Book of the Dead (33 page)

Is it
still
the United States? Bonnie wonders. Surely somewhere it
must
be.

She returns to her work, examining stalks and peeling back husks to check for insects. There are screen doors in the narrow access corridors between the agriculture wings and the Environments, but still, insects manage to get through. Despite their productive yield the Ecosphere is actually never very far away from starvation, and the loss of a single crop to insects could be—well, it just didn’t bear thinking about.

Bonnie likes to work with plants. Not in the same way that Marly does—that appraising, sterile,
scientific
way— but in a sort of…
holistic
way. An
organic
way. Yes, that’s right: organic. She smiles at the word. Bonnie feels a kinship to the plants, with the interrelatedness of all living things. She likes to feel the sunlight on her bare, freckled skin because it reminds her of the ironic combination of her specialness and insignificance. The sun is an indifferent ball of burning gases ninety-three million miles away, yet without it there could be no life. “We are all made of the same star-stuff,” Carl Sagan used to say. Well, Bonnie feels that stuff in her very cells. It sings along the twined strands of her DNA.

She certainly doesn’t miss sex. She doesn’t need sex. She hardly ever even
thinks
about sex.

She sits up and shuts her eyes. She breathes deeply.
Om mani padme om
. Who needs sex when there is such passion in as simple an act of life as breathing?

She finds a bug in a cornhusk and crushes it between thumb and forefinger.

Leonard Willard takes everybody’s shit every day. He puts it in phials and labels it and catalogs it; he analyzes it and files the results. He operates and maintains the waste-reclamation systems and biological and mechanical filtering systems. It’s a dirty job, but someone has to do it. If no one did it, the Ecosphere wouldn’t work. Leonard likes to think of himself as the vital link in the Ecosphere’s food chain. Filtration is his life. Ecosphere gives him an abundance of opportunity to feel fulfilled: there are filtration systems in the sewage facilities, in the garbage-disposal units, in the water-reclamation systems; there are desalinization units between the Ocean and the freshwater marsh; there are air filtration units, and air is also cleaned by pumping it beneath the Ecosphere and allowing it to percolate through the soil from several areas.

Leonard loves to purify things. To take a thing that is unusable in its present form, and by passing it through buffers and barriers and filters, distill a usable, needed thing—that makes him feel useful. Needed. Staff couldn’t breathe without him. Staff couldn’t drink without him. Without Leonard, staff couldn’t take so much as a healthy shit. Without Leonard, the shit would never hit the fans.

Leonard has Hodgkin’s disease, a cancer of the lymph system. Years ago radiation therapy made all his hair fall out and stabilized his condition enough that he could be put on chemotherapy, which only made him stupid and violently ill for two days out of every month. He began putting on weight again, and his hair grew back in, even thicker than before, and the doctors felt encouraged that his condition had stabilized. Somehow his body learned to live with the disease.

Or, from a different perspective, he thinks (reaching a gloved hand into a water conduit to withdraw what looks like a dirty wet air-conditioning filter), the disease has allowed his body to live. So that it can continue to feed. This is why Leonard rarely worries about the things that roam the Outside, the things Bill has dubbed carnitropes. He doesn’t worry about them because his body is being eaten from the
in
side. Or, to distill it in a very Leonard-like way, there is shit in his blood, and he can’t filter it out.

He shakes the wet filter over a plastic sheet. Ropy black strands drip down. Leonard cleans the filter with a compressed-air hose, returns it to the conduit, then bundles and twist-ties the plastic sheet.

Walking with it dripping to the lab, Leonard realizes that there is nowhere else on Earth, anymore, where he could perform his job. Leonard feels he is the most realistic of all the Staff—and he knows what it’s like outside their brittle little environment. Though he helps maintain the station, and therefore the illusion the station represents, he understands intuitively that his reasons for doing so are quite different from theirs. They maintain Ecosphere as a denial of what has changed Outside. He maintains it as a triumphant affirmation of the same. As above, so below. None of the others, being physically fit, can appreciate this. Therefore none of the others can adequately appreciate Leonard.

But he keeps up a cheery façade. It’s important to him that he do this.

