Dancing in Dreamtime (22 page)

Days ticked by. Each morning before work he peered out through the spyhole in his door, but with less and less fear—or was it hope?—of seeing her. Just when his life was composing itself again, when clouds on the Earthsat monitors were beginning to resemble clouds again instead of lips and ankles, one day he looked out and there she was, pacing along in sweat-darkened green. The lens of the spyhole made her appear swollen. Her naked feet churned and her bulbous head, fringed in red curls, bobbed ridiculously. Wondering how such an unappetizing creature could have enthralled him, Phoenix opened the door. It was a mistake. Her full stare caught him. Moist cheeks behind the glaze of makeup, long-boned feet, swim of legs beneath the gown.

This time she pronounced the words icily: “It's called walking. You should try it. Melt away some of that flab.”

By reflex, he smoothed the cloth over his cushiony stomach. Flab? How dare she refer to his body. The chill in her voice implied that, while he had been moping around with her image spiked into his brain, she had forgotten him entirely.

“Do you mind?” she said, never breaking stride. “There's less traffic here. Fewer zombies to compete with.”

He shook his head no, then in confusion nodded yes, unsure what he was answering. The woman kept up her treadmill stride. Phoenix shilly-shallied in his doorway, immobilized by a snapshot view of himself as he must appear to her: bouffant wig of iridescent
blue, face painted to resemble the star of Video Dancers, every inch of flesh cloaked in a moodgown. He could not bear to look down at the garment, which was doubtless a fireworks of color, reflecting his inner pandemonium.

“I don't mind,” he said, his nostrils flaring with the scent of her. “Why should I mind?”

“There are lots of drecks who do,” the woman said.

She smiled, and he winced. The smile, the private sharing of words, the eye contact, the exposed face—it was all coming in a rush, shattering the rules of sexual approach. Unwilling to name a body part, he stammered “Do your walking things hurt?”

“Never. That's why I go barefoot, to keep them tough.”

“And why have them tough?”

“So I can walk barefoot.”

“But why walk at all?” he demanded in vexation. Before he could slice into her circular reasoning, passengers trundled around the curve, and the woman, with no attempt at disguising her smile, crossed to the other belt and rode away out of sight.

For a long time Phoenix stood in his doorway, hoping. But traffic thickened in the corridor and the woman never reappeared. Or maybe she did pass again, duly costumed and painted, lost in the crowd. Passing, she might even have seen him, but without being able to distinguish him from the hundred others who were decked out this morning in iridescent blue wigs and the painted face of that video star. Phoenix felt paltry, lurking there on his threshold, at once conspicuous and invisible.

Finally he surrendered to the day, to work, an afternoon of lightshows, an evening of brain-puzzles at the gamepark, and then a restless night on the waterbed. The barefooted woman stalked through his dreams. An extra dose of narco failed to soothe him. A
bout on the eros couch, with the gauge spun all the way over to visionary delight, offered only mechanical relief. Neither drugs nor electronics could blank the screen in his mind where the woman's image kept burning and burning.

Desire melted away what little order remained in his life. The apartment grew shabby. Friends stopped scheduling daykillers with him when he failed to show up a second time or a third. His costume suffered, at first from neglect, and then from a striving for idiosyncrasy. Phoenix wanted to be visible to the woman when he met her again. So he hauled out unstylish clothes and flung them on in outrageous combinations. His wigs grew increasingly bizarre. His face paint appeared slapdash, as if applied in the dark by a vindictive cosmetician. Wherever he went in Oregon City the glances of passersby nipped at his heels.

At work the satellite photos looked more than ever like a collage of lips and ankles and trailing hair. His supervisor made him rewrite a third of the eco-warnings, and advised him to cut back on the narco. But Phoenix was not applying narco or any other balm to his inflamed heart. Nothing half so vivid as this love-ache had ever seized him before, and he was in no hurry to escape the exquisite pain.

Days off work he spent trying to discover some timetable in the woman's exercise. But he had no more luck than the ancients had at predicting sunspots. When she did loom into sight, he kept indoors, not yet ready to meet her again. Every night he paced with naked feet around the perimeter of his room. Five steps and then turn, five steps and turn; blisters multiplied on his soles. After two
weeks of this, questioning his own sanity, he could walk for half an hour without panting, and his feet began to leather over.

Training on the pedbelt was more risky, only possible late at night, when anyone else traveling through the corridor would most likely be as eccentric as he. Soon he was able to stay abreast of his room for an hour. Laboring to counter the belt's motion, he did not feel like a gyroscope—he felt like a lunatic.

On one of his 3:00
AM
training sessions, he was puffing along, oblivious, when her voice broke over him from behind:

“So you tried it?”

Glancing back, he met the achingly familiar stare. “Yes. I wondered what it was like.”

“And what do you think of it?”

“It's interesting.” Witlessly he repeated, “Interesting.”

They paced side-by-side, two lunatics out for a stroll. From the corner of his eye Phoenix enjoyed the woman's profile, her skin showing more nakedly than ever through the paint, her legs kicking against the loose fall of gown.

“Good for the heart and lungs,” she said.

“I suppose so,” he replied, shocked by her language.

“And legs.”

He loosed this sexual word without thinking: “Legs.”

The woman blithely continued, as if she were in stage four of the mating ritual. “My name is Teeg Passio.”

