Terrarium (24 page)

Arched tunnels led her from dome to dome, through workshops and greenhouses, past a solar kitchen and a battery of sunscoops. Through portholes she noticed hydrogen tanks and the fretwork tower of a windmill. Most of this survival equipment she recognized; it had been standard for many years on longer repair missions and construction projects. Some of it she had designed herself, ages ago, before realizing that only a web of cities could safely quarantine humankind.

Why ten shimmersuits, she wondered, and why ten sleepsacks? She had only kept nine bundles of cards in her rocket-covered lunchbox. Who was the tenth conspirator? At the doorway of each sleepchamber she paused to look inside, identifying the occupants by the accumulations of personal things—Marie by her trowel, Coyt by the pillow he used to brace his humpback in sleep, Jurgen by the
leather tool belt he had kept oiled and limber through all these decades of plastic, Sol by the ivory comb he used for straightening his beard. Zuni lingered in Sol's doorway, her eye caught by the air-cushions, rolls of gauze, basin: the equipment of a sickroom. She felt a lurching in her heart, as if Sol were one of her children fallen sick. Weren't they all her children?

Each tunnel eventually led her back to the central dome. It was apparently their meeting place, with a flare at the center and white pillows around the circumference and a snowy vault overhead. Zuni understood only the haziest outlines of their group mysticism, but she found it easy to imagine spirit-work in this hushed, uncluttered place. She withdrew respectfully, without crossing the threshold.

Outside in the meadow she discovered that the rain had quit. The sun hovered near the horizon. No one visible anywhere. Perhaps they were off gathering something—dandelions or ginseng or seaweed. Who knew what wildergoers might take it into their heads to gather? Or her noisy arrival might have scared them into hiding. Maybe the health patrollers had caught up with them and hauled them away for rehabilitation? No, no, the HP would never have left the colony intact. Sickness then? Poisons waiting here all these unpeopled years? Attack by an army of wolves? But where were the bodies?

Hobbling along and brooding, she soon found herself on the beach. Except for knobs of stone that showed through like vertebrae, the sweep of sand was bare. What might have been bathers floating in the surf turned out, when she limped over for a look, to be driftlogs. A mewing gull flapped down to investigate some bit of sea wrack, then flew away. Greetings, thought Zuni. High up the beach she discovered their empty raft, and in one of the caves she found the scraps of crates. Husks that they had left behind.

She collapsed onto a log and sat numbly watching the surf crash against upthrust rocks in the bay. When her strength returned she would go back to the settlement, wait
for them there, live on alone if need be until whatever had spirited them away came in search of her. Whatever it was had better be ready for a fight. For now, she would sit here on the edge of the continent, peeling the damp white hair from her face, licking salt from her lips.

Twice she closed her eyes, to soothe them, and the second time lengthened into a nap. When she woke the sun was squatting on the ocean like a fat rooster. The tide lapped at her log seat. Maybe they're back, she thought excitedly. She was just twisting round to spy along Salt Creek toward the meadow when she noticed pinpricks of fire on the headland, away up where the lighthouse used to be. She blinked, not trusting her eyes, but the sparks kept burning. Could they be automated signals of some sort? Fires? No, they flickered and jounced, like flares carried through woods. Over the pounding of her heart she strained to hear any sound, but there was only the surf and wind through marshgrass.

Whoever carried the lights was angling down the mountainside toward the beach. Any path inland would have to pass near her. Hide, she thought, until I can see their faces. Yet like a donkey her body refused to budge. No more fleeing, said her bones. Sit here on this log and let whatever might come, come.

The twin lights, drawing close to her, seemed to glow more brightly as the sky dimmed. They were flares, she could see that now, bright solar bulbs carried aloft by a column of walkers. In the circles of light she counted nine figures in shimmersuits, gleaming like mercury. Except for the gritting of boots on sand, they were absolutely silent.

Motionless on her log, merging with the darkness, Zuni watched them caterpillar toward her. To her bleary eyes their faces looked as featureless as balloons. The slender one with dangling braids who carried the foremost flare might be Hinta. The hunch-shouldered one who rolled like a ship when he walked might be Coyt. Hope swelled in her, nearly buoyed her off the log. She was about to cry out. But
where was Sol's unmistakable face, the zebra pattern of white beard on black skin? She squinted, straining to see. No, Sol wasn't there. Then who were these strangers? A health patrol to come sterilize the settlement? Another band of exiles?

