Terrarium

by Scott Russell Sanders

  “He was a callous man.”

  “Your father helped save billions of people from eco-death.”

  “He murdered my mother!”

  “The health patrol was on a routine sterilizing mission.”

  “Then his ideas murdered her! Him and his obsession with transcendence. He couldn’t stand knowing she was out there. He was always terrified of germs and dirt, scared of clouds, bugs. His ideal was pure consciousness floating in a vacuum.”

  “Those yearnings are ancient, Teeg. Your father didn’t invent them. Where do you think the dreams of angels come from, the creatures without flesh? And Nirvana? And all those visions of heavenly cities filled with spirit and light?”

  By this point Teeg was not listening. She swept Zuni’s words aside with a wave of her fist. This was a private grudge, and she would not have it diluted with talk of history. “No, he didn’t invent them. He had lots of help—from people like you. You’re just as much to blame for this”—sobbing, arms flung wide to smash the whole city with her grief—“this bottle as he is. And for Mother’s death.”

  “If believing that makes it easier for you,” Zuni answered with a forced calmness, “then go ahead and believe it.”

  “I do! I do!” Teeg cried. “And don’t try to wrap it up in your cool reasons and sympathy and pretty memories. Keep that for someone else.”

  Zuni swallowed her grief that day. Living a masquerade, she had to remain silent when her sham identity was mistaken for her true one. It was many weeks before Teeg came back for a visit, and then it was only to ask, sullenly, that Zuni nominate her for a job as troubleshooter. Zuni was glad to help, because she had already directed many restless ones into the repair corps. Several years into this job, a svelte woman of twenty-three, Teeg came back once more to ask Zuni’s help in applying for the status of master troubleshooter.

  “Do you swear you mean no harm to anyone inside the Enclosure?” Zuni demanded. “You would never abuse the master security clearance?” She studied the young woman’s rebellious eyes with an expert’s knowledge of deceit.

  “I swear,” Teeg replied.

  Zuni signed the form. On the application she wrote: “Judge this candidate by her father, one of our greatest shelterminds, not by her renegade mother.”

  The signature of Zuni Franklin evidently charmed Security, for they granted a master’s pass to this daughter of a wildergoer.

  On one of Teeg’s rare visits in the following years, Zuni planted a last seed of cunning: “Your mother was foolish to stay in the wilds alone, without allies or equipment or medicine. She was a fool to live in the infected ruins of a city, right where the health patrol would stumble over her. If she’d chosen some clean, secret place, and some resourceful companions, she might still be alive out there.”

  “Still alive?”

  To Zuni, the slender young woman, defiantly barefaced and free-haired, looked more intense than ever, more charged with the passion of revolt. “Who knows?” said Zuni.

  Meanwhile a few of Zuni’s rebels, the ones who smelled to her of discontent, had joined together in a repair crew. Into that same crew she nudged Teeg, and then stepped back to await the results.

  The results were arrayed about her now on the floor of the apartment, in these stacks of cards. Teeg’s stack was filled with brief references to those long-ago heretical conversations. The other eight records were less painful to Zuni. Together they formed a constellation. Others might have acquired the same information about them, since most of it was available on the cybernet, but only Zuni knew what pattern to seek. They were a repair crew who did their job quickly and well. True, they kept their bodies fit, but that was a condition for survival in their work. They were fanatically committed to one another, and they shared some patched-together religion; but that was common among repair crews and health patrollers and security squads, among all those who faced the dangers of the wilds. No, there was nothing outwardly suspicious about these nine.

  You had to know what questions to ask about their past, what patterns to look for in their present movements, before you could see the outlines of a conspiracy. You had to look even more shrewdly to detect the separate lives meshing together toward a crisis. Zuni prayed the conspiracy and crisis were real, and not simply her invention. She had already staked on that hunch what little future remained to her.

