Harmony Read Online Free Page A

since I’d discovered I could both work and have a social life. Cris had that dark, wild-eyed beauty that turns heads on the street and looks promisingly “artistic.” When I was mad at him, I thought him bony and overbearing, but my status among our peers had improved perceptibly since he’d given me the nod. My own looks were more responsible and workmanlike, a source of some career anxiety to me in a Town where style was paramount, never mind the personal woe of wishing to be gorgeous enough to hold on to any man I wanted. I experimented mildly with the cut of my honey-colored hair and didn’t delve too deeply into why I’d hooked up with someone who often wasn’t very nice to me.
    Conscious always of Crispin’s judgmental eye, I made my stride to the door look purposeful. On the stoop stood Howie Marr, shifting about with genial impatience.
    “Oh,” I said, none too brightly. It was going to be hard sending this one away.
    “Morning, Gwinn. Know it’s early. Is Micah about?”
    Howie was producer and sometimes director at the Arkadie, fondly called the Ark, one of Harmony’s leading theatres. With his mop of red-gold curls stealing toward gray and his rich imposing voice, he was just what you’d want on the vid screen selling your product.
    “You know how he gets,” I warned. Howie was an old friend of Micah’s and nearly his contemporary, but his manner encouraged far greater familiarity, even from apprentices.
    “But this is me,” he grinned, and blew past me like a fair-weather gust, drawing the heady flower scent and bird-chatter of the courtyard through the door in his wake.
    Energy was Howie Marr’s specialty: boundless, indefatigable energy and the impression (his enemies would say illusion) of a fine intelligence properly leavened by keen commercial sensibilities. He and Micah had come along together in the business, colleagues since a youthful Howie had wrested the leadership of the Arkadie from the failing hands of its original founder, by means of an almost accidentally brilliant production-cum-pageant about the raising of Harmony’s dome. Absolute surefire patriotic material: right-thinking artist-pioneers throw down their pens and brushes and take up their laser assault rifles to save a stretch of wasted Vermont farmland and found a sanctuary for Art and the Intellect. That play may also have begun Micah’s reputation, though for that honor there are many more claimants and much dispute.
    Since then, Howie had achieved other more minor successes as a director, but his real triumph was the Arkadie itself, now thriving under his producerial hand.
    He swept down the narrow aisle between the desks, grasping Crispin’s quickly proffered hand, dispensing airy waves to Jane and Songh like some Eastern potentate. He breezed to a halt at Micah’s shoulder to peer at the work in progress as if already shopping for ideas. “How nice! Crusader castles for the terminally rich.”
    Micah never walked around the studio. His bagged-out slippers fell off if he took full-sized steps. But now his shuffle assumed a more stubborn weight. “Ah, Howard. You lost your watch?”
    “Couldn’t wait, Mi. This one’s too special. Always ask you first, you know.”
    “Send me the script.”
    Howie spread his arms without apology. “No script yet.”
    “Howard, you know the rules.” Micah bent over his sketch.
    “I’ll
talk
you through it.” Howie eased under the slanted overhang of stucco and beam that made Micah’s corner so reminiscent of a cave. No machinery lived there, no artists’ prosthetics. The computers and effects simulators were exiled to Crispin’s end of the room. Micah did all his roughs and sketches with brush, pen, or pencil. Prehistoric wall paintings would have been as much at home as the tracings and drawings that layered the rough plaster like molting feathers.
    Howie peered at a tattered watercolor, peeled back an edge to squint at a pencil sketch below. “The piece is written,