Terrarium (19 page)

“Still a little queasy?” Teeg asked, studying his eyes.

Phoenix tried to sound reasonable. “The fear goes pretty far back. Dad used to tell me how people got the outside
madness in the old days. Too much disorder, you know. Reduced them to gibbering idiots.” His father's drug-blasted face, reduced to idiocy by chemicals, ballooned in his memory.

“Coyt and Hinta and some of the others went through the same fear, learning to be wildergoers,” Teeg said. “My problem was always the opposite, learning to be a citizen. Mother taught me the madness was
inside
. Too much order.”

Even now, in the nervous flexing of her body, he sensed she was eager to be out there, working on the settlement. “I thought maybe I'd just watch things from the raft today,” he said. “Kind of get my bearings.”

“Fine. I'll drop in later with lunch. Then tonight, when the world gets dark and simple, maybe you'll feel like going out.”

He nodded doubtfully. She brushed her lips over his ear before slipping away through the hatch. Stepping confidently like some beast native to the place, she crossed the beach to where Sol huddled on a driftlog. The sick man tilted his face to greet her, black skin lustrous with ocean spray or sweat. Phoenix felt a pang of jealousy. Sol reached out and Teeg grasped his hand in both of hers. They might have been lovers once, might still be, for all Phoenix knew, Teeg and this old plum-dark man with his matted white beard, his calm stories of commando raids on breeder reactors, his lung full of plutonium.

Presently Hinta joined Sol and Teeg on the driftlog. For a while the two women hugged the old man between them. Seeing their embrace, Phoenix understood for the first time why the crew could not think of leaving this dying man behind when they made their escape from the Enclosure. The whole crew was a marriage of spirit. Would he ever truly feel a part of it? Before Hinta left the driftlog, she placed something on Sol's tongue and stroked his forehead. Over Teeg's rib she smoothed her healing palm. Later on, Jurgen came to hulk down next to Sol, wrapping his arms
about the frail man. Teeg withdrew toward the caves, where the pieces of the settlement were stored.

Throughout the morning the other conspirators sidled up to the dying man, one by one, and sat with him to watch the sea. Phoenix defended himself from the dizzying assault of the wilds by watching these visits. Indy brought a clutch of wildflowers that shone on the foggy beach like distant lights. Coyt brought his violin, and Phoenix could hear, in the lull between waves, the high notes pirouetting. Marie was the last to come, hobbling across the sand. Her bald head bobbed side-to-side, as if overfull of thoughts. Sol lifted his hands to her, and she bent down, pressed her palms against his, her forehead against his forehead. They held so still, with so much quiet passion, that Phoenix looked guiltily away. Imagine, being loved so fully by these people, even in your weakness.

At noon Teeg brought food, drink, and the smell of outside into the raft. In one hand she dangled a long-tailed bulbous plant. “Here, meet a bull kelp.” It felt slimy in his palm, undersea, one of the planet's secret organs. In her other hand she carried a bucketful of shells. “Get the feel of things,” she urged. He fondled them, fascinated by their whorling grain, their microscopic perfection.

“You doing all right?” she asked, cocking her head at him.

He shrugged. “I've been watching clouds. I can't get used to seeing them from underneath, up close, after so many years of watching by satellite.”

She nodded absently, shifting from one foot to the other just inside the hatch, impatient to escape the closed space of the raft.

“How's the work coming?” he asked.

“Slowly. Everybody's so drunk with being out here, it's hard to keep our minds on the job.”

“I want to go help build. But every time I get to the hatch and try to walk through, there's this terrific pressure.”

“Think how I felt when my father tricked me into visiting
him in Oregon City. And then he told me I had to
stay
there. Huge mountains of buildings and swarms of people. More people on one belt than I'd seen in my whole life. Talk about
pressure
. I thought my head would explode.” Recollecting, she grabbed a fistful of red hair at each of her temples. The hard-tipped breasts rose with the motion of her arms, a reminder of the geography that had lured him out here.

“You go on back. I'm all right,” he reassured her.

