“Wait,” he begged. In a panic he thought for ways to keep her, fearing that such an improbable creature might not survive until tomorrow. “Do you live in Portland Complex?”
She jerked a thumb domeward. “Seven floors above you.” Walking again, she kept her place on the belt. Arched above her face the hair formed a red border of turbulence.
“And what brings you through here for exercise?” he asked.
“Looking for a walking partner.”
“Oh.” Again he scrambled for words. Her bluntness dried up his throat. “And why do you walk?”
The smile again, crippling all his faculties. “I’m in training,” she said.
“Training?”
“For going away.”
11 October 2026—Astoria, Oregon
Teeg and I watch an acorn woodpecker hammer a hole in the trunk of a dead fir, red topknot catching the sun. When the opening is just the right size and roundness, the bird taps an acorn snugly into it. Squirrels cannot dig it out. But the woodpecker can, and will, some February day when the bug population is running low.
Teeg’s five-year-old eyes open wide in wonder. “Is it killing the tree, Mommy?” she wants to know.
“The tree is already dead,” I tell her, “poisoned from the things people sprayed, and the woodpecker is using it for a cupboard.”
And all the open cities are becoming husks, abandoned shells, as people flood into the domes. At least we can salvage the steel and copper, the aluminum and chrome, the bits of Terra tied up in the old places. The dismantling of Portland is nearly complete. Sad, plucked city. Brick streets and wooden houses are all that remain. I mourn by bringing Teeg out here to Astoria for a weekend, where we admire the acorn woodpecker. Astoria, thank God, will not be recycled, for it is built mostly of wood. The salt and wind and birds can have it. We have seen fourteen birds since yesterday morning, six of them able to fly.
* * *
* * *
TWO
Unlikely as it seemed to Phoenix, Teeg did meet him at the gamepark. Afraid she might not recognize him in the crowd of merrymakers and chemmieguzzlers, he wore the same mask and costume as yesterday. He would have dangled a sign about his neck, if need be, to attract her attention. Who cared a fig about the stares? He stood on a bench to make himself a landmark, high above the passing wigs, and presently he spied her slipping toward him through the crush of people. Facepaint instead of mask, baggy robe kicking at her feet, hood tied crookedly about her head. Thrown-together look, as usual.
“So you came,” she announced, with what seemed like mild surprise. She drew him away from the racket of electronic warfare, past the simulators where people lined up to pretend they were piloting rockets or submarines, past the booths where ecstatic customers twitched upon eros couches.
“Zoo time,” Teeg muttered, leading him on. She said something else, too, but Phoenix could only make out her bitter tone and not the words, for two opponents were haranguing one another on a nearby shouting stage.
Why so angry? he wondered, following her along the pedbelt. As the conveyor banked around a curve, Teeg swayed to one side and her hip swelled against the fall of her robe. She seemed unconscious of her body. How could he begin mating ritual with a woman who ignored the simplest sexual rules? She might rip off his mask and lick his chin in front of everybody. Who could predict?
Soon they reached a deserted corner of the park, where the pedbelts gave out. Antiquated amusement booths, with shattered windows and dangling wires, were heaped on both sides of a disused footpath.
“This is left from a skategame kids used to play,” Teeg explained, patting the scuffed walkway with her foot, “back when kids used their legs.”
Legs again. Apparently she would say anything. Blinking at the body-word, Phoenix answered, “I remember, you hunched down like this,” and he assumed the bent-knee posture he had perfected as a boy on skates. Looking up, he found amusement in her green eyes, and quickly looked away.
“So you were a skater?” she said, and then she was a squall of questions. What work do you do? Who are your parents? Any children? Ever go outside? How do you like living in Oregon City?
