Terrarium (25 page)

The coma of exhaustion gave way to gentler sleep, and sleep feathered away to wakefulness. Phoenix was lingering in the doorway, round-eyed, when Zuni came fully awake. A glance from her sent him scampering.

“Who's your rabbity friend?” Zuni whispered. She squeezed an upraised finger against each side of her head, to simulate rabbit ears, and she made a small O of her mouth to imitate his startled look.

Teeg was overjoyed to hear her voice. “Oh, Phoenix? He's my partner. He thinks you were one of God's advisers at the Creation.”

“Ha! Wait till he gets a good look at me. A half-blind old crone. Half-dead, too, when you lugged me in here last night.”

“Night before last,” Teeg corrected her.

Zuni hummed. “Well, I truly am a lazybones. Didn't sleep much on the way out here. Damned beasties kept running off with my gear.”

“What sort of beasts?”

With a grunt Zuni sat up. “Elk or mice or bears. It might have been anything, for all I could see. Mutant grasshoppers! Ambulatory mushrooms!” Teeg laughed. A new alertness came into Zuni's face. “Since when did you have a partner, and a citygoer at that, from the looks of him?”

“Since about ten months ago. I was hiking on the pedbelt one morning and he popped out of his door.” Exactly like a rabbit, Teeg admitted, now that Zuni had supplied her with the image: a frightened rabbit with chocolate eyes and a gaping circle for a mouth. While Zuni sipped broth, Teeg proceeded to tell her about wooing Phoenix.

Zuni listened with merry eyes. “And so you turned him into a mystic?”

“Of sorts.”

“And he joined your—what do you call them—ingatherings?”

“How did you know about ingatherings?” Teeg asked with surprise.

Zuni gave her evasive Buddha smile. “I told you, I've made a hobby of observing you all. Who nudged you together into this work crew to begin with?”

Teeg pondered this. “You
built
the crew?”

“Building conspiracies is a messier business than erecting cities.”

“You knew all along we were coming out here?”

“I certainly hoped so. That's why I put you malcontents together.”

Scattered memories of things Zuni had said to her over the years, small gestures of discontent, suddenly took shape in Teeg's mind like birds flocking for spring migration. “You've been planning to come back out to the wilds, all this time?”

“In my heart, I never left.”

“But your architecture,” Teeg protested, “the Enclosure …”

“That was my way of helping make sure there would be some wilds for me to come back to. And haven't things
grown wonderfully?” Zuni grabbed Teeg's arms and drew herself upright. “The earth was sick, with a disease called people. So I helped put us in quarantine. Inside the bottle, as you liked to say so bitterly.”

“I never blamed you.”

Zuni gave her an appraising look. “No? Perhaps not. But you hated your father with a fury.”

“He
was
hateful.”

“For helping build the Enclosure? Would you prefer to do without it, and have everybody traipsing around outside and fouling the planet?”

There was silence, while Teeg savored the bitterness she had felt since childhood toward her father. Hating him was bound up with loving her mother and loving the wilds. But if his work had been necessary? If the Enclosure had been a blessing to Terra?

Zuni's legs suddenly buckled and she slumped to the cushions. Weakly, she asked, “Will you help me shower, child? I don't have the starch back in me yet. And I'm so filthy you could scrape me and use it for potting soil.”

“Oh, Zuni, of course! I'm standing here like a light-pole.”

After the two women spun beneath airjets, Teeg massaged oil into Zuni's back, where skin slid over a rack of bones. “We'll have to fatten you up on algae,” Teeg said mischievously.

Zuni made a face. “Thanks, but I'd rather stay scrawny.”

Oiling her own skin, Teeg was reminded of bathing in the ocean with her mother, who took this same unself-conscious pleasure in nakedness. Life inside the Enclosure, where bodies went cloaked in gowns and desire was fenced in by rituals, had been a torment. The only relief had come from Zuni, who scoffed at the sexual taboos as she scoffed at all the other pieties of the Enclosure.

“Father hated having a body,” Teeg mused. “You could tell by the way he covered it with any old rag. And the way he let himself go to blubber.”

“Because he was fat and sloppy, you say he hated his body?” The creases about Zuni's eyes showed amusement.

“It was distasteful to him. A clumsy animal for transporting his brain.”

