Harmony (53 page)

“Just let me play the damn scene!” Ule snarled at him. Sam took him on over the timing of a bit of magical business and told him he had his head up his ass. At the intermission break, Omea walked Howie to the back of the house for a very animated conference. When the second act began, Howie left the actors alone and took notes.

The act glided right along and we were into Two, five, before we had a chance to worry about it. Ule and Cu began the incantation, the matta appeared, the Ancestors spoke, and Mali moved into position downstage center. I didn’t hear the field hum; but a quick, hard flash lit the backdrop white and a geyser of sparks shot up as the floor slitted to drop Mali into the trap. He danced back from the widening gap. Sam hurtled forward to snatch him away. Bright pinpoints of fire died in the air above their heads.

Babble roared in the headset. “Kill it, kill it!” Liz yelled.

Actors and crew surged into the wings and the exit ramps. Howie raced center stage. “Everyone okay? Mali?”

Mali nodded, searching himself and his clothing for burns.

“Where’s Sean?” Howie was tired of asking.

“Not here,” someone called.

“In the big house,” someone else added.

Howie shoved his hands to his hips and stared at the floor for a full thirty seconds. “All right,” he said finally. “Let’s work it through to the end.”

“It’s not fair,” I muttered to Micah afterward. “A whole evening ruined by the failure of one effect.”

“An arch would collapse without its keystone.”

“Well, that’s not fair, either,” I returned irritably.

“No, but it’s so wonderful when it stays up that it’s worth it.”

Ever since I’d joined his studio, Micah had been leading me toward an understanding and appreciation of the “wondrous” aspect of risk. Until then, I’d thought he’d succeeded. “Is it?”

“You’d prefer a sure thing, perhaps?”

“Surer than this, I guess.”

An ironic smile softened his rebuke. “Then you’d better join Reede Chamberlaine next door.”

Howie insisted that we all put in an appearance at the
Crossroads
press reception in the lobby. To my surprise, the Eye gathered willingly to plan another of their attention-grabbing entrances, then went off to change from one set of costumes into another.

Press nights weren’t jewels-and-black-tie fancy like official openings, but being the “in” night for the literati, they brought out the most expensive casuals in Harmony’s closets. Well-worn coveralls used to be an apprentice badge of merit, but now, conscious of their stains and baggy fit, Mark and I sipped champagne on the sidelines with Songh, and watched the Eye work the crowd. Enveloped in their most exotic finery, they laughed and sang like eccentric sentient birds imported from another planet. Sam moved among them mute and entirely in black, creating minor sensations with his astonishing hands.

Crispin let no apprentice self-consciousness hold him back. He retied his red bandanna to a more rakish angle, split the neck of his coveralls another several inches and plunged into the glittering crowd bearing his arty beauty and his most arrogant smile.

“We should be doing that,” noted Mark.

“Yeah,” I agreed, with equal lack of enthusiasm. “At least you’re good at it.”

“With me, it’s an act. Crispin
is
the act.”

“I just want to do the work. The selling shouldn’t have to be part of it!”

“Micah doesn’t sell,” said Songh.

“Not now that he’s famous,” Mark and I replied simultaneously.

When they’d done what they could with this opportunity for free publicity, the Eye drifted away, taking us with them.

“That ought to sell a few tickets,” I said to Omea on the way to the dressing rooms.

She sighed, untangling orange feathers and blooms from the dark buoyant cloud of her hair. “Just once, though, I’d like to know we sold because we were the best show in town, not just the weirdest. I mean, however we sell is better than not selling, but… just once.”

“This time,” I insisted gallantly.

Omea laughed and curled her arm about my waist. “Of course. What am I saying? Of course, this time.”

Crispin caught up with us in the corridor as the Eye dispersed to change into their street clothes. “Did you guys talk to the production manager from Pineland Stage? Guy with a dark beard and glasses?”

This described half the men in the Arkadie lobby. It was press night, after all, and eyeglasses were back in vogue among journalists. “Didn’t get around to him,” I said circumspectly.

“They’re looking for designers for next season. He wants to see my stuff, said to call first thing tomorrow.” Cris smoothed his hands down his coveralls as if they were suede and silk. “He really liked what I had to say.”

“Good,” I said wanly.

“We might not even be around next season,” muttered Mark.

