“What did you say to them?” Micah asked.
Mali relaxed with a modest grin. “Only what they wanted to hear.”
“Please. Enlighten us.”
Mali’s voice softened to an unctuous purr. “Oh, kindest madam, I do so deeply regret this disturbance to your recreation, but I have the inestimable high honor to be First Aide to the Chief Protocol Officer for His Extremely Exalted Magnificence, the Prince of Cairo. I must ask you all to leave, so that His Magnificence might grace Master Cervantes with a royal visit.”
Cris and I broke up. Jane looked bewildered.
“And how was His Magnificence to get in, with that mob in the courtyard?” asked Micah dryly.
“Arab princes always use the back door,” Mali replied.
“Ah, but there isn’t one.”
“Ah, but do they know that?”
Micah chuckled at last. “Shameless.”
“Effective.” Mali smiled with him, then eased away from the door. “And so. How are you coming with the changes?”
Micah’s smile cooled. “Coming along.”
“I thought it might be that, when there was no word in rehearsal.”
I hadn’t noticed before how tired Micah looked. Not just tired, wrung out.
Mali stooped under the slanting eave of Micah’s corner, hands shoved into his pockets. He studied Micah’s face rather than the drawings on the board. “I might offer some assistance.”
The only thing Micah hated more than tourists telling him how to design his shows was hearing it from the actors. But true admiration can overcome such prejudices. He settled back on his stool. “Please. Tell me your idea.”
Mali laughed softly. He picked up the carved bead from Micah’s worktable, dusted it off on his pants, and held it between both palms as if warming it. “No idea, Master Cervantes. I am not so bold. An observation merely. It’s all in the seeing, isn’t it? How you are seeing these new things he requires?”
Micah rubbed the bridge of his nose. “Go on.”
Mali put the bead back where he’d found it, then pulled up a stray stool, and straddled it, bringing his eyes to level with Micah’s. “Seeing. If you are seeing Howie’s new demands as objects, you naturally feel they’ll be out of place in an environment of ideas. But if you could see them as ideas, well, then their natures could be moulded to your needs.”
Micah sighed. “Would that reality were so ephemeral.”
“Mine is.” The Tuatuan grinned with sudden mischief. “It is… Mali-able.”
This was either truly profound or total bullshit. I was unsure for which to cast my vote. I looked to Cris. His straight back imitated Mali’s, his mask of sophistication was set aside. He was transfixed.
“If you’ll permit me,” said Micah, somewhat stiffly. “Beyond its philosophical nature, an object’s reality is not so, ah, maliable when it must exist in three dimensions in an actor’s hands.”
“Then its nature must be determined before it is real. While it still exists in the realm of ideas.”
“Sophistry!” Micah growled. “The problem is having to change the idea in order to accommodate the new object.” He turned for proof to the confusion on his drawing board. There, something caught his eye. He fingered the frayed corner of a tissue overlay, then snatched it aside, and balled it up violently. He pressed it between both hands, staring down at the board.
“Aha,” said Mali quietly.
“Maybe.” Micah was as stubborn and irritable as ever a badger could be. He tore two more layers free of their tape, balled them up with the first, and tossed the crumpled wad onto his worktable. He laid a fresh sheet of tracing paper over his sketch, lowered himself heavily onto his stool, and braced his head in his hands. “Just maybe…”
Mali sat back. He nodded two or three times, a motion faintly more than breathing, then glanced across at our astonished faces. He shrugged negligently and ambled over. “The rest of you take the day off.”
His audacity made me laugh. “Actually, we already had it off.”
“Take it again. Leave the man to his muse.”
Delivered ever so lightly, it carried the weight of an order. And we were too in awe to refuse him anything.
“You are a magician,” breathed Cris.
“No, that’s Sam. I’m Mali.”
“He knows that,” I said.
“Then he knows more of me than I of him.”
I ticked off our names and we shook hands all around.
“So, Jane and Cris and Gwinn: where do you get lunch in this Birdy Cliff?”
