Terrarium (21 page)

But she reached the stream through a tangle of blackberries and maple saplings without spying another beast. Swollen with spring rains and snowmelt from the mountains, the creek surged ponderously seaward. At least this much had not changed. It smelled the same, sounded the same. She remembered this springtime urgency of water, remembered how the uprooted trees used to hurtle past her down the current while she searched the banks with her father for mushrooms.

“Wolf Creek,” she said rapturously, as if by naming it she would become again the mushroom-picking child.

She knelt down and lowered her face to within a few centimeters of the rushing water. The cool breath against her cheeks had arrived here from frozen mountains. The taste of creekwater, even sucked through a detox filter, was so familiar it made her cry. There was the taste of rock in that water, and lichen, wood, and earth. The flavor of canyons and pine mountains was dissolved in it. She knew it was absurd, after so many decades of masquerading as the inventor of cities, to kneel here now on a creekbank weeping over the taste of water. It was as if the flavor of the entire abused and abandoned planet had burst suddenly into her mouth after long fasting.

Where ferns grew thickest she unfurled her sleepsack, which quickly swelled with air until it assumed a mummy-shape. She wriggled inside and the inflated walls snugged tight against her. The pungent smell of broken ferns and the lingering taste of melted snow made her eyes water.
Listening to the creek distracted her for a while from the pain in her joints and muscles. When she could no longer ignore the ache she thought back over the day—the apartment treating her as a stranger, the cybernet answering zeroes to all her questions, the costumed monstrosity gazing back at her from the mirror, the last ride across Oregon City, the cautious locks of the repair station, the overwhelming green dazzle of the wilds.

What tale would they finally believe about her, back there? That she had crawled into a vaporizer? Shipped out to the asteroid colonies? Allowed her brain to be transplanted into a cyberfield? Changed her identity so she might hide among them under a new name?

It pleased her, lying there snug in a sleepsack beside Wolf Creek, to imagine them spinning modest little legends about her. The pleasure could not keep her body's pain at bay, however. Even in Oregon City she had rarely used chemmies. Out here, it was unthinkable. Instead she chewed a foodstrip slowly, grimacing at the harsh synthetic taste, waiting for sleep.

She woke into the gray light of predawn. Stars might have pricked through the gloom overhead, but her bleary eyes would never be able to make them out. She was reluctant to try moving, for fear some of her bones or sinews would refuse to obey. In that stillness, against the background purr of the creek, she heard a few hesitant twitters, as if a bird were testing the air. Then came delicate, flutelike notes. She had not heard that song for sixty years, but the bird's name sprang to mind. Varied thrush. Orange breast and black eye-stripes. After a spell the raucous cry of a jay interrupted the fragile melody, and suddenly the boughs overhanging the creek were filled with the chatter and whistle of many birds.

Zuni lay gratefully listening as the sky grew light. Wind sluiced through the blue-green branches, water sluiced through the rocky channel of the creek, blood sluiced through her veins. She felt intensely happy. But the moment
passed over her like a breath and was gone, as her legs ached and her stomach grumbled and memory recalled that she might die out here alone. Was there even a settlement to find?

At least there was a remedy for hunger. Those infernal foodsticks. She reached out to dig some from the beltpack, but her hand found nothing except ferns. Thinking she had perhaps rolled about in her sleep, she sat up and peered around. There were her boots, tongues hanging out as if from fatigue, and there was her jacket, but no pack. She scrambled out of the sleep-sack, crawled anxiously over the bitter-smelling ferns, calculating how long she could live without food, filters, or anti-toxins.

Just as she was trying to imagine how death would come—slowly by thirst and hunger or quickly by poison—her outstretched fingers touched a strap. She tugged, and the beltpack emerged from under a heap of brush. Whatever had dragged it away in the night and hidden it there had slashed a hole through the fabric. Checking quickly, she found the filters and medicines and tools safe inside. Several of the foodstrips in their foil wrappers had been tentatively gnawed—the teethmarks were as sharp as compass points—but none had been eaten.

