Harmony

by Marjorie B. Kellogg

  Harmony

  Copyright © Marjorie Bradley Kellogg, 1991

  All rights reserved.

  Published as an ebook in 2014 by Jabberwocky Literary Agency. Published in 1991 by Penguin Books USA, Inc.

  Cover design by Tiger Bright Studios

  www.tigerbrightstudios.com

  ISBN 978-1-625670-78-6

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Prologue

  Phase I: Pre-Production

  Phase II: Rehearsal

  Phase III: Technical Rehearsals

  Epilogue

  Also by Marjorie B. Kellogg

  to S. R.

  (at last)

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  For their willingness to read and for their generously offered expertise, heartfelt thank-yous to Diann Duthie, John Kellogg, Lynne Kemen, Ken Frankel, Michael Golder, Mel Marvin, Betsy Munnell, Bill Rossow, Joel Schwartz, Angela Wigan, and of course, my editor, John Silbersack.

  And special thanks to Ming, Robin, Tony, Ted, Virginia, and Desmond, the Micahs in my own life.

  PROLOGUE

  GWINN:

  I wasn’t born in Harmony. I’ve never been that lucky, except for being born Inside. Chicago’s my birth-dome, a sad and sullen place to grow up if ever there was one. But overcoming disadvantage can make you strong. My mom always said that about herself, and my dad swore I took after her.

  You could say my story begins with the Dissolution, though I wasn’t born ‘til ten years after the worst of it, when Famine, War, Plague, and that newer grim horseman, Ecological Collapse, had already reordered life on this earth, and those who were able: the strongest, the richest—in Chicago, we’d have said the most righteous—had holed up twenty years since behind the high-tech walls we post-crisis generations took for granted.

  Your history program will have taught you that Chicago was one of the first cities to Enclose by public ballot: October 4, 2002, it was, our only official holiday for decades after. Every liquifiable civic asset was staked on a first-generation field-technology dome. There was pioneer courage in that, to be sure, but there was shame as well. Having sold off the priceless contents of the Art Institute and stripped the sculpture gardens and libraries bare, Chicago’s crisis leadership finally delegalized the Arts. Painting, writing, music, sculpture—all declared “societally non-productive.” After all, they said, you can’t eat Art.

  True enough. But these righteous citizens also felt the need to revenge themselves on the “decadents” who had opposed the final measures. Punishment was mass expulsion of all artists but those with a useful skill—my wise painter-mother took up industrial design just in time. People who were neither warriors nor survivalists were thrown out without recourse when the dome was raised, to fend for themselves in what had already come to be called the Outside.

  The witch-hunts continued for years. You’d see it on the vid at dinnertime: some poor citizen caught with his life’s work stashed away in his vent ducts or inside his mattress. The expulsion ceremony was preceded by a public burning of the offending work, attendance for children compulsory. The generation who built those walls intended that we who had never seen the Outside would fear it as much as they did. Extreme times require extreme measures, you’ll say, but why, with the food crisis well under control, is it still illegal to be an artist in Chicago?

  The point is, Chicago then or now holds no future for a would-be artist, and that was me from an early age. Others, friends of mine, dutifully channeled their creative leanings into the approved applications. I continued to scribble and sketch when I should have been learning resource management or the new economic theory. My mother’s fault, no doubt, despite endless bedtime conferences in the glare of the overhead fluorescents. She meant to help me overcome my anti-social impulses but never could hide her longing for the old paints and brushes. Being Inside-born, I took for granted my right to safety in the dome and thought my mom’s Dissolution-survivor gratitude too slavish for one who’d been forced to give up her art. The secret hours of my childhood were enlivened by the struggle to capture the images rising unbidden behind my eyes—with pencil, paper, plastic, wood scraps, bits of string, anything available. Nothing else seemed worthwhile, or even interesting.

  And so I went to Harmony.

