Terrarium

by Scott Russell Sanders

  “Any sign?” Marie asked from the cabin.

  No, Teeg was going to answer, when she glimpsed Hinta jogging down the ramp from the sanitation port. Behind her loped a clown-painted figure in billowing gown. Tassels and sleeves fluttered about him as he ran, and the green tresses of his wig trailed behind like seaweed. Even through this bizarre get-up, Teeg recognized him by the way he bit down on his tongue and by the shape of his ears.

  “Yes,” she answered Marie gaily, “here he comes in all his finery.”

  Hinta soon ducked through the hatch, straw-colored hair lolling across her cheeks. A moment later Phoenix lurched through behind her, fringes flying, skirts clutched in each hand. Cheers greeted him.

  “Made it,” he panted. “Long way—crowds—stupid belts.”

  Hands disentangled him from his outlandish costume. The facepaint (green forehead and chin, purple cheeks, orange nose, vermilion lips) would have to wait for soap or saltwater. Lightfooted in his shimmersuit, he danced a little jig, and then collapsed into a seat.

  “Buckle in,” Teeg called, “and put blinders on that giddy clown.”

  With chest still heaving from his run, Phoenix submitted to the black eye-patches.

  As soon as the hatch sealed tight with a kiss of gaskets, Teeg thumbed the lift button. The hangar doors swung open and the hovercraft coasted into the sky. There was a smash of sunlight, a shudder as wind caught the craft, and they were out over the sea.

  “Goodbye, city!” Marie cried, and she sang a few words for departure.

  Silence followed her song as the crew turned inward to celebrate their deliverance. Teeg had to keep her eyes open to watch the instruments and the waves, yet she could feel the strength of the ingathering. It was a little bit like the heavy g-force you felt when accelerating in a rocket, only pleasanter, a gravity of the spirit.

  After a while easy talk fluttered through the cabin. Oregon City dwindled behind them, humped and glittering, like a cold glassy sun perishing in the water, and the satellite domes surrounding it were so much froth.

  Once the hovercraft escaped the city’s turbulence, Teeg set the autopilot and went back to sit with Phoenix. His knuckles were pressed white on the armrest. “You all right?” she asked.

  “The light,” he answered through clenched teeth. Tears seeped below his eye patches.

  “But you can’t see a thing,” she objected.

  “I feel it on my face, my hands.”

  She peeled one of his hands from the armrest, laid it in her lap. The hand was a many-boned wonder, with slivers of paint in the crosshatched grain of the skin. She began tracing figure-eights around his knuckles. “You’ll get used to it.”

  “Sure, I know, I know.” His head tilted back against the seat cushion, Adam’s apple prominent, showing the border along his jaw where the purple mask gave way to the tawny color of his own skin. He seemed to doze while she traced the symbol of infinity around his knuckles. When the hovercraft suddenly bucked in a crosswind he jerked his hand free and seized the armrest. “What’s that?”

  “Wind.”

  “It felt so sudden. Like a fist.” He drew his legs up as if to make ready for a jump. “It always looked so deliberate and slow on the monitors.”

  “This is only the trailing edge of the storm.”

  His body coiled even more tightly. “You mean it gets worse?”

  “Look, why don’t you let me take those blinders off, put the smoked glasses on?”

  “It gets worse?”

  “The raft will be much rougher. So you’ve got to get used to it. Now let me take those blinders off.”

  “No, no, not yet.” He flattened a hand over each eye.

  “You’d rather fly blind?”

  After a moment’s hesitation the hands lowered. “Go ahead.”

  She quickly replaced his blindfold with sun-goggles, glimpsing the puckered skin around the shut eyes, like two purses laced tight. “Now open them slowly.”

  Through the somber lenses his eyes appeared as black slits, winced shut, then slitted open again. He slowly craned about, squinting through the hovercraft windows. “So that’s sunlight?”

  “It’s what your goggles don’t filter out.”

  “It’s bluer than I thought.”

  “That’s from the rain clouds.” Near Oregon City the clouds had been silver fishscales, each flake catching the light. Out here in the storm, clouds sloped away in great slabs toward the horizon, ranging from violet to deep purple to black. It was like an incline in the mind, tilting away toward sorrow.

