Terrarium (20 page)

Marie also passed them on her way to the dome, her head visible only as a paleness, a hole hammered in the dark. “Don't let him stay out too long, child,” she murmured.

“I know the danger,” Teeg replied. Each word was balanced, like water in a brim-filled cup. “We're just waiting for the sunset.”

But there was no sunset. Rainclouds shut down on the ocean, gray on darker gray. Darkness oozed from trees and stones and soil, weighting everything with longer shadows. The speed of the transition from day to night astonished him. In Oregon City there was no real night, only an artificial gloom when lamps dimmed for the hours of sleep, and even then one could look out the window to find the avenue as brightly lit as ever. Here the darkness seemed ponderous and final, heaving the mountains up like volcanoes of ink, swamping the meadow with liquid shadows. Darkness lapped menacingly at his feet.

“Let's go inside now,” he said. Could she hear the tremble?

“Come,” Teeg said gently, taking his hand.

He hastened along beside her over the treacherous ground. Lighted from within by flares, the dome swelled before them like a molten globe half-risen from the soil. As day cooled into evening, the fabric turned opaque, to
conserve heat inside. At the threshold he did as Teeg did, kicking off his boots, hanging his soiled clothes on a hook in the entrance chamber. He spun naked beside her in the air-shower, brush of elbow against rump, shoulder against her fiery hair. Then he dressed in a clean shimmersuit, pure white for the ingathering, and followed her through a corridor into the meeting room, which was a canopy of brightness at the center of the dome.

Ten cushions formed a circle around a glowing flare. Eight of them were already occupied. As Phoenix took his place, the water-filled cushion swaying beneath him, he noticed the slumped shoulders, the exhausted faces. For all their rugged training these people were showing the effects of the ocean passage and the day of hard labor. Sol was propped in an air-harness, eyes sunken and bloodshot, with a cloth pressed to his mouth. And Marie was no longer young, must have been near ninety, for she had worked as a graduate student on the earliest synthetic proteins, back before the turn of the century. Even the younger colonists, Indy and Josh and Coyt, gave an impression of utter fatigue.

Rocking slightly on his cushion, with eyes shut and breath measured, Phoenix waited for the stillness to wash over him. It was always hard, the sinking down into stillness. Tonight he found himself growing more tense with each passing minute. The meeting space kept rustling with breath and the stir of bodies. Stealing a glance, he saw that no one else had settled into the posture of deep trance. All round the circle fists clenched on knees, backs hunched wearily, jaws worked with unconscious speech. Next to him, Teeg's breath came raggedly. The air wheezed through his own pressured lungs in tatters. What was wrong? Was he some poison that had murdered their closeness? That must be it, his city spirit poisoning the ingathering. He was about to rise and go from them, go somewhere, even outside into the annihilating blackness, when Jurgen's huge head lifted.

“We'll have to work ourselves clear again before we can draw together,” Jurgen said. The struggle had left his great body trembling.

Phoenix stiffened on his cushion, waiting to be accused. A look from Teeg kept him silent. You do not understand these things, said her eyes.

“Let us eat,” Hinta pronounced in a tone of profound weariness.

The warm bowls passed from hand to hand, and the grainy loaves followed them around the circle. Marie fed Sol, tilting the bowl to his lips while he lay propped against the cushions. Everyone kept a solemn hush, eyes lowered over the food.

Phoenix sipped the broth without hunger, nibbled at the loaf. After a while Coyt stood in front of him with a kettle. Steam plumed from the spout, obscuring the mutant's skewed features. Phoenix held out his empty bowl, let Coyt pour some hot water in, then swished it around and drank it off. If only we could cleanse ourselves like that, he thought, purge all the residues of our old lives and start out clean.

The meal was followed by subdued talk concerning the next day's work. Phoenix agreed to help Indy run assays on air and water and dirt, so the colonists would know for sure which toxins to dose themselves against. “That will keep you safe inside,” Jurgen said bluntly.

