Harmony Page 6

  “Coffee plantations. Also tea and banana, some rubber, pineapple and avocado, papaya and cardamom. The climate is ideal for agriculture, and the ground remarkably fertile.”

  In the brighter light of the open fields, Sean reached for and opened a beer. “But no good eating it, growing out there like that.”

  Micah sectioned an apple into eighths. “We might be eating it now, if they’re exporting what they grow.”

  Sean frowned at his plate. “We wouldn’t import Outside fruit.”

  “It’s not Outside, officially.”

  “I don’t care what those scientists say, the sea ain’t gonna keep out the airborne crap. It was the whole system broke down. You believe the Pacific could get clean out there all of a sudden?”

  “I live in hope,” said Micah mildly. “They do appear to be managing marvelously well without a dome.”

  “Voodoo,” I suggested. “Isn’t that what the legends say?”

  “Yeah, right,” Sean snorted.

  Songh giggled, and I grinned at him. “You probably believe there is such a thing.”

  “The local tribes don’t call it voodoo,” said Crispin. “They say it’s the power of the Ancestors.” He fingered the keypad, and around us the neat plantations flared into the glaring, bustling streets of a city, tall and white. Squinting into the Pacific sun, Cris resumed his lecture voice: “But maybe their power’s not working so well anymore, because the big news about Tuamatutetuamatu, besides gourmet coffee and pineapples, is that there’s practically a civil war over whether or not to Enclose.” He glanced at Jane and flapped his eyebrows wickedly. “Oh-oh. Politics…”

  Sean nodded. “Yah, well, there’s always someone thinks they’re against a doming, but they get used to the idea soon enough.”

  “This debate’s gone on for twelve years,” said Cris.

  “Why dome now,” I asked, “if they’ve been okay without one?”

  “The pro-domers claim being undomed isolates them from the world community. They say—”

  “I don’t think we need to go into the sociology right now,” said Micah. “You can print it out for me later.”

  “There’s just this last,” Cris insisted, and we were perched on a parapet, looking across at steep hillsides encrusted with lavish single-family estates. Gardens, pools, the heart-stopping works.

  Sean let out an admiring whistle. “Somebody’s done all right by themselves on this little rock.”

  “Somebody sure has. Descendants of settlers from Before. Tuatua’s new entrepreneurs. But I’m not supposed to bore you with that.” Cris shoved his keypad aside. The white room re-formed around us.

  Micah ignored Crispin’s sulk. “Thank you. Excellent work on such short notice.”

  It was. Cris had exploited a minor research project into an affecting design exercise. I was only mildly jealous.

  “You didn’t show us any Tuatuans,” I complained.

  “Oh, right.” An array of flat pix flashed up on our one blank wall. Dark faces, naked bodies, flowers and feathers, and a child with a braided necklace strung with a large carved bead. I shot Cris a look and sat back satisfied. He killed the pix and tucked into his lunch without comment. Cris hated being proved wrong.

  Sean drained his beer. “So what’s this play about?”

  “Misunderstanding and betrayal, Howie says. Among other things.”

  “Sounds right, for Howie.” Sean rocked back in his chair with a deep, and deliberate belch. “You gonna do it, Mi? Be good to have you back in my shop. Take the show. I’ll put the beer on ice.”

  “I told Howard I’d read it and let him know.”

  Sean laughed, shaking his head. “C’mon, you’re gonna do it. Tuatua! How can you resist? Now, if we stay together on it, we might just keep the Howie beast under control. You got all my best, you know that. When d’you think you can get me drawings?”

  “I haven’t said I’d do it.”

  “Sure, Mi, I know.” Sean grinned at him. “So when can you get me drawings?”

  * * *

  That afternoon, Howie faxed over the script. We all clamored so loudly that Micah had Songh make up four copies and sent us home to read it. Jane was still working on the castle revolve for Deo Gratias at the Paris Opera. It wasn’t due for another month, but she was convinced that Songh should stay to help her finish it. Songh pressed his bundle of still-warm pages to his chest and jittered like a six-year-old until Micah shooed all four of us into the courtyard. We ran off whooping and laughing, just as a clutch of black-veiled Arab women arrived at the gate for open studio hours.

