Harmony (3 page)

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 was 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.

You see, Micah was extremely busy at the time, booked nearly seven years in advance. His projects were big, spectacular and complicated, and he liked to take his time with them. He liked to take ours as well, worrying every one of the details he was so justly famous for. We were already way behind schedule with the Marin project currently on his desk, even though it didn’t go into actual production for another year and a half. There were models and spec sheets and drafting and programs backed up far enough to occupy another three people if we’d had room enough and terminals for them. But between his home, the studio, and the adjacent conference room shared with the studio on the other side, Micah had used every micrometer of his officially allotted space, and he wouldn’t hear of an assistant working at home, out from under the Master’s dogged supervision. I didn’t really blame him. Three years had been enough to teach me how little I knew. But the point is, Micah was better at his art than he was at saying no, and right then, the absolute last thing we needed was another project.

“Has an outside producer attached to it,” Howie added.

“Is that outside, or Outside?”

Howie laughed indulgently, and I pictured some sooty, raw-eyed Outsider shedding mud all over Howie’s expensive leather chairs.

“It’s Reede Scott Chamberlaine, from London.”

“You’re getting into bed with him?”

“He owns the script.”

“Howard, think again.”

“Yeah, yeah, he’s a skinflint and he’ll cheat me blind. Don’t worry, I can handle him. We watch him close enough, we might learn something about making money. It’s worth it. You’ll see.”

Howie ducked out of the cave, squared his shoulders, and let his eyes drift soulfully toward the skylight. The Big Sell was coming, but watching Howie sell was always entertaining, so we all stopped work to listen.

“The Ark’s been in a real rut lately—one nice, uplifting spectacle after the other, no messiness, no waves. Sure, it’s been great for the box office, but it ain’t why I got into the business. Nor you either.” He flicked a mocking glance at the crude profile of turrets and ruined battlements rising from the holo pad, then offered Micah his most earnest smile. “This piece is different.”

“And?” Micah rinsed his brush noisily. He had a talent for making total skepticism sound polite. Most people never noticed when he was being rude, and if Howie noticed it now, he knew Micah too well to let it show.

“It’s time to take a risk, Mi. A big one.” The catch in Howie’s voice was subtle enough to convince me he’d finally fallen victim to his own hype. “Time to knock that pseudo-liberal audience of mine on their asses! Send ’em out remembering more than their ticket price and the outfit the star was wearing!”

Songh and Jane glanced at me in mute alarm—as if there were anything I could do. I thought Songh must watch Jane very carefully to be always able to do exactly as she did. Micah’s only reaction was a faint pursing of his lips under the dark brush of his mustache.

The Arkadie did not particularly cater to the daytime tourist trade that supported many of Harmony’s newer theatres. Its audience of mostly local residents and their guests
was
liberal, certainly by Chicago standards. But as a result, it was more than usually self-satisfied, and Micah despised smugness.

Howie knew that. “Whadda ya say, Mi? Ready to stretch that underused brain of yours a little? Ready to do something you’ve never done before?”