Cris and I cheered simultaneously, “The Brim!”
MALI:
He might have been the Pied Piper, the way we trouped after him so willingly. I feared we’d find the courtyard jammed with tourists awaiting a glimpse of His Magnificence of Cairo, but their chatter had long ago faded down the lane.
“Better lock it,” Mali advised outside the gate.
“Micah doesn’t like that,” said Jane before she could stop herself.
Mali studied a red lizard clinging to the stucco. When he touched an inquiring fingertip to its triangular head, it did not bolt. “You want to help him over the hump or not?”
I locked the gate and pocketed my key with ceremony. “Don’t know why we don’t do it more often.”
Cris placed himself at Mali’s side. “Boy, you sure got Micah going again!”
Mali trailed a long arm through the foliage overhead, blue-green and glossy as silk. “Easy. He only needed reminding that the solution was already within him. While you all sat about with glum faces as if there wasn’t one.”
“Glum, huh? I guess we were.” Cris attempted to match the Tuatuan’s gangling stride.
“Yah. I saw you.”
I prevaricated. “Changes are usually real easy for Micah—”
“In a familiar landscape, sure. Harder in foreign territory.”
“It’s not just the culture, your culture,” added Cris. “This kind of design is… foreign for him, too.”
“I know that.” Mali halted at the top of a long flight of shallow whitewashed steps overhung with hibiscus, vermilion, and fuchsia against the earth brown of his ringleted hair. With an actor’s sixth sense, he consistently placed himself in contrast with his surroundings. “But you—you just stand at the border of the known and wring your hands?” He frowned at us paternally. “Venture out there with him! Support his courage with your minds as well as with your skills!”
“Yessir,” mumbled Cris.
“Micah’d never ask us for help with an idea,” I said.
“He’s too proud to ask us,” Jane seconded.
Mali started down the steps. “Are you sure you’ve been listening?”
We slouched after him, sunk in self-pity, while Mali admired the blooming hedges and nodded cheerfully to passing tourists who looked askance at his worn clothing and his bare feet. Finally Cris asked disconsolately, “You still want that lunch?”
Mali returned a surprised glance, then laughed, and clapped him hard on the back. “No one ever scold you before, bro? Well, I don’t live here under this dome, so I don’t have to spoil you like you’re used to. You give me those anything-you-say dog-eyes, you got to be ready to hear it when it comes, hah?”
Crispin’s mouth tightened. “I suppose.”
“Of course I want lunch. Who the hell wouldn’t want lunch? Maybe some overfed boss man wouldn’t want lunch, maybe some fat-cat producer.”
Cris could not hold on to his sulk. “Reede Chamberlaine—”
“… wouldn’t want lunch. But me—”
“We—”
“We want lunch,” I chimed in, unable to resist the sudden lilt in Mali’s step and the jaunty rise of his chin.
“We want lunch!” we chanted as we clattered down the stairs. The tourists stared. Mali tipped an invisible hat. Jane lagged behind, disclaiming us. I averted my eyes, both embarrassed and delighted by our raucous, childlike behavior. If challenged, I’d have pointed to Ma
li. It’s him, I’d say. He’s magic. He made me act this way.
By the time we got Mali up the narrow stairs at the Brim, Crispin’s spirits had buoyed and Mali had sobered. A young man in evening clothes stopped us at the door to the main salon.
“Excuse us,” I said, “we’re just heading for the terrace.”
“The terrace is full.”
Our favorite table was often occupied since Gitanne had redecorated. Her landlord, one of the local galleries, had raised her rent. She’d been obliged to put in a fancy sign at street level to encourage tourists to discover the backwater pleasures of the Brim. Mali hummed a little song to himself as we struggled with the realization that the Brim now had a maître d’.
“We don’t mind sitting in the rain,” said Cris suddenly.
The young man turned. A surprise shower was emptying the outer terrace. The kid was new to his job. He couldn’t think what else to do but let us by.
