None too soon, I almost said.
“Howie and his goddamn gimmicks.” He grinned. “Shit, if your native pals can voodoo my remotes broken next door, I oughta just leave all this to them.”
I did not grin back. “Think it’ll work?”
“Fuck me, who knows?” he said tiredly. “Yeah, I guess.” He threw his shoulders back, surveyed the stage. “All right. Let’s get this joint in shape for actors to walk on.” He glanced at me slyly. “Or we could leave it messy. Probably more what they’re used to, eh?”
He’d moved away before I could respond.
But there was no way the set would be finished by noon the next day. While we built and carved, our foam scraps and sawdust and metal shavings were swept up behind us. The gaps between the decking sections were plugged. Spongy spots were shored up. Hickey slouched around with his crew, placing prop tables and being told to move them the hell out of the carpenters’ way. He’d nod and shrug morosely. He wasn’t saying much. I wondered if the Great Romance had ended with him still pining after Lucienne.
Liz Godwin bustled in to check out the safety railings and escape stairs and the installation of running lights where actors had to make entrances and exits in the dark. She edged up to the down-center pit and peered in. “This gonna be ready?”
Sean ran his tongue along his teeth. “Hope so.”
“Think it’ll work?”
“All right,” Sean bellowed to the entire theatre. “Any other asshole wanna ask that question?”
Liz backed away. “Howie’s bringing the cast in at five.”
“On their day off?”
“Howie wants them familiar with the layout. He doesn’t want them thrown by any surprises tomorrow.”
Sean sniffed, rubbed his belly. “Five it is, then. But not an an actor on this stage before.”
He stayed in the theatre all day, giving orders and assignments, avoiding Micah when he came in to work, taking battle reports from Ruth, who’d been stationed next door at Crossroads. In another era Sean would have commanded armies.
At five, Micah stood with me in the house as Howie ushered the Eye around a set they’d already spent more time on than he had.
“Why’d Sean let it go so long if he was going to do it anyway?”
“He’s done part of it,” Micah corrected. “The technical part.”
Yes. Sean had stormed in to save the day at the last minute and covered all his bases except one: the design. The set loomed like Frankenstein’s monster, patched and seamed, a functional but ungainly wreck without grace or conviction. Hardly the stuff of atmosphere and illusion… or magic. It seemed over-large for the space, raw and out of place, as if Micah had made some sort of horrible mistake.
“Hey, how ’bout this!” Howie waved a sheet of newsfax, then thrust it at Omea like a captured flag. “ ‘Fascism is the death of Art,’ huh? Somebody finally had the guts to respond to those jerks!”
The Eye passed the e-mail among themselves, murmuring as if it were a welcome surprise. They were grumbly today, sticking close together, moving as a unit. Moussa complained that his “spot” was lumpy and uncomfortable, even though he’d not actually be sitting on it but on his Gorrehma. Tuli and Lucienne thought the deck might be too pliable for dancing. Ule found places that were too hard. Te-Cucularit snarled at the two prop boys swapped off Crossroads and threatened to walk because they were not handling the ritual items with proper respect.
Mali drew a shell up around himself and broke away to work his blocking in a private dance around the stage. I considered warning him of Crispin’s latest speculations, but didn’t want to seem a part of this Conch obsession. I no longer cared who the Conch was. I hoped it was none of them. I thought that would keep them safe.
While they circled and groused, I slouched in my seat and studied Sam. Not the sort you’d normally bother to watch. Even his tricks were about not watching him. Without his face in front of me, I couldn’t call it to mind. Only his blue eyes and a memory of hardness. A serious disadvantage for an actor, this unobtrusiveness, but a talent in magic, perhaps also in politics. Unobtrusive but somehow always there. Mali might claim his father was the Rock, but I identified him more with Fire. Sam was the one whose feet seemed anchored in the very core of the Earth. I couldn’t help but find that attractive.
