Oblivious, Salt Creek purled along seaward past her feet. She was almost afraid to follow the stream to Whale’s Mouth Bay, for if she did not find Teeg and the others there she would not have the strength or desire to search much farther. She wanted to sag down here and quit the pointless struggling. She had escaped into the wilds, had found her way home. Let this charred desolation be the end of it.
Yet the creek surged on, abiding and momentary. It had not changed in all her years of knowing; yet it changed constantly. You never quit, old one, the creek was saying. You live in this moment, and this moment only. After a while the sound of it lifted her up and forced her to hobble along the bank, over fissured stone. As if blind, she stumbled on for most of an hour, left hand fumbling against the cliff, through pain, past what she imagined must be the outer limits of exhaustion, until the lavalike stone gave way to cinders, the cinders to moss. She fell down there in her wet clothes and slept, with the valley of ashes gaping behind her.
* * *
* * *
SEVENTEEN
During most of that first week after the landing at Whale’s Mouth Bay it rained. The meadow squished underfoot as the colonists went about erecting domes and laying pathways of glass. The needles of spruce and hemlock, glistening with rain, looked like fine green jets squirting from branches. Grass stems bent under the weight of water. Marie had to cover her garden with polyfilm to keep it from turning into a quagmire. Coyt grumbled because unbroken clouds reduced the power from his photoelectric cells. There was methane enough from the seaweed digester, however, and enough hydrogen from the vats of blue-green algae to fuel stoves and generators, so the colony enjoyed electricity and warm food.
Rain pipped the surface of the fishpools, which were stocked with fingerlings of bluegill and rainbow trout and bullhead catfish, all carefully smuggled from Oregon City. The smuggled crayfish had died in their barrels, so Josh and Jurgen went off hunting some wild ones. Rain pattered on the greenhouse, where Phoenix helped sow vegetables. Teeg was delighted to see him poking his fingers into the sterilized dirt.
Rain drumming overhead soothed Teeg’s heart at the nightly ingatherings. The still point, the luminous center where they all fused with the spirit, kept eluding them. “We must be patient,” Marie counseled. “This is our time of wandering.” But how long could they wander before losing touch with one another? Each night Teeg studied the haggard faces, wondering who had muddied the mystical waters. Could one of them really be a spy, willing to betray the colony? Or was it merely anger, jealousy, even Sol’s dying?
One night Marie’s voice rose above the rain’s drumming to suggest naming the settlement Jonah. “Because we have all sojourned in the guts of the Enclosure,” she explained, “and now we have been cast up on dry land.”
“Not so very dry!” Indy quipped.
Sol gathered himself to speak, and everyone hushed. “Out of Leviathan into Whale’s Mouth,” he whispered. His face shone with a many-wrinkled smile, even though, inside, his body was a shambles, one membrane after another yielding its fluid to the rising waters of death. “Yes,” he whispered. “That is good. Let us call this place Jonah.”
During that rainy first week Sol kept inside his meditation dome. The others went in to him by turns, stroking his face or talking quietly or merely sitting for a time in utter stillness. Even Hinta’s touch could not bring healing now. Sol would swallow no chemmies, saying he wanted to be alert for his death. When pain tugged his white beard he was forced to cover his sagging mouth with a hand. Marie spent the most time with him, since the two of them had journeyed together on many spirit-quests. She was the one who stayed with him now through the nights, when desperate cries bubbled up out of the depths of his sleep.
Phoenix would only visit Sol in Teeg’s company, and then he would stay no longer than a minute before hastening back to the shelter of greenhouse or lab, away from the old man’s decaying flesh.
Teeg knew the fugitive look in Phoenix’s eyes. He was suffering from a bad case of wilder-shock. Several times she discovered him at a porthole staring out, appalled, at the forest or sea. Or she found him with his ear pressed against the inner wall of the dome, listening.