In the lab he unbundles the plastic and breathes deeply.
That
is the stuff of life, and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.

Deke and Haiffa are fucking on the thirty-foot beach. Deke and Haiffa are always fucking somewhere. “Oh, look,” Haiffa says. She points, and their rhythm halts. Deke rolls his head to look out on the water, not minding the sand that grinds into his brush-cut hair.

“Don’t see nothin’,” he says.

“A fish,” she says. She sets her hands on his chest and resumes.

“Fish on Friday,” he says. “Maybe I’ll hook ’im. What’s today?”

“I don’t know.” Her accent, which used to charm him, is invisible to him now. “Wednesday.”

“Anything-Can-Happen Day,” he says, and arches his back as he begins to come.

*  *  *

Above them on the roof, Dieter the marine biologist watches through the glass. Sometimes the Ecosphere to him is a big aquarium. He watches Deke and Haiffa not from a need to accommodate voyeurism so much as from a desire to alleviate boredom. The first couple of months, everybody went at everybody else in various combinations, then settled into a few pairings that dissolved, either from attrition or from entropy, and now everybody is more or less an environment unto his or her self. In this they are like the scientific wonder in which they all live, but which none calls home.

Dieter is supposed to be cleaning solar panels. Dust from the Arizona desert accumulates on the Ecosphere’s glass-and-aluminum roof, and when it is thick upon the solar cells, the station’s power supply is diminished. But there are a lot of solar-power cells, and it is a hot July day in the Arizona desert. Dieter takes frequent water breaks.

Below him Haiffa and Deke seem to be finished, and he looks away. He stands and puts his hands on his hips, turning to take in the gleaming, sloping geometry of glass and aluminum that is the station. Ecosphere is built into the side of a gently sloping hill; the rain forest uphill is forty feet higher than the desert downhill, which is also nearly six hundred feet distant. Hot air rises from the desert and flows uphill; condensers in the rain forest cool the air and separate the moisture. It actually rains in the indoor rain forest.

Dieter looks at the terraced Aztec pyramid of glass and aluminum that caps the rain forest. What would it feel like, he wonders, to jump from the top? A sense of freedom, the exhilaration of weightlessness, and then the ground, stopping all thought. All worry. All pain. All fear.

But an eighty-foot fall might not kill him. And even if it did, he’d just get back up and start walking around again. No, a bullet in the brain is about the only way to go, he thinks laconically, bending to pick up his rags and economy-size bottle of Windex. Shame Bill had to have the foresight to lock up the guns they obtained on that one expedition to Tucson, a year ago.

He looks left, over the edge and down at the parking lot behind the human habitat. The Jeep Cherokee and the Land Rover are still there. It would be so goddamned easy. Just get in, crank up one of those babies—might need to juice up the battery, but there was plenty of that to go around—put her in gear, and fucking go.

He’d do it in a minute, too, if there was someplace to fucking go
to
.

And Marly. She climbs down from a tree, drops her pruning shears, unties her harness, and lets it fall at her feet. She mops her brow. It is amazingly humid in here. “Tropical” is such a misleading word, she thinks, conjuring mai tais and virgin beaches. In the higher branches of the tree she has been pruning it is not so bad; the eternal trade wind from the downhill desert is cooling. On the surface, though, the breeze is broken up by the thick foliage, and the climate is dank and wet.

She watches a squirrel dart along branches. They’ve been having trouble with the squirrels. They’re dying out, and no one is sure why. Marly was against their presence from the start; they’re filthy little rodents that carry disease and live by stealing whatever they can get their grubby little paws on. Everybody likes them because they have neotenic characteristics: big heads in relation to the body, big eyes in relation to the head. They look, in other words, like babies, and
everybody
likes babies. Well, small-scale evolution is taking care of the little shits, so Marly guesses she showed them. Nobody would listen to her because she’s a botanist, which everybody knows is just a fancy word for gardener. Have you met Miss Tsung, our Chinese gardener—oh, I
do
beg your pardon:
Ms
. Tsung, our
Asian botanist
.

