Harmony (45 page)

Sean’s door was shut and the lights off.

“Jane, keep a watch.” Cris went straight to the console and punched up the morning’s public messages. “Nothing, nothing… wait. Here it is. Goddamn! She pulled it off!”

I peered over his head at the screen, blue as sapphires, white as snow: F
ASCISM
I
S THE
D
EATH OF
A
RT
. O
PEN
A
LL THE
D
OORS
.

“That sounds like Mali,” I noted fondly.

Jane deserted her post at the door to stare at the message silently.

“Magic…” I murmured.

“Very close to it. She’s good, the girl is very good.” Bent over the screen, Cris began his habitual morning scan of the news. “Oh,” he said suddenly. “Wow.”

It was a small bit toward the end of the WorldNet report, where the items of minor interest get tossed: O
PPOSITION
L
EADER
R
ETURNS
.

Cris read aloud. “Tuamatutetuamatu. Sunday, August 10. A locally broadcast inspirational message from the Antidomers’ fugitive figurehead contradicted recent reports that the Conch had fled and set off tribal celebrations across the island…’ ”

“He’s back!” marveled Jane.

“He never left,” I said, ashamed that Sam had been savaged for nothing and that it had been our fault.

But Cris had seen Tua at work. He thought in terms of the world computer network more instinctively than I, a daughter of isolationist Chicago. “Or he’s Mali, after all. It’s gotta be!” Then, angry at his own impulsive tongue, he glared at Jane. “But this time we’re keeping it to ourselves!”

Jane’s eyes widened reproachfully. “I wouldn’t do anything to hurt Mali. I’d rather die first.”

DAT OFF:

When Sean decided to do a thing, he did it, for whatever reason.

When we came back from breakfast, Ruth was starting a crew on the tracking units. In the theatre, five men clustered downstage center, banging and muttering and lowering equipment into the hole in the deck.

Sean stood by watching. His beer gut had swelled during the past few months. He eyed us sidelong with a trace of his old humor. “There goes most of your budget, into the pit.”

None too soon, I almost said.

“Howie and his goddamn gimmicks.” He grinned. “Shit, if your native pals can voodoo my remotes broken next door, I oughta just leave all this to them.”

I did not grin back. “Think it’ll work?”

“Fuck me, who knows?” he said tiredly. “Yeah, I guess.” He threw his shoulders back, surveyed the stage. “All right. Let’s get this joint in shape for actors to walk on.” He glanced at me slyly. “Or we could leave it messy. Probably more what they’re used to, eh?”

He’d moved away before I could respond.

But there was no way the set would be finished by noon the next day. While we built and carved, our foam scraps and sawdust and metal shavings were swept up behind us. The gaps between the decking sections were plugged. Spongy spots were shored up. Hickey slouched around with his crew, placing prop tables and being told to move them the hell out of the carpenters’ way. He’d nod and shrug morosely. He wasn’t saying much. I wondered if the Great Romance had ended with him still pining after Lucienne.

Liz Godwin bustled in to check out the safety railings and escape stairs and the installation of running lights where actors had to make entrances and exits in the dark. She edged up to the down-center pit and peered in. “This gonna be ready?”

Sean ran his tongue along his teeth. “Hope so.”

“Think it’ll work?”

“All right,” Sean bellowed to the entire theatre. “Any other asshole wanna ask that question?”

Liz backed away. “Howie’s bringing the cast in at five.”

“On their day off?”

“Howie wants them familiar with the layout. He doesn’t want them thrown by any surprises tomorrow.”

Sean sniffed, rubbed his belly. “Five it is, then. But not an an actor on this stage before.”

He stayed in the theatre all day, giving orders and assignments, avoiding Micah when he came in to work, taking battle reports from Ruth, who’d been stationed next door at
Crossroads
. In another era Sean would have commanded armies.

At five, Micah stood with me in the house as Howie ushered the Eye around a set they’d already spent more time on than he had.

“Why’d Sean let it go so long if he was going to do it anyway?”

“He’s done part of it,” Micah corrected. “The technical part.”

Yes. Sean had stormed in to save the day at the last minute and covered all his bases except one: the design. The set loomed like Frankenstein’s monster, patched and seamed, a functional but ungainly wreck without grace or conviction. Hardly the stuff of atmosphere and illusion… or magic. It seemed over-large for the space, raw and out of place, as if Micah had made some sort of horrible mistake.