Since first glimpsing Phoenix in the corridor all those months ago, in his ridiculous blue wig and video-actor’s mask and luminescent gown, Teeg had assumed he would love the coast once he saw the rocky headlands and breathed the salty air. But the dread went deep, back into his childhood and perhaps further back, into the twisted messages of the genes. People had been walling themselves off from nature for a very long time.
Marie said Phoenix would have to break through the fear from inside; there was no coming at it, by words or touches, from without. So Teeg let him stay indoors, let him keep his aching distance from her in the sleepsack, let him dwell in his numbed silence.
There was still a great deal of work to do in the settlement. When she had finished helping Coyt rig the photoelectric cells and the methane generator, and had seen the first flicker of electricity illuminate a test lamp, she went on to help Jurgen pour the glass walkways. The black sand on the beach was ideal for the job. Trenches were cut into the meadow, wires and pipes were laid in, and molten glass was spread into them. While it was still warm Teeg etched the surface with a trowel, to keep it from being slippery underfoot. By week’s end all the domes were linked by glass pathways. Sinuous black tentacles spread out from Jonah Colony to the beach and up Salt Creek and away into the coastal hills.
Whenever she felt tired of work or the thought of losing Sol became too heavy in her, she went in to sit with the dying man. Marie was usually there, giving him sips of water or simply holding one of his black hands between her two callused white ones.
Once, when Sol was alone, Teeg brought a cluster of the tiny bell-shaped flowers from the salal bush and laid it in his outstretched palm.
“The beauty goes on and on!” he whispered to her, drawing the flowers up close to his eyes. He made an effort to smile.
There was a silence. Teeg sat cross-legged beside him and fixed her gaze on the flare glowing at the center of the dome. Sol clutched the salal blossoms in one hand and in the other a blood-soaked gauze which he pressed from time to time against his lips.
“The rhodies should be blooming,” he murmured. “It’s May, and they should be glimmering on the cliffs. And the gorse should be burning their yellow flame.”
“Yes, my love, they are, they are.”
His eyes seemed completely black and sightless, as if they were gateways inward to some nether universe. The flare was mirrored in each one like a star. “And the gray whales are swimming up the coast,” he whispered. “Mothers and calves and young bulls. North along the coast to the Arctic.”
“They’re not …” Teeg began, and then she held her tongue. Why remind him they had all died long ago? His eyes were extinguished and his cancerous body was forgotten. He was a young man in memory, and in that memory the ocean still heaved with whales.
“The cranes should be flying north,” he said in a rhapsodic voice. “And petrels and ospreys. Look outside, dear, and see if there isn’t an osprey overhead.”
Teeg stared obediently through a porthole at the blank sky. Not even the ragged herring gulls, the only birds they had spied so far, were visible in the empty air.
“Here’s one now,” she lied. “All creamy below, and a brown head, and bands across the tail, and the wings nearly two meters across.”
“Is it fishing?” There was a rising note of eagerness in his broken voice.
“Yes, there, it’s just plunged down and caught a great squirming fish, and now it’s flying up to the cliffs for its meal.”
His eyes filled slowly with tears, like two ragged holes dug down past the water-line. Teeg watched the saltwater rise in them. The tears caught in the folds of his plum-dark face and dripped into his lap. He made no attempt to wipe them away. Propped against cushions, a star gleaming in each pitchblack eye, he held very still. Teeg could no
t move. His passion struck her dumb.
At last he dabbed the gauze to his mouth, drew it away bright with blood, and murmured, “Tell Marie I am ready for the journey.”
“And where will we take you?”
“Up onto the headland, where the lighthouse used to be.”
Teeg thought uneasily of that exposed place, where the most casual sky-eyes might spot them. “Everyone?” she said.
He nodded. Speech was a heavy labor. “I must have my whole family with me. Now go; Marie knows what to do.” He waved the handful of flowers weakly.
Marie was in the garden, taking advantage of the rare rainless afternoon to plant seeds. She laid rows from the hub of the circular garden to the outer rim, like spokes in a wheel. She pressed a long tube into the soil, dropped in a seed, then withdrew the tube and shuffled dirt over the hole with her bare feet.
