Terrarium

by Scott Russell Sanders

  Suffused with the tranquillity of ingathering, the other faces were watching her. Better now than later, Teeg thought, and so she began telling them about Phoenix. He was a global weather man, she explained, a seer of patterns and reader of maps. He knew how the satellite spy-eyes worked, so he might help them avoid detection by Security. He was twenty-seven, a walker, in good physical condition but in need of yoga training. Not a meditator, out of touch with the flow, he was all tangled up in the tendrils of the Enclosure, but she would remedy that, would teach him yoga and the arts of contemplation and loving, if they were willing to accept him. Both his parents were dead, and he had no siblings, no close relations, so far as she could tell no eros mates or even goodbuddies to bind him to Oregon City. And she kept on without knowing why she told these things, about his milky pale skin showing through the face paint, his shuffling walk and cockeyed wigs and his frightened heart.

  “You want him very much?” Hinta asked quietly.

  Teeg was saved from having to answer this by Jurgen, who demanded gruffly, “And his record?”

  “Clean,” Teeg answered, grateful to him. Mountainous Jurgen, the rock. Depend on him to shrug eros aside and talk about nuts-and-bolts. “I scanned the net, and Security shows him a pure insider. Health board the same. He went to state nursery, school in New Mexico City, geo-meteorology institute at Baltic, then to work here in the big bottle.”

  “Sounds like another sleepwalker,” Jurgen mused.

  “But he’s waking up, I know he is.”

  “Because of the attractions of one Teeg Passio?” Marie suggested in her grandmotherly way.

  “Of course,” Teeg admitted without hesitation. She had danced the dance of sex with enough men and women to recognize the softening in the gaze, the heat of nearness, as if Phoenix were melting in the retort of his own body. “Sure, that’s part of it, the desire for me. Maybe at first that was all of it. But now I think he’s smelled the outdoors on me, and that’s drawing him on.” She didn’t know how true that was, but she wanted it to be true.

  “It doesn’t matter,” said Marie. “Wilderness is wilderness, and you’re territory enough to keep him busy a long while.”

  Coming from anyone but Marie, this remark would have embarrassed Teeg. But when this old woman—the veteran spirit-traveler, the keeper of songs—when she focused her gentleness on you and told you the truth, how could you be ashamed?

  “We could use someone who knows maps and weather,” Sol observed, the words shattering into coughs at the end.

  “So we could,” Jurgen agreed. He peered at her across the circle. Black curly bush of hair, then broad forehead crisscrossed with scars, then wide-set eyes and mashed-in nose. Battering ram, hammering a way forward. Lovely chocolate skin. He and Hinta were the nearest to being leaders of this leaderless crew. And now he was demanding, “You trust him?”

  Teeg had settled that with herself the night Phoenix brought the fossil to her in his outstretched palm. “He won’t betray us.”

  “He would submit to the test of our ingathering?”

  “He would have to.”

  “And if he fails?”

  “We leave him behind,” Teeg whispered.

  Hinta wrapped her long healing fingers more tightly around Teeg’s hand. Sol grasped the other, with the uncertain grip of an ailing old man. All around the circle hands joined, a chain of flesh. There was a lull in the talk, then a deeper silence, as the questioning turned inward. Each person listened into the communal silence. Teeg’s last thought before entering the stillness was that schools of fish veered that way, spontaneously turning, as if guided by an inner signal.

  Sometime later Jurgen rumbled, “My sense is that we should accept this new one into our circle. But he is to learn no secrets until he dwells in the light with us.”

  “I agree,” said Hinta.

  “That speaks my mind,” muttered Sol.

  “And mine. And mine.” The welcome carried from voice to voice around the circle until all had agreed, and so the decision was made.

  Blueprints of the settlement soon appeared on the overhead screen, superimposed on a map of Whale’s Mouth Bay. The oil tank hummed with technical discussions of heat-gain, amino-acid balance, heliostat orientation.

  Amid that babble, Teeg heard someone mention the name of Zuni Franklin. Curious, she asked, “What about Zuni?”

