The Dark Symphony

might have lain deeper and might have required a stronger trigger to release it He struck gleefully, without reservation. As blow after blow set a savage rhythm against the other boy's body, Guil began screaming again and again: "You goddamned violent bastard!"
    It bubbled mindlessly from his lips in a dull, monotonous chant while the imprisoned part of his mind tried to analyze it and in this manner see from where it came and what was meant by it. "You violent, goddamned bastard!" Who? Who was the bastard, the barbarian? Rosie? Himself? Or neither? Was he screaming against just one man or against a way, a society, a manner of doing things? Did his rejection of society, then, roll back his rejection of Rosie and eventually his rejection of himself?
    When he was physically drained and Rosie's face was a mass of bruises and cuts, and when the hunchback was weeping and clutching piteously at him in a plea for mercy, for friendship, Guil fell upon him weak and weeping too, the questions that plagued him still unanswered.
    Together, they stained the blood and the vomit with their tears…
    "I'm sorry, Rosie," he said, his hand on the door palmer. The Medallion was wrapped around Guil's neck now, a necessary plunder if he were to keep the Composer from leaving and spreading the alarm as he should have done in the first place. If he could not leave the room after Guil locked it, there was no way he could summon help. A private room in a Musician Tower was perfectly private, as good as a cell.
    "Sure, Guil. Go on." There was no bitterness in the voice, only resignation. Rosie, in all his talk of tools and toolmasters, had forced Guil into playing by the same rules, into degenerating to the hunchback's own philosophy. Or, perhaps, as sensitive as he was, he knew the philosophy was an ugly one to live by. Perhaps there had been doubts in his own mind whether going on in this way was worthwhile. In the end, Guil had fought better under this philosophy than he himself had.
    Guil stood, looking at the bloodied Composer, and he was stunned by the sour knowledge that he had scarred the man. It took something more out of him than the strenuous battle had. To have fallen—even this briefly— into the mold he had seen in the Musicians and found disgusting, was a very unpleasant event. It was well known, of course, that environment played a large role in the development of any individual's personality. He had thought he was different. The truth was bitter.
    But Rosie was right. There were tools and toolmasters. It was a good analogy. The toolmasters jammed their blades into the slots in other people's backs, twisted and used everyone and got away with it. The only hope anyone could have in this world was to become one of them, to take up the skills of a toolmaster and brutally use others to your own ends, to fulfill your own desires. No, another part of his mind said, there was another way to avoid what they wanted to do to you. Withdraw, leave, find your own way outside of society.
    He thought about that. All through history, judging from what little he knew of Earth's past, there had been segments of society that wanted out of the social mold, that did not care to be either a tool or toolmaster. Gypsy bands were among them. He could recall the greatest movement, one that supposedly had changed Earth society for centuries before a normal tool-toolmaster setup could be restored. It had started as a movement called the Hippy. The name had evolved over the years until there were literally millions involved with it.
    But there was a problem. Here, on this postwar Earth, there was nowhere to run. The other city-states would be just as hostile. And he would have to bear the additional burden of being a stranger. If he went into the ruins, the natural, or artificial mutants would eventually do him in. If he went to the few areas that were still wild and untouched by either city-states, city-state farms, or ruins, he would also die, for he was a creature of civilization, not of the forests.
    There was only one place, then, that offered refuge. It hummed darkly, spun, hissed beneath the floor of the arena, sustained by its own generator buried beneath it…
    "Rosie—" he began, then realized there was nothing he could say.
    He had destroyed a world. He had reached out and pulled down Rosie's reality. There were no words to phrase an apology for an act of that magnitude.
    Quickly, he opened the door, went out and closed it behind, locking it