Teeg halted at the border of the tilled earth, heavy with her news. When Marie at last noticed her and looked up, her face seemed drowsy from the labor of planting.
“Sol’s ready,” Teeg announced.
At once Marie’s lovely, rumpled face came alert. “Is he conscious?”
“Yes, but a little delirious.”
“Talking of whales? He began seeing them last night, dear old visionary.” Marie scraped the seeds from her palm into a pouch. “Here, child, help me cover the garden,” she said, and the two women dragged fluttering sheets of polyfilm over the naked soil. Even with death coming—especially with death coming—the living must be provided for.
On the way back to Sol’s dome Marie instructed her to gather the others at the lighthouse path, have Jurgen rig a stretcher, have Indy provide enough pure water for an all-night vigil.
The sun was falling through the roof of clouds, its lower edge brilliant against a ribbon of blue sky, as Teeg went in search of Phoenix. She found him in their private dome, enveloped in his sleepsack.
“I can’t, I can’t. I’m afraid.” Muffled by the sack, his words sounded as though they had been spoken underwater.
“Sol needs you.”
The tousled brown head emerged from the pouch, like a sea lion surfacing. “Aren’t you and the others enough?”
“No, love. Once you join the ingathering you draw part of his spirit into you, and he draws part of yours into him. He needs everyone’s power to carry him through.”
Phoenix sat up and turned his harried eyes on her. The week-old beard stubbling his cheeks made him look even more fugitive. “He really needs me?”
“Yes; we all do. That’s what it means to belong to one another.”
His breath came quickly. He looked so frantic and displaced, like a merman flung gasping on the beach.
“Is it raining?” he asked.
“Not just now.”
“Should I … should I bring a poncho?”
Teeg smiled, knowing he would go. She hugged him against her sore ribs. “Yes, and a blanket, too. We’ll be staying up there all night.”
“All night?”
“As long as he needs for his spirit-journey.”
Phoenix rose on unsteady legs and collected his poncho and blanket. She led him into the slanting sunlight, his hand in hers, tremors passing between them.
“Pick one thing and look at it,” she reminded him. His gaze skirted warily, until something on the forest’s edge caught his attention. “What are those pinkish flowers up there?”
“Rhododendrons.”
His head swiveled to take in the sweep of hills. “They’re everywhere! Who planted them?”
Planted them! She squeezed his clumsy paw. “God!”
On the beach they passed within sight of the yellow raft. Teeg’s body still held the memory of its wallowing sea-motion, the rise and fall of waves and lovemaking.
“We could sleep there again some night,” she said.
A smile of recollection eased onto his face. “Yes, that would be good.”
Waves slid up the black sand and then retreated with a sucking noise. The massive headland that formed the whale’s upper jaw loomed ahead, and at its base the other colonists waited, tiny and silvery, like upright minnows. Spray from incoming breakers hid them, and then, falling back, revealed them again. Atop the headland were the ruins of Whale’s Head Light, where Teeg had often picnicked with her mother, and that was where they would be taking Sol. Teeg worked at clearing a space in her mind for Sol to dwell in after his death. He would enter the catacomb within her where she kept the other lost loved ones—her mother and Zuni Franklin, her babies who had kicked in other women’s wombs, the nine conspirators who had died before the escape. There was even a small place in that catacomb for her father.
She and Phoenix soon drew up to the death-party, whose silver-sleeved arms were raised in greeting. Sol lay in a stretcher on the sand, eyes closed.
“Is it Teeg?” he whispered.
“Yes, old one, I am here.” The dark hands stirred at his side but could not lift. Teeg grasped each of them in turn and pressed his palms against her own.
“And the other one … is he with you?”
“Yes, Phoenix is here. Everyone is here.”
The old man’s mouth was tugged open by pain. Saliva mixed with blood drooled from one corner. Marie, bending over him, daubed it away. “Good,” he rasped. “Now it is time.”