Zuni was shrinking back into the shadows just as the trailing flare drew even with her. The woman who bore the flare halted for a moment to pick up something from the beach—a shell or bit of rock—and drawing the light near her cheek she studied the find in her cupped palm. In that instant Zuni recognized the bald mushroom head, the cratered moonface, the squat body.

“Marie!” she called out of the darkness.

The woman's hand fell limp, dropping whatever prize it had discovered, and her face swung blindly in Zuni's direction. “Who's there?”

Zuni tried to stand, but her knees would not unbend. Stupid legs!

“What is it? What? What?” The others crowded around Marie, a knot of astonishment. The twin flares bobbed and jerked over their heads.

“Somebody called my name,” said Marie.

“I'm here. Here!” Zuni cried. “Come get me. I'm rusted solid.”

Their voices babbled in consternation. Marie waded forward, searching for this impossible voice. But a smaller body darted past, arms outstretched and red hair flying, and in the next instant Zuni was flat on her back in the sand, surf licking her ears, with Teeg pawing her like a puppy.

“Zuni! You can't be here! Did you drop out of the sky? Come, sit up, let me help you, there.” She tugged and shoved at Zuni, pummeling her with affection. “Ach, my rib! Never mind. Everybody come see what the tide washed in!”

Their bent heads formed an inquisitive circle above her as Zuni sat, giggling and weeping like a schoolchild, with Teeg's arms about her.

“My lord, my lord, it's really you,” Marie said wonderingly. She touched Zuni's cheek, as if to test whether she was an apparition.

“What's left of me. I'm about worn down to a frazzle.”

“However did you get here?”

“I hiked.”

“From where?”

“Cascade repair station.”

Again the babble of consternation. Over one hundred kilometers!

“How did you know we were here?” It was Jurgen's voice, rumbling, suspicious.

Zuni allowed herself a sly smile. “You've all been my hobby for a very long time.”

“But why did you ever leave the city?” asked Teeg.

“For the same reasons you left. To see the mountains again, the forests, the ocean. To see how things are growing now that people are locked indoors.”

“Did you come by yourself?” Jurgen reared over her. Dear cantankerous Jurgen. A bulldog at heart.

Zuni laughed. “Who would be crazy enough to come along with me?”

Jurgen hunched down and shoved his great bewhiskered mug close to her. After a moment's glare, a grin split his face. “You are an old fox,” he said, pressing his forehead to hers. “I can't believe you're really here. But I'm glad.”

When they had all finished greeting her, Marie scolded, “Now Teeg, quit smothering the woman. Let's take her home. Where's the stretcher?”

“Oh fiddle! I can walk!” Zuni waved them aside. They stood back respectfully. But when, after a half minute of straining, she could not persuade her legs to unbend, Jurgen swept her up, light as a doll, and laid her gently on the stretcher. She was too bone weary to protest, or to ask why they carried a stretcher with them or where they had been all day. A slender man with the raggedy beginnings of a beard, a man she did not know, bore the front of the stretcher. Was
he the mysterious tenth conspirator? And why were there only nine in this procession? Who was missing?

Teeg pranced alongside, chattering the whole way to the settlement. Once there, she tucked Zuni into a sleepsack, murmuring, “Rest now, love.”

Zuni teetered on the brink of sleep, held back only by a sense of loss to which she could give no name. Then she recalled who was missing. “Sol came with you from Oregon City?”

“Yes.” There was an unwillingness in the girl's voice.

“Where is he?”

Teeg brushed the salty strands of hair from Zuni's face. “He died this morning.”

Zuni felt the sudden loss as if someone had carved a hole through her belly. But she was not surprised. She had known about his cancer. “He was a lovely man,” she whispered. “So gentle. Remember how he would embrace you with his eyes when he spoke?”

“You were mates?” Teeg asked softly.

“For a little while. Long ago.”

Both women kept still a moment, feeling Sol's presence. Finally Teeg said, “That's where we've been since yesterday, up on the headland singing him through.”

“He's buried up there?”

