Terrarium

by Scott Russell Sanders

  “Of course not. It fizzled this morning, and last night, too, when you were out there playing fishbait in the raft.”

  “But doesn’t the ingathering always work?”

  “Usually, in the city. It was easy to dream up utopias back there, easy to trust one another. Out here”—she collapsed in a boneless heap—“it’s harder.”

  “So what’s blocking us?”

  “It could be a million things. Maybe somebody’s a spy, maybe somebody’s jealous.”

  “Spy?” He was alarmed by this talk. The spiritual magic was like electronics: if it quit working, what could you do?

  “Or mistrust,” she added, “or chemmies hanging around in the body.”

  “Could it be Sol’s illness?”

  She looked thoughtful. “Yes, it could be that. Or someone wanting a little power or hungering after a new mate.”

  “But I thought you’d worked through all those things.”

  “Nobody but saints ever worked through them once and for all. We just keep working.” Teeg drew down the zipper of her shimmersuit and shrugged free of the clinging fabric. Her nakedness was still so new it astonished him. He looked at her flat belly with acute awareness of the vacuum inside, the zero where there should have been the seeds of children. “Well,” she said, “are you going to hold up the roof like that all night?”

  Then Phoenix realized he had backed away from her until his spine curved against the dome’s outer wall. Through the flimsy hide he sensed the patter of rain. He undressed awkwardly, ashamed for her to see that all the while they had been talking, his cock had pursued its own designs.

  “Will you get the light?” she asked. “My rib doesn’t appreciate the stretching.”

  He touched the flare and darkness slapped tight around him. Inside the sleepsack his fingers soon found the cool paired globes of her ass. She rolled silkily toward him and nipped his nose. “Now is the dark really so bad?” she whispered.

  For the half hour of their lovemaking there was neither dark nor light, only the river hurling them down its powerful current. Afterwards he was flung again onto shore, onto this Oregon beach with its encircling hills and ponderous surf and immense night.

  “Tell me,” he whispered, “which is real—the crowded daylight, with its billion dazzling pieces, or that great black vacancy out there?”

  7 March 2034—Portland/Whale’s Mouth

  On our way from Vancouver to the sanitation port, where Teeg is to be purified for admission to the Enclosure, we stop over in Portland. I wanted to see what nature had made of the place in the seven years since we finished the dismantling. The scoured hills are covered with fireweed, huckleberry, salal, red alder, and great hedge nettles, the same plants that always reclaim this land after forest fires and clear-cuts. Vines lace up through the brick shells of buildings. Grass buckles the pavement. My cache of tools has stayed dry in the old slate-roofed mansion in the park. Many of the wooden houses have caved in, but a few could be salvaged. Now that Vancouver is demolished and shipped north to become pieces of Alaska City, and my commission has expired, and my wilder-license is running out, I think I will begin work on a sanctuary here. Perhaps I could have something underway when Teeg comes back outside in two weeks.

  In the afternoon she begs me to stop at Whale’s Mouth Bay, so I land the glider on the beach. Teeg skips across the sand with a show of lightheartedness, but I suspect she feels as heavy as I do. She opens her arms wide to the surf, licks the spray from her lips, as if to swell herself up with the sea. All you can carry with you into Oregon City, I want to tell her, are the shadows of this place and other places you love, traces in the mind like tracks of particles through the fog of a bubble chamber. Instead of speaking, however, I write these lines in my journal. When I finish, I will tuck the little notebook into her pack, let her carry along a piece of me, too, when she goes inside. Will she ever carry it back out?

  * * *

  * * *

  SIXTEEN

  As she toiled up into the foothills Zuni kept turning back to locate the repair station, making sure of her direction. When she had last walked these slopes, sixty years before, they had just been clearcut. Bulldozers had gouged the shallow topsoil right down to bedrock. Between stumps the hillsides had been a hideous mire of oil cans and sawdust and bonewhite slash. Dirt which had taken millennia to accumulate sloughed off the mountains in a season of rain, burying the valleys below in mud. Even though brush had partially reclaimed the slopes since then, and conifers crept skyward from ravines, Zuni still recognized the devastated contours of the land.

