Terrarium

by Scott Russell Sanders

  When she swam up out of the trance the pain swam back with her, but she ignored it, for the sea felt gentle and the roof was silent and the molten columns of sunlight streaming in through the portholes had turned a mellow rose. At the portholes across from her Phoenix and several others were shouldering for a view. Between their heads Teeg saw a ragged strip of brown, draped across the horizon like a scrap of cloth. Land.

  She dipped in and out of the trance, shallower each time, thankful. When at last she surfaced for good, Jurgen was saying, “We hauled the supplies overland, from those hills back there. I never saw the place from the sea.”

  Arda, who was tracking the raft on an overhead projection of the Oregon coast, said, “We’ve got to be within a few hundred meters. I can’t map it any closer than that.”

  “Hey, everybody move out of my way,” Teeg said. “Let me have a look.”

  Her voice turned their worried faces around.

  “How’s the pain?”

  “Does it hurt when you breathe?”

  “Keep still until we land.”

  This last came from Hinta, who shook her head sharply no when Teeg reached for the buckles of her harness. She had to answer all their questions about the rib before they would shuffle aside to give her a view through the portholes. Teeg surveyed the rumpled strip of coast from left to right, a circular chunk at a time where the portholes opened, and in the next-to-last circle she found what she was looking for.

  “There,” she said, pointing, “you see that headland, the one with the nub on top? Isn’t that the base of a lighthouse up there? Cement, flaking white paint?” Whale’s Head, and beneath it Whale’s Mouth, the gaping jaws of volcanic stone that had frightened her once when she was a child. Mother’s place. Mother. Home.

  Marie, with the binoculars, confirmed her vision, and Jurgen set the wheel accordingly.

  The surf thickened near the shore, but the sea had spent its rage and only rocked the yellow ark enough to remind them all who was master. The bay accepted them like any other sea-offering, like driftwood, like a tangle of weeds. A few gulls carved the last dying colors of the day, skating across the sky with the ease of experts.

  Phoenix knelt on the cushion beside her and watched this lazy flight. “Birds,” he said wonderingly.

  Of course, Teeg reminded herself, all this is new for him, like landing on some alien planet. “Herring gulls and kittiwakes and terns,” she told him. The names tasted good on her lips. “If we’re lucky, there might be cormorants and sandpipers.”

  “How can they just hang up there like that?”

  “They ride the wind.”

  To the left waves shattered against a blunt cliff, and to the right against a fractured wall of rock that seemed to be sloughing into the sea. As a child she had thought of them as the whale’s upper and lower jaws. Jurgen guided the raft skillfully between, until the prow, hesitating on a breaker, touched shore.

  Teeg could not hear her own voice amidst the cheering. The whole raft trembled with shouts and the stamp of feet. Even Sol, who held a wad of gauze against his mouth, cried out in triumph. Phoenix hugged Teeg and pawed her hair and she nearly passed out from the wrenching in her rib. When she undid his hands she realized from the way they shook that he was clinging to her as much from fear as from joy.

  “We’re home,” she said.

  “I guess so.”

  “Aren’t you glad?”

  “Oh, sure, sure.”

  Sol was unloaded first, on a makeshift litter. Jurgen and Coyt set him down gently on a patch of sand. When they returned with the litter to fetch Teeg, she waved them away and walked from the raft on her own. Phoenix escorted her as far as the hatch, and there he balked, his hands raised as if to fend off the feeble strokes of the sun.

  “Aren’t you coming?” she said.

  “In a minute.”

  Teeg watched the unpacking from a barnacle-encrusted rock on the beach, waiting for Phoenix to emerge. She kept her distance from Sol, for she sensed that he wanted to be left alone. Hinta was bending over him, touching his chest, murmuring. After a few moments she withdrew, and approached Teeg with the medicine satchel thumping against her leg.

  “How is it with Sol?” Teeg asked.

  “The artificial lung’s okay,” Hinta said. “But the other one’s hemorrhaging.”

  “Why didn’t he let them change the bad one?”

