Terrarium (5 page)

Resilience. She liked that, the springing back of nature. She smeared the sweat across her belly, enjoyed the springiness of her own flesh. Womb inside there, where never babe did dwell. Enclosure. The great domed cities, wombs spun of glass and alloy and geometry. Mother helped provide the materials for them. Zuni and Father helped provide the designs. And I? I want out.

She propped herself on elbows and surveyed the bay. Yes, this was the place to build a colony—hills shouldering down to within a few hundred meters of the shore, then a meadow traversed by a sluggish river, and then the beach of black sand and black volcanic boulders. The north arm of the bay was a massive headland, topped by the ruins of a lighthouse. There was even an abandoned oil pipeline running along the old roadbed nearby, connecting across eighty kilometers of ocean to the tank farm in Oregon City. Ideal for smuggling out equipment and supplies.

When she had first visited this place as a child, on one of those rapturous holidays with her mother, the pipe had still carried oil and the shoreline had been half a kilometer farther west. Snags of the old coast were still visible as gray outcroppings, great broken teeth, farther out in the bay. On one of their recent outings Phoenix had assured her that the polar icepacks had stopped melting. “One more benefit from the transition to solar living,” he explained. That meant the new coastline would probably remain stable for a while.

A strand of marsh grass blew along the sand, clung to her ribs like a green wound. She peeled it away and wrapped it about her left thumb. Will Phoenix decide to come out here
with us? she wondered. The grass made a vivid ring on her sun-pinked flesh. Sitting up, she hugged her knees. Can he shake himself free of the city? And will the others let him join our circle?

A bank of clouds shut away the sun, and the air grew chill. Teeg rose, slapped sand from her legs and buttocks. Cleaning grit from her back would have to wait until she took an air-shower at the sanitation port. Despite the chill, her body still felt atingle from the sun. She slithered into boots and shimmersuit, tightened the breathing-mask over her face. Through goggles the bay still looked beautiful. Running shadows marked the passage of clouds across the knobby black walls of the cliffs. Surf exploded rhythmically on the boulders. She wanted to make love with that roar in her ears.

Aloft in the shuttle, Teeg hovered for a minute over the beach, before heading inland toward the nearest port. She skimmed across the meadow, sun winking in the river, then she climbed the foothills at a height some ten meters above the tips of spruce and hemlocks. There was joy in balancing the tiny craft on its cushion of air, riding the thermals like a falcon. From above, the slopes looked solid green, a carpet of moss, as if you could walk from treetop to treetop without ever touching the ground. Some patches still showed brown where the last clear-cuts had not yet mended, or where toxins had concentrated. But everywhere the forest was coming back. The oceans provided cheaper substitutes for cellulose, without all the mess of lumbering.

Between the first range of hills and the somber mountains, she could just make out stretches of the old coastal highway. Scraps of concrete and tar showed through the weeds. In places the ocean had backed into valleys and covered the roadbed. A charred clearing beside the road and a scattering of rubble marked the location of a dismantled town, probably some fishing port. The map Phoenix had given her mentioned neither road nor town, identified nothing but landforms and the frail web of tubes.

From the peak of the next range she spied, away down in the mountain-shadowed Willamette Valley, the glowing travel-tube. Its translucent glass pipes, frosty white and glittering like an endless icicle, stretched north towards Vancouver City and south towards the clustered domes of California. Whenever she glimpsed the tube system or the domes from outside, she was amazed at their grace, and she thought of her father. Whatever shape you could reduce to a mathematical formula, he would weep over. But that was the only beauty he had ever learned to see.

While Teeg watched, a freighter poured its flash of blue lights through the northbound tube.

She let the shuttle skip lightly on the updrafts along the far side of the coastal range, dipping down into shadows. The valley stretched away north some two hundred kilometers to Portland, her mother's place, the place of death. Teeg shivered, trying to shut the scene back in its mental cage. Yet I must go there, she thought, go and face whatever remains of her.

