Behind me, Mark said to Mali, “I got hassled by some German tourists yesterday. If the tourists are picking up on it now…”
This seemed a safer conversation. I offered Ule a parting grin and crawled over to listen in.
“Time to air your issues more publicly.” Sam struggled the words past his swollen jaw. When I joined them, he nodded at the Matta. “You do nice work, Rhys… for a girl.” He couldn’t quite manage a grin.
Mark chewed his lip. “The rights of petition are clearly in place, but we don’t have the numbers.”
“Maybe you do.” Mali’s bony frame was folded up like a mahogany deck chair tossed carelessly on the floor. “You say there’s less than two thousand active apprentices, but think a little further: what about those who once were apprentices? Or those living with ex-apprentices, who might be convinced with a little talk?”
“There’s also sympathetic Second- and ThirdGens like Songh who’ll go with you,” added Sam. “If the CDL were sure of their majority, they wouldn’t be bothering with these e-mail games. You’d have all been Out long ago.”
I was impressed. In Harmony less than a month, if you didn’t count their quarantine, and they already had as good a grasp on its sociology as we did. Maybe better. We saw ourselves as helpless chaff in the wind. These two didn’t believe in helpless.
“There are more of you than you think.” Mali extended a palm and fisted it. “There’s power in those numbers and the CDL knows it and wants you to think otherwise. They want you demoralized and distracted. Don’t let them fool you with this dangerous-radicals talk. We’re just the bait, bro. You are the prey.”
Sam frowned faintly. I wasn’t sure he agreed.
Mali scavenged a splinter of wood from the floor and stuck it in his mouth. “On Tuatua, we are two minorities—one rich and in power, one poor but”—he smiled—“well organized. We struggle for control of a mostly apathetic majority.”
Sam nodded. “There’s your job: convince the quiet uncommitteds to speak up in your favor. Write that petition. Start airing your grievances, like the CDL airs theirs.”
“Their way’s too sneaky,” said Mark.
“And so far it’s worked,” Sam replied.
“We don’t really have grievances,” I said. “We just don’t want to get thrown out.”
“Some jerk hassles your friend on the street and that’s not a grievance?” Mali spat his splinter into the air behind him. “Ah, Sam, what are they teaching our children? Everything about enjoying the freedom of the artist and nothing about how to hold on to it!”
Mark felt his hard efforts being dismissed. “I suppose you can teach us better?”
“What the hell,” returned Sam softly but not particularly kindly, “do you think he’s been doing?”
With a rustle of skirts, Omea dropped gracefully beside me. “There! That’s done. Except he’ll want us to dedicate it properly, but that can wait ‘til it’s dry.” She raised both arms to her hair to undo some complicated fastenings, removed the tall feather headdress, and set it aside as if it were any old hat. She peered at the men’s faces. “Problems of the world time, is it? How are you, Sam? You shouldn’t be thinking with your head all swelled up like that.”
Mali regarded Sam with wry fondness. “The organizer’s gearing up.”
“I don’t take well to being shit-kicked,” Sam growled. He leaned forward, swept the floor with his bandaged palms as if scratching battle diagrams in the dirt of some rebel hideout. “Listen, kid: first you have to set your style, right?”
Mark eased back and let go of his sulk.
Sam returned the best he could do for a grin. “Good lad. Now, the CDL’s already stolen the media angle. But you have your squeaky-clean image: innocent youth. Very potent. And because it’s important for you to represent the constitutional, the legal and democratic side of the argument—”
Upstage, a warning yell rang out, then a metallic groan and more panicked shouting.
“The scaffolding!” I gasped.
Mali turned, rising. “Pen! Moussa!” He was already scaling the decking framework. Two tired crewmen struggled at the base of thirty feet of tipping scaffold. Tools scattered from the top walkway where the bearded kid, one of the new hands, hung on for dear life. Sam lurched up to follow Mali, swearing harshly as Omea and Mark held him back. He was too weak to shake them off.
