Terrarium (10 page)

“Home study,” she told him, returning with a scroll of microfilm. “The flora and fauna of the Oregon coast.” She tucked the scroll into a pocket of his moodgown. Tranquil green eyes considered him a moment. She was all there in her eyes, gathered up.

For parting, they touched palms as she had taught him. Flesh to flesh. The power flows more smoothly that way, she had said.

“Morning and night without fail,” he promised. He patted the lump in his gown where he had pocketed the drawings, those stick-figure caricatures of Teeg doing yoga.

“And remember,” was the last thing she told him, “when you do them, take off that tent, scrub the muck off your face and go naked.”

He meditated. He coaxed his body into limberness. He studied the microfilms of trees and rocks until his eyes grew bleary. Twice a week he went to her apartment for coaching and comfort.

“Don't try to make yourself into a noodle,” she warned, her fingers reading his stiff limbs like Braille. “The point is to learn to dwell in your body, find your center.”

Long after he had memorized the name of every plant in the terrarium, she made him stay back there in the blue-lit room, studying the miniature wilderness until each leaf and curving stem stood out in his memory.

“Watch until you disappear,” she urged him.

As usual, Phoenix did not understand what she meant. Feeling like a child learning a new alphabet, he pressed his nose against the glass terrarium and watched by the hour. Gradually he perceived how the leaves unfolded, as if each plant were a rivulet slowly seeping its trickle of green. He saw white roots groping into the dirt. Dirt. He still could not bring himself to touch it. Even the bits of shell and bark that
Teeg delighted in showing him made him uneasy. Poison and muck. If the healthers knew she had smuggled these bits of the wild inside, they would clap her in quarantine.

“Look,” she would say, handing him a milkweed pod or a sea-smoothed pebble. And he would juggle the gift in his palm as if it were a hot coal.

Sometimes his fear made her laugh. More often it made her frown, and her frown could make him feel as if he had lost the outer layer of his skin. “Trust the earth,” she scolded. “It's what we're made of.”

But the earth was hostile; he could not get over feeling that. Why else did we scramble up out of the sea, down out of the trees? he reasoned. Shelter in caves, build thatch huts, wrap ourselves in animal hide against the cold. Cave to cabin to city. And building the space colonies, enclosing ourselves inside the domes—wasn't that the next logical step?

Yet here was the terrarium in front of him, a patch of wildness, and it was surpassingly lovely.

From time to time, when he was studying the plants in her blue-lit room, Teeg would look in at the doorway and say, “Have you disappeared yet?” He never knew what to answer.

She gave him other microfilms to read—on ecology, on wilderness skills, on what she called the technology of survival. Because he was adept at grasping patterns, he soon understood the basics of nutrition and superconductivity, thermal shielding and coastal eco-systems and dozens of other subjects he had never dreamed of before meeting Teeg.

She loaned him the holograms she had made during her stay at Whale's Mouth. “Project them at home,” she explained, “so you can get the feel of wandering about in the wilds.”

With the holos mounted in his projector he could explore one slice of the bay at a time. At first the ghostly shapes frightened him, the vibrant ferns and grasses, the rocks and
water-birds, the disorder. They're only images, he kept reminding himself, mere concentrations of energy. But then what is anything in the universe, except a concentration of energy? Reaching out cautiously to stroke a fern, his hand merged with the plant's shadowy curve. His feet melted into the illusory sands underfoot. Where moisture seeped down over the black pockmarked face of the sea-cliff, there was a sumptuous green carpet. Moss, that was the name for it. But he could never touch that inviting softness. His outstretched hands found only air. Nor could he pick up the shells that glimmered iridescently on the beach.

One night he decided to leave the holos shining, to see if he could sleep amid these images of the wilds. He chose a beach segment and lay down well away from the water, beside a hummock of grass. Immobilized in the hologram, the grass blades were bent under the force of an onshore wind. The nearest wave was capped in a froth of white, frozen there at the peak of its curve. Overhead a gull hung motionless with parted beak.

