“Teeg! Teeg, wait!” He took a few hesitant steps forward. “The raft! The gear!” Dense bushes pressed in from each side, forming walls higher than his head. He advanced a few more paces. Still no sign of her. “You don’t even know where this thing leads!” In places the thicket arched completely over the path. He faltered to a stop. The pressure of vegetation was too much.
He backed onto the terrace and sat gloomily down. She was always scooting off somewhere, no explanation, just a cloud of dust and come-if-you-dare, Phoenix! Well, he wasn’t crawling into that jungle for anything, brick walk or no brick walk. He would just stay here and wait. Camp alone if he had to.
Thinking that, he crossed over to the raft and lugged the rucksacks onto the terrace. The mill groaned on and on, setting his teeth on edge. First he sat with his back toward the chaotic forest, trying to put himself in a contemplative mood by gazing across the river at Mt. Hood. But he kept reflecting that some beast might slouch toward him from the rear and he would never be able to hear it above the infernal din of the water wheel. So he spun around and faced the vegetation. But then who knew what slimy beast might fling a tentacle out of the river?
After more than an hour of facing first one way then the other, and still no sign of Teeg, he decided this was ridiculous. Do something. He managed to deflate the raft and squeeze it into its bag without once getting entangled. Now what? The wooden gears shrieked monotonously.
Better the jungle, for the sake of Teeg and quiet, than all night beside this screeching mill. Shouldering his own rucksack, Phoenix wrapped his arms around Teeg’s pack and hugged the weight against his chest. He staggered a few paces along the path, and then, discovering his balance, plodded heavily onward between the walls of vegetation. Padded front and rear with rucksacks, he felt less vulnerable. Whatever tried to make a sandwich of him would have to open its jaws very wide.
Someone evidently kept the path open, for the bushes on each side were trimmed evenly, and where the branches arched overhead they were pruned into a smooth vault. He supposed that was reassuring, a token of human control, although he would have appreciated knowing who the pruner was.
Following the twists and turns of the brick path, occasionally sitting down to rest, he soon lost all sense of direction. Where was the river? The sun was obscured by clouds, so it was no help. His legs told him the trail had been climbing steadily. As he pressed onward, arms aching from the weight of Teeg’s pack, the shrieking of the mill-gears dwindled beyond hearing. In the stillness, the jungle seemed less threatening—less, in fact, like a jungle and more like a garden. He noticed that some of the bushes were hung with pinkish, bell-shaped blossoms, lovely. Here and there above the canopy of shrubs he spied the brick shells of what might once have been offices or stores, and then as the path kept rising he spied the moss-covered bones of houses.
Eventually the thickets gave out and he found himself on the edge of a meadow. Dazzled by the open space he dropped Teeg’s rucksack and stood there panting. The grass beside the brick path was cropped short, and he quickly spied the reason—sheep. They were grazing on a hillock not thirty paces away from him. Sheep were harmless, weren’t they? Was it the wolf in sheep’s clothing or sheep in wolf’s clothing you were supposed to avoid? He seemed to remember his father once calling a cowardly person sheepish. Or was it chickenish? Goatish? He felt certain they were timid beasts, yet he edged by them sideways along the path, taking no chances. They did not pause in their snuffling and munching to so much as glance at him.
The walk rollercoastered over the pasture, following the contours of the land, rising steadily. When he topped the first hillock he turned back around to get his bearings. Far below, the river dragged its dark length through the forest, past the desolate islands of downtown Portland. Much farther away to the east rose the snowy cone of Mt. Hood. Phoenix calculated he must be standing on the ridge where he had glimpsed a flash of light, the place Teeg called Washington Park.
Where the devil was she? He crept along, under the combined weight of the rucksacks. The walkway dipped again, skirted a heap of gray rectangular stones, then climbed another hillock. From there he could see the pasture’s farthest edge, where the land seemed to fold steeply upward, and on the highest point, looking tiny against the sky, was a house.