“He was rather keen on making love,” Zuni observed mildly, stuffing her arms and legs into a crisp shimmersuit.

“Father?”

“To which I can testify from personal experience.”

“With
you
?”

Again Zuni flashed the Buddha smile. “It is a very old habit of the race, my child. And on the whole a pleasant one.”

Teeg was flabbergasted. That walrus of a father wallowing in bed with elegant Zuni? Impossible! “You were conceived artificially,” her mother had assured her. “Your father never touched me, not once, not even with gloves.”

Trailing Zuni back to the sleepchamber, where the older woman lay down again with a sigh, Teeg kept repeating, “Father?
Father
? With
you
? I don't believe it. And even if it's true, I still say he loathed the wilds. He thought Mother was crazy for staying outside.”

Zuni crossed arms on her chest and spoke with eyes closed. “He was certainly the most indoors person I ever knew.”

“There! So don't pretend he was some kind of hero for building the Enclosure. He didn't care a damn about saving Terra.”

“Has it ever occurred to you that Terra used him and your mother and all the rest of us to preserve herself?”

“Used us … What are you saying?”

“I'm saying what you know intuitively. Terra is an organism, and like any organism it has evolved methods of protecting itself. The body rejects alien tissues, germs, infection. How? It seals them away. Suppose Terra has sealed
us
away inside the Enclosure?”

“You mean … thought it? Willed it?”

“Does the body need to think about infection? Reflex serves extraordinarily well.”

“But we're talking about centuries of effort—”

“An eyeblink for Terra.”

“—and millions upon millions of people, the whole population of the planet cooperating to—” Teeg hesitated, overwhelmed by the idea.

“To do what?” Zuni asked drowsily.

“Seal themselves away,” Teeg whispered. Kneeling beside Zuni, who seemed to float on the cushion, she was astonished by the thought. Science's yearning outward into space, religion's yearning to escape matter—could all that have been the self-preserving ruminations of Terra? And was all of human history—at least since the decline of nature-religions and the rise of cities—a prolonged healing process for the planet? Was industrialization only a fever, succeeded by the calm years since the Enclosure?

There were a hundred questions to ask, but Zuni was asleep, the creases about her eyes still gay.

As the colonists went about their work, transplanting ferns and wildflowers into the shelter, gathering cuttings of trees to root in the nursery, they kept one eye cocked at the sky, like nervous robins tugging at worms. Health patrollers could plummet down like meteors, swoop down like hawks. The wildergoers had lived with this knowledge since escaping the city. But these days they kept even sharper lookout for catastrophe. Sol's death and Zuni's arrival disturbed their collective life, as rocks break the current of a stream.

Sol had brought a spiritual intensity to every act, to stirring soup or fixing cybers as much as to ingathering. He had also been their communications expert, who was to have assembled equipment for monitoring the Enclosure's transmissions. By patching into the nearest land cable, he would have supplied Jonah Colony with data on climate, oceans, sun activity, toxin levels. From the air he would
have plucked news about spy satellites. He had grown so weak by the time of the landing at Whale's Mouth, however, that he could merely scrawl instructions for assembling the communications gear.

At the moment everyone was too busy to puzzle over the crates of communicators. Once Jurgen's wild crayfish joined the trout and bluegill in the tanks, Indy began experimenting with algaes and waterlilies, to get the right mixtures of plants and fish. Water from the tanks circulated through troughs in the greenhouse where lettuce, squash, and several dozen other vegetables were sprouting. Earthworms, frogs, wasps, flies, predatory mites and spiders were painstakingly collected from the forest and loosed into the greenhouse. Indy had her heart set on lizards and praying mantises, but none were to be found. Marie brought two green snakes dangling by their tails. Teeg and Phoenix searched the meadow until they had gathered a flask's worth of ladybugs. The small islands of plants inside the colony now stirred with tiny creatures. Crawling into bed one night, Phoenix thrust his bare toes against a frog, and leapt up howling. On subsequent nights he always shook the sleepsack, to see what tumbled out.

