Harmony Read online

  The same went for his sketches, which were very popular with the tourists. If you are skilled with the light pen and the airbrush (or in Micah’s case, with old-fashioned pencil and watercolor), you can attempt to represent the ephemeral: the vivid spear thrust of the laser lancing through a storm-dark stage house, or the glimmer of a hologrammed warrior rising through the mists of an ancient moor. The result might be beautiful—Micah’s always were. It might even be Art, but it will not be magic, the magic of illusion made real, of time halted, of history and fantasy brought to life as if in substance, living breathing three-dimensions, before your very eyes. This was the mystery that bound Micah Cervantes to the theatre forever. He called it his “lovely anarchy.”

  Micah had no children. We were his children, and those who came before and after us. He lived with Rosa Fein, the poet, who spent much of her time closeted in her workroom, or out on tour, doing readings and guest professorships. She would occasionally drop in for lunch at the studio, but with the long hours that Micah put in, we wondered when they ever saw each other. Still, the relationship had held through the years, perhaps as the only appropriate accommodation for two people who were neither hermits nor aesthetes, but who loved their work above all else.

  Shall I tell you more? That Micah loved animals, but would never allow one in the studio? That he would have worn nothing but white if we didn’t get after him? That he loved good food and good drink, and even better, a good argument? Or that there were things, beside Rosa and the music, that meant nearly as much to him as his work, such as integrity (his own as well as others’), the rich experience of collaboration, and above all, friendship.

  HOWIE’S RESEARCH: A LONDON DANCE CRITIC’S REVIEW

  Review/Dance

  EXOTIC MYSTERIES, SURPASSING SKILLS

  by Glynna Farquharson

  … Though their meaning and purpose remained obscure, there was no question about the passion and skill exhibited last night at the Aix Festival by an unusual dance theatre troupe called the Eye.

  This is a new (to us) company of remarkable performers whose combined skills offer a rich and original blend of music, movement, voice, and song. While their chosen idiom remains that of the small Pacific atoll where they are based, the three pieces on the evening programme (selections from a twelve-part work entitled Stations) were no slavish reproduction of traditional island dances. Here is potential for an exciting fusion of the old and the new, tantalizing but as yet unrealized, lacking only the textual coherence needed to guide an urban audience along the intended metaphorical journey.

  The opening piece, Mother Wind, was a series of interlocking duets and quartets for four performers who played their own haunting accompaniment on flutes and pipes as they danced. The choreography was both athletic and sinuous, full of spectacular leaps and catches but at its most expressive when borrowing from the movements of Nature. The graceful, trailing masks and cloaks of sky blue and white feathers here, as throughout much of the evening, disguised each dancer fully, so that it was often impossible to distinguish sex, age, or race. This reviewer considered scolding the management for neglecting to anywhere list the performers by name, but perhaps the Eye intends this further air of mystery, even to the point of concealing the size or makeup of their company.

  The middle work, Fish Sister, was stylistically ritualistic and though it employed the troupe’s dramatic gifts, was less successful. A mythlike story of impenetrable plot was danced to a chanted text including oddly juxtaposed quotations from nineteenth-century mystic H. D. Thoreau and the Bible, as well as less famous…”

  THE ASSISTANTS:

  Jane was quiet the rest of that day, even for Jane. I knew she was working up one of her major worries when, after an afternoon of Marin meetings plagued by unusually vocal tourist visitations, she dogged Crispin and me all the way back to the dorm.

  Cris showed his malicious streak. Knowing Jane avoided the perimeter, he led us the long way round, over the little stone bridge across East Avon Brook and up through the quaint warehouse maze that hugged the generator wall (not even in Harmony would anyone in his right mind build a residence within sight of the Outside). It was nearly six. The little street-cleaner robots were nosing up and down the paths like dogs on a scent. We’d soon be late for dinner at the dorm. But Jane stuck like glue. At the perimeter, while Crispin idly bounced pebbles off the force field, she turned her back and faced inward toward Town.

  “He’s going to take that show of Mr. Marr’s, I know he is.”

