Harmony (16 page)

Micah waved it away. “Just think about it. Willow Street’s looking for young designers to work in their second space, and Gitanne tells me Images is putting in a new holo system that will make working with them much more challenging.”

He stood, a bulky white shape against the blank white wall, punctuated by a dark mustache. He had much more to say to me. I think he was considering whether this was the right time to say it.

Finally he leaned against the wall as if grateful for its support. “When you take your oath of citizenship, you swear to promote and preserve not the quality of life in Harmony, but the quality of its output, its artistic product.

“There are many in the world to whom this implies elitism or decadence, Art raised above the more ‘humane’ priorities. But it’s not just Art we’re preserving here in Harmony. It’s civilization itself. Art may not be necessary to life, but it
is
integral to civilization.” He pushed away from the wall, moving slowly along its cool white expanse. “Without Harmony and the other enclaves like it, nothing except life, mere existence, unadorned, would have survived those twenty years of death and destruction. We’d all be living like Outsiders, reduced to the pursuit of animal comforts, living without history, without mirrors, without images of our great human potential to urge us upward.”

I murmured, “Without the science that gave us domes and the industry to build them, nothing would have survived at all.” But that was my mother talking, my painter-mother, once painter, who had not been fortunate enough to find a haven like Harmony. I answered my own protest at once: without messy old Art, Science and Industry gave you neat, clean, soul-parching Chicago. Chicago was not Micah’s idea of survival, and if it had been mine, I guess I’d have never left it in the first place.

Micah’s slow progress brought him to the end of the wall, and the connecting door to Marie Bennett-Lloyd’s studio. He studied it thoughtfully, then turned back the way he’d come. “The Apprentice Administration is under pressure lately. There’ve been complaints about renewals being granted too leniently.”

“But Bela’s work was fine!”

“Yes, I would have said so.” Micah shook his head. “But Mark has also been protecting him, making his work look even better than it was. Mark, you see, has unusual talent. Mark is what the Outside Adoption Policy was created for. But he’s hardly likely to develop his full potential if he’s spending half his energy making up for someone else.”

He gazed straight at me. I tried not to look away but failed. The cold white surface of the table was easier to look at than the compassion in Micah’s eyes.

“We’re not making up for Jane in any way,” I mumbled.

“No, you’re not.” He gave a brief, dry laugh. “I am. And I’ll continue to do so for as long as I can get away with it. But in doing so, I am betraying my oath, my solemn oath, out of pure selfishness, because she is useful to me.”

I felt the first stirrings of revolt. “Some of the designers who made citizen in the past aren’t as good as either Bela or Jane.”

Micah nodded. “Perfectly true. But the past is not now.” He returned to the table. “I’d been meaning to say something to you all. Even if Jane hadn’t, well…” He squeezed my shoulder briefly. It was rare for Micah to be demonstrative with us, so I was grateful, but I realized if he saw the need to break his pattern, we all had reason to be frightened.

“Thank you. Yes. I understand.”

“Do you? I’m not sure I do. I fear this pressure on the Admin is motivated less by aesthetic concerns than by a few powerful people’s concern that overpopulation will lower Harmony’s standard of living. Look to the future, Gwinn. You’re going to have to fight for it much harder than I did.”

He sighed, a growly release of regret and relief that did not quite satisfy him. “But still, it is odd. Marie didn’t say anything to me, and the Admin is supposed to inform the craftmaster a few days ahead of time if they’re going to lose someone. In fact, I’d swear she said Bela wasn’t due for review for another six months.”

* * *

Later, I found the courage to stick my head into Marie’s studio. It was empty but for a lone tourist, looking querulous and lost.

“Are you Ms. Bennett-Lloyd?” He frowned.

“Not me,” I replied.

“Well, where is she?” he demanded as I withdrew.

Mark wasn’t seen anywhere for two days.

I was worried. “He’s got to eat.”

“Leave the guy alone,” Crispin muttered.

Finally I loaded up a tray at dinner and knocked on Mark’s door. He answered it unshaven and haggard.

“Oh, Mark,” I whispered. I offered him the tray. To my surprise, he took it.

“Thanks, G. I… really couldn’t face the mob downstairs.”

“You ready to talk?”

His bruised brown eyes wandered, then refocused on me with effort. “Um, no, not yet. I…” He set the tray down inside and hovered miserably in the doorway. Impulsively I put my arms around him. He clung to me, shuddering. “He wasn’t up, you know. It wasn’t his time.”

“Are you sure?”

He jerked away. “You think I wouldn’t know about a thing like that?” He whirled into his room. “Gwinn, they took him!”

“They can’t just take people at random.”

Mark reached the far wall and rebounded toward me. “So they tell us, but they did. They just took him when they had no right to!”

WORLDNET/COMMENT

07/02/46

SEATTLE

THE DESIGN:

But life and work went on. Mark came dutifully to Marie’s studio every morning and went back into hiding as soon as the day was done. Jane pulled her work over her head like the proverbial ostrich. Even a mention of Bela was forbidden.

The simple eloquence that Micah was striving for in his design for
The Gift
did not come easily. His first impulse toward bold abstraction required thoughtful articulation, and Howie needed weaning from the literal-minded habit of his normal directorial style. Between the first rough model and the final design, the two of them ransacked and devoured six working models. Progress on any other front—the Willow Street piece or
Don Pasquale
—slowed to a crawl as we raced to have construction drawings and a presentation model of
The Gift
finished by first rehearsal.