  3 March 2031—Anchorage

  Between the cold and poisons, my dismantling crew suffers terribly. We erect portadomes over each wrecking site, we pipe in air and water from the Enclosure, but still people fall ill every day. The buildings themselves, the rusting furniture, the pavements, everything is contaminated, and no filter yet devised will guard a person entirely. The medics report fevers, skin rashes, vomiting, breakdowns in the nervous system. Eight deaths so far, six of them men, who appear to succumb more readily than women.

  Teeg remains healthy, except for an occasional worrying bout of dizziness. Three more years until she reaches breeding age—and then what?

  On his vidcalls Gregory quizzes her about mathematics, doubtless trying to prove that I am not teaching her adequately. When Zuni Franklin comes on the screen, she’s likelier to ask the child what mosses she has found, or whether the Chinook salmon are still spawning in the Susitna River.

  * * *

  * * *

  TEN

  In boots and hoods and ankle-flapping capes, with masks drawn close to hide their faces, Teeg and Phoenix walked among the circular oil stains of the tank farm. Behind them, the gamepark flung its riotous colors toward the night-darkened dome, and farther behind, near the city center, buildings heaped up in pyramids and honeycombs of light. Ahead of them loomed the dark knobby shapes of the few remaining oil tanks.

  “What if I can’t—” Phoenix began.

  Teeg shushed him quickly. “You can. Now be still and keep your mind centered. No doubts. You’ve got to be clear.”

  They passed between two partly-demolished tanks. Where lasers had cut through the triple-hulled walls, cauterized edges gleamed with a dull luster. This might be the last ingathering here, Teeg realized, for the wreckers were gnawing their way each week nearer to the tank where the seekers met. The pipeline leading from here to the mountains near Whale’s Mouth Bay had already been severed. Phoenix had to pass the test tonight, for there might not be another chance.

  Teeg climbed the ladder first, feet quiet on the rungs, and when Phoenix joined her on the roof of the tank she motioned for him to slip off his gown and streetmask. They added their garments to the pile beside the entrance valve, pried off their boots. Turning, with Phoenix between her and the distant glow of the gamepark, she could see for the first time his actual shape, hugged in the fabric of his shimmersuit. The months of training had drawn his body tight. She touched him lightly on the chest, felt the quiver of muscle, then trailed her fingers downward over ribs to his waist.

  “I’m afraid,” he whispered.

  “Of course.”

  Through her bare feet she sensed the hum of voices in the tank below. As she cranked the valve open the hum grew louder, then separated into distinct and familiar voices. Jurgen’s gruff baritone, Hinta’s soothing purr, Sol’s gasping with the sound of blood in it. They were discussing Phoenix, wondering aloud if his light would merge with theirs.

  “You follow me,” she whispered to him. “And relax, keep yourself clear.”

  His silhouette blocked out a man-shaped chunk of inner-city lights. “But am I ready? Maybe I need more—”

  “You’re ready.”

  She lowered her feet through the cold jaws of the valve, swung down from handhold to handhold. Before her feet kissed the floor the voices hushed. She bowed deeply. Grave faces nodded at her: the lovely rainbow shades of skin, cinnamon and plum, olive and cornsilk—the colors of growing things. A moment later Phoenix swung down beside her, looking self-conscious in his silvery shimmersuit and naked face. She had never before seen him scrubbed perfectly clean of paint. His cheeks were the col
or of peaches; descent through the valve had left one of them smudged with grease. As the conspirators stared at him, he shuffled his feet nervously, and that little stagger caught at her heart.

  “Phoenix Marshall,” she announced.

  “Peace,” murmured several voices. Each person raised the left hand, palm exposed. Although the backs of the hands were the color of salmon and copper and chocolate, a mixture of races, the palms were all yellowed with calluses. They carried this imprint of the outdoors with them always, this thickening of the skin from work.

  After bowing, Phoenix licked his lips and carefully pronounced the formula she had taught him. “I am seeking the light. I ask to join your circle.”

  Hands waved him to the mat which had been made ready. Teeg lowered herself onto the mat next to his, and the circle was gathered. She noticed Sol and Marie staring across at Phoenix, sizing him up—curious, probably, to see what had attracted her to him. If asked, she would not have known what to say, except that something in her leapt up to answer the yearning she felt in him.

