“As soon as we’re safe inside,” Gregory insisted, “the eco-system can go smash, and we’ll get by without it.”
Gregory’s yearning for liberation from the planet ran so deep in him that Zuni treated it as she would treat any religious impulse—with tolerance and silence.
Always a lover of solitude, whose idea of the perfect life was a one-man interstellar flight, Gregory had been reluctant to accept her scheme for a global network of cities. He was not even moved by her argument that no other plan would preserve as many people from Terra’s mounting inhospitality.
“Humanity’s the one item we have in surplus,” he commented sourly.
What had finally convinced him to work on the Enclosure was a combination of esthetics and religion. He discovered that it was far less challenging to design a one-person capsule than to design an entire city. And he eventually admitted that only the Enclosure was large enough to sustain a civilization; only a sophisticated technical civilization could ever lift entire cities free of Terra. After a few decades of operation on Terra, the system Zuni proposed might be sufficiently perfected and powerful to venture off into space, not merely to establish a colony elsewhere, but to be a colony, a wholly human world free to drift forever through the universe. Project Transcendence, Gregory had named it. And that leap into space was the vector he had been riding since childhood.
Zuni realized this was a vector that ran through the hearts of many people, perhaps most people, on earth. Build a shelter. Condition its air, its heat, its light. Put it on wheels, on wings, on rockets, so you can move it wherever you will. Scrub your hands, spray your armpits, paint your skin, eradicate all the imperfections of flesh. Break free of Terra’s antique constraints, break free of gravity and frostbite, banish infection, banish stink. This desire arrowed through the hearts of billions of people, as potent and unfaltering as gravity itself. It was a force Zuni could tap.
At the time she announced her retirement, in the early months of 2051, Zuni had been tapping that force—that human longing for escape from Terra—during more than five decades. It made her regretful, now, in her spartan office, to leaf through so many blueprints bearing the name of Gregory Passio. But there was no use regretting those years of falsehood. Gregory would never have understood her deeper motives for advocating the Enclosure. Had she tried to explain, he would have furrowed his brow more and more deeply, would have glared at her with those unearthly eyes, and then dismissed her as a hopeless romantic, a throwback to the tooth-and-claw days.
Once, when Zuni hinted that saving the whales might be a pleasing side effect of the Enclosure, Gregory had flared at her, “Why all this moaning about stupid brutes that haven’t even figured out how to hoist themselves out of the sea? Millions of years of evolution, and what have they got to show for it? Songs. Zuni, sometimes you remind me of my wife. Wilderness, wilderness, that’s all she thinks about. She’s out there in the wilds now, dismantling the old cities. Wriggling her toes in mud and smushing her face in green things. And she’s infecting my daughter with the same wilderness disease.”
That was the first time Zuni ever heard him mention Teeg, then four years old, and it was the last time she ever hinted at her own deeper motives.
No, it was no use regretting that her collaboration with Gregory had been woven of truths and lies. Surely he took some of his own secrets with him into the frigid Alaskan waters.
Eventually her files were sorted, and all but a few blueprints disposed of. These few she would take away with her, including plans for a twelve-person geodesic dome, a miniature tidal generator, and a fish pool. The other mementos she kept from her office were tools: drafting pens and rulers, pocket cyber, 4-D modeler, scrolls of plax, ink, everything small enough for hiding in a beltpack.
Her apprentices and her few remaining projects she assigned to other master architects. When one of those apprentices, a young woman named Marga, begged to remain with her, Zuni replied:
“Surely you will learn as much from Sventov as you would from me.”
“But I have not modeled myself on Sventov,” Marga protested. “I’ve modeled myself on you.”
Zuni interrupted her sorting of blueprints to study this troubled visitor. The mask was a cinnamon-colored blur, the wig a swatch of black. Solemn and reproachful, another earnest child of the Enclosure. “And are you certain you know what I am?”
Marga seemed startled by the question. “You’re the architect of humanity’s liberation from Terra,” she said, repeating a phrase Zuni had seen in print a dozen times.
