Hard Road by Barbara D'Amato

mean you'd rather do theater than festival lighting?"
     
     
"Usually. The Oz Festival was more fun than most, because it was more imaginative."
     
     
"More profitable, too, I would think."
     
     
"They pay reasonably well," he said, a bit sourly.
     
     
"Well, that, too, but I meant the publicity. You got a huge media boost from it."
     
     
"Yeah. Wasn't that color spread in Chicago magazine excellent? I do edgy work, but the magazine really picked up on the best parts. The Day-Glo, and the neon tubing on the merry-go-round. The cover photo rocked ! Very discerning, weren't they?"
     
     
He certainly didn't seem uncomfortable about the fact that a woman had been killed near his edgy merry-go-round. Suddenly he remembered he was supposed to be modest. "Of course, the Oz Festival caught a lot of PR because this year is the hundredth anniversary of the publication of The Wizard of Oz . It wasn't all just because of my lighting."
     
     
Hey, no kidding.
     
     
I said, "Do you do music festivals? Or rock concerts?"
     
     
"The major rock stars have their own lighting people. I do some of the Grant Park music festivals. I do some industrials."
     
     
"Industrials? You mean like factory lighting?"
     
     
He snorted. "God, no. Like restaurants. Sometimes lobbies, like corporation lobbies. That stuff is mainly a matter of designing just the right mood. For a restaurant, the mood you set can make or break them. Imagine cafeteria lighting in L'Heure Bleu, for instance."
     
     
"I see what you mean."
     
     
I wandered around the room, looking at his stock of equipment— various lightbulbs, several dozen different types, socket styles, holders, mounts, pedestals, clamp-ons, plus small light boards with computerized circuits that did the same job huge boards used to do, and piles of rolled wire. When I was a child, there were only a couple of dozen kinds of lightbulbs in general use. My dad told me that when he was a child there were only four— twenty-five watt, fifty watt, hundred watt, and hundred-and-fifty watt. He was exaggerating, but not by much. Now, judging by Taubman's shelves, there were hundreds upon hundreds— not just different wattage but par count and focus angle and filament type, and more and more and more.
     
     
"Do you keep all these to use?"
     
     
"No. Wouldn't pay. You need very large numbers for installations. There's no point in my being a lightbulb warehouse. I just have a few examples here if I need to check one out."
     
     
"A few examples?"
     
     
"Yes. Just to look at. Then I try to duplicate that light on Softplot. That's the main software I use. Anyway, let's see what I can show you about the— um— the Oz Festival." He played around with a couple of swift keystrokes and the screen filled with an aerial overview of Grant Park.
     
     
"Okay. Look. The streets and permanent paths and Buckingham Fountain and so on are obvious here. These contour lines show the elevation of the ground. You know there are little rises, and some flat, low areas—"
     
     
"Yes. I know roughly where they are. And I can see them there."
     
     
"We wanted to take advantage of nice things in the terrain. This is an early sketch version. At this point we hadn't even thought of putting in the castle. The first plan was to have a central vendor area that was all green and to call it the Emerald City. But then your brother said we had to have a small on-site office and— uh— somebody said everybody loves castles. So we made the office a castle."
     
     
The plan changed. It no longer looked like a sketch. Like all CAD design, it looked a bit too polished. The terrain map showed the placement of booths and rides and light sources.
     
     
"Orange is my designation for the existing park lights. All the other lights are installed specifically for the festival."
     
     
"Does your data include underground plans, like tunnels and Grant Park Underground, and so on?"
     
     
As I said this, I watched his face to see