I noted also the Eye’s pattern as a group: Omea always in their midst, touching, smiling, soothing over the rough places; Mali apart, listening, digesting, dispensing policy; Sam and Moussa circling the perimeter, each going about his actor-business with a part of him removed and on alert.
Now Sean approached Howie center stage, hands in pockets as if for a chat about last night’s dinner or the soccer scores. “I got the lift and the slit-drop working okay, but the field generator’s not installed. We’ll keep on it but my guess is, you’ll have to fake it for tomorrow.”
Howie frowned. “I see.”
Beside me, Micah sighed. Another day of waiting, plus the spectacle of Howie bounding up the aisle toward us.
“Our trick’s not ready,” he announced querulously.
Micah glanced up at him, nodded.
“C’mon, Mi, you knew that was the one thing I was really going to want to work with! He won’t have my moving units ready either.”
“I know, Howard.”
“Well, Christ, maybe you ought to work your shit out with Sean and get him back on our team! I don’t see Max Eider having trouble convincing him to work nights.”
The soft weight of Micah’s body seemed to slim and lengthen with the lifting of his chin. Six hundred years of aristocratic heritage fighting to reassert itself. “I’m working on that, Howard.”
“Well, work harder. We’re running out of time.”
Mark startled me, appearing suddenly at my shoulder. “Time to check in with them.”
I let him drag me up out of my seat, away from Howie and Micah. “They’re not in the best mood…”
“Who is?” He nudged Songh, damp and eager beside him. “Get Cris.”
“In the shop,” I called as Songh raced off.
“Got chased on the way over,” Mark panted. “Broad daylight. Some kiddie ball team. Didn’t like the color of my coveralls.”
“You should have called Security.”
“You gotta be kidding. Security are their older brothers and sisters.” Mark steered me to the front row and pulled up short in front of Mali. “Got a minute?”
I expected the worst, a flash of that hidden temper, as Mali frowned down at him, this slim blond with the determined jaw. But Mali asked, “How many?”
“Enough, sir. I think.”
“You think? Numbers, bro.”
“Six thousand.”
When Mali smiled like that, it was like watching the sun come up. “Well done, young Mark.” He reached behind him without looking and snagged the shoulder he seemed to know was there. “Sam! We’re needed. Time to go to work!”
NIGHT MEETING:
It was hard to paint, knowing what was ahead of us that night, but I insisted we work until the very last minute. Cris bitched a lot, but I think even he felt guilty about leaving a job unfinished when the boss is working right alongside you.
“What if we present the petition and they arrest us all on the spot?” I’d worried to Mali while Sam ran through our plan with Mark and Cris.
“Unlikely,” he replied. “Too precipitous for domer folk.” His long legs were crooked over the seat back in front of him, his elbows rested on the cushions to either side, his head rolled back until I thought his neck would break. Theatre seats were not made for a man this shape. “But there are worse things than jail, you know.”
“Yeah, they could put us Out.”
“Worse things than that.”
I couldn’t imagine.
“People do live lives out there.”
“Half lives.”
Mali sighed, patience and exasperation in the same sound. “Infinitely harder than yours, infinitely freer.”
“One kind of freedom I don’t need.”
“Oh?” Mali raised his dark, thin arms to scribe an arc, aport de bras above his head and I saw blue sky, that profound open blue, the blue of Sam’s eyes, and felt myself begin to float. I coughed and sat up and planted both feet flat on the carpeted floor, breathing shallow and fast.
“Never having had this freedom, you can’t know how much it might mean to you,” he said quietly.
I struggled to deny my disorientation, to refuse the possibility that he’d caused it. “It’s not fair to use your life on Tuatua as a parallel for the Outside, just because you haven’t got a dome.”
He rolled his head sideways to look at me, privately amused, challenging. “What makes you think I was?”
* * *
A half hour before curfew, we laid our brushes down. Micah got all formal and shook our hands, Songh and Jane and Crispin and me, one by one.
“Be back to paint soon as we’re done,” I promised.