Once the tasks were divvied up, people began retiring in pairs and triplets into the private cells surrounding the meditation chamber. Curious about the joining, Phoenix noted each departure. Hinta and Jurgen—that union he could have predicted, for the two always seemed to work in tandem, Hinta picking up vibrations as if she were a delicate antenna, and Jurgen hammering the world into a shape to fit her intuitions. Coyt, Josh, and Indy ambled away together, a surprising threesome. Marie and Arda were more of a surprise as they departed with arms round one another, the old woman and the young, intense Marie with the lovely,
sleep-walking host-mother, Arda. That left Sol, slumped against his cushion, and Teeg and himself.

“Ready?” Teeg said. When Phoenix glanced at Sol, she explained, “He asked to be left alone. He has a spirit-journey to make.”

Sol opened his eyes, two points of gleaming blackness, and they reminded Phoenix of the night outside. Death was coming for the old man, yet the eyes showed no fear. The head nodded faintly, agreeing to something, perhaps to what Teeg had said. She kissed the old man's forehead on her way to the sleep-chamber. Phoenix padded after her, conscious of Sol's calm dark gaze upon him.

Two sleepsacks, zippered together to make one great pouch, took up the entire floor of their private chamber. A flare hung from the ceiling, and twin portholes opened onto the night. Phoenix quickly shuttered the windows, but when Teeg reached up to douse the flare he grabbed her hand. “Not yet,” he pleaded, searching for a reason. “Let's … talk a minute.”

“You can't talk in the dark?”

“I want … to see you … see your eyes.” She stared at him unblinking, two pools of calm green. He could find no hint of accusation there, could read nothing but desire. “Maybe I caused it,” he stammered. “You know, ruined the ingathering.”

“So that's why the donkeyface,” she said with apparent relief. “I thought you were still brooding on my little fertility melodrama.”

He despaired of ever predicting the swing of her emotions. By comparison, weather prediction had been easy. “I didn't ruin it?” he asked hesitantly.

“Of course not. It fizzled this morning, and last night, too, when you were out there playing fishbait in the raft.”

“But doesn't the ingathering always work?”

“Usually, in the city. It was easy to dream up utopias
back there, easy to trust one another. Out here”—she collapsed in a boneless heap—“it's harder.”

“So what's blocking us?”

“It could be a million things. Maybe somebody's a spy, maybe somebody's jealous.”

“Spy?” He was alarmed by this talk. The spiritual magic was like electronics: if it quit working, what could you do?

“Or mistrust,” she added, “or chemmies hanging around in the body.”

“Could it be Sol's illness?”

She looked thoughtful. “Yes, it could be that. Or someone wanting a little power or hungering after a new mate.”

“But I thought you'd worked through all those things.”

“Nobody but saints ever worked through them once and for all. We just keep working.” Teeg drew down the zipper of her shimmersuit and shrugged free of the clinging fabric. Her nakedness was still so new it astonished him. He looked at her flat belly with acute awareness of the vacuum inside, the zero where there should have been the seeds of children. “Well,” she said, “are you going to hold up the roof like that all night?”

Then Phoenix realized he had backed away from her until his spine curved against the dome's outer wall. Through the flimsy hide he sensed the patter of rain. He undressed awkwardly, ashamed for her to see that all the while they had been talking, his cock had pursued its own designs.

“Will you get the light?” she asked. “My rib doesn't appreciate the stretching.”

He touched the flare and darkness slapped tight around him. Inside the sleepsack his fingers soon found the cool paired globes of her ass. She rolled silkily toward him and nipped his nose. “Now is the dark really so bad?” she whispered.

For the half hour of their lovemaking there was neither dark nor light, only the river hurling them down its
powerful current. Afterwards he was flung again onto shore, onto this Oregon beach with its encircling hills and ponderous surf and immense night.

“Tell me,” he whispered, “which is real—the crowded daylight, with its billion dazzling pieces, or that great black vacancy out there?”

