Terrarium (30 page)

Phoenix
was a welcome sight as he came plodding through the avenues of roses, loaded down with two packs like some long-suffering donkey. Seeing him toil past the goldfish pools and over the Japanese bridge, Teeg felt a great tenderness. Love for her had tugged him up the brick path from the river, as it had tugged him from Oregon City and Jonah Colony. Could she stretch his love so thin it would snap? What if one time she ran away and he didn't follow?

Three hours of quarreling with her mother had left her so upset that she could only manage to offer a numb greeting when Phoenix reached the front steps. The stranger who wore her mother's face greeted him with open hostility. Vile offspring of the Enclosure, her mother had called him. But how could she look at Phoenix and find him hateful?

Teeg motioned him to a rocking chair and served him tea, ignoring her mother's withering stare. For a long spell only the rockers made any noise as the three of them sat on the porch, sipping from cups of translucent china, looking out
over the formal gardens. What little there was to say, after seventeen years of absence, Teeg and her mother had already said.

When Teeg had come dashing up the walkway three hours earlier, her mother had greeted her without surprise. There was no weeping, no embrace, merely a cold, “Hello, my daughter.” The thirteen others who lived in the patchwork house were off working in fields or lumbermill or brick kiln. “To protect them from contamination,” Judith had explained bluntly. She alone had waited for Teeg, knowing about the trip down river, about Jonah Colony, about the escape from Oregon City. She knew all this thanks to the one piece of technology in the house that was less than two centuries old—an antique solar receiver, which monitored HP surveillance broadcasts.

Horrified, Teeg had asked, “The HP are watching us?”

Her mother seemed pleased to deliver the news. “Oh, yes. They located you three days after your supposed accident at sea.”

“But why haven't they arrested us?”

“Why bother?” There was a disturbing remoteness about this woman, bonneted and gowned like a wax figure in a museum. “You're nonentities. We all are. So long as we leave the Enclosure alone, we don't matter to them.”

“And this house … ?”

“They've been observing me since 2035.”

“And that's why you quit calling me?”

Judith smiled faintly. “Exactly. By keeping quiet, I am permitted to live out here like any other dumb beast.”

Teeg felt the betrayal like a slap. “You let me believe you were dead?”

“Better that than quarantine,” Judith answered tranquilly.

Nothing Teeg said could upset her composure. It was as if, living in a house patched together from pieces of nineteenth-century mansions, tending sheep and milking
goats and laboring for hours at a hand loom, she had withdrawn in feeling as well as time from the world Teeg inhabited.

Now, three hours after that chilly meeting, Phoenix sat between them with the fragile teacup balanced in his hands. He looked from one to the other, seeking an explanation for their bitter silence. “Did you build this place all by yourself?” he asked hesitantly.

When it seemed clear she was not going to answer, Teeg said sharply, “It won't hurt you to talk with him.”

Judith sighed. “In the beginning, yes, I worked alone.” She rocked as she spoke, her voice carrying that faint rustiness one sometimes heard among returned space colonists. “By and by other exiles drifted through, labored on the mansion a while, then drifted away or gave up the ghost. There are fourteen of us now.”

“Gave up the ghost?” said Phoenix.

Teeg translated: “Died.”

“Of what?”

Once again Judith sighed, as if speaking to this cityman were a terrible labor. “Infections, bites, exposure. Cancer, mostly.”

“You have no medicines?”

“Herbs, yes, and ointments.” Judith studied him from beneath the awning of her bonnet. “But you mean—what is your word?—chemmies, don't you? Manufactured poisons. Those are available only from the Enclosure, and it is far better to die than to have any dealings with that place.” She eyed him contemptuously. “If you were not hopelessly contaminated yourself, you would understand that without being told.”

“Mother, you promised,” cried Teeg.

“It's all right, child.” Judith drew her lips tight, regaining her composure. “Soon he will go back to his own kind and you will stay here where you belong.”

