Terrarium

by Scott Russell Sanders

  “Teeg, you’ve got to promise never to go outside again.”

  She laughed once, harshly. “Dream on. Haven’t you been listening to me?”

  “You can’t recreate that old world. You can’t crawl back into your mother’s lap. All that’s finished.”

  “I don’t need to create anything. It’s all there, waiting. All I have to do is walk into it.”

  “To a brutal death.”

  Stretching her arms wide, she spun in a circle, gown and hair aswirl. “You see any wounds?” He shrugged, avoiding her stare. But she danced sideways until he was facing her again, looking into her inflamed eyes. “Hasn’t your body taught you anything after all these months of walking? We were made to live out there, shaped to it. Look,” she said, her voice softening, “just think about it. People’ve been inside—what? twenty-four, twenty-five years? Not even a generation. And before that humans lived outside for how long? Millions of years.”

  “In misery, sickness, and constant fear.”

  “Not always, not everywhere. Some people lived truly, handsomely.”

  “So tell me about Eden.”

  “Forget myths. I’m talking about real communities of people, living outside in harmony and simplicity. Listen, some of us want to try it, try making a place out there—”

  “You can’t go back.”

  “Who said anything about going back? I’m talking about going forward.”

  “No!” He clapped hands over ears, frightened by what she was offering.

  “Phoenix, please listen—”

  “No no no!”

  When at last he looked up, she was gone, the door standing open. On the threshold rested a small gray parallelogram of stone. Stooping warily over it, he could see the faint imprint of a leaf in the surface—or perhaps it was a fern; it had been many years since he had looked at pictures of plants. With a tablemat he scooped up the stone, held it near his face. There was a faint smell of damp. The tiny veins of the leaf formed a riotous maze of intersecting lines that reminded him of the map’s labyrinth of rivers. Had it been decontaminated? Where had she found it, in what mire out there? For a long time he hesitated, fingers poised a few centimeters above the stone. And then at last he touched the mazy indentation, gingerly, so as not to injure himself. The delicate lines of the fossil proved hard, harder than his cautious fingers.

  The stone felt cold in his palm, slick with perspiration, as he shifted from foot to callused foot before her door. That was her doing, the calluses, the twitching in his legs, the lust for escape. Passengers streamed by on the pedbelts, slashing him with their glances as he debated what to do. But he ignored them, and that also was her doing. Should he report her, get her wilder-license revoked, then try coaxing her into sanity again? Could he betray her that way? Or should he let her make those journeys outside, each one longer, until, one day, she failed to return? Could he actually go out there with her?

  His heart raced faster than it ever had from their walking or stair-climbing.

  At last he rang, and the door clicked open. For the first time he entered her lair, smelling her, but unable to see anything in the dim light. He groped his way forward. “Teeg?”

  “In here.”

  Her voice came from a second room, visible only as a vertical streak of blue light where the door stood ajar. With halting steps, hands raised to fend off obstacles, Phoenix picked his way through the darkness toward the blue slither of light. As he approached, the door eased open, forcing him to shield his eyes from the brightness. Swimming in the wash of blue was Teeg’s silhouette, not naked, surely, but with arms and legs distinctly outlined. Was she in her working gear, a shimmersuit?

  “I found this,” he said, reaching the fossil toward her in his open palm.

  “That was for you to keep,” she snapped. “A gift for parting.”

  “I didn’t come to return it. I came to have you read it for me—tell me what it means—tell me—I don’t know.” He halted in confusion. The hard edge of her voice, the blue glare, the inner turmoil made his eyes water. “You’ve got to be patient with me.”

  “So you’ll have time enough to file that infection alert?”

  “I didn’t mean for you to see that.”

  “No, I’ll bet you didn’t.”

  “I won’t file it. I can’t.”

  She studied him. “Why did you get it in the first place?”

  “I just wanted to keep you,” he stammered.

  “What do you mean, keep me?”

  “Keep you safe, keep you inside.”

  “Well I won’t be kept inside, you hear me? Not by you or the health board or anybody.”

  His eyes still watered, but he could make out her swift movements as she paced about the room gathering vials and cassettes and food capsules into a massive carrycase. It was a shimmersuit she wore, silvered to reflect sunlight, clinging to her like a second skin to allow for work on the outside. The disclosure of her body embarrassed him. Even in stage ten of the mating ritual he had never seen a woman so exposed.

  “Where are you going?” he demanded.

  “I’m not waiting here to be arrested.”

  “You’re not going back outside?”

  “Eventually. A few of us together, back to the wilds, home.” She slammed the carrycase on the floor. “What do you think I’ve been wooing you for, you colossal idiot? We wanted a few more people, to build a little colony.” A shove from her boot sent the case skidding across the floor. “So when you came out walking I thought maybe you wanted your body back. Maybe you wanted out of the bottle.”

  “You never told me.”

  “I didn’t want to spell it out. I wanted you to hunger for the wilds the way I do.” Her anger drove her prowling back and forth in front of him. Beyond her, directly under the hanging blue lamps, he could see a glass tank filled with a writhing mat of green. Plants? In the city? Her angry stalking drew his eyes away.