“Hey, how ’bout this!” Howie waved a sheet of newsfax, then thrust it at Omea like a captured flag. “ ‘Fascism is the death of Art,’ huh? Somebody finally had the guts to respond to those jerks!”

The Eye passed the e-mail among themselves, murmuring as if it were a welcome surprise. They were grumbly today, sticking close together, moving as a unit. Moussa complained that his “spot” was lumpy and uncomfortable, even though he’d not actually be sitting on it but on his Gorrehma. Tuli and Lucienne thought the deck might be too pliable for dancing. Ule found places that were too hard. Te-Cucularit snarled at the two prop boys swapped off
Crossroads
and threatened to walk because they were not handling the ritual items with proper respect.

Mali drew a shell up around himself and broke away to work his blocking in a private dance around the stage. I considered warning him of Crispin’s latest speculations, but didn’t want to seem a part of this Conch obsession. I no longer cared who the Conch was. I hoped it was none of them. I thought that would keep them safe.

While they circled and groused, I slouched in my seat and studied Sam. Not the sort you’d normally bother to watch. Even his tricks were about
not
watching him. Without his face in front of me, I couldn’t call it to mind. Only his blue eyes and a memory of hardness. A serious disadvantage for an actor, this unobtrusiveness, but a talent in magic, perhaps also in politics. Unobtrusive but somehow always there. Mali might claim his father was the Rock, but I identified him more with Fire. Sam was the one whose feet seemed anchored in the very core of the Earth. I couldn’t help but find that attractive.

I noted also the Eye’s pattern as a group: Omea always in their midst, touching, smiling, soothing over the rough places; Mali apart, listening, digesting, dispensing policy; Sam and Moussa circling the perimeter, each going about his actor-business with a part of him removed and on alert.

Now Sean approached Howie center stage, hands in pockets as if for a chat about last night’s dinner or the soccer scores. “I got the lift and the slit-drop working okay, but the field generator’s not installed. We’ll keep on it but my guess is, you’ll have to fake it for tomorrow.”

Howie frowned. “I see.”

Beside me, Micah sighed. Another day of waiting, plus the spectacle of Howie bounding up the aisle toward us.

“Our trick’s not ready,” he announced querulously.

Micah glanced up at him, nodded.

“C’mon, Mi, you knew that was the one thing I was really going to want to work with! He won’t have my moving units ready either.”

“I know, Howard.”

“Well, Christ, maybe you ought to work your shit out with Sean and get him back on our team! I don’t see Max Eider having trouble convincing him to work nights.”

The soft weight of Micah’s body seemed to slim and lengthen with the lifting of his chin. Six hundred years of aristocratic heritage fighting to reassert itself. “I’m working on that, Howard.”

“Well, work harder. We’re running out of time.”

Mark startled me, appearing suddenly at my shoulder. “Time to check in with them.”

I let him drag me up out of my seat, away from Howie and Micah. “They’re not in the best mood…”

“Who is?” He nudged Songh, damp and eager beside him. “Get Cris.”

“In the shop,” I called as Songh raced off.

“Got chased on the way over,” Mark panted. “Broad daylight. Some kiddie ball team. Didn’t like the color of my coveralls.”

“You should have called Security.”

“You gotta be kidding. Security are their older brothers and sisters.” Mark steered me to the front row and pulled up short in front of Mali. “Got a minute?”

I expected the worst, a flash of that hidden temper, as Mali frowned down at him, this slim blond with the determined jaw. But Mali asked, “How many?”

“Enough, sir. I think.”

“You think? Numbers, bro.”

“Six thousand.”

When Mali smiled like that, it was like watching the sun come up. “Well done, young Mark.” He reached behind him without looking and snagged the shoulder he seemed to know was there. “Sam! We’re needed. Time to go to work!”

NIGHT MEETING:

It was hard to paint, knowing what was ahead of us that night, but I insisted we work until the very last minute. Cris bitched a lot, but I think even he felt guilty about leaving a job unfinished when the boss is working right alongside you.

“What if we present the petition and they arrest us all on the spot?” I’d worried to Mali while Sam ran through our plan with Mark and Cris.

“Unlikely,” he replied. “Too precipitous for domer folk.” His long legs were crooked over the seat back in front of him, his elbows rested on the cushions to either side, his head rolled back until I thought his neck would break. Theatre seats were not made for a man this shape. “But there are worse things than jail, you know.”

