Harmony Read Online Free PDF Page A

that. “Whadda ya say, Mi? Ready to stretch that underused brain of yours a little? Ready to do something you’ve never done before?”
    He hovered before the display model of Micah’s design for
A Dream of Red Mansions
, a multi-award-winner waiting to be shipped to a museum in the Beijing Dome. The glass housing was dark, and Howie’s hand that could never leave well enough alone strayed to the keypad set into the base, selecting act and scene. The box came to life at the top of Two, four, with the portentous music of the entr’acte and holographic mists sifting down from midnight hills to coil around curly pines and painted pagodas lit by the glow of dragon-headed lanterns. I sighed. I loved that design, envied its darkness and mystery and the completeness of its conception. The downside was it made me despair of ever being able to come close to it in my own work.
    “I flew to Glyndebourne for the evening just to see this,” Howie murmured. He watched until the entrance of the tenor, saw he was losing us to the model’s evolving magic, and switched it off in the middle of a crescendo. “Sublime, but exactly what my piece isn’t gonna want. None of your usual spectacle.”
    Usual?
Well, I thought Howie must be pretty desperate if he was willing to needle his old friend into saying yes.
    But Micah always said anger took years off his life. In three years I’d only once seen him lose control, at a producer, and then it took two burly stagehands to hold him back. Now he rinsed his brush again and set it deliberately aside. “Songh, make coffee, would you please?”
    I waited for Howie to be treated to one of Micah’s intimidatingly articulate defenses of The Work, coupled with a lecture on the value of his time. But that was when clever Howie chose to tell us about the Eye.
    He followed Micah to the narrow trestle table beneath the courtyard windows. Every other surface in the studio was crammed with tools and supplies, stray model pieces and research. These dark planks were kept clean and oiled, to show off a single vase of flowers from the courtyard. Order within Chaos. This week, Order was red gladiolus.
    Howie waited, hulking in the filtered sunlight like some smartly dressed grizzly, until Micah settled fussily into his wooden armchair. He perched opposite. “There’s this troupe, actor-dancers—”
    “From?” Micah’s chin folded into his chest.
    “They’re a touring company. They don’t have a permanent space.”
    “I didn’t mean what theatre, I meant what dome?”
    “No dome, actually.”
    Micah glanced up, I thought, hopefully.
    “No, they’re not Outsiders.”
    Micah’s mouth quirked. “Not ready to be that radical.”
    “The next best thing. They’re from Tuatua.”
    Jane gasped. Crispin cheered and slapped the off switch on his holo. Songh’s painstaking coffee making halted, his round moon face lit in joyous disbelief. Even Micah nodded with faintly raised brows. Howie leaned back to enjoy his carefully orchestrated sensation, and then I ruined everything.
    “From where?”
    Crispin made a face I wished I could hate him for.
    “Tuatua!” Songh was innocent of malice. “You know, the Magic Island! Everyone’s heard of it!”
    Not me, from benighted Chicago, not even three busy, informative years later.
    “It’s a tiny island in the Pacific,” Micah supplied gently. “Hasn’t been much in the news once the initial furor died down.”
    “The Island That Time Passed By!” Songh waved empty coffee mugs in circles above his head. He was small but lithe and graceful as a dancer. My mental image of Songh was always smoothness.
    “It really exists?” Jane murmured, as if she wished it didn’t.
    Micah nodded. “The only known community in the world to survive the Dissolution without doming. Quite the mystery, actually.”
    “Tuatual” Howie beamed. “The very stuff of legend.”
    “Without doming? And they’re all right?” I asked.
    “Yup. Drives those science types