Harmony (15 page)

The props, sound, and electrics shops were next door, squeezed into three rooms that would have done better as one. A plan to find new space was offered at the beginning of each season, always without results. Below Plastics lurked several filled-to-bursting levels of warehouse sunk into the Green Mountain granite. The costume shop sweltered in the attic space above the ceiling of Theatre Two.

The horn had just blown for afternoon coffee break. The saws were quiet. A tall stack of shrink-wrapped lumber waited to be moved out of the open bay of the vacuum tube terminal. Sean was very proud of that terminal. Not all theatres had their raw materials delivered directly to the shop.

The crew hailed Micah like a long-lost brother and shoved hot cups and giant sugared pastries into our hands.

“Gonna bust our balls this time? Gonna keep us up nights?”

“Naw, we won’t have to sink a screw! Those tribal guys’ll voodoo the friggin’ scenery onto the stage!”

“You think they do love potions? I could really use one.”

The men laughed. “Can ya help him, Mi? The boy’s in
need
!”

“Old Howie, stirrin’ up trouble,” an older hand remarked.

“The hell, let ‘im!” roared a tall redhead. “Christ, we’re fuckin’ sick and tired of Easy Street down here!”

I loved watching Micah go into action in the shop. This man who had no patience for the usual social trivia knew every crew member by name, knew their spouses, knew the names and ages of their kids. He admired their craftsmanship, he asked about their current projects. He worked the floor of that shop, any shop, like Howie worked an opening-night crowd. He loved it, and so did they.

While I stuffed my face with unneeded sugar, Micah strolled among the worktables with the shop foreman, Ruth Bondi, to inspect a new material she was eager to show off. The carpenters joked with me, but their eyes followed Micah possessively. The crew felt they could bitch with him about the administration and tell funny stories in Max Eider’s accent, and know that Micah would return their fraternity by never repeating what he heard or naming names to the front office. Crispin slipped once and called him the Badger in public, and the nickname raced like wildfire through every shop in Harmony, though like us, none of them would think to call him anything but Micah to his face.

This was always the best time to visit with a crew, with the problems of your last show there forgotten and the problems of the next show not yet confronted. But the rough model remained in its opaque wrapping. Revealing it to Sean was one thing, but it was not smart to show something so nascent, so inchoate to the crew. They’d only be disillusioned.

Ruth returned, chortling with Micah, as the horn declared the end of the break. “Well, folks, seems like we’re in for some real exotica. And I don’t mean just the cast!”

Micah smiled innocently. “Keeping you on your toes.”

The crew went back to work laughing, and we climbed toward Sean’s office. Soft goods lived off the second-level gallery, along with mechanics and animation, holography, projection, and miniatures. The computer clean-rooms were up on the third level with the special-effects labs. Micah stuck his head into Animation to say hello and waved at the stitchers tending their huge machines in Soft Goods. A printout production schedule clipped to the door listed twenty-two separate drops of various sizes and materials for
Crossroads
.

Micah took a deep breath. “I’d like to get away with just one.”

Well, I thought
that
was pretty radical.

Sean’s office was the sort that began each day as neat as a pin and devolved into chaos by quitting time. Though it was only mid-morning, entropy had already taken its toll. The wide interior window that overlooked the shop floor was plastered solid with the
Crossroads
elevations also papering every bit of wall. Sean was on the phone, arguing with his lumber supplier in Singapore. I always kidded him about using the old black handsets like my parents had in Chicago, but telescreens broke down and cost you money, Sean said, and he had little need (and no desire) to see his dealers face-to-face. He tossed a wave as we came in and went on arguing.

The property master, Hickey Kirke, slouched over Sean’s huge drawing board. More
Crossroads
plans were spread out like the pawed-over goods in a market stall. Tall and dark and dour, Hickey was Sean’s antithesis. They didn’t socialize much, but balanced each other well in the workplace. I was always careful with Hickey, who struck me as painfully vulnerable.

“ ‘Lo, Hickey. What’s new?” I asked while Micah leafed absently through Eider’s drawings, waiting for Sean to dicker the dealer down to a price they could both live with.

