Harmony (24 page)

“What do you talk about?”

Hickey’s shoulders flopped up and down like a loose-stringed marionette. “Stuff. Drugs. Their tours. Politics.”

“Politics?”

His head sank into his chest, but his eyes looked up. “Yeah. So?”

“Nothing. Just, well, their politics have been sort of an interest around the studio.”

“Ah. Right. I remember. The Crispin Fox Tuatuan Remote News Service. Maybe I should subscribe.”

“So… what kind of politics?”

“Oh, how they feel about ten thousand years of religious tradition and their rights to their homeland being threatened by the greed of recent immigrants, little stuff like that. It’s the old story, you know. Their way of life is simple, non-aggressive. Colonizers moved in without a fight. Tuatua’s such a backwater, nobody realized the colonizers had taken over until the doming thing.”

“Do they say anything about the end of the world?”

Hickey hesitated between a cough and a laugh. “It comes up now and then.”

“And what do you say when it does?” An idea had come to me.

“As little as possible. Why wreck a blooming friendship?”

I gave the idea some rein. “Hick, can I ask a personal question?”

His eyes grew wary. “Sure. I guess.”

“You’re SecondGen, right?”

His head eased up, the puppeteer tightening its string. “No, actually. I’m not.”

“Oh.” This left me planless. “Gee. I assumed—”

“Most people do.” His laugh was a short bark. “Only the stars could be FirstGen, right?” He glanced away.

“I didn’t mean that.”

“No. Of course not.” He hesitated. “Shit, what the hell. You want the whole number?”

I felt obscurely privileged. “Yeah, I’d like that.”

He blew air silently through his lips. “Hokay. The Story of Hickey Kirke. I came here twelve years ago to study furniture making and design. Worked hard, struggled through my apprenticeship, survived to journeyman, got my citizenship, a hole-in-the-wall workshop, a gallery… then just couldn’t get enough commissions to make it go. Not chic enough. Well, not commercial. The tourist trade was just catching on in a big way then and…” He shrugged, but it was nothing casual. “Furniture’s tough to carry home as a souvenir. So I lost the gallery. Lost the shop. But I’d been doing some free-lance work around the theatres, so when this job opened up…”

“I see.” And I did. And was glad I’d had always the sense to treat him gingerly. “But you survived, Hick. You’re still here.”

His eyes flicked around the Cage. “Here?”

“Harmony.”

“Oh. Yeah.” He picked up the big knife again, idly testing its balance across his forefinger, then just as idly set it aside. “Why d’you ask?”

“Just curious.”

“Unh-uhn. You worked up to it much too carefully for ‘just curious.’ ”

“Did I?”

Hickey leaned forward, shoulders gathered up, hands shoved deep into baggy pockets. “So what’s up?”

I wondered why Hickey Kirke was going to be the first full citizen I told about this. “Have you ever heard of something called the Closed Door League?”

His eyes narrowed to study me a moment. Then he fished among the piles on his desk and pulled out a sheet of e-mail printout. “Anything to do with this?”

This one was a little more direct: C
ITIZENS OF
H
ARMONY
! D
ANGEROUS RADICALS ARE AMONG US
. C
LOSE THE DOOR
!

“This came this morning?”

“Like the first one. What’s it all about?”

“That’s what I’m trying to find out.” And then I let it out all in a rush, Jane’s worries, what Songh had said. I was so relieved to tell it to someone more experienced with the politics of the citizenry. I finished suddenly, like running out of fuel, and gazed at him breathless. “Hickey, I don’t think you’re surprised.”

“No. Not very. Except that it’s taken this long.”

I cocked my head in question.

“For the territorial imperative to reassert itself.”

“But who are these people? What do they mean by ‘dangerous radicals’?”

“People who don’t think the way they do.”

“Like us, for instance.” I swore him to secrecy even as he was mulling through a list of SecondGen friends he might safely worm some information out of.

“Why not Sean? Surely we could ask Sean.”

Hickey didn’t even consider. “Nah, I don’t think so. Sean’s got enough on his plate right now.”

Funny. Same reason I’d used for not telling Howie or Micah.

07/26/46

OVERTIME:

Overtime was technically forbidden in the apprentice program. Weekends were legislated: apprentices were expected to pursue their independent futures on Saturdays and Sundays, in the dormitory studios or out among the galleries and performance spaces, observing the work of others, making contacts.

But it’s hard for anyone except writers or maybe miniaturists to manage anything but sleep in a five-by-eight dorm room. And the communal studios were always crowded and noisy, more conducive to arty clowning and debate than to serious accomplishment.

So we worked in Micah’s studio. This tradition had been instituted by a clever former apprentice, one of Micah’s first. The Master allowed us the studio on Sundays in return for a few illegal hours here and there when a crunch was on.

Only problem with Sunday was it really meant Sunday morning, working as efficiently as possible, because once the Gates were open, Sunday was a total loss.

We were in early that Sunday, even before Micah. At breakfast, I’d browbeaten Jane about resurrecting a neglected project she’d done some very nice work on.

“There’s no point,” she replied. “I mean, it’s too late for me, isn’t it?” But she came anyway, perhaps for the company on a lonely Sunday morning.

The door of Marie’s studio, brazen with red and yellow stripes, stood wide to the morning breezes. Mark’s battered racing bike stood in the courtyard rack next to Bela’s, its twin. I called out cheerily as we passed the door. Bent over his drawing board, Mark raised a hand but not his eyes.

“He was never in Sundays when Bela was around,” I murmured.

“Then Bela will not have failed in vain,” Cris replied.

