Dancing in Dreamtime

by Scott Russell Sanders

  His fingers shook as he punched the health hotline number. He explained his concern to the rubbery, passably human face of the mechano on the screen, but without giving Teeg’s name.

  “Only licensed wildergoers are permitted to leave the Enclosure,” the mech told him, its jaw slightly out of synch with its voice. “Such personnel must be sanitized before re-entry. Any persons breaking this code, either by leaving without authorization or by returning without decontamination, constitute an infection threat, and will be treated as beasts.”

  “What does that mean?” Phoenix asked.

  “One who deliberately endangers the human system becomes a part of Earth—a beast,” the mech explained. Within seconds a form headed INFECTION ALERT slithered from the printer.

  Fingering the sheet, Phoenix said, “And if a wildergoer breaks the rules?”

  “First offense, revocation of license. Second offense, quarantine. Third, exile. Fourth, execution.” The mech paused for what seemed to Phoenix a carefully measured interval, before asking, “Do you wish to report name and circumstances?”

  “No. I’m just curious. I have no evidence.”

  “Very well.” Again the measured pause, the scrutiny by a counterfeit face. “Infection from the outside is the gravest threat to the human system. You do not wish to report?”

  “Not at the present time.”

  Only when the mech vanished did Phoenix realize that he had been addressing it in polite mode, with face turned aside, eyes lowered, body rigid, as if this digital phantom were the most appealing of human strangers. Two weeks without Teeg, and already the web of inhibitions was tightening around him again.

  The messages he left on her answering machine pleaded with her to call, yet when Teeg did finally appear it was not on the phone but at his door, hood thrown back to reveal an unkempt blaze of hair, face bare of paint yet reddened in a way he had never seen before. It was like having a bomb delivered.

  “You’re just back from the seminar?” he asked her carefully.

  “I never went to Alaska City,” she admitted.

  Watching her pad familiarly about his room, Phoenix looked for some taint of wilderness. Her ankles and wrists, jutting from the hem and cuffs of her gown, were the same uncanny shade of red as her face. Did the sun do that? Her smell ran like a fire in his throat. He sensed a lightness in her movements, a thinning of gravity, as she pranced and fidgeted.

  “So where did you go?” he said.

  She yielded him a faint smile. “Away.”

  “Outside? For two weeks?”

  “Wolf’s Leg Bay, to be precise. Look.” From the pouch in her gown she tugged the map, now tattered from repeated folding. Cross-legged on the floor, she spread it across her lap and eagerly pointed where he expected her to point, at the blue finger of ocean that hooked into the Oregon coast about 44 degrees. “It was the place Mother and I used to go, all right. The water’s colder than I remembered, and the beach is narrower, but it’s still lovely.”

  “You were there all by yourself? With beasts and poisons?”

  “The only beasts were a few bedraggled sea lions and gulls.”

  Illustrations recollected from childhood began streaming through his mind. “You saw actual sea lions?”

  “Not only saw them—heard and smelled them. And the rock flowers! The spray! You’ve got to come see.”

  And so she went on and on, in a delirium of talk, tracing her explorations on the map, pulling at his hands as if to lead him there that very moment, looking up occasionally to read his face. The desire he felt for her, and the dread, swelled to encompass the sea lions, the gulls, the ferns and flowering bushes she described in her rapt voice.

  “Fossils!” she cried, as if the word alone should convince him to share the delirium with her. “Leaves and shells and even—once—a three-toed footprint between the layers of slate. And in the shallows of a drowsy river I found some tall reeds. Cattails, Mother used to call them. Isn’t that a name? And birds! Why doesn’t video ever show any landscape with birds and trees? Oh, just come look!” And she grasped both his hands and tried to dance him round the room. But his legs would not bend, his whole body was rigid. He wrenched his hands free.

  “Teeg, promise me you’ll never go outside again.”

  She laughed once, harshly. “How can you say that? Haven’t you been listening to me?”

  “You can’t recreate the old world. You can’t crawl back into your mother’s lap. All that’s finished.”