Coyt hefted the front of the stretcher and Jurgen hoisted the rear, both taking care not to jostle the broken man. Teeg imagined him drowning in his own juices. Only the outer skin still held; the inner walls had given way to cancer, the cells were loosing their saltwater, the architected molecules of life were scattering into elements again.
Flare in hand to light the way, Hinta parted hemlock boughs and stepped onto the overgrown path that led up to the headland. The others followed, Teeg and Phoenix hindmost. Thickets of salal crowded in from both sides. Blackberry vines arched over the trail and caught in the meshes of shimmersuits. Soon the beach was blotted out behind them and nothing was visible ahead except darkening green. Tree roots humped the soil underfoot. Coyt stumbled once, and the lurching of the stretcher tore moans from Sol.
On a grassy ledge halfway up, they paused to rest. Gorse flickered on all sides. Rhodies glowed palely from the shadows, like luminous floral tablecloths spread over bushes to dry.
“You all right?” Teeg asked Phoenix.
He sucked in air and gazed down at the white-fringed curve of beach now far below them. “It’s better up here. I feel lifted above everything.”
Only the upper third of the sun still glowed between the ocean and the flat ceiling of cloud. The red light, catching the tops of waves, seemed to form a pathway of sparks across the sea. Teeg wondered how Phoenix would endure the darkness tonight, when he had no dome, no raft, no shelter of any sort.
When the march resumed, Phoenix took the front handles of the stretcher from Coyt, who seemed grateful. The hump-backed man was powerful, so lifting was no chore; but smoothing out his crippled walk to avoid jostling the litter must have been a strain.
Sensing the motion, Sol opened his eyes, rolled his head to face the sea, and whispered, “Whales … going north. …”
Bringing up the rear of the procession, with her flare lifted high, Teeg could tell from the delicate way Phoenix picked his footholds that he was oblivious to the darkness, he was wholly absorbed in the effort of balancing the shattered man. Sol in his anguish had not been able to recall Phoenix’s name. “Is the other one with you?” he had asked. Yet even without a name for him, the old man had sensed Phoenix’s absence and arrival. Now Teeg thought he must be comforted to have the newest wildergoer, this city man, help carry him up the darkening hill to death.
Up steeply along the mountain’s flank they followed an old road-cut, now barely distinguishable from the encroaching forest. It must once have been paved, for stony lumps underfoot made the walking treacherous. From one switch-back they could see down into Salt Creek meadow, where the domes of Jonah Colony, each lit from inside by a flare,
glowed like jewels. The road soon led them beyond sight of the settlement, steeply up and up, and the gloom was filled with the heavy panting of climbers and ocean. The sun was a rim of scarlet. Watching it vanish, Teeg sensed the unimaginable swiftness of the turning planet.
At length the procession emerged onto the headland, the only shelf on the precipitous mountainside broad enough to support a lighthouse. Tumbled blocks of stone marked where the keeper’s hut had stood. The base of the lighthouse, still faintly visible in the gloom, thrust up from the soil like a broken tooth. Teeg remembered the awe she had felt, as a child of five or six, when her mother had first led her onto this headland. The snaggle-tooth of the lighthouse had seemed huge and menacing enough for any whale. “There’s no harm in this place,” her mother had assured her. “The lighthouse was for guiding ships through fog and darkness.” Ever afterward, Teeg had associated the ruins of Whale’s Head Light with dangerous journeys.
Phoenix and Jurgen lowered the stretcher onto the grass, egg-soft, as if the old man might burst like some flimsy sack. Marie knelt over him and resumed her comforting murmur. Tired from the climb, they all stood for a spell with the forested mountain rising darkly behind them, and looked out over the sea. A thousand meters below, visible only as a faint lace of white against black water, waves smashed against the base of the cliff and boiled in rings of foam around boulders. Flares lit the grass at their feet, but everything beyond this ring of light shaded away to absolute blackness. Instinctively, the conspirators huddled in a circle around the dying man, some facing inward as if to watch over him, some facing outward as if to convoy him through the night.
Terrarium Page 17
