Terrarium (14 page)

Phoenix switched back to visual mode. At last through a gap in the clouds he spied the hooked finger of blue where the bay clawed into the cliffs. The boulders in the shallows were ringed with lacy collars of foam as the waves broke over them. The black cliffs were pockmarked with even blacker caves, like the sunken eyes of very old men who have seen much sadness. Tides had scrubbed away all evidence that Jurgen and the others had stashed several tons of materials in those caves. The path leading away from the
beach to the oil pipeline in the foothills was invisible except where it passed over dunes. There Phoenix could see faint wheelmarks. A few days of wind would scatter those signs as well.

Returning the satellite to routine surveillance, Phoenix erased from the cyber all evidence of his visit to Whale's Mouth. Leave no tracks for the H.P. He leaned forward and gazed along the ranks of observers, each painted face tilted upward, each wigged head clasped by earphones, eyes turned glassily upon the screens, intently watching the ballet of clouds. Mesmerized. You could not follow that dance of white and blue for longer than forty minutes without the mind going blank, the self dissolving into mist and air.

So rest breaks came every half hour. Phoenix's relief—a slump-shouldered woman whose last name he had learned after two years of working with her and whose first name he had never been told—now stood beside his chair.

“Break,” she said. And that was about all she ever said.

She kept her face averted while he unclasped the earphones and stood up.

“All quiet,” he reported, wondering idly what she looked like beneath the facepaint, beneath the wig (chartreuse and mauve today, like the mistress-of-ceremonies on
Win a Planet),
beneath the muffling clothes.

Without answering she placed her cushion in the chair, wiped a sani-cloth over the desk wherever his arms might have rested, then took his seat at the console.

Touch me not, he thought, riding the belt to his rest cubicle. Other workers rode away to their own cubicles or rode back to the monitoring room with eyes lowered and voices still. Some he recognized from the way a paunch humped beneath a gown, or the way a head seemed to perch like a bulb atop a scrawny neck. But most were costumed and painted into anonymity. Their eyes, when you could glimpse them, were rarely the same color two days running. You never saw the person; you saw the current persona.
Hiding behind a disguise had once seemed reasonable to Phoenix, since he had been raised to believe that contact with other people was the chief source of disorder and sorrow. How else will we ever liberate ourselves from the slavery of flesh? his teachers had asked. How will we survive the friction of life in the city unless we insulate ourselves?

Inside the cubicle he closed his eyes. He counted breaths, rode in and out with the air, until the stillness of meditation began to wash over him. Husk after husk fell away, leaving him naked, waiting to be touched.

When the alarm buzzed after fifteen minutes, he opened his eyes onto the grid of holes in the acoustical tile overhead. His limbs felt sluggish, unwilling to resume the stiff pose of a citizen. Back to cloud-watching.

The slump-shouldered woman made way for him, sweeping her cushion from the chair, scouring her handprints from the desk.

“Quiet?” he asked.

“Nothing,” she conceded in a monotone. And then she was gone—only to return half an hour later. And so they would alternate through his shift, like two lepers locked in a dance in which touching was forbidden.

A week had passed since the last ingathering, then three weeks, four. It was March, a month Teeg assured him made a difference in the wilds. Everything would be greening up, she told him. Ferns would be uncurling their new fronds like question marks through the loam. Birds would be singing with amorous intent, little feathered balls of lust. March was also dandy for stirring up foul weather over the Pacific. Tropical seas heated up, cloud clusters straggled into shape, and occasionally one of those clusters would begin to swirl, sucking heat and moisture from the ocean. It would look on the satellite monitors like a great spiral galaxy, graceful arms of cloud curving outward, with a
deceptively peaceful eye in its middle, and this typhoon would then play hell over the ocean.

So far in March three typhoons had formed in the Pacific, but each had surged westward, cracking travel tubes and battering aquafarms near the float-cities of Japan and the Philippines. Near Oregon City the weather remained gentle. No violent storms, no gales, no hint of typhoons. The lights on Phoenix's monitors hovered safely in shades of indigo and blue.

