Terrarium

by Scott Russell Sanders

  Zuni was shrinking back into the shadows just as the trailing flare drew even with her. The woman who bore the flare halted for a moment to pick up something from the beach—a shell or bit of rock—and drawing the light near her cheek she studied the find in her cupped palm. In that instant Zuni recognized the bald mushroom head, the cratered moonface, the squat body.

  “Marie!” she called out of the darkness.

  The woman’s hand fell limp, dropping whatever prize it had discovered, and her face swung blindly in Zuni’s direction. “Who’s there?”

  Zuni tried to stand, but her knees would not unbend. Stupid legs!

  “What is it? What? What?” The others crowded around Marie, a knot of astonishment. The twin flares bobbed and jerked over their heads.

  “Somebody called my name,” said Marie.

  “I’m here. Here!” Zuni cried. “Come get me. I’m rusted solid.”

  Their voices babbled in consternation. Marie waded forward, searching for this impossible voice. But a smaller body darted past, arms outstretched and red hair flying, and in the next instant Zuni was flat on her back in the sand, surf licking her ears, with Teeg pawing her like a puppy.

  “Zuni! You can’t be here! Did you drop out of the sky? Come, sit up, let me help you, there.” She tugged and shoved at Zuni, pummeling her with affection. “Ach, my rib! Never mind. Everybody come see what the tide washed in!”

  Their bent heads formed an inquisitive circle above her as Zuni sat, giggling and weeping like a schoolchild, with Teeg’s arms about her.

  “My lord, my lord, it’s really you,” Marie said wonderingly. She touched Zuni’s cheek, as if to test whether she was an apparition.

  “What’s left of me. I’m about worn down to a frazzle.”

  “However did you get here?”

  “I hiked.”

  “From where?”

  “Cascade repair station.”

  Again the babble of consternation. Over one hundred kilometers!

  “How did you know we were here?” It was Jurgen’s voice, rumbling, suspicious.

  Zuni allowed herself a sly smile. “You’ve all been my hobby for a very long time.”

  “But why did you ever leave the city?” asked Teeg.

  “For the same reasons you left. To see the mountains again, the forests, the ocean. To see how things are growing now that people are locked indoors.”

  “Did you come by yourself?” Jurgen reared over her. Dear cantankerous Jurgen. A bulldog at heart.

  Zuni laughed. “Who would be crazy enough to come along with me?”

  Jurgen hunched down and shoved his great bewhiskered mug close to her. After a moment’s glare, a grin split his face. “You are an old fox,” he said, pressing his forehead to hers. “I can’t believe you’re really here. But I’m glad.”

  When they had all finished greeting her, Marie scolded, “Now Teeg, quit smothering the woman. Let’s take her home. Where’s the stretcher?”

  “Oh fiddle! I can walk!” Zuni waved them aside. They stood back respectfully. But when, after a half minute of straining, she could not persuade her legs to unbend, Jurgen swept her up, light as a doll, and laid her gently on the stretcher. She was too bone weary to protest, or to ask why they carried a stretcher with them or where they had been all day. A slender man with the raggedy beginnings of a beard, a man she did not know, bore the front of the stretcher. Was he the mysterious tenth conspirator? And why were there only nine in this procession? Who was missing?

  Teeg pranced alongside, chattering the whole way to the settlement. Once there, she tucked Zuni into a sleepsack, murmuring, “Rest now, love.”

  Zuni teetered on the brink of sleep, held back only by a sense of loss to which she could give no name. Then she recalled who was missing. “Sol came with you from Oregon City?”

  “Yes.” There was an unwillingness in the girl’s voice.

  “Where is he?”

  Teeg brushed the salty strands of hair from Zuni’s face. “He died this morning.”

  Zuni felt the sudden loss as if someone had carved a hole through her belly. But she was not surprised. She had known about his cancer. “He was a lovely man,” she whispered. “So gentle. Remember how he would embrace you with his eyes when he spoke?”

  “You were mates?” Teeg asked softly.

  “For a little while. Long ago.”

  Both women kept still a moment, feeling Sol’s presence. Finally Teeg said, “That’s where we’ve been since yesterday, up on the headland singing him through.”

  “He’s buried up there?”