  When at last the two old spirit-travelers lowered their eyes, Teeg did the same, and immediately power began to flow around the circle. There was a roaring like the joining of rivers inside her, and then stillness began trickling through her.

  Open up to us, Phoenix, open up, she chanted over and over to herself.

  After several moments she realized her back was tensed and her jaw was clamped tight. She was trying to will the coming together. Gradually she relaxed, let go, made herself into a gauzy sail that winds of the spirit could shove along. And the winds set her quivering, caught and spun her, leaf-light, across the waters. Presently she drifted up against some barrier, could not break through. She was conscious of her skull, an enclosure trapping her, and then the walls of bone evaporated like mist and she floated outward, nudging against the curved walls of the tank. Those also gave way, and after them the walls of Oregon City, and then the vaporous envelope of the planet, and so on outward past solar system and galaxy, always adrift, until her frail craft burst through every last barrier and coasted into the center of light. Here all was a dazzle and a blazing stillness, a burning without movement, a chorus without sound. A fierce energy gripped her, spinning her round, and yet she felt calm.

  Against the dazzle at the center shone fainter lights, like dim stars set off against the awesome fire. The lights formed a ring, and with her last shred of consciousness Teeg knew which light was her own and which Phoenix’s. The ring drew inward, the ten lights merged into one and that light merged with the fire, and Teeg was Phoenix was Jurgen was Hinta, Teeg was all the other seekers, and she was God, and she was herself. There was no wind anymore, for she was at the source of all winds, and no time passing, no urge to go anywhere else; there was only abundance and peace.

  After a while the breeze caught her, shoving her away from the center, back toward the two-legged packet of flesh called Teeg Passio. The walls thickened around her again, walls of galaxies, walls of bone, shutting her up once more within the confines of her own self. Yet as she roused from the trance she brought with her glimmers of that inner blaze. She held her fingers close to her face and bent each one in turn, feeling the joints mesh, the blood flow, the billion cells flame with their sparks of the infinite burning. Each time, coming back from the center, she was more amazed by life, by this flame leaping in the meshes of matter.

  She reached out to left and right, found Marie’s hand on one side and Phoenix’s on the other. Hand joined to hand around the circle and the shudder of return passed through them, like the involuntary shudder after a bout of crying or lovemaking. Following a spell of quiet, to let the ecstasy settle in them all, Jurgen said, “Peace.”

  “Peace,” said Teeg.

  “Peace, peace, peace,” Phoenix murmured. His cheeks were slick.

  “Welcome, new one,” the others said.

  Phoenix gazed at them, letting the tears come. He sat there with a look of baffled joy on his face while the seekers approached him, each one in turn pressing palms to his palms and forehead to his forehead. Marie came last. Her shaved head glistened. She beamed down at Phoenix with all the intensity of her weathered and finely-wrinkled face. “Now you know where we truly are,” she said, brushing her forehead against his, “and don’t you ever forget.”

  “That’s where we are,” Phoenix echoed her. “And all this,” he said, gesturing at the other people and the oil-smeared walls of the tank, “all this is illusion?”

  Marie’s gleaming head wagged side-to-side. “No, it’s not illusion. It’s performance. We’re all performing the history of God, all of us, men and women and trees and pebbles, each one carrying bits of fire.”

  She withdrew to join the others at the far side of the tank, leaving only Teeg beside him. His lips parted as if he were going to thrust out his tongue and taste the air.

  “That’s Marie,” Teeg said. “She and Sol have taken the longest spirit journeys, so we listen to them. Sol’s the one over there with skin the color of ripe plums.” Realizing Phoenix had never seen a plum, she pointed. “There, see, the one kneeling down and unrolling the map.”

