Terrarium (16 page)

Long before that, if all went well, the raft and its ten passengers would be safely snugged away in Whale's Mouth.

Teeg cinched the flotation vest tight around her chest. Another artificial skin, to keep the saltwater in her cells from mixing with the saltwater of the ocean. She glanced around the cabin, alert for any sign of their conspiracy. The place looked innocent, except for a splotch of Phoenix's facepaint on the window. With licked palm she smeared it away. His gown and wig had already been vaporized—and good riddance, she thought. Shed all the old skins.

She gave one last hasty look, like a traveler careful not to leave anything behind in a hotel room. The hovercraft was
already nosing away on its ill-fated trajectory. The raft swayed farther and farther astern. Finally she yanked the facemask into place, skidded over the lip of the escape hatch. For a fraction of a second the chute brushed against her sides, feathery, then she fell through open air, the ocean spread its corrugations beneath her like a vast and rumpled bedspread, and then water crashed around her.

Before she could gain her bearings a wave dragged her sputtering through its guts. The vest bobbed her to the surface, but she could not spy the raft. Away off to one side the seatube floated, endless frosty stripe, too far to swim in such rough water. Nothing else visible in any direction except furious green. Another wave gobbled her, spat her out. If she couldn't see that wallowing yellow ark, they'd never see her. Easy, she thought. Don't panic.

Another wave jammed brine down her throat. Shutting her eyes, she listened inward for the stillness. Dwell in the light, the light, the light. With tons of water thrashing all round her, heaving her about like a chip of wood, she grew calm. Once she quit fighting the waves there was pleasure in the muscular heft and sway. She rode with mind gone blank, a toy on the ocean, until a crest lifted her high enough to make out the yellow blob.

Fifteen minutes of swimming landed her, belly up and exhausted, on the floor of the raft.

“We'd about given you up for lost,” Hinta told her. The long healing fingers smoothed water from Teeg's forehead.

When she tried to answer, all that emerged was a salty sputter. The faces bent over her were tinged yellow by light suffusing through the roof and walls of the raft. One of them was a clown's cockeyed mug, with makeup smeared by the sea into a pie of colors.

“Hello, fish,” said Phoenix.

“Hello there, clown-face.”

The way she reached up to stroke a finger across his cheek must have convinced the others that she was in no danger of dying from her swim, for they sang her a brief
welcoming song, a song of resurrection, and then they scattered to their stations in the raft, to map-screen and compass and wheel. Phoenix stayed beside her, on hands and knees for balance, and still the bucking of the raft made him scuttle to keep from rolling over.

“The green in my face isn't all from paint,” he said.

“Pretty rough here,” she agreed. Through the portholes she saw canyons and mountains of waves. “Everybody all right?”

“Arda wrenched a knee. Sol's hacking up blood.”

Teeg propped herself onto elbows, searching for the plum-dark face.

“Don't worry,” Phoenix soothed. “Hinta's with him. You rest.”

She slumped down again. The raft bucked wildly. “Are we making any headway?”

“Jurgen swears we are. But it looks to me like the same old water over and over.”

She listened to the seethe of bubbles at the stern, where the air jets were shoving against the ocean. It seemed uncanny, to be driven by these little bags of nothingness, these bubbles, all the way to land.

A heavy surge threw her on the floor and made Phoenix scramble crabwise. Before she could laugh, an even more violent wave tossed them both into a heap and piled four others on top of them. There was a sharp pain in her side where an elbow landed, and as the others unpiled she only had to rub the spot once to know it was more than a braise. She remembered this knife-point of pain from earlier accidents.

“Fasten down!” Jurgen roared from the wheel.

Everyone climbed into a seat and buckled harnesses across chest and lap. Teeg had to loosen the straps to keep from squeezing her rib. Phoenix plumped down beside her.

“We caught up with the storm,” he observed. For the first time she noticed he no longer wore goggles. His eyes seemed swollen from a steady diet of surprise. “It must
have run into a cold air mass over the coast. That means we'll be hitting rain soon.”

Here was the weatherman suffering his first weather. Teeg didn't blame him for being scared.

