Terrarium (15 page)

“But people don't just—”

“People
do
disappear,” she interrupted, “all the time. Pressure of work. Despair. They'll just think you couldn't stand the ugliness of another hurricane—”

“Typhoon.”

“Whatever. Couldn't stand knowing all the damage it would do. So maybe you crawled into the nearest vaporizer.”

“But they—”

“What do they know? What do they care? Look, Phoenix, we've been through all this. Your apartment's clean, your record's clean. You simply vanish. Another breakdown. A statistic. Poof.”

The puff of air seemed to ease through the speaker into his ear. “All right. I change clothes, grease up. Then where do I go?”

“You go as fast as you can to the hovercraft terminal, number seventeen. That's where we ship from, if something gives way outside.”

“How do I get through the sanitation barriers?”

“Hinta will meet you outside the port. Her palm will open any health gate.”

“If the mechano asks me for a voice-ID?”

“Hinta knows the override code.”

“And what if the storm misses us? What if nothing breaks?”

“Just come. Shut up that rattling brain and follow the light.”

A metallic click broke the connection. Her excitement rang on in his ears. When the relief woman sidled up to his chair, waiting mutely for him to leave, he stood up with a tremor in his legs. “Grade C typhoon in sector 45,” he told her simply, “tracking on visual.”

In his cubicle he smeared himself with grease, for protection against salt water. But as he rode belts across Oregon City to the hovercraft terminal, his sweat kept trickling through the grease, as if his body's own salt were seeping out to meet the salt of the ocean.

22 January 2032
—
Vancouver

The last pieces of Vancouver left by tube this morning for the ocean building site of Alaska City. Gregory, who hates the wilds in any weather, travels up there in the midst of winter to make sure his blueprints are followed to the letter. The Franklin woman stays in Oregon City. Will he see my handprint on any of those chunks of Vancouver, copper and aluminum and steel, before they melt and take on the shapes of his vision?

When we were studying architecture at Houston I never dreamed he would one day build new cities while I tore old ones down. He calls me the destructive one, because I oversee the salvaging of empty shells. He doesn't understand my need to touch the old materials, smell dirt and trees in the parks, wander through the
antique buildings with their windows and doors that open onto the actual air.

If people can't live in the outside cities, I tell him, at least we can incorporate some of the old materials in the enclosed cities. Urban reincarnation, I tell him. He looks at me blankly through the telescreen. Spirit-words leave him cold.

I can tell from the fish-slide of his eyes he has given me up. Let the wild woman rot in her filthy paradise. But everytime we talk, in words or silences, the same command seeps through: Send Teeg inside.

On
the hovercraft instrument panel an amber light kept flashing. More data on the seatube rupture, Teeg guessed. But she dared not answer the call, for it might also be Transport Control, demanding to know why the crew still hadn't left the hangar.

Come on, Phoenix. If he didn't show up in about two shakes they would have to leave him behind. Could they smuggle him from the city later? That would be risky, might give the colony away. But waiting for another seatube emergency would be even more risky. Since losing their meeting place in the oil tank they had gone over a month without ingathering, and the forcefield of spirit that bound them together was weakening.

The thought of leaving Phoenix behind swung a weight in her heart.

“Any sign?” Marie asked from the cabin.

No, Teeg was going to answer, when she glimpsed Hinta jogging down the ramp from the sanitation port. Behind her loped a clown-painted figure in billowing gown. Tassels and
sleeves fluttered about him as he ran, and the green tresses of his wig trailed behind like seaweed. Even through this bizarre get-up, Teeg recognized him by the way he bit down on his tongue and by the shape of his ears.

“Yes,” she answered Marie gaily, “here he comes in all his finery.”

Hinta soon ducked through the hatch, straw-colored hair lolling across her cheeks. A moment later Phoenix lurched through behind her, fringes flying, skirts clutched in each hand. Cheers greeted him.

“Made it,” he panted. “Long way—crowds—stupid belts.”

Hands disentangled him from his outlandish costume. The facepaint (green forehead and chin, purple cheeks, orange nose, vermilion lips) would have to wait for soap or saltwater. Lightfooted in his shimmersuit, he danced a little jig, and then collapsed into a seat.

“Buckle in,” Teeg called, “and put blinders on that giddy clown.”

