Eider’s look must have pretty much mirrored my own. Micah had already endowed this little play with a crusading significance. At twenty-two, I found this astonishing but somehow reassuring, that Micah at forty-nine was still willing to tilt at windmills.
Max Eider was not reassured. He summoned a sickly grin and gave his birdy little shrug. “Ach, Micah. You will make good of this, and then you will see them coming to the rest of us saying, ‘Look what Cervantes has done! Why didn’t you think of that?’ ”
Micah chuckled. “But, Max, it could be so satisfying, to be artists again instead of mere showmen.”
“But we are showmen!” Eider hugged his drawings tight under his arm. “If not, why make our work in a theatre and not alone on the canvas?”
“I’ll bet that’s what you say to Sean when he’s telling you to cut down on the expensive detail.” Micah’s amiable smile said he’d gone as far as he cared to with this debate.
Eider accepted the truce. “This is only how I get what I want from him.”
“An example to us all.” Micah was already moving up the steps, out of the glaring sun. “Good luck. See you around when the time comes.”
Eider waved, heading out across the heat-shimmered plaza, past the street cleaners finishing up. “Ja, Micah, same to you. But only, watch out for this Howie!”
“Phew!” I said when we’d got inside, into the Arkadie’s prizewinning lobby, suffused by sunlight filtered through panels of stone cut thin enough to be translucent. The walls glowed warmly, showing only a faint and carefully planned pattern of seams and fasteners.
Micah nodded ruefully. “Sean wasn’t kidding when he said Max was a handful. He’ll stand at a painter’s elbow for hours, telling her how to lay in each stroke. One old carpenter at Willow Street nearly put a clip of nails through his head.
“But he does something very special that the audiences love, and he does it very well. What Sean won’t admit in all his railing against the old man is that producers hire Max precisely because he can exact such good work from the shops.”
“But you get good work out of them…”
Micah’s laugh was deprecatory. “Oh, I grump and coerce. Max browbeats. And there are plenty who feel on principle that a designer’s not getting the best for the producer’s money unless he or she browbeats the shop. Those people don’t tend to hire me.”
What he really meant was he didn’t accept those people’s offers. Micah would rather be rude to a rich backer than insult a stagehand. The discussion with Eider seemed to have fired him up. He strode through the carpeted acres of lobby as if ready to take on the entire design establishment, which at that moment in Harmony, perhaps in the world, included himself and Max Eider and at most a dozen others.
At the door to the administrative offices, he punched the entry code and we stepped into pandemonium. People in motion, the clatter of simultaneous conversation, the skreel of the fax machines. The offices, where the public never set foot, were nowhere as luxurious as the lobby. Here, the space shortage endemic to life under a dome reasserted itself with a vengeance. The staff worked practically in each other’s pockets. The aisle between the desks would not have allowed for a fat man.
The walls were painted a careful pale lavender but every inch that wasn’t behind a desk or file cabinet was covered with clippings and notices and printout and schedules and subscription lists, and all the rest of the paper detritus of running a theatre. What old fool said computers would free us from drowning in paper?
“Micah! Welcome back!” The subscriptions director gripped Micah’s shoulder as he squeezed past with a stack of printout under one arm. “I’ve only read the first act, but I love it!”
“This is going to be a tough one to sell, you think, Micah?” worried the head of Marketing, glancing up from her terminal.
A secretary I knew gave me the thumbs-up sign from across the room. The heavyset bookkeeper wriggled his shoulders in proud anticipation. “Isn’t it wonderful? What other theatre would take this kind of chance?”
“Micah! About time you showed!” Kim Levin, Howie’s assistant and right arm, hung over the railing of the executive offices balcony with a harried grin. “Get the hell on up here!”