She seemed intent on this madness. In those hours before
Phoenix came laboring up the hill like a donkey, she had outlined Teeg's future. The returning daughter would exchange her shimmersuit for a woolen dress and linen bonnet, discard her watch and detector belt, seat herself at a loom. When Phoenix arrived, she would send him away, back to Jonah Colony with his gear and his corrupting city habits. “Send him away?” Teeg had replied incredulously. “I see your years in the Enclosure are not so quickly scrubbed off,” Judith had said. “Therefore I will give you the length of the afternoon to get rid of your cityman.”

Perched on the front of his chair, still balancing the teacup as if, tipping, it might explode, Phoenix groped for something polite to say. “You must have hunted all over to get the parts for this old house.”

“While I was dismantling Portland,” Judith answered coldly, “I had the foresight to store building materials and books and various items of furniture up here in Washington Park.”

“Tools and nails and everything?”

“No nails. There is no metal anywhere in this house, and no plastic.”

Phoenix twisted round to gaze in through the parlor window. Teeg recognized in his movements the same eager curiosity that had driven him onto the pedbelt months ago to talk with her. “Do you suppose I could … see the place?”

The gaunt figure rocked several times, as if weighing his request. Then she stood up and pronounced, with a note of distaste, “Very well. But you will not be able to appreciate our life.”

“I'm used to ignorance,” Phoenix said, rising and handing Teeg the treacherous cup. “I'm an expert at failing to understand.”

Teeg had already toured the house, but she followed them anyway, fearing what her mother might say to Phoenix. In the entryway hatracks and umbrella stands flanked a moonfaced
grandfather clock. The ornate hands proclaimed ten o'clock, and thus were either five hours slow or nineteen hours fast. The parlor was crowded with overstuffed couches and chairs, their velvet upholstery neatly patched. A threadbare carpet spread its faint purple design over the floor. A ponderous oak table, gleaming with oil, occupied the dining room. Unlit tallow candles leaned from wooden sockets on the walls. In the kitchen a fire seethed beneath an iron pot. Mutton stew, her mother explained. Except for the pots, everything visible was of wood or stone, including the sink and counters and the trough that fed water from a spring. Bundles of weeds hung upside down from the rafters. The other ground-floor rooms were filled with potters' wheels, looms, heaps of wool in various stages of preparation, woodworking benches, and other primitive equipment which Teeg did not recognize and Judith would not bother to identify.

The interior of the house was as much a patchwork as the exterior. Doorways shrank or expanded from one room to the next. The flooring was a crazyquilt of shapes and colors. The wall paneling and stairway spindles changed pattern several times on the way to the first floor.

In an upstairs bedroom, where oil lamps and potted ferns and doilies occupied every flat surface, the handmade dress and bonnet intended for Teeg hung limply from a bedpost. Seeing them, she felt a panicky desire to run outside into the woods. Her mother passed over them in silence.

On the third floor were a north-lighted studio and a library. Easels held half-finished copies of antique drawings—knights astride muscular horses, maidens cradling infants. The bookshelves were filled with guides to horticulture, bee-keeping, wood-heat. Among works of literature, Teeg recognized no title more recent than Rousseau's
La Nouvelle Héloïse
—a pastoral romance, three centuries old. For that matter, hardly anything in the house seemed to date from a time more recent than 1800. She remembered her
mother proclaiming that the steam engine and railroad had corrupted the earth. So why not turn history backward until those fearful inventions—and every other premonition of the Enclosure—had been erased?

When Phoenix, marveling at the leather-bound books, reached out to finger one, Judith warned, “You will touch nothing in this house.” His hand snapped back as if singed.

By means of a spiral staircase they mounted through the roof into a watchtower. Teeg had been surprised, on first visiting this room, to find it strung with antenna wires, to hear the blather of a receiver, and to see a crude telescope aimed out one window. “Our one concession to modern technology,” Judith had explained, nodding at the electronic device, “so we can listen for our enemies.” This time, with Phoenix along, she made no explanations, merely standing back with arms crossed over her chest and one hand on each shoulder, as if guarding herself from the devilish influence of this cityman. She had informed Teeg that none of the others who lived in the mansion would return until Phoenix was gone. “You wouldn't expose your disciples to a leper, would you?”
Disciples
? The word left Teeg deeply troubled.

