Tintagel by Paul Cook

enclosed worlds forever, unless another Stalker opted for them.
    Walkers, they were called. Lanier wanted to help as many people as he could, but time crippled him, as well as mental exhaustion and the ever-present need to retain his anonymity. But there constantly hovered a specter of residual guilt when stories grew of mothers committing suicide because no one could search for their children who had succumbed. Husbands going crazy, lives torn in half. The ones who didn't make it out were called Walkers.
    They were the accidental inhabitants of someone else's paranoid fantasy, since often the same fantasy would beckon more than just one unfortunate person. Lanier had known one or two in his career, and the other Stalkers reported more. Even in his search for Randell, Lanier hoped that he might find a Walker or two among Randell's dreamlings.
    But all those women …
    At least Lanier could have rescued one or two more in the same sitting. But Randell, unfortunately, had been alone.
    So private lives deteriorated, business and industry limped along as best it could. But politics and diplomacy bordered on chaos, and often lapsed into internecine warfare as experts looked for causes and solutions, and lobbied for available funding.
    But the biggest agony was music itself.
    Music was, and always had been, a vital part of human culture. Folk tunes and whistle-while-you-work melodies were just as important as grand symphonies. The world was slowly being robbed of the emotional release that music continually provided. Music literally saved lives. It made man rocket to euphoric states or plunged him into shallows of despair. Now, music caused terror and instability.
    Except to those immune, those who could listen to anything without the fear of succumbing. And there were only eighteen hundred of those.
    Ironically, proletarian China suffered as well. For the disease didn't die out by the time it blew over Europe and the Caucasus. Its current mutation guaranteed a long life for the organism. And the Chinese had a tradition of folk music reaching back thousands of years. Millions had disappeared, though the official reports were not saying just how many. It afflicted everyone in ways that Lanier could not bear to consider.
    "Let's do the Barber piece in twenty minutes. Shelve the Estevan for the time being. She may be important to the pleasure of many people, but there are priorities," he said, closing the Perry Eventide file.
    With a pressurized whump ! the door to Francis Lanier's workroom closed at Christy's touch. There was silence inside and silence outside. From the music library adjacent to the workroom, she placed herself at the transmission board, staring through the one-way mirror, watching Lanier adjust the equipment on his belt and beneath his priest's collar. Then he seated himself on the floor in his usual half-lotus position, his right foot crossed over his left thigh. Perry Eventide rated an ambulance—in the sense that only senators rate helicopters—and Christy sent out the call to the hospital as Lanier prepared himself.
    Lanier, dressed in his usual priest's collar and long black coat, had concealed on his person the usual packet of stimulants and depressants, including sodium pentothal and Baktropol. His Malachi rested under his armpit; three clips hung at his waist. He was prepared for every kind of emergency, and then some. He often felt like a deep-sea diver, he carried so much equipment. But one couldn't be too careful.
    He threw back his head and closed his eyes. He started to cleanse his mind, calm his body down. Properly speaking, it was a meditation without a mantra: he listened to the tiny humming in his head, the millions of synapses that vibrated at their own shifting frequencies. And when he was deep enough into a near samadhi -state, Christy would begin the music.
    Lanier breathed deeply and slowly. His fingers, curled in his palms, twitched. Christy slotted the sonic-wafer of Barber's Second Essay