He could sense the expectant twist in her body as she waited for a response. “My name? Oh. Sure. It's Phoenix Marshall.”

“You're not offended? About exchanging names?”

“No. I don't really accept all the . . . well . . . the formalities.”

“They're stupid, aren't they?” She dismissed the mating code and his lifelong decorum with a stroke of her arm. “All this
business of when you can look in another person's eyes, when you can swap names, when your little fingers can touch! Idiocy.”

Phoenix heard himself agreeing. “Yes, it's like a web.”

“Cut loose, is what I say.”

“Loose?” He stilled his tongue, alarmed by the turmoil she had stirred in him. Sweat trickled down his face, no doubt streaking the paint, dampening the collar of his moodgown.

“How often do you walk?” she asked.

“Oh, every day. Sometimes twice a day.”

“Any special time?”

His eye was caught by the surge of flame-colored hair along the borders of her hood. His fingers twitched. “Morning,” he said, quickly adding, “or night, just about any time. My schedule's flexible. And you?”

Her smile seemed to raise the temperature in the corridor several degrees. “I don't keep a schedule. But maybe we could set a time, meet for a walk. That is, if you—”

“I would. Yes, very much,” he said hastily.

“I know places we can walk without these conveyors.”

“Anywhere's fine.”

“Shasta Gamepark, then, south gate, at 1600 tomorrow.” She lifted a palm in farewell.

“Wait,” he begged. In a panic he cast around for ways to keep her, fearing that such an improbable creature might not survive until tomorrow. “Do you live in Portland Complex?”

She jerked a thumb domeward. “Seven floors above you.”

“And what brings you through here for exercise?”

“Looking for a walking partner.”

“Oh.” Again he scrambled for words. “And why do you walk?”

“I'm in training.”

“For what?”

“For going away.”

Unlikely as it seemed to Phoenix, Teeg did meet him at the gamepark, where they strolled for an hour on the glass pathways, avoiding chemmie guzzlers and merrymakers. “Remember skating on these,” she asked him, patting the scuffed walkway with her foot, “back when kids used their legs?”

Legs again. She would say anything. “Like so,” he replied, assuming the bent-knee stance he had perfected as a boy on skateboards.

Teeg laughed. “There's hope for you yet.”

On the following day, they ventured down into the bowels of Oregon City, along pipelines marked
EXPLOSIVE
, through tunnels pungent with brine. His thighs quivered from the incessant thrum of pumps and extractors. “You forget the whole city's afloat,” she told him, cupping a handful of ocean water to sniff, “until you come down here. We forget a lot of things.”

Other days, as they wandered among the green vats of the hydroponics district or between the huge whirling energy-storage wheels of the power zone, Phoenix discovered parts of Oregon City he had known about only from hearsay, and, in his anarchic talks with Teeg, he discovered parts of himself he had never known about at all. Signals kept arriving from neglected regions of his body—aches at first, then pleasures.

She was a squall of questions. What work do you do? Who are your parents? Any children? Ever go outside?

And so he told her about his training in meteorology, his job studying satellite images (“Because I have a good eye for patterns,” he boasted, “something the computers still can't match.”), and he told her about his mother's death in the 2067 fusion implosion at Texas City, about his father's three-year drug coma; told her his sperm was duly banked away but remained unused; told her he had never stuck so much as his nose outside the Enclosure; told her, in a voice that surprised him with its urgency, how restless he felt, how lonely, how trapped.

All the while Teeg was nodding yes, yes, that is truly how it is, and between questions she was telling about herself: most of her life spent in the wilds, shifting about the Northwest with her mother, who had been in charge of dismantling Anchorage, Vancouver, and Portland; her own work now back outside the Enclosure, in the wilds, fixing communications terminals; her eggs used for nine—or maybe eleven, she forgot—babies, all of them grown inside other women; mated three times, never happily, never long, twice with men and once with a woman.

“You're licensed to go outside?” he asked.

“Why so surprised?” she answered. “You think all those pipes and tubes and transformers maintain themselves?”

“But aren't you a risk, having grown up outside?”

“Not many people will take the work. Too messy in the wilds, too dangerous. And those who do, except the suicidal maniacs, know enough about the Enclosure's defenses to forget sabotage. The most I could do is stay out there after some job and never come back.”

Phoenix pretended to be absorbed in watching his brazenly naked feet scuffle along beside hers. She had him so rattled, he
had given up trying to calculate which mating rules they were breaking. “Do you think about that sometimes—staying outside?”

“Sometimes,” she confessed, then after a few more steps she said, “Often. All the time, in fact. I've only lived in the city maybe five or six of my twenty-seven years. Here's the place that seems alien to me,” arms sweeping overhead, the loose sleeves fluttering like wings, “and outside is home. Coming back inside is exile.”

One moment the dome seemed to Phoenix impossibly high, higher than the unroofed sky, and the next moment it seemed a cruel weight pressing down on him.

“Coming back in,” she added, “is like crawling inside a huge sterilized bottle.”

A wave of claustrophobia nearly choked him, like the bitter taste of food long since swallowed. He stopped walking, halfway across Marconi Plaza, and the city snapped tight around him. Glide-rails sliced the air into hectic curves; towering offices and apartments shimmered with the trapped energy of a million lives, tower after tower as far as eye could see. The sudden pressure of the city was so intense that he did not notice for several seconds the lighter pressure of Teeg's hand on his arm.