Terrarium (13 page)

Back at the table she riffled through the surviving bundles of cards. Where on earth did the conspirators mean to settle? She had been retired now for nearly five months, strenuous months of calisthenics in the bedroom and meditation in the mindroom, and at last she felt gathered and ready, yet Teeg and her crew seemed to be going about their business very much as usual, biding their time, waiting for the right moment. If that moment came before she guessed their destination, she would lose track of them altogether.

She dealt the cards on the view-table, with the most recent entries uppermost, the ones written in her large block lettering as in a child's primer, and for the hundredth time she hunted for some clue to the location of the settlement. Jurgen and Hinta had been working almost exclusively on the aquafarms in recent months, out here in the ocean near Oregon City. Arda, Marie, and Coyt had also spent most of their time at sea, changing turbines in the geo-thermal installations far up north over the Aleutian Trench. Josh and Indy were at work cleaning membranes in the salinity gradient systems. Sol had apparently been too sick in recent months to venture outside at all.

That left only Teeg to do scouting on the mainland, and for the last eight months solo repair missions had taken her all over the Pacific Northwest. Squinting through a magnifier, Zuni had carefully plotted each of those repair sites on a map, an antique paper map with holes worn through at the folds. There were place names for all the vanished towns, for the rivers and mountains and bays. At the
location of each repair mission she daubed a spot of purple ink. The resulting rash of dots looked wholly random, like the bullet-perforated roadsigns she used to see as a child. Zuni stared at that map until the purple flecks seemed to crawl about; yet no pattern emerged.

What if, she wondered at last, the key is not space, but time? How long did each of those trips last, and where else might Teeg have gone besides the repair sites?

She typed her question to the Info cyber. The lightsticks soon printed time-elapse figures for each of Teeg's missions. Zuni glanced at the numbers, heart skipping. They seemed high, very high. How long should each of these repairs take? she asked the cyber,
ESTIMATES VARY
, the cyber replied,
THERE ARE NO HARD FIGURES FOR REPAIR RATES. WORK RATE FOR T. PASSIO FALLS WITHIN SLOW-NORMAL RANGE
.

Zuni had observed Teeg during her troubleshooter apprenticeship, watched those brisk hands flying deftly over tools and machines, and she knew there was nothing slow about her work. No, Teeg was staying out longer than necessary on her repair missions. But how much longer? Zuni estimated the time each repair should take, often drawing on her own experience as a builder, sometimes guessing from what troubleshooters had told her. The difference between this number and the actual elapse-figure was the amount of time Teeg would have to play with. To avoid the spy-eyes in her shuttle, she would have to hug the contours of the land, probably average no more than sixty or seventy kilometers per hour.

Excited now, sniffing a solution, Zuni drew around each of the purple dots a circle whose radius was equal to the distance Teeg could have traveled in her surplus time on each trip. Before half the circles were drawn, already the pattern was emerging, arc after arc intersecting on the southern Oregon coast. Each additional circle narrowed the region of overlap. By the time the last one was inscribed, Zuni was staring at a tiny portion of the map, a few miles of
coastline bordered on the south by the Oregon dunes and on the north by Mount Wind. She squinted through the magnifying glass to make out the smaller print. Square in the middle was a yawning blue inlet called Whale's Mouth Bay. When had she heard that name before? As a child in Oregon? Perhaps, but the memory seemed fresher than that. She repeated the words to herself. In a moment she recollected hearing Teeg speak fondly of the place:

“Whale's Mouth Bay. My mother and I used to go there whenever she could slip away from work. It was our favorite place. It's the last place I saw her.”

Only when the map lifted and fluttered on the slick table did Zuni realize she was panting. Steady, she thought. But she felt like heading for the coast straightaway. After a moment's hesitation the desire lifted her off the chair and sent her pacing from room to room.

6 September 2031
—
Whale's Mouth Bay

Back in the jaws of Leviathan. Every workbreak, Teeg begs me to bring her here in the glider. The burned-out towns we pass on the way make my heart ache.

