Harmony Read online

  My first, relieved gulps of “proper” Inside air were an instant sense memory of my grandfather’s bedroom. My beloved grandfather: physically and spiritually broken by the horrors of the Dissolution, he hid himself away to spend every waking hour tending a scavenged zoo of houseplants. He groomed them, crooned to them, rotated them in turns into the light of his tiny window. I was allowed to visit but had to slip in quickly and shut the door, so that Grandpa’s precious “green air” did not escape. Because he told wonderful stories of Before, I forgave his obvious insanity. His generation often exhibited such damage. We kids knew that was the way things were.

  And now, an entire dome filled with Grandpa’s green air, moist and sweet and earthy. How could I help but fall in love with it?

  My tall companion drew me away from the Gate, still chattering. I was too bedazzled to answer. We faced a vast plaza, sun-drenched and warm. Outside it was March-gray. The pavement was an intricate floral swirl, yellow flowers chasing green and blue leaves across the square. Public eating places lined opposite sides, wide glass doors open to the square, umbrella-shaded tables spilling into the plaza like children’s toys. In Chicago, there might be a cafeteria every eight or ten blocks, but you really had to search for it. Here, the clatter of laughter and glassware was as gay as the flowerboxes trailing fuchsia and nasturtiums from the second-story terraces. Crowds strolled the square, plump with shopping bags, resplendent in bright, strange clothing. Men in ankle-length skirts or thigh-length shorts. Women in saris and kimonos. Clothing I’d seen only in pictures from Before and thought people didn’t wear anymore. The riot of color made my eyes brim and my fingers itch for pastel or crayon, as if it might be taken from me at any moment.

  Past the blue-tiled café roofs, steep hillsides rose frothed in green. The plaza could be easily defended from above if the Gates were breached (which had surely occurred in the early days: I’d been taught no doming was ever accomplished without violence). At the far end of the square, a half-dozen graceful tiled arches framed the domestic Tube station.

  I turned to my companion with a question, and promptly forgot it. Her black headcloth and veil had vanished. Her black robe had become a breathtaking blue. I stared, and her strong mahogany face glowed with mischief. The glass beads trimming her hundreds of tiny braids chimed and glittered as she laughed. “Now, child! How do I look?”

  “Oh! Incredible!”

  Her smile was ageless and dazzling. She was the most astonishing creature a poor innocent from Chicago could ever hope to meet on her first day in a new world.

  She snatched up my hand and pulled me deeper into the crowd, glancing about as if looking for someone. In the shade of a red and white café awning, she let the front of her blue robe fall open and peeled back her draping sleeves. Rows and rows of bracelets circled her arms. Necklaces layered her dark neck and looped around her waist, bright against the silky black of her undergarment. Hoops and chains of beaten brass and wood and pale white bone, strands of blue glass and threaded opalescent shells, pendants of carved pink stone and semiprecious jewels, loops of dyed fiber and painted wood. I’d never seen such jewelry in all my life.

  “Choose which you will have. For bringing me through the Gate.”

  Had I done that?

  She smiled at my puzzlement, that astonishing smile that made me stare again in wonder. “Quick, now. Choose. Before the Greens catch on to me. The merchants aren’t happy that the tourists prefer my wares to theirs.”

  But a child of Chicago has not been taught to make such choices. “You tell me.”

  She seemed surprised and obscurely pleased. Dancing high on her toes to be away, she didn’t just toss me an easy bauble from her visible store. Instead she searched an inner pocket, chittering and jangling with every move, and pulled out a length of braided leather, supple but plain. Three strands of subtly different browns strung with a single dark bead the size of a small walnut. The bead was faceted with tiny carvings. She circled my head with arms of sparkle and flash, and fastened her simple gift around my neck.

  The twined leather lay soft against my skin. I touched the bead as it nestled into the hollow of my throat. “Thank you.”

  “From Tuamatutetuamatu. Wear it honestly, child. There is power in it.” Her head snapped up. “Ah. Here they come.”

  I turned, saw nothing but the crowds streaming in from the Gate. I turned back and my stranger was gone.