“These tubs are indestructible,” she said, just as the first patter of rain sounded overhead. Soon the roof was thundering and the ocean, smoky with rain, looked as if it were afire. Phoenix called something to her, but she could not hear it above the drumming of the rain. She lifted her eyebrows.

“I said you look pale!” he shouted.

She made a megaphone of her hands and spoke into his ear. “I think I cracked something in that pile-up.” His hair, brushing her nose, smelled of sweat. She nuzzled into it and kissed his ear, that whorl of cartilage and skin she would know from any other's.

Something—the news or the kiss—brought his face around to her and opened wide his eyes. His brown irises madly compensated for the sudden increase in light. “Cracked what?”

“A rib, I think. We'll patch it up when we get to shore.”

“I'll tell Hinta!” he yelled.

Before she could stop him he was scrambling on all fours down the row of seats, legs and arms unsteady from the pitching of the raft. He spoke something close to Hinta's ear, then scrambled back, Hinta following with the first-aid satchel.

Like the others, Hinta had skinned back the hood of her wetsuit. Her long hair, knotted behind, was the lemony color of the raft. “Where is it?” she asked.

Teeg pointed to the rib three rungs from the bottom on her left side. Hinta's touch felt dull and distant through twin thicknesses of shimmersuit and wetsuit, until she reached the point where the knife pain was, and then Teeg winced. Lips pursed, Hinta focused an ortho-scanner over the rib. Teeg imagined what she would see—the creamy curving bone, the inky slash of the break. Phoenix wavered behind
Hinta's shoulder, peeking at the scanner, and Teeg could read the injury in his eyes.

“Can't it wait?” Teeg mouthed at her, unwilling to shout because of the pain.

“It'll have to,” Hinta yelled. The tendons in her neck stood out. “Can't wrestle you out of these suits with it rough like this.” Her hands moved gently around Teeg's waist. “Just hold very still, no sudden movements. If the rib snaps, you could puncture a lung.”

“Can't you give her narco?” Phoenix pleaded.

“No chemmies. Her head has to be in working order in case we smash up.”

Watching Hinta stagger back to her own seat, Teeg thought: If we smash up I'm finished anyway. Could never swim with this knife in my side.

“Anything I can do?” Phoenix said. Hunched beside her, his face a pie of colors, he looked in worse pain than she was.

“Smooth out the ocean!” Her attempt at laughter broke down into a cough, dredging up the taste of brine in her throat, and the pain of it blacked her out for a few seconds. Phoenix looked more distraught than before. She curled a hand around his neck and pulled him close, his ear to her lips. “Be still and don't worry. I'm going into trance and dive under this pain.”

His crazy-quilt face swung out of sight and she closed her eyes. Wash of yellow light through her lids, gullying lift and fall of the raft, thunder overhead, fire in her rib. She kept her breath shallow, riding the air in and out. Then the yellow began to fade and there was only brightness. Stars, flung like salt through the brightness, congealed into one great sun, and the sun was still, and there was no bucking motion, no raft, no rough sea. The fire in her rib was a slender jet of flame from the sun, and there was no pain, there was only fire.

When she swam up out of the trance the pain swam back with her, but she ignored it, for the sea felt gentle and the
roof was silent and the molten columns of sunlight streaming in through the portholes had turned a mellow rose. At the portholes across from her Phoenix and several others were shouldering for a view. Between their heads Teeg saw a ragged strip of brown, draped across the horizon like a scrap of cloth. Land.

She dipped in and out of the trance, shallower each time, thankful. When at last she surfaced for good, Jurgen was saying, “We hauled the supplies overland, from those hills back there. I never saw the place from the sea.”

Arda, who was tracking the raft on an overhead projection of the Oregon coast, said, “We've got to be within a few hundred meters. I can't map it any closer than that.”

“Hey, everybody move out of my way,” Teeg said. “Let me have a look.”

Her voice turned their worried faces around.

“How's the pain?”

“Does it hurt when you breathe?”

“Keep still until we land.”

This last came from Hinta, who shook her head sharply
no
when Teeg reached for the buckles of her harness. She had to answer all their questions about the rib before they would shuffle aside to give her a view through the portholes. Teeg surveyed the rumpled strip of coast from left to right, a circular chunk at a time where the portholes opened, and in the next-to-last circle she found what she was looking for.

