Terrarium (23 page)

Phoenix and Jurgen lowered the stretcher onto the grass, egg-soft, as if the old man might burst like some flimsy sack. Marie knelt over him and resumed her comforting murmur. Tired from the climb, they all stood for a spell with the forested mountain rising darkly behind them, and looked out over the sea. A thousand meters below, visible only as a faint lace of white against black water, waves smashed against the base of the cliff and boiled in rings of foam around boulders. Flares lit the grass at their feet, but everything beyond this ring of light shaded away to absolute blackness. Instinctively, the conspirators huddled in a circle around the dying man, some facing inward as if to watch over him, some facing outward as if to convoy him through the night.

Phoenix was one of those who gazed inward, toward the comforting flare. He stood half bent over, hands curled, as if he still bore the weight of the stretcher in his mind. Wind swept across the clearing and laid the grass on its side. Sol moaned.

“Let us have a fire,” Marie said.

“Phoenix and I will get wood,” Teeg quickly offered.

She took him by one of his curled hands and led him behind the lighthouse, toward the shaggy spruce and hemlock. Her flare lit a few meters near their feet, making it seem as if the land were being tugged past beneath them. When they reached the border of the forest, where gorse blossoms smoldered yellow and rhododendrons shone a vaporous pink, Teeg knelt to crawl beneath the overhanging boughs.

Phoenix balked, with the down-thrusting branch of a spruce against his belly like a sword. “I can't go in.” Lit from below by the flare, his face was a desert landscape, hollowed and gullied by shadows. Teeg felt overcome by a fierce love, because of the courage it had taken for him to walk even this far.

“You stay here,” she said, “and I'll load you up with sticks.” She hung the flare on his belt and stood on tiptoe to kiss him. Ferns stroked her sides luxuriously as she crawled beneath the feathery branches. The carpet of needles was pungent with decay and rebirth. She had to remind herself she was here after firewood, the feathery darkness was so tender against her, the branches like fingers along her body. She had only gathered a small armful of sticks when his panicked voice cried out, “Teeg? Come,
cornel
”

Careful not to strain her sore ribs, she squirmed back to him through wet ferns and caressing branches. “Only a little while longer,” she comforted, “just a little while, my bear.” She dumped the firewood into his cradled arms, pressed her forehead against his, then crawled once more into the damp feathered woods. She made half a dozen trips, staying each time only long enough to find a few sticks, before his sobbing drew her to him again. Eventually they were both loaded down with wood and could go back to join the others.

A fire soon blazed on the ruins of the old lighthouse. The stretcher had been rigged so that Sol could recline against it, face half-turned toward the flames, half toward the sea. His white hair and beard and the black gateways of his eyes shone luminous in the firelight. Marie, his oldest companion on spirit-travels, sat by his left side. Jurgen sat near him on the right, massive and still, like a boulder. Everyone else took a place in the circle. Fire leapt in their midst and the unplumbed universe opened above.

Stillness gradually enveloped them like mist, floated them free of gravity, free of time and flesh and the
mechanics of separation. It was a true gathering, their first since landing, and Teeg wept with joy.

When they had all met and fused in the depths, Marie began the death-song, lilting high and frail. Jurgen soon joined in gruffly, then Hinta with her rich keening voice, and then each one in turn around the circle, the song passing like flame from candle to candle. Teeg was not surprised to hear Phoenix catch the melody and hum it shyly. She recognized the sound of surf in it, and of wind through fir forests, the sound of rain and bird-song, of animal footsteps and plants growing.

Cracked, brittle, like a page from one of the old paper books Zuni used to show her, Sol's voice rose into the song. They were singing his death, carrying him on that journey, but they were also singing his life, all life, the grass turning green before it turned brown before it turned green, the birds flying south and then north and then south again.

They sang all night, sometimes everybody at once, always at least one voice, for the song was a fire they must keep alight through the temporary darkness. Each time Sol's voice joined the song it flickered more weakly. Teeg reached out and laid her hand by turns on the old man, or on Phoenix, wherever the current of emotion urged her to lay it. She knew from her mother that all life flamed up out of darkness, like flowers burning out of the black earth, and she was not afraid.