  * * *

  I wore the necklace for a few days, then put it away and forgot it. Three years later, it became very important that I find it again, but on that day, I stood alone and dumbfounded as the tourists elbowed past, giggling none too privately at my provincial astonishment and plain provincial dress. There were no tourists in Chicago. How was I to know that in its dome-centered way, the world was getting back on its feet, that tube systems crossed continents and supersonic air transport was again available to anyone who could afford it? People were traveling, rich people mostly but more and more the not-so-rich, and Harmony’s Open Studio policy was world-renowned. Strolling a market square during visiting hours was a lesson in global sociology.

  But the greatest wonder of all, and the final irony, was that Harmony and its many farm and support-system domes—water and air, power and recycling—were all sustained through aggressive marketing of exactly what impoverished Chicago had forbidden: the Arts.

  Later that night, wide-eyed in my new bed in my new dormitory room, narrow as a coffin but totally mine, I fingered the carved bead at my throat and contemplated what it really means to have one’s mind boggled.

  But you needn’t hear every detail of my adjustment to the strange and giddy freedom of life in Harmony. It was earthshaking enough to me, but much the thing you’d read in any artist’s biography. The story that is special, the tale I must tell, begins three years later, after I’d survived the first hurdles of my apprenticeship, the easy first-year cut and the murderous second, when two thirds of each class was winnowed out, or more precisely, winnowed Out. My only competition in Chicago had been Chicago itself. In Harmony, I had artistic peers. The competition was stiff and my confidence sorely shaken. But I’d done well enough to be granted an unusual three-year renewal and was ready to relax a little, to believe again in the future I’d dreamed about, my future as an artist.

  My story is about that future and what became of it. It begins quietly, though I thought it an unpardonable interruption at the time. It begins early one sunny morning—early mornings in Harmony were always sunny—in the studio of Micah Cervantes.

  PHASE I

  Pre-Production

  HARMONET/ARTNEWS

  EVENTS ABOUT TOWN: 05/13/46—15:30

  WELCOME TO HARMONY. Visitors, please note: this listing for performance and special events only. For more detailed listings, press D and organization filename. For gallery information, press G and enter gallery name.

  AMADEUS

  Minot’s Hill Chamber Ensemble [MHCE]: Mozart, D. Scarlatti, Saunders, Verger. At the Village Odeon. 14:30, 20:00. Tickets available evening only.

  Greentree Mews [GTM]: Program of works by contemporary choreographers. 14:00. Some locations available.

  BARDCLYFFE

  Images [IMAG]: Works by Balanchine, Taylor, Walley, Takata. BardClyffe Village. 20:00 Tickets available.

  Theater in the Glade [TIG]: PHAEDRE, starring Lilian Shu. 14:30, 20:30. See ARTNEWS/COMMENT for reviews. Sold out.

  Galleria Finzi: The special exhibit, The Art of the Glassmaker, has been held over for another week.

  EDEN VILLAGE

  The Woodstock [WOOD]: RUE THE DAY, by Suzanne Pryor. Directed by Philly Krentzmuller. 14:30. Tickets available.

  The Archive [OLDFILM]: A BOY AND HIS DOG. 13:00, 15:30, 18:00.

  The Eden Philharmonic [EDEN]: Rachmaninov, Faure, Glidden. Maria Lewis Ricardo, conductor. 14:30.

  Museum of the Musical Instrument [MUSE]: Special exhibit of pre-Dissolution wind instruments. Some contemporaneous recordings. 12:00–17:00 Daily
.

  FETCHING GREEN

  Arkadie Repertory Theatre [ARK]: Theatre One: LES MISERABLES, with Will Egan and Miranda Pilar. 14:00, 19:30. Sold out.

  Theatre Two: BAGNA. 20:00 Tickets available at all prices.

  Harmony Rare Book Library [BOOK]: Daily by appointment only. Gift Shop open to the public, Daily 12:00–19:00. Special exhibit: The Marquez Legacy.

  FRANKLIN WELLS

  The Beat Street Theatre: Daily around the town. Keep your eyes and hears open!

  Interaction [INT]: Jazzabelle. 21:00. Some seats available.

  The Composer’s Group [TCG]: The Dingo Sonata.

