Terrarium (18 page)

“Yes.” Zuni sat across from him at the glass viewing table. While they spoke, blueprints of the space habitat glowed up at them through the surface.

“And you won't tell me where?”

“Do you really want to know?”

Images of the colossal orb of cities hovered in the glass. Fitted with sails and great looming scoops, the gauzy sphere was designed to voyage through space without being anchored to any planet or sun. It would glean what energy and materials it needed from the interstellar dust. The entire population of the Enclosure could be housed inside.
Transcendence.
Zuni repeated the word to herself as she waited for Richard to answer.

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

“Then indulge me this one last time.”

“At least tell me if it's suicide.”

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

She studied him, lips pursed, recalling their talks of Oregon. “No, I don't think so.”

“Then I can see you again?” Richard asked hopefully.

“Time will tell.” Her fingers traced the frail outlines of the space habitat. His hands skated toward hers across the glass tabletop, then shyly retreated.

“You're like a squirrel with acorns about this,” he said in exasperation.

That was one of the things that had endeared him to her, the way he still spoke in the archaic language of nature.
Squirrels and acorns. She nearly asked him what else he remembered from those years of growing up in the Oregon forests. But no, those were the wilds, taboo. “Promise,” she said, “you won't sniff around when I'm gone and dig up the secret?”

“I can't believe you'd quit now, with Transcendence on the drawing board.”

“Promise?”

“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?” she said, pointing at a diagram of the gossamer habitat.

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

“Yes, what other future?” she echoed. The gauzy construction of interlacing filaments brought back childhood memories of spider webs, dew-soaked, each strand beaded with water diamonds.

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

She nodded. “Transcendence.”

“Cut free of Terra.”

“Free,” she said.

“Flow with the cosmic energy.”

“Energy,” she echoed.

He clapped with pleasure. “That sounds like my old Zuni. Never lost your vision.”

“No, I haven't,” she assured him.

Packing her few remaining things in the apartment that night, Zuni thought regretfully of Richard. 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, Woolman's
Journal
and Noncinno's
Whalecall.
The other paper books she tagged as gifts for the Incunabulary. The remaining volumes, all fiches and tapes, she heaved by the armload down the recycle chute. Her visual and audio libraries soon followed. My little boost to entropy, she thought. The appliances were all standard issue, food dispensers and videowalls, and so were the furnishings. She ran the sanitizer over them and left them in place.

Alongside the two books in her beltpack she loaded the drafting materials from her office. That left just room enough for a first-aid kit, lighter, insul-blanket, knife, some high-cal food, a compass and the much-folded map. The health-security pass would pin to her traveling gown. After much hesitation she tucked Richard's gift into the beltpack as well. It was a model of the Enclosure, small enough to fit in the 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, grains of wheat, god dolls, she carried fragments of her own days.

With a thick moodgown slung from her shoulders and draping to the floor, the beltpack did not show. She set that gown aside and then dumped the rest of her clothes down the recycle. From vacuum storage she recovered the cotton shirt, wool trousers and leather boots. The boots were cracked but serviceable. Although the colors seemed to have faded on the shirt (or perhaps her stubborn eyes would no longer perceive colors as brightly as her mind recalled them), the cotton still felt soft against her neck.

From the top shelf of her closet she retrieved a scarlet wig and a face mask meant to resemble an Aztec sungoddess. They had been given to her as a joke some years earlier by
fellow architects, who knew she would never 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 gleaming, Zuni lay down on the airbed to wait for dawn.

Next morning the screen of her vidphone refused to glow when she tapped the keys. The food spout yielded nothing but a faint sucking noise. Bank, clinic, every agency replied with zeroes when she signaled them to see if they remembered her.

She felt a fool, tugging the wig over her neat bun, strapping the mask onto her face, hanging the moodgown over her shoulders. 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 refused to budge.

The pedbelt was jammed with people. Towering headdresses, wigs of every hue, phosphorescent robes, sequined bodysuits—the normal 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 from newsfax or chemmiedream to notice her. No one paid her any attention as she rode across Oregon City to the shuttle terminal, past the honeycombed towers, beneath the curving gliderways. With sadness, and with an almost giddy joy, she watched the city pass.

The ticket machine flashed questions at her when she requested passage to shuttle stop 012. Was customer aware 012 was repair terminus? Yes, Zuni replied. Was customer authorized to enter vulnerable zone? For answer, Zuni slipped her health pass into the machine, and a ticket wheezed out.

Today the ocean was not stormy, for the shuttle raced through the seatube without so much as a tremor. 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. That was ample time. To dream of living longer would be greedy.

When the shuttle began decelerating for 012, the regular commuters looked up in mild puzzlement. There should have been no stops until Cascade Mountain Nexus, another twelve minutes away. Zuni soothed them by calling, “Just routine repairs,” as she ducked out of the car onto the platform. The doors clapped shut behind her and the shuttle sighed away down the tube.

The emergency repair station was deserted. At each turn locks scanned 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. Her last act as a citizen was to punch into the cybernet a code, known only to masters of health and security and design, which erased all record of her movement from the Enclosure's memory. After she satisfied another series of locks, finally a round hatch swung open and she stepped outside into the blinding green jumble of an Oregon forest.