  Phoenix pressed his face to the window, nose and lips smushed against the glass, drinking in the spectacle. “All these colors. Are they always there? And the ocean! Video never showed it so … huge.”

  “You can’t squeeze all that onto a wall screen.”

  “The satellite images make it look far away, like another planet. Tame somehow.”

  “Tame it’s not,” she said. Though the typhoon had already left these waters, the hovercraft still bucked and sawed in the wind. Occasionally a high wave slapping the belly sent a shudder through the frame. Just a little reminder—a cat toying with a bird. “You sit tight,” she told him. “We’ve got to get ready for work.”

  Tool packs slumped around the hatch at the rear of the craft. Some of the conspirators were wriggling into wetsuits. Marie was helping Sol, who seemed too weak to dress himself. The ones already dressed were checking the waterproof bundles, the uninflated raft, the tanks of compressed air. So many membranes had to hold—skin of boat and skin of body—or they would not survive this savage dunking long enough to reach Whale’s Mouth.

  “Everything set?” Teeg asked Jurgen.

  He had both legs in a wetsuit and was shoving his arms through the sleeves. “Set as we’re going to be. You just keep this bubble aloft and keep it handy. Doesn’t look very friendly out there.”

  In the wetsuit he seemed like a bulky merman, green-skinned, heavily muscled. When you wanted to lean on someone who would not give under your weight, someone sturdy and rooted, you leaned on Jurgen.

  “I’ll be up here,” Teeg promised him. “Signal when you want the raft.”

  On her way back to the cockpit she stopped beside Phoenix. He had changed the first window, smudged with his facepaint, for another one. “The streak down there—looks like an icicle—that’s the seatube,” she said. “You see where two orange balloons are whipping and bobbing? Those mark the break.”

  “We’re that close?” Behind the goggles his eyes widened.

  “Just a couple of minutes. Get your wetsuit on.”

  In the cockpit she returned the controls to manual, easing the hovercraft alongside the floating tube, heading for the tethered balloons. Waves still licked over the pontoons onto the seatube. A vicious one—or a few hundred vicious ones—had cracked the polyglass outer wall, releasing the balloons and triggering alarms in Transport Control. Emergency, emergency, the human skin is broken, the beast world is invading.

  “Going down,” Jurgen shouted.

  Teeg heard the sucking noise as the hatch opened, the slither of the exit chute unfurling. Half a minute later there were eight heads bobbing in the rough water beneath the seatube, then eight bodies clambering onto the pontoons. Several arms waved assurance to her, legs staggering to keep their balance. “Hang some zeroes,” Sol’s words came crackling through the speakers, “and be ready to come get us.” His voice was labored.

  “You okay, Sol?” Wordless static in her earphones. “Sol?”

  He grunted yes. His plum-dark face, fringed white with beard, hung like a troublesome weight in Teeg’s mind as she tilted the hovercraft into a lazy circular glide. She knew the screens tracking her from Oregon City would show her path in glowing loops.

  “Time for me to play fish,” she told Phoenix.

  He was taking great sticky steps about the cabin, trying out his wetsuit. “This thing will really keep me dry in that chaos down there?”

  “Wet isn’t wh
at will hurt you. It’s the cold. And these outfits keep you warm.” Sliding on, the wetsuit always felt clammy and stubborn, like the skin of some slow-witted beast. A shark, maybe. Soon all of her, except the oval window at her face, was sheathed in this rubbery hide.

  While she and Phoenix lugged raft, survival bundles, and air tanks to the hatch, she calculated how much longer the repair would take: flotation collars to stabilize the broken segment, torches cutting away the weakened polyglass, patches shaped to the curve of the tube and fastened with epoxy, then torches fusing the edges. Healed scar. The skin of the human network intact once more.

  “Another dozen circles,” she told Phoenix, “and they should be ready. Into the float vest with you.”

  It took fifteen circles before Sol’s voice crackled through, panting between each word: “All—done—notify—Control—and—bring—us—up.”

  No one would ever be hoisted into this hovercraft again, but messages beamed over the radio and monitored back in Transport Control had to pretend the mission was an ordinary one. (Would they detect the pain in Sol’s voice, the wheeze of cancerous lungs?) Teeg sent word to Oregon City that the break was sealed, the crew was recovered, the craft was headed home. And that lie would probably be her last exchange with the Enclosure.