Moussa beat Mali to the scaffold. He threw his solid bulk against the angle of its fall and planted his feet. Pen and Mali hauled on the other end and the scaffold swung back. Cris reached it and grabbed hold as it steadied and settled back on its legs. The crewmen sank to the deck in relief and exhaustion.
The kid clambered down the still-vibrating metal frame. “Piece o’ shit scaffold!” He grabbed Moussa’s hand. “Saved my life, man!”
“No problem,” Moussa replied.
Mali stood over the nearest stagehand. “How long since you’ve had a night’s sleep, bro?”
The man laughed. “Sleep? Who needs it?”
“You do,” said Mali. “Go on home.”
The men looked at each other. “Well, we’d sure like to, but—”
“He’s right,” called Ruth from the loading door. Her face was puffy with sleep. “When we start getting that careless, we should call it a night.”
Mark relaxed his hold on Sam. “Sorry.”
Sam twitched his clothing into place irritably. “Yeah. So am I.”
“Mali’s always telling other people’s workers what to do,” I observed as the tall Tuatuan climbed down off the decking and came toward us.
“Don’t mind him,” said Sam. “When you’re the chiefs son, you’re taught to order folks around.” He pretended Mali had not overheard him. “He does okay, considering.”
Mali returned one of his complex looks, then wrapped a careful arm around Sam’s shoulders. “Time for all of us to go home, bro.”
I’d really like, I thought, to see Sam play Horatio to Mali’s Hamlet. The dynamic seemed so right just then.
The evening’s bizarre and intimate mood was broken. Omea went to see if the paint was dry. Tuli finished gathering up brushes. Hickey and Lucienne emerged from house left, blinking in the glare of the work light. Though he held her hand firmly in his own, Hickey watched the girl as if she might disappear. I helped Tua stack the paint in a caddy, eyeing her sidelong. I couldn’t really blame Cris for finding her distracting, but it hurt when he did it while I was still around.
No-Mulelatu roused himself from his smoke-wreathed reverie. He gripped my shoulder, leaning into me unsteadily. He snatched off his knit cap and jammed it on my head. “A little token. For your good work.”
I adjusted the cap with a silly smile. “Ule, are you sure?”
“Yeah.” He grinned. “I’m never so stoned I don’t know what I’m doing. Look at the rest. Anyone else said thank you?”
“Omea. Sam, sort of.”
“Oh. Well, they would.” He shrugged and wandered off.
Te-Cucularit, who had painted through the entire disturbance, muttered something indecipherable and dropped his brush into the water bucket. He hunkered over the Puleales to review his work. I gathered his paint jars and capped them.
“Those look great,” I noted. He had covered each knobby cylinder with an intricate web of interlocking geometry, recalling a Greek key, pale yellow or red against ebony wood. I reached to smooth the lustrous surfaces with an admiring finger. Cu snatched my hand away so abruptly that I let out a squeak of surprise.
“You may not touch them.”
The odd evening had worn me out. “Oh, Cu, I’ve been handling those things for days!”
“They were not painted then,” he insisted doggedly. “They are for men’s hands only now.”
I wasn’t going to let myself tear up in front of him again. I picked up his paint jars. “If you say so.”
“I know what you think,” he said quickly, before I could move away. “But there are true matters about the separate power
s of men and of women that must be observed. Else we are both weakened.”
I gave up on the notion that if Te-Cucularit was so aware of himself as a performer in these ceremonies he staged, he might be more into the pomp and ritual than the actual belief. “You don’t make it easy, Te-Cucularit.”
“Easy?” He settled tightly on his heels, urgency replacing his scowl. “Listen to me. Someone in the world must live responsibly. Someone must walk the Stations. Someone must decide to keep the laws. If not I, then who? If not anyone, then where are we? What are we? No better than our enemies.”
I resisted the urge to say, “Lighten up, Preacher,” as I had the feeling Sam would have. Cu was too much in earnest. Besides, I decided, we each must be allowed to pursue our personal strategies for keeping Chaos at bay. I was eager to develop one myself, now that it looked like I was going to need it.
THE PETITION:
The more I thought about Sam, the angrier I got with Cris.