Every so often Micah would call Sean to ask if he’d discovered how to accomplish the downstage center magical disappearance we were counting on. Micah was convinced that the success of the design as well as the play relied on that single piece of business.

“Got some ideas,” Sean would say. “Just working out the details.” Meanwhile, the rumor mill reported that the Arkadie’s shop was in way over its ears with
Crossroads
.

But we were too busy to worry about that right then.

The design that at last evolved was so spare and elegant that it took me awhile to see how truly brilliant it was.

It took its textural inspiration from Tuatua’s volcanic bedrock, but the overall lines were as sinuous and lyrical as jungle mists and sunrise. Micah played a lot of French Impressionists as he worked. He said there was more of himself in this design than in anything he’d done in a long time, and that he understood how the clansman felt in the play, offering up his most precious private magic to public view. His eloquence convinced me, and Howie too.

“Well. No bullshit here,” said Howie finally. “It’s… it’s truly humble.”

And he looked at Micah and smiled.

I put all of us to work on the final model, even Crispin. We reproduced Micah’s sweeping collage of texture and color in the finest degree of finish. Jane spent a whole week on the backdrop alone, incising fine strata lines and pebbly grit into its undulating surface with the precision and tireless patience that was her most remarkable asset. The model cost a fortune in time and materials, but Micah said it must represent the finished set exactly.

“Translating models is a learned skill,” he worried. “We don’t want the Eye thinking they’re getting anything less than our best.”

We set the completed model in a fully detailed scale replica of the theatre, to show its dynamically eccentric placement within the space. Micah always said, if you want to grab their attention from the start, focus the space so that the seating is an element in the total composition. This draws the audience “into” the set, without doing something pretentious like putting them onstage with the actors.

It was completed the day of first rehearsal, with minutes to spare. Jane remained at my elbow all morning as scrub nurse, handing me tools. We crated it up like the precious object that it was and just before noon, hurried off to Fetching to meet the Eye.

Gift
rehearsals were not to be at the Arkadie itself. Both theatres had shows playing in them, and all the in-house rehearsal space was taken up by the complications of
Crossroads
. The secondary space was a small and ageing warehouse on the edge of Fetching’s commercial district. Howie rented it for a nominal sum from Campbell Brigham, the chairman of his Board of Trustees. Cam owned a prestigious print gallery in Lorien and apparently needed a tax break.

The Ark staff called it “the Barn.” Micah explained this was a nostalgic gesture to the mythic days of summer stock, which even he couldn’t remember. It didn’t remind me much of the gleaming white metal tunnels in Harmony’s farm domes. It was rectangular, with a peaked and girdered roof and lots of columns breaking up the space, which made it hard for the stage managers to tape out the ground plan on the floor. Also, it needed a good coat of paint. But it had great, tall windows along two sides, and stood on an open corner that got lots of light.

At noon, the Barn was empty, except for the stage managers. Micah strolled in and immediately began rearranging the furniture.

“We’ll use this table for the model. Pull the big one over here longways so they can look at the set while they read.”

The production stage manager, Liz Godwin, a freckled, smiling woman with an outrageous mop of curly red hair, watched calmly while her assistants raced to replace disordered chairs and water pitchers and rescue their careful arrangement of clean scripts, pads, and pencils that Micah had shoved aside in his search for the right table to show off the model.

“It’s only because you’re cute that I’m allowing you to get away with this,” Liz called after him from the production table.

Micah pulled his chosen model stand a fraction closer to the long central table where the cast would sit to read through the play for the first time. He stood back, contemplating.

“Fine,” approved Liz. “It’s fine, it’s perfect! Gwinn, get that thing over here before the mad decorator changes his mind!”

Micah smiled, but distractedly. He hovered like a mother hen as we set our precious package down on the table.

“How’d it do?”

“Good,” said Cris. “We only dropped it twice.”

Jane flashed Micah a look saying
she
understood there were some things that just should not be joked about.

Most actors see scenery as simply a backdrop for their own work, so a model of the set only has to be pretty to keep them happy. But with
The Gift
Micah was presuming to create within a foreign, exotic culture. He wanted the Eye to take one look at his model and know he understood exactly what their play was about.

Cris lifted the model out of the crate, and we freed it from its packing one layer at a time like archaeologists unwrapping a mummy. The stage managers clustered around to watch. Our peace and quiet ended when Howie bustled into the hall with Marie Bennett-Lloyd. Marie had finally agreed to coordinate the clothes and design whatever the Eye had not brought with them. She and Howie were nodding and gesticulating like a pair of tandem robots. Rachel and Kim followed more sedately, with Mark behind them, alone and solemn.

“Just find me an hour sometime, okay?” Marie was insisting. “I’m not telepathic.”

“Funny. I always thought you were.” Howie wheeled away to confer with Liz. Marie descended on us as the last fold of plastic wrap slid off the model.

“Have you seen them yet?” she demanded cheerfully. Marie was tall and a bit of a whirlwind, always in motion within her many layers of clothing. I felt dowdy and reserved standing next to her. Today she wore a flowing, skirted wrap in tie-dyed blues reminiscent of water. I thought Marie and the Eye should get along very well in matters of dress.

“I haven’t a clue what they’ve brought!” she exclaimed. “We weren’t allowed to unpack the trunks. Then no resumé photos, no one could get measurements! Honestly, sometimes I wonder about Howie!” She glanced expectantly at the door, as we all were doing. “I just hope they’re cooperative!”

Mark eased up beside me. “Did you wear it?”

“No, but…” I pulled my bead and leather necklace partway from my pocket. “For good luck.”