Terrarium (2 page)

He wondered how long he could traipse around like this before the health patrollers carted him away for a little hormonal therapy. Perhaps he should even turn himself in for a checkup. Judging by all he had been taught concerning health, he was a profoundly sick man. Yet he did not
feel
sick. He felt exhilarated.

At work the satellite photos looked more than ever like a stew of lips and breasts and trailing hair. His supervisor made him rewrite a third of the eco-warnings and advised him to cut back on the narco. But Phoenix was not applying narco or any other balm to his inflamed heart. Nothing half so vivid as this love-ache had ever seized him before, and he was in no hurry to escape the exquisite pain.

Days off work he spent vainly trying to discover some timetable in the barefooted woman's exercise. But he had no more luck than the ancients had at predicting sunspots. When she did loom into sight, he kept indoors, not yet ready to meet her again. Every night he paced with naked feet around the perimeter of his room. Five steps and then turn, five steps and then turn: the blisters multiplied on his soles. After two weeks of this, questioning his sanity at each step, he could walk for an hour without panting, and his feet began to leather over.

Training on the pedbelt was more risky, only possible at two or three in the morning, when anyone else traveling through the corridor would most likely be as eccentric as he. Soon he was able, with very little puffing, to stay abreast of his room for half an hour. Struggling to defeat the conveyor's ceaseless motion, he did not feel like a gyroscope—he felt like a lunatic.

On one of his three
A.M.
training sessions he was striding along, engrossed in the study of his feet, when her voice broke over him:

“So you tried it.”

Looking up, he met the achingly familiar stare. “Yes,” he mumbled. “I kind of wondered what it was like.”

“And what do you think of it?”

“Oh, it's interesting.” Witlessly he repeated, “Very interesting.”

For several seconds the two of them paced side by side, two lunatics out for a stroll. From the corner of his eye Phoenix enjoyed the woman's profile, her skin showing more nakedly than ever through the paint, her legs kicking against the loose fall of gown. Elegant concentration of energy. The eyewall at the center of a typhoon, that's what she was.

“Good for the heart and lungs,” she said.

“I suppose so,” he agreed, shocked by her language.

“And legs.”

He loosed the sexual word without thinking: “Legs.”

The woman calmly continued, as if she were in stage seven of the mating ritual. “My name is Teeg Passio.”

“Passio?”

“Something wrong with that?”

“It's just a famous name, that's all.”

“Famous for the wrong reasons,” she said. “My father …” she began in a tone of bitterness. There was a spell of silence, broken only by the pad of feet, the rumble of the conveyor. “And don't you have a name?” she eventually asked.

Phoenix could sense the expectant twist of her body as she waited for a response. “Name? Sure, sure. My name's Marshall.”

“Only Marshall?”

“The back one's Marshall. Front one's Phoenix. Phoenix Marshall.”

Her green eyes seemed to be measuring him. “You're not offended? About exchanging names?”

“No, no, certainly not,” Phoenix boasted, with a show of bluffness. “I don't really accept all the … well, you know, the formalities.”

“Stupid waste of time, aren't they?”

“Stupid, yes indeed.”

“All this business about mating rituals,” she proclaimed, dismissing his lifelong code of behavior with a sweaty stroke of her greensleeved arms, “and when you can exchange names, and when you can look in another person's eyes, and when your little fingers can touch. Ye gods. Idiocy.”

“Idiocy,” he mumbled, swept up by those passionate gestures.

“It's like a web, all these rules. Every time you want to open your mouth or lift your hand there's a rule binding you.”

Phoenix heard himself agreeing earnestly. “Like a web, exactly. Everywhere you go you get tangled in it.”

“Cut loose, is what I say.”

“Cut … loose?” He stilled his tongue, alarmed by the turmoil her talk was stirring in him. He could feel the sweat trickling down his face, streaking the paint, dampening the collar of his moodgown.

“How often do you walk?” she asked.

“Oh, every day. Sometimes twice a day.”

“Any special time?”

His eye was caught by the surge of flame-colored hair around the edges of her hood. His fingers twitched. “Morning,” he said, then quickly added, “or night, just about any time. My schedule's flexible. And you?”

