Harmony

by Marjorie B. Kellogg

  “TeCu!” I screamed.

  His head went up. He turned against the human traffic and saw me. He gave me a strange, bright look of warning and challenge, then let the traffic carry him into the lock. A final tourist hurried through behind him.

  TeCu was the last to leave, I knew he was. The Green on duty lifted an eyebrow at me as I danced at the barrier. “The Gates are closing, citizen.”

  “TeCu!”

  Through the clear wall of the lock, I spotted Tua ahead of him, Ule and Moussa just beyond. Still no sign of Sam or Mali or anyone who could be them, but all along the boulevard, the Outsiders pressed close to the rail as the Tuatuans drifted toward the far edge of the throng. Feral eyes followed them, gray lips muttered, scrawny hands stretched between the pickets, begging for a handout. Within an arm’s length of the fence, Cu did not look at them, but hidden by the crowd to most eyes but mine, he reached out to them, his fingers grazing theirs, his clean brown hand slipping from one grimy outstretched paw to the next. They did not snatch at him. It was his touch they demanded, and Tua’s and Moussa’s and Ule’s ahead of him. A mere touch of their fingertips and the grimy paw was withdrawn in gratitude. In reverence. Worshiping eyes followed after them, lips moved in soundless longing, shaping over and over a name I recognized: Latooea. Latooea. Latooea.

  Latooea! There!

  Caught in a sudden haze of blue, I shoved the astonished Green aside as she unlatched the safety barrier and let it slide home. I skinned through the narrowing slit and pounded after Te-Cucularit, not caring whose shoulder I rammed into or how many toes I bruised. Cu did not look at me when I caught up with him, breathless. He gripped my wrist tightly and guided me toward the hover.

  He was angry, but I wasn’t sure it was at me. Wonder and apprehension kept me mute. Latooea! the Outsiders breathed, hardly a name at all but a round and rolling murmur like oceans. The Outside summer heat hit me like a blow to the chest. The air was thick and moist and dirty, the tarmac soft and hot and very black. The floodlights glared brighter than the sun glowering above the mountains.

  Oh, Micah, what have I done? Thrown away my citizenship on the very day I acquired it! For Latooea? For a patch of sky?

  I followed Te-Cucularit toward the green hover, refusing to think about being Outside, or about who had lived and who had died. I let time slow and relished the few moments left when I didn’t know the truth.

  At the gangway, Cu stood aside for me to ascend. Tua held back and surprised me with a quick hug. “Good work,” she said, mystifying me. At the top of the ramp, Omea met me with a maternal embrace. “Gwinn, thank the good powers. Are you all right?” Her eyes searched me as she urged me inside. My grace time was over.

  The hover’s interior glowed with a softer light, cool spring greens in the carpet, richer leaf greens on the fabric-lined walls, in the velvet seats, in the silk window shades. Cora Lee’s private craft, I was sure. The ceiling was recessed and lit around the rim. It was blue, a profound and endless sky blue. I stared up into it, transfixed. For a moment I forgot why I was there.

  The rest waited inside, their silly tourist outfits in rude contrast with the serene decor. Ule was already stripping off his shirt, flinging it to the floor as if to punish it. I began counting immediately. Including the three outside, nine, and the ninth was Mark. Mark, in tourist garb like the others. No Mali. No Sam. Behind me, Omea told the pilot he could retract the gangway.

  Nine, plus me. The tenth? Me? Oh no, that couldn’t be. Not Sam. Not Sam too. He’d promised I’d be safe. I’d never thought to worry about him.

  Mark put his arms around me, rocking me gently. “Gwinn, Gwinn. We were afraid you weren’t coming.”

  We. Already it was we. “He’s dead, isn’t he? They’re both—”

  Mark touched a finger to my lips. “Everything in good time.” He took my hand and led me to the rear of the craft. Through a green-curtained doorway was a little tassel-and-tufted-velvet observation lounge. There with his back to us, staring out the dome-side port, was Sam.

  I pressed my fist to my mouth to keep from crying out. Mark squeezed my hand and left, letting the drapes fall shut behind him. I stayed where I was, just looking. Sam. Alive at least. As for well, I couldn’t say. He was in a black T-shirt and jeans. Bandages wrapped his chest and right shoulder, immobilizing his arm in a sling. A brightly patterned jacket and scarf lay shucked in a corner.