Jane looked like she would happily murder him if he showed even the hint of a smirk. I went around noisily propping open the skylight panes and swung the front door flat against the wall. Letting the air breathe freely through the space could make you question the need for walls, and hopefully it could lighten our fractious mood.

Crispin cleared the rough white-paper model of
Fire!
from Songh’s table and sat down. We called up our projects from the files and settled in to work.

“I’m sure Mark’s lonely in there all by himself,” said Jane after a while.

I grunted. I was finally making progress with my modern-dress version of
Lysistrata
. I’d decided that Greek city-states and autonomous city-domes had something in common. My scheme mixed huge, animated marionettes with high-tech robots. The sound and atmospheric effects were going to be so complicated, I’d need Crispin’s help with the programming. (Never confine yourself to what you know how to do, he always said. Hire an expert.) Now that I had a look that I liked, I wanted to get on with the details. But I’d been thinking it was time to include Mark in on the Closed Door mystery. “Let’s invite him in to work with us.”

“Leave the guy alone,” said Cris. “Work is the only true solace.”

Lately, Jane delivered her attacks on Crispin to me. “How can you waste your time with someone with so little human feeling?”

“I’m not really sure,” I replied seriously.

“She needs me around,” he laughed. “She’ll never be a player unless I push her into it. Right, Gwinn?”

“That must be why she’s the First and you’re not,” Jane countered bravely.

Cris snorted. “Micah’s no fool. He knows who’ll always put his interests before her own.”

“Your way is not the only way,” I said.

“Better way than sitting waiting for it to happen to you. I make things happen, and I make ’em happen for you, too. Don’t I?”

My file had come back from Actors’ Collective with an invitation for an interview. “Yes,” I admitted.

Jane eyed me pityingly.

“And there are a few other human feelings beside pity and fear.” Cris threw in his final salvo and let the matter drop. We worked in the enforced concentration of discord until Micah arrived an hour later.

Most Sundays, if he came in and found us working, Micah would make the rounds from desk to desk, favoring us with nuggets of advice and criticism, which we stored away like chipmunks against that wintry season when we’d have to do without his guidance. He had the natural teacher’s gift for unraveling, with a well-aimed observation or two, the tangled knots both in your head and on the paper. He taught us that ideas were cheap, that we must never hesitate to throw them out in order to make room for the solutions, which were the real gold.

That morning he came in hunched and solemn. He greeted us abstractedly and retreated immediately to his corner, where he rolled up his sleeves and sat down to work without putting on his smock. He had on one of his good shirts, a fine drapey white cotton trimmed with embroidery at collar and cuffs—flashy, for Micah. He’d dressed up for his Sunday breakfast with Rosa, then forgotten to change before he came in. If I didn’t do something, the shirt would be gray by noontime and he’d be upset, despite his insistence that the real and only purpose of clothing was to intercept dirt.

I got his smock off its hook and padded over. “Anything we can do to help things along this morning?”

Micah stared blankly at the smock, then shrugged, and put it on. “Until I solve this, we’re pretty much at a standstill.”

He meant the changes to
The Gift
. The original sketches were laid out on his board, buried under smeary overlays of tracing paper—embryonic ideas touched in in pencil, then worked over and over. The increasing coarseness of the line cried out his dissatisfaction with each successive solution. All day Saturday, while I’d churned out prop drawings, Micah had struggled to answer Howie’s demands without sacrificing the clean simplicity that was the heart and soul of the design. Carving into it was like dismembering his child.

“Reconceiving after the fact is a contradiction in terms,” he muttered.

“Would it help to talk it out a bit?”

“I doubt it.”

I didn’t take it personally. Micah was mostly angry with himself for being unable to shake free of his original mindset. I retreated to my own dilemmas. By the time I’d got up to speed, it was noon. Time for the weekend tourist invasion.

The problem with the weekends wasn’t only the greater number of tourists. It was the weekenders’ odd presumption that they were on holiday not only from work but from other aspects of civilization as well, such as manners and social restraint. They ate more. They drank more. To the gallery owners’ delight, they bought more and bigger. They talked louder and moved faster, and while the weekday tourists tended to accept that what went on in a studio might actually be work they should allow to proceed undisturbed, the weekenders expected the world to come to a halt the moment they arrived.

The first shadows over the sill that day were three plush couples whose accents placed them in one of the Texas domes. They were rich and high-profile. One of the men carried a substantial hip flask that Security should have confiscated at the Gates. As he flashed it about, I wondered where he’d hidden it coming through the detectors. Cris enlightened me later about the thriving mail-order trade in objects made of non-detectable materials: flasks, syringes, cameras, recorders—the sort of things rich boys know about. What was illegal in one dome was a profit industry in another. He’d even heard of weapons made of the stuff, not just blades but guns and explosives. I felt a lot less safe after that.

The flask, however, was the only thing these folks were trying to hide. They gleamed and jingled. All six of them were sheathed in leather from head to toe. The women wore their wealth like African tribeswomen, bracelets to the elbow and rings on every digit.

“So this is the place.”

“Small.” The woman’s heart-shaped face was so perfectly manicured, I wondered how she dared smile.

“A true artist can work anywhere.” Her friend was a buxom brunette with a cowhide beret angled over a full mop of curls. A clear jewel the size of a cherry sparkled on her hatband. A diamond? I contrived for a closer look. Even in Harmony, diamonds were none too common.

Crispin, Jane, and I smiled the welcome that apprentice regulations required. Micah hunched his shoulders and kept working.

“We’ll just look around a bit.” The thick, pale-faced blond strode possessively around the studio, stopping at Crispin’s console. He lifted the dust cover. “Jeez, look at this old antique!”