Harmony (36 page)

The Eye stared at him stony-faced. A few staff members in the back nodded in unconscious agreement. Sour Jorgen from Costumes bent to share a whisper with a neighbor.

Howie, like a good bird dog, sensed a shift in the wind. “Thanks, Reede, for your honesty. Our job now is to work together to re-establish a good working atmosphere and not be distracted by the self-serving machinations of the political fringes.” He beamed on us as if we’d all be grateful in the long run that he’d slapped our wrists and got us back to business. “We’re artists and we’ve got a play to do. Okay?”

The meeting broke. I excused myself from Micah and pushed through the muttering crowd of staffers to intercept the Eye as they stalked out of the room.

Liz Godwin dogged close behind. “Good working atmosphere, my ass! After this fiasco?”

We ran into Howie.

“Are we moving to the theatre or not?” Liz demanded.

Howie sighed irritably. “Micah talked me out of it. He swears Sean’ll never finish otherwise.” Micah stood nearby, talking with Rachel but close enough to overhear. “The old bastard threatened to take his name off the program if I insisted on coming in early. Ah, well. The mayor’s so worried about Harmony getting a reputation for lawlessness, she’s agreed to assign Security to the Barn.”

Mali approached. I tried to catch his eye, but he brushed past as if I weren’t there. No-Mulelatu followed, last in line. I grabbed his elbow.

“Ule! Is Sam all right?”

Ule pulled me along with him. “Why, right as rain, my lady.”

“Jane says you magicked him.”

“Well…” He seemed concerned lest I suspect some lack of faith in Cora’s doctor. “Just to hurry him along, you know.”

“Sure, I understand… uh, the eye in the plaza was great.”

The little dance-man licked his thumb and scribed an imaginary point score in the air as he ducked through the doorway.

I tagged along outside in the hallway, wading up-current against the stream of cheerful
Crossroads
cast members pouring in for their first tech rehearsal. “You didn’t tell them about Jane and…”

Ule resettled his knit cap on his head. “Nope.”

“Why not?”

He tapped the tip of his finger against his temple. “Knowledge is power, ladykins.”

He misread the little frown I could not repress.

“Don’t worry, we’ve got it all in hand.” He lifted the hem of his orange T-shirt to reveal the carved bone handle of a knife sheathed behind his waistband in the hollow of his back. The blade alone was eight inches long.

“Jeez, Ule. Don’t let them catch you with that.”

Ule only smiled.

* * *

Sure, I understand
.

What else can you say when a person, while admittedly eccentric but otherwise quite like a normal human being, acts as if magic were nothing out of the ordinary?

“Exactly the contradiction that got to me in the script,” I explained to Mark over a machine lunch in the crew room.

“Do you believe in magic, G?”

“Well, not, you know, fairy godmothers and things…” Nobody’d asked me right out like that before. “But their kind of magic… oh hell, I don’t know what to think!”

“Or what to let them think you think.” He gathered up our trash for the recycler. “I know I don’t believe in magic. But damned if I’ve been able to admit that to the Eye.”

I lounged deeply in my overstuffed armchair. “Skepticism insults them.”

“Irrational belief insults me, or at least my sense of myself as a rational being. And because they seem rational, it’s hard for me to believe
they
believe it.”

“Maybe they are just playing with us,” I sighed.

Micah claimed the Eye’s manipulative dexterity was the height of their art. I thought manipulation was condescending and didn’t want to believe it of them. Or maybe I just wanted to be special. One of the chosen few they didn’t manipulate. “Guess the best we can do for now is just play along.”

“Or avoid the issue entirely.” Mark held out a hand to haul me out of my chair. “C’mon, lazybones, duty calls.”

“Get any further with the constitution?” I said as we waded through the chaos in the scene shop.

His face brightened. “I’m gathering details on those rights of petition.” On the spiral stair to the costume shop, he moved aside for a brace of SecondGen seamstresses returning from lunch. “It’s complicated. I’ll tell you about it later!”

When we don’t have to worry about who’s listening, he meant.

I waved him upstairs and returned to my chilly white prison, my dressing room paint shop.

* * *

Mark had the right idea. The rational route was easier. After all, the Eye’s magic was still by implication only. They spoke of tales and power, but only Te-Cucularit actually used the word
magic
. And they hadn’t exactly dazzled us with miracles. Their magic hadn’t protected Sam. Even Sam’s magic hadn’t protected Sam. Yet Jane insisted that magic had healed him. “Inside, where the doctor didn’t go.”