  “The cancer’s spread pretty much everywhere now. After the lung it would have been the liver, kidney, and on and on. He said he didn’t want to die in pieces.”

  “Plutonium.” Teeg spat out the word.

  “Memo from the twentieth century,” said Hinta, without any trace of irony.

  Teeg glanced over at Sol, who sat with knees drawn up, holding himself together, while the other seekers carried equipment from the raft. “How long’s he got?”

  Hinta was peeling the wetsuit and shimmersuit down to Teeg’s waist, uncovering the troublesome rib. “He’s alive now, isn’t he? And now’s the only time we have.”

  “But wouldn’t he have lasted longer inside?”

  “More hours probably.” Hinta gently touched the reddened skin above the fractured rib. Her fingers seemed to draw pain out of the injury. “But living isn’t measured in hours, is it?”

  “No, of course not.” The late March evening, the mist from breakers, and the onshore breeze chilled Teeg’s back and chest. The analgesic spray Hinta applied to the rib felt colder still. Her skin was a rash of tiny welts. Goosebumps, her mother used to call them, back when there were geese.

  “Let me get some tape around here to keep that rib from wandering,” Hinta said. She grazed one of the taut nipples, and Teeg was surprised by the sexual alarms running through her body. “After I get this on,” Hinta explained, “all you have to do is loaf for about two weeks. No lifting, no pushing.”

  “No heavy breathing.”

  “Suit yourself in that department.” Hinta smoothed the tape with birdsoft strokes. “But if you make love,” she said, glancing toward the raft, “be sure you ride on top.”

  “Don’t worry.” Teeg grimaced. She knew the broken-rib routine from two earlier falls. She held the other woman’s hand against the ache for a moment, imagining Hinta’s spirit-power knitting the bone together. Hinta knew medicine the way a million people knew medicine; but it was because of her healing touch that she had become the crew’s physician.

  “Do you want Marie to go talk with him?” Hinta said. “She could help him deal with his wilderfear.”

  “No, let me see what I can do,” Teeg said.

  “Just take it easy. And don’t worry about Sol. He’s where he wants to be.”

  Hinta scrunched away over the sand until she reached Sol. He struggled up, wrapped an arm over her shoulders, and together they hobbled to the caves where the others were sorting out food and sleeping bags and cook gear. Tomorrow they would all begin erecting domes farther inshore, in the meadow beside the creek, where an arena of hills would shelter them from storms and from orbiting spy-eyes. For tonight, they would sleep in the caves, playing like savages. Everyone was there except Phoenix, whose silhouette paced back and forth inside the translucent skin of the raft, like some rebellious meal in the guts of a beached leviathan.

  Teeg stuffed her arms in the shimmersuit, zipped it up, then peeled the wetsuit away. Amphibian shedding skin. Her mother had shown her frogs doing it, the glistening new bodies emerging from worn-out husks. Except for missing her mother and Zuni Franklin, she felt newborn, exultant. The tape encircled her ribs like a ring of bone. She kicked off her boots, shed her socks. The stone was lingeringly warm underfoot. Walking to the raft she was aware of the black scoop of cliffs, the hill slopes feathered with hemlock and fir, the sea unfurling its endless blankets of froth. Home, this was home now; no more nights in Bottle City.

  Through the hatch she could see Phoenix pacing, hands balled into fists next to his cheeks.

  “You aren’t coming out?”

&n
bsp; He gave a quick shake of his head. The eyes had retreated into slits.

  “Food’s ready,” she said.

  Again the nervous head-shake, quick, like a spring-wound doll.

  “Is it too much for you all at once?” she said. “Is that it?”

  His face, suddenly lifted to her, was stretched taut with a panic she recognized, the same she had felt for a moment while bobbing in the furious unlandmarked ocean. Lost, alone, adrift in the wilds. “I know,” she soothed him; “that’s all right. I’ll bring some food and sleeping bags in here.” As she spoke she drew the shades down, until the interior of the raft was a bath of honey-colored light. “We’ll sleep here. We’ll take it slow. The land’s patient.”

  When she made to duck out through the hatch, thinking to fetch the food and sleep gear before dark, he tugged at her arm and said, “Don’t go.”

