Terrarium (6 page)

“Very well.” Again the measured pause, the scrutiny by an eyeless face. “Infection from the outside is the gravest remaining threat to the human system. You do not wish to report?”

“Not at the present time.”

Only when the mechano vanished from the screen did Phoenix realize that he had been addressing it in polite mode, with face turned at right angles, eyes lowered, body rigid, as if this machine, animated and sightless, were the most appealing of human strangers. Two weeks without Teeg, and already the web of inhibitions was tightening around him again.

The messages he left on her answering tape all made the same plea:
Call Phoenix Marshall immediately upon arriving. His sanity at stake.

When she finally did appear it was not on the screen but at his door, hood thrown back to reveal an unkempt blaze of red hair, face bare of paint, yet reddened in a way he had never seen before. It was like having a bomb delivered. Phoenix hastened her inside before the neighbors caught sight of her.

“I hate those things,” she explained, pointing a finger with a broken nail at his phone.

“How did you like the seminar?” he asked her carefully.

“I never went to Alaska City.”

Watching her pad familiarly about his room, Phoenix looked for some taint of wilderness on her. Her wrists and
ankles, escaping from the cuffs of her haphazard gown, seemed to be the same uncanny shade of red as her face. Did the sun do that? Her smell ran like a fire in his nostrils. He sensed a lightness in her movements, a thinning of gravity, as she sniffed at a bowl of protein pellets.

“Ugh.” She grimaced.

“So where did you go?” he said.

She yielded him a faint smile. “Away.”

“Outside? For two weeks?”

“Whale's Mouth Bay, to be precise. Look.” From the pouch in her gown she tugged the map, now rumpled from many foldings. Squatting cross-legged on the floor, she spread the polyfilm across her lap and eagerly pointed where he expected her to point, at the blue finger of ocean that hooked into the Oregon coast about 44°.

“I guessed that was the place Mother and I used to go. And it was. The water's colder than I remembered, and the beach is narrower, but it's lovely.”

“You were there all by yourself? With the beasts and poisons?”

“The only beasts are a few bedraggled sea lions and gulls.”

A parade of childhood pictures began streaming through his mind. “You saw actual sea lions?”

“Not only saw them—smelled them. And the rock flowers! The spray! You've got to come see.”

And so she went on for an hour, for two hours, in a delirium of talk, tracing her explorations on the map, pulling at his hands as if to lead him there that very moment, looking up occasionally to read his face. Unable to halt the parade of visions from his own childhood, Phoenix kept himself turned away. The desire he felt for her, and the dread, swelled to encompass the sea lions, the fossils, the slender ferns she told him of in her enraptured voice.

“Fossils!” she cried, as if this single word should convince him to share the delirium with her. “Leaves and ferns and even—once—a three-toed footprint between the
layers of slate. And in the shallows of a great drowsy river I found some reedy things growing that Mother used to call cattails. Isn't that a name? And birds! Why doesn't video ever show any landscape with birds—or even with trees? Oh, just come look!” And she grasped both his hands in hers and tried to dance him round the room. But his legs would not bend, his whole body was rigid with the effort of containing his inner tumult. He wrenched his hands free.

“Teeg, you've got to promise never to go outside again.”

She laughed once, harshly. “Dream on. Haven't you been listening to me?”

“You can't recreate that old world. You can't crawl back into your mother's lap. All that's finished.”

“I don't need to create anything. It's all there, waiting. All I have to do is walk into it.”

“To a brutal death.”

Stretching her arms wide, she spun in a circle, gown and hair aswirl. “You see any wounds?” He shrugged, avoiding her stare. But she danced sideways until he was facing her again, looking into her inflamed eyes. “Hasn't your body taught you anything after all these months of walking? We were
made
to live out there, shaped to it. Look,” she said, her voice softening, “just think about it. People've been inside—what? twenty-four, twenty-five years? Not even a generation. And before that humans lived outside for how long? Millions of years.”

“In misery, sickness, and constant fear.”

“Not always, not everywhere. Some people lived truly, handsomely.”

“So tell me about Eden.”