  I slowed, listening for the music of metal and glass beneath the dark flowing robes. But these women were short and wide and moved like toadstools. I felt only vaguely guilty that we’d left Micah to deal with them alone.

  CRISPIN’S RESEARCH: A LETTER AT RANDOM

  April 2, 1957

  Dear Father Wilhelm,

  Please forgive the several-months gap since our last report. The materials for the school finally arrived, and we have been beside ourselves gathering manageable work crews and organizing the building in weather that does not always suit our habits of work.

  And time, I fear, has somewhat dampened the euphoria that possessed us upon our arrival. You must not think that we are disheartened, but so often the things that one expects should be easy turn out to be the hardest to accomplish.

  For instance, the issue of agriculture. Though the ground is prodigiously fertile, the native diet is sadly limited and starchy. Though they do not complain, they cannot be expected to know any better. I felt from the first that we must put serious effort into improving nutrition if we want the human ground to be equally fertile to our Mission here.

  Well, Father, I promise you we did our best to introduce some of the excellent European varieties we brought with us, such as the improved legumes and grains, and resistant vegetable strains, ones that we were sure would thrive in this happy climate and provide for a wealth of nourishment and a more various diet.

  We grew test plots right in the Mission yard, using the new intensive methods, and at harvest time, invited the chiefs in with their advisers to view the results, which were fruitful beyond even our own expectations.

  Ivar and I loaded giant baskets with squash and sweet melons, tomatoes and beans, together with packets of seed for each. The chiefs smiled and thanked us, then each lugged a basket home to his village and set it up in front of the Men’s House like a battle prize, where of course the produce soon rotted in the sun.

  And no curious farmer came to consult about the planting of the seed or our new growing methods. All continued to grow what they’d always grown in the way they had always grown it.

  When we remarked on this, several of the Mission workers hastened to compliment us on our wondrous crop, as if concerned by our distress but lacking the thought that this success might be repeated in their own fields season after season, with the benefit of improved nutrition. My Beryl, always the voice of wisdom, suggests this is because this land already supports its people well enough and their need to change is not urgent.

  As for the school, the pages that follow are Ivar’s summary of our progress on that front. He and Beryl…

  HARMONET/CHAT

  05/16/46

  ***Just keeping you up-to-date, friends and neighbors, and we know you want to be kept up-to-date when you just happen to meet Mr. World Famous Cellist TUI-PIKIN at the corner table in the café down the street. Or even if it’s only your old friend SALLY. You’ll want to be chatting with the best***

  ***You’re gonna want to slip it to him (or her) that you heard **somewhere** how L’EVANA WILLARD’s unhappy with her recording contract with Ho’town Studios over in Amadeus, how she’s sure she can go worldwide with her utterly *rip* holo, DIE FOR ME.

  ***Or how ’bout our man-about-town CAMPBELL BRIGHAM? Never the Prince of Fashion, our Cam, but he sure knows who to have dinner with. Our question: who regged the tab? Cam or FRANCOTEL? You gue
ss the dinnerchat. Perhaps an elegant BardClyffe branch for Cam’s Lorien gallery in that gorgeous hotel the boys from Marseille want to build?

  ***While we’re on Cam, we’ll send along our compliments to him and the rest of the Arkadie Rep trustees for a totally *rip* evening at Monday’s benefit for OutCare. Were YOU there? Everyone ELSE was. Our favorite little fireball CORA LEE could charm the credits out of a cleanerbot, but where does she get that Fu Manchu wardrobe??

  ***And speaking of the ARK, what’s HOWIE MARR got up his sleeve this time? TUATUA and REEDE SCOTT CHAMBERLAINE? Can we put those two together in our wildest imaginations, friends and neighbors? Beauty and the Beast? Question is, which one’s which?

  ***Remember, you DIDN’T hear it here!***

  THE SCRIPT:

  Cris and I didn’t go home with the script. We went down to the Brim.

  “She’s following us,” he hissed as we snaked among the tourists mobbing the hedge-lined lane to the village square. He pulled me under a handy tree, kissing and fondling me until I squirmed and Jane had slunk off on her own.

  “Cruel, Cris, cruel.” I pushed him away so I could breathe.