  LORIEN

  Windermere Opera Society [WIND]: Presenting the Cardiff/Bath Interdome Opera production of DER ROSENKAVALIER. 19:00

  SILVERTREE

  Willow Street [WILLO]: SECRET LIVES, by James Carlisle. Directed by William Rand. 14:30, 20:00. Tickets available.

  UNDERHILL

  The RoundHall [HALL]: A MIDSUMMER NIGHTS DREAM. 19:00 or after dark. Tickets available.

  THE STUDIO:

  The studio was best in the early morning. In the mornings we got the real work done, before the rush of calls and visitors that followed the opening of the Public Gates at noon.

  Our little stone building was a twelve-minute hike from BardClyffe, the local village, up a narrow dogleg lane, away from the bustle of cafés and shops and galleries on the market square. The humble wooden gate was unmarked by the usual tourist signage. A magnificent copper beech stood just inside, its russet branches shrouding the gate in leaf-shadow. High stucco walls enclosed the cobbled yard, smothered in a chaos of untrimmed vegetation: honeysuckle, ice-white jasmine, vermilion trumpet vine, and purple clematis. Inside, fruit trees: orange and plum, peach and kiwi and vines of luscious grapes. Each day I came to work in a Garden of Eden, actually eating fruit right off the vine.

  One year, the Tourist Bureau had the master artists’ names leafed in gold on granite plaques, in honor of Harmony’s fortieth anniversary, and mounted them outside each studio gate. Micah made us take his down and still the world beat a path to our door, to his supposed irritation and chagrin. Later, I came to suspect that secretly he loved it. For if that many strangers were willing to work so hard to find him, he must be a very great artist indeed. Or well known, at least. Micah often worried this particular distinction into the wee small hours.

  On the off chance that the name means nothing to you, Micah Miguel Cervantes was a master scenographer. A profound conceptualist, a sculptor in space and light and time. An opera or ballet designed by him might sell out on his name alone. Mind you, I had never seen a live play before I came to Harmony, never sat in a theatre except to hear boring civic lectures. But Micah’s studio was where the computers deemed my skills most appropriate. I could have requested reassignment after a six-month trial. The thought never occurred to me. I was hooked from the beginning.

  But about those mornings. Mornings that turn in my mind like crystal in the wind—the early sun sinking soft as milk through the skylight, we apprentices bent like monks over our drawing tables, the Master puttering away in his corner. Micah refused to schedule meetings before noon, so with the tourists at bay and the phone off-line, those few peaceful hours were our sanity and the cornerstone of our productivity. We guarded them with near-religious fervor because they could be, from time to time, purely about making Art.

  Still, what’s sacred to one is sure to be profane to the next. And so, that crisp sun-flooded May morning, our precious monastic silence was disrupted a mere hour after we’d settled into it. It was only a knock at the door, but in that moment of pure peace, it was the worst kind of sacrilege.

  HOWIE:

  The evil rapping set Micah’s slippers whispering irritably across the slates. In his cavey recess, he shuttled from palette to work table to drawing board, like a chunky, white-frocked badger, humming absently and pretending not to hear.

  I glanced at Songh to my left, then past him to Jane, immobile at the cutting table. Both stared at me a little stupidly, their mouths dropped open the same half inch, and I wondered when they were going to learn to think for themselves. Songh Soonh was very young and new to the studio, and so had some excuse. But Jane Kessler was six full years my senior, what we called an “old” apprentice. Still, it was me who’d just been made First Assistant, and along with my very own key to the studio came the responsibility of providing a fully detailed code of studio behavior.

  The first rule was: sit tight, maybe whoever it is will go away. I frowned hopefully at the front door, grandly wide and dark against the white plaster walls. It was solid wood, preserved from some pre-Enclosure barn, and the long bank of windows facing the courtyard were too high to allow for any preliminary screening of visitors.

  The knocking continued.

  “Could be an emergency,” whispered Jane. She was tallish and worry-thin, with large eyes and a heart-shaped chin set at a watchful angle. She was always the first to jump to the direst conclusion.

  I sighed. “Micah, do I go?”

  “That Marin bunch is due after lunch,” the Master grumbled. “I have roughs to finish.”

  I slid off my stool. “I’ll tell them to come back at five.”