Mali eased among the crowded tables with quiet dignity. I followed, thinking how right he’d been about Cris. Cris hadn’t been scolded much in his life. Not by his parents. Certainly not by Micah, whose idea of scolding was to let slip a dry remark or two and expect the offender to make the adjustment on his own. But this required understanding what you’d done wrong in the first place. Reading Micah was not always as easy as Mali had made it seem.
The rain stopped as we squeezed into a small table along the wrought-iron railing. “That’s better,” said Mali.
Jane squinted up at the high golden arch of dome. I found myself trying to imagine the heat and the summer stink of the slums Outside. Mali leaned over the rail to study the teeming crafts stalls in the market square. Windows and doors were open along the surrounding gallery arcade. Paintings sat outside on easels or propped against the walls, big lush landscape oils framed in gilt and picturesque rural scenes painted last month of a world that hadn’t existed for a century. Below, a street musician doled out Gershwin on the violin. No synth players on the paths of BardClyffe. You had to go over to Amadeus for that.
At the far end of the square, a plastic bubble swelled like a giant blue growth over Francotel’s construction site. Fine white dust dried in droplets on the table and dulled the broad leaves in the terrace flowerboxes.
Mali sighed. “Just one big marketplace.”
“Oh no,” Jane countered softly. “We have all sorts of beautiful homes and museums and parks—”
“Parks you can’t use,” he retorted.
“Parks you can’t sleep in,” Cris amended recklessly.
“Yah.” Mali turned away from the rail as if something smelled bad. We glanced at each other, uneasy and self-conscious.
Gitanne, with the unerring herd instinct of performers, wheeled over to welcome him with iced cappuccino on the house. Mali covered his sourness with a winning grin, and the two of them went to work charming one another, dropping the names of touring houses and sympathetic restaurants around the world. “Bring the others in soon!” she bade him when she was called away to the kitchen.
Mali slouched back in his chair. He nodded at the bright trellised vines, the white tile, and bleached wooden furniture. “Sure, I will. Not bad here, as the Inside goes.”
We grinned foolishly, delighted that our place, our Brim, had won his seal of approval.
“In Fetching,” I pointed out, “Gitanne couldn’t afford to be so generous to the likes of us.”
“Us?” he asked.
“Apprentices.”
“Ah.” He nodded. “Apprentices and other second-class citizens.”
“Fetching,” said Cris, “is real high-rent.”
“Unlike the rest of Harmony?” Mali laughed his bitter, open laugh. “Under this lid, bro, the very air smells like money.”
One of Gitanne’s ThirdGen granddaughters popped up to take our orders. Mali disappointed us by choosing a prosaic cheese sandwich and a beer. I’d half hoped he’d exhibit his alienness by demanding something not on the menu.
“So,” Cris ventured at last, “tell us about Tuatua.”
“What’s to tell about a little place so far away?”
I flew eagerly in the face of his gentle mockery. “Everything!”
“We’ve been studying it.” Cris got more boyish by the minute. “Ever since we knew you were coming.”
“Then you know all there is to know, young bro.”
Cris frowned. This was not going according to his plans and fantasies. Since I couldn’t imagine what interest the Eye would have in me, I’d kept my own fantasies safely limited. An opportunity to socialize was an unexpected bonus.
“Please tell us,” begged Jane suddenly.
Mali turned his complex stare on her. Even then, he was gentler with Jane than with the rest of us. “What is it you really want to know?”
She went tongue-tied, twisting her hands.
“How do you live without a dome?” I asked, for her sake.
“Is the air really that clean?” asked Cris.
“Wouldn’t life be easier with a dome?”
Jane found her voice, barely. “How do you keep Outsiders away?”
When our onslaught had subsided and we hung on his word like eager students, Mali said, “Children, listen to me. The only dome Tuamatutetuamatu needs is the one great dome of the sky.”
We gazed at him nervously.
“Yes, I know. Such talk caused riots in Stockholm. But if you’ve studied up on Tuatua, surely it’s no surprise. Can you not imagine that some in this world do not want to be Enclosed?”