  “We’re going to adapt some of her early dome-flower designs for the settlement,” Sol explained.

  “Does she know about that?”

  Sol’s eyebrows tilted upward, white strokes on his plum-dark forehead. He was aging, eaten up by the plutonium lungrot, and it pained her to see it. “You don’t imagine we’d tell her, do you?”

  “I’ve been tempted,” she confessed.

  All eight faces swiveled toward her then. The mixture of feelings was hard to sort out—alarm, regret, surprise. Hinta was the first to say what the others apparently felt, for heads nodded as she spoke:

  “Teeg, we all have reason to be grateful to Zuni. She’s done each of us favors. But in the end we all had to break away from her influence, because she’s identified herself with the Enclosure.”

  “Yes, yes, I know.”

  “And now she’s a danger to us. If she knew about our plans to move back outside she’d have Security down on us in ten minutes.”

  “And yet,” Teeg objected, “she gave each of us a little shove that helped land us here in this grimy tank, plotting escape. Doesn’t that seem a bit odd, for a woman as private as Zuni Franklin?”

  “She’s private, secretive, but she’s influenced many thousands of people,” said Jurgen.

  “Influenced them to come inside, yes. But what about us? Here we are trying to get back in touch with earth—and what does that have to do with Zuni?”

  Jurgen heaved his massive shoulders. “That’s puzzled me for years.”

  “Well, it’s too late now to do anything about it,” Hinta insisted. “We’ll do well to integrate your new recruit before we have to clear out of this place. We’d never be able to convert such a devout leader as Zuni in the time we have left.”

  “No, I suppose not,” Teeg said reluctantly.

  “Then it’s settled?” Jurgen looked from person to person, seeking consensus. “Do we need to submit it to an ingathering?”

  No, no, the heads gestured.

  “Then the circle has decided,” Jurgen announced. “After Teeg’s recruit, we will take no new seekers.”

  Teeg unbent her legs. Shuffling across the oil-slick floor to record on the map the data from her last trip to the bay, she realized from the stiffness in her body how tense she had been during the silent gathering. She took a deep cleansing breath and allowed herself to smile. Zuni was lost to her. But at least they had agreed to risk opening the conspiracy to this gawky friend of hers, with his callused feet and visionary eyes. Now all she had to do was transform Phoenix into a true wildergoer and mystic.

  17 January 2030—Seattle

  Lonely. I can summon up books on the informat, music and theater and games on the video, data on the Cybernet. What I can’t summon up is an adult companion, let alone a mate. Wreckers are a hard lot, men and women both. For most of them, dismantling is the only work they can get. I find it hard to stand more than one night’s mating with any of them.

  Inside the Enclosure—as Gregory informs me, dried old prune that he is—there would be potential lovers in abundance. But they all prance about in costumes and masks, hiding that shameful thing, the body. And sex is fenced round by so many rules, even looking into someone else’s eyes requires months of labor. I don’t see how anyone has the patience to work through all the levels of loving. Hence the eros parlors, I suppose. They give the quick fix. Libido express. Just lie down, insert your credcard, and the orgiastic field embraces you.

  I guess if you can’t eradicate the flesh you can trivialize it, with eros parlors, or etherealize it, with mating rituals.

  In our solar room Teeg an
d I go naked. She enjoys her body—the toes like kernels of corn, the seashell ears, the pouting nipples and the little silken purse between her legs. She has learned every yoga position I have to teach her, and she practices them with a gay seriousness. The pleasure in her body, like the limberness, is easy at age nine, out here in the wilds where no one has taught her that the flesh is something one must escape.

  * * *

  * * *

  EIGHT

  “What sort of test is it?” Phoenix asked nervously, licking the narco-flavored paint from his lips.

  “It’s called an ingathering.” Teeg lay face-down, back arched so that her upper trunk was lifted off the floor. “It’s a form of collective trance. Pioneered by the Quakers centuries ago.”

