Dancing in Dreamtime (25 page)

“Will you be lecturing? Teaching young architects?”

“No, I will be learning again, from the wisest instructor.”

“From Rosenbarger? Chu? Sventov?” The interviewer named the only Terran architects whose fame rivaled Zuni's.

“None of those.” She guessed the man's age. Under thirty, certainly. He would have been born in the 2050s, after the Enclosure. “You wouldn't know this teacher at all.”

For a week or two the media poured out rumors concerning her future. Zuni Franklin, dismayed by blindness, would have herself vaporized and blown into the air of her beloved Oregon City. On the contrary, she would have her face rebuilt and begin life over as an eros parlor hostess. No, no, she would disguise herself and lurk through every dome and pipeline of the Enclosure, like a queen incognito, inspecting the empire she had helped construct.

Perhaps, some commentators reflected, she was merely impatient to get on with the business of evolution, to push Homo sapiens further from its animal origins, toward the realm of pure energy. She might stow aboard a lightship. She might experiment with chemmies, with trances, with psi-travel. Or she might even be the first person to have her brain transplanted into a cyber-field, and thus liberate mind entirely from the entanglements of flesh.

Zuni was content to let them guess away, so long as they did not guess the truth. There was little chance of that, since the
truth ran counter to everything the public knew about her life. For wasn't her name synonymous with the Enclosure? Hadn't she fought harder than anyone else to move humanity inside the global network of cities, to shelter our species from the dangers of the wilds? During the middle decades of the century, when climate chaos and accumulated toxins were threatening humankind with extinction, she tirelessly preached the idea of a global shelter. She constructed models of the Enclosure, drew up detailed blueprints, described the safety of life inside that perfected world. If Terra is inhospitable, she argued, let us build our own habitat, as we have done on the moon and Venus and the asteroids. We can mine the ocean for materials. We can suck energy from sun and wind and tide. We can purify everything that enters our system, admitting only what is useful to us. The Enclosure can be the next home for our race, a waystation on our road to transcendence, and everything in it will bear our mindprint.

Knowing such things about Zuni, how could they ever guess her true plans?

Amid the speculations, Zuni quietly went about severing the ties that bound her to the Enclosure. She delivered the last of her scheduled lectures on the psychology of disembodied mind, and declined all further speaking engagements. She resigned from boards of directors, taskforces, committees. For a week she sorted through her files, assigning to the archives whatever she thought might be of use to future planners, erasing the rest. There were hundreds of blueprints, ranging in scale from greenhouses, designed as refuges for nature, to the global skein of cities, designed as refuges for humans. Had she lived in less troubling times, she would have preferred imagining cabins, gardens, backpacking tents, stone walls.

The only blueprint she chose to take away with her was for a twelve-person geodesic dome, and the only mementos she kept were drafting pens and rulers.

She assigned her apprentices to other master architects. One of those apprentices, a woman named Marga, wept on hearing the news.

“Don't fret,” Zuni told her. “You will learn as much from Sventov as you would from me.”

“But I haven't modeled myself on Sventov,” Marga protested. “I've modeled myself on you.”

Zuni interrupted her sorting of blueprints to study this young apprentice. The face was a cinnamon-colored blur, the hair a swatch of black. Solemn and reproachful, another earnest child of the Enclosure. “And are you certain you know what I am?”

Marga seemed startled by the question. “You're the architect of humanity's liberation from Terra,” she said, repeating a catch-phrase from the media.

“And you will carry on that liberation after I am gone?”

“Of course. But why should you leave us, with your head still full of visions?”

“My eyes are failing.”

“I'll be your eyes. I'll draw your ideas.” In her excited gesturing, Marga thumped the model of the Enclosure, setting the fretted globe swaying.

“That is kind of you,” said Zuni, “but I have other work to do now.”

“What can be more important than Project Transcendence?”

“In old China,” Zuni began patiently, “before the Enclosure, it was the custom for a person to devote her youth to learning and her adult years to community work. When she reached a certain
age, however, she was free to withdraw from the world and pursue her quest for enlightenment.”'

Marga pondered this. “And you have reached such an age?”

“I have.”

“Nothing will make you change your mind?”

“No, my dear.” Zuni longed to tell this solemn young woman the truth, revealing the private self who had been kept secret during decades of public work. But the habit of deception was too old now to be broken. She would be freed from it soon enough.

“Enlightenment?” Marga repeated the word quizzically.

“Getting back in touch,” Zuni translated.

“With what?”

“With the source of things.”

“Isn't that where we're all headed? Back toward the state of pure energy?”

Zuni smiled, knowing it was foolish to speak of spiritual matters. “Sventov will teach you well.”

“I suppose he will.”

When Zuni busied herself once more with the stack of blueprints, Marga asked shyly, “Do you suppose I could have something of yours to keep?”

Zuni withdrew from her modest trove of mementos one of the drafting pens, and this she pressed into Marga's hand. The touch was obviously a shock to the young woman, but not so great a shock as the kiss Zuni brushed on her cheek. “Now go on, leave me alone,” Zuni said, “and be sure you draw beautiful cities with that pen.”

