Terrarium (26 page)

Zuni looked up quizzically from her apple planting. “Who did what?”

“My mother—drowned herself.”

Phoenix broke in, “What's the point in getting yourself worked up again?”

“Of course … your mother.” Zuni shifted from a kneeling posture until she sat with legs straight before her. She gave Teeg one of her appraising looks, the stare an architect would give to a roof truss. Her soil-blackened hands hovered in the air near her face, like those of a surgeon waiting for gloves. “All I know is what I read in the newsfax, plus some few hints from your father.”

“What hints?”

“Oh, he used to complain about how restless you were during those early years inside the Enclosure. ‘Why shouldn't she be restless?' I'd say. And he'd say, ‘If only her mother were erased, she'd forget about going outside.'”

“Erased?” Teeg repeated, horrified.

“He wasn't very delicate when it came to speaking of your mother.”

“So you think
he
sent the patrollers after her?”

“He might have.” Zuni hesitated. The knees of her
shimmersuit were dusky where she had massaged them with her apple-planting hands. Before her critical gaze, Teeg felt like a girder whose strength was being judged. At length Zuni said, “Or he might have dictated the story to the newsfax.”

Teeg blinked, stunned by the implication. “You mean …
made it up
?”

“It's possible. Your father was an inventive man.”

“She might not even be dead?”

Phoenix interrupted, “This is crazy! Seventeen years in the wilds—”

“Maybe she never drowned? She could have been living out here all this time, in Portland or wherever—and you never even
told
me?”

“Teeg, love,” Phoenix said hurriedly, “nobody can survive seventeen—”

“She could be
up
there,” Teeg said bitterly, “and even on repair missions I've never been able to force myself to go anywhere near Portland. It was too painful, the picture of how she died. Gliders swooping down and stunners blazing and her leaping into the river. I couldn't have stood seeing the place where it happened.” She looked sharply at the other woman. “But if it didn't happen?”

Zuni pursed her lips. “I've always wondered about that myself.”

“But you never thought of sharing your doubts with me until now.”

“Oh, I thought about it.” Zuni reached out a hand and Phoenix helped her to rise. Leaning on him, she flexed each knee experimentally. “I simply didn't want you to come charging out here all by yourself, looking for someone who probably isn't to be found. If you'd gone to Portland and found only ruins? What then? Suicide? No, you're too precious for me to risk destroying you with false hopes.”

“But now with Jonah Colony for a base, and somebody to go along—what's to keep me from going?”

“Absolute madness!” Phoenix interjected.

“What's to keep me?”

“Nothing I can see,” Zuni replied mildly. She carefully poured the remaining appleseeds into Phoenix's waiting palm. “Save me a few,” she told him, “so I can help you again tomorrow.”

“Of course, as many as you want.”

Tugging at his neck, Zuni lowered his forehead until it touched hers, and when she let him straighten again he smiled as though he had just glimpsed the heavenly fields. “And if our impulsive one over there,” she said, nodding at Teeg, “should take a notion to go hunting her mother, promise me you won't let her go alone.”

He nodded vigorously. Zuni limped away toward her chamber, brushing her fingers lightly over the seedlings as she went. Phoenix gazed after her with an expression more nearly resembling adoration than anything Teeg had ever seen on a human face. She had seen the look on dogs, long ago when people still kept them as pets, but never on people.

“I suppose you'd rather die than break your promise to her,” Teeg said.

“Promise?”

“About going with me.”

He turned despairing eyes on her. “Going where?”

“Why, to Portland.”

Phoenix
knew better than to hope Teeg would change her mind. Might as well hope Salt Creek Falls would change its direction and tumble uphill. No sooner get my feet under me here, he thought, than she's itching to go somewhere else. Portland, ye gods. What could be left of the place, twenty years after its dismantling? Moss-covered rubble and tons of plastic. Maybe it was all cinders, like Zuni's village, like the hundreds of blackened townsites he had viewed in satellite photos.

“I have a concern to make a trip,” Teeg announced in the stillness following that night's ingathering. “I am moved to seek my mother, to find out how she died. Or if she died.”