“Come on, you guys! We’re gonna be here. We’ve got it nailed!” Cris untied his bandanna and folded it carefully. “So then I talked to this woman from the puppet theatre in Franklin Wells—”

“I, um, left my notes in the theatre. Be right back.” I shot Mark a look of apology and escaped down the corridor.

Theatre Two was a lightless cavern at the end of the white tunnel of hallway. Preoccupied with what I wasn’t doing to further my career, I was already onstage before I felt the full weight of the darkness, and then it closed around me like a fist. I slowed. Had I heard someone behind me? My hand shot to my pant cuff, fumbling.
Gods, so quick to reach for a weapon!
And then I thought, What good is it if I can’t get it out any faster than this?

“Gwinn? Can we talk a minute?”

“Cris! You scared me.”

“Sorry. Suddenly got nervous about you being alone in here in the dark.” He shrugged. “Silly, hunh?”

I exhaled deeply. “Liz forgot the safety light.”

“I’ll get it.”

He turned toward the red glow of the indicators on the work-light panel against the stage right wall.

“Cris! Shhh!”

When he stilled, there it was again, a faint rustle and thump from the darkness onstage.

“Yeah. I hear it.” He felt his way quietly to the panel. The work lights flared on, revealing an empty stage. The noises continued. I knelt, pressed my ear to the deck, then looked at Cris, and jabbed my thumb downward. Cris moved silently to my side. I was very aware of the knife strapped to my leg.

Suddenly the downstage trap unsealed and Peter rose through it on the elevator, a lit searchbeam in one hand and the little remote operating console in the other. He squinted around in the work light, then spotted us staring at him openmouthed.

“Hi!” He gave us his puppy-dog grin. “Just finishing up here.” He switched off his beam, hung his belt. “Man, that Sean is one clever dude. Hey, how was the party? Lots of priceless fizzy?” He stepped aside and thumbed the remote to retract the elevator. The hole resealed.

Cris eyed Peter’s laden tool belt. “What’s up down there?”

“Oh, she’s working fine now.”

I went to retrieve my pad from the house. “No call tonight, right?”

“Tomorrow first thing. You got notes for me?”

I laughed. He was so eager. “Morning’s soon enough.”

He loped over to the work-light panel, looping his long legs over obstacles instead of going around. “Go on ahead. I’ll get these.” He waited until we’d reached the stage right door, then doused the lights.

“Leave the safety,” I reminded him.

“Oh. Yeah.” He messed around for a bit, then the overhead safety light glowed on. He followed us out. “Okay, see you in the old
A
.
M
.” He tossed us a two-fingered salute and went off down the corridor, bobbing and jingling.

“Odd,” I said, watching after him. Laughter echoed from the dressing rooms.

“Who, him?” Cris snorted. “He’s the kind of techie who figures the more his tool belt rattles, the better his work must be.”

“No, odd him being there. I’m sure he told me Sean was keeping him away from the effects equipment.”

“Odd who was where?” Sam came down the hall with Moussa and Mali. He was still in his black jumpsuit, looking trim and competent, and I was very glad to see him. He moved between Cris and me, drawing me close. Pen was with them, raucous with a vermilion blossom behind his ear, a little drunk.

“That new kid Peter was in the pit. And… wait a minute!” Peter had gone toward the stage door, not the shop. “He took the remote console with him.”

Crispin laughed. “Trying to steal Sean’s secrets. As if all it took was a look or two.”

I turned, met Sam’s clear gaze. He nodded, looked to Mali.

Mali dipped his head.

“Moussa?”

“Where?”

“Onstage,” said Sam. “Pen, are you with us?”

“Back off,” Pen growled. “Just tell me where.”

“A look around up here, then the stage door.”

I led the way down the back stairs to the trap room, turning on lights as we went. Beneath the stage, a complicated scaffold of braces and posts supported the elevator mechanics and the dark bulk of the field generator, surrounding the access stair to the landing just below the trap. Construction debris had been simply pushed aside to make a pathway to the bottom step. Plastic rod and particle board were piled at random along the way. Portable work lights clamped to the cross beams lit up a hanging garden of abandoned strips of wrapping tape. Wires trailed and silvery cable looped around the slim shafts of the hydraulic cylinders.

“A little man-made jungle,” Mali observed.

“Don’t get underneath the stage too often, do you?” Cris grinned. “It’s always like this.”

Sam adjusted his tiny searchbeam, the size of his thumb. It produced an astonishingly bright and directed light.

“What are we looking for?” I asked.