  The urgency in his voice spoke to the restlessness, the frenzy of celebration she had been feeling since the raft had touched shore. At his throat she found the cool tab of the zipper and drew it down. As he shrugged free of the wetsuit and kicked the clinging rubbery hide from his feet, she unzipped both shimmersuits, his and hers. His body emerged pale, sunless, a brand-new creature. There was a whirlpool of brown hair around each of his nipples and a mop of brown where his cock rose, strung with veins, stiff. It was a spring creature, his shy cock, and all of him was newborn.

  “Help me,” he begged.

  “It’s all right, it’s all right,” she said, wiping the last smudges of paint from his cheeks, stroking his lovely backside. “Just pretend you’re flying. Ride the wind.” One hand found the dip at his waist between hipbone and ribs, the other pressed the small of his back, drawing him to her. His chest smelled of the grease he had smeared on it to protect him from the sea. Her breasts were slick against him. The hollow at the base of his throat tasted of salt.

  “But your rib …”

  “What rib?”

  After clinging fearfully to her for a moment, his hands at last came alive, two shy animals exploring her slopes and crevices. Wherever they brushed her skin tremors ran outward, like ripples on wind-kissed water. She pressed against him, their bodies tilting, until he lay beneath her on the floor of the raft. Her breast in his mouth was a delectable fruit, his cock was like an insistent root between her legs.

  “Fly,” she murmured, settling her weight onto him. “Let the current carry us.”

  The raft, though firmly grounded on the beach, rocked with the rhythm of the sea.

  * * *

  * * *

  FOURTEEN

  Terra’s occasional rampages put the newscasters in a quandary. Reports of earthquakes and volcanoes and pestilence in the wilds made life within the Enclosure seem all the more desirable. But if the wilds actually broke through the skin of the human system? And if Terra, on one of these violent sprees, actually killed a few people, swallowed an Arctic research team down a sudden throat of ice, or drowned a repair crew in the ocean outside Oregon City? That sort of news would be disquieting. The trick was to remind people of Terra’s brutality without making them brood too much about the Enclosure’s fragility.

  So the first half meter of newsfax unscrolling on Zuni’s desk brought her word of the typhoon, without mentioning damage or casualties, FREAK STORM LASHES OREGON CITY, the headline proclaimed, DOME UNHARMED. At least my architecture is sound, she reflected wryly. How had the travel-tubes fared? No mention of that in the lead story. Curious, she skimmed over the week’s fashion news, skimmed rhetoric tournament results and summaries of World Council debates, skimmed the daily geometries and mating announcements, until she found, eight meters from the beginning of the scroll, a brief notice of damage to the Oregon-Alaska seatube. Typhoon generates high waves, the article stated. Seatube cracks—vacuum partially destroyed—commuter traffic disrupted—protective systems activated—wildergoers quickly repair damage.

  Who worked those repairs? With a heart-pounding premonition of what she might find, Zuni spun the newsfax rapidly, eyes skidding over the headlines, until she reached the fine print at the twenty-three meter mark. There were legal notices and production quotas and, scattered among them like somber floor tiles, the black-edged obituaries. With a magnifying glass she studied these death reports, and eventually discovered the tiny caption she had been seeking and dreading: WILDERGOERS DROWN AT SEA. Beneath the heading she found the nine names: Jurgen Marberg, Hinta Wood, Sol Musada, Marie O’Brien, Teeg Passio, Arda Ling, Indy Chavez, Josh Swenson, Coyt Russell. The words strung out below them were painfully small and blurred. She squinted, tilted the magnifier, struggling for sharper focus. At last she made out the words: shuttle demolished—no bodies recovered—died protecting the Enclosure. And so on through a few more perfunctory sentences.

  The projector cast a new mural onto the wall in front of her. She glanced up at it, unseeing, then stared again at the black-edged box. No bodies recovered. Zuni shut off the newsfax, but remained seated there, hunched over the blank scroll, thinking. No bodies recovered. Had they used the storm as a cover for their escape? Or had they really drowned?