“One of them, perhaps,” Zuni conceded. “A very minor one. And you will carry on that liberation after I am gone?”
“Of course, of course. But why should you leave us, with your head still so full of visions?”
Zuni held a blueprint against the viewlight, squinting. “My eyes no longer serve me.”
“I’ll see for you, I’ll draw your ideas.” In her excited gesturing, Marga thumped the model of the Enclosure, and the fretted globe wobbled overhead.
The young woman’s intensity reminded Zuni of Teeg. But Marga’s intensity was directed inward, ever deeper into the Enclosure, while Teeg’s—as Gregory had feared—was directed out into the wilds.
“That is kind of you,” said Zuni, “but there are other things I must do now.”
“What can be more important than Project Transcendence?”
“In China—” Zuni began patiently. Then, realizing that Marga would only know the domed cities on the Asian mainland or the float cities in the Japanese Sea, places scarcely distinguishable from Oregon City, she explained, “In old China, before the Enclosure, it was the custom for a person to devote her youth to learning, her adult years to community work. When she reached a certain age, however, she was free to withdraw from the world and pursue her quest for enlightenment.”
Marga pondered this. “And you’ve reached such an age?”
“I have.”
“Nothing will make you change your mind?”
“No, my dear.” Zuni longed to tell this solemn young architect the truth, reveal to her the private self who had been kept secret during six decades of public work. But the habit of deceit was too old now to be broken. She would be freed from it soon enough.
“Enlightenment?” Marga repeated the word quizzically.
“Getting back in touch,” Zuni translated.
“With what?”
“With the center, the origin of things.”
“Isn’t that where we’re all headed?” Marga said. “Out of this stink of matter, back towards the state of pure energy?”
Zuni only smiled, knowing it was foolish to speak of spiritual things. “Sventov will teach you well.”
“So you say.”
When Zuni busied herself with the stack of blueprints again, Marga asked shyly, “Do you suppose I could have a little something of yours to keep?”
Zuni withdrew from her modest heap of mementos one of the drafting pens, and this she pressed into Marga’s hand. The touch was obviously a shock to the young woman, but not so great a shock as the kiss Zuni brushed on her cheek. “Now go on, leave me alone,” Zuni said, “and be sure you draw kindly cities with that pen.”
After Marga left, Zuni sat for a long time at her desk, staring out over Oregon City, wondering how kindly a place it was. Nothing lived in it except people and experimental animals and the essential bacteria. Older citizens reminisced about the abundance of life in the wilds, about hickory trees and rutabagas and kangaroos, but they did not reminisce about typhoid or starvation, about mercury poisoning or radioactive dumps. At least within the Enclosure people were shielded from toxins and drug-resistant germs. The apartments were stacked a thousand meters high, nearly reaching the dome, but at least no one lacked a roof or bed. The algae-based food tasted like pap to anyone who could recollect dirt-grown vegetables, but it was abundant and pure. The young people, those born inside the Enclosure, had never seen dolphins or potatoes, had never seen anyth
ing except what human beings had made. The young did not reminisce. Their parents and grandparents had quit the wilds, as irrevocably as their remote ancestors had left the seas.
At least Zuni hoped the move inside was irrevocable. Have I betrayed them? she wondered fleetingly. But no, she had settled that doubt long ago. She had only to recall the decades before the Enclosure, when environmental burdens crushed down more heavily each year like snow swelling a glacier, to reassure herself that the move inside had been the sole path to survival. And how could it be a betrayal if it was what people had always longed for? Wasn’t the Enclosure just a cave, a hut, a walled village, a shopping mall carried to its logical extreme, stretched out over the globe, hermetically sealed, perfected?
The few items she chose to keep from her years of professional work all fitted into a satchel. They were light, easily smuggled. Before closing her office for the last time she looked carefully about to make sure no trace of her was left behind. Satisfied, she gave the hanging model of the Enclosure one last swing and shut the door.
