Terrarium

by Scott Russell Sanders

  Throughout the morning the other conspirators sidled up to the dying man, one by one, and sat with him to watch the sea. Phoenix defended himself from the dizzying assault of the wilds by watching these visits. Indy brought a clutch of wildflowers that shone on the foggy beach like distant lights. Coyt brought his violin, and Phoenix could hear, in the lull between waves, the high notes pirouetting. Marie was the last to come, hobbling across the sand. Her bald head bobbed side-to-side, as if overfull of thoughts. Sol lifted his hands to her, and she bent down, pressed her palms against his, her forehead against his forehead. They held so still, with so much quiet passion, that Phoenix looked guiltily away. Imagine, being loved so fully by these people, even in your weakness.

  At noon Teeg brought food, drink, and the smell of outside into the raft. In one hand she dangled a long-tailed bulbous plant. “Here, meet a bull kelp.” It felt slimy in his palm, undersea, one of the planet’s secret organs. In her other hand she carried a bucketful of shells. “Get the feel of things,” she urged. He fondled them, fascinated by their whorling grain, their microscopic perfection.

  “You doing all right?” she asked, cocking her head at him.

  He shrugged. “I’ve been watching clouds. I can’t get used to seeing them from underneath, up close, after so many years of watching by satellite.”

  She nodded absently, shifting from one foot to the other just inside the hatch, impatient to escape the closed space of the raft.

  “How’s the work coming?” he asked.

  “Slowly. Everybody’s so drunk with being out here, it’s hard to keep our minds on the job.”

  “I want to go help build. But every time I get to the hatch and try to walk through, there’s this terrific pressure.”

  “Think how I felt when my father tricked me into visiting him in Oregon City. And then he told me I had to stay there. Huge mountains of buildings and swarms of people. More people on one belt than I’d seen in my whole life. Talk about pressure. I thought my head would explode.” Recollecting, she grabbed a fistful of red hair at each of her temples. The hard-tipped breasts rose with the motion of her arms, a reminder of the geography that had lured him out here.

  “You go on back. I’m all right,” he reassured her.

  With a smile of relief she backed through the hatch, into that frightening immensity. Studying holos back in his apartment had not prepared him for the vast scale of the wilds. They just went on and on, first the turbulent ocean, and now the land with its frenzy of vegetation. The terrarium in Teeg’s blue-lighted room had been a box of wildness engulfed by the city, a speck on a chessboard. Now wildness was everywhere, and the raft, with its manufactured walls and filtered light and symmetries, was the only assurance of human order. Space did not curve to a halt at the dome’s edge, as it had in Oregon City, but kept on soaring into the watery distance. Overhead, beyond the skin of the raft, a haze of vapor was all that separated him from the empty infinities.

  All afternoon he watched the colonists lugging gear from the cave, across the beach to the creek mouth, then through a gap in the hills to a meadow where the settlement would rise. Teeg was ambling back and forth between cave and building site along with the others, but carrying smaller loads. Whenever she disappeared into a cave, blotted out by darkness, some citified part of him feared she would never return. Grass hung down over the opening, water drooled from the upper lip, as if the cave were a slobbering, bearded mouth. Yet she emerged each time unscathed and made her way along the beach to the building site. By late afternoon the struts of a windmill jutted above the hill’s flank, and the crescent of a solar dish gleamed nearby.

  When Teeg ducked inside the raft with his supper there was an excitement about her. While he ate, she kept pacing, halting only to gaze out through a porthole at the settlement.

  “The meeting dome will be up before midnight,” she said. “Look, you can just make out the white bulge there, above those old stumps.”

  “I found a spider;” he told her, wanting to show her he had crept at least this far out of his shell. “It’s already built a web in the life preservers. So quick!”

  “Good, good,” she said vaguely. “Of course it’s only the outer skin so far, on the big dome. But it’ll keep off rain. The heat-void and photoelectric hulls can wait.” She prowled the length of the raft, thumping the yellow walls. “Coyt says we’ll have electricity in two days. The footings for the veggie tank and the fish pools are all marked out. The digester’s already working on a load of seaweed.” She grabbed him by the ears, gently, as if they were two fragile handles, and pulling his face down she kissed him on each eye. “Wait till you see it.”