Hickey shrugged, his long face solemn, then flicked me a guarded smile. “Not much. The Eye’s show props arrived via the Tubes, but I’m not allowed even to crack open the crates. Taboo, you know. Guess they’ll cut off my left ball or something.”

“Maybe just sacrifice your firstborn.” I deposited the model on a pile of printout and peered over Micah’s shoulder. Eider’s apprentices’ drafting didn’t look any better than mine, though the title-block labeling each plate was bordered with a complex egg-and-dart motif—much flashier than Micah ever wanted.

“Done,” Sean concluded. “I’ll need it Monday… Yeah, it’s friggin’ sudden! I get
sudden
drawings thrown at me every day now! Hey, up yours, Carlos, have I ever traded you bad credits? You just get it here. My order came in short last week… Yeah, sure, the Tubes swallow things, right… Hey, I’m on time more than most of your customers!… Fine. I look forward to it.”

Sean dropped the archaic phone into its cradle. “ ‘Will the money be there’…! Friggin’ jerk! After all the business I give him! That’s the trouble when your supplier’s not next door. You can’t just go over and threaten to beat the crap out of him.”

“When was the last time you beat the crap out of someone?” Hickey inquired, as if he really needed to know.

“Well, it always sounds like a good idea.” Sean shoved back his chair and stalked to his cooler. “Just about beer time, isn’t it?”

Micah continued his study of Eider’s excruciatingly elaborate ground plan. “What have you got?”

“What I’ve always got. Damn, Micah! You know I only stock one beer in here!”

“We can’t afford that imported swill you drink, Mi.” Hickey’s strangled little cough was his idea of a laugh. Sean was famously loyal to the local brand brewed in Harmony’s farm domes.

“You want one or not?” Sean demanded.

“Is it cold?”

“Jeez, Howie must be givin’ you some hard time, huh?” Sean put aside his irritation with the lumber dealer and opened four frosty beers. He passed two along to Hickey and me, then stood in front of Micah, holding the others and nodding expectantly at the shrouded model. “So how’s it going, fella? How’s the dragon thing?”

“Out for bids.” Micah ran his finger along the track of a magnetic winch drawn on the plan and clucked his tongue.

“Gwinn, get those friggin’ drawings away from him, will ya?”

I played the magician pulling the tablecloth from beneath the twelve-course dinner.

Micah took his beer. “Well, it’s not going to be what you’d expect from me.” At his signal, I slid the model out of its wrappings. It was a simple-looking construction in brown paper and cardboard, a little bent from the trip. I tweaked it back into shape. Micah came and stood over it. “I think it’ll end up as one set with a few minor changes and some special effects.”

“And a shitload of props,” predicted Hickey darkly.

“Most of which the Eye has brought with them.”

Sean stared at the little model. “C’mon, really? This is it?”

“The basic idea of it,” Micah drawled. Sean’s, genuine astonishment delighted him.

“No kidding.” Sean circled the table as if searching for hidden complications. “One-setter, eh? Jeez, like the old days.”

Micah wagged his head from side to side, at his most badgerlike. He could go from banter to dead serious so fast, most people got lost catching up. “Not quite like the old days, I hope. When I say special effects, I mean something quite out of the ordinary. Something that, in this innocent, untechnical environment that we create, will come as a complete surprise and blow their socks off.”

“I thought these guys came with their own magic,” said Hickey.

Sean said, “Hell, we can manage a little magic.”

“Have you read the play yet?” Micah asked.

“Sure. Well, most of it. Not my sort of thing, y’know?”

“Fine, but give it some real thought for a moment.”

“Yeah,” said Hickey. “Don’t just mouth off like some asshole.”

Sean tossed his empty bottle at Hickey’s head, then banked his grin to listen.

“The characters in this play believe that magic is real, remember that. Now, just before the climax, an Ancestor god dances with something called a ‘Matta,’ then delivers it to the clan elders to use in their ritual murder of the heretical clansman. They ‘wind it about him until he is no more.’ ” Micah seemed to be studying the inside of his beer bottle. “What I need you to do is make an actor, a live actor, disappear downstage center instantaneously and without using flashpots, smoke, or any of the recognizable decoy techniques.”

“Sure, I, well… it has to be a live actor?”

“Oh yes.”