  They were in Teeg’s apartment, where she was demonstrating yoga positions for him, and he was doing his best to avoid staring at her. She wore a body-colored shimmersuit—“The next best thing,” as she had informed him one day, “to nakedness.” Phoenix sat muffled in several meters of gown, feeling like a cheap present extravagantly wrapped. He had come to her place straight from work, so he was still bedaubed and bewigged and befrocked in the public manner. “All right, I fall into this trance. Then what happens?”

  “If you achieve the trance,” she corrected him, her back arching further, vertebrae popping, “you drift toward the center.”

  “Where’s the center?”

  “It’s not a place. It’s an experience. Kind of a stillness, a brightness. In the ingathering we all gravitate there. If everyone’s perfectly clear, we merge together in the—well, the shining.”

  “Shining?”

  “It’s no good describing it. It’s like loving. You’ve got to be there yourself to understand, and once you’ve really been there, you don’t need to talk about it.” The tension of her arched body put her voice under strain. “This one’s called the cobra.”

  Phoenix drew a stick-figure to illustrate, omitting the red spill of hair, the enticing swell of her rump. Beside it he printed, COBRA. Talking about mysticism is to mysticism, he reasoned, as a stick-figure is to Teeg’s body. That made eight drawings on his notepad, and beside them were eight queer names. Lotus, plough, crab—such mysterious titles for these shapes her body was passing through. She seemed liquid, pouring from shape to shape, like clouds on the time-lapse film of a storm. Her shimmersuit caught the overhead lights; as she moved she blazed incandescently. He was painfully self-conscious, watching her, because she was so little conscious of herself. Where did she learn that ease in her flesh?

  He felt as rigid as a stick-figure when he tried to imitate the yoga positions. Cobra seemed the tamest so far. But when he lay belly-down and arched his back, alarms rang up and down his spine. He collapsed in a heap of cloth and sweaty wig and rocked moaning on the floor.

  “Easy does it,” Teeg cautioned. “You can’t undo twenty-seven years of abuse overnight. You’ve got to coax your body along. It’s like growing plants.”

  “It’s like suicide, is what it’s like.”

  “Poor Phoenix!” The room filled with her laughter. “But just keep at it and in two or three years you’ll be something worth looking at.”

  “Three years!”

  She eyed him, with the sort of look you would give an oversize console to see if it would fit through a doorway. “Maybe four, unless you work hard.” She ignored his groans. “Look, here’s what you do to get the kinks out.” She lay on her back, legs flat, with finger-tips lightly resting on her diaphragm. “You breathe in deeply. Count to ten. Then bunch your fingers together and press them on your forehead. Like so. Then exhale slowly—slowly—and when you do, try to fill yourself with light.” She rolled on her side and swatted his tail. “Now flop over and you try it.”

  “Haven’t I had enough torture for one day?”

  “How do you ever expect to learn anything?”

  Obediently he lay on his back. The gown draped over him like a clammy blanket. With stiff fingers he prodded his chest.

  “Lower down,” she said, guiding his hands until they rested just below his ribcage. “And loosen up. You’re not touching a corpse. Now breathe. Deep. Deep.” She waited while he sucked air. “Now fingers to forehead and breathe out.”

  He obeyed, searching behind his shut eyes for the light she spoke of. “I don’t see anything.”

  “You probably won’t, not until you’ve been through the ingathering.”

  “How do you find the center?”

  “Same way rainwater finds the sea.”

  “Translate.”

  “You quit clutching at things, and the curve of the universe guides you home.”

  “Forget I asked.”

  He tried to sit up, but she pushed him firmly down. “Do the breathing again,” she ordered. While he ballooned with air, she told him, “You do this seven times after you finish the exercises.” When he sighed the breath out again she stroked the cloth smooth over his belly. “Better. I almost feel a hint of muscle in there.”

  “Beneath this paunch lurks a man of titanium.”

  “Okay, man of titanium, when you do yoga at home, always go naked. The power flows more smoothly that way. Flesh to flesh.”

  Dizzy, he lay still, with the memory of her hand like a brand on his belly. Such touching would have placed them at level nine of the mating ritual—if she had ever acknowledged the ritual.