And so he told her about his training in geo-meteorology, his job studying satellite images (“Because I have a good eye for patterns,” he boasted shamelessly, “something the cybers still can’t match”), and he told her about his mother’s death in the 2027 fusion implosion at Texas City, about living with his father who tested chemmies in New Mexico City, then about his father’s bad trip and the eleven-year drug coma that followed. He mentioned his twenty-one years of schooling, the move to Oregon City a year ago after his father’s death, the days at work and nights at the gamepark. His sperm was duly banked, he told her, but so far as he knew, none had been used. Eugenics probably thought one of him was enough. He admitted that he had begun the mating ritual with a bevy of women, but had rarely pursued it to—he paused, reticent—consummation. He confessed that he knew all about weather but had never stuck so much as his nose outside the Enclosure, confessed, in a voice that surprised him with its urgency, how restless he felt, how lonely, how trapped.
All the while Teeg was nodding yes, yes, that is truly how it is, and between questions she was telling about herself: She had spent most of her childhood in the wilds, traveling about the northwest corner of the continent with her mother, who had been in charge of dismantling Portland, Vancouver, Anchorage, lesser places. Her father was one of the architects of the Enclosure, a monster of rationality.
Teeg’s last name finally plunked into a slot in his brain. “Passio? Gregory Passio? You’re his daughter?”
“Yes,” she replied. “That’s the particular monster. You’ve heard of him?”
“He was one of my childhood heroes. He and Zuni Franklin. They made me want to be an architect.”
“Then why’re you a weatherman?”
“I got hung up on third-order topology. When the cyber simulated my buildings, they kept falling down.”
“You don’t need math for meteorology?” Teeg asked wryly.
“Sure, but not so much, not where I come in. After the cybers spit out the weather maps, I see the patterns. Gestalts. Kind of a right-brain thing.”
She looked at him skeptically, the kind of look you would give a food-stick that seemed off-color. What did she think of him? Blue-wigged noodle-brain, or stage-seven lover? Impossible to tell. Talking with her was like tracking a typhoon—you never knew which direction she would take.
“Gregory Passio was my father all right. And not much of one. You could have picked a better hero.” She paused. Her facepaint was so thin he could actually follow her turbulent emotions with a sidelong glance. “Don’t mix him up with Zuni Franklin. She’s a different fish altogether.”
“Fish?” he said.
“You know, swimmy-swimmy?” She laced her fingers together and wriggled her joined palms in the air before her. Evidently the confusion still flickered in his eyes, for she explained: “I just meant that Zuni Franklin and my father both helped design the Enclosure, but for very different reasons. She’s no monster.”
“I don’t understand.”
“You couldn’t,” she said bluntly, and she went on to tell Phoenix how her father had made her come inside when she turned thirteen, legal breeding age. And then he had drowned while up supervising the construction of Alaska City. Now she worked mostly outside the dome, back on land, as a troubleshooter repairing tubes and transmitters and auto-machinery. Her ova had been used for eighteen—or perhaps twenty, she forgot—children, all of them grown inside other women. She had been mated three times, she told him, never happily, never long, twice with men and once with a woman.
“Eighteen offspring?” Phoenix whistled. In a steady-state population that was an astonishing number. Worthy of Eve in the old garden.
“That’s what comes of having bright parents.”
“Is your mother still outside?”
Teeg smiled crookedly.
“I guess you could say that.”
“Do you see her when you go on repair missions?”
“They killed her.”
“Who killed her? What? The wilds?”
Instead of answering, Teeg swung away down the path, back toward the clanging heart of the gamepark.
A few days later they spent an afternoon at the disney, studying the mechanical beasts. “Timber wolf,” a sign proclaimed, and there stood a shaggy creature with jaws agape and ribs protruding. Awful, Phoenix thought, as Teeg pressed the button and the wolf’s jaws clapped open and shut, howling. But Teeg seemed to take some bitter delight in making the beasts perform. She led him on from “griffin” to “pterodactyl” to “African elephant,” pressing every button, her mouth pursed and her eyes hard.
On other days they hiked around the hydroponics district, along hydrogen pipelines marked EXPLOSIVE, down aisles between huge whirling energy-storage wheels. Teeg’s ID opened gateway after gateway. With each expedition she led him deeper into the mechanical bowels of the city, down several hundred meters below sea level where minerals and food and power were extracted from the ocean. Was it because of her famous father, Phoenix wondered, that Security allowed her to venture down here among these life-and-death machines? Red-eyed surveillance cameras greeted them at every turn. The few people they met in those lower reaches—technicians intent upon some repair or adjustment—pretended not to see them.
