Dancing in Dreamtime

by Scott Russell Sanders

  Finally he surrendered to the day, to work, an afternoon of lightshows, an evening of brain-puzzles at the gamepark, and then a restless night on the waterbed. The barefooted woman stalked through his dreams. An extra dose of narco failed to soothe him. A bout on the eros couch, with the gauge spun all the way over to visionary delight, offered only mechanical relief. Neither drugs nor electronics could blank the screen in his mind where the woman’s image kept burning and burning.

  Desire melted away what little order remained in his life. The apartment grew shabby. Friends stopped scheduling daykillers with him when he failed to show up a second time or a third. His costume suffered, at first from neglect, and then from a striving for idiosyncrasy. Phoenix wanted to be visible to the woman when he met her again. So he hauled out unstylish clothes and flung them on in outrageous combinations. His wigs grew increasingly bizarre. His face paint appeared slapdash, as if applied in the dark by a vindictive cosmetician. Wherever he went in Oregon City the glances of passersby nipped at his heels.

  At work the satellite photos looked more than ever like a collage of lips and ankles and trailing hair. His supervisor made him rewrite a third of the eco-warnings, and advised him to cut back on the narco. But Phoenix was not applying narco or any other balm to his inflamed heart. Nothing half so vivid as this love-ache had ever seized him before, and he was in no hurry to escape the exquisite pain.

  Days off work he spent trying to discover some timetable in the woman’s exercise. But he had no more luck than the ancients had at predicting sunspots. When she did loom into sight, he kept indoors, not yet ready to meet her again. Every night he paced with naked feet around the perimeter of his room. Five steps and then turn, five steps and turn; blisters multiplied on his soles. After two weeks of this, questioning his own sanity, he could walk for half an hour without panting, and his feet began to leather over.

  Training on the pedbelt was more risky, only possible late at night, when anyone else traveling through the corridor would most likely be as eccentric as he. Soon he was able to stay abreast of his room for an hour. Laboring to counter the belt’s motion, he did not feel like a gyroscope—he felt like a lunatic.

  On one of his 3:00 AM training sessions, he was puffing along, oblivious, when her voice broke over him from behind:

  “So you tried it?”

  Glancing back, he met the achingly familiar stare. “Yes. I wondered what it was like.”

  “And what do you think of it?”

  “It’s interesting.” Witlessly he repeated, “Interesting.”

  They paced side-by-side, two lunatics out for a stroll. From the corner of his eye Phoenix enjoyed the woman’s profile, her skin showing more nakedly than ever through the paint, her legs kicking against the loose fall of gown.

  “Good for the heart and lungs,” she said.

  “I suppose so,” he replied, shocked by her language.

  “And legs.”

  He loosed this sexual word without thinking: “Legs.”

  The woman blithely continued, as if she were in stage four of the mating ritual. “My name is Teeg Passio.”

  He could sense the expectant twist in her body as she waited for a response. “My name? Oh. Sure. It’s Phoenix Marshall.”

  “You’re not offended? About exchanging names?”

  “No. I don’t really accept all the . . . well . . . the formalities.”

  “They’re stupid, aren’t they?” She dismissed the mating code and his lifelong decorum with a stroke of her arm. “All this business of when you can look in another person’s eyes, when you can swap names, when your little fingers can touch! Idiocy.”

  Phoenix heard himself agreeing. “Yes, it’s like a web.”

  “Cut loose, is what I say.”

  “Loose?” He stilled his tongue, alarmed by the turmoil she had stirred in him. Sweat trickled down his face, no doubt streaking the paint, dampening the collar of his moodgown.

  “How often do you walk?” she asked.

  “Oh, every day. Sometimes twice a day.”

  “Any special time?”

  His eye was caught by the surge of flame-colored hair along the borders of her hood. His fingers twitched. “Morning,” he said, quickly adding, “or night, just about any time. My schedule’s flexible. And you?”

  Her smile seemed to raise the temperature in the corridor several degrees. “I don’t keep a schedule. But maybe we could set a time, meet for a walk. That is, if you—”

  “I would. Yes, very much,” he said hastily.

