I pulled the necklace out of hiding and offered it to him on my palm. “Please, I wanted to ask—”
The look he gave me was quick and as penetrating as a laser, but he took the bead and leather from me casually enough. “Where did you get this?” He smiled as my story unfolded. “But why keep it hidden away? Will you not wear it?”
“I didn’t—I wasn’t sure—I thought it might be—”
“Sacred?” Mali held the bead up between two fingers. “This carving honors the twelve Station Clans: each of the twelve figures is a clan totem. Here is my clan: the Rock. You will offend no one by wearing it.”
“What did she mean, saying there was power in it?”
He handed the necklace back with a sly and mysterious grin. “Twelve totems is a lot of power.” He took another long gulp of beer and a huge bite of his sandwich, then sat back. “Now. Here’s my question for you.”
He pulled crumpled papers out of his back pocket, spread them flat on the table, and slid them toward us with thumb and forefinger of both hands. I recognized the recent anonymous e-mailings:
CITIZENS OF HARMONY! DANGEROUS RADICALS ARE AMONG US!
Mali cocked his head. “What can you tell me about that?”
While we explained about the Closed Door League, I fastened the bead around my neck, and have never willingly had it off.
CRISPIN’S RESEARCH: FROM THE SONGS OF THE STATION CLANS
The Twelve Stations
Of the World’s Twelve Stations, the First is Rock, the Father, companion to Wind, the Mother, and his name is Pirimaturamiram, whom we celebrate in the first moon of the Turning and call on him for his approval.
The Second is Water, Laukulelemelea, the Birth. In the second moon, we give thanks for the gift of life and sing Water’s songs to the full circle of her hearing.
The Third is Wind, the Mother, who carries the Birth in her womb and is mother to all creatures. Her moon is the fat third and her name breathes in all of us slow and fast, Moorililil, Moorililil.
The Fourth is Earth, and he is the Death, whose moon is dark but soon shines in a sliver. He is called Nawki, brother to Water, and his songs are both sad and glad, for he is the end and the beginning.
The Fifth is Fire, our Uncle the Sun. He stands with Wind his sister to guard the Giving. In the fifth moon we sing of his goodness to woo him from anger, calling him Wurimutonutonu.
The Sixth is Tree, our blessed cousin of a thousand shapes. In the shelter of her leaves we praise her strong magic. She is Mishimishi-Medangin our protector, healer of Moorililil and companion to our kinsman Earth.
The Seventh is Fish, sister to Water, brave provider to our needs, whose color is moon and we name Atiapelu. Her song we sing each time we meet in Water’s embrace.
The Eighth is Bird, brother to Wind, who carries our dreams where we cannot. Him we call Timbulele for his music is laughter.…
CHANGES:
Cris didn’t invite me along that Sunday when he biked back to the studio after dinner to power up the research files. I went to bed early and alone, and told myself I didn’t mind.
In the morning, he tossed brightly colored weather maps onto my desk. “It’s true, you know. Tuatuan air is better.”
Jane looked up from the paper model of Fire! “It can’t be!”
“Better than some domes. Better than Chicago, I’ll bet.”
I refused the serve. “That wouldn’t be hard.”
Cris turned back to Jane. “It’s a famous mystery phenomenon among climatologists. Seems like everybody’s taken a crack at it. They claim a unique dynamic of wind current and temperature creates an anomalous eddy that keeps airborne pollution away from the island.”
“Voodoo,” Songh intoned.
I touched my bead. “Totem power.”
Micah was looking profoundly satisfied that morning as well. The revisions rolled off his table as fast as I could snatch them up. By judicious manipulation of shape and volume, he’d met Howie’s need for windows and doors by creating a “zone of reality” pocketed within the larger abstraction.
He let this “reality” enter the world of the play on a long track curving from upstage right to downstage left. The transition into and out of its smaller, more mundane world would be smoothly gradual, a cinematic zoom to close-up detail. Jane and I threw together a paper mock-up for him to look at.