  When I could trust myself to show some dignity, I went over and stood beside him, looking where he was looking, silent, not touching him for fear my crazy joy would fracture against his hard transparent shell.

  Out on the tarmac, the last tourists shoved on board. The hovers retracted and closed up, taking off one by one. The field lights dimmed. The floods illuminating the stone Muses carved above the Gates flicked off. The dome was a shimmering liquid darkness swimming with stars. Along the boulevard, the Outsider mob eased away from the fence and straggled off to their shacks and smoky lean-tos. A few remained, young mostly, gazing steadfastly at the green hover with distant fire in their eyes.

  “Good work, Rhys,” said Sam. “You made it. You listened better than I knew.” He reached into his back pocket and pulled out my little knife, safe in its sheath. He handed it to me without looking. “You’ll need this where we’re going.”

  I took it, drew the blade slowly from the dark tooled leather.

  “I cleaned it for you,” he said, and that told me everything I didn’t want to know. To steady myself, I rolled up the leg of my borrowed coverall and strapped the knife in place. I’d missed it while it wasn’t there.

  “I thought you were dead.”

  “And you came anyway? Better and better, Rhys.”

  “Then I did right, coming? He said you’d never ask.”

  “Mali?” he whispered.

  “Mali,” I said, and felt my heart crack wide open.

  He exhaled, as if he’d been holding his breath for hours, then curled his good arm around me, and held me tight to his bandaged chest while I wept for the lack of real magic in the world to bring back the dead.

  EPILOGUE

  THE OUTSIDE:

  “Sam?” Omea stood in the curtained archway. “Tua’s got the Town Hall tap on the vid, if you want. It’s nine.”

  He didn’t answer at first but must have felt curiosity stirring beneath my tears. He let me go and turned away from the port. “Come on, then. The farewell performance.”

  In the forestgreen room, the others hunkered in front of the big wall vid like eager, vengeful children. I started at seeing Harmony so clearly again, as through an open window, as if I’d never left it: Town Hall Plaza, the rain, and the growing throng sheltering under scattered umbrellas or jackets pulled up over heads.

  “… and though we can see from our third-floor vantage,” the vid commentator was saying, “that the nasty weather has discouraged many from accepting this peculiar invitation in person, the crowd is still enormous, and we know you’re there at home watching…”

  I sank to the rug beside Moussa. Sam stood by, unwilling to settle. Moussa folded me into the circle of his arm. “Welcome.”

  “… you can see the rain is still coming down hard and the wind has been picking up all afternoon, but Mayor von Hirsch has asked us to announce that Maintenance is hard at work searching out these temporary glitches. Also, those citizens concerned about the strange restlessness among Harmony’s bird population should understand that this is a natural response to an abrupt change of climate and is also temporary…”

  Beside me, Moussa shook with deep private laughter. The soft whoosh across the carpet was Sam pacing, ranging the edges of the room as Mali would have done.

  “Now, at twenty seconds to nine o’clock, the silence out there is deafening… fifteen… ten…”

  In the plaza, the gusting winds beat up to a sudden gale. Rain-swept foliage heaved and swayed along the edge of Founders’ Park, waves of green lashing the wet shore of pavement. Umbrellas and jackets tore free and rose li
ke a flock of frightened birds, red and yellow and orange, fleeing toward the zenith.

  “Five seconds, citizens, and are we ever glad we’re inside!”

  Exactly at nine, the wind died and all the artificials blinked out. Umbrellas and jackets and hats spiraled gently through the slackening rain onto the heads of the crowd. Under the gathering of cloud at its apex, the vast curve of the dome was as transparent as fine crystal, as if it weren’t there at all. The hard line between In and Out melted into clear, bright air. Rays of amber and pink shot lengthwise across the white plaza as Outside, the sun slid along the dark edge of mountains.

  “They could have it that way all the time,” Omea sighed.

  A rainbow misted into view above the twin towers of Town Hall.

  Ule cheered and whalloped Tua on the back. “What finesse!” Tua coughed, then nodded graciously.

