Harmony (8 page)

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

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 always 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.

I was moved by the murder of the tribesman, an innocent caught in the cross-cultural vise, but the dramaturgy was awkward here and there. It had the patchwork quality of a communally written work, and somehow, the ending didn’t quite happen.

“But with all this talk of new and daring…”

“Yeah. You expected something more… exotic.” Cris dropped a hand to the discarded script, thoughtfully riffling the pages. “But you know, there’s more to it than it seems right off. I wonder if even Howie knows. Tuatua’s Enclosure crisis is barely covered by WorldNet. I really had to dig for it.” He rose to his elbows. “What Micah didn’t let me explain today is that the real issues in the dispute are magic and religion. There’s a group of tribes still keeping the ancient practices who claim that doming will interfere with their rituals. They say Tuatua’s survival has nothing to do with geography, that it’s their magic keeps it pure and alive.” He lay back, pensive again. “Got to check up on actual climate conditions there.”

“Must be some reason the others want to Enclose.”

“Money, what else? With their limited landmass, agriculture can get them only so far. They want to expand their tourist trade beyond the few who think it’s macho to spend a week Outside.”

With Jane’s worries in mind, I was not eager to discover a political motive to this play. “You blame everything on tourism lately.”

“I know,” he agreed, as if that proved his point.

The play did not leave my mind as quickly as I’d expected. “Odd how this script reads like a straightforward play, realistic dialogue and everything, despite all the weird shit going on: visions at the shrine and all the totems and talismans, the magic and the ancestor gods and the singing of the curse.”

“That stuff
is
realistic to the Eye. All the research says these tribal guys really believe their magic. I mean, really.”

Magic. I pulled the thin sheet up around me, my eyes tracing the rational geometry of the cubicle’s four walls. No one talked about magic in Chicago. Even in church, miracles were seen as feats of the human spirit. Without training in the irrational, I found it scary but fascinating. Micah often used magic as a metaphor in his work, but
The Gift’s
nonchalant mixing of magic with the everyday was an entirely new concept. Magic offered as reality either turned your world upside down or forced a retreat into skepticism, where the whole idea could be dismissed as primitive ignorance.