Jane shook her head. “You must keep safe from the Outside!”
Mali smiled. “But we are Outside.”
“No!” Jane rasped.
“What do you know of the Outside? Firsthand, I mean.”
“I was Outside when I came here. The air was poison.”
“Plenty people out there breathing it.”
“Outsiders.”
Mali didn’t answer immediately. Then he sighed, as if starting something he must but hadn’t wanted to. “The air Outside is neglected. The water is sick, the land diseased. The earth needs our care. Instead we put all our best science magic into carving it up and shutting the best of it away in little boxes.”
“Conservation of resources,” said Cris.
“Quarantine,” said Jane.
Mali frowned. “I just got out of quarantine. Nearly went mad in there. Tuamatutetuamatu lives while we care for her. I would not for my life put her in a box just to make my task easier.”
“How do you care for her?” I asked.
“We walk the Stations.”
Not one of us was ready to touch that yet.
“The Open Sky people say the domes should come down everywhere,” challenged Cris. “Is that what you think?”
“I think we should not use walls to avoid our larger responsibilities.”
“We do it to survive,” I said.
“Outsiders survive,” Mali reiterated.
“I mean, long enough to fulfill that larger responsibility. Outside, you can’t do anything but survive.”
“And do you also believe that it rains sulfuric acid out there, and every child is born with two heads?”
Jane’s stare was glassy. She stopped asking questions.
Mali eased off his accusatory tone and hooked his arms over the back of his chair. “Look, it has to be someone’s job to remind us that walls and boxes and lids are not the natural order of things.”
“Your job?” Cris ventured.
“My job is the telling of the tale.”
“What tale?”
“The tale of the life of Tuamatutetuamatu and how to save it.”
“How do the planters fit into your tale?” Cris pursued.
“The ignorant shall learn, the misled shall be redirected.”
“But what if they win? The money and guns are on their side.”
Mali’s lids flicked like bird wings. “Were I gifted with the spirit vision, I would answer you. But my
gift is another.”
“What is your gift?”
“As I said, the telling of the tale. Proclaiming the true story of the present to those who will create the future.”
Cris had a vise grip on the edge of the table. “Like the Conch?”
I noticed Mali’s fractional hesitation only because I was listening so hard.
“How do you mean?” he asked softly.
“That it’s the revolutionaries who create the future. Your domeless future for Tuatua.”
Mali relaxed. “I see your studies taught you something, after all.”
Cris flushed. He copied Mali’s lean into the table. “Have you ever seen him?”
Mali wagged his head slowly, not quite a negative. “I have been where Latooea has been, I have heard Latooea’s voice.” His words rolled out hushed and sober, like a litany, like prayer.
Cris wanted more. “But if you’ve never seen him, how do you know he exists? Maybe he really is only a myth.”
“Only a myth?” Mali sat up very straight. “Do you think a myth cannot walk? Or that magic lives bodily like you or me?”
The waitress arrived, her tray piled high with sandwiches of thick brown bread. We drew back from the table, suspended in silence while she doled out the plates. Mali snatched his beer out of her hand and downed a long, cold swallow before setting it down with a grunt of satisfaction.
To Cris he said, “You want what I cannot give you, young Crispin. You want proof. But that’s because your only stake in Latooea is a boy’s romantic notions.”
“No, I—”
“Yah, you are drawn by the legend, not the cause. Were you Tuatuan, your need would create faith enough.”
I’d have hung my head. Not Crispin. “Then you don’t believe the Conch fled Tuatua? A walking myth wouldn’t need to run away.”
“Left, they said. Not run away.” I fingered the carved bead hidden in my pocket.
Mali read the label on his beer bottle with interest. “If Latooea has retired from the battle, I must believe it was for good reason, to return when it’s time to take up the fight again.”
“No point in being a martyr,” I offered. “If he is a real person, that is.”
“Martyrs are useful only when a cause is already lost,” he agreed. “But see, here we are, neglecting this fine lunch.”
Harmony Page 20
