Terrarium (3 page)

On other days they hiked around the hydroponics district, along hydrogen pipelines marked
EXPLOSIVE
, down aisles between huge whirling energy-storage wheels. Teeg's ID opened gateway after gateway. With each expedition she led him deeper into the mechanical bowels of the city, down several hundred meters below sea level where minerals and food and power were extracted from the ocean. Was it because of her famous father, Phoenix wondered, that Security allowed her to venture down here among these life-and-death machines? Red-eyed surveillance cameras greeted them at every turn. The few people they met in those lower reaches—technicians intent upon some repair or adjustment—pretended not to see them.

Phoenix discovered parts of Oregon City he had only known about from video. In his increasingly anarchic talks with Teeg, he discovered parts of himself he had never known about at all. Signals kept arriving from forgotten regions of his body, aches at first, then pleasures, as if nerve and muscle were conspiring with heart to make him love her.

Some two weeks after their first walk they descended one afternoon to the bottom-most level of the city, a labyrinth of tunnels reeking with brine. Teeg scooped up a handful of ocean water from one of the desalinization tanks, and said, “You forget the whole city is afloat, until you come down here.”

Phoenix suddenly felt queasy, vulnerable, the way he felt when something reminded him of death. Yes, the ocean was always there, ready to burst the human bubbles that floated upon it. He gazed around at the mammoth pumps and extractors, listened to the slosh of water. Afloat. He recalled how Oregon City appeared in the satellite monitors: the
central dome, and clustered around it the ring of smaller domes for manufacturing and aquaculture, for cancer wards and corpse freezers and mutant pens, then radiating outward from each dome the pipelines and tubes that linked the city to the rest of the human system. Viewed from the sky, set off against the vast curve of ocean, how fragile it all seemed.

He was relieved when they ascended to the workaday level of Oregon City again, up where the dome shut out sky and ocean, where the honeycombed buildings and pedbelts and shuttles reassured him of the power of mind over matter. Up here, nature did not exist. People everywhere, and the shiny things people had made.

“Do you work in the wilds all by yourself?” he asked her.

“Depends on the job. Sometimes on my own, sometimes with my crew.”

“Did your crew mostly grow up outside the way you did?”

“Mostly. But a few of them were insiders, then got fed up. …” Her voice broke off sharply.

Phoenix tried to get her to say more about the crew. What would possess someone to work in the wilds? How could they stand the chaos, the filth? But she would not answer, so he let it go.

After a while he said, “That pass of yours seems to get you anywhere.”

“I'm a master troubleshooter. That lets me work on any part of the human system, inside or out.”

“How did you wangle that?”

“Zuni Franklin arranged it.”

“You
knew
her?”

“Know her,” Teeg corrected.

Phoenix was awed. It was like knowing Michelangelo, Buckminster Fuller, Alexi Sventov. “How did you ever get to meet her?”

“After my father made me come inside, he dumped me
with her every time he went off on a job. Thought she'd teach me to love the Enclosure, forget my mother.”

“I take it she didn't succeed.”

Teeg laughed, a quick laugh that always punched him in the wind. “No, she didn't teach me that at all.”

The shadow of a glider flowed over them, and Phoenix glanced up at the shiny belly of the machine. No walkers up there. No walkers anywhere in the city, so far as he could see, only the streams of cloaked bodies riding pedbelts or coasting in the aluminum gliders overhead.

“She was a powerful woman,” Teeg added.

“I'll say. She conceived this entire city.”

“I wasn't thinking of Zuni Franklin,” Teeg said impatiently. “I was thinking of my mother.”

She stepped onto a pedbelt and he followed close behind. Other passengers shouldered aside, and turned their masked faces away. Probably thinking: here were two escapees from quarantine. Mutants on parole. Phoenix tried to recall his own mother. But he had only been four when she died, and all he could remember was a square face with stray hairs fluttering around it. Implosion. One of the last attempts at sustaining fusion before they gave up the idea, and she had been erased. Poof. His father, whom he had gone to observe occasionally during the eleven-year drug coma, was hump-nosed and pasty-skinned in his memory, a thing with sagging mouth waiting forever to die.