  I couldn’t just pick up and go. It wasn’t as easy as that. I didn’t even know where—or if—Harmony was. Nobody official in Chicago would admit to the existence of such a heathen place. But I’d heard rumors and chose to believe them. I needed to believe them. Surely every artist in her heart believes there is a place like Harmony, where if only she can find it, she will be left alone to do her work in peace.

  The rumors were forbidden, delicious. I nursed them like the precious candies my mother made with hoarded sugar on the sly. They said Harmony was green and spacious, the food was varied and plentiful. Each citizen owned his own home. Paintings were exhibited right out in the streets, and all the studios had north light.

  The downside, rumor claimed, was that only artists could live there and that Harmony’s population was by constitutional law fed only by the adoption of promising young talent from other domes, as a guard against aesthetic inbreeding. At the time, I was deeply impressed by such total commitment to Art and Excellence. Population was always a crisis issue within the domes. Chicago’s census was updated daily on the public news channels, alongside the harvest data from our struggling farm domes, and any unlicensed child was put Out as soon as discovered. (Into the Lord’s hands, my mother would say, with reflex if compassionate acceptance, the way of a true survivor.) So I didn’t wonder what became of the children born under Harmony’s dome. I saw this Outside Adoption Policy as my escape hatch. I had only to prove I was the sort of promising young talent Harmony was looking for.

  Once I’d decided to resist authority, the trick was doing it invisibly. I pondered this late into the night during the long, gray months of my thirteenth year, then buckled down to my math and physics and managed to qualify for a Building and Engineering course at the local technical school, the closest thing to art training you could get in Chicago. My mother watched me narrow-eyed while my father sighed with relief, secure in his delusion that I was at last preparing to assume a citizen’s proper responsibility.

  They wouldn’t teach free-hand drawing at Chi-Tech, but one of the endemic shortages was terminals, so I did learn to draft by hand. Happy to be drawing at all, I produced endless plans, elevations, and orthographics of boring solar collectors and hydroponics plants. I was initiated into the mysteries of the laser knife and the point welder, if only to build hulking models of factories and housing blocks. I absorbed graphics programming, memorized load- and stress-tolerance tables, all critical information for survival in this broken world, but dull stuff for a teenager living on romantic fantasies. It was boredom as profound as starvation. My manna in the wilderness was my dream of an artistic future. Concentrating on technique, I locked my imagination away until it could wing free in Harmony.

  By the time my schoolmates threw off their cocoons to flutter about as women and young men, I had metamorphosed into a determined workaholic. Friendships and social life died from neglect. Every credit I could pry loose from basic food and clothing went in secret to buy computer time, literally bit by bit, until I had enough to send formal e-mail application to Harmony. In truth, there was nothing formal about it. I had no forms, no names or addresses. I couldn’t save enough to send a real portfolio. I hadn’t a single assurance that my painstakingly worded plea would reach the proper hands, or any hands at all outside Chicago.

  But months later, when I had nearly given up hope, a foreign signal waltzed through Chicago’s electronic blockade like a voice from another planet. What
this said about Harmony’s power in the post-Dissolution world impressed my parents more than it did me. All I cared was that Harmony’s computers, sifting reams of applications from domes everywhere, had spat mine out into the Yes pile.

  A miracle.

  The acceptance statement made me an instant provisional ward of the Town of Harmony, to avoid complications when I tried to leave Chicago. I was invited for a year of trial apprenticeship in the studio of Micah Cervantes. Harmony, the information file explained, was a dome complex in the upland valleys of what used to be Vermont, USA. It was, as rumor claimed, home to many of the world’s most famous painters, sculptors, actors, and musicians, glittering names that meant nothing to me in benighted Chicago.

  No matter. After six years of blind faith and sacrifice, there on our living room terminal was proof that while Harmony was not so far from Chicago geographically, it was ideologically at the other end of the universe. Exactly where I wanted to be.

  The offer was better than my wildest imaginings. It included transportation, room, and board. My parents would not suffer, at least not materially, from my repudiation of their city and their values. The catch was that if I failed to please in Harmony, I would be put Out, and my birth-dome was in no way required to take me back. My citizenship was forfeit the second I walked out of Chicago. My father called me a fool and a wasteling. My mother wept, but her eyes smiled proudly.