“Cremated. It's what he asked for.” Teeg sat on her heels and stroked Zuni's face. “I guess it's what I want after I die, to go right back to earth.”

Sol … ash? All life was a burning, Zuni thought, a fire in the cells defying for an instant the ultimate cold of the universe. In the Enclosure, he would have been frozen after death, against the hope of some future cure. But out here there were no resurrection vaults, and death, when it came, might as well be celebrated with a final fire.

“We've put you in his sleepchamber,” said Teeg. “You don't mind?”

“I'm glad.”

The fingers took up Sol's ivory comb and untangled Zuni's hair. “Do you need anything, old one?”

“No, child.”

“Would you like me to stay with you through the night?”

Zuni was unable to keep the amusement from curling on her drowsy lips. “No, no. Nothing frightens me here. This is where I've wanted to be.”

Teeg's fingers at last withdrew from her face, and Zuni slipped away into sleep, her body a constellation of stars.

“It's
simply exhaustion,” Marie pronounced over Zuni's fretful body.

The wildergoers were all crowded inside her chamber in the morning, eager to learn why the city-builder had come into the wilds and whether she could be trusted to keep the secret of Jonah Colony. Each had reason to be grateful to her, for help in getting jobs or schooling, for years of kindness. But she was an architect of the Enclosure! What could possibly drive her outside? Seeing her twitch and mumble, however, with her famously neat bun of hair now a wreck of whiteness on the pillow, they saved their questions.

Watching her from the foot of the sleepcushion, Teeg felt like a bear in the fairytale, gaping at Goldilocks. What improbable visitor is this, dozing in our midst?

Tests had shown low blood-sugar, but no concentrations of toxins. Hinta prescribed rest and broth, then like the others she returned to the labor which Sol's death had interrupted.

While Teeg nursed Zuni through the next day of shock, Phoenix kept stopping by the door to peek in. Teeg would gesture for him to stop gawking and come in, for God's sake, but always he held back, awestruck, like a pilgrim at a shrine. You'd think he was paying a visit to Michelangelo. The worshipful look that had always come over him whenever they spoke of the architect exasperated Teeg, for whom Zuni was no legendary figure, but merely a person, crotchety and fond of teasing, a surrogate mother with a face shaped like a wedge of pie, eyes buried in creases from her habit of squinting, and a mind that made light-year leaps.

Now pale and hollow-cheeked against the pillow, this face had aged by seventeen years since Teeg had first glimpsed it. The memory of that first encounter was painful. Teeg had just left her mother at the sanitation port, arm bravely uplifted, to visit her father inside the Enclosure. “Only for a couple of weeks!” her mother called reassuringly. Her father looked ridiculous when he met her in Oregon City, with a video crooner's mask plastered on his puss and a bright red wig perched like a throw-rug on his skull. “I've brought a friend to meet you,” he said by way of greeting. The friend was a slight, vigorous woman who fixed Teeg with an intense gaze before bowing. Even back then, at age sixty or so, Zuni was already white-haired and her face was a map of delicate lines, like frost on a window.

“Architect Franklin will care for you when I am forced to leave the city,” her father explained stiffly.

Teeg felt a sickening loss of balance, as when the floor of a glider lurches beneath you. “But I'm going back outside with Mother in two weeks.”

Her father's many-faceted eyes looked in every direction but hers. “That was a misunderstanding. The eugenics law requires you to stay inside.”

Teeg looked pleadingly at the woman, who raised her eyebrows and asked, “You would separate the child from her mother?”

“To preserve her from the wilds, yes I would.”

“There are worse fates than living in Oregon,” Zuni observed.

Those words had roused in Teeg a glimmer of affection for the woman, an affection which swelled over the years into love. After that first glimpse of Zuni, Teeg had to wait seven years before being licensed to venture outside the Enclosure. By then her father had frozen in the waters off Alaska, and her mother—according to the health patrol—had drowned in the Columbia River.

While Zuni lay in the sleepchamber recovering from shock, Teeg studied every branching in the delicate frost-pattern of wrinkles on her face. It might have been the map of an imaginary country. Words bubbled up occasionally from the old woman's sleep. What few sentences Teeg could make out had to do with birds and cages. “It's all right, love,” Teeg soothed, petting her. “You're with us now. You're free.”