Dancing in Dreamtime (46 page)

CHAPTER FOUR

On the beach at Whale's Mouth Bay, amid boulders and sea gulls, Teeg lay roasting in the sun. Against her naked back and rump the sand felt like a thousand nibbling flames. Salt-laden wind fanned her hair. Even through the breathing-mask she could smell the ocean. Between repair missions, when she was required to stay inside the Enclosure, more than anything else she missed the feel of sun on her skin.

During this trip she quickly finished her assigned job—replacing fuel cells on a signal booster atop Diamond Mountain—and had three hours left over for scouting. Most of the time she used for discovering how hospitable a place the bay might be, testing for radiation, toxins, soil nutrients, the quality of water. These last few minutes of her allotted time she lay basking in the sun, as a celebration for having found the right place at last. She would have to make sure Whale's Mouth had been omitted from the surveillance net. It probably had, since no tubes or laser channels or signal avenues passed anywhere near the place. Just another piece of real estate long since erased from human reckoning. She hoped
so. Phoenix could tell her for sure. And she would need to spend a week here, later on, to run more tests on plants and microbes and air before she could assure the other seekers that this was indeed the place for the settlement.

Phoenix's maps had led her straight to the bay, her shuttle flying low and coasting along on compressed air to avoid the patrollers and the sky-eyes. On each repair mission, stealing time to explore locations for the settlement, she was more and more tempted to stay outside alone. But whenever she wavered, all she had to do was close her eyes, think about the plans for the settlement, and the faces of the seven other conspirators would rise within her silence. She was one of them, a limb of their collective body.

Lying there on the beach, she felt the sweat gathering in her navel, between her breasts, on the slopes of her thighs. The crash of surf against the volcanic walls of the bay sent shudders through her. Occasionally an eddy in the wind snatched the odors of fir and alder from inshore and filled her with the pungency of green. Thoughts swung lazy as hawks through her mind.

A sound pried her eyes open. Two gulls squabbling over a fish. Life was creeping back into the land, the ocean, though on nothing like the scale her mother used to tell about. Her mother. Dead up north in Portland. Murdered. Will I ever gather the courage to go there, Teeg wondered, and look at the place where they killed her?

The cliffs surrounding the bay bristled with young trees and bushes. Life reclaiming the land. The plants seemed hardier than animals; they recovered more quickly, perhaps because they had evolved in an atmosphere even more toxic than the present one. She had noticed on this flight that there were fewer scars of bare soil in the countryside. Perhaps, as Zuni always insisted,
Enclosure had been the only way of halting the energy slide, the famine for materials, the poisoning of the planet. If it
was
halted. An oceanographer had confided to Teeg (one did not say such things in print or on video) that it might take another fifty years for all the toxins to wash off the land masses into the seas, and perhaps another fifty years before the oceans showed whether they could survive the poisons. “We might already be dead and not know it,” he had whispered. “Or then again, the ocean may surprise us with her resilience.”

Resilience. She liked that, the springing back of nature. She smeared the sweat across her belly, enjoyed the springiness of her own flesh. Womb inside there, where never babe did dwell. Enclosure. The great domed cities, wombs spun of glass and alloy and geometry. Mother helped provide the materials for them. Zuni and Father helped provide the designs. And I? I want out.

She propped herself on elbows and surveyed the bay. Yes, this was the place to build a colony—hills shouldering down to within a few hundred meters of the shore, then a meadow traversed by a sluggish river, and then the beach of black sand and black volcanic boulders. The north arm of the bay was a massive headland, topped by the ruins of a lighthouse. There was even an abandoned oil pipeline running along the old roadbed nearby, connecting across eighty kilometers of ocean to the tank farm in Oregon City. Ideal for smuggling out equipment and supplies.

When she had first visited this place as a child, on one of those rapturous holidays with her mother, the pipe had still carried oil and the shoreline had been half a kilometer farther west. Snags of the old coast were still visible as gray outcroppings, great broken teeth, farther out in the bay. On one of their recent outings
Phoenix had assured her that the polar icepacks had stopped melting. “One more benefit from the transition to solar living,” he explained. That meant the new coastline would probably remain stable for a while.