“The eye’s magic, too,” she said about the shimmering image fading into the sunset above Fetching Plaza. She was as dogged now in her defense of the Eye as she had been critical of them previously. “I saw them make it. We went there at sunrise and they just
did
it.”

* * *

I called the studio to say I was sending Jane home but I’d be working late.

Cris brought supper and the news reports. “Howie created a real media event. Managed to bury the whole Conch thing very nicely. Damn!” he reflected irritably, “I was so sure it was Sam.”

“Jane says they magicked Sam. I think they ‘magicked’ Jane. They’ve got some reason to want her really believing in their magic.”

“Jane’s the weak link,” he replied, as if he were privy to all the Eye’s reasoning. “She became dangerous. They had all the Eye’s reasoning. “She became dangerous. They had to defuse her somehow, without making a public scene out of it.” He peeled back plastic. Steam rose in the chilled air, smelling like brown rice and stirfry. He pulled two stolen forks out of a pocket and dug in. “What better way than a quick dose of revelation?”

“It was our speculating that egged her on,” I reminded him. “No, it’s more like… like they took her on.”

He was unconvinced when I told him what the Eye had promised. “Sure, that’s all they need, Jane hanging around after them.”

“I don’t believe they’d lie to her.”

“Why not, if it gets her off their backs?”

I couldn’t say why I was sure. “Mali wouldn’t lie.”

Cris laughed. “Maybe they’ve magicked you a little, too.”

After we ate, we went up to the plaza to search for the holo projectors we knew the Eye must have hidden somewhere. But the glowing green image had vanished with the coming of darkness, and though Cris carefully worked out all the math to plot exactly where they should be, we never did locate those projectors.

did locate those projectors.

THE MATTA:

When we went back to work, Te-Cucularit was waiting in the dressing room with all four of the women. Hickey nosed about in the back. “Got any empties to mix new paint in?”

“Gwinn-Rhys.” Cu’s greeting was nothing that could be called a welcome, but at least he remembered my name. “Tonight we will paint the Matta.”

“Great!” The ladies were a triumphant riot of color. I felt recharged just looking at them. “You look wonderful! Have you been to a party?”

Omea did a laughing pirouette. The folds of her garment flared wide, then settled around her in a spiral like a flock of landing birds.

“It is for the Matta,” said Cu firmly.

Tua tossed her head. “It is to make us happy!”

“Proud!” breathed Tuli.

The drab white dressing room shimmered with life. Each woman wore a seemingly endless length of brightly patterned fabric wound around the torso, tucked and wrapped in ways as magical and mysterious as Sam’s sleight of hand and lying loose below the hips. Wreaths of white flowers nestled against bare brown necks and shoulders. Lucienne wore red to accent her contrasting paleness. The headdresses were towering confections of plumes and flowers, woven into the shapes of birds and animals, trimmed with arching wisps of feather and tails of trailing vine.

“We do need a little pick-me-up,” Omea conceded, “after today.”

“Reede Chamberlaine.” I shook my head disgustedly.

“Howie Marr,” she corrected. “We don’t expect Reede to know any better.”

Tua adjusted her flowers in a mirror. “At home, we would go bare-breasted.”

Omea sighed. “Yes. But here it would not be understood.”

“I’d understand,” promised Hickey, slipping his arm around Lucienne’s tiny waist. She nestled against him and a most un-Hickey-like grin blossomed on his face.

I smiled on them benignly. So what if he looked silly?

Te-Cucularit muttered over his paint cans, pouring while Tuli stirred. Tuli was barely out of adolescence, with the gawky grace of very young dancers. Her tongue pressed the corner of her mouth as she gripped the stirring stick with both tiny hands. The sorcerer’s apprentice. I smothered a laugh.

“Cu does not sanction this dilution of tradition,” Omea noted. “But I say if our intention is pure, the Ancestors will approve.”

I gathered up the thick folds of the Matta from the counter. “Let’s do it out in the theatre where there’s room.”

“Wait!” Cu barked, then added more quietly, “Let Omealeanoo carry the Matta.”

Omea regarded me sympathetically as I surrendered the silky layers into her arms. “Come. The Matta ritual was my husband’s favorite. You will enjoy it.”

“Your husband?”

“My husband Seluk. Our first director, our first leading man. Seluk played the roles that Mali plays. He’s dead now.”

I recalled the name from Crispiri’s early research. “I’m sorry.”