She wipes palms on denim and walks from the rain forest to the sparse growth near the beach. She pulls open a screen door and walks down an access corridor, then out the screen door at the far end. Bare-breasted Bonnie waves to her as she cuts across a corner of the Agricultural wing. Marly ignores her and enters the Supply section of the human habitat.

“Supplies, supplies!” she says.

From a closet whose door is marked
EXT STORES
she takes the two-man tent and a sleeping bag.

Walking toward the front door she meets Billtheasshole walking in. He stops in front of her, eyebrows rising, and does not get out of her way. “Again?” he says, looking at the blue nylon tent bag and rolled sleeping bag. “I don’t know that I altogether approve of this antisocial behavior, Marly. Everybody needs his privacy—or
her
privacy—but you are
actively segregating
yourself from us.”

She holds the camping supplies before her like a shield. Her mouth forms an O as she mimics sudden recollection. “Oh, I
am
sorry,” she says. “We were having the Tupperware party tonight, weren’t we? Or were Haiffa and Deke going to sell us Amway? I forget.”

“Grace tells me you didn’t show up for your last two scheduled sessions.” He rubs his jaw (tending toward jowls) with the span of thumb and forefinger. Of the four men on Staff, only Bill continues to shave—his badge of civilization endeavoring to persevere. Striking a blow for
homo gillette
.

She laughs. “Who has? I don’t have time for her bullshit. She’s more fucked-up than the rest of us. Just tell her it was my bad toilet training, okay?”

“I am merely attempting to express my concern over your lack of cooperation,” he says with the mildness of psychotic conviction. “Everyone has to contribute if we’re going to pull through—”

“Pull through? Pull
through
, Bill? What is this, some
phase
the world’s going through? Going to grow out of it, is that it?”

“I think I understand your resentment toward authority, Marly, but you must see that some sort of hierarchy is necessary in light of—”

“Authority?” She looks around, as if expecting a director to yell “Cut!” “Why don’t you do me a favor, Bill, and fuck off?” She shoulders past him.

“This will have to go into my report,” he warns.

She opens the door. “More demerits!” she wails to the vegetable crops. “Golly. I’m—I’m so
ashamed
.” She turns back to smile meanly, then tries to slam the door behind her. The hydraulic lever at the top hisses that she’d better not.

A last swipe with a dirty rag, and Dieter grins at his reflection. “I can
see
myself!” he says.

He collects the dirty rags scattered around him on the glass. Waste not, want not: the Golden Rule of the Ecosphere. He stands and surveys the surrounding Arizona desert. As an experiment in maintaining an artificial environment in the midst of an alien one, Ecosphere is immensely successful: They are an island of glass on the rusted surface of Mars.

He stretches cramped muscles and breathes in the dry Martian air. Dieter Schmoelling, naked to the alien plain, the only human being able to withstand—

He frowns. Wipes sweat from his brow. Shades his eyes, squints, bends forward.

A tunnel of dust, a furrow in the desert. A giant Martian mole burrowing toward the invading glass island. A Martian antibody come to attack the invading foreign cell.

A car.

[4]

Marly is pitching her tent in the downhill desert when the P.A. sounds an electronic bell:
Bong!
“All personnel to the fruit grove,” commands Billtheasshole.
Bong!
“All personnel report to the fruit grove immediately.” And clicks off.

What confidence, what assurance! The son of a bitch just
knows
that everybody will show up there,
bong!
Marly thinks of not showing up, just to remind him that his authority lies entirely in their acquiescence, but curiosity gets the better of her. Despite her dislike of him, she knows that Bill wouldn’t call them together in the middle of their working day for no good reason. But what Bill thinks of as a good reason is not necessarily dreamt of in her philosophy.

Marly sighs, pulls up stakes, and walks around the bluff, past scrub, into savanna, beside the ocean, into the southern access corridor, across croplands, and into the fruit grove.

The others are already there, except for Bill. Their backs are to her as they look out the windows. “I suppose we’re all wondering why he called us here,” says Marly.

Dieter turns and beckons her over. She pulls an apple from a tree and heads toward them. She bites into the apple and Dieter frowns. She grins and offers it to him, Chinese Eve. His frown deepens, and she laughs at his seriousness.