  “So if I tie myself in yoga knots,” he said, “and I do the meditations morning and night, and I change my diet, and I study all this nature stuff you’ve given me—eventually I’ll be ready for the ingathering?”

  “Eventually.”

  “And how do we know when I’m ready for this test? When I’m—how did you say it—clear?”

  “We won’t know ahead of time.” Kneeling beside him, she drew his head into her lap. Fingers crept under the wig and toyed with his ears. “We won’t know until we’re all joined together in the circle. If everyone’s clear, we reach the still point, the brightness. If there’s any anger, any hatred or dishonesty in the group, then we—then nothing happens. Darkness.”

  “The ingathering doesn’t work?”

  “It doesn’t happen. That’s the beauty of it. No spies allowed. No bitterness. If we have problems in the crew, we’ve got to work them out, or quit the whole business.”

  Phoenix was aware of her thighs against the back of his skull, the warm angle of her legs. He knew his facepaint would be streaked from sweat—a clown’s mask cradled in her lap. “So it’s a truth experiment?”

  “Partly.”

  “Who invented it?”

  “The apes, probably. The ingathering is ancient. All the old literatures talk about it.”

  “But where did you all find out about it?”

  “When Jurgen and Hinta and Sol and Marie started the group a few years ago, they were all reading these journals by a mystic named George Fox, and he told about seeking the inner light.” As she spoke, she trailed her fingers through the paint on his face, smearing the colors. “Marie came across the books and liked the name. Fox. Sly one, you know. Bushy-tailed animal sort of like a dog. Pointy muzzle, eyes very solemn and wise,” she said, trying her best to resemble a fox. “You’ve seen the pictures?”

  “I think so. When I was a child.”

  “Anyway, they started reading Fox’s journal, meditating together, and hunting for God.”

  From where he lay he could see the blue veins under the span of her jaw, a pale tract of skin framed by the twin prominences of her breasts. “So you joined them?”

  “About two years ago. We were all outside on a repair mission, and we began talking about how we felt more in touch with things, somehow, out there in the wilds, and wouldn’t it be great to just stay outside. The talk went on, and pretty soon Marie was teaching me how to meditate. Water seeks its origin naturally, you know, but people have to be taught. And eventually they invited me to the ingathering. I made it to the central fire, met them there. It turned out everyone
else in the work crew was already a seeker. I was number nine.” She tilted her face down at him. Strands of red hair dangled to within a handsbreadth of his eyes. “You’d make ten.”

  “If I survive.”

  When she smiled, the brightness in her eyes grew more intense, a luminous green, as if she carried about with her sparks of that inner fire. “You’ll survive.” Her legs shifted beneath him. “Sit up now, while I go get you something else to study.”

  He sat there dazed, body aching. From the next room came the sounds of Teeg humming, drawers rolling out and in. Hunting for God—the phrase left him uneasy. God was the rind of an outmoded hypothesis, like phlogiston, like ether. Much of what she said made him uneasy. But his peace of mind had already been shattered by this woman, so he had no choice but to keep following her, in hopes she would eventually put him together again. Humpty Dumpty. Her God-talk seemed to him as whimsical as nursery rhymes. Metaphors for the ungraspable.

  “Home study,” she told him, returning with a scroll of microfilm. “The flora and fauna of the Oregon coast.” She tucked the scroll into a pocket of his moodgown. Tranquil green eyes considered him a moment. She was all there in her eyes, gathered up.

  For parting, they touched palms as she had taught him. Flesh to flesh. The power flows more smoothly that way, she had said.

  “Morning and night without fail,” he promised. He patted the lump in his gown where he had pocketed the drawings, those stick-figure caricatures of Teeg doing yoga.

  “And remember,” was the last thing she told him, “when you do them, take off that tent, scrub the muck off your face and go naked.”

  He meditated. He coaxed his body into limberness. He studied the microfilms of trees and rocks until his eyes grew bleary. Twice a week he went to her apartment for coaching and comfort.

  “Don’t try to make yourself into a noodle,” she warned, her fingers reading his stiff limbs like Braille. “The point is to learn to dwell in your body, find your center.”