I didn’t argue. “Where?”
“Over at Crossroads. One of our new holo machines crapped out in the middle of last night’s tech.”
In form, Theatre One was a traditional proscenium house of the sort that has been around for four hundred years. In scale, it was operatic: five tiers of crystal, gilt, and velvet, four thousand seats and not a one of them obstructed view.
The stage was as big as a sports arena. For Crossroads, it was tracked and winched and geared and elevatored six ways from Sunday. Not a square inch of deck was left unmechanized. The fly loft was jammed with scenery, lighting equipment, projectors, and FX machines. Both wings were piled two stories high and two whole acts of finished scenery still waited onstage, getting in the way.
The Crossroads show carpenter, a slight, dark man in jacket and cravat, paced around muttering into his headset, halting every so often to stare up into the flies, where the scenery was packed so tightly he couldn’t see through it to his men on the grid. Six of the paint crew were up on a rolling scaffold, shiny new I noticed, touching up a hanging window wall. Max Eider lurked beneath them.
“Ja, Gallia, is good, only more golden!” He was hoarse from shouting over the noise. “No, Rene, you must make this transition better. That is like finger painting!”
“How’s it going, Mr. Eider?” I did not stop as I hurried past.
“You see how!” He gestured eloquently at the painters. “I hear Micah is very far behind?”
I nodded and kept going. It wasn’t Micah who was behind.
Sean was bent double over a pulled-up section of deck, shouting to the men below. I had to tap his back to get his attention.
“One sec.” He leaned further into the pit. “So check every goddamn connection and run the sequence again! Jesus, man, do I gotta get in there and do it for you?” He straightened. “What?”
“Got a minute?”
“Sure, sometime next year.”
“Oh, Sean.” I made a comic face at him, as if everything were the way it had always been.
“Awright, awright, what is it? Wait, hold it.” He cupped his hands to his mouth. “Pedro! Get the vac over and clean this hole out! This equipment won’t work sittin’ in garbage!” He turned back to me. “So what’s this I hear about a petition?”
“Hunh?”
“You involved in it? Must be, I guess.”
“How did you… ?”
“Good idea to get the issue out in the open.” Sean was nodding without looking at me. “I mean, I got my kids’ future to worry about just like anyone, but talking, that’s what Harmony’s about, right? No point pretending we don’t have a problem.”
“No,” I said slowly. Which problem did he mean? “Of course not.”
“Right.” He dismissed the topic with a wave. “Well, what’s up?”
I expressed my concerns about the set.
“Really? Well, you bring in new people, you know, that’s what you get.”
“Ruth’s not new people.”
“Sean!” The show carpenter waved his headset from center stage.
“Yeah, what?”
“Bill Rand’s on the line here asking can you still make it for lunch?”
“Tell him I’ll be ten minutes late,” Sean yelled. He turned back impatiently. “Gwinn, look, they’re probably going at it a little fast next door, but that’s so there’ll be something to walk on by Tuesday’s tech. They won’t notice what it looks like.”
“You mean the Eye?”
“I mean actors. They never do. It still bothers you later, we’ll go back in and fix it.” He looked straight at me. “You think I’d let Micah down?”
* * *
Micah and I both knew the chance of an after-the-fact fix. If a remote broke down or a door handle fell off in an actor’s hand, it was repaired, sure enough. But if a major piece of scenery was built wrong to begin with, management right away started weighing the costs of labor and materials versus the artistic necessity of the redo. Most often, it became the designer’s job to camouflage the error or learn to live with it.
In Sean’s shop, you didn’t usually have to worry about mistakes.
Micah didn’t mention Sean. “Could it be purely coincidental I’m being so heavily pressured right now to deliver Bill Rand’s piece for Willow Street?”
* * *
On my way back to the Arkadie, some kid threw eggs at me.
I was philosophical as I washed drying yolk off my sleeve in the dressing room sink. “Could have been a gang of homicidal teenagers, like I’ve been dreaming about lately.”