  “I don’t need to create anything. It’s all there, waiting. All I have to do is walk into it.”

  “To a brute’s death.”

  Stretching her arms wide, she spun in a circle, gown and hair aswirl. “Do you see any wounds?” He shrugged, avoiding her stare. But she tugged him around until he was facing her again, looking into her inflamed eyes. “Hasn’t your body taught you anything after all these months of walking? We were made to live out there, shaped to it,” she said, her voice softening. “Humans have lived in the Enclosure thirty years. And before that our ancestors lived outside for hundreds of thousands of years.”

  “In misery, sickness, and fear.”

  “Not always, not everywhere. Some people lived well, in peace and plenty.”

  “In Eden, I suppose.”

  “Listen, Phoenix, I know what I’m doing. I’ve been stashing supplies and equipment outside one of the stations ever since I went to work on the repair crew.”

  “You can’t go back.”

  “Who said anything about going back? I’m going forward.”

  “No!” He clapped hands over his ears, frightened by what she was offering.

  “Phoenix, please listen—”

  “No no no!”

  When at last he looked up, she was gone, the door standing open. On the threshold lay a hand-size wedge of grey stone. Stooping warily over it, he could see the faint imprint of a leaf in the surface. With a stiff tablemat he scooped up the stone, held it near his face. There was a damp, dusty smell. The veins of the leaf formed a riotous maze of lines that reminded him of the map’s labyrinth of rivers. Had it been decontaminated? Where had she found it, in what mire out there? For a long time he hesitated, fingers poised above the stone. Then at last, gingerly, he touched the mazy ridges. The delicate lines of the fossil proved hard, harder than his cautious fingers.

  The stone felt cold in his palm, slick with perspiration, as he shifted from foot to callused foot before her door. This was her doing, the calluses, the twitching in his legs, the yearning for escape. Passengers streamed by on the belts, whipping him with glances as he debated what to do. But he ignored them, and that also was her doing. Should he report her, get her license revoked, then try to talk her into sanity again? Could he betray her? Or should he let her make those journeys outside, each one longer, until, one day, she failed to return? Could he actually go out there with her? His heart raced faster than it ever had from their walking or stair-climbing.

  At last he rang, and the door clicked open. For the first time he entered her lair, smelling her, but unable to see anything in the dim light. He groped his way forward. “Teeg?”

  “In here,” she called.

  Her voice came from a second room, visible only as a slip of blue light where the door stood ajar. With halting steps, hands raised to fend off obstacles, Phoenix picked his way through the darkness toward the stroke of light. As he approached, the door eased open, forcing him to shield his eyes. In the brightness he could make out Teeg’s silhouette—not naked, surely, but with arms and legs distinctly outlined.

  “I found this,” he said, lifting the fossil in open palm.

  “That was for you to keep,” she said. “A gift for parting.”

  “I didn’t come to return it. I want you to tell me what it means . . . what you want . . .” He halted in confusion. The hard edge on her voice, the blue glare, the inner turmoil made his eyes water. “You’ve got to be patient with me.”

  “So you’ll have time
to file that infection alert?”

  “I didn’t mean for you to see that.”

  “No, I’ll bet you didn’t.”

  “I won’t file it. I can’t.”

  She studied him. “Why did you get it, then?”

  “I wanted to keep you safe, keep you inside.”

  “Well, I won’t be kept inside, not by you or the healthers or anybody else.”

  His eyes still watered, but he could follow her swift movement as she paced about the room gathering vials and cassettes and food capsules into a suitcase. It was a shimmersuit she wore, silvered to reflect sunlight, skin-tight to allow for work on the outside. Even in stage five of the mating ritual he had never seen a woman so exposed.

  “You’re not going back outside?” he demanded.

  “I’m not waiting here to be arrested.”

  “You’re going right now?”