7 March 2034
—
Portland/Whale's Mouth

On our way from Vancouver to the sanitation port, where Teeg is to be purified for admission to the Enclosure, we stop over in Portland. I wanted to see what nature had made of the place in the seven years since we finished the dismantling. The scoured hills are covered with fireweed, huckleberry, salal, red alder, and great hedge nettles, the same plants that always reclaim this land after forest fires and clear-cuts. Vines lace up through the brick shells of buildings. Grass buckles the pavement. My cache of tools has stayed dry in the old slate-roofed mansion in the park. Many of the wooden houses have caved in, but a few could be salvaged. Now that Vancouver is demolished and shipped north to become pieces of Alaska City, and my commission has expired, and my wilder-license is running out, I think I will begin work on a sanctuary here. Perhaps I could have something underway when Teeg comes back outside in two weeks.

In the afternoon she begs me to stop at Whale's Mouth Bay, so I land the glider on the beach. Teeg skips across the sand with a show of lightheartedness, but I suspect she feels as heavy as I do. She opens her arms wide to the surf, licks the spray from her lips, as if to swell herself up with the sea. All you can carry with you into Oregon City, I want to tell her, are the shadows of this place and other places you love, traces in the mind like tracks of particles through the fog of a
bubble chamber. Instead of speaking, however, I write these lines in my journal. When I finish, I will tuck the little notebook into her pack, let her carry along a piece of me, too, when she goes inside. Will she ever carry it back out?

As
she toiled up into the foothills Zuni kept turning back to locate the repair station, making sure of her direction. When she had last walked these slopes, sixty years before, they had just been clearcut. Bulldozers had gouged the shallow topsoil right down to bedrock. Between stumps the hillsides had been a hideous mire of oil cans and sawdust and bonewhite slash. Dirt which had taken millennia to accumulate sloughed off the mountains in a season of rain, burying the valleys below in mud. Even though brush had partially reclaimed the slopes since then, and conifers crept skyward from ravines, Zuni still recognized the devastated contours of the land.

Just beyond this stony ridge she would enter the watershed of Wolf Creek. Downstream, where the Wolf joined Salt Creek, she would come to the site of her childhood village. What could be left there but the rotting sawmill and a few shriveled cabins, perhaps an overgrown orchard? It was an old woman's foolishness to try going back. But I might as well get some advantage out of growing old, Zuni
thought, something other than sore knees. She had to pass that way anyhow, for Salt Creek would lead her, after one or at most two days of walking, to Whale's Mouth Bay. By that time over a week would have passed since Teeg and her crew had disappeared at sea. If they weren't at Whale's Mouth when she arrived? Can't waste energy fretting about that.

On that windswept ridge, where lichens were patiently rebuilding the soil, she sat down to let her body recover from the climb. Far below the station squatted, unnaturally white and spherical, like a ship that had just landed. The travel tube glistened away beyond sight to east and west. Presently a flicker of purple sparks announced a shuttle approaching, lights shot through the tube, past the station, past her, and away into the interior of America. Gregory had been right, the Enclosure was beautiful, with its globe-encircling filaments, its cities like stunning jewels. When the skycities were finished, in another twenty or thirty years, humanity could float free of Terra, free of the sun, free of every star except the one glowing in our foreheads. The mind was building itself a perfect house. Hadn't the earliest molecules done the same, weaving membranes about themselves, forming cells? However long Zuni lived, out here in the wilds, part of her would always ache for that jeweled perfection.

With a sigh she turned her back on the station and travel tube, and headed laboriously downhill toward the gray slither of Wolf Creek. Halfway down, while she rested in a clearing, a shadow glided past her feet and she flinched her gaze skyward, expecting a health patrol glider to descend on her. But the shape cruising overhead was that of a large bird, and Zuni was so astonished that she cried aloud, “Come down! Come, I won't harm you!”

The great wings beat languidly and the bird sailed away, magisterial, untouchable. Zuni stood there with heart knocking. But she saw no more of it, and so she picked her way downhill through ferns and brush, over fallen trees, wondering what the huge bird found to eat. Rats, surely, for
no toxins ever invented could discourage rats. And if rats, why not rabbits and moles, a few at least, perhaps even foxes, black-tailed deer, elk? The mountain streams would most likely still breed fish, which meant black bears might have survived. As she hobbled toward Wolf Creek, parting the breast-high ferns, she filled the woods with dragonflies and scarlet tanagers, bobcats and loons, mountain lions and mosquitoes, all the creatures she had known from childhood. And why not wolves along Wolf Creek?