  He glanced outside. Lateness and rainclouds had thinned the light, simplifying the world, merging the dizzy details into great slabs of land and sea. Offshore rocks thrust up like fists through leaden water. He took a deep breath. “Let’s go see it now.”

  He stepped quickly through the hatch, before dread could shove him back. There was a sickening looseness underfoot. Sand. Beach in front of him tilting up, then gravel, boulders, deserts of rock scoured smooth as tongues, then a green terrace speared down by huge trees, and next the misty outlines of hills, and then gray sky lifting away forever and ever into darkness. He leaned back, panting and terrified. The tremendous size of the world oppressed him. The mountains crushed down with a pulverizing weight. Behind him the surf breathed its mammoth breath.

  It took him a minute to notice the tug at his arm, to hear Teeg saying, “Look at something close by, one single thing. That’s the way to fight it. Here—get some sand.”

  He extended his palm and she scooped it full of grit.

  “Now stare at it,” she said. “Put everything else out of your mind.”

  He lifted his hand close to his face. Flecks of stone, rasped from mountains, dust of a continent. He stirred the specks with a finger. Some were dark with moisture, others tawny, and the driest grains were pale flecks of light, like sparks of some icy fire.

  Teeg’s voice reached him from the colossal world he had momentarily forgotten. “That’s the secret. Look at one thing at a time. Everything’s gathered there anyway.”

  Stumbling up the beach with his weight on Teeg, he obediently looked at a seagull’s feather, a driftlog bleached white as bone, a moss-covered stone, the thorny arc of a blackberry vine, examining each with a mixture of caution and wonder, as he might have examined the alien debris of Mars. The shapes of these things were familiar to him from the holos; but now they were substantial, resisted the hand, like the furniture of dreams suddenly encountered in daylight.

  Teeg reminded him of the names—barnacle and sea-lettuce and bearded moss. She steadied him while they scrambled along a creek bank to the meadow where the settlement was rising. Here the breathing of the surf was not so menacing. He felt more at ease, surrounded by crates, half-finished towers, sun-catching boxes, the hemispherical skeletons of domes. The sky, broken up by trees, was less daunting. With dusk coming on the air grew thick and intimate.

  “Almost time for ingathering,” Teeg said. “Do you want to go straight inside?”

  Horror brushed him, yet now that he was finally out of doors the vastness was intoxicating. “Can’t we look around a little?”

  Her look measured him. “Maybe you can stand a few minutes.”

  She led him to a great circular swath of tilled ground. “This is where the outdoor garden will be.” Marie was at work there, feet planted far apart for balance, stooping over to pick out roots and stones. She was a bulky woman, powerful in her old age. Mud caked her fingers and wrists. There was a smear of mud on her bald pate. When she inclined her face to look at him, the creases converging like pathways around each eye, it was easy to believe she was a spirit-traveler.

  “So how do you like the wilds?” said the old woman, extending her dirty palms toward him.

  Phoenix gingerly pressed his palms against hers. “I’m still a little shaky,” he admitted.

  “Good. Don’
t ever quit shaking. The world’s an awesome place.” Marie bent to work again, nabbing a rock and tossing it onto a pile beside the garden plot.

  Phoenix closed his eyes and sniffed. There was a musty smell, distinct from the odor of brine or hemlocks or rotting wood. Dirt? He remembered pale roots lacing down into the soil of the terrarium, the probe of white tendrils. Now I’m walking in the terrarium, he thought. Grass underfoot, creek slipping through its channel, feathery trees gathered on all sides. Yet he still sensed danger stealing along behind him, tramping silently in his footsteps.

  And so Teeg led him around the site, through lengthening shadows. Two sides of the meadow were rimmed by spruce-covered hills, one sinuous boundary was formed by a blunt escarpment, with Salt Creek Falls tumbling from its crest and the creek undulating along its base. The fourth side of the meadow opened across Whale’s Mouth Bay to the sea. Throughout the site, blueprints were materializing. Some projects were announced as yet only by jumbles of unopened crates; others, like the fish pools, by forms bolted together around freshly-poured liquistone. Still others were set up and functioning, like the water purifier with its coil of pipe, the composting toilet, the faceted solar oven. Stakes driven into the turf marked where greenhouses and hydroponics tanks would go. Eighteen smaller domes, for meditation and privacy, were laid out in a necklace around the large central dome.