The main lobby was a blaze of light for the Crossroads first preview. The little SecondGen ushers were tarted up in new maroon uniforms with smart white buttons and trim. They roamed the acres of mauve carpeting and picked up discarded ticket stubs, regarding us with suspicion while we hung about waiting for Mark. Champagne glasses clinked in the upper lobby as the concessions prepared for intermission.
Mark came bounding out of the office door with two women from Administration. SecondGens, both of them, looking worried but determined. I was both encouraged and guilt-ridden. I should have been doing more over the past few days to recruit support. I’d let our problems with The Gift absorb me totally.
Four other apprentices trotted down to meet us from the upper lobby, Max Eider’s three assistants and a stranger. Roly-poly and spike-haired, the new boy introduced himself as the Crossroads sound apprentice. “There’s twelve more coming from Music, Costumes, and Lighting.” He offered Mark every protocol of respect but a salute. “Maybe a few from Special Effects, ‘cept they’ve really got their hands full.”
“Where’s the rest of you?” asked Eider’s number one.
I laughed bitterly. “This is all of us.”
She rolled her eyes. “Boy, everybody’s heard The Gift is understaffed, but golly…”
The professional chitchat covered our nervousness, but it wore out fast as we padded the winding kilometer-long path through the thick leafy twilight of Founders’ Park. The flagstone walk narrowed to allow no more than three abreast as it snaked around oaks as wide as double doorways. We picked up strength as we met other pathways, moving inward toward the center of the dome. Cris counted heads and kept revising upward. Over a hundred, he claimed, in our group alone, and when we emerged from tree shadow into sunset, crossing the wide white ring of plaza surrounding the twin spires of Town Hall, crowds were streaming in from all directions.
My birth-dome is a city once known for the quality of its high-rise architecture, but those buildings were all from Before and Harmony’s dominant styles were archaic or at least nostalgic and until recently, under three stories tall. The children’s block geometry of Town Hall was the only contemporary large-scale building I’d ever seen, and it never ceased to amaze me: two shining glass cylinders rising sixty stories from the sloping sides of a massive glass cone, set on eight thin stacked discs of white marble. A clean, abstract physicalization of a clean abstract idea: Athenian democracy. The towers housed Business and Administration. The transparent twenty-story cone held the Meeting Hall, its vast curve of glass opaqued only for Town Meetings. It sat thirty thousand people, the heart and soul of Harmony’s political life.
“I can’t believe we’re actually doing this,” I exclaimed as the towers rose up before us.
Mark smiled nervously. “The mayor’s not going to believe it, either.”
Streetlights glimmered sweetly in the wall of glass, like the stars we read about but never saw, their tiny sources being diffracted into invisibility by the energy dance of the dome. The undulating panes scattered golden shards of artificial dusk across the white pavement. Hudson River School. A heroic kind of light. I thought Louisa would approve. Desk lamps glowed here and there through the reflection of Founders’ Park and several floors were lit up in the South Tower, where the mayor’s office was. Above, behind, the dome was velvet black. Outside, it must have been storming. It was already darker than it ever got in Harmony.
A single Security Green sat by an open door at the marbled entrance to the South Tower. She’d been laughing at some program on her portable vid, but she thumbed the volume down as she watched the inexplicable crowd swell in the plaza. She listened to the unnatural quiet, the murmurs and foot shuffling, the absence of laughter, got up and went in, dragging her folding chair with her.
“Putting in a call for reinforcements,” Cris gloated.
“Or asking what the hell to do,” said I.
“I don’t blame her.” In her first sign of anxiety in days, Jane was wringing her hands like Lady Macbeth.
Mark mounted the broad, curving stairs and gathered the apprentice representatives from the seven other villages, a boy and a girl from each dorm, wearing freshly laundered coveralls, brandishing their stacks of signed petitions like a precious but potentially dangerous object. Like I might carry a gun or Ule’s knife, I decided, grasping a handful of the BardClyffe stack. I gave some to Jane to keep her restless hands occupied.