Phoenix discovered parts of Oregon City he had only known about from video. In his increasingly anarchic talks with Teeg, he discovered parts of himself he had never known about at all. Signals kept arriving from forgotten regions of his body, aches at first, then pleasures, as if nerve and muscle were conspiring with heart to make him love her.
Some two weeks after their first walk they descended one afternoon to the bottom-most level of the city, a labyrinth of tunnels reeking with brine. Teeg scooped up a handful of ocean water from one of the desalinization tanks, and said, “You forget the whole city is afloat, until you come down here.”
Phoenix suddenly felt queasy, vulnerable, the way he felt when something reminded him of death. Yes, the ocean was always there, ready to burst the human bubbles that floated upon it. He gazed around at the mammoth pumps and extractors, listened to the slosh of water. Afloat. He recalled how Oregon City appeared in the satellite monitors: the central dome, and clustered around it the ring of smaller domes for manufacturing and aquaculture, for cancer wards and corpse freezers and mutant pens, then radiating outward from each dome the pipelines and tubes that linked the city to the rest of the human system. Viewed from the sky, set off against the vast curve of ocean, how fragile it all seemed.
He was relieved when they ascended to the workaday level of Oregon City again, up where the dome shut out sky and ocean, where the honeycombed buildings and pedbelts and shuttles reassured him of the power of mind over matter. Up here, nature did not exist. People everywhere, and the shiny things people had made.
“Do you work in the wilds all by yourself?” he asked her.
“Depends on the job. Sometimes on my own, sometimes with my crew.”
“Did your crew mostly grow up outside the way you did?”
“Mostly. But a few of them were insiders, then got fed up. …” Her voice broke off sharply.
Phoenix tried to get her to say more about the crew. What would possess someone to work in the wilds? How could they stand the chaos, the filth? But she would not answer, so he let it go.
After a while he said, “That pass of yours seems to get you anywhere.”
“I’m a master troubleshooter. That lets me work on any part of the human system, inside or out.”
“How did you wangle that?”
“Zuni Franklin arranged it.”
“You knew her?”
“Know her,” Teeg corrected.
Phoenix was awed. It was like knowing Michelangelo, Buckminster Fuller, Alexi Sventov. “How did you ever get to meet her?”
“After my father made me come inside, he dumped me with her every time he went off on a job. Thought she’d teach me to love the Enclosure, forget my mother.”
“I take it she didn’t succeed.”
Teeg laughed, a quick laugh that always punched him in the wind. “No, she didn’t teach me that at all.”
The shadow of a glider flowed over them, and Phoenix glanced up at the shiny belly of the machine. No walkers up there. No walkers anywhere in the city, so far as he could see, only the streams of cloaked bodies riding pedbelts or coasting in the aluminum gliders overhead.
“She was a powerful woman,” Teeg added.
“I’ll say. She conceived this entire city.”
“I wasn’t thinking of Zuni Franklin,” Teeg said impatiently. “I was thinking of my mother.”
She stepped onto a pedbelt and he followed close behind. Other passengers shouldered aside, and turned their masked faces away. Probably thinking: here were two escapees from quarantine. Mutants on parole. Phoenix tried to recall his own mother. But he had only been four when she died, and all he could remember was a square face with stray hairs fluttering around it. Implosion. One of the last attempts at sustaining fusion before they gave up the idea, and she had been erased. Poof. His father, whom he had gone to observe occasionally during the eleven-year drug coma, was hump-nosed and pasty-skinned in his memory, a thing with sagging mouth waiting forever to die.
After several moments Phoenix realized that he and Teeg were drifting along, each one lost in a separate reverie, and he wanted to connect with her again. So he stepped off the pedbelt at Marconi Plaza and gently tugged at her sleeve so she would follow.