  The rainbow faded as the rain stopped and the cloud dispersed. The plaza shimmered gold and pink. The dying sun picked out damp jewels in the flowerboxes and etched the faces of the citizenry, who lowered their umbrellas and gazed about, taking great breaths of relief and bewilderment.

  “A whiff of jasmine, a tang of orange and ginger,” offered Tua.

  “Like home,” Omea smiled. “Well done.”

  “Home!” Pen echoed fervently.

  “Hullo! What now?” demanded the commentator. Cries rang out from the plaza. Pointing arms surged skyward like a legion of bayonets. The vidcam panned up sharply. In the furthest heights of the dome, a cloud of darkness circled, now sinking like smoke through the misty golden air. Moussa leaned forward eagerly as the darkness resolved into separate inky specks, wheeling in formation.

  Birds. Thousands of birds. Different kinds but all black, flying together, the loon side by side with the raven, the toucan with the crow. They circled above the marble steps, around and around in an edgy symphony of wings, until the crowd backed away and left them room. On the spot where we’d presented our petition, the spot where Jane had lain, the flock landed, turning the white marble to mobile ebony.

  I turned to Sam. “How did you… ?”

  “Not me. That’s Moussa’s crowd.”

  I leaned away from the big African beside me, eyes wide.

  “Akeua,” he nodded.

  Ule cackled. “And a shitload of bird food.”

  The vid commentator’s vocabulary was being sorely tried. “What a sight! This is unbelievable! This is the most extraordinary…!”

  The screen blanked abruptly, then flashed bright blue. The message built letter by letter: HARMONY NEEDS DISCORD, white like clouds in…

  … sky! Yes! The blueness seized me, filled me with the joy of Mali’s gift: the courage to embrace freedom. His gift to me.

  Sam mistook my intake of breath. “I know. Mali would have written it better.”

  Cora’s hover lifted of at nine-fifteen, joining the end of the caravan gliding toward the Albany-Springfield airport. I stood with Sam at the observation port as the geometric glitter of the landing lights and the red safety beacons atop the Gates and finally the fitful glimmer of the dome itself shrank into darkness.

  Leaving Harmony.

  “Where are we going?”

  “I can’t tell you that. Later, everything.”

  “Is this a test?” I asked lightly.

  He shifted, eyeing the green-draped walls.

  “Even here?” I whispered.

  Sam only shrugged.

  Leaving Harmony. But not the Harmony of my childhood dreams. That had been taken from me before I left.

  My only regret was not saying good-bye to Micah. I hoped he’d understand as he always seemed to, that Cris and Songh could keep the studio running properly without me, without Jane, with the SecondGens who were to be Micah’s new help. That was the agenda, after all. Train the home folk, see if they can do the job. See if all that foreign talent can be done without.

  They’d manage. Competently, earnestly, mostly without inspiration but always adequately enough to satisfy those to whom Art was a foolish luxury. No matter what Sean said about reviewing the OAP, I knew my generation of apprentices was Harmony’s last. Oh, Crispin would be famous very soon, I was sure of that, but from now on, Harmony’s younger artists would know nothing but Harmony. At least the adoptees knew their birth-domes. We had all been, at least once, Outside. In time, the work coming out of Harmony would have reference only to itself. It would be rarefied and insular. I did not weep for three years wasted as the lights of the dome were swallowed by the night. I was grateful to get out with my creativity intact.

  Ahead of us, the slow-moving curl of red and blue running lights banked toward the south. When our craft slowed and quietly dropped off the end of the caravan, I realized we weren’t going to the airport. We veered off into the void without beacons to guide us. I glanced at Sam but held my tongue. He was absorbed in the darkness beyond the port. Now that I was there beside him, he’d put me from his mind entirely.

  He wouldn’t sit. Between long vigils at the port, he paced the little lounge as if struggling with a particularly thorny problem, which I interpreted as how he should negotiate the chasm of grief that confronted him no matter how hard he tried to avoid it through withdrawal or outrun it by endless circling of the room. Finally Omea wheeled in the onboard first-aid module and made him sit long enough to have his bandages changed.

  The shoulder wound was a nasty laser tear-and-burn. Omea probed and swabbed, and it hurt to watch Sam lean eagerly into the pain, welcoming the distraction of a bodily agony. He seemed disappointed when she finished quickly, and refused the painkiller she offered.

