Dean R. Koontz - Dark Symphony

Dean Koontz – The Dark Symphony

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THE ARENA

Of the six who had gone before Guil, only three had made it through the tests. Were the

odds always this grim? Quak-ing, he walked before the bench, bent his neck so he could

see the judge far above.

“Are you prepared to begin your test?” He wanted to shout. No, but he said, “Yes.” He

accepted the three weap-ons from the attendant: the sedative whistle, the sonic knife, and

the deadly sound rifle. He retreated a hundred paces into the Arena, then turned to face the

first test. The hundred-foot monolith that was the judge's bench shim-mered, then an opening

appeared . . . a hole fifty feet across and seventy feet high. Guil shivered, wondering what

within could be so big.

And then the dragon came forth, yellow, with scales as large as shovel blades and eyes as

red as blood.

The test had begun.

DEDICATION:

To Bob Hoskins, without whom . . .

THE DARK SYMPHONY

Dean R.Koontz

LANCER BOOKS

NEW YORK

A LANCER BOOK

THE DARK SYMPHONY

mechanical. In-cluding photocopying, recording, or by any Information storage and retrieval system, without

permission in writing from the Publisher.

All the characters and events portrayed in this story are fictitious.

LANCER BOOKS, INC. • 1560 BROADWAY

NEW YORK, N.Y. 10036

“There is a music for Death and a music for Life. Some-how, I find the music of that other

world more interest-ing than that which is played in this one. The music of Death is of peace

and rest and love. It is only the music of Life that is a Dark Symphony.”

. . . Vladislovitch writing in

The Primary Testament

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 trum-peteer. 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 mo-ment 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 en-trance. 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 fol-lowed 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 build-ing, 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 cor-ridor 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 eyes from the piano, however, he missed the last

third of an arpeggio and heard the famil-iar tech-tech-tech of the instructor's tongue as it clicked against

the roof of his mouth. Involuntarily, he shuddered, for he knew that that sound invariably meant trouble.

He turned his eyes full on the keyboard and concen-trated on his exercise. It would not have been

too horrible to have been a Class IV Musician if only his instructor had been someone understanding like

gentle Franz, someone not so demanding and able to see the boy's side of it when an occasional note

was missed or a chord slurred. But this was Frederic, and Frederic had been known to use the leather

sting-strap on young knuckles when he felt a boy had not been practicing. Guil, not daring to look away

again, approached the next arpeggio with care. He had the span to reach the keys, to do things boys

born with even slightly smaller hands could never do. Indeed, perhaps that was his very problem.

Perhaps the genetic engineers had erred and given him hands too large for the keys, fingers too thin and

long and bony to be graceful or adept on the board. Clumsy hands, he thought. I was born with cows

for hands and big, floppy teats for fingers!

Despite his teatlike fingers, he made it through the trouble spot without difficulty. Ahead lay easy bars

of music, things he could cope with. He risked a glance at the clock, careful not to move his head from its

bent and proper angle. Two more minutes! In all that infernal, godawful self-inspection and tricky finger

work, had no more time passed than that?

Suddenly, his fingers stung with the bite of Frederic's strap. He tore them from the gleaming

ivory-white keys and sucked them to draw off the pain.

“You murdered that chord, Grieg!” The voice was thin, yet harsh, strained through a scrawny throat

and sharp, pointed teeth.

“I'm sorry, sir,” he said, licking the two fingers that had taken the brunt of the blow. He was sniveling

again, act-ing miserably subservient, and he was ashamed of himself. He longed to wrench that strap

from the old weasel's hands and use it across his face for a while. But there was his father to think about,

all of the things his father ex-pected of him. A word from Frederic to people in the right places, and Guil's

future was so much gray ash. “I'm sorry,” he said again.

But Frederic was not to be appeased with apologies this time—he rarely was. He stood, his thin,

long-fingered hands folded behind his back, and began pacing behind Guil, reappearing on the right for a

few steps, turning again and stepping out of sight. His face, a bird face, was drawn tight in sour disgust.

Did you get a bad-tasting worm, you old crow? Guil thought. He wanted to laugh, but he knew the

strap would sting neck, cheeks, or head as easily as fingers. “This is perfectly simple,” Frederic said.