Construction of a library completed the outermost circle of domes. Jonah Colony took on the shape of a flower: the meeting dome in the center was surrounded by an inner ring of sleepchambers and an outer one of workchambers, like concentric rings of petals. The musty green smell of vegetation spread everywhere through the shelter. In the stillness of the meeting chamber one could hear the flap of fingerling trout leaping in their tanks. People and other beasts provided carbon dioxide and food for the plants, which provided food and oxygen in return. Frogs and insects gobbled pests. Fish tanks absorbed the day's heat and gave it back at night, so the temperature varied only a few degrees from noon to midnight. The life of the place, like its shape, was a nest of circles.

A few days after Zuni's arrival, when Phoenix and Teeg
were returning with bundles of conifer seedlings dug from nearby slopes, he paused, studying the many-humped shelter, and said, “Do you ever worry it might just grow until it becomes a city?”

“Then keep on growing till we've built the Enclosure all over again?” said Teeg. Terra healing herself: she remembered Zuni's words.

“Don't you worry?”

“Sure, it could happen.” She twirled the bundle of seedlings, letting the rootlets, fine as hairs, whip against her throat. “Deep down maybe we all want to build an incorruptible world. Build utopia … heaven. That's what drove my father.”

“But how do we keep from shutting ourselves inside again?” asked Phoenix, obviously troubled. “You see, ever since the vigil at the lighthouse and Sol … I've been thinking, if he could let himself
go
like that, into the wilds, so peacefully, then I should be trusting enough to
live
here.”

“Then why're you so upset?”

“Because every time I go back inside the shelter I think how easy it would be to just
stay
there, like on a starship, and never come out.”

“The starship is a machine,” Teeg countered.

“And what about the colony?”

“It's an organism. Frogs and ferns and microbes. It breathes the air, takes in water and seaweed and dirt. All the doors invite you to walk outside. Everywhere we turn it reminds us we're part of earth.”

“I suppose so,” Phoenix muttered skeptically.

In exchange for the materials of life, the colonists repaid the land with mind, the attentions of consciousness. They had agreed early in their conspiracy to help reforest the nearby slopes, especially with nut trees and fruits and hardwoods, which would provide food and shelter for
beasts. Accordingly, three domes in the outer ring of the colony were fitted out as a tree nursery.

As soon as Zuni regained her strength, she made her way there to admire the bold twiggy shoots marked
walnut
and
cherry
. Teeg found her bent inquisitively over Phoenix, who was on his hands and knees planting apple seeds in an earthen flat. The snowy hair was knotted once more into a meticulous bun, and her cheeks, though sunken, were tinged with rose. Evidently she had put Phoenix at ease, for when Teeg arrived he was jabbering learnedly about the germination of appleseeds.

“It takes them so long?” Zuni mused. “Do you suppose they spend all that time thinking about the sun?”

Phoenix beamed up at her. “And about breaking into blossom.”

“I see you've made friends,” said Teeg, approaching them.

Phoenix balanced on his heels, fingers dingy with potting soil. “Zuni was telling me about her father's orchard.”

The older woman smiled a welcome. “Curious man, my father. He spent all day cutting down trees and most evenings tending the ones he had planted.”

Teeg had already heard about Zuni's ashen homecoming, so she could guess, from the bruised look around the other woman's mouth, that Zuni was remembering the valley of cinders.

“Curious man,” said Zuni, gazing vacantly. “All those trees. Gone.”

To draw her back, Teeg asked, “What do you think of our plans for reforesting?”

“Plans? Oh yes, for the trees. A splendid project. I only wish I could see well enough to tell a crabapple from a redwood.”

“Here, you can do these by feel,” Phoenix said, and he poured appleseeds, glittering like bits of fire, into Zuni's palm. She imitated his motions, poking a hole in the soil with her index finger, dropping in the seed, covering it over.
Her pleated face held a look of absolute concentration and delight.

Not wanting to disturb the rhythm of their work, Teeg stood by the outer wall of the nursery, watching a spider perfect its web in a clump of eelgrass. Patient architect, this spider, building nets in hopes the universe would fling some morsel its way. Teeg was reminded of her mother, who had been an architect in reverse, patiently dismantling buildings and entire cities, unweaving nets. The newsfax had even invented a word to describe her profession: Judith Passio—Anarchitect. The day she drowned in the Columbia, the obituary had been titled: FAMOUS ANARCHITECT ACCIDENT VICTIM IN WILDS. If she
had
drowned. For all Teeg knew, her mother had been lasered by the HP. Impulsively, she asked. “Do you suppose she really did?”