She rocked on her heels and shook with laughter. Wise beast, to be wary of city food! Raccoon, she guessed, or weasel. There might not be many beasts left, but one had managed to sniff her out in the enormous night. Were these the last of the old beasts, or the first of the new ones? The doomed survivors that would soon perish, or the genetically resistant ones that would eventually fill the forests?

So she would not die just yet. The beltpack was soon mended with glue, the sleepsack was deflated and tucked away. Only when she bent over the creek and splashed her face with the frigid water did she recollect her stubborn joints and muscles. In her excitement over the missing pack she had tricked them into motion. Now that she was up and packed and ready for the journey, her old bones would damn
well cooperate. The face wavering up at her from the water was a little hollow about the eyes and cheeks, red as a poppy from the unfamiliar sun, but still merry.

Heading downstream, she chewed a foodstrip thoughtfully, her tongue playing over the beast's finicky toothmarks. The going was difficult. In most places the vegetation crowded down to the water, so she had to force her way through. Elsewhere the bank rose in a sheer cliff and she had either to pick her way precariously over stones in the creek, or else climb the steep ridge. Tributary streams cut through the bank, often plunging over waterfalls into Wolf Creek. When she came to one of these she had to follow it upstream until the water was narrow or shallow enough for wading.

Twice before sunset she stumbled onto game trails and followed them so long as they kept within earshot of the creek. She only let herself believe that deer had gouged these trails when she saw the sharp cloven hoofprints in a muddy stretch. She had to squat down and actually place her fingers in the tracks to make sure, because to her dim eyes the hoofprints might have been flakes of bark. For the rest of the afternoon she toiled along with the image of deer inside her.

With the pack tucked securely beneath her head, and the awning pulled over her sleepsack to keep off rain, Zuni abandoned herself for a second night to the growl of Wolf Creek.

In the morning she discovered that one of her boots had been chewed about the toe. Her own stockinged toes showed through when she put it on, and she gazed down at them with dismay.

She scolded the indifferent woods. “Do you start on my legs tonight, you impertinent beasts?”

Nothing actually bit her legs that following night, but she woke in blackness to find something nosing at her sleep-sack. A wolf after all? Inside the inflated walls it sounded as if a child were clumsily pawing at a drum. When Zuni
reached out, flare in hand, to see what manner of beast it was, all she glimpsed was the humped retreating back of something large and furry and quick. Two green eyes swung momentarily round to catch the flare-light, then disappeared. She felt as she had felt once, as a child, upon discovering that a bear watched her from a thicket of willows—not threatened, but observed, measured, the way any intruder is examined by those who belong in a place.

“Come let me have a look at you!” she called foolishly into the blackness.

By noon of the third day she could sense the nearness of home. Wolf Creek was narrowing down between rock cliffs for its ten-meter leap into Salt Creek. The gullies and bogs atop the cliffs were so familiar that she thought to look for mushrooms, and there they were, in the leafmold and rotted logs, pale mushrooms as thin as fingers, mottled brown ones larger than two clasped hands, creamy fists. A pity she dare not eat them. Even swallowed with detox they were likely to make her sick, for mushrooms, like whales, had a way of concentrating poisons. Her father used to amaze city visitors by popping unfamiliar mushrooms into his mouth. “I know the few lethal ones,” he had explained to her, “so everything else I can trust.” From this man who had left home each morning with a chainsaw tilted over his shoulder, she had learned to trust the earth.

Her excitement mounted along with the rising tempo of the current. A dozen meters ahead the creek vanished over a ledge, leaving only a fume of mist in the air, as if it darted into a fourth dimension. Zuni made her way cautiously over the slick rocks, relishing the spray that soaked her face and hair, until she neared the falls. On hands and knees she crept to the very brim and peered down through the crash of water at the meadow. A gust of wind blew the mist aside, exposing the valley, and at last she was able to see—nothing. Where the village had been there was only a smear of black, no hint of decaying houses, no green ferment of returning forest. Perhaps her miserable eyes were playing
tricks on her. She waited for another clearing of the mist, and then another, but each time the valley appeared as a blackened scar.