  “Cremated. It’s what he asked for.” Teeg sat on her heels and stroked Zuni’s face. “I guess it’s what I want after I die, to go right back to earth.”

  Sol … ash? All life was a burning, Zuni thought, a fire in the cells defying for an instant the ultimate cold of the universe. In the Enclosure, he would have been frozen after death, against the hope of some future cure. But out here there were no resurrection vaults, and death, when it came, might as well be celebrated with a final fire.

  “We’ve put you in his sleepchamber,” said Teeg. “You don’t mind?”

  “I’m glad.”

  The fingers took up Sol’s ivory comb and untangled Zuni’s hair. “Do you need anything, old one?”

  “No, child.”

  “Would you like me to stay with you through the night?”

  Zuni was unable to keep the amusement from curling on her drowsy lips. “No, no. Nothing frightens me here. This is where I’ve wanted to be.”

  Teeg’s fingers at last withdrew from her face, and Zuni slipped away into sleep, her body a constellation of stars.

  * * *

  * * *

  NINETEEN

  “It’s simply exhaustion,” Marie pronounced over Zuni’s fretful body.

  The wildergoers were all crowded inside her chamber in the morning, eager to learn why the city-builder had come into the wilds and whether she could be trusted to keep the secret of Jonah Colony. Each had reason to be grateful to her, for help in getting jobs or schooling, for years of kindness. But she was an architect of the Enclosure! What could possibly drive her outside? Seeing her twitch and mumble, however, with her famously neat bun of hair now a wreck of whiteness on the pillow, they saved their questions.

  Watching her from the foot of the sleepcushion, Teeg felt like a bear in the fairytale, gaping at Goldilocks. What improbable visitor is this, dozing in our midst?

  Tests had shown low blood-sugar, but no concentrations of toxins. Hinta prescribed rest and broth, then like the others she returned to the labor which Sol’s death had interrupted.

  While Teeg nursed Zuni through the next day of shock, Phoenix kept stopping by the door to peek in. Teeg would gesture for him to stop gawking and come in, for God’s sake, but always he held back, awestruck, like a pilgrim at a shrine. You’d think he was paying a visit to Michelangelo. The worshipful look that had always come over him whenever they spoke of the architect exasperated Teeg, for whom Zuni was no legendary figure, but merely a person, crotchety and fond of teasing, a surrogate mother with a face shaped like a wedge of pie, eyes buried in creases from her habit of squinting, and a mind that made light-year leaps.

  Now pale and hollow-cheeked against the pillow, this face had aged by seventeen years since Teeg had first glimpsed it. The memory of that first encounter was painful. Teeg had just left her mother at the sanitation port, arm bravely uplifted, to visit her father inside the Enclosure. “Only for a couple of weeks!” her mother called reassuringly. Her father looked ridiculous when he met her in Oregon City, with a video crooner’s mask plastered on his puss and a bright red wig perched like a throw-rug on his skull. “I’ve brought a friend to meet you,” he said by way of greeting. The friend was a slight, vigorous woman who fixed Teeg with an intense gaze before bowing. Even back then, at age sixty or so, Zuni was already white-haired and her face was a map of delicate lines, like frost on a window.

  “Architect
Franklin will care for you when I am forced to leave the city,” her father explained stiffly.

  Teeg felt a sickening loss of balance, as when the floor of a glider lurches beneath you. “But I’m going back outside with Mother in two weeks.”

  Her father’s many-faceted eyes looked in every direction but hers. “That was a misunderstanding. The eugenics law requires you to stay inside.”

  Teeg looked pleadingly at the woman, who raised her eyebrows and asked, “You would separate the child from her mother?”

  “To preserve her from the wilds, yes I would.”

  “There are worse fates than living in Oregon,” Zuni observed.

  Those words had roused in Teeg a glimmer of affection for the woman, an affection which swelled over the years into love. After that first glimpse of Zuni, Teeg had to wait seven years before being licensed to venture outside the Enclosure. By then her father had frozen in the waters off Alaska, and her mother—according to the health patrol—had drowned in the Columbia River.

  While Zuni lay in the sleepchamber recovering from shock, Teeg studied every branching in the delicate frost-pattern of wrinkles on her face. It might have been the map of an imaginary country. Words bubbled up occasionally from the old woman’s sleep. What few sentences Teeg could make out had to do with birds and cages. “It’s all right, love,” Teeg soothed, petting her. “You’re with us now. You’re free.”