If the earth didn't curve, I could see Oregon City away out over the water. Gregory will be tinkering with it, perfecting his gigantic machine. “At last we've built a safe home for humanity,” he scolds me, “and you refuse to come inside.”

If he and the other architects of the Enclosure hadn't been trained on the space colonies, they would never have dreamed of shutting people inside domes. (I suppose Zuni Franklin is an exception. I think she actually trained in the wildcities of the Northwest, the very ones I'm dismantling.) I can hear Gregory object: “You're swimming against the current of human history. Enclosure is the next logical step in our emancipation from Terra. It is the necessary future.”

I cannot refute him. I can only say no. Every message he beams to me carries the same refrain: “If you don't care about poisoning yourself, at least think of Teeg.”

I do think of Teeg, all the time, and of the shrunken world she will inherit. Tonight I must scrub her with special care.

She prances up to me, palm thrust forward, to show me how the whorls in a shell resemble those on her thumb. “We're made the same,” she cries with pleasure.

“So you are,” I answer.

Phoenix
tossed notebooks, microfilms, bits of bark and stone into the vaporizer. Footprints of rebellion. He listened with regret to the hiss as each tell-tale item withered to a memory of molecules. Down in the guts of Oregon City devices would sort the vapors and reuse them for making plastic kidneys or glowrods or spoons. He searched the apartment for other incriminating evidence. Guides to meditation, maps of the coast, stick-figure illustrations of Teeg's yoga positions—all went into the shaft. Hiss, hiss. Soon the only remaining clues were the holos of Whale's Mouth Bay, tiny cubes intricate with the shapes of beach and cliff and grasses. He squeezed them until the points dug into his palm. Once he destroyed them he would have no way of bringing the wilds to life. And what if the city spun its webs of comforts around him again, lulled him in the hammock of its pleasures, until he grew to dread the outside?

Why not just leave the holos in the projector until the last moment? It was early in the year for typhoons. But you
never knew about weather. Cantankerous, the weather. Any day, a storm could roar across the Pacific, tearing at the Enclosure's skin, and the crew might be called out to mend a float or weld a cracked tube, and if the call arrived while he was away from the apartment, there would be no time for returning home to vaporize the cubes. And he must leave no tracks. If the crew simply vanished, apparently gobbled up by the sea, the health patrollers would lose no sleep. There were always too many bodies crowding the Enclosure. Security would simply recruit new troubleshooters. But if the H.P. came along, found the holos, and recognized the Oregon coast, they would have gliders waiting in Whale's Mouth Bay when the crew arrived. Welcome to quarantine, ladies and gentlemen.

Better to be safe. Phoenix quickly opened his fist and brushed the miniature cubes into the shaft. With a sizzle his phantom bay was gone—the black cliffs and pebbled beach, the windbent trees, the waves frozen as they broke into foam, the glittering shells, the sky.

He surveyed the apartment one last time to make sure nothing looked amiss. Wigs dangled on their racks like trophies from a scalping expedition. Moodgowns of various cuts, bereft of bodies, hung neutral gray in the closet. Paint bottles stood in parade formation before the mirror. Photomurals slathered pattern after abstract pattern across the wall. There was nothing in his library of tapes that a contented citizen of Oregon City would not read. The video and food vendor and info terminals were all standard, their sterilized surfaces gleaming like new teeth, their control knobs and keyboards waiting for commands. Nothing anywhere marked him as a renegade. After he vanished, a team would come here to inspect things, to wind up his affairs, to unravel the ties between the late Phoenix Marshall and the human system.

There would be precious few ties to unravel. As Phoenix moped around the apartment he was struck by how little imprint he had left on the place. The furniture, of mirror-surfaced
pipe and curved polyglass, was for sale in every city in the network. The posters and prints that hung on his wall also hung in the windows of half the decorating stores of Oregon City. The mood synthesizer, chemmie-dispenser, eros couch and other appliances had come as a set from Teledyne, and the whole outfit could be plugged into any apartment in the city. In fact, the entire apartment could be unplugged from Portland Complex and reinserted in any one of several hundred housing towers.