  “The Marin thing might push him into it.” I wanted to ask about Tuatua, but I thought I’d exposed enough ignorance for one day.

  “I like Marin,” Cris announced.

  “Sure, it’s a programmer’s dream. But Micah’s so bored with sleeping princesses and rune swords, he’s open to the mere whiff of something unusual.”

  “Hope springs eternal,” Crispin sniffed.

  “Micah’s as vulnerable to hope as any of us.” I considered how much hope I’d expended on Crispin early on, then stood with Jane to take in the view. After three years, this verdant beauty still stunned me with gratitude and joy.

  The Vermont hamlet that Enclosed as Harmony was nestled in a giant natural bowl in the Green Mountains. Her Founders built their field-generator wall around the rim, enclosing rich farmland and a deep, spring-fed lake. They dammed up the outflow, built their Gate in the drained riverbed, their service domes in the fluvial valley beyond, and hid all of the residence dome’s working systems—climate, power, water, and waste—beneath terraced and planted hillsides. From the heights along the rim, the entire five-kilometer spread of the dome opened before us like one of Crispin’s holo models. Tree-softened hills, quartered by artificial mountain streams falling from the four points of the compass, embraced eight villages, then rolled down to a flattened center where the glassy twin spires of Town Hall, Harmony’s only high rise, rose out of the dark green of Founders’ Park. At their feet, an oval lake shot back ripples of artificial amber dusk.

  Older citizens, especially the surviving Founders, complained that by swelling over the years to fifty thousand inhabitants, Harmony had lost its rural atmosphere. But I was sure it was the most beautiful place on Earth, even though I’d seen only one other. Chicago had sacrificed all its parks to housing construction. Harmony seemed like one big park. Even the bright domesticity of its low-slung architecture soothed and pleased. In Chicago the air reconditioners often malfunctioned. Here the air was always fresh and sweet, my grandpa’s “green air.”

  “Wonderful, isn’t it?” I murmured. A mild jasmine-scented breeze ruffled my hair, and in the upmost arc of the dome a puffy gathering of cloud promised an evening shower. Harmony’s wild-programmed climate offered the treat of unscheduled “weather.”

  “Actors’ Collective in Underhill’s interviewing for designers,” Crispin called from the wall. “Saw it in Micah’s e-mail this morning.”

  I left Jane to her worries. “You think we’re really ready?”

  “Hey, get the job, then worry.” Cris draped an arm across my shoulders. “They’re real loose over in Underhill, all those weavers and potters, what do they know? I say you’re ready as you want to be. You’re a First now, Gwinn. You should be getting your stuff out there.” He squeezed me briefly. “But you don’t want, I won’t send your file over with mine.”

  “Let me think about it.”

  “Yeah, sure.” His arm slipped away, to resume tossing stones with slow, sinuous arcs of his arms, like a dancer checking position at the mirrors. Crispin’s mirrors were in his head.

  Each time I came to the perimeter, I promised myself not to stare, and found my eye caught anyway. Because Harmony’s art-export business thrived and because she was a tourist mecca full of successful artists able to shoulder a huge tax load, her field technology was state-of-the-art. The quality of light Inside was said to be more “natural” but more to the point, the Outside was clearly visible through Harmony’s dome.

  From
the generator wall, the land fell away into a dry-bottomed moat. It rose again a half kilometer beyond in abrupt slopes of gray rock and scrub. Further off, mountains loomed. Their scrubby spring growth was spiked with burned-out evergreen and the tall, fortified towers that enclosed the dome’s exhaust vents. The Gate and shuttle port were on the opposite side of the dome, but the dozen hemispheres of the farm domes were visible off to the left, and beyond them, Power and Recycling, glinting through the haze.

  Huddled against the exterior of the Wall, the Outsider bidonvilles shared the meager shelter of the moat: clusters of junk-built huts wreathed with the constant smoke of trash fires, teeming with Outsider families bent on the drear business of survival. I’d have found the same had I ventured outside Chicago (unthinkable) or any dome, anywhere in the world.