A strand of marsh grass blew along the sand, clung to her ribs like a green wound. She peeled it away and wrapped it about her left thumb. Will Phoenix decide to come out here with us? she wondered. The grass made a vivid ring on her sun-pinked flesh. Sitting up, she hugged her knees. Can he shake himself free of the city? And will the others let him join our circle?

A bank of clouds shut away the sun, and the air grew chill. Teeg rose, slapped sand from her legs and buttocks. Cleaning grit from her back would have to wait until she took an air-shower at the sanitation port. Despite the chill, her body still felt atingle from the sun. She slithered into boots and shimmersuit, tightened the breathing-mask over her face. Through goggles the bay still looked beautiful. Running shadows marked the passage of clouds across the knobby black walls of the cliffs. Surf exploded rhythmically on the boulders. She wanted to make love with that roar in her ears.

Aloft in the shuttle, Teeg hovered for a minute over the beach, before heading inland toward the nearest port. She skimmed across the meadow, sun winking in the river, then she climbed the foothills at a height some ten meters above the tips of spruce and hemlocks. There was joy in balancing the tiny craft on its cushion of air, riding the thermals like a falcon. From above, the slopes looked solid green, a carpet of moss, as if you could walk from treetop to treetop without ever touching the ground. Some patches still showed brown where the last clear-cuts had not yet
mended, or where toxins had concentrated. But everywhere the forest was coming back. The oceans provided cheaper substitutes for cellulose, without all the mess of lumbering.

Between the first range of hills and the somber mountains, she could just make out stretches of the old coastal highway. Scraps of concrete and tar showed through the weeds. In places the ocean had backed into valleys and covered the roadbed. A charred clearing beside the road and a scattering of rubble marked the location of a dismantled town, probably some fishing port. The map Phoenix had given her mentioned neither road nor town, identified nothing but landforms and the frail web of tubes.

From the peak of the next range she spied, away down in the mountain-shadowed Willamette Valley, the glowing travel-tube. Its translucent glass pipes, frosty white and glittering like an endless icicle, stretched north toward Vancouver City and south toward the clustered domes of California. Whenever she glimpsed the tube system or the domes from outside, she was amazed at their grace, and she thought of her father. Whatever shape you could reduce to a mathematical formula, he would weep over. But that was the only beauty he had ever learned to see.

While Teeg watched, a freighter poured its flash of blue lights through the northbound tube.

She let the shuttle skip lightly on the updrafts along the far side of the coastal range, dipping down into shadows. The valley stretched away north some two hundred kilometers to Portland, her mother's place, the place of death. Teeg shivered, trying to shut the scene back in its mental cage. Yet I must go there, she thought, go and face whatever remains of her.

In the shadowed valley she looked for the yellow beacon that marked a gateway to the Enclosure, her thoughts drifting, as they
often did, from her mother to Zuni, who had grown up in one of the lumber towns on these slopes. Sheep used to graze in this valley, Zuni would tell her, and the hills were green with mint, and fruit trees covered the terraces like ornate stitchery. Teeg had always been surprised, the way the older woman's eyes would soften when she told about the Willamette Valley.

Can I tell her about Whale's Mouth Bay, about the settlement? Teeg wondered. No, no, she decided, it would be madness to confess this hunger for the wilds to the mother of the Enclosure.

Fly the shuttle, she reminded herself. There must be no mistakes on reentry. Each time she returned from a mission she feared they would demand proof that all her time had been spent making repairs. But the insiders who staffed Security never dared go outside, so they grew more ignorant of the wilds each year. With no idea how long a repair job should take, they let the wildergoers alone.

At the junction of the Willamette and McKenzie Rivers she spotted the yellow beacon of the sanitation port. Come here, the beacon seemed to promise, come here all you who have wandered from the human system, come and we will purify you, bathe you in artificial light, admit you once again into the charmed circle of the city.

CHAPTER TEN

In boots and hoods and ankle-flapping capes, with masks drawn close to hide their faces, Teeg and Phoenix walked among the circular oil stains of the tank farm. Behind them, the gamepark flung its riotous colors toward the nightdarkened dome, and farther behind, near the city center, buildings heaped up in pyramids
and honeycombs of light. Ahead of them loomed the dark knobby shapes of the few remaining oil tanks.

