Harmony (26 page)

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.”

I pulled the necklace out of hiding and offered it to him on my palm. “Please, I wanted to ask—”

The look he gave me was quick and as penetrating as a laser, but he took the bead and leather from me casually enough. “Where did you get this?” He smiled as my story unfolded. “But why keep it hidden away? Will you not wear it?”

“I didn’t—I wasn’t sure—I thought it might be—”

“Sacred?” Mali held the bead up between two fingers. “This carving honors the twelve Station Clans: each of the twelve figures is a clan totem. Here is my clan: the Rock. You will offend no one by wearing it.”

“What did she mean, saying there was power in it?”

He handed the necklace back with a sly and mysterious grin. “Twelve totems is a lot of power.” He took another long gulp of beer and a huge bite of his sandwich, then sat back. “Now. Here’s my question for you.”

He pulled crumpled papers out of his back pocket, spread them flat on the table, and slid them toward us with thumb and forefinger of both hands. I recognized the recent anonymous e-mailings:

C
ITIZENS OF
H
ARMONY
! D
ANGEROUS RADICALS ARE AMONG US
!

Mali cocked his head. “What can you tell me about that?”

While we explained about the Closed Door League, I fastened the bead around my neck, and have never willingly had it off.

CRISPIN’S RESEARCH: FROM THE SONGS OF THE STATION CLANS

CHANGES:

Cris didn’t invite me along that Sunday when he biked back to the studio after dinner to power up the research files. I went to bed early and alone, and told myself I didn’t mind.

In the morning, he tossed brightly colored weather maps onto my desk. “It’s true, you know. Tuatuan air is better.”

Jane looked up from the paper model of
Fire!
“It can’t be!”

“Better than some domes. Better than Chicago, I’ll bet.”

I refused the serve. “That wouldn’t be hard.”

Cris turned back to Jane. “It’s a famous mystery phenomenon among climatologists. Seems like everybody’s taken a crack at it. They claim a unique dynamic of wind current and temperature creates an anomalous eddy that keeps airborne pollution away from the island.”

“Voodoo,” Songh intoned.

I touched my bead. “Totem power.”

Micah was looking profoundly satisfied that morning as well. The revisions rolled off his table as fast as I could snatch them up. By judicious manipulation of shape and volume, he’d met Howie’s need for windows and doors by creating a “zone of reality” pocketed within the larger abstraction.

He let this “reality” enter the world of the play on a long track curving from upstage right to downstage left. The transition into and out of its smaller, more mundane world would be smoothly gradual, a cinematic zoom to close-up detail. Jane and I threw together a paper mock-up for him to look at.

“It’ll force those scenes to comment on themselves in a way I’m not happy with,” he mused. “But one can only go so far with telling a director what’s good for him.”

Brave Micah. Still fighting for that revolution in style.

We tracked down Howie Tuesday before rehearsal in the lobby of Theatre Two, where he was supervising the rehang of his
Gift
display material. The new paint did wonders, even with only half the lighting installed. The finished
Gift
model, once I’d brushed the shop dust away, looked spectacular against the creamy satin-white walls. But it was not the best time to be trying to win Howie over.

“Why the hell didn’t you send him back?” he ranted.

He meant Mali, of course.

Micah bent over the model to nudge the mocked-up additions into a happier configuration. “Howard, I am not aware of where your actors are meant to be at every moment.”

“He was meant to be in rehearsal, where did you think?! There we are working, things are going great, we take a break and poof! he’s gone. No one even saw him leave!” Howie halted his arm waving to glare at me. “Hanging out at the Brim? And he’s the most responsible of all of them! Jesus H, they show up late, they disappear in the middle! How am I going to get this play ready if my cast thinks rehearsal is something they can take or leave?”

“You needn’t question their commitment,” returned Micah calmly. “The problem is their somewhat altered sense of priorities.”

“Somewhat… ! The other day Omea was insisting we all take the afternoon off to visit the farm domes. Christ!”

“Mali came to talk to me about the set. He evidently thought it important.”

As important as rehearsal, he meant. But Howie wasn’t listening for subtleties. He leaned both palms against a gleaming wall, suddenly weary. “You hear I got hauled into Town Council last night?”

“No. Why?”

“The mayor wanted to know was there any truth to the rumor I’d brought ‘dangerous radicals’ into Harmony. I said she’d better hope they were something at least that interesting!”

Micah straightened up from the model. “The Eye?”

Howie nodded darkly. “Seems someone’s decided our e-mail artist is referring to them. Someone like Cam Brigham, my own goddamn fat-ass chairman, who just happened to mention to Her Honor recently—just a point of information, of course—that our actors belong to the same clans that are the focus of the anti-Enclosure movement on Tuatua. He’s got her worrying about the Eye spreading Open Sky propaganda around Harmony. I scoffed, but she comes back with the riot in Stockholm last month. Then Cora Lee from my board demands to know if we’d all forgotten the difference between radicalism and creative thinking. She got so mad she offered that castle of hers for the Eye to stay in.”

“At least that solves your housing problem,” Micah observed. “The Eye can’t help but be happy living at Cora’s.”