  “Why so many?” Phoenix asked.

  “For the other exiles who will come,” said Teeg.

  “You really believe there’ll be others?”

  Her eyes scanned the meadow, then came to focus on him. “I hope so. If we’re the only ones, the last ones, it all seems like a dead end.”

  “But we have one another.”

  “Ten of us. Soon to be nine, when Sol dies. And in a few years, perhaps, Marie. Or someone else might die sooner from poison or accident. No, no,” she insisted, “there have to be others. It has to go on.”

  A sudden yearning came over him. “We could have children.”

  She turned her back to him and said in a careful voice, “Arda is the only one of us who still carries her eggs.”

  He looked at her stiff shoulders, feeling the shock of tenderness. “It doesn’t matter.”

  She swung angrily round and shouted, “It matters! Don’t tell me being sterile doesn’t matter!”

  The depth of her feeling appalled him. He could only stare in silence as she walked away over the grass. Not yet inflated, the spare domes meant for future exiles lay in puckered folds at his feet.

  In the thickening darkness he shuffled after Teeg. His fear of the wilds seemed selfish, an indulgence, when compared to the grief of her barrenness. As he trailed after her toward the dark verge of the meadow, he met other colonists, who had quit work for the day and were trooping domeward. Coyt stumped out of a half-roofed dome just as Phoenix caught up with Teeg. He was hunchbacked, with a badly twisted face, the chin far out of line from forehead and nose, as if before birth a mocking hand had yanked him out of shape. His brain had saved him from exile to the mutant wards. He was a particle physicist, his head full of matrices, according to Teeg, but his hands were the wise-fingered hands of a tinker.

  “What pains you?” he asked Teeg, looking at her with concern. When she did not answer he paused tactfully, then addressed Phoenix. “Now that you’ve had a look outside, firebird, can we ever lure you back in?” He gestured with a misshapen arm toward the luminous bubble of the dome.

  “In a minute,” Phoenix replied.

  Coyt stared round at the gloomy hills. “Mind the dark,” he said, then went stubbing away on his uneven legs.

  Marie also passed them on her way to the dome, her head visible only as a paleness, a hole hammered in the dark. “Don’t let him stay out too long, child,” she murmured.

  “I know the danger,” Teeg replied. Each word was balanced, like water in a brim-filled cup. “We’re just waiting for the sunset.”

  But there was no sunset. Rainclouds shut down on the ocean, gray on darker gray. Darkness oozed from trees and stones and soil, weighting everything with longer shadows. The speed of the transition from day to night astonished him. In Oregon City there was no real night, only an artificial gloom when lamps dimmed for the hours of sleep, and even then one could look out the window to find the avenue as brightly lit as ever. Here the darkness seemed ponderous and final, heaving the mountains up like volcanoes of ink, swamping the meadow with liquid shadows. Darkness lapped menacingly at his feet.

  “Let’s go inside now,” he said. Could she hear the tremble?

  “Come,” Teeg said gently, taking his hand.

  He hastened along beside her over the treacherous ground. Lighted from within by flares, the dome swelled before them like a molten globe half-risen from the soil. As day cooled into evening, the fabric turned opaque, to conserve heat inside. At the threshold he did as Teeg did, kicking off his boots, hanging his soiled clothes on a hook in the entrance chamber. He spun naked beside her in the air-shower, brush of elbow against rump, shoulder against her fiery hair. Then he dressed in a clean shimmersuit, pure white for the ingathering, and followed her through a corridor into the meeting room, which was a canopy of brightness at the center of the dome.

  Ten cushions formed a circle around a glowing flare. Eight of them were already occupied. As Phoenix took his place, the water-filled cushion swaying beneath him, he noticed the slumped shoulders, the exhausted faces. For all their rugged training these people were showing the effects of the ocean passage and the day of hard labor. Sol was propped in an air-harness, eyes sunken and bloodshot, with a cloth pressed to his mouth. And Marie was no longer young, must have been near ninety, for she had worked as a graduate student on the earliest synthetic proteins, back before the turn of the century. Even the younger colonists, Indy and Josh and Coyt, gave an impression of utter fatigue.