“Anything out of order.”

I glanced around. “Order? Here?”

“That’s what’s going to make it hard to find.” He started up the stairs to the elevator access platform.

Cris went up after him, clambering around on the scaffold, following cable runs, checking connections. Mali leaned against a post, content to let Sam do the climbing. “And how is your own work coming in the midst of all of this?”

“Mine? Neglected, I’m afraid. We’ve been so busy.”

He smiled at me. “And so distracted.”

“Well, I…”

“No excuses. I love him, too, but the Work, that must not be neglected. If it is your Work.”

That’s how it was with Mali. You’d be talking, casually, you thought, and then he’d drop something like that on you, where you felt the extra weight of the capital letters like guilt or inspiration. “What do you mean, if?”

Above our heads, Cris called softly. “I don’t see anything.”

“Keep looking,” Sam replied.

Mali settled himself more comfortably against his post. “Only that you are young and may not have found your real Work yet.”

Did he mean I wasn’t good at it? “I don’t know what is, if it isn’t this!” I remembered the joy I’d felt solving my
Lysistrata
. I clung to that for support. “I’ve risked my life to come to Harmony, and these three years with Micah have been—”

“… worthy training,” he said soothingly. “But the path to the Work is not always a straight one. Look at Sam, how roundabout it’s been for him.”

I was sure Mali knew everything that had gone on between Sam and me, every intimacy, every detail, either because Sam had told him or because he just
knew
. An odd feeling, and odder that I didn’t mind it. “How do you know when you’ve found your… Work?”

“Oh shit,” Sam said quietly, as if he’d stepped into a nest of snakes.

Mali stood free of his post. “What?”

The scaffold shook as Cris scrambled toward him. “What? What?”

“Damn, kid, don’t move so hard! Mal, come up but come up easy.”

Sam hooked his legs over a sprinkler pipe to hang out beyond the reach of the scaffold. Mali ignored the stairs and swiftly scaled the bracing along the side. Squinting up from below, I saw nothing until Sam’s little beam picked it out; three tiny daubs of pinkish gray, stuck like wasps’ piles to the inside corner of a steel I beam. A strand of wire fine as a hair passed from one daub to the other, then out around the I beam toward the field generator housing.

“Exactly,” muttered Sam, “where I’d put it myself.”

Cris craned his neck around the bottom of the I beam. “Ohh.”

“Down,” Sam said to him. “I don’t want you up here with this.”

Cris obeyed without argument.

“What is it?” I demanded.

Mali sighed, then quietly let himself down the scaffold. Sam followed, plodding pensively down the stairs. At the bottom he leaned against the legging, arms crossed and his eyes on Mali. “Some vacation, hunh?”

“So. It’s me this time,” Mali rumbled.

“Please!” I begged. “Will somebody—”

“It’s plastique,” said Cris.

“Not a lot.” Sam was still looking at Mali. “Enough to kill within three or four meters.”

I was aware of the darkness again, past the tight glow of the work lights, hanging like smoke among the pipes and posts and looping wires, darkness that rendered the pinkish gray daubs invisible. Three tiny blobs of death.

Sam said, “That kid who was down here… where’d he come from?”

“He’s an extra hand. He came in to help Micah.”

“What d’you know about him?”

Nothing, I realized. “You think Peter put it there?”

“Does kinda look that way,” said Cris.

Sam frowned. “Well, that’s just the problem.”

“Made himself rather conveniently obvious,” Mali agreed.

“Misdirection,” muttered Sam. “Could be. Question is, who’s the business?”

Peter didn’t fit my profile of a thug. “Maybe somebody on the regular crew put it there?” I recalled the clique in the coffee room. “They’re all SecondGen—it could be any of them.”

“What d’you want to do, Mal?” Sam idly flipped his searchbeam from finger to finger until it was spinning so fast it looked like a solid silvery disk. “How ’bout this; let’s play the scene out.”

Mali shrugged a wordless negative.

“Why not? It’s the thing they’d least expect.” The searchbeam vanished. Sam’s hands smoothed the air in front of him. The beam reappeared. “If we rip it out now, they’ll know we’re on to them. They’ll just find some other place, some other time. If we leave it, my guess is they’ll wait ‘til there’s an audience, for the greatest impact. If we play it right, we’ll flush them out and win the sympathy vote, plus all the oohs and ahhs when you show up walking around after all.” His hands flicked, empty. “A miracle.”