“Me?” he demanded. “What about her?”
Across the breakfast table, Jane worked serenely away at a double helping of oatmeal. Beside her, Mark scribbled on a napkin, his eggs cooling at his elbow.
“Jane learned her lesson,” I said. “You’re still at it!”
“And bet I’m gonna watch who I talk to from now on!”
The long, airy dining room was crowded but suspiciously quiet. No singing or boisterous arguments, no food fights. A halo of empty seats isolated our table.
Songh arrived bearing the latest e-mail snatched fresh from his parents’ fax. Jane grabbed it. Mark crossed a sentence out on his napkin and started over.
“The petition?” Songh read over Mark’s shoulder. “Sounds like civics class.”
“Just consider for one minute that they’re telling it straight,” I pursued. “That they’re ordinary people stuck in ordinary domestic politics and that they’re not hiding the Conch.”
“Ordinary? The Eye? Be serious.”
It was foolhardy to pick a fight with Cris. He was so much better at it, able to be incredulous and defiant simultaneously. “You ought to think about what’s good for them for a change, instead of being so hot to show everyone how clever you are!”
Jane read the e-mail. “… while the League certainly deplores such unconscionable violence, it does wonder how a certain artistic director did not foresee that a criminal element would bring its own violence with it.”
Mark crumpled his napkin and reached for mine. “You need this?”
“Maybe it should be more straightforward,” suggested Songh.
Mark nodded. “The power is in the signatures, not the language.”
Yolanda stopped behind Mark, balancing her laden tray on her forearm, looking as if she wanted to ask me a question.
I edged away from Cris. “There’s room over here, Yoli.”
“Nah, I can’t… I, um…” She leaned over the table. “What’s this about a meeting last night? A petition? Everybody’s talking.”
Mark laid down his pen. “Would’ve been better if they’d come.”
“With fifteen minutes’ notice at midnight? Come on, I was asleep already.”
Cris laughed. “Ten people. Not bad for a bunch of amateurs.”
“Got to start somewhere.” Mark bent back to his scribbling.
Yolanda shifted the tray to her other arm. “You know, guys, some think you shouldn’t be raising waves at a time like this.”
“They’re wrong,” murmured Jane into her oatmeal.
“Like that list you put up? You guys put that up, right?”
Mark was very relaxed and deliberate. Dignified, I decided. He was learning more from Mali than political consciousness. “If apprentices are being harassed on the streets, we should be telling each other about it.”
It was Songh’s idea to write all the incidents down and post the list outside the dining room. Next to it, he pinned up copies of all the e-mails received to date.
Yolanda leaned in closer. “Nobody wants to tell that stuff! Jeez, whadda ya write, some old lady spit on me today?”
“Sam said not to expect a groundswell right off,” said Mark.
“Yeah. Well, just thought I’d mention it. See ya.”
“Yoli!” Mark let his voice ring through the dining room. “There’s another meeting tonight, don’t forget.”
We’d called a dorm meeting on impulse after the Matta ritual, with faint success. On the same impulse, we’d invited the Eye to dinner at the dorm.
“Anytime,” agreed Mali, the evangelist and teller of tales.
“No way,” decreed Sam, the strategist. “Last thing we want is to encourage the CDL’s apprentice-conspiracy accusations. They are the conspirators, not you.”
But he did approve a breakfast planning session at Cora’s as being faintly less visible. “Only to the public, you understand. The CDL will be keeping a record every time you fart.”
It was morning cool in Cora’s cavernous brick-walled kitchen. The high arched windows let in a quiet lavender light through rippled glass. The butcher-block counters were shining and empty, the antique tole-work canisters all in place. Cora’s house was what I’d dreamed Harmony would be way back in Chicago.
Cris bounced around the room, then settled with Mark and Mali under the hanging lamp at the refectory table. He had taken to wearing his coverall unfastened to his navel, and today he had braided the long hair at his temples like Pen sometimes did. I thought he looked stupid.
“Where is everybody?” he demanded.