  “I know places we can walk without these conveyors.”

  “Anywhere’s fine.”

  “Shasta Gamepark, then, south gate, at 1600 tomorrow.” She lifted a palm in farewell.

  “Wait,” he begged. In a panic he cast around for ways to keep her, fearing that such an improbable creature might not survive until tomorrow. “Do you live in Portland Complex?”

  She jerked a thumb domeward. “Seven floors above you.”

  “And what brings you through here for exercise?”

  “Looking for a walking partner.”

  “Oh.” Again he scrambled for words. “And why do you walk?”

  “I’m in training.”

  “For what?”

  “For going away.”

  Unlikely as it seemed to Phoenix, Teeg did meet him at the gamepark, where they strolled for an hour on the glass pathways, avoiding chemmie guzzlers and merrymakers. “Remember skating on these,” she asked him, patting the scuffed walkway with her foot, “back when kids used their legs?”

  Legs again. She would say anything. “Like so,” he replied, assuming the bent-knee stance he had perfected as a boy on skateboards.

  Teeg laughed. “There’s hope for you yet.”

  On the following day, they ventured down into the bowels of Oregon City, along pipelines marked EXPLOSIVE, through tunnels pungent with brine. His thighs quivered from the incessant thrum of pumps and extractors. “You forget the whole city’s afloat,” she told him, cupping a handful of ocean water to sniff, “until you come down here. We forget a lot of things.”

  Other days, as they wandered among the green vats of the hydroponics district or between the huge whirling energy-storage wheels of the power zone, Phoenix discovered parts of Oregon City he had known about only from hearsay, and, in his anarchic talks with Teeg, he discovered parts of himself he had never known about at all. Signals kept arriving from neglected regions of his body—aches at first, then pleasures.

  She was a squall of questions. What work do you do? Who are your parents? Any children? Ever go outside?

  And so he told her about his training in meteorology, his job studying satellite images (“Because I have a good eye for patterns,” he boasted, “something the computers still can’t match.”), and he told her about his mother’s death in the 2067 fusion implosion at Texas City, about his father’s three-year drug coma; told her his sperm was duly banked away but remained unused; told her he had never stuck so much as his nose outside the Enclosure; told her, in a voice that surprised him with its urgency, how restless he felt, how lonely, how trapped.

  All the while Teeg was nodding yes, yes, that is truly how it is, and between questions she was telling about herself: most of her life spent in the wilds, shifting about the Northwest with her mother, who had been in charge of dismantling Anchorage, Vancouver, and Portland; her own work now back outside the Enclosure, in the wilds, fixing communications terminals; her eggs used for nine—or maybe eleven, she forgot—babies, all of them grown inside other women; mated three times, never happily, never long, twice with men and once with a woman.

  “You’re licensed to go outside?” he asked.

  “Why so surprised?” she answered. “You think all those pipes and tubes and transformers maintain themselves?”

  “But aren’t you a risk, having grown up outside?”

  “Not many people will take the work. Too messy in the wilds, too dangerous. And those who do, except the su
icidal maniacs, know enough about the Enclosure’s defenses to forget sabotage. The most I could do is stay out there after some job and never come back.”

  Phoenix pretended to be absorbed in watching his brazenly naked feet scuffle along beside hers. She had him so rattled, he had given up trying to calculate which mating rules they were breaking. “Do you think about that sometimes—staying outside?”

  “Sometimes,” she confessed, then after a few more steps she said, “Often. All the time, in fact. I’ve only lived in the city maybe five or six of my twenty-seven years. Here’s the place that seems alien to me,” arms sweeping overhead, the loose sleeves fluttering like wings, “and outside is home. Coming back inside is exile.”

  One moment the dome seemed to Phoenix impossibly high, higher than the unroofed sky, and the next moment it seemed a cruel weight pressing down on him.

  “Coming back in,” she added, “is like crawling inside a huge sterilized bottle.”