Sean glanced at the wide-open downstage sweep of the model. “If you can move him upstage a little, I could—”

“No. It has to be right down there in the middle, so that the audience thinks it’s magic. Real magic. The whole piece is going to turn on it.”

I should explain something of Sean’s predicament: the smaller of the Ark’s two theatres was a modified arena: blunted wedges of seating framed three quarters of a circular stage that extended forward from the remaining 90 degrees. Broad ramps pushed the playing area in between the seating wedges so that the action could, in effect, surround the audience.

Downstage center meant out in the middle of God’s country, with skeptical viewers on three sides. Working with holos and lasers and smoke projections and the like as we usually did, we could make all sorts of stuff happen in this no-man’s-land. But to cause a living actor to vanish into thin air with no visible effects was a very tall order down there. We hadn’t yet perfected matter transport.

Hickey handed Sean another beer. “Better give it some thought, eh?”

Sean said, “I better give it some thought.”

Micah nodded. “Let me know.”

“I will. You bet I will.” Sean took a great swig of beer. “Hey, you sure they couldn’t just do it with voodoo?”

RENEWAL:

It was very quiet in the studio when we got back.

“Someone painted in front of the theatre again,” I announced.

Crispin’s head snapped up from his screen. “Could you read it this time?”

“Yeah. It said, ‘Close the door.’ ”

There was a rustle at Jane’s desk as she slid from her stool and fled toward the conference room.

Micah and I blinked after her.

“She hasn’t been feeling too well,” I lied, and sped off in pursuit. I found her sitting pale and dry-eyed, her hands spread wide on the broad tabletop as if it might tip over and crush her.

“Jane, it’s only words…” The instant I put my arm around her, she collapsed sobbing to the table.

“Bela wasn’t at breakfast this morning, did you see?”

“No?” I’d slept in with Crispin before heading off to the Arkadie.

“He wasn’t renewed!” she blurted.

“What?”
I dropped into the chair next to her. “But… I didn’t know he was up.”

Jane shook her head savagely. “Nobody did.”

“Not even Mark?”

“I don’t know. He’s… I just couldn’t talk to him.”

“Bela. Oh no.” That was how it went. If you said nothing to your friends, and you didn’t pass your review, one morning you just weren’t there anymore. They said Security spirited you out in the middle of the night and dropped you Outside your birth-dome. Perhaps if we’d had to watch our friends dragged away kicking and screaming, we wouldn’t have accepted the situation so readily, with mourning but without question. Domer children have been taught to accept in the name of survival what earlier eras would have called atrocity. I’d dream about failing review once in a while, and wake up in a cold sweat, boundlessly grateful to find myself in my narrow dorm bed instead of Outside Chicago. Yet it never occurred to me to ask,
Is this necessary?

“Jesus. Poor Mark.”

“Poor
Bela
!”

“Jane, I know you’re up for review yourself soon, but…”

She collapsed again. “September,” she wailed, as if it were tomorrow. “I don’t understand it! Bela’s work was good. Marie needed him! Why didn’t they renew him? Why?”

I agreed it was odd that Bela hadn’t made the cut. People less talented than he made it all the time. This was going to make a lot of apprentices very nervous.

“Don’t worry,” I murmured uselessly. Jane was unlikely to be soothed by the usual reassurances, especially if delivered from my position of relative security. So I held her, deciding it would serve her best if I just let her weep.

ADVICE FROM THE MASTER:

No more was said in the studio about the graffito.

But when Jane had recovered sufficiently to go back to work, I invited Micah into the conference room to explain that because Jane was so worried about her own upcoming review, Bela’s failure had set off an attack of panic.

Micah looked at me oddly. “I didn’t know he was up.”

“Me neither. I don’t think Mark even knew.”

Micah smoothed wrinkles from his smock. He was pensive for long enough to make me glad Jane wasn’t there listening, then said, very delicately, “It might be of some help with Jane’s situation if she had encouragement from her peers to work more on her own outside the studio.”

The way he said “situation” chilled me, as if the word were a fragile eggshell placed on the table between us. “But she’s only got until September…”

“Wouldn’t hurt,” he continued, “for you and Cris to be thinking about it yourselves.”

“We are!” My surge of fright must have been visible in my eyes.