We scaled the slim spiral stair as the child receptionist gawked after us. Kim met us at the top with brisk kisses on both cheeks. She was a thin, pretty brunette, always dressed to kill, with a street-wise manner that belied her native Harmonic upbringing. I wondered if both parents having been apprentices explained why they’d done right what so often went wrong with second-generation kiddies. Howie would have been lost without Kim and everyone knew it. And she knew we knew it. She never felt the need to throw her weight around. Plus, she always remembered all the apprentices’ names. I expected she’d be running the Arkadie someday, when Howie got tired of it.
Micah slumped against the railing as if celebrating a narrow escape. “Time to petition the Board for more office space.”
“Foolish man,” Kim snorted. “Try something we might be able to afford, like more staff. We are ready for some new blood around here! We’re so bored looking at each other all the time!”
“You’re about to get your wish, I do believe.”
Kim laughed. “Indeed. And I’m a big fan of surprises, but a touch more advance information would be heartening. So far all I know about the Eye is that they’re great and there are ten of them.”
Ten. Even Crispin hadn’t uncovered that little kernel. I pocketed it to carry home in triumph.
“I suppose it’s company policy that their reviews never mention individuals?” Micah asked. “Presenting only the communal identity?”
Kim groaned. “Oh god, I hope not. We’ve been through the group-decision number before. Everything stops dead in rehearsal while the entire cast votes on whether so-and-so should walk upstage on this syllable or that one.”
She linked one arm in mine and the other in Micah’s and drew us down the narrow, carpeted hallway. “He is a madman today. When I left, he was yelling at Reede Chamberlaine and had reached decision crisis over the lunch menu.”
“How are things going with Reede?”
Kim hissed eloquently. “Slime, he is slime.”
Rachel Lamb, the general manager, called a hurried welcome as we passed her open door. Several meetings were going on at once in her little cubicle, and a sidebar was starting up out in the hall. We squeezed by and found Howie as promised, in his own cramped but well-appointed office, hunched over his vid with a caterer’s menu clenched in his fist as if he were ready to ram it into the screen. His curly mane of red-gold and gray was more than usually disarranged.
“Then you damn well talk ’em into it, Reede!” he roared. “No, we can’t push the schedule back! I have a season here! I have trustees and subscribers to answer to! Bring that famous velvet pressure to bear.” Howie waved us into chairs without looking up from the screen. “We can’t let these actors start here thinking our time means nothing just because they don’t live that way. If they have to go home first, they have to, but the quarantine means I need ’em here three weeks early!”
Reede Chamberlaine’s answering voice was an Oxbridge-accented purr, so casual in contrast to Howie’s ranting as to sound faintly sinister. I tried to sneak a look over Howie’s shoulder but moved too slowly.
“Right. Keep me posted.” Howie slapped the cutoff with a growl, then spread the crushed menu flat with both palms. “Now, Micah. What don’t you eat every day at the studio?”
Micah eased into a chair beside the translucent outside wall. The glow warmed his olive skin to burnished gold. He looked very youthful and relaxed, slouched deep in cream-colored leather as if on holiday. I loved to watch Micah’s Great Master persona slip whenever he left the studio. He put his feet up on the chair opposite and waved me into a third.
“I solve this problem thusly: I let them send me whatever they feel like, with enough variety to allow plenty of alternatives.”
“What if y
ou don’t like any of it?”
“It’s never happened.”
Howie pulled at his nose reflectively. “Maybe I should change caterers. D’you suppose yours’d charge me extra for long-distance delivery?” He turned to me. “So whadda ya say, Gwinn? Know what you want to eat?”
They might be willing to take up most of our precious lunch hour discussing the lunch itself, but I wasn’t going to be a party to it.
“Lean corned beef on sisal rye with french mustard, cornichons, a side of red cabbage slaw, and iced tea with lemon.”
Kim whistled. “I like a decisive woman. Make that two!”
I’d only learned to order like that since I’d come to Harmony. In Chicago, menus were a fable. You ate what was available.
“Three,” rumbled Micah.
Howie grasped his temples. “But I hate corned beef!”
Kim levered the menu out of his hands and headed for the door. “I’ll order you chicken salad.”
Howie nodded. “Dull, dull. But no heartburn.”