In the shadowed valley she looked for the yellow beacon that marked a gateway to the Enclosure, her thoughts drifting, as they often did, from her mother to Zuni, who had grown up in one of the lumber towns on these slopes. Sheep used to graze in this valley, Zuni would tell her, and the hills were green with mint, and fruit trees covered the terraces like ornate stitchery. Teeg had always been surprised, the way the older woman's eyes would soften when she told about the Willamette Valley.

Can I tell her about Whale's Mouth Bay, about the settlement? Teeg wondered. No, no, she decided, it would be madness to confess this hunger for the wilds to the mother of the Enclosure.

Fly the shuttle, she reminded herself. There must be no mistakes on re-entry. Each time she returned from a mission she feared they would demand proof that all her time had been spent making repairs. But the insiders who staffed Security never dared go outside, so they grew more ignorant
of the wilds each year. With no idea how long a repair job should take, they let the wildergoers alone.

At the junction of the Willamette and McKenzie Rivers she spotted the yellow beacon of the sanitation port. Come here, the beacon seemed to promise, come here all you who have wandered from the human system, come and we will purify you, bathe you in artificial light, admit you once again into the charmed circle of the city.

8 January 2028
—
Vancouver, British Columbia

From the platform where I supervise the dismantling of Vancouver, I can watch through binoculars as health patrollers search the ruins for wildergoers. When sonics drive the renegades out of hiding, gliders swoop down, stunners freeze them, and the patrollers bind them in nets. Rehabilitation centers are the next stop. I am told that many elect suicide. Most conform.

Every day my credentials are checked, and those of my crew, to make sure we are legally entitled to remain outside. They examine Teeg with grave suspicion. Why is a child outside? they demand. She is six, seven, is she not? She belongs inside, in school, in safety. They look at me as if I were a savage, to keep my child with me in the wilds.

Gregory throws me the same accusing looks from the vidphone. Zuni Franklin would look after Teeg as if the child were her own daughter, he promises. No doubt, no doubt, and suck the blood from her in the bargain.

The
image of Teeg squatting beside the map screen kept burning in Phoenix's mind. The geography of Oregon and the imagined geography of her body merged for him into one sensuous landscape. He tried calling her after the evening of maps, to apologize, to arrange a walk, anything to be near her. But her answering tapes informed him she was meditating, she was at the clinic, she was on a repair mission, always somewhere painfully out of reach. He could not have felt a greater craving for her if they had sparred through all twelve stages of the mating ritual.

When he finally did track her down, overtaking her at the bottom of the firestairs as she began her daily seventy-story climb, she told him she was about to leave for a two-week seminar in Alaska City. Something to do with thermionics.

“Look, can I go with you?”

“Phoenix—”

“I can arrange leave. We can talk after your classes. We can walk in the disney there. It's a fine one—famous—with mechanoes of beasts from all the continents—”

“Phoenix!”

He hushed. She let him chill for a few seconds. Then she calmly told him, “Another time. This trip I'm very busy. Understood?”

Breathless from the stairs, he halted at the next landing and let Teeg climb ahead by herself. Something about the determined swing of her hips, something in the angry strength of her climbing, so alien to everything he had been raised to believe about the body, convinced him she really would slip away from Oregon City one day, enter the chaos of the map, and never look back. That meant annihilation, first of the mind, cut off from civilization, then of the body, poisoned or broken or devoured by the wilds. Dizziness sat him down upon the landing. The metal felt cold through his gown. With eyes closed he listened to Teeg's bare feet slapping on the stairs above him, fainter and fainter as she climbed.

Yes, the work coordinator assured him, Teeg Passio was on a two-week leave. Yes, the Preservation Institute informed him, a Teeg Passio was signed up for the thermionics seminar. But when Phoenix reached Alaska City, driven there by his desire to see her, he found she had never registered with travel control, nor with the health board, nor with the Institute. The officials studied him cautiously. Do you need a psyche session? they inquired. No thanks, he assured them. Just unbalanced by the change of air. But our air is the same as yours, surely? Yes, of course, he explained, fatigue, nothing more.

