Dancing in Dreamtime (26 page)

Coyt, the draftsman, was old enough to remember seeing icicles, for he had grown up with Zuni in one of the Oregon lumber towns, back in the 2020s and 2030s, when the last of the North American rainforests were being clear-cut. He had studied forestry with her, and when she switched to the study of architecture he tried to switch as well. But exponential calculus baffled him, so he had to settle for becoming a draftsman in order to stay near her. Over the years he had trailed her from project to project, a timid shadow. Once he even worked up the nerve to ask her to mate with him, and she agreed. Much of her remained hidden, however, a cold inaccessible depth, and when they separated amicably after two years he was relieved. Living with her had been like walking in limestone country, where at any step one might plunge into a sinkhole or cave. Indeed, three mates had vanished after spells of living with her, and she had merely noted each disappearance with a hazy smile. All in all she was a woman to admire from a distance,
Coyt decided. Still, no one inside the Enclosure knew her better than he did, or brooded more about her inscrutable plans.

So Coyt was the last person Zuni called on to wish good-bye. If he did not guess the truth, no one would. She found him at his studio, working on a design. Even though the details were blurry, she recognized the drawing as Project Transcendence, a space-going version of the Enclosure.

His palms kissed hers in greeting. “You leave tomorrow?”

“Bright and early.” Zuni sat next to him at the drawing console.

“And you won't tell me where you're going?” he asked.

“Do you really want to know?”

Images of the colossal orb of cities glowed on the screen. Fitted with sails and great flaring scoops, the gauzy sphere was designed to voyage through space, gleaning energy and materials from interstellar dust, freeing humankind from Earth.
Transcendence
: Zuni repeated the word to herself as she waited for Coyt to answer.

Finally he said, “I've always respected your secrets.”

“Then indulge me this one last time.”

“Are you contemplating suicide?”

“Many people would think of it that way, yes.”

“Would I?”

“No.”

“Then I can see you again?” Coyt asked, suddenly hopeful.

“Probably not.” Her fingers traced the outlines of the space habitat on the screen.

His hands reached toward hers, and then shyly retreated. “You and your secrets. You're like a robin building a nest in a bush.”

Coyt's habit of speaking in the archaic language of nature endeared him to her. Robins in bushes! She longed to ask him what
else he remembered from those childhood years in the Oregon forests. But no, those were the wilds, taboo. “Promise,” she said, “you won't sniff around when I'm gone?”

“Like a hound dog after a raccoon?”

“Promise?” she insisted.

“Yes,” he answered glumly. Then he stammered, “I just don't understand. You've never given up before.”

If he wanted to believe she had been defeated by the complexities of the new space architecture, then let him. That might be the kindest illusion she could leave with him. “So that's the future you want?” she said, gesturing at the diagram of Project Transcendence.

He looked puzzled. “What other future is there?”

She kept silent. The gauzy construction of interlacing filaments brought back memories of spider webs, dew-soaked, each strand beaded with water diamonds. Were there still spiders?

“That's where we're bound to go next,” he said. “It's where you've been pointing all these years. Escape from Terra.”

“Escape,” she echoed.

“Merge with the cosmos.”

“Finally go home,” she said.

He clapped with pleasure. “That sounds like my old Zuni. You've never lost your vision.”

“No, I haven't,” she assured him.

Packing her few remaining things in the apartment that night, she thought regretfully of Coyt. Once she had imagined he might go with her. But gradually she had realized his mind was
too brittle. It would have snapped if he had tried to follow her. So she must go alone.

She selected from her library two of the rare paper volumes, Carson's
The Edge of the Sea
and Lopez's
Elegy for Whales
. The other paper books she tagged as gifts for the archives. The remaining volumes, all flexies and discs, she heaved by the armload down the recycle chute. The appliances were all standard issue, and so were the furnishings, so Zuni scrubbed them clean and left them in place.

She snugged the two books into her beltpack, along with the drafting materials from her office. That left just room enough for a first-aid kit, dehydrated food packets, a compass, and the much-folded map. The health-security pass would pin to her traveling gown. After some hesitation she tucked Coyt's gift into the pack as well. It was a model of the Enclosure, small enough to fit in her palm, with threads of silver to represent the transport tubes, silver beads for cities, and, inside, a blue-green sphere of glass to represent Terra.

As she strapped the pack to her waist, with its tiny cargo of mementos, she recalled how the ancients had loaded graves with tokens for the journey to the other world. Instead of miniature boats, dishes, and icons, she carried totems from her own days.

From vacuum storage she recovered the cotton shirt, wool trousers and leather boots that she had saved for this journey. The boots were cracked but serviceable. Although the shirt's color appeared to have faded (or perhaps her eyes could no longer perceive colors as brightly as her mind recalled them), the cotton still felt soft against her neck. She would cover these garments with a moodgown, which would also hide the beltpack. The rest of her clothes she dumped into the recycle chute. From the top shelf of
her closet she retrieved a scarlet wig and a face mask meant to resemble an Aztec sun goddess. They had been given to her as a joke years earlier by fellow architects, who knew she wouldn't even paint her face or tint her hair, let alone wear such a frightful get-up.