With chest still heaving from his run, Phoenix submitted to the black eye-patches.

As soon as the hatch sealed tight with a kiss of gaskets, Teeg thumbed the lift button. The hangar doors swung open and the hovercraft coasted into the sky. There was a smash of sunlight, a shudder as wind caught the craft, and they were out over the sea.

“Goodbye, city!” Marie cried, and she sang a few words for departure.

Silence followed her song as the crew turned inward to celebrate their deliverance. Teeg had to keep her eyes open to watch the instruments and the waves, yet she could feel the strength of the ingathering. It was a little bit like the heavy g-force you felt when accelerating in a rocket, only pleasanter, a gravity of the spirit.

After a while easy talk fluttered through the cabin. Oregon City dwindled behind them, humped and glittering,
like a cold glassy sun perishing in the water, and the satellite domes surrounding it were so much froth.

Once the hovercraft escaped the city's turbulence, Teeg set the autopilot and went back to sit with Phoenix. His knuckles were pressed white on the armrest. “You all right?” she asked.

“The light,” he answered through clenched teeth. Tears seeped below his eye patches.

“But you can't see a thing,” she objected.

“I feel it on my face, my hands.”

She peeled one of his hands from the armrest, laid it in her lap. The hand was a many-boned wonder, with slivers of paint in the crosshatched grain of the skin. She began tracing figure-eights around his knuckles. “You'll get used to it.”

“Sure, I know, I know.” His head tilted back against the seat cushion, Adam's apple prominent, showing the border along his jaw where the purple mask gave way to the tawny color of his own skin. He seemed to doze while she traced the symbol of infinity around his knuckles. When the hovercraft suddenly bucked in a crosswind he jerked his hand free and seized the armrest. “What's that?”

“Wind.”

“It felt so sudden. Like a fist.” He drew his legs up as if to make ready for a jump. “It always looked so deliberate and slow on the monitors.”

“This is only the trailing edge of the storm.”

His body coiled even more tightly. “You mean it gets worse?”

“Look, why don't you let me take those blinders off, put the smoked glasses on?”

“It gets
worse
?”

“The raft will be much rougher. So you've got to get used to it. Now let me take those blinders off.”

“No, no, not yet.” He flattened a hand over each eye.

“You'd rather fly blind?”

After a moment's hesitation the hands lowered. “Go ahead.”

She quickly replaced his blindfold with sun-goggles, glimpsing the puckered skin around the shut eyes, like two purses laced tight. “Now open them slowly.”

Through the somber lenses his eyes appeared as black slits, winced shut, then slitted open again. He slowly craned about, squinting through the hovercraft windows. “So that's sunlight?”

“It's what your goggles don't filter out.”

“It's bluer than I thought.”

“That's from the rain clouds.” Near Oregon City the clouds had been silver fishscales, each flake catching the light. Out here in the storm, clouds sloped away in great slabs toward the horizon, ranging from violet to deep purple to black. It was like an incline in the mind, tilting away toward sorrow.

Phoenix pressed his face to the window, nose and lips smushed against the glass, drinking in the spectacle. “All these colors. Are they always there? And the ocean! Video never showed it so …
huge
.”

“You can't squeeze all that onto a wall screen.”

“The satellite images make it look far away, like another planet. Tame somehow.”

“Tame it's not,” she said. Though the typhoon had already left these waters, the hovercraft still bucked and sawed in the wind. Occasionally a high wave slapping the belly sent a shudder through the frame. Just a little reminder—a cat toying with a bird. “You sit tight,” she told him. “We've got to get ready for work.”

Tool packs slumped around the hatch at the rear of the craft. Some of the conspirators were wriggling into wetsuits. Marie was helping Sol, who seemed too weak to dress himself. The ones already dressed were checking the waterproof bundles, the uninflated raft, the tanks of compressed air. So many membranes had to hold—skin of boat and skin of body—or they would not survive this savage dunking long enough to reach Whale's Mouth.

“Everything set?” Teeg asked Jurgen.

He had both legs in a wetsuit and was shoving his arms through the sleeves. “Set as we're going to be. You just keep this bubble aloft and keep it handy. Doesn't look very friendly out there.”