With a smile of relief she backed through the hatch, into that frightening immensity. Studying holos back in his apartment had not prepared him for the vast scale of the wilds. They just went on and on, first the turbulent ocean, and now the land with its frenzy of vegetation. The terrarium in Teeg's blue-lighted room had been a box of wildness engulfed by the city, a speck on a chessboard. Now wildness was everywhere, and the raft, with its manufactured walls and filtered light and symmetries, was the only assurance of human order. Space did not curve to a halt at the dome's edge, as it had in Oregon City, but kept on soaring into the watery distance. Overhead, beyond the skin of the raft, a haze of vapor was all that separated him from the empty infinities.

All afternoon he watched the colonists lugging gear from the cave, across the beach to the creek mouth, then through a gap in the hills to a meadow where the settlement would rise. Teeg was ambling back and forth between cave and building site along with the others, but carrying smaller loads. Whenever she disappeared into a cave, blotted out by darkness, some citified part of him feared she would never return. Grass hung down over the opening, water drooled from the upper lip, as if the cave were a slobbering, bearded mouth. Yet she emerged each time unscathed and made her way along the beach to the building site. By late afternoon the struts of a windmill jutted above the hill's flank, and the crescent of a solar dish gleamed nearby.

When Teeg ducked inside the raft with his supper there
was an excitement about her. While he ate, she kept pacing, halting only to gaze out through a porthole at the settlement.

“The meeting dome will be up before midnight,” she said. “Look, you can just make out the white bulge there, above those old stumps.”

“I found a spider;” he told her, wanting to show her he had crept at least this far out of his shell. “It's already built a web in the life preservers. So quick!”

“Good, good,” she said vaguely. “Of course it's only the outer skin so far, on the big dome. But it'll keep off rain. The heat-void and photoelectric hulls can wait.” She prowled the length of the raft, thumping the yellow walls. “Coyt says we'll have electricity in two days. The footings for the veggie tank and the fish pools are all marked out. The digester's already working on a load of seaweed.” She grabbed him by the ears, gently, as if they were two fragile handles, and pulling his face down she kissed him on each eye. “Wait till you see it.”

He glanced outside. Lateness and rainclouds had thinned the light, simplifying the world, merging the dizzy details into great slabs of land and sea. Offshore rocks thrust up like fists through leaden water. He took a deep breath. “Let's go see it now.”

He stepped quickly through the hatch, before dread could shove him back. There was a sickening looseness underfoot. Sand. Beach in front of him tilting up, then gravel, boulders, deserts of rock scoured smooth as tongues, then a green terrace speared down by huge trees, and next the misty outlines of hills, and then gray sky lifting away forever and ever into darkness. He leaned back, panting and terrified. The tremendous size of the world oppressed him. The mountains crushed down with a pulverizing weight. Behind him the surf breathed its mammoth breath.

It took him a minute to notice the tug at his arm, to hear Teeg saying, “Look at something close by, one single thing. That's the way to fight it. Here—get some sand.”

He extended his palm and she scooped it full of grit.

“Now stare at it,” she said. “Put everything else out of your mind.”

He lifted his hand close to his face. Flecks of stone, rasped from mountains, dust of a continent. He stirred the specks with a finger. Some were dark with moisture, others tawny, and the driest grains were pale flecks of light, like sparks of some icy fire.

Teeg's voice reached him from the colossal world he had momentarily forgotten. “That's the secret. Look at one thing at a time. Everything's gathered there anyway.”

Stumbling up the beach with his weight on Teeg, he obediently looked at a seagull's feather, a driftlog bleached white as bone, a moss-covered stone, the thorny arc of a blackberry vine, examining each with a mixture of caution and wonder, as he might have examined the alien debris of Mars. The shapes of these things were familiar to him from the holos; but now they were substantial, resisted the hand, like the furniture of dreams suddenly encountered in daylight.

Teeg reminded him of the names—barnacle and sea-lettuce and bearded moss. She steadied him while they scrambled along a creek bank to the meadow where the settlement was rising. Here the breathing of the surf was not so menacing. He felt more at ease, surrounded by crates, half-finished towers, sun-catching boxes, the hemispherical skeletons of domes. The sky, broken up by trees, was less daunting. With dusk coming on the air grew thick and intimate.