“Forget myths. I'm talking about real communities of people, living outside in harmony and simplicity. Listen, some of us want to try it, try making a place out there—”

“You can't go back.”

“Who said anything about going back? I'm talking about going forward.”

“No!” He clapped hands over ears, frightened by what she was offering.

“Phoenix, please listen—”

“No no no!”

When at last he looked up, she was gone, the door standing open. On the threshold rested a small gray parallelogram of stone. Stooping warily over it, he could see the faint imprint of a leaf in the surface—or perhaps it was a fern; it had been many years since he had looked at pictures of plants. With a tablemat he scooped up the stone, held it near his face. There was a faint smell of damp. The tiny veins of the leaf formed a riotous maze of intersecting lines that reminded him of the map's labyrinth of rivers. Had it been decontaminated? Where had she found it, in what mire out there? For a long time he hesitated, fingers poised a few centimeters above the stone. And then at last he touched the mazy indentation, gingerly, so as not to injure himself. The delicate lines of the fossil proved hard, harder than his cautious fingers.

The stone felt cold in his palm, slick with perspiration, as he shifted from foot to callused foot before her door. That was her doing, the calluses, the twitching in his legs, the lust for escape. Passengers streamed by on the pedbelts, slashing him with their glances as he debated what to do. But he ignored them, and that also was her doing. Should he report her, get her wilder-license revoked, then try coaxing her into sanity again? Could he betray her that way? Or should he let her make those journeys outside, each one longer, until, one day, she failed to return? Could he actually go out there with her?

His heart raced faster than it ever had from their walking or stair-climbing.

At last he rang, and the door clicked open. For the first time he entered her lair, smelling her, but unable to see anything in the dim light. He groped his way forward. “Teeg?”

“In here.”

Her voice came from a second room, visible only as a vertical streak of blue light where the door stood ajar. With halting steps, hands raised to fend off obstacles, Phoenix picked his way through the darkness toward the blue slither of light. As he approached, the door eased open, forcing him to shield his eyes from the brightness. Swimming in the wash of blue was Teeg's silhouette, not naked, surely, but with arms and legs distinctly outlined. Was she in her working gear, a shimmersuit?

“I found this,” he said, reaching the fossil toward her in his open palm.

“That was for you to keep,” she snapped. “A gift for parting.”

“I didn't come to return it. I came to have you read it for me—tell me what it means—tell me—I don't know.” He halted in confusion. The hard edge of her voice, the blue glare, the inner turmoil made his eyes water. “You've got to be patient with me.”

“So you'll have time enough to file that infection alert?”

“I didn't mean for you to see that.”

“No, I'll bet you didn't.”

“I won't file it. I can't.”

She studied him. “Why did you get it in the first place?”

“I just wanted to keep you,” he stammered.

“What do you mean, keep me?”

“Keep you safe, keep you inside.”

“Well I won't be kept inside, you hear me? Not by you or the health board or
anybody
.”

His eyes still watered, but he could make out her swift movements as she paced about the room gathering vials and cassettes and food capsules into a massive carrycase. It was a shimmersuit she wore, silvered to reflect sunlight, clinging to her like a second skin to allow for work on the outside. The disclosure of her body embarrassed him. Even in stage ten of the mating ritual he had never seen a woman so exposed.

“Where are you going?” he demanded.

“I'm not waiting here to be arrested.”

“You're not going back outside?”

“Eventually. A few of us together, back to the wilds, home.” She slammed the carrycase on the floor. “What do you think I've been wooing you for, you colossal idiot? We wanted a few more people, to build a little colony.” A shove from her boot sent the case skidding across the floor. “So when you came out walking I thought maybe you wanted your body back. Maybe you wanted out of the bottle.”

“You never told me.”

“I didn't want to spell it out. I wanted you to hunger for the wilds the way I do.” Her anger drove her prowling back and forth in front of him. Beyond her, directly under the hanging blue lamps, he could see a glass tank filled with a writhing mat of green. Plants? In the city? Her angry stalking drew his eyes away.