“Or a man with a knife,” said Jane seriously.
Like No-Mulelatu, I thought. “Who d’you think told Sean about the petition?”
“Word gets around,” said Hickey.
“Not that fast, when it has to do with apprentices.”
“What are you suggesting?”
“Nothing. I don’t know.” Why would Sean care about an apprentice petition when he was so far over his head with everything else? I shut off the water and blotted my still-soiled sleeve on a paint rag, gazing around at the welter of empty or dried-up jars of paint, the skinned-over cans and murky water buckets, the balled-up paint rags, the old food wrappings and drink. “Hey, where are all the finished props?”
“He took them,” said Jane. “To keep them Clean.”
Hickey rubbed his face disgustedly. “I’m putting up a sign: Unclean and proud of it.”
His expression made me laugh. “You really got to start getting some sleep, Hick. All this burning the candle at both ends’ll do you in… you are going to Town Meeting tonight?”
“They want me at the Crossroads dress. Special request from the director.”
Bill Rand again. “Are you going?”
“To Town Meeting? You bet. Wouldn’t miss this one for the world.”
* * *
It felt like a game until then, these urgent dorm meetings and petition signing and street harassment, a real-life variation on our armchair survival exercises. Like the sparring of young cubs as they learn the moves that will feed and protect them when they’re grown: serious, but lacking the sharp cut of reality. It was not the Eye’s fault. Mali and Sam did their best to wake us from our dreaming.
But in the theatre, the unreal is life-critical one moment, the next, a poster on the wall and a recycler full of scenery. No wonder we continued to laugh and go about our work as if it would always be there tomorrow, no matter how much we claimed to feel threatened. If we’d truly understood what was happening, we’d have been glued to Video Town Hall.
We were all hard at work when Micah appeared in the dressing room that night. I was overjoyed to have him finally in the theatre. But he hadn’t come to talk about the show. Hickey slid past him, threw his shambling body into a chair, and sat massaging creases into his forehead.
Immediately I worried for the Eye. “You just got out? It’s very late.”
Mark and Jane set down their brushes nervously.
“The Closed Door League came up for discussion tonight,” said Micah tightly.
“Uh-oh,” breathed Songh.
“The meeting went on a bit,” Hickey muttered.
“How’d it go?” asked Cris.
Micah was very calm. “Half the town was there.”
“The wrong half,” said Hickey.
“When the subject of the League came up, Cora Lee and myself and some others called for the members of this secret organization to declare themselves and what they stood for.” Micah leaned heavily against the doorframe. “I’ve never heard a packed arena so filled with silence.”
“A regular graveyard,” grumbled Hickey. “Some woman behind me said she’d heard the CDL was formed to protest the Francotel deal.”
“Got a little sidetracked, didn’t they,” I muttered.
Micah said, “So we made our pretty little speeches about anonymous harassment undermining the democratic principles of Town Meeting, etc., etc. The mayor nodded and c
lucked and agreed that the matter must be investigated. A committee was appointed, including most of us who’d spoken up, then the mayor insisted we not waste discussion time before the new committee had thoroughly looked into the matter and presented their findings. A motion to table was seconded and voted on faster than you could take a breath.”
Hickey nodded. “You catch who seconded that motion?”
“Campbell Brigham.”
“You see how he looked at us?”
Micah shrugged. They brooded in silence for a while.
“Well, you tried,” I said finally.
“There’s more.” Micah’s head dipped as if in shame. “Next on the agenda was a proposal from ‘a coalition of concerned citizens and parents,’ who feel that Harmony’s ‘valued apprentice resource’ is under threat from ‘Outside influences,’ and the best way to assure its safety is a nightly curfew.”
“Curfew!” Cris yelped.
Mark said, “You mean they’d lock us in the dorms at night?”
“Like little children?” I muttered.
“Like criminals,” said Jane.
“Off the streets for your own good,” confirmed Hickey.
“But we do half of our work at night!” I protested.