“You aren't what you own,” Teeg had scolded him one day.

“On my salary, that's lucky.”

“Then why do you cling to all this stuff?” The sweep of her arm dismissed everything he had worked for years to buy. “Remember what Thoreau said: ‘A person is rich in proportion to the number of things she can live without.'”

By that measure, Phoenix was growing richer all the time. In the seven months since he had first come upon her in the corridor, her feet bare and her armpits sweaty from walking, he had let most of his possessions go. Between yoga and meditation and study there was little time outside working hours to use the gadgets. Now he wandered through his own apartment with a sense of detachment, as if this were a museum exhibit of some remote and dim-witted culture.

In a belt-pack, thin enough so that when it was strapped to his stomach no bulge showed through the gown, he stowed the few things he cared about: the fossil Teeg had given him; microfiche texts of poetry, philosophy, meteorology, and the history of science; photographs of his parents from the time before their divorce, before his mother's accident, before his father's drug coma; a bone-handled pocket-knife (bone of
what
? he often wondered); emergency food and medicine to see him through the water-borne trip to Whale's Mouth Bay.

Whenever he tried to imagine what it would be like, out there bobbing around on the waves like a bit of flotsam,
with actual wind in his face and the naked sky overhead and the awesome continent unrolling before him, he felt a rising sense of panic. The early astronauts must have felt the same queasiness, just before launching for the first time to Luna or Venus or one of the countless inhospitable rocks afloat in the solar system.

When the fear grew too strong he shut his eyes and meditated upon the fire, and the other seekers rose within him: Teeg with her hair like flame; bald-domed Marie, whose face seemed to concentrate emotion the way a magnifying glass concentrated light; plum-faced Sol with the lacerated voice; massive Jurgen, with a dark stare like the mouth of a cave; and all the rest of them, face after face. They flamed in him, licked him into their single fire, until he felt at peace.

At work he studied the monitors with extra care. Give us a nasty storm off the northwest coast, he thought, crack a seatube or drown an algae farm, and outside we go. Data on air pressure, wind velocity, and ocean currents oozed from the teleprinters. The measurements came from floating buoys and moored balloons, from satellites and seabed stations. Cybers turned the numbers into images on his console, abstract designs like Persian carpets, like shattered glass, and his job was to read meanings in them. He thought of the old shamans, hunting for omens in the entrails of pigs.

On the screens the North American cities and interconnecting tubes showed a pale green. Across this human web the cyber traced movements of air masses, high-pressure and low-pressure zones, temperature gradients, the scudding ballet of wind. Kindly weather appeared on the screens as arabesques of blue. The more menacing the weather, the more its color shaded toward the far end of the spectrum, through yellow and orange to incendiary red. The color of Teeg's hair, Phoenix had decided. Which was appropriate, since she had burst into his life like a typhoon. He had read
about foul weather—gales whipping up whitecaps on the ocean, snow smothering the mountains, rain drenching or sun scorching the plains, hail hammering the dandelions—but he had never felt the weather on his own skin. He had only watched it glide soundlessly across the ovoid screens, a dance of abstract forms.

After glancing stealthily at the workers who occupied desks to his right and left, to make sure they were studying their own consoles, Phoenix dialed the scanner to highest resolution and set the coordinates for Whale's Mouth. The satellite took half a minute to respond, since an auto-program was necessary before it could fix upon an area outside the surveillance net. On visual, all that showed were clouds, so he switched over to infrared, then to the radiation display bands, then to magnetic and gravitational field scans. Nothing suspicious appeared on any of those channels. Just another deserted patch of earth. Once the settlement was built, however, and once solar collectors and wind dynamoes and domes began trapping heat, a keen eye would be able to detect aberrations in the infrared scan. But it was unlikely that such an eye would ever direct the sensors upon Whale's Mouth, unless some dramatic sign gave the settlement away. Teeg had chosen the spot shrewdly. No artery of the human network passed anywhere near the place. The renegades who had once lurked in the Oregon forests had long since been rehabilitated or exterminated. The bay and its encircling mountains had dropped through the meshes of history.