Mark studied the irregular ranks still gathering below us, all those expectant faces, raised in a sea of well-worn blue relieved here and there with bits of the brighter civilian clothing. “Crowd estimate?”
“Four thousand, maybe forty-five,” said Cris.
“We’ll wait a bit longer.” He glanced to me for confirmation.
“ ‘Til curfew,” I agreed. “Like Mali said.” I looked for Mali in the crowd, but Sam had decreed a low profile for the Eye. “We’ll be there if you need us,” he’d said.
By nine, the ambers of sunset had muted to lavender and blue. Cris was confidently claiming upward of seven thousand, more than we had signatures. The streetlamps glared. The knot of twenty Greens now huddled in the South Tower lobby had turned them up to full. Somebody’s watch beeped, then another.
Mark smoothed his hair back, lifted his chin. “Okay, people. Let’s go.”
Petitions clutched to our chests, we mounted the white steps and approached the lobby doors. All had been turned off but one, where the Greens stood guard.
“What if they won’t let us in?” whispered Songh.
Mark had thought of that, or someone had. He stopped us a few paces from the door, then stepped forward himself, folded his arms, and waited. The Greens conferred behind the glass. One relayed messages from a terminal in the brightly painted tourist-information booth. They all looked young and worried. Their only experience with crowd control was shepherding tardy tourists through the Gates. Finally, one brave boy approached and let the door slide open. “You’re all in violation of curfew as of nine minutes ago.”
Mark raised his hand, signaled behind him without taking his eyes or his reassuring smile off the Green in the doorway. Songh moved up beside him. A SecondGen girl came up out of the crowd. Mark split his stack of petitions and placed them in their hands. “Not all of us.”
“What d’you want?” demanded the Green. He was dark and robust, probably a soccer player.
“We’ve a petition to deliver to Her Honor the Mayor.”
“Give it here and get home. You’re violating curfew.”
Mark smiled. “Are you going to arrest us all?”
The boy frowned. “I’ll take your damn message up to the mayor.”
Mark drew a folded paper out of his breast pocket. He walked up and handed it to the Green. “Here’s the text. The signatures we’ll deliver into her hands only.”
The Green scowled at the paper, and a wordless murmur rolled across the waiting crowd, like the wind Outside must sound, or like the growl and sigh of cargo passing through
the Tubes underground. The front ranks shifted forward, mounted the first curved step.
“And we don’t intend to leave,” said Mark, “until we’ve done so.”
“What’s your name, fella?”
Mark reached to either side. Songh and the girl were there with the petitions. Mark took a stack in each hand and raised them high. The crowd surged onto the second step. “Our names are here.”
The Green backed away. The door hissed shut behind him.
Mark let his arms drop. With his back to the thronged plaza, he clenched his eyes shut and drew a ragged breath.
“You’re doing great,” I assured him.
“And that was the easy part,” he muttered.
“Keep this up, we’ll run you for mayor.”
He gave me a twisted smile. “If we’re around that long.”
Songh gathered the petitions into his arms. “What do we do now?”
“Play it by ear, Sam said.” Mark turned to face the plaza, standing tall. He looked surprised and gratified when the crowd hushed immediately. “Don’t know how long we’ll have to wait,” he called out. “We might as well relax.”
We hunkered down on the steps to set the example, and the crowd settled to the pavement in front and around us, whispering, comparing notes. Groups formed, people went visiting. Now there was laughter, relieved and quietly jubilant. Mark’s dialogue with the Green was recalled and repeated, passing already into apprentice myth. Even Jane was busy supplying Songh’s version with a more exact wording. Cris chatted up a pretty young citizen who reminded me of Tua, telling her what the Green should have said and done if he’d had half a brain.
Mark stared silently at the white marble between his feet.
I nudged him gently. “I know it’d be better if he were here with you, but this is a very major gesture in his memory.”
“You know what they said?” he murmured.
By now we knew that “they” always meant the Eye.
“They said maybe they could help me find him.”
“Find Bela?” I stared at him. “How?”
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