  Another mural slathered onto the wall, and she irritably threw the projector switch. All the machines bothered her now. She hurried around the apartment, turning everything off—the food vendor and fragrancer and ion-generator and all the rest. Soon the place was quiet, dark, with only the lamp at her desk to break the gloom. She sat there absorbing the silence for a few minutes. Her hands lay in the lamp’s glow, palms up, cupping the light.

  Could they actually have drowned? After all these years of planning, living a double life, with every detail of her journey plotted out—could it all come to an end in the blind smash of a wave?

  Very easily, she admitted after a while. Very easily. The world was not set up to coddle us. It took no reckoning of our plans. Yes, they could very well have drowned. Or they could have survived the storm and slipped through Security’s fingers. The only way to be certain was by carrying through her plan. And if the gamble failed, if the crew had died, well, she would go through with the plan anyway. She was too old to plant new seeds of conspiracy.

  She rose from the desk, stretched her arms toward the ceiling. An old woman, she thought, with half my organs manufactured. But the spine is still pretty good, the legs will carry me, and the brain keeps ticking pretty well.

  There were many things to do. Vanishing was a harder business than being born. Uncertainty rode heavily upon her as she moved about the apartment, yet it did not slow her down. She had lived with uncertainty too many years to let it bother her now. She had danced with shadows, with hints of conspiracy and fading green memories of Oregon, with architectural visions and the ghosts of hope. She would not quit dancing now.

  For the next few days Zuni went about erasing herself from the city’s records. She could have settled her accounts at the bank, the housing bureau, the clinic and elsewhere by vidphone, of course, but she chose instead to go in person. More often than not, when she arrived at an office she had to deal with mechanoes rather than people. She didn’t mind. The mechanoes were fun to fool with crooked answers, and they had no feelings to hurt. The glittering bulbous heads, like chromium balloons, purred ritual greetings at her. Was she absolutely certain she wanted to close her accounts, terminate her insurance, cancel her lease? the mechanoes wanted to know. Yes, Zuni declared. Was she perhaps dead? No, she did not think so. Was she planning on dying? In a fashion, yes; in a fashion, no. That answer never failed to silence the chromium heads for a moment. Evidently the mechanoes possessed no polite formulas for responding to news of quasi-suicides.

  “I am perfectly clear about what I’m doing,” Zuni would assure them at last. “Now kindly settle this matter as I have instructed.”

  At that the glittering balloon head (or occasionally a human head, modishly wigged and painted) would nod in obedience and carry out her orders. From one tape after another her name was erased. Her lease, her insurance, her allotment of food and en
ergy were set to expire in a week. In a week her vidphone would go dead, the lock on her apartment would cease to open at the touch of her palm. For seven days more she would remain a citizen, secured to the Enclosure by a chain of numbers—the numbers of policies, licenses, bank balances. Then at week’s end all the numbers would rush to zero, and, so far as the Enclosure was concerned, Zuni Franklin would cease to be.

  She spent much of those seven days riding pedbelts and gliders, tracing French curves high in the air above Oregon City. She had drawn those curves, once upon a time. And this was what kept her running errands in person, back and forth through the city, this fascination with the glass and alloy shapes her blueprints had taken on. Many others had worked on the design of Oregon City, to be sure, but she had always been given the final say. Her pen had moved the armies of builders. So each tower soaring domeward, each fountain, each plaza encircled by arcades, each sculptured facade echoed the shapes that had lived inside her since childhood. The entire city bore the familiarity of an obsessive dreamscape.

  The simulated weather during that last week was halcyon blue. Yet Zuni felt certain the weather outside the float city was stormy. When water trembled in drinking glasses, authorities might blame the extraction pumps, but she knew the shudder came from the ocean. As a young woman she had stood on the Oregon coast watching storms and had felt the cliffs tremble beneath her. Waters that could shake the basalt margins of a continent could easily shake a glass city.

  Outside it would be early April, a time of green explosions, a time for bursting out of shells. Through all her years inside, where the seasons did not matter, where weather had been reduced to an electronic ballet played out on the dome, she had kept track of the turning year. And now it was spring.