“Almost time for ingathering,” Teeg said. “Do you want to go straight inside?”

Horror brushed him, yet now that he was finally out of doors the vastness was intoxicating. “Can't we look around a little?”

Her look measured him. “Maybe you can stand a few minutes.”

She led him to a great circular swath of tilled ground. “This is where the outdoor garden will be.” Marie was at work there, feet planted far apart for balance, stooping over to pick out roots and stones. She was a bulky woman, powerful in her old age. Mud caked her fingers and wrists. There was a smear of mud on her bald pate. When she inclined her face to look at him, the creases converging like pathways around each eye, it was easy to believe she was a spirit-traveler.

“So how do you like the wilds?” said the old woman, extending her dirty palms toward him.

Phoenix gingerly pressed his palms against hers. “I'm still a little shaky,” he admitted.

“Good. Don't ever quit shaking. The world's an awesome place.” Marie bent to work again, nabbing a rock and tossing it onto a pile beside the garden plot.

Phoenix closed his eyes and sniffed. There was a musty smell, distinct from the odor of brine or hemlocks or rotting wood. Dirt? He remembered pale roots lacing down into the soil of the terrarium, the probe of white tendrils. Now I'm walking in the terrarium, he thought. Grass underfoot, creek slipping through its channel, feathery trees gathered on all sides. Yet he still sensed danger stealing along behind him, tramping silently in his footsteps.

And so Teeg led him around the site, through lengthening shadows. Two sides of the meadow were rimmed by spruce-covered hills, one sinuous boundary was formed by a blunt escarpment, with Salt Creek Falls tumbling from its crest and the creek undulating along its base. The fourth side of the meadow opened across Whale's Mouth Bay to the sea. Throughout the site, blueprints were materializing. Some projects were announced as yet only by jumbles of unopened crates; others, like the fish pools, by forms bolted together around freshly-poured liquistone. Still others were set up and functioning, like the water purifier with its coil of pipe, the composting toilet, the faceted solar oven. Stakes
driven into the turf marked where greenhouses and hydroponics tanks would go. Eighteen smaller domes, for meditation and privacy, were laid out in a necklace around the large central dome.

“Why so many?” Phoenix asked.

“For the other exiles who will come,” said Teeg.

“You really believe there'll be others?”

Her eyes scanned the meadow, then came to focus on him. “I hope so. If we're the only ones, the last ones, it all seems like a dead end.”

“But we have one another.”

“Ten of us. Soon to be nine, when Sol dies. And in a few years, perhaps, Marie. Or someone else might die sooner from poison or accident. No, no,” she insisted, “there have to be others. It has to go on.”

A sudden yearning came over him. “We could have children.”

She turned her back to him and said in a careful voice, “Arda is the only one of us who still carries her eggs.”

He looked at her stiff shoulders, feeling the shock of tenderness. “It doesn't matter.”

She swung angrily round and shouted, “It
matters
! Don't tell me being sterile doesn't matter!”

The depth of her feeling appalled him. He could only stare in silence as she walked away over the grass. Not yet inflated, the spare domes meant for future exiles lay in puckered folds at his feet.

In the thickening darkness he shuffled after Teeg. His fear of the wilds seemed selfish, an indulgence, when compared to the grief of her barrenness. As he trailed after her toward the dark verge of the meadow, he met other colonists, who had quit work for the day and were trooping domeward. Coyt stumped out of a half-roofed dome just as Phoenix caught up with Teeg. He was hunchbacked, with a badly twisted face, the chin far out of line from forehead and nose, as if before birth a mocking hand had yanked him out
of shape. His brain had saved him from exile to the mutant wards. He was a particle physicist, his head full of matrices, according to Teeg, but his hands were the wise-fingered hands of a tinker.

“What pains you?” he asked Teeg, looking at her with concern. When she did not answer he paused tactfully, then addressed Phoenix. “Now that you've had a look outside, firebird, can we ever lure you back in?” He gestured with a misshapen arm toward the luminous bubble of the dome.

“In a minute,” Phoenix replied.

Coyt stared round at the gloomy hills. “Mind the dark,” he said, then went stubbing away on his uneven legs.