After several moments Phoenix realized that he and Teeg were drifting along, each one lost in a separate reverie, and he wanted to connect with her again. So he stepped off the pedbelt at Marconi Plaza and gently tugged at her sleeve so she would follow.

The plaza was deserted, except for a few children in power-prams. The fountain at the center, where Teeg and Phoenix stood for a moment to watch the play of water, smelled of brine. Shreds of money, torn up and flung there by some mumbler of wishes, jostled on the surface.

“How have you kept your pass, thinking the way you do?” he asked her.

“They don't know how I think. I do my work well. I've never been caught breaking any machinery or any rules.”

“But doesn't Security think it's a risk, letting you go outside?”

“Because I grew up in the wilds?” Teeg gave him one of her unsettling green stares. The paint on her cheeks was cracked and peeling. Paleness underneath. Her actual skin. “They don't have much choice,” she said. “Not many people will take the work. Too messy out there, too dangerous. And the few of us who do go out—except the suicidal maniacs—wouldn't mess with the system. We know enough about the defenses to avoid thoughts of sabotage. The most I could do is just stay out there after some job, never come back. Outside, I'm no threat. It's inside the city I'm a threat.”

Phoenix felt her eyes searching him for some response, and he pretended to be absorbed in watching his feet, his long-boned and brazenly naked feet, scuffling along beside hers. She had him so scrambled that he had given up even trying to calculate which mating rules they were breaking. Just don't get arrested for indecency, he thought, and otherwise ride the emotional rocket. “Do you think about that sometimes,” he asked, “staying outside?”

“Sometimes,” she confessed; then after a few more paces she added, “Often. All the time, in fact. In my twenty-nine years I've only lived in the city nine, maybe ten of them. Here's the place that seems alien to me,” she said, sweeping both arms overhead, trailing the gauzy sleeves like wings, “and outside is home. Everytime, coming back inside, it's torture.”

One moment the dome seemed to Phoenix impossibly high, higher than the sky ever could have been, and the next moment it seemed a brutal weight pressing down on him.

“It's like crawling back inside a bottle,” she continued, “a huge sterilized bottle for culturing people.”

A feeling of claustrophobia rose in his throat, nearly choking him, like the sour taste of food long-since swallowed and forgotten. He stopped walking, halfway across Marconi Plaza, and the city snapped tight around him. Apartment towers glistened feverishly with the trapped energy of several million lives; the pedbelts and glider-paths sliced the airspace into hectic curves; offices repeated the same honeycomb pattern, like geometrical stuttering, as far as the eye could see. The sudden pressure of the city on his mind was so awful that he did not notice for several seconds the lighter pressure of Teeg's hand on his arm.

“You never felt that before?” she asked gently.

“I guess I did,” he answered. “I guess I've always felt that. I just never admitted it before. The frenzy—it's always there, like death, waiting. But I fight it down, hide it away.”

“Make things tidy,” she suggested.

“Exactly. Tidy, tidy. I put everything in order. And then at night I lie in bed and a crevice opens in my heart, and the dread creeps out, a fog, engulfing me. Death, I suppose. Nothingness.” He stopped abruptly, ashamed of his passion.

“Yes?” she urged.

But he was too shaken to say anything more.

Without planning their next walk, they parted in Marconi Plaza. Phoenix rode the belt home, frightened by Teeg, by the crevasses she opened inside him. For the first time in weeks he was aware of the alarmed glances his helter-skelter costume and his bare feet provoked. Surely people would think he was crazed, afloat on a tide of chemmies, reverting to beasthood. Perhaps they would even notify the health patrollers. Rehabilitate him. But he could rehabilitate himself, could fight down the chaos that Teeg had loosed in him.

He didn't care if she was an alluring animal. He didn't care if she really was the daughter of Gregory Passio, or the
intimate of Zuni Franklin. She would quickly destroy him if he didn't break free.

Safely back in his room, he scrubbed himself, dressed in his most fashionable moodgown and wig, then applied a fresh mask, painting very carefully, copying the face of a dance champion whose poster hung beside the dressing mirror.