Even from this distance he could tell it was unlike anything he had ever seen before outside a history park. Smoke trickled from a chimney. As he drew nearer, hurrying now, he could see a banistered porch encircling the ground floor. On top of that squatted two more floors, like layers on a cake, each one encrusted with windows and balconies, and atop it all was a pointy-roofed tower resembling the lookouts on ancient ships.
Was it a monument? A museum? A bit of pre-Enclosure gimcrackery preserved for showing schoolchildren the foolishness of old ways? He had never heard of such a thing. But then, since meeting Teeg, he had stumbled onto a good many things he would never have dreamed of beforehand.
The brick walk led him beyond the pasture, through a labyrinth of hedges, the house disappearing at each turn and then reappearing again, larger and less probable. The path crossed a stream over a high-arching wooden bridge, wound through some thorny bushes that bore fragrant blossoms of red and pink and white. Were these the roses Teeg had spoken of? Suddenly he emerged from the labyrinth of flowering bushes and there was the house. He leaned back to get a full view of the bizarre structure. Like the shed down by the river, it had been neatly carpentered of bleached wood, yet the materials for it seemed to have come from a dozen different houses. No two windows were the same size, the spindles in the banisters differed wildly in shape, the roofing tiles came in all shades of yellow and red. It was the sort of house an inventive child who owned too many construction sets might have built.
There were no signs anywhere to explain this apparition. No loudspeakers. He crept forward, peeking around the edges of Teeg’s rucksack, afraid to call out. He was nearly to the steps when he noticed two figures sitting motionless in the shadows of the porch. One of them stood up, silvery, and the familiar voice filled him with joy.
“So you’ve come,” Teeg said listlessly. Her face seemed blank and her voice was drained of all feeling, as if she were in shock. What was the matter? “Mother, this is Phoenix Marshall,” she said, and then, waving her arm toward the seated figure, “Phoenix, this is my mother, Judith Passio.”
The other woman rose, swaybacked and gaunt, her face hooded beneath a bonnet, a somber dress cloaking her from neck to ankles. In his confusion, Phoenix dropped Teeg’s rucksack. As the spectral woman stepped to the edge of the porch the rocking chair she had abandoned continued its motion. Even shadowed by the bonnet, her face revealed a great effort of restraint. Obeying the ancient rule of politeness which Teeg had taught him, Phoenix bowed slightly and reached one hand clumsily toward her. The woman pulled back, thrust both hands behind her, and announced with an unplaceable accent, “Don’t touch me with your city filth.”
* * *
* * *
TWENTY-THREE
Phoenix was a welcome sight as he came plodding through the avenues of roses, loaded down with two packs like some long-suffering donkey. Seeing him toil past the goldfish pools and over the Japanese bridge, Teeg felt a great tenderness. Love for her had tugged him up the brick path from the river, as it had tugged him from Oregon City and Jonah Colony. Could she stretch his love so thin it would snap? What if one time she ran away and he didn’t follow?
Three hours of quarreling with her mother had left her so upset that she could only manage to offer a numb greeting when Phoenix reached the front steps. The stranger who wore her mother’s face greeted him with open hostility. Vile offspring of the Enclosure, her mother had called him. But how could she look at Phoenix and find him hateful?
Teeg motioned him to a rocking chair and served him tea, ignoring her mother’s withering stare. For a long spell only the rockers made any noise as the three of them sat on the porch, sipping from cups of translucent china
, looking out over the formal gardens. What little there was to say, after seventeen years of absence, Teeg and her mother had already said.
When Teeg had come dashing up the walkway three hours earlier, her mother had greeted her without surprise. There was no weeping, no embrace, merely a cold, “Hello, my daughter.” The thirteen others who lived in the patchwork house were off working in fields or lumbermill or brick kiln. “To protect them from contamination,” Judith had explained bluntly. She alone had waited for Teeg, knowing about the trip down river, about Jonah Colony, about the escape from Oregon City. She knew all this thanks to the one piece of technology in the house that was less than two centuries old—an antique solar receiver, which monitored HP surveillance broadcasts.
