Authors: Marjorie B. Kellogg
The pile of Micah’s personal history built on his worktable. Some of the drawings had been on the wall so long that the tape was gummy and the paper gray and brittle.
“Sure, we do plays about the importance of culture, but most of them were written two hundred years ago, and the actors, however well intentioned, dredge up their character and motivation from the research files. The Eye was born knowing what their play’s about! Do we ever do plays about Harmony? Not since
Domers
. We should be doing them all the time! It’s the only thing we know about, I mean,
really
know, like the Eye knows
The Gift
.”
He took down the last sketch, and the wall that faced him was as blank as I had ever seen it. Smudge marks and tape gum formed faint square outlines, the ghosts of all that work lying on the table. A silence settled into the studio, all of us transfixed by that blank wall.
Fill me, fill me
, it demanded.
“Howard’s right about his audience.” Micah’s hands swung empty at his sides. “They are smug and complacent. We all are. We think we’ve got it right, here in Harmony. We are so busy preserving the Enlightenment against the anarchy Outside. But the Planter in the play’s no different—a liberal thinker, not a bad guy. His problem isn’t his intentions, it’s his lack of vision. He just cannot see that there are other values as valid as his own.”
He raised open palms to the wall as if communing with its emptiness. And then, his invocation complete, he shifted gears with a grinding sigh and faced the mound of drawings on his worktable. “I suppose that Marin bunch wouldn’t take well to finding their project off the wall so soon…”
Micah did not want to fill that waiting space. Not yet.
I understood his reluctance, but in my gut rather than my head. “You might want to find a spot somewhere for
Cymbeline
.”
He nodded, then dutifully sorted out the Marin and
Cymbeline
sketches and retaped them to the right of his drawing board, allowing the wall in front of him to remain bare. Micah regarded it with satisfaction and sat down to work.
The studio had just got peaceful again when Cris exclaimed from his console, “I don’t believe it.”
I enlarged the Marin elevation on my desk to do details. “What?”
“Totally amazing.”
“What? What?”
“I stumbled across a mention of some big Tuatuan folk hero the other day and added him to my search list. Not a scrap showed up for two days and now, all of a sudden, here it is, an entire file, all neatly put together like someone collected it for me. Like… magic.” He shook his head, almost a shudder. “I got to have twigged some library call code somewhere.”
“For a file on a folk hero?”
“Well, why not?” But Cris was gazing at his screen as if it really were magic. Having never seen actual awe in his eyes before, I barely recognized it. “He’s called Latooea, the Conch, after those big shells that islanders used to call tribal meetings with back when. Supposedly this Conch is invisible, he can be several places at once. He walks through walls and spirits anti-domer prisoners out of jail. He eavesdrops on Planters’ Association meetings and reveals their secret pro-domer strategies.” He looked back at me. “Dynamic, huh?”
Was he baiting me? I couldn’t tell.
“Of course, the planters claim the Conch is anti-domer propaganda. But according to the tribes, he always appears in times of crisis, using his magic to protect the ancient ways. Neat, huh?” Cris blinked at me, shook his head, and sank back into communion with his keyboard.
I leaned toward Jane, hoping to jolly her at least a little. “See? Told you this play has nothing to do with politics.”
She did not appreciate my irony. And I found my mind straying all morning. Magic Tuatuan revolutionaries, Micah talking politics—I’d never heard him express such vehement dissatisfaction with Harmony before, and undeniably,
The Gift
had inspired it. I didn’t know what a rich kid’s life in Buenos Aires was like, but if Micah’d grown up in Chicago, he’d be as grateful as I was for the advantages of life under Harmony’s dome. You could say what you liked in Harmony, and do what you liked, and if someone didn’t approve, they could get up in Town Meeting and tell you about it without fear of reprisal. Even then, you were required only to listen, not to come to an agreement. It was what Micah called “the encounter-therapy heart of Harmony.”
Surely a little smugness was deserved?
But this Closed Door thing sounded like a lot more than smugness. And why so secret? Constitutional issues had been submitted to open debate in the past. Micah’d once said the best way to defuse a hot issue was to talk it to death. Was that what the Closed Door League was afraid of?