  “Authority Training 101,” intoned Crispin, rising like a swimmer from his numerical daze at far end of the room. The holographic miniature of the Marin site froze on a north/south axis over the computerized model stand. “The Polite-but-Firm Negative.”

  Crispin Fox was Second Assistant, in charge of programming, and the latest of the affairs I’d fallen into since I’d discovered I could both work and have a social life. Cris had that dark, wild-eyed beauty that turns heads on the street and looks promisingly “artistic.” When I was mad at him, I thought him bony and overbearing, but my status among our peers had improved perceptibly since he’d given me the nod. My own looks were more responsible and workmanlike, a source of some career anxiety to me in a Town where style was paramount, never mind the personal woe of wishing to be gorgeous enough to hold on to any man I wanted. I experimented mildly with the cut of my honey-colored hair and didn’t delve too deeply into why I’d hooked up with someone who often wasn’t very nice to me.

  Conscious always of Crispin’s judgmental eye, I made my stride to the door look purposeful. On the stoop stood Howie Marr, shifting about with genial impatience.

  “Oh,” I said, none too brightly. It was going to be hard sending this one away.

  “Morning, Gwinn. Know it’s early. Is Micah about?”

  Howie was producer and sometimes director at the Arkadie, fondly called the Ark, one of Harmony’s leading theatres. With his mop of red-gold curls stealing toward gray and his rich imposing voice, he was just what you’d want on the vid screen selling your product.

  “You know how he gets,” I warned. Howie was an old friend of Micah’s and nearly his contemporary, but his manner encouraged far greater familiarity, even from apprentices.

  “But this is me,” he grinned, and blew past me like a fair-weather gust, drawing the heady flower scent and bird-chatter of the courtyard through the door in his wake.

  Energy was Howie Marr’s specialty: boundless, indefatigable energy and the impression (his enemies would say illusion) of a fine intelligence properly leavened by keen commercial sensibilities. He and Micah had come along together in the business, colleagues since a youthful Howie had wrested the leadership of the Arkadie from the failing hands of its original founder, by means of an almost accidentally brilliant production-cum-pageant about the raising of Harmony’s dome. Absolute surefire patriotic material: right-thinking artist-pioneers throw down their pens and brushes and take up their laser assault rifles to save a stretch of wasted Vermont farmland and found a sanctuary for Art and the Intellect. That play may also have begun Micah’s reputation, though for that honor there are many more claimants and much dispute.

  Since then, Howie had achieved other more minor successes as a director, but his real triumph w
as the Arkadie itself, now thriving under his producerial hand.

  He swept down the narrow aisle between the desks, grasping Crispin’s quickly proffered hand, dispensing airy waves to Jane and Songh like some Eastern potentate. He breezed to a halt at Micah’s shoulder to peer at the work in progress as if already shopping for ideas. “How nice! Crusader castles for the terminally rich.”

  Micah never walked around the studio. His bagged-out slippers fell off if he took full-sized steps. But now his shuffle assumed a more stubborn weight. “Ah, Howard. You lost your watch?”

  “Couldn’t wait, Mi. This one’s too special. Always ask you first, you know.”

  “Send me the script.”

  Howie spread his arms without apology. “No script yet.”

  “Howard, you know the rules.” Micah bent over his sketch.

  “I’ll talk you through it.” Howie eased under the slanted overhang of stucco and beam that made Micah’s corner so reminiscent of a cave. No machinery lived there, no artists’ prosthetics. The computers and effects simulators were exiled to Crispin’s end of the room. Micah did all his roughs and sketches with brush, pen, or pencil. Prehistoric wall paintings would have been as much at home as the tracings and drawings that layered the rough plaster like molting feathers.

  Howie peered at a tattered watercolor, peeled back an edge to squint at a pencil sketch below. “The piece is written, Mi. Just haven’t got my hands on a clean copy yet. It’s not… well, it’s not exactly local.”

  Micah ended a delicate stroke that left his brush suspended like a baton. He frowned faintly at the sketch. “Not local?”

  Howie grinned like a happy shark.

  Crispin rolled his eyes disapprovingly and reactivated the Marin holo. Jane sighed, though of course not loudly enough to offer the appropriate public protest. Being an apprentice is often like seeing an accident about to happen while reluctant to cry out a warning, just in case it doesn’t.