This was always the best time to visit with a crew, with the problems of your last show there forgotten and the problems of the next show not yet confronted. But the rough model remained in its opaque wrapping. Revealing it to Sean was one thing, but it was not smart to show something so nascent, so inchoate to the crew. They’d only be disillusioned.
Ruth returned, chortling with Micah, as the horn declared the end of the break. “Well, folks, seems like we’re in for some real exotica. And I don’t mean just the cast!”
Micah smiled innocently. “Keeping you on your toes.”
The crew went back to work laughing, and we climbed toward Sean’s office. Soft goods lived off the second-level gallery, along with mechanics and animation, holography, projection, and miniatures. The computer clean-rooms were up on the third level with the special-effects labs. Micah stuck his head into Animation to say hello and waved at the stitchers tending their huge machines in Soft Goods. A printout production schedule clipped to the door listed twenty-two separate drops of various sizes and materials for Crossroads.
Micah took a deep breath. “I’d like to get away with just one.”
Well, I thought that was pretty radical.
Sean’s office was the sort that began each day as neat as a pin and devolved into chaos by quitting time. Though it was only mid-morning, entropy had already taken its toll. The wide interior window that overlooked the shop floor was plastered solid with the Crossroads elevations also papering every bit of wall. Sean was on the phone, arguing with his lumber supplier in Singapore. I always kidded him about using the old black handsets like my parents had in Chicago, but telescreens broke down and cost you money, Sean said, and he had little need (and no desire) to see his dealers face-to-face. He tossed a wave as we came in and went on arguing.
The property master, Hickey Kirke, slouched over Sean’s huge drawing board. More Crossroads plans were spread out like the pawed-over goods in a market stall. Tall and dark and dour, Hickey was Sean’s antithesis. They didn’t socialize much, but balanced each other well in the workplace. I was always careful with Hickey, who struck me as painfully vulnerable.
“ ‘Lo, Hickey. What’s new?” I asked while Micah leafed absently through Eider’s drawings, waiting for Sean to dicker the dealer down to a price they could both live with.
Hickey shrugged, his long face solemn, then flicked me a guarded smile. “Not much. The Eye’s show props arrived via the Tubes, but I’m not allowed even to crack open the crates. Taboo, you know. Guess they’ll cut off my left ball or something.”
“Maybe just sacrifice your firstborn.” I deposited the model on a pile of printout and peered over Micah’s shoulder. Eider’s apprentices’ drafting didn’t look any better than mine, though the title-block labeling each plate was bordered with a complex egg-and-dart motif—much flashier than Micah ever wanted.
“Done,” Sean concluded. “I’ll need it Monday… Yeah, it’s friggin’ sudden! I get sudden drawings thrown at me every day now! Hey, up yours, Carlos, have I ever traded you bad credits? You just get it here. My order came in short last week… Yeah, sure, the Tubes swallow things, right… Hey, I’m on time more than most of your customers!… Fine. I look forward to it.”
Sean dropped the archaic phone into its cradle. “ ‘Will the money be there’…! Friggin’ jerk! After all the business I give him! That’s the trouble when your supplier’s not next door. You can’t just go over and threaten to beat the crap out of him.”
“When was the last time you beat the crap out of someone?” Hickey inquired, as if he really needed to know.
“Well, it always sounds like a good idea.” Sean shoved back his chair and stalked to his cooler. “Just about beer time, isn’t it?”
Micah continued his study of Eider’s excruciatingly elaborate ground plan. “What have you got?”
“What I’ve always got. Damn, Micah! You know I only stock one beer in here!”
“We can’t afford that imported swill you drink, Mi.” Hickey’s strangled little cough was his idea of a laugh. Sean was famously loyal to the local brand brewed in Harmony’s farm domes.
“You want one or not?” Sean demanded.
“Is it cold?”
“Jeez, Howie must be givin’ you some hard time, huh?” Sean put aside his irritation with the lumber dealer and opened four frosty beers. He passed two along to Hickey and me, then stood in front of Micah, holding the others and nodding expectantly at the shrouded model. “So how’s it going, fella? How’s the dragon thing?”
“Out for bids.” Micah ran his finger along the track of a magnetic winch drawn on the plan and clucked his tongue.
“Gwinn, get those friggin’ drawings away from him, will ya?”
I played the magician pulling the tablecloth from beneath the twelve-course dinner.
Micah took his beer. “Well, it’s not going to be what you’d expect from me.” At his signal, I slid the model out of its wrappings. It was a simple-looking construction in brown paper and cardboard, a little bent from the trip. I tweaked it back into shape. Micah came and stood over it. “I think it’ll end up as one set with a few minor changes and some special effects.”
“And a shitload of props,” predicted Hickey darkly.
“Most of which the Eye has brought with them.”
Sean stared at the little model. “C’mon, really? This is it?”
“The basic idea of it,” Micah drawled. Sean’s, genuine astonishment delighted him.
“No kidding.” Sean circled the table as if searching for hidden complications. “One-setter, eh? Jeez, like the old days.”
Micah wagged his head from side to side, at his most badgerlike. He could go from banter to dead serious so fast, most people got lost catching up. “Not quite like the old days, I hope. When I say special effects, I mean something quite out of the ordinary. Something that, in this innocent, untechnical environment that we create, will come as a complete surprise and blow their socks off.”
“I thought these guys came with their own magic,” said Hickey.
Sean said, “Hell, we can manage a little magic.”
“Have you read the play yet?” Micah asked.
“Sure. Well, most of it. Not my sort of thing, y’know?”