  Rocking slightly on his cushion, with eyes shut and breath measured, Phoenix waited for the stillness to wash over him. It was always hard, the sinking down into stillness. Tonight he found himself growing more tense with each passing minute. The meeting space kept rustling with breath and the stir of bodies. Stealing a glance, he saw that no one else had settled into the posture of deep trance. All round the circle fists clenched on knees, backs hunched wearily, jaws worked with unconscious speech. Next to him, Teeg’s breath came raggedly. The air wheezed through his own pressured lungs in tatters. What was wrong? Was he some poison that had murdered their closeness? That must be it, his city spirit poisoning the ingathering. He was about to rise and go from them, go somewhere, even outside into the annihilating blackness, when Jurgen’s huge head lifted.

  “We’ll have to work ourselves clear again before we can draw together,” Jurgen said. The struggle had left his great body trembling.

  Phoenix stiffened on his cushion, waiting to be accused. A look from Teeg kept him silent. You do not understand these things, said her eyes.

  “Let us eat,” Hinta pronounced in a tone of profound weariness.

  The warm bowls passed from hand to hand, and the grainy loaves followed them around the circle. Marie fed Sol, tilting the bowl to his lips while he lay propped against the cushions. Everyone kept a solemn hush, eyes lowered over the food.

  Phoenix sipped the broth without hunger, nibbled at the loaf. After a while Coyt stood in front of him with a kettle. Steam plumed from the spout, obscuring the mutant’s skewed features. Phoenix held out his empty bowl, let Coyt pour some hot water in, then swished it around and drank it off. If only we could cleanse ourselves like that, he thought, purge all the residues of our old lives and start out clean.

  The meal was followed by subdued talk concerning the next day’s work. Phoenix agreed to help Indy run assays on air and water and dirt, so the colonists would know for sure which toxins to dose themselves against. “That will keep you safe inside,” Jurgen said bluntly.

  Once the tasks were divvied up, people began retiring in pairs and triplets into the private cells surrounding
the meditation chamber. Curious about the joining, Phoenix noted each departure. Hinta and Jurgen—that union he could have predicted, for the two always seemed to work in tandem, Hinta picking up vibrations as if she were a delicate antenna, and Jurgen hammering the world into a shape to fit her intuitions. Coyt, Josh, and Indy ambled away together, a surprising threesome. Marie and Arda were more of a surprise as they departed with arms round one another, the old woman and the young, intense Marie with the lovely, sleep-walking host-mother, Arda. That left Sol, slumped against his cushion, and Teeg and himself.

  “Ready?” Teeg said. When Phoenix glanced at Sol, she explained, “He asked to be left alone. He has a spirit-journey to make.”

  Sol opened his eyes, two points of gleaming blackness, and they reminded Phoenix of the night outside. Death was coming for the old man, yet the eyes showed no fear. The head nodded faintly, agreeing to something, perhaps to what Teeg had said. She kissed the old man’s forehead on her way to the sleep-chamber. Phoenix padded after her, conscious of Sol’s calm dark gaze upon him.

  Two sleepsacks, zippered together to make one great pouch, took up the entire floor of their private chamber. A flare hung from the ceiling, and twin portholes opened onto the night. Phoenix quickly shuttered the windows, but when Teeg reached up to douse the flare he grabbed her hand. “Not yet,” he pleaded, searching for a reason. “Let’s … talk a minute.”

  “You can’t talk in the dark?”

  “I want … to see you … see your eyes.” She stared at him unblinking, two pools of calm green. He could find no hint of accusation there, could read nothing but desire. “Maybe I caused it,” he stammered. “You know, ruined the ingathering.”

  “So that’s why the donkeyface,” she said with apparent relief. “I thought you were still brooding on my little fertility melodrama.”

  He despaired of ever predicting the swing of her emotions. By comparison, weather prediction had been easy. “I didn’t ruin it?” he asked hesitantly.