  Just beyond this stony ridge she would enter the watershed of Wolf Creek. Downstream, where the Wolf joined Salt Creek, she would come to the site of her childhood village. What could be left there but the rotting sawmill and a few shriveled cabins, perhaps an overgrown orchard? It was an old woman’s foolishness to try going back. But I might as well get some advantage out of growing old, Zuni thought, something other than sore knees. She had to pass that way anyhow, for Salt Creek would lead her, after one or at most two days of walking, to Whale’s Mouth Bay. By that time over a week would have passed since Teeg and her crew had disappeared at sea. If they weren’t at Whale’s Mouth when she arrived? Can’t waste energy fretting about that.

  On that windswept ridge, where lichens were patiently rebuilding the soil, she sat down to let her body recover from the climb. Far below the station squatted, unnaturally white and spherical, like a ship that had just landed. The travel tube glistened away beyond sight to east and west. Presently a flicker of purple sparks announced a shuttle approaching, lights shot through the tube, past the station, past her, and away into the interior of America. Gregory had been right, the Enclosure was beautiful, with its globe-encircling filaments, its cities like stunning jewels. When the skycities were finished, in another twenty or thirty years, humanity could float free of Terra, free of the sun, free of every star except the one glowing in our foreheads. The mind was building itself a perfect house. Hadn’t the earliest molecules done the same, weaving membranes about themselves, forming cells? However long Zuni lived, out here in the wilds, part of her would always ache for that jeweled perfection.

  With a sigh she turned her back on the station and travel tube, and headed laboriously downhill toward the gray slither of Wolf Creek. Halfway down, while she rested in a clearing, a shadow glided past her feet and she flinched her gaze skyward, expecting a health patrol glider to descend on her. But the shape cruising overhead was that of a large bird, and Zuni was so astonished that she cried aloud, “Come down! Come, I won’t harm you!”

  The great wings beat languidly and the bird sailed away, magisterial, untouchable. Zuni stood there with heart knocking. But she saw no more of it, and so she picked her way downhill through ferns and brush, over fallen trees, wondering what the huge bird found to eat. Rats, surely, for no toxins ever invented could discourage rats. And if rats, why not rabbits and moles, a few at least, perhaps even foxes, black-tailed deer, elk? The mountain streams would most likely still breed fish, which meant black bears might have survived. As she hobbled toward Wolf Creek, parting the breast-high ferns, she filled the woods with dragonflies and scarlet tanagers, bobcats and loons, mountain lions and mosquitoes, all the creatures she had known from childhood. And why not wolves along Wolf Creek?

  But she reached the stream through a tangle of blackberries and maple saplings without spying another beast. Swollen with spring rains and snowmelt from the mountains, the creek surged ponderously seaward. At least this much had not changed. It smelled the same, sounded the same. She remembered this springtime urgency of water, remembered how the uprooted trees used to hurtle past her down the current while she searched the banks with her father for mushrooms.

  “Wolf Creek,” she said rapturously, as if by naming it she would become again the mushroom-picking child.

  She knelt down and lowered her face to within a few centimeters of the rushing water. The cool breath against her cheeks
had arrived here from frozen mountains. The taste of creekwater, even sucked through a detox filter, was so familiar it made her cry. There was the taste of rock in that water, and lichen, wood, and earth. The flavor of canyons and pine mountains was dissolved in it. She knew it was absurd, after so many decades of masquerading as the inventor of cities, to kneel here now on a creekbank weeping over the taste of water. It was as if the flavor of the entire abused and abandoned planet had burst suddenly into her mouth after long fasting.

  Where ferns grew thickest she unfurled her sleepsack, which quickly swelled with air until it assumed a mummy-shape. She wriggled inside and the inflated walls snugged tight against her. The pungent smell of broken ferns and the lingering taste of melted snow made her eyes water. Listening to the creek distracted her for a while from the pain in her joints and muscles. When she could no longer ignore the ache she thought back over the day—the apartment treating her as a stranger, the cybernet answering zeroes to all her questions, the costumed monstrosity gazing back at her from the mirror, the last ride across Oregon City, the cautious locks of the repair station, the overwhelming green dazzle of the wilds.