5 November 2029—Seattle
Gregory’s bulbous head gleams like an ornament on the vidscreen. Teeg should be in school, he protests. Teeg must learn to socialize—that’s the actual word he uses, socialize—with other children. Teeg must be sheltered from filth and disease. I only glower at him, knowing he can’t force me to deliver the child until she reaches breeding age.
Suddenly a woman’s face appears on the screen, and Gregory announces, “Zuni Franklin. She’ll explain why the girl should be sent inside.”
I have seen the face hundreds of times on video and newsfax, but always filtered to disguise its nakedness. Now I see clearly the delicate features, nose and cheeks finely molded, creases streaming out in rays from each eye, mouth softened as if from patient smiling at the world. I am prepared to find the woman ugly, but find her beautiful. How old? Perhaps about sixty. And this is the one he intends for Teeg’s Enclosure mother?
I expect to hate her, yet when she begins speaking—about the child, about the Pacific Northwest where she grew up, about my dismantling work—I find myself drawn to her. And can this possibly be the visionary of the Enclosure? The hater of flesh?
After fifteen minutes of talking about the Cascade Mountains and the old timber industry, she has still not mentioned sending Teeg inside. Fearing that she soon will, I break contact.
* * *
* * *
SEVEN
Is it the wilds he’s hungry for—or is it only me? Teeg could not decide. His eyes would glaze over whenever she told him about the wilderness. But then, his eyes glazed over and his breathing quickened whenever she leaned close to tell him anything. He was so ensnarled in the mating rigmarole that she would probably be disentangling him for months before they could actually make love. In the meantime, whether or not he was hungering for the wilds, he was certainly hungering for her, and that appetite would have to do, until she could deliver him into the wilderness. Once he was outside, the sea and forest could work on him. If she had to be the bait that lured him out there, then bait she would be.
She had already reported to the other seekers, after her two weeks of prospecting, that Whale’s Mouth Bay would make an ideal location for the settlement. Tonight, when the crew met for an ingathering, she must speak with them about Phoenix, before his passion cooled or his wilderdread returned.
Bits of gravel crunched between her boots and the city’s metal floor as she made her way through the abandoned tank farm to the meeting place. A ghostly blue light filtered over from the neighboring gamepark. The whine of sirens and the high-pitched bleat of scoreboards rose above the city’s perennial hum. Occasionally, when the air-current shifted, Teeg could hear the voices of revelers, giddy with desperate pleasures. Except for those noises she might have been creeping over a pockmarked asteroid, for the tank farm, useless now that the petroleum supplies had given out, was being demolished to make way for an expansion of the gamepark.
The city devours itself, Teeg reflected. Stalking among the ruins of the tank farm, she was reminded of her mother’s handiwork in Portland and Seattle: buildings reduced to steel skeletons, skeletons reduced to lengths of girders, girders melted down into metal soup, congealed into ingots, shipped away for the building of the Enclosure.
Most of the pipes that had once led from this place to refineries on the mainland had already been carved up and recycled. Where oil tanks had stood there were now only circular black stains, like gigantic colonies of bacteria. Teeg avoided them, not wanting to leave oily tracks. In the vague blue light she found the tank where the crew always gathered. According to the numbers painted on its side, this would be the last one demolished. But how long before the wreckers would show up with their laser torches? How many more weeks to plan the escape?
She climbed the ladder, cranked the great spoked wheel of the valve. Quietly she lowered herself through the opening. After nearly two years of gathering here with the others each week to worship and to plan the settlement, she had grown accustomed to the way voices, footsteps, even breathing echoed and re-echoed within the cylindrical walls. But she had never overcome the feeling, as she crawled in through the valve, that she was entering the throat of a machine.
Inside, the others were already seated in a circle, meditating, four men and four women in silvery shimmersuits. She peeled away her gown and streetmask, stepped out of her boots, bowed low to the unseen presence. No one looked up as she settled cross-legged onto her mat. Now the circle was complete. Teeg stilled herself, waiting for the power, waiting for the inward voice to rise.
