the Popular Sector.
    "I understand," she said, her blue face solemn.
    He looked at the ten majestic towers jabbing their points at the night sky. "And yet I can't go back and live in the city. I know what Vladislovitch was and what he started. Not only what he made the Musicians, more than that It was Vladislovitch who established the conditions that force the Populars to eat rats. Oh, I know Vladislovitch was dead centuries before the colony ship returned to Earth and built the city-state. But Vladislovitch is responsible for the psychological structures of these Musicians' minds—and was therefore indirectly at fault with regard to the fate of the Populars. Because of his teachings and his social order, the Musicians are cold, self-centered, sadistic. They keep the Populars in abject poverty by forcing them to remain in their ruined compound, by not giving them land to farm and raiding all independent farming efforts made by the mutants outside their compound. And then there are the sensonics."
    "I smashed the console the first night," she said.
    Without her having said so, he knew that she had not liked the sensonics either. But it was good to hear her say it, to make it a certainty beyond dispute. He felt a longing to protect her while at the same time he knew she needed no protection. "We're trapped. I can't go on knowing my pleasure as a Musician will bring pain to others in the Popular Sector. Yet I can't live in the Popular Sector or in the Popular-dominated city that would follow a breakdown in the present system. I can't find my place or purpose, and I can't bear to be purposeless as they are."
    "There's always—" she began.
    "Der Erlkonig."
    So there it was. There were not two lands, but three for them to choose from. There was the city-state, the Popular Sector, or the land beyond the pillar. Death. The place from which no researchers had ever returned. It was impossible to say, at this moment, that the land beyond the pillar had been chosen, for there was still enough fear of it to keep them from talking about it openly. But was Death a hideous place? Or was it merely another plane of existence beyond this one? And maybe the researchers had never returned simply because they did not want to—or because travel was one way. Their disappearance did not necessarily indicate that the land of Death was an unpleasant one.
    "Then will we help them?" she asked.
    "
It
would make things right again, even if we fit nowhere in the order that follows. In time, without the gene-warping broadcasts, they may breed human again, rebuild the parks and restore the prewar cities to the glory they once knew."
    "We'll help despite the Erlking?"
    He grinned an odd, half-formed grin. "Not despite the Erlking.
Because
of the Erlking."
    She pulled him down onto the flat blue stone into the glowing warmth of the neon-spattered night and held him there in softness, blue-toned before him.
    And he held her too.
    And morning was coming…
    The preparations for the revolution had begun.

THE THIRD MOVEMENT: Revolution and Beyond
    FIRST:
    As a boy living in the Popular Sector, Strong (even then a fine specimen of a superman, with muscles that rippled beneath the sheath of his dark brown skin like live animals with purposes of their own) had been part of a close-knit family group. His father was Shell—an odd creature with a carapace and other horny platings protecting various regions of his body—and his mother was Fingers (she had an abundance of them). Both Shell and Fingers loved their children and raised the three boys—Strong, Loper, and Babe—in an environment that encouraged the boys to be as concerned with their brothers as they were with their own well-being.
    It seemed, therefore, that Babe, being the youngest of the trio of