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

At length she unfolded the map and blinked at it. Tears made her vision even more hazy than usual, blurring the lines, so she tucked the map into her beltpack and set off through the woods along a pathway of memory.

5 March 2034
—
Vancouver

If I do not let Teeg go inside for a visit, Gregory threatens to send the HP after her, as he certainly can now that she's reached breeding age. Unlucky thirteen. All he wants is a visit, just two weeks with his daughter, he swears solemnly on the vidscreen.

“And will they breed her up like a prize cow?” I ask him.

He clears his throat. His gleaming bulbous head wobbles on the screen. “I rather doubt it. Her—how shall I say it?—her middle section—”

“Pelvis?”

“Well, yes. It's narrow, they tell me. Other women are better suited for bearing her children. The eugenics board will simply preserve her”—he tiptoes gingerly around the word—“eggs, and match them with suitable”—again the hesitation—“male seed.”

“Are you sorry we made Teeg in the old-fashioned way?” I ask him.

His eyebrows lift and lift, rippling the vast forehead, his multi-lensed eyes soften, and for a moment I think he is going to smile, an event as remarkable and rare as the northern lights.

In
the morning Teeg padded about naked through the chill air to unshutter the portholes. Cylinders of daylight bored through the openings, playing on her flesh like searchlights as she walked the length of the raft. At the seaward end she paused, studying the bay, arms lifted to tie her red swish of hair into a knot. She had the body of a gymnast or runner, lean and taut, with narrow hips and small upward-tilted breasts and the flex of long muscles down her back and legs. The tape encircling her ribcage was a pale brushmark against her ruddy skin, which seemed to glow from inside, as if incandescent.

Phoenix admired her through barely-parted eyes, pretending to sleep. He still lay in their joined sleepsacks, where the lovemaking had deposited him. This was the way he imagined a drift log would feel, if it could feel, heaved and bulled by the waves, flung at last upon the shore, there to lie stunned and humble until caught again by the next high sea.

When she crawled back into the sleepsack, her leg
slithered against him and her finger began inscribing circles on his belly.

“You're not a very convincing sleeper,” she said.

He snored loudly, imitating a mechanical bear he had seen once in a disney.

“I saw you watching,” she said. “Brown eyes like saucers of chocolate.”

He snored even more loudly.

With an exaggerated sigh she drew away. “So much for romance.”

He clutched at her then, crying, “I'm awake, hey, I'm awake!” Need for her filled him. His hand, shying to avoid her tender ribs, came to rest between her thighs. Her own hand settled on top of his, a confirmation, and so he caressed her there—pad of hair over bone, moist lips parted—while they kissed. Heat gathered between them like morning light. Presently she straddled his hips, anchored herself to him, and began slowly rocking. The sleepsack fell away from her shoulders and haloed about their joined hips. Stroking her throat, her breasts, her belly, Phoenix thought how alive she was in her temporary skin, and she moved on him in slow circles, meditatively, like a woman on a pilgrimage.

Afterwards she drew pictures on his chest with her finger. Eyes closed, he was supposed to guess their meaning. The only one of half a dozen he guessed correctly was a seashell. The beach outside would be littered with them, purple as royalty. When his own turn came to draw pictures, his hand kept straying onto her breast. The nipple was a warm knot between his fingers.

“Unfair distractions,” he complained.

“The wilderness of the body,” she murmured.

He was not yet ready to face real wilderness. “Won't they be looking for you outside?”

With a groan, Teeg lifted her weight from him and began stuffing legs and arms into her shimmersuit. “Nobody expects lovers to use clocks.”

He crawled to a porthole and looked toward the caves, where the other colonists were stirring, tiny silver figures toddling beneath immense black cliffs. “They
know
?” he said with dismay. The rumpled sleepsacks curled at his feet like an accusation.

She zipped the suit up the front, crotch to throat. Where there had been radiant flesh a moment earlier, now there was a metallic sheath. “What are we having here,” she said, hands on hips, “a few withdrawal symptoms? The child of the city retreating into his don't-touch-me bottle?”

“No,” he protested.

“Then don't look so hang-dog. We all came out here to get back in touch, didn't we?” She combed her fingers through his hair, bent down with a grunt to kiss him. “Back in a minute.”

Touch. For the first time since clinging to her last night, when he had begged her not to abandon him in the raft, alone on the dark beach under that impossibly distant sky, he was overcome by the dread of the wilds. He mumbled
yes
when Teeg, ducking out through the hatch, told him to get some clothes on his bones.

As he finished dressing she returned with a plate of steaming gray mush. “Don't examine it too closely,” she advised. “Just eat. We'll have to live on synthetics until our fish and veggies start flourishing.”

He ate. Every time his eyes rose to the level of the portholes, they flinched away, stung by the blaze and hustle of the wilds. Last evening in the gloom the bay had seemed like a drift of huge, menacing shapes. This morning in full light he could see that these awesome shapes, the beach and encircling mountains, were a swarm of smaller things, ragged trees and rocks and driftwood and an infinity of grass. The world was drenched in detail, filled up with a bewildering intricacy of things.