  “But how can I want what I’ve never had?” he protested. “This is all I know.” With outspread arms he gestured to indicate the floating city, the thousands of miles of travel tubes, and the dozen other cities he had lived in or visited, always inside, always insulated from the beast world.

  She stopped her prowling in front of him. In the clinging shimmersuit her body trembled like quicksilver. Her stare no longer made him wince. And he noticed her eyes were almost the same gray-green color as the slate he still held stupidly in his hand. “All you know,” she murmured, grasping him by a wrist. “Then come look at this.”

  She led him to the glass tank, drew him down to kneel with her and peer through the translucent wall. Inside was an explosion of tendrils, petals, stems, dangling frail seed pods, fierce blossoms like concentrations of fire, all of it in greens and browns and reds so vibrant they made Phoenix tremble. His eyes hunted for a leaf that would match the fossil she had given him, while his thumb searched out the delicate imprint in the stone. But there was too much activity in this amazing green stillness for him to see anything clearly.

  “It’s a terrarium,” Teeg said. “A piece of the earth.”

  He ran his fingers along the glass wall, expecting to feel heat radiating from these intense creatures. But the tank was cool, sealed on all sides. “They’re alive?”

  She laughed at what she saw in his face. “Of course they’re alive. That’s dirt, the brown stuff.”

  “But how—closed in like that?”

  “Wise little beasts, aren’t they?” And she used the word beasts tenderly, as he had never heard it used before. “There’s your chaos,” she said. “That’s what you’re saving me from.”

  Phoenix started to protest that this was only a tiny fragment of the earth, without animals, without tornadoes or poisons or viruses, without winters. But his tongue felt heavy with astonishment. His eyes would not move from this miniature wilderness, at once so disorderly and so harmonious.

  “Well,” she said, her fingers tightening on his wrist, “will you go?”


  “I might,” he answered. And then, uncertainly, “I will.”

  1 July 2028—Whale’s Mouth Bay

  There is a humbleness in stones, a patience, a yielding to weather and to the restlessness of earth. Teeg gathers them by the bucketfuls, stooping low over the gravel bed so her little bottom rises like a peach. The sun turns her a warm sienna hue. When a stone amazes her, she brings it in her muddy palm for me to admire. Look, Mommy, another miracle!

  Together we study fossils, cracking the slate with a hammer. She thumbs through my old ragged field guide for pictures that match what we find in the hearts of rocks. We walk around on so many thicknesses of history.

  More and more I feel like a fossil myself, squeezed beneath the enormous burden of the future—at least what Gregory assures me is the inevitable future, the life shut up inside the antiseptic human system, life barricaded from what he calls the beast world. The Enclosure Act is not even two years old, and already the resistance movements are broken.

  Soon there will be no one left outside except the sick and the vicious and the mad.

  I only have Anchorage and Vancouver left to dismantle, and the small coastal cities in Oregon, and then my commission expires. “If you refuse to come in when the work is finished,” Gregory warns, “if you insist on reverting to bestiality, you still must deliver my daughter to Oregon City.” “Teeg stays with me,” I insist. “The Enclosure Act, the health board—” he huffs at me, but I break contact and his voice withers away.

  The stain on this page comes from Teeg’s muddy paw, plumped down here to display a treasured fossil. I make no attempt to wipe it clean.

  * * *

  * * *

  SIX

  While friends and journalists speculated about her plans for the future, Zuni quietly went on severing the ties that bound her to the Enclosure. She delivered the last of her scheduled lectures (on the psychology of disembodied mind), speaking as usual for two hours, without notes, holding the audience spellbound, and then she declined all further engagements. She resigned from boards of directors, task forces, committees.

  For the better part of a month she sorted through her files, assigning to the archives whatever she thought might be of use to future planners, piping the rest to recycle. There were sixty years’ worth of blueprints here, beginning with plans for a ten-kilometer-square greenhouse she had designed at sixteen. Even so large a greenhouse, she had discovered, would not sustain a complex eco-system. Trees might thrive in it, but hawks could not. And if she altered the design to accommodate hawks, the ferns might die. Cyber simulations taught her that the smallest environment capable of sustaining a continent’s menu of life would be the size of the continent itself.

  Soon after age sixteen she had given up the notion of creating glass refuges for nature, and had begun designing human habitats. All the plans were there in her files, graduated in scale from single-person dwellings to planetary skeins of cities. Leafing through those early drawings—tents for backpackers, two-person space arks, bubble-villages for the ocean floor, flower-shaped colonies—Zuni was amused by their modesty. Between dreaming up tents for a single person and dreaming up a planetary Enclosure, her mind had gone on a long journey.