“That’s what kept the discussion going for so long.” Micah shoved at a paint rag on the floor with the toe of his shoe. “Until someone pointed out that the curfew would only apply to apprentices, not resident trainees.”
Songh groaned.
Cris was incredulous. “But it couldn’t have passed!”
Micah’s eyes were clear and cold and very angry. “It passed. It goes into effect tomorrow.”
CURFEW:
Our petition raced like wildfire through the eight apprentice dormitories. Then we took it into the workplace.
Howie signed eagerly enough. He even dragged me into the main lobby to do it in full view of the citizens lining up to buy tickets for Crossroads. But about the curfew, he just rolled his eyes.
“Ah, it’ll never stand. Wait ‘til the restaurants start feeling the loss of apprentice business at night. Wait ‘til their theatres are half empty.”
“We can’t afford the restaurants anymore, Howie. And we don’t buy our tickets.” Except for Mark’s recent difficulty at Willow Street.
“Look. You are asses in their seats, too many of which would otherwise be empty, especially at night.” Heading off to rehearsal, he threw me a wink. “Who’d pay to see some of the shit they produce in this town?”
I looked down at the petition, hanging limply in my hand.
He stopped in the sunlight flooding through the lobby doors. “Hey, tell you what. Just let me get through this show, then I’ll get out and do some campaigning for you kids. Maybe it’s time to do a play about apprentices, what do you say? There’s a good young writer working with the RoundHall I could put you in touch with. Think about it.”
I blinked into the darkness of his silhouette framed by the too-bright doorway. “I don’t think we’ve got that kind of time.”
“Relax, Gwinny. Nothing happens that fast around here.”
Louisa Pietro, freshly arrived from lighting the Ring Cycle at the Amsterdam State Opera, was not so sanguine. “You mean my assistants can’t work in the theatres after nine? Gimme that petition!”
Micah and I paced her through the lower lobby after a winey lunch in Fetching Plaza. “Songh’s off with Mark getting signatures,” I told him. “That all right?
He nodded. “Push now, while people are angry about the curfew.”
I described Howie’s response.
“Howard has no apprentice help,” replied Micah. “He sees the whole issue in the abstract. The strategy of course is to force us to fall back on our homebred assistants.”
“Never had one worth their salt,” said Louisa.
We rounded the corner into Howie’s spruced-up gallery. Properly hung and organized, the photos had an earnest, important look.
“We might be partly to blame for that, you know.” The cooling of Micah’s outrage had left him deeply thoughtful. “If we’d given our SecondGens a better chance, treated them more equally—”
“Nonsense!” Lou declared. “It’s what comes of prosperity. The pressure’s off, you realize you’re not going to starve, next thing you know, you’re bored and greedy and inventing enemies where there are none! It’s as bad as this Open Sky paranoia! I heard Ingrid Hibberd speak when I was doing Werter in Stockholm. What she said was basic common sense: now the Dissolution is under control, we should put the same brilliant resources that saved humanity to work saving the world.”
Micah eyed the walls as if they might be hiding vidcams and recording devices. He offered an arch, conspiratorial grin.
“Oh balls!” said Louisa. “It’s not sedition. Hibberd’s only asking do we want to live under glass for the rest of whatever?” She halted in front of a panoramic view of a Tuatuan plantation house, bright white against green. “I don’t. Do you?”
Lou Pietro was in the prime of middle age, solidly built with a round, unlined face. Her silvery blond hair was always cut to the latest fashion of whatever dome she had worked in most recently. Now she wore it curling smoothly under at one shoulder, clipped close to her ear above the other. Her gestures were full of stabbing fingers and clenched fists. When Lou and Micah worked together, they chattered spiritedly about Art, life, everything under the sun except the show, and managed in the end to produce work that flowed together as seamlessly as if it had come from a single hand.
“It’s a sane, forward-looking question!” Lou continued. “But it raises the issue of common good, of sacrifice by the few for the many, and nobody wants to hear about that these days.”