  What tale would they finally believe about her, back there? That she had crawled into a vaporizer? Shipped out to the asteroid colonies? Allowed her brain to be transplanted into a cyberfield? Changed her identity so she might hide among them under a new name?

  It pleased her, lying there snug in a sleepsack beside Wolf Creek, to imagine them spinning modest little legends about her. The pleasure could not keep her body’s pain at bay, however. Even in Oregon City she had rarely used chemmies. Out here, it was unthinkable. Instead she chewed a foodstrip slowly, grimacing at the harsh synthetic taste, waiting for sleep.

  She woke into the gray light of predawn. Stars might have pricked through the gloom overhead, but her bleary eyes would never be able to make them out. She was reluctant to try moving, for fear some of her bones or sinews would refuse to obey. In that stillness, against the background purr of the creek, she heard a few hesitant twitters, as if a bird were testing the air. Then came delicate, flutelike notes. She had not heard that song for sixty years, but the bird’s name sprang to mind. Varied thrush. Orange breast and black eye-stripes. After a spell the raucous cry of a jay interrupted the fragile melody, and suddenly the boughs overhanging the creek were filled with the chatter and whistle of many birds.

  Zuni lay gratefully listening as the sky grew light. Wind sluiced through the blue-green branches, water sluiced through the rocky channel of the creek, blood sluiced through her veins. She felt intensely happy. But the moment passed over her like a breath and was gone, as her legs ached and her stomach grumbled and memory recalled that she might die out here alone. Was there even a settlement to find?

  At least there was a remedy for hunger. Those infernal foodsticks. She reached out to dig some from the beltpack, but her hand found nothing except ferns. Thinking she had perhaps rolled about in her sleep, she sat up and peered around. There were her boots, tongues hanging out as if from fatigue, and there was her jacket, but no pack. She scrambled out of the sleep-sack, crawled anxiously over the bitter-smelling ferns, calculating how long she could live without food, filters, or anti-toxins.

  Just as she was trying to imagine how death would come—slowly by thirst and hunger or quickly by poison—her outstretched fingers touched a strap. She tugged, and the beltpack emerged from under a heap of brush. Whatever had dragged it away in the night and hidden it there had slashed a hole through the fabric. Checking quickly, she found the filters and medicines and tools safe inside. Several of the foodstrips in their foil wrappers had been tentatively gnawed—the teethmarks were as sharp as compass points—but none had been eaten.

  She rocked on her heels and shook with laughter. Wise beast, to be wary of city food! Raccoon, she guessed, or weasel. There might not be many beasts left, but one had managed to sniff her out in the enormous night. Were these the last of the old beasts, or the first of the new ones? The doomed survivors that would soon perish, or the genetically resistant ones that would eventually fill the forests?

  So she would not die just yet. The beltpack was soon mended with glue, the sleepsack was deflated and tucked away. Only when she bent over the creek and splashed her face with the frigid water did she recollect her stubborn joints and muscles. In her excitement over the missing pack she had tricked them into motion. Now that she was up and packed and ready for the journey, her old bones would damn well cooperate. The face wavering up at her from the water was a little hollow about the eyes and cheeks, red as a poppy from the unfamiliar sun, but still merry.

  Heading downstream, she chewed a foodstrip thoughtfully, her tongue playing over the beast’s finicky toothmarks. The going was difficult. In most places the vegetation crowded down to the water, so she had to force her way through. Elsewhere the bank rose in a sheer cliff and she had either to pick her way precariously over stones in the creek, or else climb the steep ridge. Tributary streams cut through the bank, often plunging over waterfalls into Wolf Creek. When she came to one of these she had to follow it upstream until the water was narrow or shallow enough for wading.

  Twice before sunset she stumbled onto game trails and followed them so long as they kept within earshot of the creek. She only let herself believe that deer had gouged these trails when she saw the sharp cloven hoofprints in a muddy stretch. She had to squat down and actually place her fingers in the tracks to make sure, because to her dim eyes the hoofprints might have been flakes of bark. For the rest of the afternoon she toiled along with the image of deer inside her.

  With the pack tucked securely beneath her head, and the awning pulled over her sleepsack to keep off rain, Zuni abandoned herself for a second night to the growl of Wolf Creek.