  I, in the flush of youth, didn’t give the long run an instant’s thought. I was sure Harmony would recognize my genius and take me immediately to her long-dreamed-of bosom. I had no idea who this guy Cervantes was or what he did. That he did it in Harmony was enough for me. I accepted the invitation, my every fantasy come true. Or so I thought.

  But of course, therein lies my tale.

  THE OUTSIDE:

  A brief digression:

  Do you remember the world twenty years ago?

  Of course not. Like me, you were taught very little about it. In straitened isolationist enclaves like Chicago, truth was an unaffordable luxury in those days. Even with order restored Inside, often with an iron fist, the average dome-dweller remained too haunted by memories of plague and collapse to admit that the horrors he’d walled himself away from still lurked Outside, awaiting solution. Inside air was sanitized, water purified, food and materials dome-grown and recycled. Living Inside, you didn’t think about the Outside. You only feared it.

  Children were raised on horror stories, at home, in church, in school. No one went Outside, at least not willingly. Outside was Ye Forest Darke, Grendel’s Cave, the final circle of Hell. Outside was where I’d end up if I didn’t behave. My actual experience of it was limited to staring at the ruined suburbs from atop Chicago’s encircling generator wall. Broken buildings, dead, littered streets and smoke, always smoke. Something was always burning Out there. We’d nod to each other, wise children: Outsider work, we’d say. Berserkers. But even those grim visions were softened by the wavering energies of our primitive dome. Field technology has improved a lot since then. Much harder now to pretend that what you see out there isn’t quite real.

  When it was time to leave for Harmony, I was in a terror about facing the Outside. But domers would never leave a vital transportation system on the surface where Outsiders could get at it. The entire thousand-mile journey was safely underground by high-speed Tube. That is, until I got to Harmony.

  Harmony was a mere village of twenty thousand when the Enclosure Movement caught fire, a colony of successful artists hiding out in the cleaner, safer hills from the increasing violence and political polarization of the times. They Enclosed reluctantly and as a last resort, vowing to remain a haven for the inalienable freedoms of speech and belief, if not of movement. They weren’t the only small community to try doming without big-city resources, but their wealth and like-mindedness made them one of the few to succeed. Still, the irony of having to wall themselves in and others out in order to preserve these freedoms was not lost on them, for the Founders made sure that to enter Harmony, one must at least briefly go Outside.

  They made their point.

  Most domes are like Chicago: urban, fortified, with Tube transport to the airports accessed from Inside. Not so Harmony. Vacuum tubes bring imported supplies direct from the transfer network, but Harmony has allowed no passenger-tube connection to her residential dome. Material goods may travel fast and deep enough to be safe from Outsider tampering, but a human visitor must board a shuttle at an overworked air/rail terminal shared with Albany Dome and the Springfield industrial complex. This lethargic hover is little more than a rickety frame with windows. It lumbers between gray and smoking hills, drops sickeningly onto a broad oval tarmac, and spits you out into the open air.

  You huddle among strangers at the bottom of the ramp. They’re mostly tourists on day visas, and you’re all stunned as the hover takes off and leaves you… Outside. Ahead the great curve of Harmony’s main dome looms like a rising planet, huge and blue-green and shimmering above a rolling gray horizon. I’d never seen a dome from the Outside before. How disconcerting that this dance of energies should look so fragile, as insubstantial as a soap bubble. And though its vastness makes it seem close, you must walk an entire half kilometer down a wide boulevard paved in amber granite before you reach the arched and columned safety of Harmony’s Gate.

  You suffer an eternity walking down that boulevard.

  Your dome-bred lungs constrict against air that smells like smoke and dirt, and leaves an aftertaste of metal on your tongue. Ingrained terrors of poisoned air catch at your throat. You wonder should you, could you, hold your breath until the Gate? You discover agoraphobia, which has nothing to do with marketplaces at all, but with the gasping need for a lid, a roof, of any kind, anything to shut out the vast, unending sky. The tourist brochures suggest it helps to bring a wide-brimmed hat.