  “I’m tired of her long face around everywhere.”

  Our village must have been called BardClyffe out of some Founder’s nostalgia, since there were no cliffs. But there were hills, some quite steep, with low white houses cut into the slopes and narrow streets stone-paved and whitewashed, like the Greek villages it was modeled on. Maybe it had been “Birdcliff,” until some theatre maven got hold of it. There were a lot of birds. Birds thrived in our wild-programmed climate, perhaps because the programmers had limited themselves to mild breezes and gentle rains. No hurricanes. No snow. No thunderstorms or tornadoes. Still, you could get drenched without warning. Did this keep the creative juices flowing? The Founders apparently thought so.

  The BardClyffe market was jammed, as always. Weekday tourists meant heavy business at the brightly canopied glass and ceramics stalls out in the open plaza. Weekends brought the big money to the painting and sculpture galleries in the surrounding two-story arcade. The art in BardClyffe was low-tech and conservative, for the most part. You wanted high-tech or avant-garde, you went across town to Franklin Wells. The Chat always implied that BardClyffe did the better business.

  At the head of the square, we passed under a raw metal scaffold thrown up around a lovely old stucco town house. Cris slowed to peer through the chain link fence.

  “Big flap over this at Town Meeting last night, until they got sidetracked onto overpopulation.”

  Apprentices were not invited to Town Meeting, but Cris was an avid spectator of power games. He kept up with Video Town Hall, as well as WorldNet/News and the Chat. I didn’t pay the news services much heed. The Chat amused me occasionally, but I’d had my fill of small-town politics in Chicago.

  “The BardClyffe C. of C. was going to tear this down without clearing it through the Town. The issue of village autonomy is suddenly a hot one.”

  “Tear a whole building down without asking?” I shook my head in wonder. In Chicago, you couldn’t paint your bathroom without permission.

  “You wait. The Town Council finds a way to okay anything that encourages tourism.”

  High on the chain link, a fancy signboard announced the construction of the multinational Francotel’s twenty-story luxury hotel. With the exception of Town Hall, three stories had been the legislated limit since Harmony’s founding. Travel brochures touted our “Old World charm,” but tourists complained about the scarcity of available bedrooms.

  Two overalled architects’ apprentices on ladders scrubbed at the sign furiously. Scrawled red lettering vanished under their foaming brushes. A small crowd had gathered. Beat Street, a roving street theatre from, you guessed it, Franklin Wells, had arrived on the scene to improvise a little mime satirizing the scrubbers and the crowd. Quite the event. Public graffiti were unheard of in Harmony.

  “Se… the… oor?” Cris squinted at the lettering. “Boor? Poor?”

  “See the boor?”

  “House the poor?”

  “There are no poor in Harmony, just us apprentices, and they certainly aren’t building us more housing.”

  I felt the first drops of an unscheduled shower and grabbed his sleeve, heading for the rain canopy at the Brim. The Brimhaven was the one café on the market square that apprentices could afford: since it was on the third floor, you had know to about the Brim to find it—plus they gave theatre folks a discount.

  We waved to the owner on the way in. Gitanne had been with Images, the local dance group, until her retirement. She still did her barre each morning in the restaurant’s main salon, gazing bravely into the long wall of mirrors, seeing perhaps not today’s rather robust grandmother, but the pale, black-haired sprite of fifty years ago.

  Gitanne had been lucky. Her licensed two children had both turned up talent. Her daughter now ran Images, so the dancers were in and out of the Brim like their own living room, or in the case of the apprentices, the living room they didn’t have back in the dorms.

  Out on the canopied terrace, the Blond Twins had already commandeered our favorite table. The rain had stopped as suddenly as it had begun, and Mark and Bela sat with heads close together, hands clasped beside thin, frosted glasses and little plates of cake. I smiled just looking at them. Seeing them together, you were struck by their sunny beauty. Apart, they seemed unremarkable, two pleasant-faced youths whose main distinctions were Bela’s gift as a raconteur of human foibles and Mark’s uncanny ability to look stylish in apprentice coveralls. They were the sweetest couple I knew.