“It’ll force those scenes to comment on themselves in a way I’m not happy with,” he mused. “But one can only go so far with telling a director what’s good for him.”
Brave Micah. Still fighting for that revolution in style.
We tracked down Howie Tuesday before rehearsal in the lobby of Theatre Two, where he was supervising the rehang of his Gift display material. The new paint did wonders, even with only half the lighting installed. The finished Gift model, once I’d brushed the shop dust away, looked spectacular against the creamy satin-white walls. But it was not the best time to be trying to win Howie over.
“Why the hell didn’t you send him back?” he ranted.
He meant Mali, of course.
Micah bent over the model to nudge the mocked-up additions into a happier configuration. “Howard, I am not aware of where your actors are meant to be at every moment.”
“He was meant to be in rehearsal, where did you think?! There we are working, things are going great, we take a break and poof! he’s gone. No one even saw him leave!” Howie halted his arm waving to glare at me. “Hanging out at the Brim? And he’s the most responsible of all of them! Jesus H, they show up late, they disappear in the middle! How am I going to get this play ready if my cast thinks rehearsal is something they can take or leave?”
“You needn’t question their commitment,” returned Micah calmly. “The problem is their somewhat altered sense of priorities.”
“Somewhat… ! The other day Omea was insisting we all take the afternoon off to visit the farm domes. Christ!”
“Mali came to talk to me about the set. He evidently thought it important.”
As important as rehearsal, he meant. But Howie wasn’t listening for subtleties. He leaned both palms against a gleaming wall, suddenly weary. “You hear I got hauled into Town Council last night?”
“No. Why?”
“The mayor wanted to know was there any truth to the rumor I’d brought ‘dangerous radicals’ into Harmony. I said she’d better hope they were something at least that interesting!”
Micah straightened up from the model. “The Eye?”
Howie nodded darkly. “Seems someone’s decided our e-mail artist is referring to them. Someone like Cam Brigham, my own goddamn fat-ass chairman, who just happened to mention to Her Honor recently—just a point of information, of course—that our actors belong to the same clans that are the focus of the anti-Enclosure movement on Tuatua. He’s got her worrying about the Eye spreading Open Sky propaganda around Harmony. I scoffed, but she comes back with the riot in Stockholm last month. Then Cora Lee from my board demands to know if we’d all forgotten the difference between radicalism and creative thinking. She got so mad she offered that castle of hers for the Eye to stay in.”
“At least that solves your housing problem,” Micah observed. “The Eye can’t help but be happy living at Cora’s.”
Howie regarded him balefully. “And won’t Cam be pleased. His place is right nearby.”
It did me good to see them both laughing together, so much that I didn’t even resent it when Howie okayed the changes without asking if they’d compromised the design.
“And what does the Eye make of all this?” Micah asked.
“Didn’t tell them. Hard enough getting them to concentrate on their work as it is.”
Well, guess what? I thought. They’re way ahead of you. But what we’d told Mali about the Closed Door League already needed updating.
* * *
We took the model and headed for the shop. The front doors of the theatre stood open, spilling bright sun from the plaza onto the unusually l
ong line at the box office’s advance-sales window. Cam Brigham’s completed display for Crossroads was already arousing tourist interest.
Shop noise assailed us from halfway across the lobby.
“I forgot Three Sisters was loading out today!” Micah groaned.
The connecting corridor was an obstacle course of Victorian furniture and storage crates piled high with flowery chinaware and gilt picture frames. The fire door was propped open with an upholstered rocking chair, upon which rested a large silver samovar.
The shop was a madhouse. The south wall loading door lay open to the cavernous stage of Theatre One. A logjam had formed between stage and shop, dead scenery waiting to be stripped and recycled. A load of pipe and canvas had just arrived in the vacuum tube bay. Amid the screech of saws and the snap of the cutting torch, Ruth did one-armed semaphore while bawling instructions through a bullhorn.
“Bring that on through! Stack ’em over there for now!” She lowered the horn when she saw us coming. “No room to breathe in here! Gotta get some of Crossroads out onstage!”
