Harmony Read Online Free

day I came to work in a Garden of Eden, actually eating fruit right off the vine.
    One year, the Tourist Bureau had the master artists’ names leafed in gold on granite plaques, in honor of Harmony’s fortieth anniversary, and mounted them outside each studio gate. Micah made us take his down and still the world beat a path to our door, to his supposed irritation and chagrin. Later, I came to suspect that secretly he loved it. For if that many strangers were willing to work so hard to find him, he must be a very great artist indeed. Or well known, at least. Micah often worried this particular distinction into the wee small hours.
    On the off chance that the name means nothing to you, Micah Miguel Cervantes was a master scenographer. A profound conceptualist, a sculptor in space and light and time. An opera or ballet designed by him might sell out on his name alone. Mind you, I had never seen a live play before I came to Harmony, never sat in a theatre except to hear boring civic lectures. But Micah’s studio was where the computers deemed my skills most appropriate. I could have requested reassignment after a six-month trial. The thought never occurred to me. I was hooked from the beginning.
    But about those mornings. Mornings that turn in my mind like crystal in the wind—the early sun sinking soft as milk through the skylight, we apprentices bent like monks over our drawing tables, the Master puttering away in his corner. Micah refused to schedule meetings before noon, so with the tourists at bay and the phone off-line, those few peaceful hours were our sanity and the cornerstone of our productivity. We guarded them with near-religious fervor because they could be, from time to time, purely about making Art.
    Still, what’s sacred to one is sure to be profane to the next. And so, that crisp sun-flooded May morning, our precious monastic silence was disrupted a mere hour after we’d settled into it. It was only a knock at the door, but in that moment of pure peace, it was the worst kind of sacrilege.
    HOWIE:
    The evil rapping set Micah’s slippers whispering irritably across the slates. In his cavey recess, he shuttled from palette to work table to drawing board, like a chunky, white-frocked badger, humming absently and pretending not to hear.
    I glanced at Songh to my left, then past him to Jane, immobile at the cutting table. Both stared at me a little stupidly, their mouths dropped open the same half inch, and I wondered when they were going to learn to think for themselves. Songh Soonh was very young and new to the studio, and so had some excuse. But Jane Kessler was six full years my senior, what we called an “old” apprentice. Still, it was me who’d just been made First Assistant, and along with my very own key to the studio came the responsibility of providing a fully detailed code of studio behavior.
    The first rule was: sit tight, maybe whoever it is will go away. I frowned hopefully at the front door, grandly wide and dark against the white plaster walls. It was solid wood, preserved from some pre-Enclosure barn, and the long bank of windows facing the courtyard were too high to allow for any preliminary screening of visitors.
    The knocking continued.
    “Could be an emergency,” whispered Jane. She was tallish and worry-thin, with large eyes and a heart-shaped chin set at a watchful angle. She was always the first to jump to the direst conclusion.
    I sighed. “Micah, do I go?”
    “That Marin bunch is due after lunch,” the Master grumbled. “I have roughs to finish.”
    I slid off my stool. “I’ll tell them to come back at five.”
    “Authority Training 101,” intoned Crispin, rising like a swimmer from his numerical daze at far end of the room. The holographic miniature of the Marin site froze on a north/south axis over the computerized model stand. “The Polite-but-Firm Negative.”
    Crispin Fox was Second Assistant, in charge of programming, and the latest of the affairs I’d fallen into