Most of those March days the crew spent working repairs on the city, replacing photoelectric cells or mending flotation collars. It made Phoenix uneasy to think of Teeg laboring away shoulder-to-shoulder with some sweating companion. “Who're you working with these days?” he asked her by vidphone.

“Does it matter?”

“Just curious.”

“Depends on the assignment. Sometimes Jurgen and Hinta, sometimes Marie or Rand.” She gave him a sharp look—or rather, her image on the vidphone, flat and odorless, untouchable, gave him a sharp look. “Phoenix, I despise jealousy. There's no room for it in the ingathering.”

“Jealousy?” He forced a laugh. She could read him even through all the electronics that separated them. “I ask a simple question and you decide I'm jealous?”

“Forget it.” She looked away from the camera, off to one side, as if she were bored with him, as if some more interesting spectacle—a chemmie-tripper or disney-bird—had suddenly materialized in her apartment. “The waiting's getting us all down.” Now she faced him again, playful. “What good is a weatherman if he can't deliver us a hurricane?”

“Typhoon,” he corrected her. “They're called typhoons in the Pacific. Hurricanes in the Atlantic.”

“Typhoon, then.”

“There's a vicious one south of here. But it's tracking westward, like all the earlier ones.”

“Why don't you steer it our way?”

“They gave up on that idea. Typhoons don't obey.”

“I'm only kidding,” she said.

“Last time they tried it was in '39, when the thing backed up on them and drowned four-hundred-some people on the Alaska City crew.”

“Yes,” she replied soberly. “That was the one that killed my father.”

“I'm sorry.”

“Don't be. I'm not.”

Teeg was gazing off to one side again, moody, unreachable.

“When can I see you?” he pleaded.

“You're looking at me now.”

“Touch you, I mean.”

This won a smile. “Listen to the man talk! I'll free you yet.” Soft green glow of her eyes. “Brew us up a little tempest, just enough to crack the bottle somewhere nearby, then you and I can go outside and do all the touching your heart desires.”

Heart, he thought, desires. Teeg would not let him visit her, for fear the H.P. might grow curious about their weatherman's friendship. She even rationed their vidcalls. Now a week had passed since he had last talked with her, and he was on his hour-long break, riding pedbelts around the hem of Marconi Plaza. At each angle of the belt's hexagonal route other passengers stepped aboard or stepped off, but Phoenix kept on riding, round and round the plaza, trying to unsnarl himself from the web of the city. He was afraid to go back to his rest cubicle. Its emptiness terrified him. In meditation that morning he had been unable to summon up more than a flicker of the inner light. If he did not gather with the crew again soon, he was afraid the light would fade away entirely and dread of the wilds would paralyze him.

The air smelled vaguely of bodies and lemons. The
bodies were a constant background flavor, despite the universal application of deodes. The lemon meant it was the last week of the month, time for a change of fragrance in Oregon City. What had it been before lemons? Coffee? Burnt candles? He could not remember.

The last week of March. Back at the office another typhoon was skidding across his monitor, but again it was far to the south and heading westward. Zuni Franklin and the others had known what they were doing when they chose the location for Oregon City, at the warm junction of the California and Japanese Currents, away from the paths of most foul weather. Most, but not all. One of these storms would eventually leap its tracks and come howling toward the city.

Phoenix gazed up past the spiky summits of office towers and apartment complexes, up to the frosted surface of the dome. The sky ballet for the day was a swirl of russets and golds, probably meant to harken back to some racial memory of autumn. From this far below you could not distinguish the struts that bound the dome together. As he rose in thought to that arched ceiling, his inner space swelled to include the million-windowed towers, the hurtling gliders, the citizens meandering through the city like molecules in a blaze of light, the display boards where ads bedazzled noontime onlookers—swelled to encompass the whole of Oregon City. It was a mighty place, technology's cathedral, the visible architecture of a dozen centuries of thought. How could he leave it? The city fed him, kept him warm, sheltered him from beasts. The city was the climax of evolution on the planet. How could he dream of leaving it to go live like a savage in the wilds?