  “I hadn’t planned on it. Not yet, not alone. I wanted a few others, to build a little colony.” A shove from her boot sent the case skidding. “But I’m tired of explaining. You’re the fifth one I’ve tried, the fifth walker, and you’re all the same. Maybe you want your body back, I tell myself, maybe you want out of the bottle. But no.”

  “You never asked me to go with you.”

  “I didn’t want to spell it out. I wanted you to hunger for the wilds the way I do.” Her anger drove her prowling back and forth in front of him. Beyond her, under hanging blue lamps, he could see a glass tank filled with a writhing mat of green. Could they be plants? In the city?

  Her glimmering figure drew his eyes. “But how can I want what I’ve never had?” he protested. “This is all I know.” His gesture was meant to include the domed city, the travel tubes, and the other nodes of the Enclosure he had visited, always inside, always insulated from the beast world.

  She stopped her prowling in front of him. In the clinging suit her body trembled like quicksilver. Her stare no longer made him wince. Her eyes were the same grey-green as the slate he still held stupidly in his hand. “All you know,” she murmured, grasping him by a wrist, “then come look at this.”

  She led him to the tank, drew him down to kneel with her and peer through the glass wall. Inside was an explosion of leaves, tendrils, stems, dangling seed pods, bright blossoms like concentrations of fire, all of it in colors so vibrant they made Phoenix quiver. His eyes hunted for a leaf that would match the fossil she had given him, while his thumb searched out the imprint in the stone. But there was too much activity in this amazing green stillness for him to see anything clearly.

  “It’s a terrarium,” Teeg said. “A piece of Earth.”

  He ran his fingers along the glass, expecting to feel heat radiating from these intense creatures. But the tank was cool, sealed on all sides. “They’re alive?”

  She laughed at what she saw in his face. “Of course they’re alive. That’s dirt, the brown stuff.”

  “But how—closed in like that?”

  “Wise little beasts, aren’t they?” And she used the word “beasts” tenderly, as he had never heard it used before. “There’s your chaos,” she said, “that’s what you’re saving me from.”

  Phoenix started to protest that this was only a scrap of Earth, without animals, without tornadoes or poison ivy or viruses, without winters. But his tongue felt heavy with astonishment. He could not shift his gaze from this miniature wilderness, at once so disorderly and harmonious.

  “Well,” she said, her fingers tightening on his wrist, “will you go?”

  “I might,” he answered. And then, uncertainly, “I will.”

  Quarantine

  The only troublesome items Zuni had not allowed the surgeons to replace were her eyes. Both lungs, one kidney, various joints, even the valves of her heart, those she had been content to let go, for they did not seem to be intrinsic parts of her. Let the doctors fiddle with her ears or pancreas, she would not care. But if she ever gave up her eyes, the ones she had used to design the Enclosure, to memorize the contours of Terra, to trace the shifting tones of daylight, then she would no longer be Zuni Franklin. Would surgeons consent to be fitted with new hands? They should have realized that an architect lives in her eyes.

  So when drugs no longer cleansed the blight from her retina, she had to put up with dimming vision. And when she announced her plans to retire from the Institute for Global Design at age seventy-six, nine years early, everyone assumed her balky eyesight was to blame.

  “Are you afraid blindness would spoil your work at the Institute?” an interviewer asked her on Meet the Magicians, a show that treated the ability to understand mathematics as akin to wizardry.

  “It is true that I no longer see things as I once did,” Zuni answered.

  “You mean you can’t see well enough to work on blueprints?”

  “I mean that vision changes with age.”

  The interviewer gave up trying to straighten out her replies. He knew that better minds than his had been stymied by Zuni Franklin’s ambiguities. They were seated in her office, surrounded on three sides by display screens and consoles. The room was as stark and impersonal as an operating theater. Zuni had deliberately kept any trace of herself from showing, for fear of giving away her masquerade. The fourth wall, of glass, overlooked the towers, plazas, and pedbelts of Oregon City, a dazzling metropolis she had largely imagined. The sky show for the afternoon was an electrical storm, so projectors flashed sullen clouds upon the inside of the dome and loudspeakers muttered with thunder.

