Free Harmony by Marjorie B. Kellogg

to slip it to him (or her) that you heard **somewhere** how L’EVANA WILLARD’s unhappy with her recording contract with Ho’town Studios over in Amadeus, how she’s sure she can go worldwide with her utterly *rip* holo,
DIE FOR ME
.
    ***Or how ’bout our man-about-town CAMPBELL BRIGHAM? Never the Prince of Fashion, our Cam, but he sure knows who to have dinner with. Our question: who regged the tab? Cam or FRANCOTEL? You guess the dinnerchat. Perhaps an elegant BardClyffe branch for Cam’s Lorien gallery in that gorgeous hotel the boys from Marseille want to build?
    ***While we’re on Cam, we’ll send along our compliments to him and the rest of the Arkadie Rep trustees for a totally *rip* evening at Monday’s benefit for OutCare. Were YOU there? Everyone ELSE was. Our favorite little fireball CORA LEE could charm the credits out of a cleanerbot, but where does she get that Fu Manchu wardrobe??
    ***And speaking of the ARK, what’s HOWIE MARR got up his sleeve this time? TUATUA and REEDE SCOTT CHAMBERLAINE? Can we put those two together in our wildest imaginations, friends and neighbors? Beauty and the Beast? Question is, which one’s which?
    ***Remember, you DIDN’T hear it here!***
    THE SCRIPT:
    Cris and I didn’t go home with the script. We went down to the Brim.
    “She’s following us,” he hissed as we snaked among the tourists mobbing the hedge-lined lane to the village square. He pulled me under a handy tree, kissing and fondling me until I squirmed and Jane had slunk off on her own.
    “Cruel, Cris, cruel.” I pushed him away so I could breathe.
    “I’m tired of her long face around everywhere.”
    Our village must have been called BardClyffe out of some Founder’s nostalgia, since there were no cliffs. But there were hills, some quite steep, with low white houses cut into the slopes and narrow streets stone-paved and whitewashed, like the Greek villages it was modeled on. Maybe it had been “Birdcliff,” until some theatre maven got hold of it. There were a lot of birds. Birds thrived in our wild-programmed climate, perhaps because the programmers had limited themselves to mild breezes and gentle rains. No hurricanes. No snow. No thunderstorms or tornadoes. Still, you could get drenched without warning. Did this keep the creative juices flowing? The Founders apparently thought so.
    The BardClyffe market was jammed, as always. Weekday tourists meant heavy business at the brightly canopied glass and ceramics stalls out in the open plaza. Weekends brought the big money to the painting and sculpture galleries in the surrounding two-story arcade. The art in BardClyffe was low-tech and conservative, for the most part. You wanted high-tech or avant-garde, you went across town to Franklin Wells. The Chat always implied that BardClyffe did the better business.
    At the head of the square, we passed under a raw metal scaffold thrown up around a lovely old stucco town house. Cris slowed to peer through the chain link fence.
    “Big flap over this at Town Meeting last night, until they got sidetracked onto overpopulation.”
    Apprentices were not invited to Town Meeting, but Cris was an avid spectator of power games. He kept up with Video Town Hall, as well as WorldNet/News and the Chat. I didn’t pay the news services much heed. The Chat amused me occasionally, but I’d had my fill of small-town politics in Chicago.
    “The BardClyffe C. of C. was going to tear this down without clearing it through the Town. The issue of village autonomy is suddenly a hot one.”
    “Tear a whole building down without asking?” I shook my head in wonder. In Chicago, you couldn’t paint your bathroom without permission.
    “You wait. The Town Council finds a way to okay anything that encourages tourism.”
    High on the chain link, a fancy signboard announced the construction of the multinational Francotel’s twenty-story luxury hotel. With the exception of Town Hall, three stories had been the legislated limit since