“It was long ago.” Omea smiled. “Yet he is with us still. Tonight we will dedicate this Matta to him.”

I led the women down the hall, feeling distinctly underdressed.

“How’s Sam?” I asked.

“Doing well, thanks be.”

“Is he in a lot of pain?”

“Mostly he’s angry at having been taken by surprise. You know how men are.”

Not these men, I thought. They take violence so calmly. As if it was deplorable but nothing unusual.

Theatre Two was dark but for a tight circle of onstage work light. The three blunted triangles of seating faded to dim geometry split by the darker thrusts of the radial ramp-ways. Like roads into the void. You couldn’t help but be drawn into that blackness. An empty theatre holds such promise.

Onstage, the skeletal outlines of Micah’s set were taking shape. The back wall swept upward in bare ribs of plastic and steel, like half the hull of a giant boat. The steeply undulating deck was a forest of metal legs and cross-bracing. I was delighted to find four of Sean’s regular crew at work on the tracking support. A small crew but still hard at work, after hours. Up center, where the deck curled up to blend smoothly with the sweep, Ruth explained shop protocol to three new faces.

“Oh, hooray,” I murmured to Omea. “Micah found extra hands and Sean didn’t throw them out of the shop.”

“That’s nice,” she replied vaguely, reminding me that the shop problem was one the Eye wasn’t even aware of. I did not elaborate. I spidered across the decking framework.

“Ruth! Okay if we paint downstage?”

“Sure.” Her stifled yawn became a snort when she got a look at my ‘crew.’ “They’re gonna work dressed like that?”

“Some kind of ritual,” I explained.

“Oh. Right.” Ruth plucked unconsciously at her own stained coveralls. “Be my guest.”

I grabbed a broom to clear scraps and welding debris from the open space downstage. Omea laid the Matta on the floor, carefully restacking its layers to unravel fold by fold. Tua and Lucienne knelt on either side of the stack. Omea took up one top corner, Tuli the other. At Omea’s signal, they began a throaty, conversational chant, like two matrons singing gossip to each other. They swung slowly across the open stage, hauling out the fabric. They walked and sang, paused while the kneeling women chanted an answering verse, then walked and sang again.

Hickey and Cris brought paint and water from the dressing room. Te-Cucularit followed with the unpainted Puleales and two raffia-bound bundles of brushes unlike any we’d been using, slim and soft-bristled. Calligraphic brushes. The singing crescendoed as Omea and Tuli ran out of stage space and laid their end of the fabric on the deck. Their four-way chant swelled into the darkness beyond the work light. Closing my eyes, I pictured as vividly as if I were there the women calling to each other in the coffee fields. Remarkable, since I’d never been in a coffee field in my life, except through the magic of vids and holos.

Up by the back wall, the crew stopped work to listen.

As the women sang, Cu set out paint jars along the length of the fabric. He unbound his brushes. Their handles were like knotty twigs, shiny with use. He laid them out as you would rare treasures, and selected one. The women wove the four voices of the chant into a single drawn-out trill in minor key that ended like a question. Cu dipped the brush into brilliant orange and handed it to Omea.

Omea held the brush high in a heartbeat of pure silence.

From the darkened house behind us, a deep voice rang out. One phrase of solo declaration, joined soon by the rhythmic punctuation of wood blocks. Moussa stepped into the circle of work light, his arm raised like the hunter returning from the night. No-Mulelatu and Pen waited behind him, half in shadow. Ule held the blocks, Pen a small leather drum. My skin prickled. On cheeks and forehead, each wore a neat thumb swipe of vermilion paint. I was grateful for their gym shoes and jeans because a worrisome time slippage was beginning around me. Like gliding down a jungle river, vines and palm fronds whipping past, falling toward an older world of spirits and mysticism, a world I felt a stranger to but, unlike Mark, could not completely discredit. I looked to Cris, crouched beside Hickey. The avid lean of his body said he’d been waiting for the Eye to do something like this. Something
weird
.

But was it really so weird? A little face paint? The heated glint in Moussa’s eye? Cu did nothing bizarre. He continued to behave exactly as I’d come to expect of him. Sober and intent, he settled cross-legged facing the painters across the shining green river of the Matta. He beckoned Moussa to one side of him, Pen and Ule to the other. Perhaps the strangest thing was that for once, the others did exactly as Cu decreed. Ule passed his wood blocks to Moussa, took off his shoes, and drew a set of panpipes from his shirt pocket.