Terrarium (11 page)

After withdrawing from the institute, Zuni would squat on the floor of her apartment with the cards circled about her like the rayflowers of a daisy. Stack by stack she thumbed through them. Her handwriting, always tidy, had grown larger over the years as her eyesight failed. She could no longer make out the earliest entries. But she did not need to, for she knew the details of those nine histories, knew about Arda's exhausting career as a host-mother, Hinta's work as a spiritual healer, Sol's exploits as a saboteur of Fourth World breeder reactors (hence the cancer?), and all the rest.

Teeg's history she recalled most vividly of all, for Zuni had known her since Gregory forced the thirteen-year-old girl to move inside the Enclosure.

“So you're helping Father shut everybody inside here?” the young Teeg had said at that first encounter.

“Helping build the Enclosure, yes,” Zuni admitted.

“Then you're wicked,” the girl announced. Tanned from traveling outside with her mother, lower lip thrust sullenly out, green eyes alight with anger, this girl would not be tamed easily to life inside the Enclosure. And Gregory never had tamed his daughter, in part because, whenever he traveled to building-sites, he left her with Zuni. And Zuni fed her wildness.

“Why does everybody inside here get costumed up?” the girl might ask.

“Perhaps they regard the body as a stubborn beast,” Zuni would reply, “an ugly donkey in need of disguise.”

“Do you agree with that?”

“Have you ever seen me paint my face or stuff my head into a wig?”

And that little heresy would be stored away inside the red-haired skull.

Often Teeg asked her what she remembered of life outdoors, particularly in Oregon, where Judith Passio still lived. And then Zuni would tell her about rafting on the McKenzie River, about the sheep scattered like furry cobblestones across the Willamette Valley, about the ocean gnawing holes through rocks at Cape Perpetua. The girl's eyes swelled with longing.

“Of course, as toxins built up and erosion grew worse,” Zuni was careful to explain, “the sheep died out. And you wouldn't dare climb into a river without a suit.”

“But earlier, when everything was green and growing, you loved the place, didn't you?”

“Oh,” Zuni hedged, “it had its beauties.”

“So if you loved it,” Teeg once asked her, “how come you got yourself into this city-building business? Why didn't you just hide away out there somewhere, the way Mother did?”

“Someday I'll explain that to you,” Zuni answered.

The time for explaining was put off from year to year, and Teeg eventually gave up asking. For a long time after Teeg moved inside, the mother kept sending messages: flee the city, come back to me. Gregory intercepted most of them, but not all, and every message reaching Teeg made her more sullen and aloof.

“If only the woman were erased,” Gregory speculated, “the child would be content to stay inside.”

Soon afterwards, he announced that his wife had died while trying to escape the health patrollers, and he begged Zuni to tell the girl.

“Has she been killed off for real, or for convenience?” Zuni asked.

Gregory blinked his faceted, otherworldly eyes at her and repeated the story, word-for-word, like a script.

Skeptical, Zuni postponed delivering the news. But when the messages stopped arriving, Teeg—then seventeen and shrewd—demanded of her:

“Something's happened to my mother, hasn't it?”

“They say she's killed herself,” Zuni answered carefully.

“Mother
?
”

And then Zuni recounted the story: how the patrol glider swooped down over Judith Passio's wooden shack in the ruins of Portland, loudspeakers intoning directions, stun-light beamed at the hovel's doorway, until the woman burst through a back window, stumbled over the city's rubble, glider kiting overhead in pursuit, stun-light arcing charge after charge into her, slowing her down, dazing her, so she was clawing along on her belly when she wriggled over an embankment into the Columbia River.

“Drowned?”

“So they say. Officially, it was suicide.” Zuni drew a cautious smile. “Resisting health arrest is generally suicide.”

The girl looked as stunned as the mother in the tale was supposed to have been. Was it only a tale?

“And unofficially?” asked Teeg.

Zuni raised her eyebrows, but kept silent.

“Murder,” the girl concluded bitterly. The green fire in her eyes burned more fiercely than ever.