Although he knew there was no danger in these phantoms, he wrestled for a long time on that imaginary beach before sleep came on. By morning the wave had not yet broken, the grasses had not unbent from the wind. No beast had pounced on him in the night.

After that he always slept among the phantom shapes of Whale's Mouth, advancing the projector each night, to display a new segment of the bay. While his body grew more limber from yoga and his mind grew clearer from meditation, the sweep of Oregon coastline was becoming as familiar to him as the miniature landscape in the terrarium.

Gradually he entrusted himself to the simulated wilds, he saw patterns in the ecology texts, and the planet came alive in his imagination. Studying global weather, he had always thought of Terra as a vast mechanism, a spaceship on which a single conscious species led a precarious existence. His teachers had spoken of the planet as an engineering
challenge: how do you make it yield the materials and conditions necessary for support of the human system? Nature was a warehouse; you went there when you needed something. Otherwise, you stayed inside the network of cities. Life on Terra—so the teachers and books and videos had assured him—was no different in principle from life on Luna or the orbiting colonies or the asteroid settlements. The engineering problems differed, there were differences in the degree of environmental hostility, and that was all.

Except for the odd museum specimen—a lump of sterilized rock or an insect embalmed in plastic—before Teeg showed him the terrarium he had never seen anything that had not been made by humans. Looking at the satellite images of Terra, it was hard to believe these weren't just electronic mirages, no more real than the photomurals continually parading across his wall. Only when a seatube developed leaks, or quakes split a dome and exposed a whole city to weather and infections, or O
₂
extractors failed and several thousand people suffocated (as had happened recently in Calcutta City), or the build-up of the anthro-toxins caused a massive die-off in a place like Brazil City—only then did nature seem tangible. Between catastrophes, nature could be safely forgotten.

Now when he closed his eyes he saw Terra whole, a sphere of green and brown and blue, a bubble afloat on the ocean of space, as Oregon City was afloat on an ocean of water.

“When are you going to quit pouring that junk into your body?” Teeg asked him one day, as he sat in his room with a steaming mug of narco beside him.

He dumped the brew down the sink. Within the next week he gave up all the rest of his chemmies: the wakers and dozers, the vim-pills, the breeze capsules. Bottle after bottle vanished down the recycling chute. For days his head threatened to split open, his brain clamored for the drugs.
At work he dozed over the monitors and at home he lay awake through the night, staring up at holographic stars. Revolts broke out in the nether regions of his body. Then gradually the pain subsided. He left off going to the gamepark or lightshows. He quit seeing his cronies from the office. There didn't seem much of anything to say to them. He wouldn't dare tell them about the wilderness that was sprouting inside him. He even gave up visiting the eros parlors, and desire backed up in him like a dammed river.

Now it was Teeg or nothing. She spoke with him and touched him, or refrained from touching him, according to her own rhythms. And Phoenix, who had never learned any other way of dealing with a woman except the mating rituals, struggled to read the meaning in her gestures.

Often when they meditated together, he seemed to feel a call from her, a reaching toward him, and he groped around clumsily in the spiritual darkness, but could not meet her. He imagined the two of them in that inward spirit-space like the halves of an arch leaning together, without quite joining.

Then one night he was peering into the terrarium, watching the snout of a fern break through the crust of soil. Teeg was humming one of her melodies in the next room. And suddenly the uncurling fern was his half of the arch, reaching out, reaching delicately out, far into the darkness, and it was met there, and the arch was joined and it spanned all the world.

When the moment passed he turned away from the terrarium and looked out through the doorway at Teeg. Only when he saw her face streaked with tears did he feel the tears on his own.

“So you disappeared?” she said gently.

Suddenly he understood. “Yes, yes I did.”

“And it was good?”

He bit his lower lip and nodded sharply. “What does it mean?”

“It doesn't mean anything. It just is, like sunshine.”

He considered that, trying to imagine sunshine, trying to imagine anything as potent as that delicate touching in the darkness. “Is the ingathering like that?”

“A little.”

“Will I be ready for it soon?”

“You're ready now,” she said.