“Sean around?” I yelled, hiking the model box over my head to squeeze between two loaded dollies.
Ruth jabbed a thumb upward, then spun aside to waylay a shop apprentice who was about to toss his load of scrap onto a carefully cut stack of spacing rods.
The dark-suited figure of Max Eider hovered at the paint frame like a guilty conscience. There were four drops hung on the frame, two full-stage eighty-footers and two smaller, at various levels of completion. All were richly detailed and pictorial, lots of foliage in seventeen different greens, amber sunlight, and late rococo architecture. Very painstaking, very time-consuming, but the stuff that painters love to show off with. Twelve painters were lined up along the frame, happily absorbed in their work.
Micah gazed briefly at this bravura display, then shook his head resolutely and led me upstairs.
Sean was a blur of edgy movement around his office. He had on hard hat and work clothes. His jeans sagged low on his hips, bagged out in the rear. Judging from the condition of his hands, he’d been onstage helping with the strike.
“I know, I know! We’re a little behind. But don’t worry. Double-Take loads out of Theatre Two on Thursday. With Three Sisters gone, we’ll get some of Crossroads off the floor, and that’ll free up men to start on your show. You gotta trust me on this, Mi. We’ll save time building it in the theatre.”
One of the younger carpenters strode into the office and handed Sean a sheet of bright blue paper, so blue it drew your eye and made you smile. “Thought you’d like to see what came in with the luan.”
“What, through the Tubes?”
“Again.”
Sean was not smiling. “What is this shit? Was there more?”
“Four bundles. Already in the recycler.”
“Good. That’s where this crap belongs.” I thought he would show it around and mock it, but he crushed the paper in his fist and a bit of light went out of the room. “Friggin’ advertisers won’t leave you alone these days!”
But I’d caught the headline over his shoulder, bold-faced across the top of the page: THERE IS A WORLD OUTSIDE. I waited for him to toss it aside and forget about it, so I could retrieve it on the sly. Instead he shoved the wad in his pocket.
Micah was busy projecting helpful concern. “I could ask Rachel for more men.”
“Nah,” said Sean. “She’ll just say we can’t afford it.”
“Never hurts to try.”
Sean snatched up a drawing, tossed it down again, dropped his hard hat on top of it. So early in the day, the clutter was already winning. “They think we’re machines down here! They don’t understand what they do to me when they schedule things this way! One of these days, real soon…” He paced away from his drawing table to glower at the revisions in the model. “You sure Howie’s gonna stick with this? We can’t waste time building shit, then rebuilding it over again.”
“No,” said Micah evenly, “only Max Eider rates that.”
Sean stared at him, then down at the model. He exhaled deeply and grinned. “Okay, you smart bastard. Go talk to Rachel. You’ve always had a way with her.”
We trudged back upstairs.
“This is the boring part,” remarked Micah with what remained of his good humor.
Rachel was fielding a rush of phone calls, nodding and smiling what sounded like excuses into the screen. Kim met us at the door, looking like the latest summer fashion plate except for the baggy cardigan she’d borrowed to ward off the chill of the air conditioner.
“He thinks it’s just peachy that Cora Lee’s taken the Eye into her house,” she grumbled cheerfully. “Some of her neighbors aren’t so overjoyed.”
“Why’s that?” asked Micah.
“Well, you know… Cora does live in the high-rent district.”
Micah’s bemusement was a trifle disingenuous. “Actors have been housed in Lorien before.”
“Stars, Micah. They have no objection to stars.”
“What are their objections to the Eye?”
Kim laughed. “Hell, they don’t know. They’ve ‘heard things.’ ”
“Dangerous radicals,” I reminded him.