Even without the telescope, one could see from the tower all the way down to the watermill. Trotting along that brick walkway, buoyed up by hopes of finding her mother, Teeg had not realized what a climb it was. Now she felt as heavy as Mt. Hood, which shimmered in the distance. Clouds had sliced away the mountain's base; its peak seemed to hover in mid-air, like an intruder from the underworld, a mountain of the mind.

“Now you've seen everything,” Judith said to Phoenix, “but have you understood anything?”

Not waiting for an answer, she led the way back down the spiral stairs. Through one of the staircase windows Teeg spied several figures ambling between outbuildings. Three or four looked to be men, dressed in gray cloaks with full
beards and hats as broad as their shoulders. Another three appeared to be women in dark flapping gowns, their faces shadowed under bonnets and hair swinging in braids down to their waists. The panicky, smothering sensation rose in her.

When Phoenix paused to look as well, Judith blocked his view. “Keep your eyes from them,” she said harshly. He flinched as if struck.

Teeg was furious with her mother. “Do you think he's a wizard, to hurt them with a look?”

Judith turned a calm and queenly face to her. “You must go change clothes, then give your metallic garment and all your city gadgets to this man. He has seen that you will live comfortably here, and now he must go back to his own kind.”

His face twisted in confusion, Phoenix backed down the stairs.

“He's not going away,” Teeg cried. “We're partners … joined together.”

“He is diseased.”

“With what?”

“With the Enclosure.”

“But I keep telling you, that's superstition. He's come into the wilds, hasn't he?”

“Yes, and if we let him stay here, he will soon have machines roaring and domes rising and the same calamity will befall us again.”

By now Phoenix had descended to the ground floor. Teeg could hear him dragging the rucksacks across the porch. “Phoenix!” she called. “Wait, I'll make her understand!” She ran downstairs in time to see him vanish among the roses, the packs scuffing behind him like corpses. She cupped hands about her mouth to call again. But remembering the baffled look on his face she knew he would not come back, and so she let her arms fall and kept still.

In a moment her mother's icy voice crept over her from
behind. “Good riddance. Now go take off those city things.”

“Mother … listen, I can't understand what's …”

“You are home, my daughter. You will obey me.”

“He's a harmless, gentle person,” Teeg insisted.

“He has lived all his life inside the Enclosure.”

“And I've lived half mine there.”

“With your robot father and that Zuni woman.”

“So does that make me diseased?”

Judith studied her dispassionately, as if examining a patient. “I cannot be sure yet.”

Teeg was too shocked to reply. From the first chilling encounter on the porch, when her mother had refused to embrace her because of the shimmersuit, Teeg had prayed that the suspicion would be temporary. A chasm had opened between them in seventeen years, but surely it could be spanned. Wasn't this the same woman who had taken her hunting for seashells, taught her to wait patiently for deer, filled her with love of the wilds? How can she fear me? Teeg wondered. Yet at every turn of the afternoon Judith revealed deeper and deeper layers of dread, a dread of the city as profound as any citygoer's dread of the wilds. Each detail of the house, the gardens, her clothes, even the studiously antiquated language she spoke was a denial of the Enclosure. She was trying to erase the last three hundred years, and would tolerate nothing which reminded her of that banished epoch.

Almost despairing, Teeg forced herself to keep talking, for fear her mother would regard silence as acquiescence. “If we stayed a few days, so you could see how harmless he is …”

“He will not stay even one night within walking distance of this house,” Judith announced firmly.

“But what can he hurt?”

“My disciples have their orders.”

Images of the dark-robed figures lurked in Teeg's mind. “To do what?”

Seated once again in her rocker, Judith swayed easily. “To see that your cityman and his paraphernalia are in the river before sunset. Whether he goes willingly or not.”

There was no sign of Phoenix above the fountaining arches of the rose bushes. Could he hear them from there? Lowering her voice, Teeg said, “You're so filled with hate I don't recognize you.”