thing
more was in favor of the Reject: he was less precise, less logical, and
therefore more glamorous than the Rash. Hence Rejects always had plenty
of women, and Reject women did well with men.

But the Rash, in the end, had everything that really counted.

Well, there was only such work that a Reject could do. But none of it
fitted Wainer. He tried all the arts at one time or another before he
finally settled on music. In music there was something vast and
elemental; he saw that he could build. He began, and learned, but did
little actual work. In those beginning years, he could be found almost
always out by the Sound, or wandering among the cliffs across the River,
his huge hands fisted and groping for something to do, wondering,
wondering, why he was a Reject.

* * * * *

The first thing he wrote was the _Pavanne_, which came after his first
real love affair. I cannot remember the girl, but in a thousand years I
have not forgotten the music. It may surprise You to learn that the
_Pavanne_ was a commercial success. It surprised Wainer, too. The Rashes
were actually the public, and their taste was logical. Most of all they
liked Bach and Mozart, some Beethoven and Greene, but nothing emotional
and obscure. The _Pavanne_ was a success because it was a love piece,
wonderfully warm and gay and open. Wainer never repeated that success.

That was one of the few times I ever saw him with money. He received the
regular government fee and a nice sum in royalties, but not quite enough
for a trip into space, so he drank it all up. He was happy for a while.
He went back to the music clubs and stayed away from the beaches, but
when I asked him if he was working on anything else, he said no, he had
nothing else to write.

Right after that, he fell in love again, this time with his mother.

The longevity treatment was still fairly new; few had stopped to
consider that, as men grew older, their mothers remained young, as
tender and fresh as girls in school, and there is no woman as close to a
man as his mother. Inevitably, a great many men fell in love that way.
Wainer was one. His mother, poor girl, never suspected, and it was pure
anguish for him. It was some time before he had recovered enough to talk
about it, and by then he was thirty. One of the ways he recovered was by
writing more music.

There were a lot of lesser works, and then came the First Symphony.

Looking back over the centu