Terrarium

by Scott Russell Sanders

  All that day and the next he rode through Oregon City, visiting eros parlors, attending rhetoric matches, watching electro-ball, clinging to his old entertainments. He played four-dimensional chess with Lon, designed murals with Chie, even resumed lackadaisical mating rituals with two women who had nearly forgotten him. With this one I had progressed to the touching of hands, he learned from the old mating charts, and with that one I had exchanged a five-second stare. But even while he tried to revive the passion that had once driven him into this prolonged sexual dance, he kept feeling the print of Teeg’s hand on his arm, kept hearing the sound of her voice, so confident in its anarchism.

  After three days of this charade, he gave up and called Teeg. She gazed directly into the vidphone, her face unpainted, her mouth a grim slash.

  “I’ve been sick,” he lied to her, turning away in confusion from her exposed face. “Chemistry’s been out of kilter.”

  “Chemistry.” She echoed the word as if it were a place he had gone to visit.

  “How about a walk today?” he asked.

  “Tomorrow,” she said. “But let’s not walk. I need you to get me some maps.”

  “Maps?”

  “From work.” She spoke in a voice as tough as the soles of her feet. “You do use thousand-to-one scale maps for weather grids?”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay, I want the sections for the Oregon coast from 43° to 46°.” Her bare face hovered on the vidscreen like a forbidden planet. “Your place. Nineteen o’clock. Any problem with that?”

  “No,” he answered hastily. “Is microfiche all right?”

  “I’d rather have polyfilm prints I could keep.”

  “What for?”

  She merely repeated the latitudes, as if he were a child with a porous memory.

  Watching her naked face evaporate from the screen, Phoenix wondered what drove her to ignore the mating rituals, what urgency in her burned through all rules.

  At greatest magnification the relief map shone upon the screen as a snarl of dunes, cliffs, inlets, river beds. Each landform was a distinct color, making a crazy-quilt of shades and textures. The disorder of it made Phoenix feel slightly nauseous.

  “They don’t supply you with maps when you go out for repairs?” he asked.

  Teeg was crouching near the screen, haunches on bare heels, tracing the shape of a bay that hooked into the coast like a bent finger of blue. “No. I type in my work coordinates and the cyber guides my shuttle there. I just climb outside the tube and work on transformers, or cables, sometimes on the tube itself. There’ll be mountains, maybe. Forests. Sometimes even deserts. But I usually don’t have any clue where those things are on a map.”

  “Usually?”

  “Some landmarks I remember from traveling with my mother, especially around the coastal cities south of Portland, the last places she dismantled.” Pointing to the map, she crooked her finger to mimic the blue hook of water. “This inlet, for instance. I remember that place. Whale’s Mouth Bay, my mother called it. She used to take me wading there. I think it was her favorite place. She took me there the last time we—”

  “Wading in the ocean?”

  A sudden fury made Teeg’s eyes turn smoky, the same fury he had glimpsed on that first day when he had gawked at her bare feet. “Yes, the ocean. The stuff we’re floating on, the stuff we’re mining and eating and tapping for energy, the stuff we pump through Oregon City every day in billions of liters. What’s wrong with wading in it?”

  Instead of answering, Phoenix forced himself to look at the chaos on the screen. The only straight lines visible on the map were the tube routes, angling north to Alaska City and south to California City, or trailing away eastward, where further maps would show them reaching the land cities of Wyoming and Iowa, the float cities on Lake Michigan and Erie and Ontario, then farther east to the oldest float cities along the New England coast. At work, Phoenix preferred using a schematic map of the continent, which showed the hundred-odd land cities as bright red circles, the thirty float cities as green squares, the connecting tubes as stripes of black or yellow or blue. This entire scheme was superimposed on a grid of cyber coordinates, and behind it all lurked the shadowy outline of North America.

  Queasiness finally made him look away from the screen. “You’re going out there someday? To stay?”

  Without turning from the map, she said, “The coast is all rocky along there. I remember some kind of yellow-flowering bushes in the spring.”