His return to Oregon City was delayed by a leak in the seatube—one of his colleagues evidently had failed to warn about a hurricane or a shift in ocean current—and by the time his shuttle was on its way he felt crazed. The curved walls, the molded seats, the incessant loudspeaker babble: everything squeezed in upon him. Bottle, he kept thinking, glass bottle.

Back in Oregon City he could discover nothing more
about her going. Do you want us to list her as missing? the health patrollers asked. Put a trace on her? No, Phoenix answered, backing away. She'll turn up. Just a misunderstanding.

He even considered phoning Zuni Franklin, to see if she knew where her protégé had gone. But no, Teeg had moved away from Zuni years before. And besides, a person of Zuni Franklin's august reputation probably would not answer his call.

Nothing to do but wait, and turn over the possibilities one-by-one like cards in a game of solitaire: She had lied to him about going to Alaska City? She had been mangled by some piece of machinery? She had gone outside to stay? The maps, he thought: perhaps that was all she had ever wanted from him. She might even have known he was a geo-meteorologist, might have lured him with her walking just to get hold of them. But no—that was nonsense. How many people would have opened their doors to find her outside walking, barefooted, and felt nothing but mild alarm or loathing? She could never have predicted the fierce hunger the sight of her triggered in him, this boiling-over of restlessness. She could not have known he would envy her for living in a space less entangled than his own, a space in which voice, eyes, arms seemed to move in gentler gravity.

In those two weeks of fretting he discovered how little presence of mind his ordinary life required. He traveled through the city, performed the necessary bows and signals in conversation, processed skeins of satellite photos, fed himself at the cafeteria, even played mediocre chess, all without diverting his thoughts from Teeg. He was convinced she had gone outside, into the chaotic world of the map. At odd moments—while a lightshow played on the screen or the eros couch worked at him with its electronic charms—he would visualize that map in all its unruly colors, and he would imagine her as a tiny laboring speck lost in it, lost climbing through mountains, lost wading in the blue hooked finger of water.

If she came back—when she came back—she
had
to come back—he would find some way to keep her from ever again putting him through this agony. Make her take him with her next time. But not outside. Somewhere human, safe, the inland cities, the spas. Anywhere but the wilds. And he would persuade her to change jobs, never go outside again. And if she insisted on going, then he would inform on her as a health risk, get her wilder-license revoked.

And then she'd be trapped in this bottle as surely as I am, Phoenix admitted. Trapped—but alive, insulated from the hostile disorder out there, shielded from disease, from weather, beasts, hunger, pain. It was simple nostalgia, he told himself, this yearning for the wilds, a mixture of childhood memories and antique books. Yet part of him was not persuaded, the part that trembled with ancient rhythms when he was in her presence.

His fingers shook as he punched the code for the health board. He explained his concern to the mechano face on the phonescreen, but without giving Teeg's name.

“Then you want Infection Division,” the mechano said, its jaw slightly out of synchronization with the words. It was an old model, bearing the stylized markings for mouth, nose, eyes, like a child's drawing.

Soon Phoenix was talking to another mechano, which patiently recited the relevant portions of the code: Only licensed wildergoers are permitted to leave the human system, and only for authorized functions. Such personnel must be sanitized before re-entering the human system. Any persons breaking this code, either by leaving without authorization or by returning without decontamination, constitute an infection threat, and will be treated as beasts.

“Treated as beasts?” Phoenix echoed.

“One who deliberately endangers the human system becomes a part of Terra—a beast,” the mechano explained.

“I see, of course.”

Within seconds the lightsticks began glowing on his informat, printing a form headed
INFECTION ALERT
.

Fingering the slick polyfilm sheet, Phoenix asked the mechano, “And if the person is a licensed wildergoer?”

“First offense, revocation of license. Second offense, quarantine. Third, exile. Fourth, extermination.” The mechano paused for what seemed to Phoenix a carefully measured space of time. Then it asked, “Do you wish to report name and circumstances?”

“No,” Phoenix replied. “I am merely concerned. I have no evidence.”