  In the morning she discovered that one of her boots had been chewed about the toe. Her own stockinged toes showed through when she put it on, and she gazed down at them with dismay.

  She scolded the indifferent woods. “Do you start on my legs tonight, you impertinent beasts?”

  Nothing actually bit her legs that following night, but she woke in blackness to find something nosing at her sleep-sack. A wolf after all? Inside the inflated walls it sounded as if a child were clumsily pawing at a drum. When Zuni reached out, flare in hand, to see what manner of beast it was, all she glimpsed was the humped retreating back of something large and furry and quick. Two green eyes swung momentarily round to catch the flare-light, then disappeared. She felt as she had felt once, as a child, upon discovering that a bear watched her from a thicket of willows—not threatened, but observed, measured, the way any intruder is examined by those who belong in a place.

  “Come let me have a look at you!” she called foolishly into the blackness.

  By noon of the third day she could sense the nearness of home. Wolf Creek was narrowing down between rock cliffs for its ten-meter leap into Salt Creek. The gullies and bogs atop the cliffs were so familiar that she thought to look for mushrooms, and there they were, in the leafmold and rotted logs, pale mushrooms as thin as fingers, mottled brown ones larger than two clasped hands, creamy fists. A pity she dare not eat them. Even swallowed with detox they were likely to make her sick, for mushrooms, like whales, had a way of concentrating poisons. Her father used to amaze city visitors by popping unfamiliar mushrooms into his mouth. “I know the few lethal ones,” he had explained to her, “so everything else I can trust.” From this man who had left home each morning with a chainsaw tilted over his shoulder, she had learned to trust the earth.

  Her excitement mounted along with the rising tempo of the current. A dozen meters ahead the creek vanished over a ledge, leaving only a fume of mist in the air, as if it darted into a fourth dimension. Zuni made her way cautiously over the slick rocks, relishing the spray that soaked her face and hair, until she neared the falls. On hands and knees she crept to the very brim and peered down through the crash of water at the meadow. A gust of wind blew the mist aside, exposing th
e valley, and at last she was able to see—nothing. Where the village had been there was only a smear of black, no hint of decaying houses, no green ferment of returning forest. Perhaps her miserable eyes were playing tricks on her. She waited for another clearing of the mist, and then another, but each time the valley appeared as a blackened scar.

  Trembling, she lowered herself down the cliff trail, careful to keep her back toward the charred vacancy that had been her home. The climb down the rockface beside the falls had seemed a lark to her as a child, when muscles were young and death was an impossibility; now she picked her way down over the slick ledges with breath trapped in her throat. Her flannel shirt and trousers were soon wet through from the spray. Hair fell in damp white strands over her eyes. Purple irises bloomed on these ledges, their delicate petals furling outward like tiny fountains, and every niche was awash in the yellow blooms of gorse. Zuni kept her eyes on these vibrant flowers, while the desolate valley yawned below.

  At last she reached the base of the cliff and faced around to survey the landscape of her childhood. The falls boomed to her right. To her left Salt Creek curled away toward the sea. All before her was a desert of rock and blackened soil, across the valley floor and as far as she could see upstream or down.

  She slumped against the cliff and shut her eyes. Orchards had carpeted the near bank, and vineyards, and tidy gardens which the lumberjacks used to fuss over in the evenings. The sawmill had loomed on the far bank, and around it the village had sprawled with crooked alleys and wooden houses. While she kept her eyes closed it was all as plain as a blueprint, but once she opened them again there was only this charred landscape. She might have been gazing from the porthole of a colony on the moon. On earth she had seen nothing so barren except the lava fields of eastern Oregon.

  She scuffed her boot against the rock. It was very like lava, bubbled and swirled and intricately fissured, as if something had melted the valley. She remembered being told how the health patrollers went about in their laser ships sterilizing the old gathering places, flushing the last wilder-goers from the forests. So this was what a sterilized town looked like. She picked up a chunk of the bubble stone and hurled it furiously over the water. It clattered against rock on the far side. There was no use crossing, only to see more cinders. In any case the bridge was gone. The HP had done a thorough job. No least sprig of green showed anywhere in the ashen valley.