“Taking down the domes is a long-term question. Our problem is short-term: population.” Micah studied a black-and-white portrait of a naked Tuatuan carving a dugout canoe and played devil’s advocate. “Our space and resources are finite. How long can Harmony afford to add population from without?”
“Let’s have fewer children! Or no children! Or, for the short term, let’s build a new dome!” Louisa yanked open a door and shooed us into the theatre. “Why is no one talking about that? This town’s one of the few that could afford it!”
“That’s what the petition is for.” I shut the door behind us. “To get them talking.”
“For the first time in forty years, one of the founding principles has come up for question,” said Micah. “People may be reluctant to face it for fear the whole structure will crumble.”
“They’re reluctant to face their own greed,” Louisa snorted. “Or the fact that the long term may be here already.”
Work noise was subdued in Theatre Two. The upstage loading door was cracked open. I could hear the murmur of the shop intercom broadcasting the Crossroads dress rehearsal from next door. Louisa marched down the aisle, scanning the equipment-laden booms right and left of each seating section, then the catwalks overhead, where electricians clambered about adding and repositioning instruments in preparation for her focusing session. She slowed when her gaze reached the stage. “I hope you’re going to tell me the rest of the scenery’s waiting in the shop… where is everybody?”
I counted four carpenters onstage, only two of them from the regular crew, laying surfacing material across the undulating support framework of the deck. The woven plastic mat was pliant, easily cut, and shaped at room temperature until treated with a curing spray. A chemical reaction hardened it to an early resilient toughness, not like a solid floor at all. More like walking on flesh. Actors loved it.
But the great sweep of backdrop was still a barren skeleton.
“Why are we so far behind?” Louisa demanded. “Damn, Micah, I thought at least here I could count on having a set to focus on!”
I couldn’t help feeling responsible. It was my job to oversee progress in the theatre. “Sean says the shop’s too busy.”
Louisa jabbed her whole arm at the stage. “But four men, when
we tech in three days? Let’s go have a word with the guy. He always says I’m his favorite harridan.”
“I don’t think so, Lou.”
“C’mon! Sean’s used to me sticking my nose in.”
“You go. I… can’t.”
“Can’t what?”
“Can’t talk to him right now,” said Micah.
“Can’t talk to Sean? An-example-to-us-all Sean?”
“Not right now.”
“I don’t get it. Are you two fighting?”
“Well,” said Micah, “let’s just say Sean’s made some priority choices I can’t agree with.”
“So tell him.”
“I did. He told me to fuck off. Basically.”
So. It wasn’t just overwork that had kept Micah away from the theatre.
Lou planted herself mid-aisle and folded her arms. “You guys have been through hell together and suddenly you can’t talk to him?”
“Not until I can manage to be civil,” Micah replied.
“Jesus, Micah, how’re you going to get a show built if you won’t talk to your master carpenter??”
Micah chose a seat at random and lowered himself into it deliberately. “That’s what assistants are for.”
Lou jammed her hands onto her hips. “This is very bad, Mi. Very naughty. This is unworthy of you.”
“It’s unworthy of Sean to drive me to it.” He was almost sullen. Sullen. My wise and temperate boss and mentor. “I did my best for him. I can’t go in there begging again.”
Louisa stared at him. “Well, if you can’t, I can.”
She strode off to take matters into her own hands. I stood awkwardly in the aisle while Micah stared at the back of the seat in front of him. Finally he pulled himself heavily to his feet. “All right. Let’s go down and take a look.”
The problems onstage were concrete and easier to talk about. We stepped around a gaping hole center stage, the hole where the vanishing trick would play, and climbed the slopes of the deck. About half the underlayment was in place: upstage where the drop swept down to blend in, and under the curved path of the tracking. I showed him where the elevations of the deck deviated from the drawings, where the changes of level seemed too sharp or angular for the age-worn stone-and-sand quality he was after. But Micah’s eye was drawn to the backdrop. His arm scribed an arc in the air, the correct arc, the arc it should have had.
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