Everyone let that soak in for a while. The ingathering, Zuni's first, had been the clearest since the landing, so there was a good deal to absorb. Phoenix sat on his mat in a clairvoyant stupor. Each of Teeg's words, as she explained her mission, drifted before him like a tiny glass animal.

Surely they would say no, you can't go, it's a crack-brained scheme. But no sooner had Teeg finished speaking
than everyone was agreeing to her plan. “It would be good for you to wait until the crops are established,” Marie was saying. “And the ribs will take another four weeks to mend,” Hinta cautioned. “And of course you won't go alone,” said Jurgen.

“Teeg needs one companion,” Zuni pronounced in her mild, queenly way. Her milky gaze settled on Phoenix.

Me? He mouthed the question at her, finger shoved like a pistol against his chest. She nodded. “I'll go with her,” he said.

Everyone murmured quick assent to that, as if he were the logical one to go. They probably figured I'm the one they could most easily do without. No irreplaceable skills here, he conceded. Just two hands and an eye for patterns and a brain full of dreck from the city. Ought to paint them a cityscape on the roof up there, he thought, something to remember me by. Towers and pyramids of lights, pedbelts curving like the paths of comets, stately citizens in masks and gowns everywhere you look.

He finally understood that Zuni had devoted her life to building those cities, not because she hated wilderness, but because she loved it. She had wanted to put humanity in quarantine.

In a moment of boldness, after the others had left the meeting dome for bed, Phoenix asked her, “Do you believe they'll stay inside the Enclosure forever?”

“A few others might slip outside, as we have,” she replied. “Not enough to harm the wilds. But the future of the species, I'm afraid, is inside.”

“Afraid?” he repeated. “Isn't that what you wanted?”

“It's what I believe is necessary.” Netted and crosshatched with wrinkles, Zuni's face showed deep emotion. She turned away from the flare at the center of the chamber and looked up through the dome, which was still transparent in the mild evening sunlight. Following her gaze, Phoenix saw the humped green hills, the fretted crowns of fir trees,
the rouged sky over the ocean. “Necessary,” Zuni repeated softly, “but it is a terrible price, to lose the earth.”

Salt Creek Falls kept tumbling down, never up, and Teeg stuck by her determination to visit Portland. The weather continued rainy for days.

“Are we going by raft?” Phoenix inquired one morning, eyeing the perennial gray clouds through the porthole of their sleepchamber.

“By the end of May it will clear, you'll see,” Teeg assured him. “It always did when I was a kid.”

“When we were kids the climate was totally different. The polar ice caps were twice as big as now, and the rainforests hadn't been cleared. The equatorial air exchanges and the jet stream have been oscillating like crazy.”

“Thus spake the weatherman,” she intoned.

“Maybe I don't know anything else, but at least I know climate.”

“You wait.”

They waited, and of course she proved to be right. During the last week of May the vault of clouds cracked open, revealing an expanse of pure and radiant blue. Teeg was never one to crow over victories, so Phoenix merely pretended he had known all along the clear weather was coming.

Jubilant over the sunlight and the new access of electricity that it provided, Coyt began tinkering with the communications equipment. Marie was the only one who could decipher the notes that Sol had scribbled in his dying hours, so she sat on a packing crate and read aloud while Coyt, his humpback and withered arms slick with sweat, plugged instruments together. After three days of electronics and head-scratching they managed to coax a little static from the speakers. Since all messages within the Enclosure traveled through glass filaments or laser corridors, it was a delicate business tapping into the system without being detected.

Meanwhile the twigs in the nursery, a mountain's worth
of trees, were bursting out in tiny green flames. Endive and tomato and chard, each put up its telltale leaf from the black humus of the greenhouse. The fish doubled in size, doubled again, browsing in their broth of algae and larvae. The sunshine brought on blooms of algae, some twenty different kinds. Even without a microscope Arda could tell them apart, each by its shade of green, its smell, the feel of it between her fingers. Phoenix liked to watch her gliding among the fish tanks, a large-boned woman who moved with the sluggish grace of an undersea creature. He couldn't help thinking of her as the one fertile woman in the colony.