  “Are you?” he insisted.

  She faced him now. “Who knows?”

  “It’s madness. Sure death.”

  “If you don’t know what you’re doing.”

  “And you know, do you? A few scrambled childhood memories, and you think you know how to survive the wilds?”

  “I can survive.”

  “Alone?”

  Her fists unclenched, her body relaxed, a quietness came over her. “No, not alone. I’m never alone.”

  31 December 2026—Portland, Oregon

  Enclosure Day. The hour had to come in some lifetime, I suppose, yet I wish it had not come in mine. Today, all around the Earth, health patrollers begin sweeping the reluctant ones into sanitation ports. Those who put up no fight are promised citizenship in the Enclosure. And those who resist? Will it be quarantine? The freezers? Oblivion?

  The last salvageable pieces of Portland leave today by tube—all except a few materials I squirrel away, tools mostly. I am thinking this might be a place for Teeg and me to hide, later on, after the patrollers are satisfied that the wilds have been scoured clean of people. The winters are mild here. Two great rivers offer passage to the mountains and the sea. One could patch together a decent sort of house from the wooden shells. And in the spring, up in the park, there are roses.

  Gregory beams me news that Oregon City is now fully operational, from tritium extractors and ocean thermal exchangers to sani-showers for the three million living units. His fat, greasy lightbulb of a head fairly glows on the screen. I am not cheered. He’s also full of chat about that Zuni woman. Visionary of the Enclosure, he calls her. If she can stand him, she’s welcome to him. When will Teeg and I be joining him inside? he asks. Never, I think, but do not say the word.

  * * *

  * * *

  THREE

  The only troublesome items Zuni had not allowed the surgeons to replace were her eyes. Both lungs, one kidney, various joints, even the valves of her heart, those she had been content to let go, for they did not seem to be intrinsic parts of her. Let the doctors fiddle with her ears or pancreas, she would not care. But if she ever gave up her eyes, the ones she had used to design the Enclosure, to memorize the contours of earth, to trace the shifting tones of daylight, she would no longer be Zuni Franklin. Would the surgeons consent to be fitted with new hands? They should have realized that an architect lives in her eyes.

  So when the drugs no longer cleansed the blight from her retina, she had to put up with dimming vision. And when she announced her plans to retire from the Institute for Global Design at age seventy-six—nine years early—everyone assumed her balky eyesight was to blame.

  “Are you afraid blindness would spoil your work at the Institute?” a video reporter asked her.

  Zuni squinted into the camera lights. “It is true that I no longer see things as I once did.”

  “You mean you can’t see well enough to work on blueprints?”

  “I mean that vision changes with age.”

  “Eyesight?”

  “Vision.”

  The reporter gave up trying to straighten out her replies. Better minds than his had been stymied by Zuni Franklin’s ambiguities. “How much longer will you remain at the Institute?” he asked.

  “Only a few weeks more. Long enough to wind up my affairs.”

  “Then you haven’t set a final date? You might still be persuaded to stay on and oversee the completed design of Project Transcendence?”

  They were seated in Zuni’s office
, surrounded on three sides by filing cabinets and display screens and consoles. The room was as stark and impersonal as an operating theater. Zuni had deliberately kept any trace of herself from showing, for fear of giving away her masquerade. The fourth wall, of glass, overlooked the towers and plazas, the curving transport belts, the dazzling geometrical shapes of Oregon City, a city she had largely designed. The sky ballet for the afternoon was an electrical storm, so projectors flashed sullen clouds upon the inside of the dome and loudspeakers occasionally muttered with thunder. A creditable imitation of ozone breathed from the fragrance ducts.

  “No,” she insisted. “I’m definitely retiring. But the precise date depends on the weather.”

  “Weather? You mean the sky ballet?”

  The corners of her mouth turned upward. “I don’t really mean anything, do I? Just an old figure of speech, from an old woman.”