  Finally, should you conquer your panic sufficiently to maintain a dignified pace, or manage even to raise your glance from the solid, blessed ground to peer through the double lines of green-uniformed security guards, stern and anonymous behind their respirators, you come face-to-face, maybe for the first time in your life, with the understanding that there are actual people living outside the domes. Not the blurred shadows I tracked slow-moving beyond Chicago’s coarse-tuned force field, but walking, breathing humans camped along the boulevard in tents and board shacks and lean-tos, cuffing their ragged children not five feet away, stirring their pots of gray muck over dying coals, too weak and dispirited to do anything more terrifying than stare. They are short and scrawny and misshapen by filthy layers of domer cast-off clothing. Their masklike faces are too weather-roughened to be anything a domer might recognize as skin. They wear odd hoods and scarves and slant-brimmed hats, and thick gloves with the fingers torn away, but the thing you can’t avoid is the reflex hatred in their eyes, so confused with desperation it’s like they grab the heart right out of you and squeeze it dry.

  But my story is not about the Outside, nor about the lies that are lived beneath the domes, at least not here, not at the beginning. What I need to tell is what Harmony was, since you know better than I what it is now. And so, we move on to my arrival, and one detail that seemed colorful but insignificant at the time.

  Would it have made any difference if I had known?

  HARMONY:

  I gained the Gate without incident and got in line. It was air lock eight, I remember. One lock said Citizens Only, nine said Visitors. I wondered at that, as I patted the pockets of my thin shirt for my precious apprentice visa. It was March, cold and raw Outside. The air made me sneeze. Many of the tourists wore coats and even gloves. I did not own a coat. Variable-climate technology was too recent and too expensive for the likes of Chicago.

  I distracted myself from my coughing and shivering by studying the imposing facade of the Gate. Three tiers of classical arches connected tapered pillars of polished granite. The air locks were set inside the lower arches. Above the highest tier, a bas-relief crossed smooth
salmon-colored stone. Big-boned women with serious eyes danced the width of the Gate, holding aloft thick books and paintbrushes, and playing strange musical instruments.

  “Turpsish…” I struggled with the block-lettered inscription.

  “Terpsichore! Calliope! Euterpe! Music in the very names, child!”

  The tall figure beside me was robed and veiled in black, like Arab women in my ancient history video. A braceleted arm curled familiarly around mine. A dark-skinned hand pointed gracefully. “See them up there? Laughing Thalia and Melpomene, always so sad? And Erato… well, we know about her. And there’s noble Polyhymnia in the center. The Muse of Harmony, you know.”

  “Of course,” I lied. The voice, deep and rhythmic, was a woman’s, and full of laughter. Her oval fingernails were bright turquoise-blue. I tried to peer without staring through her veil.

  “Well, greet them, child! These poor ladies are so neglected!” She hugged my arm to her side and steered me back into the queue. She jingled and tinkled as she moved, faint melody and dissonance from beneath the soft folds of her robe. “Few visitors take the time with them. Too much haste to scurry back Inside.”

  She seemed to want to share a laugh with me, but I felt that same haste myself and didn’t know why I should mock the tourists for it. She chattered gaily as we approached the airlock. Her energy and volubility made me chatter back. I am not a chatterer by nature, but she had my whole story by the time the six tourists ahead of us had cycled through the lock. Then she was sliding her papers and my own together through the vacuum slot to the green-coated immigration official in his plastic booth.

  Her hand guided my shoulder. Her posture was suddenly slower, stooped. An old woman’s voice reassured the official from under the opaque black veil: “Delivering this young ‘un to be apprentice.”

  He studied my papers quite carefully. He barely glanced at hers. When I passed muster, he nodded and cycled us through the lock together. I reclaimed my papers on the other side and entered into my new life on the arm of a magical stranger.