  A wave of claustrophobia nearly choked him, like the bitter taste of food long since swallowed. He stopped walking, halfway across Marconi Plaza, and the city snapped tight around him. Glide-rails sliced the air into hectic curves; towering offices and apartments shimmered with the trapped energy of a million lives, tower after tower as far as eye could see. The sudden pressure of the city was so intense that he did not notice for several seconds the lighter pressure of Teeg’s hand on his arm.

  “You never felt that before?” she asked gently.

  “I guess I did,” he answered, “I just never admitted it before. The frenzy—it’s always there, like death, waiting. But I shove it out of mind.”

  “Keep things tidy.”

  “Exactly. Tidy, tidy. And then at night I lie in bed and a crack opens in my heart, and blackness creeps out, engulfing me.” He stopped abruptly, ashamed of his passion.

  “Yes?” she urged.

  But he was too shaken to say anything more.

  They parted without planning their next walk. Phoenix rode the belts home, aware for the first time in weeks of the alarmed glances provoked by his haphazard costume and bare feet. People must think he was crazed, afloat on chemmies, reverting to hairy beasthood. Somebody would report him to the health patrollers, for rehabilitation. But he could rehabilitate himself, could fight down the chaos that Teeg had loosed in him.

  Safely back in his room, he put everything in its place, ran the sanitizer, gulped a pair of balancers. He scrubbed himself, dressed in his most fashionable moodgown and wig, then applied a fresh mask, painting carefully, copying the face of a crooner whose poster hung beside the dressing mirror.

  All that day and the next he rode through the city, catching a lightshow, visiting eros parlors, simming a basketball game, clinging to his old entertainments. He played 4-D chess with one friend, designed murals with another, resumed lackadaisical mating rituals with two women who had nearly forgotten him. And yet he still felt the print of Teeg’s hand on his arm, still heard her voice, so confident in its anarchism, still saw around him, not a city, but a smothering bottle.

  After three days of this charade, he gave up and called Teeg. She gazed boldly from the screen, her face unpainted, her mouth a grim slash. “I’ve been sick,” he lied to her.

  “Sick.” She echoed the word as if it were a place he had gone to visit.

  “How about a walk today?” he asked.

  “No walks. I’ll come to your place tomorrow. Bring a map disk from work, okay? Thousand-to-one scale will be fine.”

  “What for?”

  “I’ll tell you tomorrow. Make sure it’s got the Oregon coast between latitude 43 and 46,” she went on in a voice as tough as the soles of her feet. “You’ll do that, won’t you?”

  “Sure, but—”

  Her face hovered on the screen like a forbidden planet, then vanished, leaving him to wonder what drove her to ignore the mating rituals, what urgency in her burned through all rules.

  The relief map shone upon the wall screen as a snarl of dunes, cliffs, inlets, and river beds, each landform a distinct hue. The disorder of it made Phoenix feel slightly nauseous.

  “You don’t carry your own maps on repair trips?” he asked.

  Teeg was crouching near the screen, tracing the shape of a bay that hooked into the coast like a bent finger of blue. “No. My shuttle’s programmed to go wherever the job is. I climb out and work on transformers, maybe, or solar dishes, or travel tubes. I look around, but usually have no idea where I am.”

  “Usually?”

  “I recognize a few landmarks from knocking around with my mother, especially on the coast near Portland, the last place she dismantled.” Teeg crooked her finger to mimic the blue hook of water on the map. “This bay, for instance. Mother called it Wolf’s Leg. We used to go wading there.”

  “In the ocean?”

  Her eyes turned smoky, with the sudden anger he had glimpsed that first day after gawking at her bare feet. “Yes, the ocean. The stuff we’re floating on, the stuff we’re mining and tapping for energy and growing food in and pumping through the city every day in billions of liters. What’s wrong with wading in it?”