  “You’re worrying too hard,” she soothed.

  Sam grunted.

  “Should have given Jaeck time to work you over more thoroughly.”

  “I was busy.”

  “Moussa’s putting food together in the galley,” she said as she repacked the module. I doubted Sam could be convinced to eat, but I’d had only a meager hospital meal since the night before. I thought of Jane and her pragmatic refusal ever to miss a meal, just in case. I took Omea’s hint and went forward.

  The galley was tiny, silvery, and compact. Moussa filled it entirely. He had every cabinet open and all four cookers going. With severely limited counter space, he was creating an elaborate casserole of eggplant, tomatoes, cheese, and spices. He laid out each vegetable as if preparing it for ritual sacrifice, slicing and dicing and setting the pieces aside with slow, frowning concentration. Filling the unfillable emptiness, I thought as I watched from the doorway.

  “How is he?” Moussa asked after a while.

  “Oh, very bad, I think. How’s everyone else?”

  He laid out a fat, ripe tomato and quartered it precisely. “This is… is…”

  “Difficult.” Ule squeezed in to snatch away a whole tomato, biting into it as if it were an apple. “You going to cook up everything in the kitchen?”

  Moussa shrugged.

  “You think that’s what he’d want?” Ule growled in disgust. “Us moping about meanwhile?” He hooked my elbow and hauled me into the main cabin, where the deep-cushioned seats were arrayed in neat rectangles around low teak tables, more like a fancy waiting room than an aircraft. The seats reclined into beds. Pen was stretched out flat, Tuli cradled in his arms. Tua dozed, curled into a feline ball. Lucienne and Te-Cucularit talked quietly in a corner. Cu looked up, frowned, and looked away. Maybe it was me he was angry with. For coming? For being here when Mali wasn’t?

  Ule shook me gruffly. “Proud of you, ladykins. You used it when you had to.”

  Mark was sitting by himself, staring into space. Mark, the tenth. Mali’s chosen heir. I dropped into the chair next to him. “Yeah, great. I lasted about six seconds.”

  “Long enough. Would’ve been two down, otherwise.”

  Ah. Could I have saved Mali, then, if I’d moved faster, if I’d seen Peter sooner? If? If? I glanced toward the curtained doorway with new understanding of at least one of the tortures
Sam was putting himself through in there.

  “What happened after I… went out?”

  Ule perched on the edge of the chair opposite me, his bony knees up around his ears. “Well, you slowed the kid down real well but you didn’t exactly stop him, and we already had enough cleanup to do and Sam was moving a little slow, so Cu finished the job with those good hands of his, then dumped him while Sam and I made Mali invisible and wiped up the gore.”

  “I used you to distract the stage crew,” murmured Mark.

  “And then took Mali’s call with the rest of us.” Ule clicked his teeth appreciatively. “Mali was right under their noses all the while they were fussing over you.”

  And the elephant vanishes. I rubbed my eyes. “Dumped him?”

  A malicious mischief glimmered in Ule’s dark eyes. “The protein tanks out at the recycling station may smell a little peculiar for a few days.”

  My stomach knotted, turned over. The hover shivered in a gust, dropped, and settled. “And Mali?” I whispered hoarsely.

  “You’ll see soon enough.”

  I didn’t understand. “But why, Ule? Why the cover-up? Why not tell the world what happened? They suspect it anyway.” I pulled the damp and crumpled newsfax from my pocket and pushed it at him miserably. “Why not wipe their noses in it? Jane’s murder was useful but Mali’s isn’t?”

  They were both staring at me, Ule’s eyes narrowing as if I’d confirmed some suspicion. He took the fax and spread it out on the table top. The polished teak was inlaid with colored woods in an elaborate pattern of leaves and flowers.

  “Is he or isn’t he?” A cold grin curled Ule’s lips. “A very excellent question.”

  Mark glanced away. “Ule—”

  “Hush, boy. He’ll have his reasons.” Ule turned back, crushing the fax under my nose. “You see how the media can tame a man? Dead or even wounded, he’s mortal, measurable, a mere witty headline, his cause made trivial by gossip and the gory details. But alive, alive despite all, he’s a mystery and a miracle.”