“Totally fundamental. Nothing new in this exercise, Grieg. A review lesson, Grieg!” His voice was like a

shrill reed instrument, piercing, somewhat painful to hear.

“Yes, sir.”

“Then why do you persist in your refusal to practice?”

“I do practice, sir.”

The strap burned a red welt across the back of his neck. “Nonsense, Grieg! Damned, utter

nonsense!”

“But I do, sir. I really do! I practice even longer than you say to, but it does no good. My fingers

are—stones on the keys.” He hoped he sounded distressed. He was dis-tressed, damn it! He was

supposed to be a Musician, a complete master of sound, a child of universal harmonics, born to

understand and to use sound, to perform the rituals of music in a passable—no, a beautiful—manner.

Though it might make his fingers a trifle too long, the gene juggling chamber should not fail in giving him

the basic oneness with rhythm that was his birthright, the harmony with universal harmony that was his

legacy, the blending with melody that was the core of every Musi-cian's soul and the most basic of things

required to gain a Class. And what the genetic engineering didn't do cor-rectly, the Inundation Chamber

should have compen-sated for. The Inundation Chamber was a huge room in which the Musicians'

Ladies who were pregnant were placed in a weaving symphony of sound that carried subliminal

suggestions even into the developing forebrain of the fetus. That treatment should have smoothed the

rough edges on the genetic engineers' work. It should have made him want desperately to be a good

Musician of a high Class. But, somehow, even that had failed. The only reason he cared to do well in the

gaining of a Class in the ceremonies on Coming of Age Day was so that he would not embarrass his

father—who was, after all, the Grand Meistro, the chief-of-state of the city's government.

Unfortunately, the piano was a great, ugly, unrespon-sive monster to his touch.

Frederic sat on the shimmering yellow bench before the shimmering white piano and looked the boy

in the eyes. “You are not even a Class IV Musician, Grieg.”

“But, sir—”

“Not even Class IV. I should recommend your disposal as an error of the engineers. Ah, what lovely

lightning that would touch off! The Grand Meistro's son a reject!”

Guil shuddered. For the first time, he began to think what would happen to him if he were not given a

chance for any Class whatsoever. He would be put to sleep with a sound weapon of some sort, then

taken to the disposal furnaces and burned. Not only his father's pride, but his own existence depended

on his gaining at least a bottom classification in this sink-or-swim society.

“But I will not recommend your rejection, Grieg,” Frederic continued. “For two reasons. One, though

you fumble monstrously over these keys and have done so for the past thirteen years, ever since you

were four, you show talent elsewhere.”

“The guitar,” Guil said, feeling a moment of pride that did a little to erase the discomfort of the last

two hours at the piano.

“A fine instrument in its own right,” Frederic admitted. “An instrument for lesser sensibilities and of a

lower social order, to be sure, but perfectly respectable as a Class IV instrument.”

“You said there were two reasons,” Guil said, somehow sensing that Frederic wanted him to elicit the

last, wanted him to draw it out so that the saying of it would not be just Frederic's doing.

“Yes.” The pedant's eyes brightened like those of a craggy eagle spying a succulent lamb left alone in

a field. “Tomorrow your class will be awarded their stations after each has faced the tests and the

Ultimate Sound. I have a strong feeling that you will be dead before tomorrow night. It would be foolish

for me, then, to risk the Meis-tro's wrath when the natural course of Coming of Age Day will weed you

out of the system.”

It was his last day of lessons under Frederic, and Guil suddenly felt some of the power of his

impending freedom. The strap had lost its fearsome qualities when he realized that it could never touch

him again once he had left this room. And the clock showed that it was five after the hour. He had

already stayed beyond his time. He stood. “We'll see, Frederic.” It was the first time he had called the

teacher by name, and he saw the irritation his familiarity had caused. “I think I'll surprise you.”

He was pushing open the door to the hall when Fred-eric answered. “You may do that, Grieg. Then

again, maybe you'll get the biggest surprise of all.” His voice, his tone, the gleam in his eyes said that he

hoped this would be so. He hoped Guillaume Dufay Grieg would die in the arena.

Then the door was humming shut behind.

Free.

Free of Frederic and the strap, free of the piano and its keys which had been just a bitter punishment

over the years. Free. His own man. If . . . If he lived through the Coming of Age Day rituals. A great

many ifs wrapped up in that one, but he was flushed with the confidence of youth and it boiled without

consideration within his mind.