  Phoenix nodded sleepily, but his eyes were not focused. It was no use telling him the names of the others tonight; he was too dazzled to see their faces. Their voices chattered on about dates, routes, meetings, about plans for escape from Oregon City. Contrive a water accident, make Security think the entire crew had drowned, then boat to Whale’s Mouth—that was the gist of it. Teeg was not paying close attention to the talk, for she had this joy to share with Phoenix. She kept his fingers laced in her own, giving him time to come down, to come back. Let him giddy about on his own inner winds for a while longer. She remembered her own first ingathering, the sense of coming home at last to the place she had been seeking all her days. Rainwater rediscovering the sea. Sexual orgasm was delicious, but it could not rival the splendor of that homecoming.

  At last his fingers came awake in her hand, and this time when he looked he really saw her. “Now I know why you gave up trying to describe it,” he said.

  Later, walking back with him through the ruins of the tank farm, after the crew had worked out all the details for escape, she asked, “Was it what you expected?”

  “The test?”

  “The journey inward.”

  He lifted both arms, hands cupped domeward. “How could I ever dream of a trip like that?”

  “Of course you couldn’t.” She skipped gaily, boots scuffing on the metal floor. She felt like a gauzy sail again, blown along.

  “Is it always like that?” he said.

  “Is sex always spectacular?”

  “Is sex—what?” he stammered.

  “Spectacular. Like fireworks.”

  “Do you mean—”

  “I mean sometimes loving is magnificent, sometimes it’s okay, and sometimes it’s just a sweaty thumping of bodies. And the sky’s not always perfectly blue and the crocuses don’t burst through the soil every day. There’s rhythms to these things.” She couldn’t stop using the speech of natural things, even though she knew it meant little to him. Soon it would mean a great deal to him, once he was outside. “Things come clear in their own sweet time. We just prepare, open ourselves, and wait.”

  “So it was special?” he said.

  “Rare, very rare. We’d never been that close to the center before. Some of the others might have, privately—Sol, maybe, or Marie, even Hinta. But as a group, that was a whole new … intensity. Maybe you were just the bit of chemistry, the trace element, we needed.”

  “And you think they accepted me?”

  “You were there, weren’t you, in the fire? What other proof do you need?”

  He didn’t need any other, for he seized her by the hands and danced her in circles, their gowns kiting outward, their boots clumping. Gravel skittered away over the gray metal floor. They were like two stars orbiting one another, drifting closer as their spinning slowed, until they danced to a stop with hips
and breasts and lips pressed together. For once his body felt easy against hers, yielding, as if the glacier that had built up in him during years of emotional restraint were melting at last. This time, when his cock bulged against her, he did not turn away. He kept his lips on hers, his hands on the curve of her rump. They stayed that way for a spell, with the scraps of cut-up oil tanks heaped around them, with sirens and delirious shouts rising from the nearby gamepark. Then Teeg felt the chill slowly coming over him again, the glacier accumulating, the cold spreading through his body like crystals of ice. And finally he pulled away.

  “I lost control,” he said with an abashed tone. She could see him ticking over in his mind the articles of the mating code.

  “What you lost were those stupid shackles, for about half a minute.” She kicked a chunk of gravel, sent it clattering. Patience, she reminded herself. He had already come a long way in a few months. He had become a walker, an inward exile from the Enclosure. Did she expect him also to become an uninhibited lover so quickly? “I’m sorry,” she said. “I keep forgetting. And we’ll have time, outside. We’ll melt the polar icepack if we need to.”

  “Polar icepack?”

  “Never mind. Let’s go, before the healthers come sniffing after us.”

  She led the way cautiously through the outskirts of the tank farm, avoiding the rings of oil. The crew had decided not to meet again in the doomed tank, but still, it would not do to give the place away. Properly booted and hooded, with streetmasks over their faces, Teeg and Phoenix skirted the last heap of scrap and emerged into the many-colored illumination of the gamepark. The noise was deafening. People shuffled from one buzzing electronic box to another, climbed in and out of bump-cars, stood howling in the laughter booths. The loudest shouts came from the eros parlors, long anguished cries of pleasure, as if the customers were releasing in a single burst all the pent-up emotion of the day. Around the chemmie dispensers people hopped on one leg or flapped their arms, eyes rolling, or crowed with heads thrown back, or skittered about on all fours.