When the closets were empty, the cupboards bare, every surface in the apartment antiseptically clean, Zuni lay down to wait for dawn.

Next morning the screen of her phone refused to glow when she spoke to it. The food spout yielded nothing but a faint sucking noise. Bank, clinic, every agency replied with zeroes when she queried to see if they remembered her.

She felt a fool, donning the wig and mask, enveloping herself in the flashy moodgown. On her way out she paused at the hallway mirror to see if she recognized herself. A grotesque stranger gazed curiously back at her.

Outside the apartment she pressed her palm against the lockplate, to make sure it had erased her from its memory. The door made no response to her touch.

The pedbelt was jammed with riders. Towering headdresses, wigs of every hue, phosphorescent robes, sequined bodysuits—the usual office-going crowd. When Zuni stepped onto the belt (scarlet tresses wagging, gown flapping over the cracked tops of her boots) no one looked up to notice her. No one paid her any attention as she rode across Oregon City past the honeycombed towers, beneath the curving guiderails, to the shuttle terminal.

The ticket machine quizzed her when she requested passage to shuttle stop 012. Did customer know that 012 was a repair
terminus? Yes, Zuni replied. Was customer authorized to enter a vulnerable zone? For answer, she waved her health pass at the scanner, and a ticket wheezed out.

The sea must have calmed, for the shuttle raced through the tube without any hint of turbulence. As Zuni rode toward the mainland she tried not to think of all she was leaving behind. Medicine, for example. Her least reliable implant—a kidney—was probably good for another twenty-five years or so, time enough for her to reach 100, if none of her original organs failed first. To wish for a longer life would be greedy.

When the shuttle began decelerating for 012, the other passengers glanced up in mild puzzlement. There shouldn't have been any stops before Rocky Mountain Nexus, another hour away. Zuni called reassuringly, “Just routine maintenance,” as she ducked out of the car onto the platform. The doors clapped shut behind her and the shuttle whooshed away down the tube.

The repair station was deserted. At each turn, locks read her health pass before they would let her through. Near the last checkpoint she tossed her mask and wig and gown into a vaporizer. Then she entered the sanitation chamber, a gleaming white sphere that was the Enclosure's outermost defense against the wilds. After the security locks were satisfied, a round hatch swung open and she stepped into the damp green tangle of an Oregon forest.

She stood for a long time with eyes lowered, smelling the mosses and trees, listening to wind sizzle through the needles of new-growth firs, feeling the sponginess of soil beneath her feet. She ached.

After a spell she unfolded the map and blinked at it. Tears made her vision even hazier than usual, blurring the lines, so she tucked the map into her beltpack and set off through the woods
along a pathway of memory. When she had last walked these slopes, fifty years earlier, they had recently been clear-cut. Raw dirt, oil cans, bone-white slash. Even though the fir and hemlock and spruce had grown back abundantly since then, she still recognized the contours of the land. Without pausing to rest, she continued past remembered outcroppings of granite, past waterfalls, over sand dunes, until the ocean was in sight. Even the spectacle of breakers didn't slow her, and she kept on, trotting now, down the last slope into the cove where the domes clustered. She laughed aloud at the sight of the colony, at the timid way the windmills and greenhouses and gardens huddled together. Yes, what this place needed was a good architect.

And she laughed at the sight of former lovers and students and colleagues hurrying from the meditation dome to greet her. Zuni! Zuni! they cheered. You've taken your turn at last!

“I thought it was time for me to join you,” she answered, “before I'm too old to climb mountains and swim in the sea.”

Welcome! Welcome! they cried in all their familiar voices, and their lips brushed her face, their fingers stroked her hair, their arms encircled her.

“And haven't things grown wondrously?” Zuni crowed.

Yes, the conspirators agreed. The wilds are coming back. Not everything. A fair number of birds, some butterflies, even a few of the big predators. Bears, lions, wolves.

“And the whales?” Zuni asked.

We don't know yet, they answered. There are seals and otters, herring and krill, a couple runs of salmon. So there might be whales.

Zuni touched their cheeks, their foreheads. “You've managed to stay healthy?”

Well enough, they replied. Some cancers from the lingering toxins, but so far no deaths. The health patrollers know we're here but leave us alone, watching to see how we get on. We're afraid if we thrive, people will come pouring out of the Enclosure.

“There's little danger of that,” Zuni replied. “They're likelier to launch out into space. The dread of the wild runs deep.” Gazing around at the humped green hills of the Oregon coast, the lichen-starred cliffs, and wildflowers glimmering on the beach, she added, “They're paying a terrible price.”

But there was no choice, the conspirators objected. Without imposing quarantine, how else would Earth have recovered?

“Yes, of course,” Zuni murmured. “Still, it grieves me to think of all they've lost.”

The nine conspirators fled from Indiana City along separate paths. On the night chosen for the escape, Marn zigzagged through avenues and alleys, carrying her fear as if it were a dish of mercury. The last lights she passed were the neon signs at the gamepark, where the pedbelts ended and revelers caroused. Every step pushed her deeper into the unlit ruins of factories, over buckled pavement, past abandoned machinery ticking as it released the day's heat. This was how she had wanted to flee, carrying nothing from her old life except the mask and clothes she wore, without even a flashlight to burden her.