He clicked his heels on the wavering colors of the floor, trying to stomp on a particularly brilliant

comma of sil-ver that spun through the crimson shimmer-stone. It kept dodging his foot as if it were

sentient, and he turned down a side hallway of the Tower of Learning, chasing it and smashing his foot

into it again and again, only to see it spin out from beneath his shoe even before he had struck the floor.

He leaped, came closer to touching it than ever. Then it swam through a rouge-cinnabar swirl and came

out ocher instead of silver, and the game had lost its interest for him.

He turned to walk back to the main corridor, paying no attention now to the constantly shifting hues

and patterns of the floor, when the glorious reverberations of a well-played piano boomed down the

acoustically perfect corridor. It faded, became more pastoral. He searched through the practice studios

until he found the pianist. It was Girolamo Frescobaldi Cimarosa—Rosie, as the other boys called him.

Gently, Guil opened the door and closed it behind.

The music was Chopin's Etude in E Major, Opus 10, Number 3, one of the composer's more

beautiful works. Rosie's fingers flitted like insects across the keys as he hunched over the long board, his

shoulder-length, coal-dark hair fluffed magnificiently over the collar of his cloak. The pink tip of one large

ear showed through the hairfall.

Guil slumped to the floor, back against the wall, and listened and watched.

The upper fingers of Rosie's right hand toiled with the elegant melody while the lower fingers

articulated an accompanying figure. A difficult thing. An impossible thing for Guil. But he did not take time

to brood on that. He let the music flow through him, stir his mind with ri-diculous fantasies of visual

conceptualization.

Rosie threw his body at the board, made his fingers bayonets of attack that were determined to rend

from the keys the complete essence of the beauty contained on the sterile, white sheets of music.

Hair flew as if windblown.

Then the lyric section was over and the brilliant pas-sage based on extended broken chords was

flashing by expertly under Rosie's large hands. Before he knew it, Rosie was through the curtailed

restatement of the first section and sent the keys pounding toward the rising climax. Guil's heart thumped

and did not slow until the last of the gentle subsiding notes had been played.

“That was excellent, Rosie,” he said, standing.

“What are you doing here?” The voice was quick, knife-edged with unassurance.

Then Guil was conscious of the hunched back that was bent even when the keyboard was not before

the boy, of the two tufts of hair on the edges of his forehead that had been combed inward in an

unsuccessful attempt to con-ceal the tiny horns under them. The stigmata. The mark-ings Rosie carried

with him to show his place. “I just stopped in to listen,” Guil said, speaking a little more quickly than he

had intended. “I heard it from the hall. It was beautiful.”

Rosie frowned, unsure of himself, searching for some-thing to say. He was a rarity: a mistake of the

genetic engineers, a slip of the gene juggling chamber. When you are toying with thousands of

micro-micro-dots that rep-resent bodily and mental characteristics, you are bound to make a mistake

now and again, turn out something that is, in some small way, a freak. Never before had a deformed child

gained any distinction or even recogni-tion among Musicians. Always, they had died on Coming of Age

Day after thirteen years of impossible fumbling with every instrument and of inability to grasp the

fun-damentals of the Eight Rules of Sound. Rosie, on the other hand, had become the most accomplished

Musician in the entire Tower of Learning. Some said that he was a better pianist than even the Grand

Meistro, Guil's father. Guil thought this was very true, though he knew he was limited in his own critical

capabilities and dismissed his own opinions as irrelevant. But Rosie, despite his achieve-ments, was

touchy. He looked for slurs, for references to his deformities in everything that was said. He was hard to

make friends with no matter how much one valued his friendship, for he analyzed even the words of his

loved ones.

Now, having analyzed Guil's words and expressions, Rosie answered uncertainly. “Thank you.”

Guil crawled on top of the shimmering orange piano, dangling his legs only an inch from the floor.

“Tomor-row came fast, didn't it?”

“What do you mean?” Rosie asked, crossing his hands uncomfortably on the keyboard.

Ah, yes, Guil thought, the hands. Tiny hooks of bone-hard cartilage jagged upward an inch on the

back of each hand. “I mean, thirteen years and I don't remember what happened to me since I was four.

Dean R. Koontz - Dark Symphony

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