“What if I can't—” Phoenix began.

Teeg shushed him quickly. “You
can
. Now be still and keep your mind centered. No doubts. You've got to be clear.”

They passed between two partly demolished tanks. Where lasers had cut through the triple-hulled walls, cauterized edges gleamed with a dull luster. This might be the last ingathering here, Teeg realized, for the wreckers were gnawing their way each week nearer to the tank where the seekers met. The pipeline leading from here to the mountains near Whale's Mouth Bay had already been severed. Phoenix had to pass the test tonight, for there might not be another chance.

Teeg climbed the ladder first, feet quiet on the rungs, and when Phoenix joined her on the roof of the tank she motioned for him to slip off his gown and streetmask. They added their garments to the pile beside the entrance valve, pried off their boots. Turning, with Phoenix between her and the distant glow of the gamepark, she could see for the first time his actual shape, hugged in the fabric of his shimmersuit. The months of training had drawn his body tight. She touched him lightly on the chest, felt the quiver of muscle, then trailed her fingers downward over ribs to his waist.

“I'm afraid,” he whispered.

“Of course.”

Through her bare feet she sensed the hum of voices in the tank below. As she cranked the valve open the hum grew louder, then separated into distinct and familiar voices. Jurgen's gruff baritone, Hinta's soothing purr, Sol's gasping with the sound of blood in it. They were discussing Phoenix, wondering aloud if his light would merge with theirs.

“You follow me,” she whispered to him. “And relax, keep yourself clear.”

His silhouette blocked out a man-shaped chunk of inner-city lights. “But am I ready? Maybe I need more—”

“You're
ready
.”

She lowered her feet through the cold jaws of the valve, swung down from handhold to handhold. Before her feet kissed the floor the voices hushed. She bowed deeply. Grave faces nodded at her: the lovely rainbow shades of skin, cinnamon and plum, olive and cornsilk—the colors of growing things. A moment later Phoenix swung down beside her, looking self-conscious in his silvery shimmersuit and naked face. She had never before seen him scrubbed perfectly clean of paint. His cheeks were the color of peaches; descent through the valve had left one of them smudged with grease. As the conspirators stared at him, he shuffled his feet nervously, and that little stagger caught at her heart.

“Phoenix Marshall,” she announced.

“Peace,” murmured several voices. Each person raised the left hand, palm exposed. Although the backs of the hands were the color of salmon and copper and chocolate, a mixture of races, the palms were all yellowed with calluses. They carried this imprint of the outdoors with them always, this thickening of the skin from work.

After bowing, Phoenix licked his lips and carefully pronounced the formula she had taught him. “I am seeking the light. I ask to join your circle.”

Hands waved him to the mat which had been made ready. Teeg lowered herself onto the mat next to his, and the circle was gathered. She noticed Sol and Marie staring across at Phoenix, sizing him up—curious, probably, to see what had attracted her to
him. If asked, she would not have known what to say, except that something in her leapt up to answer the yearning she felt in him.

When at last the two old spirit-travelers lowered their eyes, Teeg did the same, and immediately power began to flow around the circle. There was a roaring like the joining of rivers inside her, and then stillness began trickling through her.

Open up to us, Phoenix, open up, she chanted over and over to herself.

After several moments she realized her back was tensed and her jaw was clamped tight. She was trying to
will
the coming together. Gradually she relaxed, let go, made herself into a gauzy sail that winds of the spirit could shove along. And the winds set her quivering, caught and spun her, leaf-light, across the waters. Presently she drifted up against some barrier, could not break through. She was conscious of her skull, an enclosure trapping her, and then the walls of bone evaporated like mist and she floated outward, nudging against the curved walls of the tank. Those also gave way, and after them the walls of Oregon City, and then the vaporous envelope of the planet, and so on outward past solar system and galaxy, always adrift, until her frail craft burst through every last barrier and coasted into the center of light. Here all was a dazzle and a blazing stillness, a burning without movement, a chorus without sound. A fierce energy gripped her, spinning her round, and yet she felt calm.