  As the hovercraft glided past the seatube, eight slick bodies again balancing on pontoons, she opened the hatch and the raft tumbled out. She kept the hovercraft steady while the torpedo-shaped raft smacked the waters. Aerators quickly pumped the yellow skin tight, swelling the small package to nine meters of cushiony boat, roofed and windowed like a toy hovercraft, flimsy, wallowing on the waves. Most of the seekers had to lurch two or three times before wriggling onto the yellow bobbing ark.

  “Now you,” she told Phoenix, shoving him down the escape chute. He resisted her with a slight back-leaning weight of his body, and then he was gone, reappearing a moment later amidst a flurry of spray and flailing arms beside the raft. The others soon tugged him aboard.

  That left Teeg alone in this doomed machine. She set the pilot for a skimming flight-path back toward Oregon City, a path that would take the hovercraft thirty-five or forty kilometers before it nipped the waves. It would skip a few times like a flat rock, then smash into the unyielding water. Screens tracking the flight would glow with urgent sparks where the ship went down. Rescue teams would find the wreck, its raft and survival gear jettisoned. Satellites could spy nothing through the storm, so shuttle planes would scout the area of the crash. Verdict after seventy-two hours: all hands drowned.

  Long before that, if all went well, the raft and its ten passengers would be safely snugged away in Whale’s Mouth.

  Teeg cinched the flotation vest tight around her chest. Another artificial skin, to keep the saltwater in her cells from mixing with the saltwater of the ocean. She glanced around the cabin, alert for any sign of their conspiracy. The place looked innocent, except for a splotch of Phoenix’s facepaint on the window. With licked palm she smeared it away. His gown and wig had already been vaporized—and good riddance, she thought. Shed all the old skins.

  She gave one last hasty look, like a traveler careful not to leave anything behind in a hotel room. The hovercraft was already nosing away on its ill-fated trajectory. The raft swayed farther and farther astern. Finally she yanked the facemask into place, skidded over the lip of the escape hatch. For a fraction of a second the chute brushed against her sides, feathery, then she fell through open air, the ocean spread its corrugations beneath her like a vast and rumpled bedspread, and then water crashed around her.

  Before she could gain her bearings a wave dragged her sputtering through its guts. The vest bobbed her to the surface, but she could not spy the raft. Away off to one side the seatube floated, endless frosty stripe, too far to swim in such rough water. Nothing else visible in any direction except furious green. Another wave gobbled her, spat her out. If she couldn’t see that wallowing yellow ark, they’d never see her. Easy, she thought. Don’t panic.

  Another wave jammed brine down her throat. Shutting her eyes, she listened inward for the stillness. Dwell in the light, the light, the light. With tons of water thrashing all round her, heaving her about like a chip of wood, she grew calm. Once she quit fighting the waves there was pleasure in the muscular heft and sway. She rode with mind gone blank, a toy on the ocean, until a crest lifted her high enough to make out the yellow blob.

  Fifteen minutes of swimming landed her, belly up and exhausted, on the floor of the raft.

  “We’d about given you up for lost,” Hinta told her. The long healing fingers smoothed water from Teeg’s forehead.

  When she tried to answer, all that emerged was a salty sputter. The faces bent over her were tinged yellow by light suffusing through the roof and walls of the raft. One of them was a clown’s cockeyed mug, with makeup smeared by the sea into a pie of colors.

  “Hello, fish,” said Phoenix.

  “Hello there, clown-face.”

  The way she reached up to stroke a finger across his cheek must have convinced the others that she was in no danger of dying from her swim, for they sang her a brief welcoming song, a song of resurrection, and then they scattered to their stations in the raft, to map-screen and compass and wheel. Phoenix stayed beside her, on hands and knees for balance, and still the bucking of the raft made him scuttle to keep from rolling over.

  “The green in my face isn’t all from paint,” he said.

  “Pretty rough here,” she agreed. Through the portholes she saw canyons and mountains of waves. “Everybody all right?”

  “Arda wrenched a knee. Sol’s hacking up blood.”

  Teeg propped herself onto elbows, searching for the plum-dark face.

  “Don’t worry,” Phoenix soothed. “Hinta’s with him. You rest.”

  She slumped down again. The raft bucked wildly. “Are we making any headway?”