Her smile seemed to raise the temperature in the corridor several degrees. “I don't keep a schedule. But maybe we could set a time, meet for a walk. That is, if you—”

“I would. Yes, very much,” he said with a rush.

“I know places we can walk without these jackass conveyors getting in the way.”

Jackass? he wondered. But all he said was, “Anywhere's fine.”

“How about Shasta Gamepark at 1600 tomorrow? South gate?”

“Sure,” he agreed, reduced to monosyllables. “Fine.”

“Peace.” With palm lifted, she began to drift away on the pedbelt.

“Wait,” he begged. In a panic he thought for ways to keep her, fearing that such an improbable creature might not survive until tomorrow. “Do you live in Portland Complex?”

She jerked a thumb domeward. “Seven floors above you.” Walking again, she kept her place on the belt. Arched above her face the hair formed a red border of turbulence.

“And what brings you through here for exercise?” he asked.

“Looking for a walking partner.”

“Oh.” Again he scrambled for words. Her bluntness dried up his throat. “And why do you walk?”

The smile again, crippling all his faculties. “I'm in training,” she said.

“Training?”

“For going away.”

11 October 2026
—
Astoria, Oregon

Teeg and I watch an acorn woodpecker hammer a hole in the trunk of a dead fir, red topknot catching the sun. When the opening is just the right size and roundness, the bird taps an acorn snugly into it. Squirrels cannot dig it out. But the woodpecker can, and will, some February day when the bug population is running low.

Teeg's five-year-old eyes open wide in wonder. “Is it killing the tree, Mommy?” she wants to know.

“The tree is already dead,” I tell her, “poisoned from the things people sprayed, and the woodpecker is using it for a cupboard.”

And all the open cities are becoming husks, abandoned shells, as people flood into the domes. At least we can salvage the steel and copper, the aluminum and chrome, the bits of Terra tied up in the old places. The dismantling of Portland is nearly complete. Sad, plucked city. Brick streets and wooden houses are all that remain. I mourn by bringing Teeg out here to Astoria for a weekend, where we admire the acorn woodpecker. Astoria, thank God, will not be recycled, for it is built mostly of wood. The salt and wind and birds can have it. We have seen fourteen birds since yesterday morning, six of them able to fly.

Unlikely
as it seemed to Phoenix, Teeg did meet him at the gamepark. Afraid she might not recognize him in the crowd of merrymakers and chemmieguzzlers, he wore the same mask and costume as yesterday. He would have dangled a sign about his neck, if need be, to attract her attention. Who cared a fig about the stares? He stood on a bench to make himself a landmark, high above the passing wigs, and presently he spied her slipping toward him through the crush of people. Facepaint instead of mask, baggy robe kicking at her feet, hood tied crookedly about her head. Thrown-together look, as usual.

“So you came,” she announced, with what seemed like mild surprise. She drew him away from the racket of electronic warfare, past the simulators where people lined up to pretend they were piloting rockets or submarines, past the booths where ecstatic customers twitched upon eros couches.

“Zoo time,” Teeg muttered, leading him on. She said something else, too, but Phoenix could only make out her
bitter tone and not the words, for two opponents were haranguing one another on a nearby shouting stage.

Why so angry? he wondered, following her along the pedbelt. As the conveyor banked around a curve, Teeg swayed to one side and her hip swelled against the fall of her robe. She seemed unconscious of her body. How could he begin mating ritual with a woman who ignored the simplest sexual rules? She might rip off his mask and lick his chin in front of everybody. Who could predict?

Soon they reached a deserted corner of the park, where the pedbelts gave out. Antiquated amusement booths, with shattered windows and dangling wires, were heaped on both sides of a disused footpath.

“This is left from a skategame kids used to play,” Teeg explained, patting the scuffed walkway with her foot, “back when kids used their legs.”

Legs again. Apparently she would say anything. Blinking at the body-word, Phoenix answered, “I remember, you hunched down like this,” and he assumed the bent-knee posture he had perfected as a boy on skates. Looking up, he found amusement in her green eyes, and quickly looked away.