  Cris and I joined them and the four of us sat there grinning at each other. On days like this, Harmony felt like a gift from that gentle and loving deity in whom I generally did not believe. The sun on the rain-washed terrazzo, the gay sounds of commerce from the market, rich espresso in a porcelain cup and the company of friends. What more could I want, besides success and my citizenship, or that Cris and I might be as devoted as Bela and Mark? But that would’ve been asking too much.

  Mark Benedict was from the Leningrad dome. Bela Mellior was from Prague. Mark said Leningrad was a “crazy” place. Cris told me there’d been a conservative coup there just before Mark arrived in Harmony. Mark didn’t talk about it but you hardly noticed, since Bela was always going on about Prague and the preservation of the architectural wonders of her Old City. The shadow on his hymn of praise was that Prague, like Chicago, wanted its children trained in so-called useful trades and would not take a “deserter” artist back again.

  “Got the script,” Cris announced. He hauled out his copy and plopped it on the table. The smooth paper shone brighter than the surrounding gleam of white tile and stucco. He balanced it in one hand. “Needs cutting.”

  Bela nodded sagely. “Fails the weight test.”

  “The Gift,” Cris read. “Hmmm. Not very auspicious.”

  “The critics complained, ‘The title gives everything away…’ ”

  Crispin gratified me with a smirk and peeled back the top page. “Jeez, they’re gonna have to do something about these names. They’re unpronounceable.”

  “You don’t have to pronounce them,” Mark noted. “The actors do, and that’s what actors are good at.”

  Bela raised a delicate brow. “Some of them.”

  “Is Marie going to do the show?” I asked.

  Mark said, “She’s considering it. We have two ballets and an opera to turn out this summer.”

  Cris let the script flop closed. “So do we read it or not?”

  “Read on,” Mark ordered.

  We took turns, through a second cup of espresso and later, through the market, empty after Closing, past the sign scoured of its mysterious graffito and along the twilit lanes toward home. The BardClyffe dorm, unprestigious residence that it was, was out along the rim and nowhere near a Tube stop. A trip to the village meant a long uphill journey home.

  “Keeps us in shape,” I said, as I al
ways did.

  “I’m living downtown when I’m a journeyman,” said Cris, as he always did.

  “We’re moving to Underhill,” said Mark. “Into the country.”

  “Sure,” said Bela. “Four rooms, a little yard for my herbs.”

  “Studio attached,” Mark added. And we all sighed in unison. We knew it was wishful thinking. Tourists were not the only ones worrying about bedrooms. The housing turnover in Harmony was miniscule. Respected talent went on living in the dorms well into their journeyships. If the Town Council was allowing high-rise buildings, I decided it should be for resident housing, not tourist hotels.

  “We’ll be lucky to find anything at all,” I concluded, as I always did.

  We took our scripts to dinner. Cris read in a stage whisper, passing the pages around under the table in a secretive manner calculated to arouse the curiosity of even the dullest of diners. Bela egged him on while Mark and I exchanged tolerant glances. It was not always apparent to those around us that Cris and I were, within a month, the same age. I valued my dignity. Crispin valued visibility.

  When it got late, I gave Mark my script. Cris and I read the last act in the privacy of his room which was identical to mine except that he’d laid his mattress on the floor and set the metal bed frame upright against the wall where, with a few minor modifications, it was managing rather well as a bookcase. Upon his accession to journeyman, he said, it would convert nicely into housing for the computer his father would then be allowed to buy him. It was no use pointing out that the bed would be needed by the room’s next occupant, or that his rich father could eventually send along an entire com center. Once Crispin got hold of an idea, he ran with it like a thief.

  “So. What do you think?” He tossed the script aside and lay back, studying the ceiling.

  “I like it.” Truth was, I didn’t know what to make of it.

  The plot was simple, like a fairy tale: a plantation owner wishes to expand his coffee plantings into an area containing a secret native shrine. An idealistic tribesman decides that the only way to make the planter understand why he should not desecrate the shrine is to take him there to experience its magic, even though this violates a major tribal taboo. The gods show themselves in the planter’s presence, but he’s too busy computing the site’s commercial potential to notice. Angered, the gods send a tremendous storm that wrecks the harvest, but the planter’s house is stone, and in it he survives. For his heresy, the tribesman is ceremonially murdered by his elders. End of play.