They rode the firelit circle like a ship into morning. Sol was the last one to sing, alone, in a voice as thin as grass. With morning light, the mountains eastward separated themselves from the sky. Westward, the horizon once again divided air from water. The universe was created anew.

Sol let the song whisper to a close. “Let me … look out … over the ocean.”

He moaned when Jurgen picked him up and carried him to the edge of the cliff, moaned again as he was lowered to the grass. Marie knelt behind him and wrapped him in her
arms. The others pressed close, kneeling, leaving his view open to the sea. Each one laid a hand on his quivering body.

“Whales!” he murmured ecstatically, gazing down at the morning waters. He drew breath harshly. “Dozens of them! There's a spout … and there!”

Teeg surveyed the calm, spoutless ocean. The dying man's eyes, darker and more vast than the night they had all journeyed through, already beheld another world.

“See the flukes! And there's one breaching … look! … the white markings on the head. …” The breath rasped in his throat. “And the calves … are with them! See … the little ones … the young. …”

He was twitching and heaving beneath their hands. Marie hugged him and soothed, “Peace, my darling, peace.”

The breath kept rasping like a saw in wood. Then presently it fell silent, the tremors dwindled away, and the old man grew still. Teeg imagined the last walls and dikes within him giving way. The elements he had borrowed for a spell and had carried around in the shape of a man were returning to earth. She stroked him and let the tears come.

All morning they sat with the body, high up there on the shoulder of a mountain, where sky-eyes could observe them. They kept very quiet, listening to wind and ocean. From time to time someone would speak out of the silence, recalling thankfully some episode in Sol's life: how he had recovered plutonium from breeder reactors to keep it out of the hands of terrorists … how he had taught one friend or another to spirit-travel … how he had baked bread and made a gift of it in his callused hands … how the spirit had bubbled up in him and set him dancing.

When no one else was moved to speak, they remained for a while in silence. Then Marie undressed the body and they all took handfuls of grass and rubbed the black flesh. With branches dragged from the woods they built a pyre on the foundations of the lighthouse. From the fire they had kept going all night, each one took a brand, pressed it to the
newly-gathered wood, and the funeral blaze licked up around he-who-had-been-Sol.

A beacon for travelers at sea, Teeg thought. Or for the health patrollers. But there was no avoiding the fire, whatever the danger. They had to see him off on his journey. She stole a glance at Phoenix. There was a look of transfiguration on his face—whether from horror or ecstasy she could not tell.

The burning took a long time, armful upon armful of branches collected from the mountainside. Rain began at mid-morning, kept on through noon and late into the afternoon, hissing in the flames. The sun was touching the ocean by the time Marie declared the burning finished. Rain cooled the ashes quickly. Each one thrust a finger into the charred remains and smeared a black streak across the forehead. The rest of the ashes they scattered in the grass, on nearby trees, by handfuls onto the ocean and into the breeze.

Then at last they could go down the mountain, to Jonah Colony, home.

An
expedition like this might have made sense for a young woman, blessed with stout legs and sound eyes, thought Zuni. But for me it is utter folly, in all likelihood my last folly.

She was resting at a bend of Salt Creek where the current bared a sweep of water-smoothed stones. The rock on which she perched had the melony shape and milky whiteness of a dinosaur's egg. Having already stumbled across a Roosevelt elk and the pawprint of a bear this morning, she would not have been surprised to feel the stone cracking beneath her or to see reptilian skin gleaming inside. The muscles of earth were quite capable of heaving forth anything you could imagine.

A dinosaur would feel at home in this dripping rainforest. Rain pattered on the hood of her parka, but she paid it no mind. The things of the world had already lost their edges in her blurred sight, so the added blur of rain made little difference. With the present moment crackling before her, why mope about the past? The valley of cinders, that burnt-out
place she could no longer think of as home, lay nearly two days of walking behind her. The sanitation port lay three days farther back. Not a bad trek for these old pins, Zuni thought, rubbing her knees. Just beyond this bend, she remembered, the land fell away along a fault, the creek leapt over the brink of an escarpment and tumbled into a pool below. From there it meandered across a meadow, sliced through the coastal ridge, and emptied into Whale's Mouth Bay.