Now that the weather was fine most of the wildergoers spent the mornings outside, adjusting the windmill or tending the circular garden or gathering seaweed for the bio-digester. There was an unspoken agreement that everyone would keep laboring until Jonah Colony was securely established. As he grew accustomed to the chaotic landscape, Phoenix would often pause in his labors to study the meadow or forest. “Keep still,” Zuni told him, “and you can see it growing.” Back in Oregon City, Teeg had promised him the same thing about the terrarium. Watch until you disappear, she had instructed him, and then you will truly be part of the earth. It was one thing to surrender yourself to a boxful of dirt and vegetation inside Oregon City, however, and quite a scarier thing to surrender yourself to a whole planet.

Which direction was Portland, anyway? When he asked Teeg she waved her hand vaguely northward, toward some impossible-looking hills. And how far was it? “A few days,” Teeg replied. “Two hundred kilometers, I should think,” Zuni told him honestly. When his eyes widened at the news, the architect reassured him, “Most of that's on the Willamette River, riding the current until it empties into the Columbia at Portland.”

That information was soothing. Ride the current. Get into the little raft, the blue one for rivers, and coast in style to Portland. Nestled in the sleepsack that night, balancing on
the brink of sleep, he was suddenly jostled by a thought. “The Willamette flows north to Portland, right?”

Teeg replied groggily, “Rivers only flow in one direction as a general rule.”

He sat bolt upright. “Then how do we ride it back all those murderous hundreds of kilometers?”

“Find another river.”

Was she teasing? He pictured them stumbling from one river to another, always a little off course, until they wound up in Florida or Indiana or some other godforsaken place. “What if we pick the wrong river? Suppose it dumps us in the Gulf of Mexico?”

“We paddle around South America until we come to the Strait of Magellan,” she replied, sitting up, “then we shinny up a vine and travel back here through the tree-tops.” The sleepsack drooped around her waist. The skin of her throat and breasts shone creamy in the feeble glow of the flare. “Actually, we'll use airjets to shove us upstream. No problem.” She stretched luxuriously.

“I guess I kind of woke you up,” he apologized.

Teeg idly stretched the pale belt of skin around her ribcage where the tape used to be. Judging from the acrobatic intensity of her lovemaking lately, Phoenix assumed the ribs were fully healed. “Oh,” she yawned, “what's the middle of the night for, except sitting around and chewing the fat?”

“Chewing fat?” he repeated with disgust.

“It just means talking. An expression I learned from Zuni.”

“You learned a lot of stuff from Zuni. Half the things she tells me—about hermit crabs and Earth Mothers and whatnot—sound like things you've told me.”

“That's me—Zuni's little echo.”

“I can see how her voice would get inside your head and stay there.”

Teeg grew thoughtful. “I carry a lot of echoes from my mother, too.”

He was seized again by the thought of Portland, that impossible destination, as doomed and unreachable as ancient Troy. The air of the sleepchamber, thick with the breath of plants, felt clammy against his chest. Something moved with tiny clicking footsteps in the nearest tub of ferns. “What will we eat all that time?”

“Mushrooms and bearded moss.”

“Seriously.”

“Seriously,” she replied, taking his hand in hers, “my hero is once again a wee bit nervous about Teeg's adventures. But Teeg has delivered him safely to gameparks and oil tanks and Oregon beaches, has she not? And she now solemnly promises to deliver him to and from Portland in one piece.” With that she spread his cupped palm over her left breast.

He grinned in spite of himself, leaving the hand on her cool, cushiony flesh. Heart mountain. “I like it when you're serious.”

“Look how easy it will be.” Using his index finger as a pointer, she drew an imaginary map on her torso. “Here's Whale's Mouth Bay,” she said, touching his finger to the pit of her arm. “We climb the coastal ridge about here,” skimming up the curve of one breast, grazing the nipple, “then along Salt Creek into the Willamette Valley, like so,” down the slope between her breasts, “ride the river thisaway,” over stomach past naval, “wriggle through the brush,” into the curled thickets of her pubic hair, “until we arrive at our destination where the two rivers meet,” she concluded, leaving his alert hand at the joining of her thighs.