  “Jurgen swears we are. But it looks to me like the same old water over and over.”

  She listened to the seethe of bubbles at the stern, where the air jets were shoving against the ocean. It seemed uncanny, to be driven by these little bags of nothingness, these bubbles, all the way to land.

  A heavy surge threw her on the floor and made Phoenix scramble crabwise. Before she could laugh, an even more violent wave tossed them both into a heap and piled four others on top of them. There was a sharp pain in her side where an elbow landed, and as the others unpiled she only had to rub the spot once to know it was more than a braise. She remembered this knife-point of pain from earlier accidents.

  “Fasten down!” Jurgen roared from the wheel.

  Everyone climbed into a seat and buckled harnesses across chest and lap. Teeg had to loosen the straps to keep from squeezing her rib. Phoenix plumped down beside her.

  “We caught up with the storm,” he observed. For the first time she noticed he no longer wore goggles. His eyes seemed swollen from a steady diet of surprise. “It must have run into a cold air mass over the coast. That means we’ll be hitting rain soon.”

  Here was the weatherman suffering his first weather. Teeg didn’t blame him for being scared.

  “These tubs are indestructible,” she said, just as the first patter of rain sounded overhead. Soon the roof was thundering and the ocean, smoky with rain, looked as if it were afire. Phoenix called something to her, but she could not hear it above the drumming of the rain. She lifted her eyebrows.

  “I said you look pale!” he shouted.

  She made a megaphone of her hands and spoke into his ear. “I think I cracked something in that pile-up.” His hair, brushing her nose, smelled of sweat. She nuzzled into it and kissed his ear, that whorl of cartilage and skin she would know from any other’s.

  Something—the news or the kiss—brought his face around to her and opened wide his eyes. His brown irises madly compensated for the sudden increase in light. “Cracked what?”

  “A rib, I think. We’ll patch it up when we get to shore.”

  �
��I’ll tell Hinta!” he yelled.

  Before she could stop him he was scrambling on all fours down the row of seats, legs and arms unsteady from the pitching of the raft. He spoke something close to Hinta’s ear, then scrambled back, Hinta following with the first-aid satchel.

  Like the others, Hinta had skinned back the hood of her wetsuit. Her long hair, knotted behind, was the lemony color of the raft. “Where is it?” she asked.

  Teeg pointed to the rib three rungs from the bottom on her left side. Hinta’s touch felt dull and distant through twin thicknesses of shimmersuit and wetsuit, until she reached the point where the knife pain was, and then Teeg winced. Lips pursed, Hinta focused an ortho-scanner over the rib. Teeg imagined what she would see—the creamy curving bone, the inky slash of the break. Phoenix wavered behind Hinta’s shoulder, peeking at the scanner, and Teeg could read the injury in his eyes.

  “Can’t it wait?” Teeg mouthed at her, unwilling to shout because of the pain.

  “It’ll have to,” Hinta yelled. The tendons in her neck stood out. “Can’t wrestle you out of these suits with it rough like this.” Her hands moved gently around Teeg’s waist. “Just hold very still, no sudden movements. If the rib snaps, you could puncture a lung.”

  “Can’t you give her narco?” Phoenix pleaded.

  “No chemmies. Her head has to be in working order in case we smash up.”

  Watching Hinta stagger back to her own seat, Teeg thought: If we smash up I’m finished anyway. Could never swim with this knife in my side.

  “Anything I can do?” Phoenix said. Hunched beside her, his face a pie of colors, he looked in worse pain than she was.

  “Smooth out the ocean!” Her attempt at laughter broke down into a cough, dredging up the taste of brine in her throat, and the pain of it blacked her out for a few seconds. Phoenix looked more distraught than before. She curled a hand around his neck and pulled him close, his ear to her lips. “Be still and don’t worry. I’m going into trance and dive under this pain.”

  His crazy-quilt face swung out of sight and she closed her eyes. Wash of yellow light through her lids, gullying lift and fall of the raft, thunder overhead, fire in her rib. She kept her breath shallow, riding the air in and out. Then the yellow began to fade and there was only brightness. Stars, flung like salt through the brightness, congealed into one great sun, and the sun was still, and there was no bucking motion, no raft, no rough sea. The fire in her rib was a slender jet of flame from the sun, and there was no pain, there was only fire.