Trembling, she lowered herself down the cliff trail, careful to keep her back toward the charred vacancy that had been her home. The climb down the rockface beside the falls had seemed a lark to her as a child, when muscles were young and death was an impossibility; now she picked her way down over the slick ledges with breath trapped in her throat. Her flannel shirt and trousers were soon wet through from the spray. Hair fell in damp white strands over her eyes. Purple irises bloomed on these ledges, their delicate petals furling outward like tiny fountains, and every niche was awash in the yellow blooms of gorse. Zuni kept her eyes on these vibrant flowers, while the desolate valley yawned below.

At last she reached the base of the cliff and faced around to survey the landscape of her childhood. The falls boomed to her right. To her left Salt Creek curled away toward the sea. All before her was a desert of rock and blackened soil, across the valley floor and as far as she could see upstream or down.

She slumped against the cliff and shut her eyes. Orchards had carpeted the near bank, and vineyards, and tidy gardens which the lumberjacks used to fuss over in the evenings. The sawmill had loomed on the far bank, and around it the village had sprawled with crooked alleys and wooden houses. While she kept her eyes closed it was all as plain as a blueprint, but once she opened them again there was only this charred landscape. She might have been gazing from the porthole of a colony on the moon. On earth she had seen nothing so barren except the lava fields of eastern Oregon.

She scuffed her boot against the rock. It was very like lava, bubbled and swirled and intricately fissured, as if something had melted the valley. She remembered being told how the health patrollers went about in their laser ships sterilizing the old gathering places, flushing the last wilder-goers
from the forests. So this was what a sterilized town looked like. She picked up a chunk of the bubble stone and hurled it furiously over the water. It clattered against rock on the far side. There was no use crossing, only to see more cinders. In any case the bridge was gone. The HP had done a thorough job. No least sprig of green showed anywhere in the ashen valley.

Oblivious, Salt Creek purled along seaward past her feet. She was almost afraid to follow the stream to Whale's Mouth Bay, for if she did not find Teeg and the others there she would not have the strength or desire to search much farther. She wanted to sag down here and quit the pointless struggling. She had escaped into the wilds, had found her way home. Let this charred desolation be the end of it.

Yet the creek surged on, abiding and momentary. It had not changed in all her years of knowing; yet it changed constantly. You never quit, old one, the creek was saying. You live in this moment, and this moment only. After a while the sound of it lifted her up and forced her to hobble along the bank, over fissured stone. As if blind, she stumbled on for most of an hour, left hand fumbling against the cliff, through pain, past what she imagined must be the outer limits of exhaustion, until the lavalike stone gave way to cinders, the cinders to moss. She fell down there in her wet clothes and slept, with the valley of ashes gaping behind her.

During
most of that first week after the landing at Whale's Mouth Bay it rained. The meadow squished underfoot as the colonists went about erecting domes and laying pathways of glass. The needles of spruce and hemlock, glistening with rain, looked like fine green jets squirting from branches. Grass stems bent under the weight of water. Marie had to cover her garden with polyfilm to keep it from turning into a quagmire. Coyt grumbled because unbroken clouds reduced the power from his photoelectric cells. There was methane enough from the seaweed digester, however, and enough hydrogen from the vats of blue-green algae to fuel stoves and generators, so the colony enjoyed electricity and warm food.

Rain pipped the surface of the fishpools, which were stocked with fingerlings of bluegill and rainbow trout and bullhead catfish, all carefully smuggled from Oregon City. The smuggled crayfish had died in their barrels, so Josh and Jurgen went off hunting some wild ones. Rain pattered on the greenhouse, where Phoenix helped sow vegetables.
Teeg was delighted to see him poking his fingers into the sterilized dirt.

Rain drumming overhead soothed Teeg's heart at the nightly ingatherings. The still point, the luminous center where they all fused with the spirit, kept eluding them. “We must be patient,” Marie counseled. “This is our time of wandering.” But how long could they wander before losing touch with one another? Each night Teeg studied the haggard faces, wondering who had muddied the mystical waters. Could one of them really be a spy, willing to betray the colony? Or was it merely anger, jealousy, even Sol's dying?