Gregory did not have to suffer his child's bitterness for long. His own drowning occurred soon after. Zuni was left to inform Teeg of this death as well.

“What was he doing in Alaska?” Teeg asked without any show of emotion.

“Overseeing the construction of a new float city,” Zuni explained.

Now Teeg smiled grimly. “Served him right. Frozen brain drowned in a frozen sea.”

The cruelty of the ignorant, Zuni thought. And for one of the few times in her dealings with Teeg she let her impatience show. “That is a callous thing to say.”

“He was a callous man.”

“Your father helped save billions of people from eco-death.”

“He murdered my mother!”

“The health patrol was on a routine sterilizing mission.”

“Then his ideas murdered her! Him and his obsession with transcendence. He couldn't stand knowing she was out there. He was always terrified of germs and dirt, scared of clouds, bugs. His ideal was pure consciousness floating in a vacuum.”

“Those yearnings are ancient, Teeg. Your father didn't invent them. Where do you think the dreams of angels come from, the creatures without flesh? And Nirvana? And all those visions of heavenly cities filled with spirit and light?”

By this point Teeg was not listening. She swept Zuni's words aside with a wave of her fist. This was a private grudge, and she would not have it diluted with talk of history. “No, he didn't invent them. He had lots of help—from people like you. You're just as much to blame for this”—sobbing, arms flung wide to smash the whole city with her grief—“this
bottle
as he is. And for Mother's death.”

“If believing that makes it easier for you,” Zuni answered with a forced calmness, “then go ahead and believe it.”

“I do! I do!” Teeg cried. “And don't try to wrap it up in your cool reasons and sympathy and pretty memories. Keep that for someone else.”

Zuni swallowed her grief that day. Living a masquerade, she had to remain silent when her sham identity was mistaken for her true one. It was many weeks before Teeg came back for a visit, and then it was only to ask, sullenly, that Zuni nominate her for a job as troubleshooter. Zuni was
glad to help, because she had already directed many restless ones into the repair corps. Several years into this job, a svelte woman of twenty-three, Teeg came back once more to ask Zuni's help in applying for the status of master troubleshooter.

“Do you swear you mean no harm to anyone inside the Enclosure?” Zuni demanded. “You would never abuse the master security clearance?” She studied the young woman's rebellious eyes with an expert's knowledge of deceit.

“I swear,” Teeg replied.

Zuni signed the form. On the application she wrote: “Judge this candidate by her father, one of our greatest shelterminds, not by her renegade mother.”

The signature of Zuni Franklin evidently charmed Security, for they granted a master's pass to this daughter of a wildergoer.

On one of Teeg's rare visits in the following years, Zuni planted a last seed of cunning: “Your mother was foolish to stay in the wilds alone, without allies or equipment or medicine. She was a fool to live in the infected ruins of a city, right where the health patrol would stumble over her. If she'd chosen some clean, secret place, and some resourceful companions, she might still be alive out there.”

“Still alive?”

To Zuni, the slender young woman, defiantly barefaced and free-haired, looked more intense than ever, more charged with the passion of revolt. “Who knows?” said Zuni.

Meanwhile a few of Zuni's rebels, the ones who smelled to her of discontent, had joined together in a repair crew. Into that same crew she nudged Teeg, and then stepped back to await the results.

The results were arrayed about her now on the floor of the apartment, in these stacks of cards. Teeg's stack was filled with brief references to those long-ago heretical conversations. The other eight records were less painful to Zuni.
Together they formed a constellation. Others might have acquired the same information about them, since most of it was available on the cybernet, but only Zuni knew what pattern to seek. They were a repair crew who did their job quickly and well. True, they kept their bodies fit, but that was a condition for survival in their work. They were fanatically committed to one another, and they shared some patched-together religion; but that was common among repair crews and health patrollers and security squads, among all those who faced the dangers of the wilds. No, there was nothing outwardly suspicious about these nine.