  The reporter cocked his head to one side, listening to editorial directions arriving through his earphones. After a moment he nodded. Then he reversed the tape a few dozen turns. While the camera and recorder idled, he confided in Zuni, “Info thought the reference to weather would needlessly confuse the viewers. Would you mind pretending that our little exchange never took place?”

  “Of course,” Zuni agreed. Although the reporter was masked and wigged to resemble an elderly newsman who had been famous back in the television era, Zuni could tell from his nervous manner and wavering voice that he was actually quite young, insecure. Awed by the grand old architect of the Enclosure? she thought wryly. She would have to keep him from blundering onto dangerous ground. “I’ll be more careful in my choice of words,” she told him.

  Reassured, the young man brought camera and recorder back to life. “So what are your plans for retirement?”

  “Of no interest to the public, I’m afraid.”

  He laughed politely. “Come now. A person of your stature—”

  “Very small, really.”

  “—of your fame—”

  “Undeserved.”

  The young man forced himself to smile for the cameras. “Are you returning to private architectural practice?” he persisted.

  “My plans would be very puzzling to you.”

  “Will you revise your Philosophy of Enclosure?”

  “I have written all I care to on that subject.”

  “But surely you can’t just abandon your lifework?” The reporter gestured overhead at the suspended model of the Enclosure, a spherical web of tubes and nodes. Each tube represented a transport artery, each node a land- or float-city, and the emptiness inside the sphere stood for earth.

  “There are others well qualified to carry on my work.”

  “But what of your mission to liberate humanity from Terra?”

  Zuni pressed fingertips to fingertips and gazed at the wizened artificial face. Behind it she sensed the earnest features of the young man. They were all so earnest, these children of the Enclosure. “Humanity’s escape from Terra is the logical outcome of all our past history. It will go forward with or without help from me.”

  “Many people are hoping you will write an autobiography.”

  Zuni scoffed at that.

  “Perhaps you’ll travel?”

  “I have a journey to make,” Zuni conceded.

  “To the lunar colonies? The asteroids?”

  “Not so far.”

  “Ah, then you’ll be traveling inside the human system here on Terra?”

  “On Terra, yes. Where else but here?” Her white hair was bound up neatly into a bun, her replies were neatly bound in a smile. She was notorious for her refusal to wear masks or wigs. The cameras showed her in filtered light, to spare video viewers the shock of seeing her naked face. It was not such an unforgivable eccentricity in a woman who had lived her first forty-odd years outside the Enclosure. Besides, her own face, benignly smiling, crisscrossed by wrinkles like a Martian landscape, was as hard to read as any mask. Like the antiseptic room where she spoke, everything about her was scrubbed clean of self.

  “Will you be lecturing?” the reporter suggested. “Teaching young architects?”

  “No, I will be learning again, from the wisest instructor.”

  “From Rupinski? Tei? Sventov?” The reporter named the only Terran architects whose fame rivaled Zuni Franklin’s.

  “None of those.” Yes, she felt the man would certainly be under thirty. No one who had been born much earlier than Enclosure Day, back in 2026, could have spoken those names with such uncomplicated reverence. “You would not know this teacher at all.”

  “A designer?”

  “Yes,” she replied, “the greatest of all. But very little known.”

  * * *

  For a week or two the video and newsfax chattered with rumors concerning her future. Zuni Franklin, dismayed by blindness, would have herself vaporized and blown into the air of her beloved Oregon City. On the contrary, she would have her face rebuilt and begin life over as an eros parlor madame. Or perhaps she would venture off into spiritual realms, in search of her dead colleague, Gregory Passio. No, no, she would disguise herself and lurk through every dome and pipeline of the Enclosure, like a queen incognito, inspecting the empire she had helped construct.

  Perhaps, some commentators reflected, she was merely impatient to get on with the business of evolution, to push Homo sapiens farther from its animal origins, toward the realms of pure energy. She might stow aboard a trans-light ship. She might experiment with chemmies, with trances, with psi-travel. Or she might even be the first to have her brain transplanted into a cyber-field, and thus liberate mind yet further from the entanglements of matter.