Micah folded his hands like a pasha over his solid stomach. “I ran into Max Eider on the way in.”
“Max, Max. He’s already driving Sean around the bend. I’m adding a rider to the standard contract: no designers allowed in the shop more than twice a week until technical rehearsals.”
“He didn’t much like all this talk of pared-down production.”
“Good!” Howie cheered. “He’s costing me an arm and a leg on Crossroads. Maybe you can teach him a thing or two.”
“Maybe we can.”
Howie blinked at him. “Whew. That sounded a bit pointed. Getting cold feet, are you, Mi?”
“No, no.” Micah crossed and uncrossed his legs on the padded chair. “Just feeling a little… exposed. You do know not everyone will understand what we’re trying to do.”
“If they understood it, we wouldn’t have to do it for them.”
Micah nodded. “Fine. So how’s Reede treating you?”
“Now I’m getting heartburn,” Howie groaned. “Nah, ole Reede’ll be here for first rehearsal and opening night, and if we’re lucky, we won’t see much of him in between.”
“Is he putting in any money?”
“As little as he can get away with.”
“What a surprise.”
“Hey, we need him. He’s booking the Eye’s tour after the run here. The new Immigration guy won’t let them in without a ticket home.”
Micah frowned. “Unusually letter-of-the-law, isn’t it?”
“And I’d like to know who’s at the bottom of it. Cora Lee from my Board tells me he’s got the backing of a majority of the Town Council.” Howie’s eyes slid wearily across his poster-covered walls. “Great reviews aren’t enough anymore. And I quote: ‘This troupe’s aesthetic value has not been sufficiently proven…’
“What happened to artistic autonomy?”
“Exactly. Never had this problem with imports before. Cora says it because Tuatua’s undomed. The T.C. is sure the Eye will want to stay once they get here. They don’t know how wrong they are!” Howie grabbed a bulging folder, then dumped Micah’s feet off the extra chair, and dropped into it with a smug, boyish grin. “I went there this weekend.”
“There?”
“Tuamatutetuamatu!” He upended the folder. Glossy brochures, picture postcards, and pamphlets spilled across the table onto the floor. “Goddamn Immigration gave me every shot in the book.”
“No quarantine?” asked Micah.
“Hey, I’m a citizen.” Howie laughed. “But they were worried.”
“Did you meet the Eye?” I asked eagerly.
“No such luck. They’re playing some dance festival in Stockholm. They’ll swing home before they come here, we’ll get a glimpse, then quarantine for three goddamn weeks.” Howie threw up his hands. “Elusive little buggers, aren’t they? But Christ, those planters want to open that little place up, they got to make it easier to get to! A cool hour to Sydney, then two puddle-jumpers and a seaplane, five more goddamn hours in the air, never mind the ground wait. A seaplane, for chrissakes! The whole place is like watching some revival at the Film Archive!”
Micah rescued a handful of candy-hued cards from the rug and pored over them hungrily. “Should I go?”
“Yeah, if you want to absorb the cost yourself. Bloody expensive. And my general manager doesn’t believe in research trips for second stage productions. She even cut the effects engineer from the budget. But we don’t need all that shit this time!” Howie laughed delightedly. “God, Mi, how many shows have we done together?”
“Too many. What did you do on Tuatua?”
Howie leaned back. “Went around staring through the locked gates of infuckingcredible plantations and asking about native shrines. The whole island was on edge with this Enclosure dispute. Rallies and protests breaking out, leaflets blowing all over the streets. Get this: the day before, the police raided this dive where somebody claimed they’d spotted this native legend called the Conch. Seven feet high, covered in blue feathers, debating domer policies with some plantation foreman who’d just dropped in for a quick one.” Howie grinned. “Wonder what he was drinking.”
“And when the police arrived?” asked Micah.
“Not a sign of the Conch, since, as we know, he’s invisible… Cops beat up on a few people, went home. Even with that going on, folks were friendly enough when they heard I was from Harmony—they’re building a tourist industry and they wanted to pick my brain about how we do it. However, they had nothing to offer about native shrines, and things cooled off pretty fast if I pushed it.”