  They rarely looked up, the Outsiders. Even seeing them in detail—a man’s twisted leg, the missing buttons on a woman’s jacket replaced by filthy twine, or a child with matchstick limbs picking invisible grains of food out of the dust—even then I distanced myself out of long habit. Unknowingly, the Outsiders encouraged the distance by refusing to acknowledge the apprentice princes and princesses gaping at them from the battlements of the fairy castle.

  It never occurred to me there might be injustice in the fact that they were Out and I was In. I was dome-born, they were not. Outsiders deserved to be Outside, because of criminal acts or mutant inferiority. The way I’d deserve it, if I couldn’t measure up in Harmony.

  Now, Cris in his rich-boy confidence might mock Jane’s avoidance of the Wall, but I understood it. Of the few thousand apprentices admitted each year, only a few hundred could expect to be in Harmony ten years later. Each visit to the perimeter, each glance Outside was a reminder you shouldn’t get cocky. Until you’re proven talented enough to win your citizenship, you’re living on borrowed time.

  “You change your mind about Underhill, let me know.” Cris shook his black hair free of the red bandanna, worn piratelike when working his precious machinery. I knew I had disappointed him. He thought I lacked ambition. Sometimes I thought he was right.

  Cris had arrived in Micah’s studio the year before, knowing exactly where he was going and what he wanted to do. I made him an object of study, thinking a mere hint of insecurity might render him less intimidating. I envied that damnable confidence. Perhaps I hoped a little of it would rub off on me.

  But confident is not the same as mature. Cris pivoted away, waving his bandanna like a flag, shedding his studio persona, the one where he posed as a responsible adult. “Tuatua! UnEnclosed! Magic and taboos! Damn, I can’t wait to meet these guys!”

  I said carefully, “I met a Tuatuan once. I think.”

  “Sure you did.”

  “Really, I think I did. At the Gate, the day I got here.”

  Cris knotted his scarf around his neck. “You think they just run around the world at large?”

  “Why not?”

  “Jeez, they’re practically Outsiders! What dome’s gonna let the likes of them in, except as a special event?” He danced away gleefully. “Damn! It’s dynamic!”

  I followed more decorously. After all, my stranger hadn’t claimed she was Tuatuan, only the necklace. And maybe I didn’t even have that part right.

  “Why does Micah always do this to us?” Jane tore at the flowers in the hedgerow, then gazed in guilty horror at her handful of shreds.

  “First he does it to himself, and then he does it to us.”

  Jane tossed the broken petals under the treads of an oncoming cleanerbot and sidestepped it quickly. Destroying plant life was a serious crime in Harmony. Even the unfrequented warehouse district was planted within an inch of its life. All that lush greenery was the real secret of the sweet air under Harmony’s dome.

  “We’ll manage,” I continued. “We always do.” Micah had assured me that studio morale was part of the First Assistant’s job. “He’ll only take the show if it really excites him, and that’s when it’s the best, not like Marin.”

  “But what if it’s too weird?”

  Cris hooted. “That could make Howie a hero. Champagne and celebrations! Vine leaves in his hair! His trustees will give him a plaque.” He vaulted onto the low stone wall bordering the lane. “Mothers and fathers of Harmony! Art took a great leap forward tonight, as our box office records will reflect…!”

  Ahead, a brace of camera-laden ladies in the bright new clothes of day-pass tourists had strayed from the beaten path. Racing to clear the Gates before Closing, they halted to consult their faxmap, the flimsy kind from the public newsboxes, just about the only thing you could get for free in Harmony. One of them snapped a few quick ones of the raven-haired scarecrow declaiming from a public wall. Our blue apprentice coveralls marked us with mysterious privilege.

  “But if he really offends them…” Jane pursued.

  “He meant excite, not offend,” I said.

  “… the Town Council might…”

  “Make him mayor?” Cris waved his arms, tottering on the wall. “Jeez, Jane, we’re’ talking Tuatua here! Major fame! Major life adventure! I’ve wanted to go there ever since I heard about it!”

  “Then go! We don’t need them coming here!”

  I’m slow sometimes when it comes to people, but finally the real source of Jane’s worry came clear to me. Her apprenticeship renewal came up for review in September, just after Howie’s “revolution in style” was due to open. I glared at Cris to back off.