“Fine, but give it some real thought for a moment.”
“Yeah,” said Hickey. “Don’t just mouth off like some asshole.”
Sean tossed his empty bottle at Hickey’s head, then banked his grin to listen.
“The characters in this play believe that magic is real, remember that. Now, just before the climax, an Ancestor god dances with something called a ‘Matta,’ then delivers it to the clan elders to use in their ritual murder of the heretical clansman. They ‘wind it about him until he is no more.’ ” Micah seemed to be studying the inside of his beer bottle. “What I need you to do is make an actor, a live actor, disappear downstage center instantaneously and without using flashpots, smoke, or any of the recognizable decoy techniques.”
“Sure, I, well… it has to be a live actor?”
“Oh yes.”
Sean glanced at the wide-open downstage sweep of the model. “If you can move him upstage a little, I could—”
“No. It has to be right down there in the middle, so that the audience thinks it’s magic. Real magic. The whole piece is going to turn on it.”
I should explain something of Sean’s predicament: the smaller of the Ark’s two theatres was a modified arena: blunted wedges of seating framed three quarters of a circular stage that extended forward from the remaining 90 degrees. Broad ramps pushed the playing area in between the seating wedges so that the action could, in effect, surround the audience.
Downstage center meant out in the middle of God’s country, with skeptical viewers on three sides. Working with holos and lasers and smoke projections and the like as we usually did, we could make all sorts of stuff happen in this no-man’s-land. But to cause a living actor to vanish into thin air with no visible
effects was a very tall order down there. We hadn’t yet perfected matter transport.
Hickey handed Sean another beer. “Better give it some thought, eh?”
Sean said, “I better give it some thought.”
Micah nodded. “Let me know.”
“I will. You bet I will.” Sean took a great swig of beer. “Hey, you sure they couldn’t just do it with voodoo?”
RENEWAL:
It was very quiet in the studio when we got back.
“Someone painted in front of the theatre again,” I announced.
Crispin’s head snapped up from his screen. “Could you read it this time?”
“Yeah. It said, ‘Close the door.’ ”
There was a rustle at Jane’s desk as she slid from her stool and fled toward the conference room.
Micah and I blinked after her.
“She hasn’t been feeling too well,” I lied, and sped off in pursuit. I found her sitting pale and dry-eyed, her hands spread wide on the broad tabletop as if it might tip over and crush her.
“Jane, it’s only words…” The instant I put my arm around her, she collapsed sobbing to the table.
“Bela wasn’t at breakfast this morning, did you see?”
“No?” I’d slept in with Crispin before heading off to the Arkadie.
“He wasn’t renewed!” she blurted.
“What?” I dropped into the chair next to her. “But… I didn’t know he was up.”
Jane shook her head savagely. “Nobody did.”
“Not even Mark?”
“I don’t know. He’s… I just couldn’t talk to him.”
“Bela. Oh no.” That was how it went. If you said nothing to your friends, and you didn’t pass your review, one morning you just weren’t there anymore. They said Security spirited you out in the middle of the night and dropped you Outside your birth-dome. Perhaps if we’d had to watch our friends dragged away kicking and screaming, we wouldn’t have accepted the situation so readily, with mourning but without question. Domer children have been taught to accept in the name of survival what earlier eras would have called atrocity. I’d dream about failing review once in a while, and wake up in a cold sweat, boundlessly grateful to find myself in my narrow dorm bed instead of Outside Chicago. Yet it never occurred to me to ask, Is this necessary?
“Jesus. Poor Mark.”
“Poor Bela!”
“Jane, I know you’re up for review yourself soon, but…”
She collapsed again. “September,” she wailed, as if it were tomorrow. “I don’t understand it! Bela’s work was good. Marie needed him! Why didn’t they renew him? Why?”
I agreed it was odd that Bela hadn’t made the cut. People less talented than he made it all the time. This was going to make a lot of apprentices very nervous.
“Don’t worry,” I murmured uselessly. Jane was unlikely to be soothed by the usual reassurances, especially if delivered from my position of relative security. So I held her, deciding it would serve her best if I just let her weep.
ADVICE FROM THE MASTER:
No more was said in the studio about the graffito.
But when Jane had recovered sufficiently to go back to work, I invited Micah into the conference room to explain that because Jane was so worried about her own upcoming review, Bela’s failure had set off an attack of panic.
Micah looked at me oddly. “I didn’t know he was up.”
“Me neither. I don’t think Mark even knew.”
Micah smoothed wrinkles from his smock. He was pensive for long enough to make me glad Jane wasn’t there listening, then said, very delicately, “It might be of some help with Jane’s situation if she had encouragement from her peers to work more on her own outside the studio.”
The way he said “situation” chilled me, as if the word were a fragile eggshell placed on the table between us. “But she’s only got until September…”
“Wouldn’t hurt,” he continued, “for you and Cris to be thinking about it yourselves.”
“We are!” My surge of fright must have been visible in my eyes.
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
When the mayors of ten North American domes meet under Seattle’s dome next week to discuss the proposed affiliation that some have styled the reUnification of the States, topics are sure to include how such an organization would be financed, where its headquarters would reside, and what would be the legal responsibilities of each member.
We watch these overtures with mixed feelings. The smaller towns like Harmony have benefitted greatly from the total autonomy they have known for the past forty years. Would such an affiliation of city-domes presume to include the unEnclosed territory in between? What about other non-signatory domes which happen to lie within the affiliation’s geographical boundaries? Will the loosely symbiotic exchanges of goods and services devolve once more into a weapon of economic diplomacy?
Harmony Page 12