  Not her mind alone, of course. Nature always unfolded in many persons at once. Beginning with the designs for villages, most of the blueprints listed Gregory Passio’s name alongside hers. Zuni found it hard to recall, from this distance in time, which lines Gregory had drawn and which she had drawn herself. Others shared the confusion, for people soon began to treat the two of them as a composite creature, Franklin-Passio. He had been the greater technician, she the visionary. Most often she would conceive a structure, and Gregory—trained in the harsh conditions of Venus, where any miscalculation converted a habitat into a tomb—would reduce it to numbers and materials. When one of their structures was being assembled, he would oversee the building, while she rested content with the drawings. The transformation from numbers on a page to airy geodesic skeletons arching against the sky never ceased to amaze him. One of those building-site visits cost him his life, when storms capsized his floating rig off the Alaska coast.

  “I’m a random element,” that was how Gregory had always liked to describe himself. “I’m one of those little leaps nature takes every now and again. Most of us are flops.”

  Looking at him, Zuni had found the evolutionary leap easy to believe. Gregory was a tiny man with an oversized head, and even in those early days he was already bald. His vision as a child had been defective in such complicated ways that surgeons were forced to anneal multi-focal lenses to his eyes. Since he had no use for wigs or facepaint, his swollen dome and blue-veined face and faceted eyes were exposed for everyone to see, and made him look unearthly.

  Zuni remembered most vividly their earliest collaborations, back in the first decade of the century, when she and Gregory and thousands of others had worked feverishly to devise a habitat that would preserve at least a remnant of humanity from the wreckage of the environment.

  “What we need are a few billion self-sustaining modules,” Gregory had maintained. “Like the exploration capsules we used on Venus. One per person.”

  At first Zuni had imagined he must be kidding. “Wouldn’t that be a bit lonely, each of us in a separate box?”

  “Oh, a man and woman could plug their modules together. Families could lock their units into a cluster.”

  “And when people grew tired of one another, they could just unplug?”

  “Correct. Like our bodies, only better.” There was no trace of a smile on Gregory’s blue-veined face. “Doesn’t that sound appealing?”

  “It sounds awful. Like Brownian motion—dust particles bumping together and then careening off to some new collision.”

  “So what’s your alternative?”

  “Cities.”

  “You’d actually rather live in a city, jammed together with millions of other people, than in your own free-roaming capsule?”

  “At least in the cities one could touch other people. And keep civilization alive.”

  Confronted by such evidence of mental aberration, Gregory would shrug, wrinkle his expansive forehead, then lapse into silence. And that was how their early debates about future habitats usually ended.

  Gradually she chipped away at his notion of living-boxes with the tool he most respected—numbers. “Fabricating and supplying a few billion private modules would take many-powers-more energy and materials than my cities would.”

  “And where do we get enough materials even for your cities?”

  “We mine the dumps and junkyards for metal. We dismantle the old cities, the burned-out factories, the abandoned machinery. We haul the rockets out of their silos and the wrecks out of the ocean, melt them down. There’s plenty around to build a thousand cities or so, connect them with pipes, enclose them with domes. But not enough for your billions of hermit igloos.”

  Once Gregory had conceded the materials argument, Zuni challenged his enthusiasm for the free-ranging nomad. “You’d really trust all those billions of people, swarming anywhere they wanted to?”

  “Why not?” he countered.

  “Poking their noses into the nuclear graves? Tinkering with the weather-monitors? Snipping data lines?”

  “We never had much problem with that on Venus.”

  “Because the population there is only a few thousand, and everybody’s carefully selected.”

  Gregory had always found it difficult to understand ordinary people, and so Zuni’s catalogue of possible mischief gave him pause. “Cut data lines? Scatter the plutonium? Would people actually do such things?”

  “Listen, Gregory, if you turned seven billion people loose to go anywhere they wanted on this planet, each in her own capsule, there would always be a million people eager to work any sort of stupidity you could imagine. And a great many sorts you couldn’t imagine.”

  Having been persuaded that Terra’s population was less trustworthy than the elite pop
ulation of space colonists, Gregory began adding to the catalogue of possible mischief. “Just think of the transformers, the deserts full of mirrors, the tide-generators. Somebody could block a laser avenue. And the whole electromagnetic spectrum is vulnerable to jamming.”

  “You see,” said Zuni. “And suppose people keep dumping their wastes? Who’s to stop them? And how much more will the eco-system absorb before the balance gives way completely?”

  That brought a suspicious look from Gregory. His eyes reflected multiple chilly images of her. “Once we’re sealed inside—capsules or cities—what does eco-balance matter? The planet’s hostile already. We can cope with a little more hostility.”

  “Not really hostile, not when you think of Venus, say.”

  The wrinkles were plowing across his great forehead. “Zuni, you’re not turning into some sappy nature-lover, are you?”

  Here was unstable ground. At any moment a fissure might open, separating them forever. Zuni phrased her answer carefully. “It’s not a matter of loving or hating. It’s a simple question of survival. We’re scrambling now to put a roof over our heads before the environment collapses. Why make matters worse?”

  “True, in the short run. But in the long run, who cares? If the algae die, and carbon dioxide builds up, we can always get oxygen from rocks.”

  “Of course we can,” Zuni soothed. “But the ocean’s still doing a pretty good job with oxygen. Let’s just help it keep working, and we’ll be free to build the habitat.”