Horrified, Teeg had asked, “The HP are watching us?”
Her mother seemed pleased to deliver the news. “Oh, yes. They located you three days after your supposed accident at sea.”
“But why haven’t they arrested us?”
“Why bother?” There was a disturbing remoteness about this woman, bonneted and gowned like a wax figure in a museum. “You’re nonentities. We all are. So long as we leave the Enclosure alone, we don’t matter to them.”
“And this house … ?”
“They’ve been observing me since 2035.”
“And that’s why you quit calling me?”
Judith smiled faintly. “Exactly. By keeping quiet, I am permitted to live out here like any other dumb beast.”
Teeg felt the betrayal like a slap. “You let me believe you were dead?”
“Better that than quarantine,” Judith answered tranquilly.
Nothing Teeg said could upset her composure. It was as if, living in a house patched together from pieces of nineteenth-century mansions, tending sheep and milking goats and laboring for hours at a hand loom, she had withdrawn in feeling as well as time from the world Teeg inhabited.
Now, three hours after that chilly meeting, Phoenix sat between them with the fragile teacup balanced in his hands. He looked from one to the other, seeking an explanation for their bitter silence. “Did you build this place all by yourself?” he asked hesitantly.
When it seemed clear she was not going to answer, Teeg said sharply, “It won’t hurt you to talk with him.”
Judith sighed. “In the beginning, yes, I worked alone.” She rocked as she spoke, her voice carrying that faint rustiness one sometimes heard among returned space colonists. “By and by other exiles drifted through, labored on the mansion a while, then drifted away or gave up the ghost. There are fourteen of us now.”
“Gave up the ghost?” said Phoenix.
Teeg translated: “Died.”
“Of what?”
Once again Judith sighed, as if speaking to this cityman were a terrible labor. “Infections, bites, exposure. Cancer, mostly.”
“You have no medicines?”
“Herbs, yes, and ointments.” Judith studied him from beneath the awning of her bonnet. “But you mean—what is your word?—chemmies, don’t you? Manufactured poisons. Those are available only from the Enclosure, and it is far better to die than to have any dealings with that place.” She eyed him contemptuously. “If you were not hopelessly contaminated yourself, you would understand that without being told.”
“Mother, you promised,” cried Teeg.
“It’s all right, child.” Judith drew her lips tight, regaining her composure. “Soon he will go back to his own kind and you will stay here where you belong.”
She seemed intent on this madness. In those hours before Phoenix came laboring up the hill like a donkey, she had outlined Teeg’s future. The returning daughter would exchange her shimmersuit for a woolen dress and linen bonnet, discard her watch and detector belt, seat herself at a loom. When Phoenix arrived, she would send him away, back to Jonah Colony with his gear and his corrupting city habits. “Send him away?” Teeg had replied incredulously. “I see your years in the Enclosure are not so quickly scrubbed off,” Judith had said. “Therefore I will give you the length of the afternoon to get rid of your cityman.”
Perched on the front of his chair, still balancing the teacup as if, tipping, it might explode, Phoenix groped for something polite to say. “You must have hunted all over to get the parts for this old house.”
“While I was dismantling Portland,” Judith answered coldly, “I had the foresight to store building materials and books and various items of furniture up here in Washington Park.”
“Tools and nails and everything?”
“No nails. There is no metal anywhere in this house, and no plastic.”
Phoenix twisted round to gaze in through the parlor window. Teeg recognized in his movements the same eager curiosity that had driven him onto the pedbelt months ago to talk with her. “Do you suppose I could … see the place?”
The gaunt figure rocked several times, as if weighing his request. Then she stood up and pronounced, with a note of distaste, “Very well. But you will not be able to appreciate our life.”
“I’m used to ignorance,” Phoenix said, rising and handing Teeg the treacherous cup. “I’m an expert at failing to understand.”