From the center of the ring a flare cast rainbows on the oil-slick roof and curving walls. The crew formed a rainbow of flesh, Teeg thought. There were Arda’s high-cheeked cinnamon, Jurgen’s chocolate, Indy’s olive, Sol’s velvety purple-black, the sandy skin of Coyt and Marie, the pale blond of Josh and Hinta. A rainbow of flesh, and a rich genetic pool for starting a new society.
In shadows beyond reach of the flare she could make out the bulky shapes of crates waiting for transport out through a pipeline to the coast. These supplies were the last they needed for the settlement, and would soon be hidden away in the basalt caves at Whale’s Mouth.
Her thoughts were still skipping about over the details of the escape when the first wave of power swept round the circle. It lifted her, let her fall again, as waves toyed with her when she bathed in the ocean. Center in, she urged her buzzing brain. Still yourself. Yet she found it hard to let herself go. With everyone anxious for departure, would they accept Phoenix? she kept wondering. And even if they did, would he be strong enough to survive outside?
The other faces around the circle were already on the threshold of trance, eyes lowered, jaws slack, and Teeg had to keep herself from rushing to catch up with them. Rushing never carried you inward to the still point. The only path to the center was through patient listening. Legs crossed, feet tucked up close, hands loosely clasped in her lap, she tensed all her muscles and then slowly relaxed them. After one last glimpse of Marie’s serene weather-beaten face and Sol’s stunning profile—white beard on black skin—she lowered her eyes. Sol and Marie, these were the two she liked to carry with her into the darkness, for they shone so brightly with the inner light.
The day slowly emptied from her: crowds shuttling through avenues, lightsigns commanding attention, gliders whizzing overhead, the blare of informats, the syntho-smells, the petty abrasions of a day in the city. The buzz in her head thinned away until all she could hear was breathing. Then the echoes of breathing dwindled away and she was bathed in silence. There were no words, no images, only stillness.
Wave after wave of power poured through her.
Sometime later a voice spoke. Teeg did not bother to attach a name to the speaker. She contained the voice, and the voice contained her.
“Praise the Lord,” it chanted, “praise the sun, praise the moon, praise the green world.”
The words sifted down through layers o
f silence into her mind.
Then another voice: “Lift the stone and you will find me, cleave the wood and I am there.”
And another: “One of the mystics said, ‘Whether you like it or not, whether you know it or not, secretly Nature seeks and hunts and tries to ferret out the track in which God may be found.’”
And a voice rose up and sang greenness until all the world was green, and every last cell of Teeg’s body was dancing. And she found words vibrating in her own throat, but what spoke was no more her voice than the others had been: “Another wishes to join us, a walker who is weary of the city. His heart longs for the wilds. Shall he become part of our circle?”
Silence for a time, then a whisper: “The flow unites all things, the living and the unliving. In the depths of me, within our circle, in every creature and gathering of creatures the river flows on.”
And later: “The city is a dam across the river. The people of the city are deafened. They do not hear the waters.”
More silence, an atmosphere of silence, and Teeg was floating inward to the source, and there was a shining in the stillness, and she was the shining, and there was nothing but light.
After a time stillness gave way to movement, silence gave way to the sound of blood in her ears. She had eased back into the supple envelope of her skin. Now she saw again through eyes of the body. Where the shining had been there was an oil-smeared patch of floor.
At last Jurgen’s baritone murmured, “Peace,” and the circle began to stir, bodies stretching, faces lifting to gaze at one another. The indrawing had been accomplished once again, they had touched the center, and the seekers were refreshed for another bout of work together.
Teeg remained still for a few moments, relishing the inward peacefulness. She knew she would have to speak for Phoenix convincingly. Thoughts of his callused feet and skittery rabbit eyes made her smile.
A hand grasped her from the right. Turning, she found Hinta’s depthless blue eyes fixed on her. “Tell us about your new recruit,” Hinta said.
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