  The coma of exhaustion gave way to gentler sleep, and sleep feathered away to wakefulness. Phoenix was lingering in the doorway, round-eyed, when Zuni came fully awake. A glance from her sent him scampering.

  “Who’s your rabbity friend?” Zuni whispered. She squeezed an upraised finger against each side of her head, to simulate rabbit ears, and she made a small O of her mouth to imitate his startled look.

  Teeg was overjoyed to hear her voice. “Oh, Phoenix? He’s my partner. He thinks you were one of God’s advisers at the Creation.”

  “Ha! Wait till he gets a good look at me. A half-blind old crone. Half-dead, too, when you lugged me in here last night.”

  “Night before last,” Teeg corrected her.

  Zuni hummed. “Well, I truly am a lazybones. Didn’t sleep much on the way out here. Damned beasties kept running off with my gear.”

  “What sort of beasts?”

  With a grunt Zuni sat up. “Elk or mice or bears. It might have been anything, for all I could see. Mutant grasshoppers! Ambulatory mushrooms!” Teeg laughed. A new alertness came into Zuni’s face. “Since when did you have a partner, and a citygoer at that, from the looks of him?”

  “Since about ten months ago. I was hiking on the pedbelt one morning and he popped out of his door.” Exactly like a rabbit, Teeg admitted, now that Zuni had supplied her with the image: a frightened rabbit with chocolate eyes and a gaping circle for a mouth. While Zuni sipped broth, Teeg proceeded to tell her about wooing Phoenix.

  Zuni listened with merry eyes. “And so you turned him into a mystic?”

  “Of sorts.”

  “And he joined your—what do you call them—ingatherings?”

  “How did you know about ingatherings?” Teeg asked with surprise.

  Zuni gave her evasive Buddha smile. “I told you, I’ve made a hobby of observing you all. Who nudged you together into this work crew to begin with?”

  Teeg pondered this. “You built the crew?”

  “Building conspiracies is a messier business than erecting cities.”

  “You knew all along we were coming out here?”

  “I certainly hoped so. That’s why I put you malcontents together.”

  Scattered memories of things Zuni had said to her over the years, small gestures of discontent, suddenly took shape in Teeg’s mind like birds flocking for spring migration. “You’ve been planning to come back out to the wilds, all this time?”

  “In my heart, I never left.”

  “But your architecture,” Teeg protested, “the Enclosure …”

  “That was my way of helping make sure there would be some wilds for me to come back to. And haven’t things grown wonderfully?” Zuni grabbed Teeg’s arms and drew herself upright. “The earth was sick, with a disease called people. So I helped put us in quarantine. Inside the bottle, as you liked to say so bitterly.”

  “I never blamed you.”

  Zuni gave her an appraising look. “No? Perhaps not. But you hated your father with a fury.”

  “He was hateful.”

  “For helping build the Enclosure? Would you prefer to do without it, and have everybody traipsing around outside and fouling the planet?”

  There was silence, while Teeg savored the bitterness she had felt since childhood toward her father. Hating him was bound up with loving her mother and loving the wilds. But if his work had been necessary? If the Enclosure had been a blessing to Terra?

  Zuni’s legs suddenly buckled and she slumped to the cushions. Weakly, she asked, “Will you help me shower, child? I don’t have the starch back in me yet. And I’m so filthy you could scrape me and use it for potting soil.”

  “Oh, Zuni, of course! I’m standing here like a light-pole.”

  After the two women spun beneath airjets, Teeg massaged oil into Zuni’s back, where skin slid over a rack of bones. “We’ll have to fatten you up on algae,” Teeg said mischievously.

  Zuni made a face. “Thanks, but I’d rather stay scrawny.”

  Oiling her own skin, Teeg was reminded of bathing in the ocean with her mother, who took this same unself-conscious pleasure in nakedness. Life inside the Enclosure, where bodies went cloaked in gowns and desire was fenced in by rituals, had been a torment. The only relief had come from Zuni, who scoffed at the sexual taboos as she scoffed at all the other pieties of the Enclosure.

  “Father hated having a body,” Teeg mused. “You could tell by the way he covered it with any old rag. And the way he let himself go to blubber.”