  There was a nasty little mind game we apprentices played among ourselves, where each would speculate on their chance of survival if put Outside. Crispin had an endless appetite for this game. He was sure he’d survive. “Intelligence is survival,” he’d proclaim. “I’d go off into the Badlands with my gang. I’d found my own colony! Wouldn’t catch me taking charity in some domeside slum!”

  I was less certain of success and, lacking Crispin’s rich and powerful father, less assured that I’d never have to play the game for real.

  Jane was from Providence, one of the strict Calvinist communities in what used to be Switzerland. I’d heard it mocked in Harmony as a god-dome. Like me, she had sacrificed her citizenship to come to Harmony. Often I wondered why. Only her obsessive dedication to the hands-on craft of design gave any inkling. Jane refused to play the Survival Game at all. Concerned about causing offense if she actually voiced her loathing, she’d go cold silent if the subject even came up. Cris said she was more of a drag on our fun than if she simply left the room.

  “Audiences like a little adventure,” I assured her. “Besides, even if Howie went too far, no one would blame you.”

  What “too far” might be, I wasn’t sure. I’d seen some pretty outrageous performances during my time in Harmony, though admittedly not at the Arkadie. “Nobody blamed the designer’s apprentice for the twelve nudes painting each other last season at Interaction. They didn’t even blame the designer.”

  “Should have blamed somebody,” Cris put in.

  “Jane, if Howie flops, it’s not going to affect your review.”

  She flinched at my comforting touch, then accepted it with schooled tolerance. She was so tense and thin, as if there was no skin softening the bones beneath the blouse of her coverall. “If the Council censored Micah, it could.”

  “Oh, Jane,” Crispin scoffed, “this is Art. That’s Politics!”

  “The Town Council’s authority is civil, not artistic,” I reminded her. “No one legislates aesthetics in Harmony.”

  “Except the gallery owners,” murmured Cris.

  But Jane was in her terrier mode. “If Howie got them mad enough, they might decide Micah doesn’t deserve four apprentices.” Her arms rose and fell in suppressed panic. “Oh, I wish I were Songh!”

  Crispin’s laugh got an edge to it. “You want to be SecondGen? So you could run home to Mommy and Daddy every night?”

  “Like you could if they threw you Out?”

  “That’s not true!”

  Jane’s
eyes raked him unbelievingly, then slid away. “At least if I were SecondGen, I wouldn’t have to worry all the time!”

  Around the curve, the sprawling three-story brick and timber bulk of our dormitory appeared from among its surrounding oaks. The BardClyffe dorm was one of the smaller ones, housing only three hundred apprentices. The exterior was modeled on ancient university residence halls like the few surviving in the Oxford dome. Inside, it was a rabbit warren. I didn’t want Jane storming in there in one of her hysterias. I had to stop and grab her for a little shake. “No one’s going to throw you Out! You know Micah couldn’t do without you. You’re carrying your weight just fine!”

  But even as I said it, I wondered.

  We left Jane at the dining room door, while Crispin deciphered the menu. Most domers’d be content with nice, legible computer readout. In Harmony, it had to be hand-lettered, in calligraphic pen and ink. I wouldn’t be surprised if they’d used a goose quill.

  “Too healthy,” Cris announced, groping me there in the hall like some dirty old man. Fool that I was, I loved it. I thought that’s what sex was all about. “Your palace or mine, princess?”

  “Mine.” It hardly mattered. All our rooms were the same. But I had sudden interest in searching up that piece of jewelry I’d stashed away three years ago and forgotten about, until now.

  * * *

  Bedtime with Crispin was athletic and speedy, as if pleasure was just another thing to be accomplished. For me, it rarely was. We never talked feelings afterward, we talked careers. His career, mostly, though occasionally we’d spend time trashing other people’s, those Crispin saw as his particular rivals.

  “You think Jane’s got reason to worry?” I mused between rounds. I’d found the braided necklace and fastened it around my neck. “That could have come from anywhere,” he’d said.