  “So what are your plans for retirement?” the interviewer asked.

  “My plans would be puzzling to you, I’m afraid,” Zuni said.

  “But surely you won’t abandon your lifework?” The interviewer gestured overhead at the suspended model of the Enclosure, a spherical web of tubes and nodes. Each tube represented a transport artery, each node a land- or float-city, and the emptiness inside the sphere stood for Earth.

  Zuni pressed fingertips to fingertips and gazed at the earnest young man. They were all so earnest, these children of the Enclosure. “My mission is accomplished,” she declared.

  “And now you’ll write a book about your career?” When Zuni waved the idea aside, the interviewer tried again: “Perhaps you’ll travel?”

  “I have a journey to make,” Zuni conceded.

  “To the lunar colonies? The asteroids?”

  “Not so far.”

  “Ah, then you’ll be traveling on Terra, exploring the Enclosure?”

  “On Terra, yes. Where else but Earth?” Her white hair was braided and neatly coiled into a bun; her replies were neatly bound in a smile. Like the antiseptic room where she spoke, everything about her was scrubbed clean of self.

  “Will you be lecturing? Teaching young architects?”

  “No, I will be learning again, from the wisest instructor.”

  “From Rosenbarger? Chu? Sventov?” The interviewer named the only Terran architects whose fame rivaled Zuni’s.

  “None of those.” She guessed the man’s age. Under thirty, certainly. He would have been born in the 2050s, after the Enclosure. “You wouldn’t know this teacher at all.”

  For a week or two the media poured out rumors concerning her future. Zuni Franklin, dismayed by blindness, would have herself vaporized and blown into the air of her beloved Oregon City. On the contrary, she would have her face rebuilt and begin life over as an eros parlor hostess. No, no, she would disguise herself and lurk through every dome and pipeline of the Enclosure, like a queen incognito, inspecting the empire she had helped construct.

  Perhaps, some commentators reflected, she was merely impatient to get on with the business of evolution, to push Homo sapiens further from its animal origins, toward the realm of pure energy. She might stow aboard a lightship. She might experiment with chemmies, with trances, with psi-travel. Or she might even be the first person to have her brain transplanted into a cyber-field, and thus liberate mind entirely from the entanglements of flesh.

  Zuni was conten
t to let them guess away, so long as they did not guess the truth. There was little chance of that, since the truth ran counter to everything the public knew about her life. For wasn’t her name synonymous with the Enclosure? Hadn’t she fought harder than anyone else to move humanity inside the global network of cities, to shelter our species from the dangers of the wilds? During the middle decades of the century, when climate chaos and accumulated toxins were threatening humankind with extinction, she tirelessly preached the idea of a global shelter. She constructed models of the Enclosure, drew up detailed blueprints, described the safety of life inside that perfected world. If Terra is inhospitable, she argued, let us build our own habitat, as we have done on the moon and Venus and the asteroids. We can mine the ocean for materials. We can suck energy from sun and wind and tide. We can purify everything that enters our system, admitting only what is useful to us. The Enclosure can be the next home for our race, a waystation on our road to transcendence, and everything in it will bear our mindprint.

  Knowing such things about Zuni, how could they ever guess her true plans?

  Amid the speculations, Zuni quietly went about severing the ties that bound her to the Enclosure. She delivered the last of her scheduled lectures on the psychology of disembodied mind, and declined all further speaking engagements. She resigned from boards of directors, taskforces, committees. For a week she sorted through her files, assigning to the archives whatever she thought might be of use to future planners, erasing the rest. There were hundreds of blueprints, ranging in scale from greenhouses, designed as refuges for nature, to the global skein of cities, designed as refuges for humans. Had she lived in less troubling times, she would have preferred imagining cabins, gardens, backpacking tents, stone walls.

  The only blueprint she chose to take away with her was for a twelve-person geodesic dome, and the only mementos she kept were drafting pens and rulers.

  She assigned her apprentices to other master architects. One of those apprentices, a woman named Marga, wept on hearing the news.