In the wetsuit he seemed like a bulky merman, green-skinned, heavily muscled. When you wanted to lean on someone who would not give under your weight, someone sturdy and rooted, you leaned on Jurgen.

“I'll be up here,” Teeg promised him. “Signal when you want the raft.”

On her way back to the cockpit she stopped beside Phoenix. He had changed the first window, smudged with his facepaint, for another one. “The streak down there—looks like an icicle—that's the seatube,” she said. “You see where two orange balloons are whipping and bobbing? Those mark the break.”

“We're that close?” Behind the goggles his eyes widened.

“Just a couple of minutes. Get your wetsuit on.”

In the cockpit she returned the controls to manual, easing the hovercraft alongside the floating tube, heading for the tethered balloons. Waves still licked over the pontoons onto the seatube. A vicious one—or a few hundred vicious ones—had cracked the polyglass outer wall, releasing the balloons and triggering alarms in Transport Control.
Emergency, emergency, the human skin is broken, the beast world is invading.

“Going down,” Jurgen shouted.

Teeg heard the sucking noise as the hatch opened, the slither of the exit chute unfurling. Half a minute later there were eight heads bobbing in the rough water beneath the seatube, then eight bodies clambering onto the pontoons. Several arms waved assurance to her, legs staggering to keep their balance. “Hang some zeroes,” Sol's words came crackling through the speakers, “and be ready to come get us.” His voice was labored.

“You okay, Sol?” Wordless static in her earphones. “Sol?”

He grunted yes. His plum-dark face, fringed white with beard, hung like a troublesome weight in Teeg's mind as she tilted the hovercraft into a lazy circular glide. She knew the screens tracking her from Oregon City would show her path in glowing loops.

“Time for me to play fish,” she told Phoenix.

He was taking great sticky steps about the cabin, trying out his wetsuit. “This thing will really keep me dry in that chaos down there?”

“Wet isn't what will hurt you. It's the cold. And these outfits keep you warm.” Sliding on, the wetsuit always felt clammy and stubborn, like the skin of some slow-witted beast. A shark, maybe. Soon all of her, except the oval window at her face, was sheathed in this rubbery hide.

While she and Phoenix lugged raft, survival bundles, and air tanks to the hatch, she calculated how much longer the repair would take: flotation collars to stabilize the broken segment, torches cutting away the weakened polyglass, patches shaped to the curve of the tube and fastened with epoxy, then torches fusing the edges. Healed scar. The skin of the human network intact once more.

“Another dozen circles,” she told Phoenix, “and they should be ready. Into the float vest with you.”

It took fifteen circles before Sol's voice crackled through, panting between each word: “All—done—notify—Control—and—bring—us—up.”

No one would ever be hoisted into this hovercraft again, but messages beamed over the radio and monitored back in Transport Control had to pretend the mission was an ordinary one. (Would they detect the pain in Sol's voice, the wheeze of cancerous lungs?) Teeg sent word to Oregon City that the break was sealed, the crew was recovered, the craft was headed home. And that lie would probably be her last exchange with the Enclosure.

As the hovercraft glided past the seatube, eight slick
bodies again balancing on pontoons, she opened the hatch and the raft tumbled out. She kept the hovercraft steady while the torpedo-shaped raft smacked the waters. Aerators quickly pumped the yellow skin tight, swelling the small package to nine meters of cushiony boat, roofed and windowed like a toy hovercraft, flimsy, wallowing on the waves. Most of the seekers had to lurch two or three times before wriggling onto the yellow bobbing ark.

“Now you,” she told Phoenix, shoving him down the escape chute. He resisted her with a slight back-leaning weight of his body, and then he was gone, reappearing a moment later amidst a flurry of spray and flailing arms beside the raft. The others soon tugged him aboard.

That left Teeg alone in this doomed machine. She set the pilot for a skimming flight-path back toward Oregon City, a path that would take the hovercraft thirty-five or forty kilometers before it nipped the waves. It would skip a few times like a flat rock, then smash into the unyielding water. Screens tracking the flight would glow with urgent sparks where the ship went down. Rescue teams would find the wreck, its raft and survival gear jettisoned. Satellites could spy nothing through the storm, so shuttle planes would scout the area of the crash. Verdict after seventy-two hours: all hands drowned.