12 June 2030
—
Willamette Valley

We have spent two days camped on Hardesty Mountain, waiting, because one of my glider-pilots swears he spied a deer grazing up here in a clearcut. Teeg and I hiked around the base of the mountain, searching for trails. At last we found the forked print of a deer hoof, only one print, as if the creature were not sufficiently alive to make a continuous trail.

So we camp beside the clearcut, binoculars aimed out over the field of stumps and blackberry vines and new-growth alder. At first Teeg won't be still, fidgets around and makes a racket. But on the second morning, as fog blankets the clearing, she sits quietly in my lap. “Will it come?” she whispers. “If it chooses,” I say.

And then a four-legged shadow glides from the shelter of the woods. A yearling doe, ears pricked forward cautiously, great brown eyes staring at us through the fog. Teeg grows still in my lap. I cannot even feel her breathe. We are one flesh, waiting. The doe takes a few more hesitant steps, bends down, snatches a bite of grass, then lifts her head alertly. The narrow jaws work side-to-side, grass dripping from the prim lips.

Then I can see the withered hind leg, the tumor on the belly. As genetic damage goes, she has come off lightly. At least she has survived for a year, which is rare enough. And she might bear young.

As the sun burns away the fog, the doe retreats, a hobbling ghost, into the forest. Teeg sighs deeply, and stirs in my arms.

“A deer,” she says. Her first, and I pray to God it is not her last.

Because
Zuni replied to each absurd speculation about her future with vague smiles and crooked answers, the media soon decided she was not the proper stuff of news. Her face vanished from the video, her name from the newsfax. Before long only her colleagues at the Institute and her few friends still wondered what was going on beneath that meticulous bun of white hair.

Even those friends could not pry the secret from her. Zuni had clutched it for so long that her will had sealed over it, like the bark of a tree grown around a nail.

Left in peace at last, Zuni holed up in her apartment to meditate, to gather strength for the journey, whenever it might begin. She had set events in motion, but now they had run their own course. To be ready when the break came, if the break came, that was all she could hope. Only let it be soon, soon.

Meanwhile there were the records to keep. Instead of checking weekly on the movements of the conspirators—the
ones who called themselves seekers, such a quaint name—now she checked daily. On her info terminal she would punch the code for Jurgen or Teeg or one of the others, and within moments the Security cyber would inform her of the person's current work assignment, itinerary, health status, credit balance and the like. Writing with a pen, one of the anachronisms which gave her pleasure, she then noted on file cards whatever seemed like new information. Under Sol's name, for example, recent cards showed the increasing frequency of his visits to the C-clinic, and then his abrupt refusal to accept any more synthetic organs. Apparently his lung cancer was galloping out of control. He would be urgent to escape. Hinta and Jurgen must also have been feeling urgent, for their cards showed they had spent their credit balance nearly down to zero, mostly for tools. For the first time in several cycles, Arda had skipped the fetal implant. Pressures for escape were building up in several other members of the crew. This discovery was what had prompted Zuni to announce her retirement, to make herself ready.

Over the years she had kept such records for hundreds of people. In each of those lives she had scented a whiff of rebellion. One person might have been nostalgic for a youth spent blasting canals through the Amazon rainforest. Another, like Jurgen, might once have fought against the Enclosure as a wilderness guerrilla. Dozens of these restless ones merely suffered from urbophobia. Whenever she could, Zuni had nudged these rebels into contact with one another, while remaining careful to seem no more than a casual friend.

Now all but nine of those hundreds of names had been struck through with black ink. Beside many of the canceled names she had written,
NATURAL DEATH
. Many others bore the legend,
SUICIDE
. Beside most she had written,
CONFORMED TO SYSTEM
or
ISOLATED
.

For each of the remaining names there was a stack of
cards. Zuni kept them hidden in the battered tin box she had used as a child, back in the 1980s, to carry her lunch to school. Hints of rocketships showed through scratches on the lid. The cards themselves, yellowed now with age, dated from the era when cybers were still referred to as computers and when computers still punched some of their findings onto flimsy cardboard. Brittle, multiply-knotted rubber bands held the cards in their nine bunches.