He put everything in the apartment in its place. He ran the sanitizer. He gulped a double dose of balancers.

All that day and the next he rode through Oregon City, visiting eros parlors, attending rhetoric matches, watching electro-ball, clinging to his old entertainments. He played four-dimensional chess with Lon, designed murals with Chie, even resumed lackadaisical mating rituals with two women who had nearly forgotten him. With this one I had progressed to the touching of hands, he learned from the old mating charts, and with that one I had exchanged a five-second stare. But even while he tried to revive the passion that had once driven him into this prolonged sexual dance, he kept feeling the print of Teeg's hand on his arm, kept hearing the sound of her voice, so confident in its anarchism.

After three days of this charade, he gave up and called Teeg. She gazed directly into the vidphone, her face unpainted, her mouth a grim slash.

“I've been sick,” he lied to her, turning away in confusion from her exposed face. “Chemistry's been out of kilter.”

“Chemistry.” She echoed the word as if it were a place he had gone to visit.

“How about a walk today?” he asked.

“Tomorrow,” she said. “But let's not walk. I need you to get me some maps.”

“Maps?”

“From work.” She spoke in a voice as tough as the soles of her feet. “You do use thousand-to-one scale maps for weather grids?”

“Yes.”

“Okay, I want the sections for the Oregon coast from 43° to 46°.” Her bare face hovered on the vidscreen like a forbidden planet. “Your place. Nineteen o'clock. Any problem with that?”

“No,” he answered hastily. “Is microfiche all right?”

“I'd rather have polyfilm prints I could keep.”

“What for?”

She merely repeated the latitudes, as if he were a child with a porous memory.

Watching her naked face evaporate from the screen, Phoenix wondered what drove her to ignore the mating rituals, what urgency in her burned through all rules.

At greatest magnification the relief map shone upon the screen as a snarl of dunes, cliffs, inlets, river beds. Each landform was a distinct color, making a crazy-quilt of shades and textures. The disorder of it made Phoenix feel slightly nauseous.

“They don't supply you with maps when you go out for repairs?” he asked.

Teeg was crouching near the screen, haunches on bare heels, tracing the shape of a bay that hooked into the coast like a bent finger of blue. “No. I type in my work coordinates and the cyber guides my shuttle there. I just climb outside the tube and work on transformers, or cables, sometimes on the tube itself. There'll be mountains, maybe. Forests. Sometimes even deserts. But I usually don't have any clue where those things are on a map.”

“Usually?”

“Some landmarks I remember from traveling with my mother, especially around the coastal cities south of Portland, the last places she dismantled.” Pointing to the map, she crooked her finger to mimic the blue hook of water. “This inlet, for instance. I remember that place. Whale's Mouth Bay, my mother called it. She used to take
me wading there. I think it was her favorite place. She took me there the last time we—”

“Wading in the ocean?”

A sudden fury made Teeg's eyes turn smoky, the same fury he had glimpsed on that first day when he had gawked at her bare feet. “Yes, the ocean. The stuff we're floating on, the stuff we're mining and eating and tapping for energy, the stuff we pump through Oregon City every day in billions of liters. What's wrong with wading in it?”

Instead of answering, Phoenix forced himself to look at the chaos on the screen. The only straight lines visible on the map were the tube routes, angling north to Alaska City and south to California City, or trailing away eastward, where further maps would show them reaching the land cities of Wyoming and Iowa, the float cities on Lake Michigan and Erie and Ontario, then farther east to the oldest float cities along the New England coast. At work, Phoenix preferred using a schematic map of the continent, which showed the hundred-odd land cities as bright red circles, the thirty float cities as green squares, the connecting tubes as stripes of black or yellow or blue. This entire scheme was superimposed on a grid of cyber coordinates, and behind it all lurked the shadowy outline of North America.

Queasiness finally made him look away from the screen. “You're going out there someday? To stay?”

Without turning from the map, she said, “The coast is all rocky along there. I remember some kind of yellow-flowering bushes in the spring.”

“Are you?” he insisted.

She faced him now. “Who knows?”