“You needn’t stand in the doorway,” Rachel called, offering us the same smile she had given the vid screen. Rachel gave the same friendly face to everyone, which because it was so restrained, never seemed totally sincere. Micah said it was the most she could allow to seep through the armor a manager must wear, dealing day in and out with people’s problems, demands, and complaints and never vocalizing her own. When Rachel and Micah spoke together, it was in the shorthand of two people with no relish for small talk. Retreating to a corner to be inconspicuous, I studied the pale blue walls, empty but for three smartly framed eighteenth-century architectural renderings, maybe even the real thing on loan from Cam Brigham’s gallery. I wondered how Rachel managed to fight off the clutter that invaded everyone else’s office.
“We’ve a problem brewing in the shop,” said Micah.
Rachel folded her brown hands on the empty deskpad in front of her. “Crossroads is much bigger than anyone expected. We’re hoping it won’t be so late we have to cancel a preview.”
“It’s not Crossroads I’m worried about. What’s the chance of putting more men on The Gift?”
“Micah, it’s a little premature—”
“The show loads in in two weeks and he hasn’t even started it.”
“Sean assures me that as soon as Crossroads is finished—”
“Crossroads is a long way from finished. I was just down there.”
“Micah, we really don’t have—”
“The money. What about Reede Chamberlaine?”
“Our deal does not require him to put any money up front.”
“It wouldn’t hurt to give him a call.”
Rachel resurrected the careful smile. “Well, I think Howie would have to do that.”
“Howard has his hands full directing this play. He needs help producing it.”
Rachel’s lips compressed without moving.
“Rachel, if we schedule shows this tightly”—Micah gently stressed the we—“then we’ve got to be ready to back Sean up when he’s in a bind.”
“All right. I’ll see what I can do. But I’m not promising anything.”
I left the Arkadie with a bad taste in my mouth.
Part of a designer’s responsibility is supervision. This is bound to involve making sure others are fulfilling their responsibilities, and designers often get accused of throwing their weight around. Micah had total faith in Sean, but he knew a problem when he saw one, one that everyone else was apparently too distracted by the pressure of Crossroads to do something about.
It wasn’t until we got back to the studio that I recalled we’d forgotten to ask how the magic trick was progressing. My mind was full of that sky-blue paper and its provocative headline: THERE IS A WORLD OUTSIDE.
ULE:
I was back a
t the shop by the end of the week. Te-Cucularit was due to inspect the props Hickey’s crew had built from my prop drawings.
I stopped to check in with Sean. Ruth said he was in conference with Eider and Crossroads director Bill Rand. I saw them over in a corner together: Rand, short and balding, more like a rich art dealer than a director, and talking as always; Sean for once quiet, listening as if this natty little man was enlightenment itself.
Being in a shop without Micah was enlightening. Some folks had more time for me, some had less. Some saw me as the ear of the prince, others as his spy. In any case, the truth was a little easier to get at. Talking to the right people, I began to realize how far behind Crossroads really was.
The crew hadn’t had a day off for three weeks. Now they were working evenings as well. Amazingly, they were still willing. They’d passed through the initial stages of exhaustion and were into adrenaline high. Though burnout lurked just around the corner, their bravado made it hard to tell how far.
“Beats me why he hasn’t gone and thrown your show at us along with everything else,” one of my informants commented as she turned out an elaborate baluster mold in the plastics shop. Her grin was weary but her pace unflagging. Eight dozen newly made balusters lay stacked on the floor by her bench. “That way they’d both be late, but they’d both be done.”
“Or neither of ’em would,” added the guy working behind her. “The flashy one’s gotta come first.”
“F’sure. Upstairs’ll have his balls if they gotta cancel any of those sold-out previews—”
“Sean won’t let it get that far,” I said.
My friend shrugged. “Who’da thought he’d let it get this far?”
* * *
“It’s really unlike him,” I said to Hickey as we waited in his multitiered Cage for Te-Cucularit to arrive.
“Sean’s protecting his crew. He’s tired of burning them out by mid-season.” Hickey wore a baseball cap with “HARD HAT” stenciled on it in gold. His black hair stuck out in wings to either side. He tossed a bunch of little cloth bags at me, pointing to the silver coffee service resting atilt on a nearby crate. “Wrap that up for me before somebody steals it.”
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