After Marga left, Zuni sat for a long time at her desk, staring out over Oregon City, wondering if she could have made it more beautiful. Nothing lived in it except people, the human
microbiota, and experimental animals. Old-timers reminisced about the abundance of life in the wilds, about hickory trees and strawberries and kangaroos, but they did not reminisce about typhoid and famine, about mercury poisoning and radioactive dumps. At least within the Enclosure people were shielded from toxins and drug-resistant germs. The apartments were stacked a thousand feet high, nearly reaching the dome, but no one lacked shelter. The algae-based food tasted like pap to anyone who could recollect dirt-grown vegetables, but it was abundant and pure. The young people, those born inside the Enclosure, had never seen dolphins or potatoes, had never seen anything except what humans had fashioned. The young did not reminisce about a lost world. Their parents and grandparents had quit the wilds, as irrevocably as their evolutionary ancestors had floundered up out of the seas.

At least Zuni hoped the move inside was irrevocable. Had she betrayed her species? No, no, she had settled that doubt long ago. To reassure herself that the move inside had been the sole path to survival, she needed only to recall the decades before the Enclosure, when more than a billion people died from heatwaves, hurricanes, flooding, drought, famine, epidemic disease, and other consequences of ecological breakdown. Besides, how could this indoor life be a betrayal if it was what people had always longed for? Wasn't the Enclosure just a cave, a hut, a walled village, a shopping mall carried to its logical extreme, stretched out over the globe, hermetically sealed?

Before closing her office for the last time she looked carefully about to make sure no trace of her was left behind. Satisfied, she gave the hanging model of the Enclosure one last swing and shut the door.

Because Zuni replied to speculations about her future with vague smiles and crooked answers, the media soon decided she was not the proper stuff of news. Her face and name vanished from the celebrity columns. Before long only her friends and her colleagues at the Institute still wondered what was going on beneath that meticulous coil of white hair. Even they couldn't pry the secret from her. She had clutched it for so long that her will had sealed over it, like bark grown around a nail.

Left in peace at last, Zuni went about erasing herself from the city's records. She could have settled her accounts at the bank, the housing office, the clinic and elsewhere electronically, but she chose instead to go in person. More often than not, when she arrived at an office she had to deal with mechanoes rather than people. She didn't mind. The mechs were fun to puzzle, and they had no feelings to hurt. The glittering bulbous heads, like chromium balloons, purred ritual greetings at her. Was she certain she wished to close her accounts, terminate her insurance, cancel her lease? the mechs wanted to know. Yes, Zuni declared. Was she leaving Earth? No, she was returning. Perhaps she was planning to die? What human is immortal? Zuni countered. That answer never failed to silence the chromium heads.

“I am perfectly clear about what I am doing,” Zuni would say firmly. “Now kindly settle this matter as I have instructed.”

At that the glittering balloon head (or occasionally a human head, modishly wigged and painted) would nod obediently and comply with her requests. Her lease, her insurance, her media subscription, her allotment of food and energy were set to expire in
a week. For seven days more she would remain a citizen, secured to the Enclosure by digits in databases, but then the numbers in every account bearing her name would go to zero, and so far as the human system was concerned, Zuni Franklin would cease to exist.

She spent much of those seven days riding pedbelts and gliders, tracing French curves through Oregon City. She had drawn those curves, once upon a time: And this was what kept her running errands in person through the city, this fascination with the glass and alloy shapes her blueprints had taken on. Many others had worked on the design of Oregon City, to be sure, but she had usually been given the final say. Her pen had moved armies of builders. So each soaring tower, each fountain, each plaza encircled by arcades, each sculptured facade echoed shapes that had lived inside her since childhood. The entire city bore the familiarity of an obsessive dream.

She could journey by tube to Bombay City or Arctic City or anywhere else within the Enclosure, and see much the same dreamscape. Once disease and weather had been eliminated, once the Enclosure had been sealed tight, once travel throughout the system had been made free, there seemed little point in concocting a different design for each city. The problems of feeding and housing millions of people did not change from place to place. The ocean yielded up the same materials everywhere. Media spread the same shows, ideas, products, and language around the globe.

The simulated weather during that last week was halcyon blue. Yet Zuni felt certain the weather outside the float city was stormy. When water trembled in drinking glasses, authorities blamed the extraction pumps or tidal generators, but she knew the shudder came from the ocean. As a young woman, she had stood atop cliffs on the Oregon coast watching storms, and had felt
the stone tremble beneath her. Waters that could shake the basalt margins of a continent could easily shake a glass city.

Outside it would be March, a time of riotous green, a time for bursting out of shells. During all her years inside, where seasons did not matter and weather played out as electronic shows, Zuni had still kept track of the turning year. And now it was spring.

She went about saying good-bye to her friends beneath this virtual blue sky, knowing that the real sky, far above, would be changeable, now surly, now serene. Her friends had never been numerous, and several of the dearest had already taken the journey she was about to take. They had never been numerous because she was a difficult woman to draw near, at once passionate and aloof. “Like fire inside an icicle,” was how one of the draftsmen had described her.