By closing her eyes Zuni could summon up that landscape, for she had dug clams and danced in and out with the breakers there many times as a child. Now she was reluctant to peek into that meadow for fear she would find it empty, or—worse yet—find the charred remains of a settlement.

All the tangled skein of my life narrows down at last to this one frail thread, she thought. Nothing to do but pull it and see what is tied to the other end.

She rose painfully and peered at the sky. If there were HP gliders snooping around up there, someone with better eyes would have to spot them. In any case, nobody's eyes were sharp enough to locate the spy satellites, which did the keenest watching. Let them watch. Delicately, as if tasting the breeze, she stuck out her tongue at the sky.

Roots snaggled from the bank like half-buried arms and legs, and these she held onto for balance as she hobbled along the creek. Limbs dipped overhead, each one strung with moss like pale green gauze hung out to dry. Old man's beard, she recollected, what a lovely name. All the venerable trees with their green whiskers.

The salt tang grew stronger and the roar of the falls beat louder. Behind the next clump of trees the sky took on that vague going-on-forevemess which signified the ocean. No use holding back now, she decided, hastening to the brim of the escarpment. She squinted down into cottony mist, corrugations of fluffy whiteness like clouds seen from above. Fog smothered the meadow and thrust like spears into each tributary valley. No sign of a colony. Maybe they
hadn't settled here after all? Maybe they really had drowned?

Clinging to the lip of land, peering down into fog, Zuni stubbornly fought against despair. There is a way to survive, she told herself; there is always a way to survive. I will live in a hollow tree and eat blackberries and converse with the owls.

She lowered herself over the brink and picked her way downward from ledge to ledge. These falls were higher and wilder than the falls of Wolf Creek, so Zuni was soaked through long before she reached the bottom. Lower down the mist thinned, revealing the ghostly boundaries of the meadow. Still she could see no signs of a settlement. At the base of the falls a pool caught the plummeting waters. She stood there, catching her breath, watching the surface churn and buck. The spectacle transported her back to childhood, and she half-expected her lumberjack father to come tramping up with a clam-shovel in his hand and a blade of grass in his teeth.

The settlement, the settlement, she had to remind herself. This land kept seducing her into memory.

Skirting the pool, one eye on the agitated water and one on the ground, she came to a slab of shining blackness. Oregon mud, she thought. But why such a neat stripe of it? No end in sight. Too broad for jumping over. She thrust one boot forward experimentally onto the blackness, and was astonished to find it held her weight. With a quickening excitement, she squatted down and touched the gleaming surface. It was glass, etched like snakeskin. For a moment she feared it might be the melted ruins of something, more of the HP's handiwork. But no, with that careful etching, it must be a walk.

Forgetting her weariness and her aching joints, she limped swiftly along the black pathway, shouting, “Hello! Hello!” and expecting any moment to bump into someone—Sol perhaps, or Marie. Maybe Teeg would be the first
one! How amazed they would be to discover their old Zuni come a-calling!

Without seeing anyone, she soon came to a ring of domes, each feebly lit from inside, ghostly, diaphanous as a bubble. A larger dome bulged from the center of the ring, like the pale snout of a whale.

“Hello!” she cried, aware of the sappy grin on her face.

They must be here, she thought impatiently, jerking open the airlock on the nearest dome. Inside she found hanging ferns, sunken tanks glimmering with minnows, rolled sleepsacks. No one answered her calls. Where the devil were they? Hiding? Not dead, surely. They wouldn't dare, with the colony built and me here propped up on sore knees. In the entryway to the large central dome she found ten pure white shimmersuits hanging from pegs, limp and sumptuous, like the pelts of snowbeasts. Nearby was an airshower. She eyed it longingly; she was filthy from her trek, but too tired for the shower just now. She contented herself with stripping off her sodden antique pants and shirt, rummaging around in a nearby sleepcamper until she found a worksuit that looked to be the right size, and putting it on.