“But how can I want what I've never had?” he protested. “This is all I know.” With outspread arms he gestured to indicate the floating city, the thousands of miles of travel tubes, and the dozen other cities he had lived in or visited, always inside, always insulated from the beast world.

She stopped her prowling in front of him. In the clinging shimmersuit her body trembled like quicksilver. Her stare no longer made him wince. And he noticed her eyes were almost the same gray-green color as the slate he still held stupidly in his hand. “All you know,” she murmured, grasping him by a wrist. “Then come look at this.”

She led him to the glass tank, drew him down to kneel with her and peer through the translucent wall. Inside was an explosion of tendrils, petals, stems, dangling frail seed pods, fierce blossoms like concentrations of fire, all of it in greens and browns and reds so vibrant they made Phoenix tremble. His eyes hunted for a leaf that would match the fossil she had given him, while his thumb searched out the delicate imprint in the stone. But there was too much
activity in this amazing green stillness for him to see anything clearly.

“It's a terrarium,” Teeg said. “A piece of the earth.”

He ran his fingers along the glass wall, expecting to feel heat radiating from these intense creatures. But the tank was cool, sealed on all sides. “They're alive?”

She laughed at what she saw in his face. “Of course they're alive. That's dirt, the brown stuff.”

“But how—closed in like that?”

“Wise little beasts, aren't they?” And she used the word
beasts
tenderly, as he had never heard it used before. “There's your chaos,” she said. “That's what you're saving me from.”

Phoenix started to protest that this was only a tiny fragment of the earth, without animals, without tornadoes or poisons or viruses, without winters. But his tongue felt heavy with astonishment. His eyes would not move from this miniature wilderness, at once so disorderly and so harmonious.

“Well,” she said, her fingers tightening on his wrist, “will you go?”

“I might,” he answered. And then, uncertainly, “I will.”

1 July 2028
—
Whale's Mouth Bay

There is a humbleness in stones, a patience, a yielding to weather and to the restlessness of earth. Teeg gathers them by the bucketfuls, stooping low over the gravel bed so her little bottom rises like a peach. The sun turns her a warm sienna hue. When a stone amazes her, she brings it in her muddy palm for me to admire. Look, Mommy, another miracle!

Together we study fossils, cracking the slate with a hammer. She thumbs through my old ragged field guide for pictures that match what we find in the hearts of rocks. We walk around on so many thicknesses of history.

More and more I feel like a fossil myself, squeezed beneath the enormous burden of the future—at least what Gregory assures me is the inevitable future, the life shut up inside the antiseptic human system, life barricaded from what he calls the beast world. The Enclosure Act is not even two years old, and already the resistance movements are broken.

Soon there will be no one left outside except the sick and the vicious and the mad.

I only have Anchorage and Vancouver left to dismantle, and the small coastal cities in Oregon, and then my commission expires. “If you refuse to come in when the work is finished,” Gregory warns, “if you insist on reverting to bestiality, you still must deliver my daughter to Oregon City.” “Teeg stays with me,” I insist. “The Enclosure Act, the health board—” he huffs at me, but I break contact and his voice withers away.

The stain on this page comes from Teeg's muddy paw, plumped down here to display a treasured fossil. I make no attempt to wipe it clean.

While
friends and journalists speculated about her plans for the future, Zuni quietly went on severing the ties that bound her to the Enclosure. She delivered the last of her scheduled lectures (on the psychology of disembodied mind), speaking as usual for two hours, without notes, holding the audience spellbound, and then she declined all further engagements. She resigned from boards of directors, task forces, committees.

For the better part of a month she sorted through her files, assigning to the archives whatever she thought might be of use to future planners, piping the rest to recycle. There were sixty years' worth of blueprints here, beginning with plans for a ten-kilometer-square greenhouse she had designed at sixteen. Even so large a greenhouse, she had discovered, would not sustain a complex eco-system. Trees might thrive in it, but hawks could not. And if she altered the design to accommodate hawks, the ferns might die. Cyber simulations taught her that the smallest environment capable of
sustaining a continent's menu of life would be the size of the continent itself.