  “Because he was fat and sloppy, you say he hated his body?” The creases about Zuni’s eyes showed amusement.

  “It was distasteful to him. A clumsy animal for transporting his brain.”

  “He was rather keen on making love,” Zuni observed mildly, stuffing her arms and legs into a crisp shimmersuit.

  “Father?”

  “To which I can testify from personal experience.”

  “With you?”

  Again Zuni flashed the Buddha smile. “It is a very old habit of the race, my child. And on the whole a pleasant one.”

  Teeg was flabbergasted. That walrus of a father wallowing in bed with elegant Zuni? Impossible! “You were conceived artificially,” her mother had assured her. “Your father never touched me, not once, not even with gloves.”

  Trailing Zuni back to the sleepchamber, where the older woman lay down again with a sigh, Teeg kept repeating, “Father? Father? With you? I don’t believe it. And even if it’s true, I still say he loathed the wilds. He thought Mother was crazy for staying outside.”

  Zuni crossed arms on her chest and spoke with eyes closed. “He was certainly the most indoors person I ever knew.”

  “There! So don’t pretend he was some kind of hero for building the Enclosure. He didn’t care a damn about saving Terra.”

  “Has it ever occurred to you that Terra used him and your mother and all the rest of us to preserve herself?”

  “Used us … What are you saying?”

  “I’m saying what you know intuitively. Terra is an organism, and like any organism it has evolved methods of protecting itself. The body rejects alien tissues, germs, infection. How? It seals them away. Suppose Terra has sealed us away inside the Enclosure?”

  “You mean … thought it? Willed it?”

  “Does the body need to think about infection? Reflex serves extraordinarily well.”

  “But we’re talking about centuries of effort—”

  “An eyeblink for Terra.”

  “—and millions upon millions of people, the whole population of the planet cooperating to—”
Teeg hesitated, overwhelmed by the idea.

  “To do what?” Zuni asked drowsily.

  “Seal themselves away,” Teeg whispered. Kneeling beside Zuni, who seemed to float on the cushion, she was astonished by the thought. Science’s yearning outward into space, religion’s yearning to escape matter—could all that have been the self-preserving ruminations of Terra? And was all of human history—at least since the decline of nature-religions and the rise of cities—a prolonged healing process for the planet? Was industrialization only a fever, succeeded by the calm years since the Enclosure?

  There were a hundred questions to ask, but Zuni was asleep, the creases about her eyes still gay.

  As the colonists went about their work, transplanting ferns and wildflowers into the shelter, gathering cuttings of trees to root in the nursery, they kept one eye cocked at the sky, like nervous robins tugging at worms. Health patrollers could plummet down like meteors, swoop down like hawks. The wildergoers had lived with this knowledge since escaping the city. But these days they kept even sharper lookout for catastrophe. Sol’s death and Zuni’s arrival disturbed their collective life, as rocks break the current of a stream.

  Sol had brought a spiritual intensity to every act, to stirring soup or fixing cybers as much as to ingathering. He had also been their communications expert, who was to have assembled equipment for monitoring the Enclosure’s transmissions. By patching into the nearest land cable, he would have supplied Jonah Colony with data on climate, oceans, sun activity, toxin levels. From the air he would have plucked news about spy satellites. He had grown so weak by the time of the landing at Whale’s Mouth, however, that he could merely scrawl instructions for assembling the communications gear.

  At the moment everyone was too busy to puzzle over the crates of communicators. Once Jurgen’s wild crayfish joined the trout and bluegill in the tanks, Indy began experimenting with algaes and waterlilies, to get the right mixtures of plants and fish. Water from the tanks circulated through troughs in the greenhouse where lettuce, squash, and several dozen other vegetables were sprouting. Earthworms, frogs, wasps, flies, predatory mites and spiders were painstakingly collected from the forest and loosed into the greenhouse. Indy had her heart set on lizards and praying mantises, but none were to be found. Marie brought two green snakes dangling by their tails. Teeg and Phoenix searched the meadow until they had gathered a flask’s worth of ladybugs. The small islands of plants inside the colony now stirred with tiny creatures. Crawling into bed one night, Phoenix thrust his bare toes against a frog, and leapt up howling. On subsequent nights he always shook the sleepsack, to see what tumbled out.