Teeg had already toured the house, but she followed them anyway, fearing what her mother might say to Phoenix. In the entryway hatracks and umbrella stands flanked a moonfaced grandfather clock. The ornate hands proclaimed ten o’clock, and thus were either five hours slow or nineteen hours fast. The parlor was crowded with overstuffed couches and chairs, their velvet upholstery neatly patched. A threadbare carpet spread its faint purple design over the floor. A ponderous oak table, gleaming with oil, occupied the dining room. Unlit tallow candles leaned from wooden sockets on the walls. In the kitchen a fire seethed beneath an iron pot. Mutton stew, her mother explained. Except for the pots, everything visible was of wood or stone, including the sink and counters and the trough that fed water from a spring. Bundles of weeds hung upside down from the rafters. The other ground-floor rooms were filled with potters’ wheels, looms, heaps of wool in various stages of preparation, woodworking benches, and other primitive equipment which Teeg did not recognize and Judith would not bother to identify.
The interior of the house was as much a patchwork as the exterior. Doorways shrank or expanded from one room to the next. The flooring was a crazyquilt of shapes and colors. The wall paneling and stairway spindles changed pattern several times on the way to the first floor.
In an upstairs bedroom, where oil lamps and potted ferns and doilies occupied every flat surface, the handmade dress and bonnet intended for Teeg hung limply from a bedpost. Seeing them, she felt a panicky desire to run outside into the woods. Her mother passed over them in silence.
On the third floor were a north-lighted studio and a library. Easels held half-finished copies of antique drawings—knights astride muscular horses, maidens cradling infants. The bookshelves were filled with guides to horticulture, bee-keeping, wood-heat. Among works of literature, Teeg recognized no title more recent than Rousseau’s La Nouvelle Héloïse—a pastoral romance, three centuries old. For that matter, hardly anything in the house seemed to date from a time more recent than 1800. She remembered her mother proclaiming that the steam engine and railroad had corrupted the earth. So why not turn history backward until those fearful inventions—and every other premonition of the Enclosure—had been erased?
When Phoenix, marveling at the leather-bound books, reached out to finger one, Judith warned, “You will touch nothing in this house.” His hand snapped back as if singed.
By means of a spiral staircase they mounted through the roof into a watchtower. Teeg had been surprised, on first visiting this room, to find it strung with antenna wires, to hear the blather of a receiver, and to see a crude telescope aimed out one window. “Our one concession to modern technology,” Judith had explained, nodding at the electronic device, “so we can listen for our enemies.” This time, with Phoenix along, she made no explanations, merely standing back with arms crossed over her chest an
d one hand on each shoulder, as if guarding herself from the devilish influence of this cityman. She had informed Teeg that none of the others who lived in the mansion would return until Phoenix was gone. “You wouldn’t expose your disciples to a leper, would you?” Disciples? The word left Teeg deeply troubled.
Even without the telescope, one could see from the tower all the way down to the watermill. Trotting along that brick walkway, buoyed up by hopes of finding her mother, Teeg had not realized what a climb it was. Now she felt as heavy as Mt. Hood, which shimmered in the distance. Clouds had sliced away the mountain’s base; its peak seemed to hover in mid-air, like an intruder from the underworld, a mountain of the mind.
“Now you’ve seen everything,” Judith said to Phoenix, “but have you understood anything?”
Not waiting for an answer, she led the way back down the spiral stairs. Through one of the staircase windows Teeg spied several figures ambling between outbuildings. Three or four looked to be men, dressed in gray cloaks with full beards and hats as broad as their shoulders. Another three appeared to be women in dark flapping gowns, their faces shadowed under bonnets and hair swinging in braids down to their waists. The panicky, smothering sensation rose in her.
When Phoenix paused to look as well, Judith blocked his view. “Keep your eyes from them,” she said harshly. He flinched as if struck.
Teeg was furious with her mother. “Do you think he’s a wizard, to hurt them with a look?”
Judith turned a calm and queenly face to her. “You must go change clothes, then give your metallic garment and all your city gadgets to this man. He has seen that you will live comfortably here, and now he must go back to his own kind.”
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