  Phoenix forced himself to look at the muddle on the screen. The only straight lines were the tube routes, angling north to Alaska and south to California or trailing away eastward, where further maps would show them reaching the land cities of Wyoming and Iowa, the float cities on Lake Michigan and Ontario, then further east to the pioneer float cities along the New England coast. Every line not showing a feature of the Enclosure was crooked, jagged, bent. Queasiness finally made him look away from the screen. “You’re moving out there someday? To stay?”

  “I might.”

  “It’s madness. Sure death.”

  “If you don’t know what you’re doing.”

  “And you know, do you? A few childhood memories, and you think you know how to survive in the wilds?”

  “I can survive.”

  “Alone?”

  Her fists unclenched, her body relaxed. “If need be.”

  For the next few days her answering tape informed him she was meditating, or at the clinic, or on a mission, somewhere tantalizingly beyond reach. When he finally did track her down, overtaking her at the base of the fire stairs as she began her daily climb, she told him she was about to leave for a seminar in Alaska City. Something to do with thermionics.

  Casting aside restraint, he pleaded, “Can I go with you?”

  “Phoenix—”

  “I can arrange leave. We can talk after your classes. Walk around. See the sights. The disney’s got mechanical beasts—”

  “Phoenix, no. This trip I’ll be very busy. Understand?”

  Breathless from the stairs, he halted at the next landing and let Teeg climb on ahead. The determined swing of her hips and the angry strength of her climbing, so alien to everything he had been raised to believe about the body, convinced him that she really would slip away from Oregon City one day, enter that chaos of the map, and never look back. That would mean annihilation—first of the mind, cut off from civilization, then of the body, poisoned or broken or devoured by the wilds. Dizziness sat him down upon the landing. The metal felt cold through his gown. With eyes closed he listened to Teeg’s bare feet slapping on the stairs above him, fainter and fainter as she climbed.

  Yes, the work coordinator assured him, Teeg Passio was on a two-week leave. Yes, the Institute informed him, a Teeg Passio was signed up for the thermionics seminar. But when Phoenix reached Alaska City, driven there by his desire to see her, he found that she had not registered with travel control, nor with the health board, nor with the Institute. His return to Oregon City was delayed by a leak in the sea tube—one of his colleagues may have failed to warn about a tsunami—and by the time his shuttle was on its way he felt crazed. The curved walls, the molded seats, the loudspeaker babble: everything squeezed in upon him. Bottle, he kept thinking, glass bottle.

  Back in Oregon City he could discover nothing more of her whereabout
s. He was tempted to call the health patrollers and report her missing, but that would only get them both in trouble.

  Nothing to do but wait, and turn over the possibilities one-by-one like cards in a game of solitaire: She had lied to him about going to Alaska? She had been mangled in some piece of machinery? She had gone outside to stay? Perhaps all she wanted from him were the maps. Discovering he was a meteorologist, she might have lured him into walking just to get hold of them. But no, that was foolish. How many people would have opened their doors to find her pacing, barefooted, and felt only revulsion? She couldn’t have predicted this craving the sight of her would trigger in him.

  In those two weeks of fretting he discovered how little presence of mind his ordinary life required. He traveled through the city, performed the requisite bows and signals in conversation, processed skeins of images, fed himself, even played mediocre chess, all without diverting his thoughts from Teeg. He was convinced she had gone outside, into the chaotic world of the map. At odd moments—while a lightshow played or the eros couch worked its electronic charms—he would visualize the map in all its unruly colors, and imagine her as a tiny laboring speck lost in it, wandering through mountains, wading in the blue hooked finger of water.

  If she came back—when she came back—he would find some way to keep her from ever again putting him through this agony. Make her take him along next time. But not outside. Somewhere human, safe, the inland cities, the spas. Anywhere but the wilds. He would beg her to change jobs, never leave the Enclosure. And if she insisted on going, he would inform on her as a health risk, get her wilder-license revoked.

  Then she would be trapped in this bottle as surely as he was. Trapped, but alive, shielded from that disorder out there, from disease, from weather, hunger, beasts, pain. This yearning for the wilds was simple nostalgia, he told himself, a mix of childhood memories and old books. Yet part of him was not persuaded, the part that trembled when he was in her presence.