So here was another thing I neglected to ask Micah about and regretted later. But I did decide to lend a more careful ear to Jane and her dogged paranoia.
CRISPIN’S RESEARCH: A CONCH STORY
… and finally they allowed me into the hut. The child’s father glowered suspiciously, but as I was under the Headman’s protection, he jerked his head toward the corner where the older siblings sat. I didn’t mind this insult, as the children soon lost their earlier awe of me, co-exile in this inferior space. Other relatives filed in. Soon we were two dozen, packed into a 15 by 20-foot hut, hunkered in the dirt, breathing thick wood smoke and the smell of each other’s fear, for the child, for his awful disease, for what was about to happen.
We waited fully an hour, in silence but for the fire snapping and the night sounds outside and the boy thrashing and moaning in his fever. The mother sat by his bed of palm fronds and sang to him voicelessly, her lips moving in tireless prayer. One of the younger sisters sagged in sleep against my shoulder. I worried that the boy might die before the ritual began.
The palm log fire burned yellow and bright against the darkness past the doorway. The flames mesmerized me, all of us, I think, waiting in that closed-packed silence. I made sure not to doze or lose my concentration and with it this extraordinary opportunity to observe the tribal magics. Even so, the creature entered the hut without my notice. I was first aware of her easing around the fire toward the delirious child. I say “she” because the creature moved with such feminine grace and quiet. Otherwise, it bore the stature of a man, tall with lean, muscular limbs stained a peculiar blue with mud and ash mixed so smoothly to seem the skin’s own natural color. It wore a mask of blue bird feathers with white cowrie shells for eyes, sewn in tight concentric rings.
This strange apparition seated itself and took the boy’s feet into its hands. The silence continued, as if nothing more unusual than another relative had joined the circle. But soon the mother’s chanting became audible, and those around me, even the children, took it up.
Latooea, Latooea
, they sang softly, over and over in ceaseless incantation. My legs ached horribly, bent under me on the hard-packed floor, but I did not stir. But I must have dozed again. Next I recall, the Headman rose and kicked at the dying ashes of the fire. Birds were singing dawn songs outside the hut, and the little boy slept peacefully in his smiling mother’s arms.
The blue-skinned apparition was nowhere to be seen, but the relatives, filing out of the hut, one by one paused to touch the sleeping boy’s head in awe and gratitude, each murmuring as he did the name of Latooea.
THE ARKADIE:
Micah settled down to work pretty well after the ritual purging of his corner. Once he’d allowed as how he’d gone about his revisions a little too freely and that it wasn’t worth setting the Marin project back another six months, we spent the rest of the morning restoring his weekend spree of damage and disorder.
“Okay,” Cris called from his console. “I’m clear on the sequencing up to Captain Seraglio breaking into the Sorcerer’s secret library and burning the rune book. But then…”
“Don’t forget the magic sword,” Songh put in.
I was glad someone was interested enough in Marin to keep track of the more baroque details.
“The sword, the sword…” Cris fiddled at the keyboard, peering at the holo miniature on the model stand. “Got the sword. After then I’m lost, when the fire spreads to the royal nursery.” His glance at Micah dared a faint reproach. “We never set the point where you want to switch from live flame to the projection, or which walls you want to be real—”
“Or for that matter,” replied Micah, “how to prevent some overly involved viewer from reaching into the cradle and rescuing the damn princess.”
I laughed out loud. It was okay to laugh at Marin. Even Jane was snorting quietly to herself, while Songh pouted in confusion.
Micah made a grand effort to pay attention, but by noon he was terminally restless. He sharpened his pencil again and again, insisting the machine was jammed and he couldn’t get a point. He complained about his brush and the quality of the paper he was forced to use “nowadays.” It was soon clear that the rest of the Marin restoration would be up to us.
But that was okay. You always learn more when you have to make a few design decisions on your own, and Marin was the perfect project to school apprentices with, where maturity and subtlety were clearly not required or even desirable. If Songh’s grasp of the CADD system had been better than hopeless, I’d have assigned him to draft Marin. Enchanted princes, love potions. It was just his speed. I decided I’d trust him to take charge of the model, and in that little burst of optimism, I began to think we might actually get Marin done in time for bids.