Kim bustled into the office. “Lunch is on its way.”
Howie ignored her. “So I searched around for someone who looked like they might know that sort of thing firsthand. I finally fastened on this old waiter at the hotel, obviously a local.”
“How did you know?” asked Micah. Kim settled like a cat in Howie’s chair to listen.
“Well, he was, you know, not white.”
“Are all the planters white?”
“White or mixed, at least all the ones I met. I mean, this guy was really not white.”
Micah laughed. “Howard, your own general manager is not white.”
“Take my word for it.”
Kim looked at me deadpan. “The bone in his nose was the real giveaway.”
“Anyway, the guy was kinda grumpy and closemouthed, until I mentioned the Eye. All of a sudden he was interested. I told him who I was and about the play, and finally he says if I really understood this play, I would understand why he couldn’t tell me where the shrines were—story places, he called them.”
Micah chuckled. “Had you there, didn’t he.”
“But he said there were places he could take me that weren’t so secret, to help me understand the play, and I realize he’s talking about things in the play I hadn’t even mentioned. Well, turns out he’s seen it. The Eye already performed it there a few years back. He says it caused a big noise and everyone on the island saw it at least once, even all those rich planters who’d told me they’d never heard of the Eye.”
“Interesting,” Micah remarked, “how entire groups of people can become simultaneously forgetful.”
Howie developed a sly grin. “The official line is the play didn’t exist. The media were told not to review it, but everyone went anyway. Even the Conch, my guy tells me. Seems he quotes the play sometimes in his underground messages to the people.”
“Invite him to the opening,” said Micah, uncharacteristically glib. I’ve always wanted to say I felt a premonition stirring. Mostly I felt a little creepy.
Howie nodded. “Somebody in that Opposition sure knows how to exploit a legend. But wait.” He leaned forward, dropping his voice. “Next morning, I meet my friend at this little café that the hotel desk has never heard of but a native cabdriver has no trouble taking me to. My man has a new guy with him, his cousin-with-the-Land Rover, and in we pile and off we go.”
The i
ntercom on Howie’s desk beeped discreetly.
Kim hopped up. “Lunch. I’ll get it.”
“It takes the rest of the day, and I’d had other visits planned for the afternoon. But once he got going, there was no way I was going to stop him, ’cause what he’s doing is driving us the full circuit of the island, which is a ring with water in the middle.
“Mostly we’re driving past planted fields and terraces, and the plantations with their fancy gates and big shiny billboards pushing the advantages of doming. But every so often, we take a turn down some dirt track and the driver pulls over and we get out into some totally breathtaking piece of nature, and my guy says, ‘This is Station Two,’ or three or five or eight, whichever, up to twelve by the end of the day, for the twelve months of the year.”
“Stations?” I pictured concrete arches and magnetic rails.
But Latin-born Micah got it immediately. “Like the Stations of the Cross.”
Howie was crestfallen. “How’d you know? That’s exactly what he said to me. One of the native clans—he didn’t call them tribes—has the duty of walking these ‘Stations’ all year long. The next year, another clan takes over. Twelve Stations, twelve clans, an endless cycle. Between moves to the next station, they live at the one they’re at and maintain it—you know, clean it up and repair any damage caused by storms… or other visitors.”
“Vandalism?” asked Micah.
Howie nodded. “Increasingly.”
“Who?”
“My guy was reluctant to say. I figure the same casual tourist damage we have—taking home a piece of the rock—or it could be—”
“More organized,” Micah supplied. “Burning churches has always been a favorite strategy of oppression.”
“Why do the clans go to all this trouble?” Kim asked.
Howie wound up for a big finish. “Because they believe that if they don’t keep ‘walking the Stations,’ the Ancestors will decide that humanity can’t be trusted to care for the world anymore. Then they’ll do us all in and find somebody else to do the job.”
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