“So you were a skater?” she said, and then she was a squall of questions. What work do you do? Who are your parents? Any children? Ever go outside? How do you like living in Oregon City?

And so he told her about his training in geo-meteorology, his job studying satellite images (“Because I have a good eye for patterns,” he boasted shamelessly, “something the cybers still can't match”), and he told her about his mother's death in the 2027 fusion implosion at Texas City, about living with his father who tested chemmies in New Mexico City, then about his father's bad trip and the eleven-year drug coma that followed. He mentioned his twenty-one years of schooling, the move to Oregon City a year ago after his father's death, the days at work and nights at the gamepark. His sperm was duly banked, he told her, but so
far as he knew, none had been used. Eugenics probably thought one of him was enough. He admitted that he had begun the mating ritual with a bevy of women, but had rarely pursued it to—he paused, reticent—consummation. He confessed that he knew all about weather but had never stuck so much as his nose outside the Enclosure, confessed, in a voice that surprised him with its urgency, how restless he felt, how lonely, how trapped.

All the while Teeg was nodding yes, yes, that is truly how it is, and between questions she was telling about herself: She had spent most of her childhood in the wilds, traveling about the northwest corner of the continent with her mother, who had been in charge of dismantling Portland, Vancouver, Anchorage, lesser places. Her father was one of the architects of the Enclosure, a monster of rationality.

Teeg's last name finally plunked into a slot in his brain. “Passio?
Gregory
Passio? You're his
daughter
?”

“Yes,” she replied. “That's the particular monster. You've heard of him?”

“He was one of my childhood heroes. He and Zuni Franklin. They made me want to be an architect.”

“Then why're you a weatherman?”

“I got hung up on third-order topology. When the cyber simulated my buildings, they kept falling down.”

“You don't need math for meteorology?” Teeg asked wryly.

“Sure, but not so much, not where I come in. After the cybers spit out the weather maps, I see the patterns. Gestalts. Kind of a right-brain thing.”

She looked at him skeptically, the kind of look you would give a food-stick that seemed off-color. What did she think of him? Blue-wigged noodle-brain, or stage-seven lover? Impossible to tell. Talking with her was like tracking a typhoon—you never knew which direction she would take.

“Gregory Passio was my father all right. And not much of one. You could have picked a better hero.” She paused. Her facepaint was so thin he could actually follow her
turbulent emotions with a sidelong glance. “Don't mix him up with Zuni Franklin. She's a different fish altogether.”

“Fish?” he said.

“You know, swimmy-swimmy?” She laced her fingers together and wriggled her joined palms in the air before her. Evidently the confusion still flickered in his eyes, for she explained: “I just meant that Zuni Franklin and my father both helped design the Enclosure, but for very different reasons. She's no monster.”

“I don't understand.”

“You couldn't,” she said bluntly, and she went on to tell Phoenix how her father had made her come inside when she turned thirteen, legal breeding age. And then he had drowned while up supervising the construction of Alaska City. Now she worked mostly outside the dome, back on land, as a troubleshooter repairing tubes and transmitters and auto-machinery. Her ova had been used for eighteen—or perhaps twenty, she forgot—children, all of them grown inside other women. She had been mated three times, she told him, never happily, never long, twice with men and once with a woman.

“Eighteen offspring?” Phoenix whistled. In a steady-state population that was an astonishing number. Worthy of Eve in the old garden.

“That's what comes of having bright parents.”

“Is your mother still outside?”

Teeg smiled crookedly. “I guess you could say that.”

“Do you see her when you go on repair missions?”

“They killed her.”

“Who killed her? What? The wilds?”

Instead of answering, Teeg swung away down the path, back toward the clanging heart of the gamepark.

A few days later they spent an afternoon at the disney, studying the mechanical beasts. “Timber wolf,” a sign proclaimed, and there stood a shaggy creature with jaws agape and ribs protruding. Awful, Phoenix thought, as Teeg
pressed the button and the wolf's jaws clapped open and shut, howling. But Teeg seemed to take some bitter delight in making the beasts perform. She led him on from “griffin” to “pterodactyl” to “African elephant,” pressing every button, her mouth pursed and her eyes hard.