But Micah wanted me to go to the Arkadie with him. By twelve-thirty he was waiting in the doorway.
He’d been inviting me to design meetings lately, ostensibly to take notes on schedule and budget figures, those crucial data directors so often hope to gloss over. But mostly I was along to learn “the process,” that mysterious and touchy method whereby a design is developed and agreed upon.
I turned off my desk and told Jane to do anything she could to hurry
Deo Gratias
along.
We squeaked out just as the first tourists came nosing around the courtyard gate, searching through the beech branches for the nonexistent sign.
“This is the place,” I assured them, though the real place to visit, if you wanted to understand where the work came from, would be the inside of Micah’s head.
We edged away through the crowds streaming up from the village and took the Tube four stops to Fetching Green, home of the Arkadie Repertory Theatre. Fetching was larger than BardClyffe, being one of the “cardinal villages,” the four original settlements ranged crosswise around Founders’ Park. The green spaces between had filled in more rapidly than anyone had dreamed, but BardClyffe was one of the last villages to be incorporated and remained, along with Underhill, the least developed.
The Tube was packed with tourists. Residents no longer used the Tube during Open Hours unless they absolutely could not walk or bike to their destination. But it was a two-mile hike to Fetching, and Micah had never been seen on a bike in his life. Mind you, everyone rode bikes in Harmony. Apprentices passed them down like antique furniture, from generation to generation. But bikes were one Harmonic eccentricity that my boss steadfastly refused to adopt. Probably he wasn’t much good on a bike, and his refusal indicated how highly he valued his personal dignity.
So highly that we stood pressed like sardines in the narrow, bright-lit car, suffering the one-way conversation of a skin-headed young man visiting from BosDome, where he attended a school which from his account was teaching him everything there was to be known in the universe and beyond. He had seen Micah’s design for
Grasses
last season at the New Avon on the other side of Town. He had a great deal to say about how marvelous the production was, but you know, he
could
offer a few ideas for how it could have been done better, no offense of course.
I looked for the chance, during a convenient lurch, to crush his foot as flat as his nasal twang. But Harmony’s Tube is magnetic. It doesn’t lurch like the Chicago monoel, or clatter madly enough to drown out conversation. And Micah, however much he avoided converse with tourists and strangers, once accosted was unfailingly polite. He even contrived to look placidly entertained, which I thought was carrying civilization just a little too far.
“What an asshole,” I breathed, when we had been released from our torment at Fetching Station.
“Just another theatre critic in the making,” replied Micah, stepping heavily onto the escalator.
At street level, we crossed the broad circular plaza ringed with booksellers’ stalls and picture galleries. Only through great exercise of the will did Micah pass the rare-book dealers by. I would have happily lingered in the galleries. Two-dimensional black-and-white photography was undergoing a major renaissance. Reproductions of old work and new originals were both selling well. During one of our weekend wanders, I spotted an ancient picture postcard of the Wrigley Building in one of these shops. Crispin bargained persuasively enough to be able to buy it for my birthday, even promising to remember the dealer after he became famous. He complained about it afterward, but I knew he’d enjoyed the contest and its victory. He hadn’t gone to all that trouble just for me. Anyway, it was good for him. No matter how much his father leaves him or how famous he becomes, there’ll always be this bit of Crispin’s life when he knew what it meant to have no money.
The sun always felt hotter to me in Fetching Green, perhaps having something to do with Fetching not being all that green anymore—another vote for BardClyffe’s runaway plant life. The market plaza was paved in alternating circles of bright red and white marble. I couldn’t look at it without thinking of the expense. Heat shimmered above the polished stone, which never seemed to age or crack. Had we been anywhere but Harmony, I’d have wondered if the stone was genuine.
The august edifice on the far side of this marble ocean was the Arkadie, tall, cylindrical, and white, very much the image of a cultural citadel. The facade was windowless and faced with smooth curved stone. The only detail was in the fluted columns flanking the pedimented entrance, consciously classical in both style and scale, scrupulously weathered as if flown in from the Parthenon itself. The name “Arkadie” was chiseled in block Roman above the door. No gaudy posters, no informational marquee. Nothing. I never could quite decide whether this plainness was the ultimate in taste or presumption.