You had to know what questions to ask about their past, what patterns to look for in their present movements, before you could see the outlines of a conspiracy. You had to look even more shrewdly to detect the separate lives meshing together toward a crisis. Zuni prayed the conspiracy and crisis were real, and not simply her invention. She had already staked on that hunch what little future remained to her.

3 March 2031
—
Anchorage

Between the cold and poisons, my dismantling crew suffers terribly. We erect portadomes over each wrecking site, we pipe in air and water from the Enclosure, but still people fall ill every day. The buildings themselves, the rusting furniture, the pavements, everything is contaminated, and no filter yet devised will guard a person entirely. The medics report fevers, skin rashes, vomiting, breakdowns in the nervous system. Eight deaths so far, six of them men, who appear to succumb more readily than women.

Teeg remains healthy, except for an occasional worrying bout of dizziness. Three more years until she reaches breeding age—and then what?

On his vidcalls Gregory quizzes her about mathematics,
doubtless trying to prove that I am not teaching her adequately. When Zuni Franklin comes on the screen, she's likelier to ask the child what mosses she has found, or whether the Chinook salmon are still spawning in the Susitna River.

In
boots and hoods and ankle-flapping capes, with masks drawn close to hide their faces, Teeg and Phoenix walked among the circular oil stains of the tank farm. Behind them, the gamepark flung its riotous colors toward the night-darkened dome, and farther behind, near the city center, buildings heaped up in pyramids and honeycombs of light. Ahead of them loomed the dark knobby shapes of the few remaining oil tanks.

“What if I can't—” Phoenix began.

Teeg shushed him quickly. “You
can.
Now be still and keep your mind centered. No doubts. You've got to be clear.”

They passed between two partly-demolished tanks. Where lasers had cut through the triple-hulled walls, cauterized edges gleamed with a dull luster. This might be the last ingathering here, Teeg realized, for the wreckers were gnawing their way each week nearer to the tank where the seekers met. The pipeline leading from here to the mountains near Whale's Mouth Bay had already been
severed. Phoenix had to pass the test tonight, for there might not be another chance.

Teeg climbed the ladder first, feet quiet on the rungs, and when Phoenix joined her on the roof of the tank she motioned for him to slip off his gown and streetmask. They added their garments to the pile beside the entrance valve, pried off their boots. Turning, with Phoenix between her and the distant glow of the gamepark, she could see for the first time his actual shape, hugged in the fabric of his shimmersuit. The months of training had drawn his body tight. She touched him lightly on the chest, felt the quiver of muscle, then trailed her fingers downward over ribs to his waist.

“I'm afraid,” he whispered.

“Of course.”

Through her bare feet she sensed the hum of voices in the tank below. As she cranked the valve open the hum grew louder, then separated into distinct and familiar voices. Jurgen's gruff baritone, Hinta's soothing purr, Sol's gasping with the sound of blood in it. They were discussing Phoenix, wondering aloud if his light would merge with theirs.

“You follow me,” she whispered to him. “And relax, keep yourself clear.”

His silhouette blocked out a man-shaped chunk of inner-city lights. “But am I ready? Maybe I need more—”

“You're
ready.”

She lowered her feet through the cold jaws of the valve, swung down from handhold to handhold. Before her feet kissed the floor the voices hushed. She bowed deeply. Grave faces nodded at her: the lovely rainbow shades of skin, cinnamon and plum, olive and cornsilk—the colors of growing things. A moment later Phoenix swung down beside her, looking self-conscious in his silvery shimmersuit and naked face. She had never before seen him scrubbed perfectly clean of paint. His cheeks were the color of peaches; descent through the valve had left one of them
smudged with grease. As the conspirators stared at him, he shuffled his feet nervously, and that little stagger caught at her heart.

“Phoenix Marshall,” she announced.

“Peace,” murmured several voices. Each person raised the left hand, palm exposed. Although the backs of the hands were the color of salmon and copper and chocolate, a mixture of races, the palms were all yellowed with calluses. They carried this imprint of the outdoors with them always, this thickening of the skin from work.

After bowing, Phoenix licked his lips and carefully pronounced the formula she had taught him. “I am seeking the light. I ask to join your circle.”