Harmony by Marjorie B. Kellogg Read Free Book Online

the dome, but the dozen hemispheres of the farm domes were visible off to the left, and beyond them, Power and Recycling, glinting through the haze.
    Huddled against the exterior of the Wall, the Outsider bidonvilles shared the meager shelter of the moat: clusters of junk-built huts wreathed with the constant smoke of trash fires, teeming with Outsider families bent on the drear business of survival. I’d have found the same had I ventured outside Chicago (unthinkable) or any dome, anywhere in the world.
    They rarely looked up, the Outsiders. Even seeing them in detail—a man’s twisted leg, the missing buttons on a woman’s jacket replaced by filthy twine, or a child with matchstick limbs picking invisible grains of food out of the dust—even then I distanced myself out of long habit. Unknowingly, the Outsiders encouraged the distance by refusing to acknowledge the apprentice princes and princesses gaping at them from the battlements of the fairy castle.
    It never occurred to me there might be injustice in the fact that they were Out and I was In. I was dome-born, they were not. Outsiders
deserved
to be Outside, because of criminal acts or mutant inferiority. The way I’d deserve it, if I couldn’t measure up in Harmony.
    Now, Cris in his rich-boy confidence might mock Jane’s avoidance of the Wall, but I understood it. Of the few thousand apprentices admitted each year, only a few hundred could expect to be in Harmony ten years later. Each visit to the perimeter, each glance Outside was a reminder you shouldn’t get cocky. Until you’re proven talented enough to win your citizenship, you’re living on borrowed time.
    “You change your mind about Underhill, let me know.” Cris shook his black hair free of the red bandanna, worn piratelike when working his precious machinery. I knew I had disappointed him. He thought I lacked ambition. Sometimes I thought he was right.
    Cris had arrived in Micah’s studio the year before, knowing exactly where he was going and what he wanted to do. I made him an object of study, thinking a mere hint of insecurity might render him less intimidating. I envied that damnable confidence. Perhaps I hoped a little of it would rub off on me.
    But confident is not the same as mature. Cris pivoted away, waving his bandanna like a flag, shedding his studio persona, the one where he posed as a responsible adult. “Tuatua! UnEnclosed! Magic and taboos! Damn, I can’t wait to meet these guys!”
    I said carefully, “I met a Tuatuan once. I think.”
    “Sure you did.”
    “Really, I think I did. At the Gate, the day I got here.”
    Cris knotted his scarf around his neck. “You think they just run around the world at large?”
    “Why not?”
    “Jeez, they’re practically Outsiders! What dome’s gonna let the likes of them in, except as a special event?” He danced away gleefully. “Damn! It’s dynamic!”
    I followed more decorously. After all, my stranger hadn’t claimed
she
was Tuatuan, only the necklace. And maybe I didn’t even have that part right.
    “Why does Micah always do this to us?” Jane tore at the flowers in the hedgerow, then gazed in guilty horror at her handful of shreds.
    “First he does it to himself, and
then
he does it to us.”
    Jane tossed the broken petals under the treads of an oncoming cleanerbot and sidestepped it quickly. Destroying plant life was a serious crime in Harmony. Even the unfrequented warehouse district was planted within an inch of its life. All that lush greenery was the real secret of the sweet air under Harmony’s dome.
    “We’ll manage,” I continued. “We always do.” Micah had assured me that studio morale was part of the First Assistant’s job. “He’ll only take the show if it really excites him, and that’s when it’s the best, not like Marin.”
    “But what if it’s too weird?”
    Cris hooted. “That could make Howie a hero. Champagne and celebrations! Vine leaves in his hair! His trustees will give him a