“There,” she said, pointing, “you see that headland, the one with the nub on top? Isn't that the base of a lighthouse up there? Cement, flaking white paint?” Whale's Head, and beneath it Whale's Mouth, the gaping jaws of volcanic stone that had frightened her once when she was a child. Mother's place. Mother. Home.

Marie, with the binoculars, confirmed her vision, and Jurgen set the wheel accordingly.

The surf thickened near the shore, but the sea had spent its rage and only rocked the yellow ark enough to remind
them all who was master. The bay accepted them like any other sea-offering, like driftwood, like a tangle of weeds. A few gulls carved the last dying colors of the day, skating across the sky with the ease of experts.

Phoenix knelt on the cushion beside her and watched this lazy flight. “Birds,” he said wonderingly.

Of course, Teeg reminded herself, all this is new for him, like landing on some alien planet. “Herring gulls and kittiwakes and terns,” she told him. The names tasted good on her lips. “If we're lucky, there might be cormorants and sandpipers.”

“How can they just hang up there like that?”

“They ride the wind.”

To the left waves shattered against a blunt cliff, and to the right against a fractured wall of rock that seemed to be sloughing into the sea. As a child she had thought of them as the whale's upper and lower jaws. Jurgen guided the raft skillfully between, until the prow, hesitating on a breaker, touched shore.

Teeg could not hear her own voice amidst the cheering. The whole raft trembled with shouts and the stamp of feet. Even Sol, who held a wad of gauze against his mouth, cried out in triumph. Phoenix hugged Teeg and pawed her hair and she nearly passed out from the wrenching in her rib. When she undid his hands she realized from the way they shook that he was clinging to her as much from fear as from joy.

“We're home,” she said.

“I guess so.”

“Aren't you glad?”

“Oh, sure, sure.”

Sol was unloaded first, on a makeshift litter. Jurgen and Coyt set him down gently on a patch of sand. When they returned with the litter to fetch Teeg, she waved them away and walked from the raft on her own. Phoenix escorted her as far as the hatch, and there he balked, his hands raised as if to fend off the feeble strokes of the sun.

“Aren't you coming?” she said.

“In a minute.”

Teeg watched the unpacking from a barnacle-encrusted rock on the beach, waiting for Phoenix to emerge. She kept her distance from Sol, for she sensed that he wanted to be left alone. Hinta was bending over him, touching his chest, murmuring. After a few moments she withdrew, and approached Teeg with the medicine satchel thumping against her leg.

“How is it with Sol?” Teeg asked.

“The artificial lung's okay,” Hinta said. “But the other one's hemorrhaging.”

“Why didn't he let them change the bad one?”

“The cancer's spread pretty much everywhere now. After the lung it would have been the liver, kidney, and on and on. He said he didn't want to die in pieces.”

“Plutonium.” Teeg spat out the word.

“Memo from the twentieth century,” said Hinta, without any trace of irony.

Teeg glanced over at Sol, who sat with knees drawn up, holding himself together, while the other seekers carried equipment from the raft. “How long's he got?”

Hinta was peeling the wetsuit and shimmersuit down to Teeg's waist, uncovering the troublesome rib. “He's alive now, isn't he? And now's the only time we have.”

“But wouldn't he have lasted longer inside?”

“More hours probably.” Hinta gently touched the reddened skin above the fractured rib. Her fingers seemed to draw pain out of the injury. “But living isn't measured in hours, is it?”

“No, of course not.” The late March evening, the mist from breakers, and the onshore breeze chilled Teeg's back and chest. The analgesic spray Hinta applied to the rib felt colder still. Her skin was a rash of tiny welts. Goosebumps, her mother used to call them, back when there were geese.

“Let me get some tape around here to keep that rib from wandering,” Hinta said. She grazed one of the taut nipples,
and Teeg was surprised by the sexual alarms running through her body. “After I get this on,” Hinta explained, “all you have to do is loaf for about two weeks. No lifting, no pushing.”

“No heavy breathing.”