  Zuni was content to let them guess away, so long as they did not guess the truth. There was little chance of that, since the truth would have seemed to run counter to the drift of her life. For wasn’t her name synonymous with the Enclosure? Hadn’t she fought harder than anyone, harder even than Gregory Passio, to move humanity inside the global network of cities, to shelter humankind from the disease and chaos of the wilds? During the first two decades of the century, when the poisonous biosphere threatened to extinguish the race, she tirelessly preached the idea of a global shelter. She constructed models of the Enclosure, drew up detailed blueprints, described in mesmerizing language the glories of life inside that perfected world. If Terra is inhospitable, she argued, let us build our own habitat, as we have done on Luna and Venus and the asteroids. We can mine the air and ocean for materials. We can suck energy from sun and wind and tide. We can purify everything that enters our system, and admit only what is useful to us. The Enclosure can be the next home for our race, a wayhouse on our road to transcendence, and everything in it will bear our mindprint.

  Knowing such things about Zuni, how could they ever guess her true plans?

  6 November 2027—Vancouver, British Columbia

  The Enclosure Act is not even one year old, and already the wildergoers have withdrawn into the Rockies, the Appalachians, and the Ozarks. Some few apparently still hold out in the Everglades and the bayou country. Beast people, the video calls them. Patrollers have scoured the plains and Gulf Coast and the shores of the Great Lakes. Rumors claim that all babies are stillborn among the renegades. Effect of the toxins? Or health policy? News about the cleansing—another video term—is hard to come by, especially from the other continents.

  In his smug messages Gregory informs me that all the plutonium stockpiles have been “liberated” from the Fifth and Sixth World territories, which leaves them weaponless against the Enclosure. They realize the Enclosure’s defenses will only grow stronger with each passing month, he says, so the last rebellious tribes are moving inside, coming home. Home! As if that rat-maze of bubbles and pipes and electronic skies and painted faces could ever be home for an animal who has walked on the earth.

  * * *

  * * *

  FOUR

  On the beach at Whale’s Mouth Bay, amid boulders and sea gulls, Teeg lay roasting in the sun. Agains
t her naked back and rump the sand felt like a thousand nibbling flames. Salt-laden wind fanned her hair. Even through the breathing-mask she could smell the ocean. Between repair missions, when she was required to stay inside the Enclosure, more than anything else she missed the feel of sun on her skin.

  During this trip she quickly finished her assigned job—replacing fuel cells on a signal booster atop Diamond Mountain—and had three hours left over for scouting. Most of the time she used for discovering how hospitable a place the bay might be, testing for radiation, toxins, soil nutrients, the quality of water. These last few minutes of her allotted time she lay basking in the sun, as a celebration for having found the right place at last. She would have to make sure Whale’s Mouth had been omitted from the surveillance net. It probably had, since no tubes or laser channels or signal avenues passed anywhere near the place. Just another piece of real estate long since erased from human reckoning. She hoped so. Phoenix could tell her for sure. And she would need to spend a week here, later on, to run more tests on plants and microbes and air before she could assure the other seekers that this was indeed the place for the settlement.

  Phoenix’s maps had led her straight to the bay, her shuttle flying low and coasting along on compressed air to avoid the patrollers and the sky-eyes. On each repair mission, stealing time to explore locations for the settlement, she was more and more tempted to stay outside alone. But whenever she wavered, all she had to do was close her eyes, think about the plans for the settlement, and the faces of the seven other conspirators would rise within her silence. She was one of them, a limb of their collective body.

  Lying there on the beach, she felt the sweat gathering in her navel, between her breasts, on the slopes of her thighs. The crash of surf against the volcanic walls of the bay sent shudders through her. Occasionally an eddy in the wind snatched the odors of fir and alder from inshore and filled her with the pungency of green. Thoughts swung lazy as hawks through her mind.