The plaza was deserted, except for a few children in power-prams. The fountain at the center, where Teeg and Phoenix stood for a moment to watch the play of water, smelled of brine. Shreds of money, torn up and flung there by some mumbler of wishes, jostled on the surface.
“How have you kept your pass, thinking the way you do?” he asked her.
“They don’t know how I think. I do my work well. I’ve never been caught breaking any machinery or any rules.”
“But doesn’t Security think it’s a risk, letting you go outside?”
“Because I grew up in the wilds?” Teeg gave him one of her unsettling green stares. The paint on her cheeks was cracked and peeling. Paleness underneath. Her actual skin. “They don’t have much choice,” she said. “Not many people will take the work. Too messy out there, too dangerous. And the few of us who do go out—except the suicidal maniacs—wouldn’t mess with the system. We know enough about the defenses to avoid thoughts of sabotage. The most I could do is just stay out there after some job, never come back. Outside, I’m no threat. It’s inside the city I’m a threat.”
Phoenix felt her eyes searching him for some response, and he pretended to be absorbed in watching his feet, his long-boned and brazenly naked feet, scuffling along beside hers. She had him so scrambled that he had given up even trying to calculate which mating rules they were breaking. Just don’t get arrested for indecency, he thought, and otherwise ride the emotional rocket. “Do you think about that sometimes,” he asked, “staying outside?”
“Sometimes,” she confessed; then after a few more paces she added, “Often. All the time, in fact. In my twenty-nine years I’ve only lived in the city nine, maybe ten of them. Here’s the place that seems alien to me,” she said, sweeping both arms overhead, trailing the gauzy sleeves like wings, “and outside is home. Everytime, coming back inside, it’s torture.”
One moment the dome seemed to Phoenix impossibly high, higher than the sky ever could have been, and the next moment it seemed a brutal weight pressing down on him.
“It’s like crawling back inside a bottle,” she continued, “a huge sterilized bottle for culturing people.”
A feeling of claustrophobia rose in his throat, nearly choking him, like the sour taste of food long-since swallowed and forgotten. He stopped walking, halfway across Marconi Plaza, and the city
snapped tight around him. Apartment towers glistened feverishly with the trapped energy of several million lives; the pedbelts and glider-paths sliced the airspace into hectic curves; offices repeated the same honeycomb pattern, like geometrical stuttering, as far as the eye could see. The sudden pressure of the city on his mind was so awful that he did not notice for several seconds the lighter pressure of Teeg’s hand on his arm.
“You never felt that before?” she asked gently.
“I guess I did,” he answered. “I guess I’ve always felt that. I just never admitted it before. The frenzy—it’s always there, like death, waiting. But I fight it down, hide it away.”
“Make things tidy,” she suggested.
“Exactly. Tidy, tidy. I put everything in order. And then at night I lie in bed and a crevice opens in my heart, and the dread creeps out, a fog, engulfing me. Death, I suppose. Nothingness.” He stopped abruptly, ashamed of his passion.
“Yes?” she urged.
But he was too shaken to say anything more.
Without planning their next walk, they parted in Marconi Plaza. Phoenix rode the belt home, frightened by Teeg, by the crevasses she opened inside him. For the first time in weeks he was aware of the alarmed glances his helter-skelter costume and his bare feet provoked. Surely people would think he was crazed, afloat on a tide of chemmies, reverting to beasthood. Perhaps they would even notify the health patrollers. Rehabilitate him. But he could rehabilitate himself, could fight down the chaos that Teeg had loosed in him.
He didn’t care if she was an alluring animal. He didn’t care if she really was the daughter of Gregory Passio, or the intimate of Zuni Franklin. She would quickly destroy him if he didn’t break free.
Safely back in his room, he scrubbed himself, dressed in his most fashionable moodgown and wig, then applied a fresh mask, painting very carefully, copying the face of a dance champion whose poster hung beside the dressing mirror.
He put everything in the apartment in its place. He ran the sanitizer. He gulped a double dose of balancers.
Terrarium Page 2