Mali was still damp from the shower and naked but for a strip of orange linen wrapped intricately around his groin. He was like bones wound in dark leather. Outrage keeps him thin, I thought. “They’re asleep,” he yawned. “It’s an hour yet ‘til warm-ups.”
“You think they’re all as crazy as we are?” Sam was fully dressed, as always. A different kind of man might have shown off scars like the ones I recalled Sam carried. He limped about opening and closing fumed-oak cabinets and pulling edibles at random out of the walk-in fridge. I thought it unfair he should be the one working, wounded as he was. I found plates and mugs and pewterware, then went to help him with the food.
“Only you and me here not used to getting waited on?” He handed me oranges and crusty bread wrapped in brown paper.
“I can’t sit at that table. Last time I saw it, you were bleeding all over it.”
His laugh was dry and quick. “Worried about me, were you?”
“Oh yes.”
He eyed me a little more gently, as if my honesty shamed him. “No need. No need.” He flexed his fingers and deftly palmed an egg, to show his hands were back in working order.
I tried to meet his gaze, to take in his livid bruises and his stapled-up lip and brow as if it were nothing very terrible. I might as well have held up a mirror for him.
“Never was much of a beauty anyhow.” He grabbed the oranges from me and turned to stick them in the juicer.
“Now, last night’s meeting was standing room only!” Cris drummed his fists and crowed. “When we read out the petition, nobody said much but…”
“Scared of taking their lives into their own hands,” said Mark.
Mali listened benignly, one leg hiked up on the table, whose aged planking was as dark and polished as his skin. “Like you were.”
“Yes, sir.” Mark smiled and flicked his blond hair back. “Like I was.”
“But wait!” Cris declared. “When we called for a vote, it was a few hands, then more, then the whole room rising to approve the motion! Wish I’d had a vidcam. What a scene! It was dynamic!” Mark said, “Those who didn’t agree, didn’t come.”
Sam delivered a pitcher of juice and signaled me to pour. “So let’s hear this miracle petition.”
Mark unfolded a copy and read.
In the end, he’d left the eloquence to his statistics and framed a simple request to the citizenry of Harmony, in care of Her Honor the Mayor, for a frank and public discussion of the f
uture of the Outside Adoption Policy and of the Apprenticeship Program as a whole. His quoting of legal precedent for petitioning was eased in almost as an afterthought.
“Good,” Sam nodded. “Good.”
Cris cheered and pounded Mark’s shoulder.
Mark fiddled with the edges of his paper. “My, uh, my father always said, in a lawsuit you have to assume the rights you’re claiming, so the other side will appear as the aggressor when they try to take them away from you.”
Sam looked to Mali. “What more can I say?”
Mali laughed. “Writing’s the easy part. Now get out there and drum up those signatures!”
TOWN MEETING:
The first signature on my petition sheet was Micah’s.
“It’s Town Meeting tonight,” he noted after he’d read it over. “Watch it on the vid.”
“We’re all painting late. Bring us a report.”
Micah handed back the petition. “This approach wouldn’t have occurred to me, but it’s probably the right idea. Positive action. Risky, but right.”
“It wasn’t completely ours,” I admitted.
“I guessed as much.” Micah tossed down his brush, settled back on his stool. “I’m missing all the excitement, closeted up here all day. How are they doing, our dangerous radicals?”
“Come to the theatre more. We could really use you there.”
“I’ll get there. Soon as I get out from under Willow Street.”
I caught him up on the details. One detail was Kim Levin buying me a fancy fruit box in the greenroom canteen so she could get me aside to ask what was wrong with Micah, why couldn’t he work things out with Sean and couldn’t I do something about it?
Another was a scene I’d had that morning with Sean.
I’d gone by the Arkadie early, feisty from our strategy breakfast at Cora’s. The Gift build was far enough along that some fairly major problems were becoming evident: curves that did not bank as smoothly as the drawings indicated, riser heights that were off by too many centimeters, shapes and surfaces in the backdrop that didn’t match the model.
I reported this to Ruth, expecting the usual can-do response.
“Talk to Sean,” she said.
Harmony Page 30