The Dark Symphony

THE FIRST MOVEMENT: The Arena
    FIRST:
    Loper hung five hundred feet above the street, his twelve fingers hooked like rigor-mortised worms over the glassy, featureless ledge.
    The wind was brisk but not bully, a piper not a trumpeter. It chirruped down the canyon of the street and swept over the facade of the Primal Chord, the genetic engineering center of Musician society, teasing the birds that lived in the offal and straw nests anchored stickily to the precarious shelves.
    Searching, he could feel no crevice for his fingers, just as he had found none on the previous forty-seven ledges. And now he had lost his rope and grappling hook. The hook had slipped as he had pulled himself up, and he had leaped convulsively, catching the last inch of the ledge as the rope and hook tumbled away into the night. Now he hung as the wind piped the darkness and tickled the hairs on his thick legs.
    Blinking away perspiration, Loper put all his strength into his arms. He would have to muscle himself up, rely solely on the corded flesh of wrists, then arms, then broad shoulders. He had done it before, except… But he had not been dead tired before. And now every ounce of his flesh ached and throbbed dully.
    No sense in delay.
Push damn you
! he told himself.
    For a moment, the weight of his huge body pulled his sweat-slicked hands over the stone. He was plagued with visions of dropping, colliding in one bright yet unfelt moment with the cold shimmer-stone pavement. Then his palms were still, his wrists cording. Soon, his enormous biceps were brought into play, and he forced himself to waist level with the ledge. He swung a knee up, skinned it. swung again and got it on the shelf. Then he was up and safe.
    He rested, his legs dangling over the side, and he watched the nine phallic towers of the Musician part of the- city-state, all of them glimmering brightly orange or red or blue or green. It was odd to think of them as sound waves, as structures constituted of interlatching waves that formed a solid substance. They looked more like glass. He tore his gaze away from the city and looked down at the streets so far below.
Now what
? he wondered.
    There was no way down but to jump. And though it was five hundred feet to the street, it was another two thousand to the roof. When the Musicians built, weaving their walls and floors of sound, they ignored the laws of gravity, the doctrine and dogma of engineering, denying the old lexicon and establishing their own dictionary of the possible. He had no rope to climb it. His best chance was to enter a window here and ascend to the floor he wanted through the inside.
    Moving along the ledge, he found a corner window that looked promising. The sheet of slightly opaque glass hummed and tingled his fingers when he touched it. It too was a creation of sound. Yet Strong had assured him that it would cut like ordinary glass, would give him entrance. Loper reached into the leather sack tied to his breechcloth and took out the diamond. He placed it against the glass, stroked hard. A thin, frosty line followed the movement of his hand. Strong was right.
    He made a tape-hinged doorway in the glass, swung it inward, and stepped into the room. He pulled the tape loose and lifted the cut square out. It vanished from his hands the moment it became unaligned with the rest of the window, and a new section appeared where it had been. Humming…
    Loper's heart thumped despite his avowed stoicism. He was very likely the first Popular to enter a Musician building, the first mutant on what might be considered holy ground. He saw that this was a chapel, and that made the excitement all the worse. Up front was a bust of Chopin. He went to the altar and spat on it.
    Aside from the thrill of the danger of his position, only one thing impressed him here: all the objects in the chapel were made of common substances. They were not sound configurations, but real objects that would not cease to exist if the transmitters and generators were shut off. But, of course, this was a chapel, and the Musicians wanted to make it something special He spat on Chopin again, stalked to the rear of the room where the door to the corridor lay. He was a dozen feet from it when it opened…

CHAPTER ONE
    The boy Guillaume, whom everyone called Guil for easily understood reasons, looked to the white-faced clock, saw that there were only four minutes—only four unbelievably agonizing minutes!—until the session would be over. In turning his