He tried to summon up the inner light, even to recollect Teeg's face, but the dome pressed around him like the plates of his own skull. There was no seeing through the walls of glass or bone.

The buzz of his wristphone broke the spell of the city. Back to the desk, he thought. Then he noticed his lunch-break
was only half over, and the phone was blinking on the emergency circuit. “Marshall,” he whispered into the tiny microphone.

“E-class alert in sectors 44 through 46,” came the mechano voice of the shift-coordinator. “All monitors report immediately. Repeat—”

Quenching the synthetic voice in mid-sentence, Phoenix leapt from the belt and raced across Marconi Plaza to the entrance of the Surveillance Tower. Faces swiveled toward him in alarm, then swiveled quickly away before he could return their frightened stares. Madman, they would think. Chemmie-crazed. A victim of the resurgent beast.

Phoenix had no time to care what they thought as he let himself through barrier after barrier with palm flattened against the identi-plates. E-class alert might only mean a severe ocean spill or volcanic activity in the Aleutian Trench, but it could also mean the typhoon had swerved and was now heading for Oregon City.

He kept poking the elevator button until the doors wheezed open. Rising the one hundred forty-three stories, he felt more than his usual vertigo.

Back at his desk he did not give his relief woman time enough to wipe her fingerprints away. He flounced into his seat, grabbed the headset from her. She backed away with her painted features barely under control.

“Tracking north-northeast at eleven degrees, speed thirty-two knots,” the voice of the cyber was droning through the earphones.

The satellite monitor showed the spiral typhoon edging into his sector. He replayed the ninety-minute elapse record, tracking the storm's movement back over the Pacific. He soon identified the point, far south of the city, where the typhoon had suddenly veered from its westward path. Oregon City lay squarely in its way. Why hadn't the sector-thirty people caught this two hours ago? A glance down the ranks of mesmerized faces reminded him of how many times he also had stopped believing in the significance of
these gauzy cloud patterns. Storms raging outside? What outside? Weren't these just images on a screen?

“Notify controller of seatubes, aquafarms, and generators, segment Astoria through Seattle,” he murmured into his headset, keeping his voice to a monotone.

The cyber tinted the satellite images a vicious red, to register the gravity of the storm. On the screen the typhoon looked like a huge scarlet spiral of blood, drawing yet more blood from the sky. He knew the extremely low pressure beneath the cyclone would suck the waters upward and drive a storm surge before it. And that was what would slam into the outflung domes and tubes of the Enclosure, that raised fist of water. Unless it changed course, it would soon intercept the frail north-south line of the Alaska seatube.

On a private channel he dialed Teeg. The call was transferred from her apartment to her belt-phone, so she must have been out somewhere, perhaps on another job. “Passio,” she replied. Faceless, her voice withered by electronics, she might have been a mechano speaking to him.

“Teeg, are you outside?” he said anxiously.

“No, we're down in level K, overhauling a desalinator.”

“Is everybody down there?”

“Yes,” she answered. “It's a big job.”

“Who's on sea-alert?”

“We are.”

“Good. Get the crew together and be ready for a call. This could be our storm.”

“How long?”

“Forty-five, fifty minutes. Unless the thing changes direction again.”

“Is it big enough?”

He glanced at the screen. The snarl of red thickened, sucking all the sky's energy into a fist of wind. “Plenty big.”

“We hadn't figured on your being at work when the storm came,” she said impatiently.

“I don't run the weather.”

There was a pause. He could sense the wheels spinning in her quick brain. Then she asked, “How long until your next rest break?”

He checked the clock. “Twenty-four minutes.”

“Okay. No questions now. Just do exactly what I say. When your relief comes, take off as usual. Go to your cubicle, strip down, grease your body all over. Then put on the shimmersuit and belly-pack, and get back into that traveling tent of yours.”

Listening to her, he plucked nervously at the folds of his gown. He stroked the mood-seam, to shut off the fireworks of color the garment was flashing. “What do they think when I don't show up at work again?”

“They think you're a statistic. Another body they lost track of.”