“Yeah, they could put us Out.”

“Worse things than that.”

I couldn’t imagine.

“People do live lives out there.”

“Half lives.”

Mali sighed, patience and exasperation in the same sound. “Infinitely harder than yours, infinitely freer.”

“One kind of freedom I don’t need.”

“Oh?” Mali raised his dark, thin arms to scribe an arc, aport de bras above his head and I saw blue sky, that profound open blue, the blue of Sam’s eyes, and felt myself begin to float. I coughed and sat up and planted both feet flat on the carpeted floor, breathing shallow and fast.

“Never having had this freedom, you can’t know how much it might mean to you,” he said quietly.

I struggled to deny my disorientation, to refuse the possibility that he’d caused it. “It’s not fair to use your life on Tuatua as a parallel for the Outside, just because you haven’t got a dome.”

He rolled his head sideways to look at me, privately amused, challenging. “What makes you think I was?”

* * *

A half hour before curfew, we laid our brushes down. Micah got all formal and shook our hands, Songh and Jane and Crispin and me, one by one.

“Be back to paint soon as we’re done,” I promised.

The main lobby was a blaze of light for the
Crossroads
first preview. The little SecondGen ushers were tarted up in new maroon uniforms with smart white buttons and trim. They roamed the acres of mauve carpeting and picked up discarded ticket stubs, regarding us with suspicion while we hung about waiting for Mark. Champagne glasses clinked in the upper lobby as the concessions prepared for intermission.

Mark came bounding out of the office door with two women from Administration. SecondGens, both of them, looking worried but determined. I was both encouraged and guilt-ridden. I should have been doing more over the past few days to recruit support. I’d let our problems with
The Gift
absorb me totally.

Four other apprentices trotted down to meet us from the upper lobby, Max Eider’s three assistants and a stranger. Roly-poly and spike-haired, the new boy introduced himself as the
Crossroads
sound apprentice. “There’s twelve more coming from Music, Costumes, and Lighting.” He offered Mark every protocol of respect but a salute. “Maybe a few from Special Effects, ‘cept they’ve really got their hands full.”

“Where’s the rest of you?” asked Eider’s number one.

I laughed bitterly. “This is all of us.”

She rolled her eyes. “Boy, everybody’s heard
The Gift
is understaffed, but golly…”

The professional chitchat covered our nervousness, but it wore out fast as we padded the winding kilometer-long path through the thick leafy twilight of Founders’ Park. The flagstone walk narrowed to allow no more than three abreast as it snaked around oaks as wide as double doorways. We picked up strength as we met other pathways, moving inward toward the center of the dome. Cris counted heads and kept revising upward. Over a hundred, he claimed, in our group alone, and when we emerged from tree shadow into sunset, crossing the wide white ring of plaza surrounding the twin spires of Town Hall, crowds were streaming in from all directions.

My birth-dome is a city once known for the quality of its high-rise architecture, but those buildings were all from Before and Harmony’s dominant styles were archaic or at least nostalgic and until recently, under three stories tall. The children’s block geometry of Town Hall was the only contemporary large-scale building I’d ever seen, and it never ceased to amaze me: two shining glass cylinders rising sixty stories from the sloping sides of a massive glass cone, set on eight thin stacked discs of white marble. A clean, abstract physicalization of a clean abstract idea: Athenian democracy. The towers housed Business and Administration. The transparent twenty-story cone held the Meeting Hall, its vast curve of glass opaqued only for Town Meetings. It sat thirty thousand people, the heart and soul of Harmony’s political life.

“I can’t believe we’re actually doing this,” I exclaimed as the towers rose up before us.

Mark smiled nervously. “The mayor’s not going to believe it, either.”

Streetlights glimmered sweetly in the wall of glass, like the stars we read about but never saw, their tiny sources being diffracted into invisibility by the energy dance of the dome. The undulating panes scattered golden shards of artificial dusk across the white pavement. Hudson River School. A heroic kind of light. I thought Louisa would approve. Desk lamps glowed here and there through the reflection of Founders’ Park and several floors were lit up in the South Tower, where the mayor’s office was. Above, behind, the dome was velvet black. Outside, it must have been storming. It was already darker than it ever got in Harmony.