Terrarium

by Scott Russell Sanders

  His face twisted in confusion, Phoenix backed down the stairs.

  “He’s not going away,” Teeg cried. “We’re partners … joined together.”

  “He is diseased.”

  “With what?”

  “With the Enclosure.”

  “But I keep telling you, that’s superstition. He’s come into the wilds, hasn’t he?”

  “Yes, and if we let him stay here, he will soon have machines roaring and domes rising and the same calamity will befall us again.”

  By now Phoenix had descended to the ground floor. Teeg could hear him dragging the rucksacks across the porch. “Phoenix!” she called. “Wait, I’ll make her understand!” She ran downstairs in time to see him vanish among the roses, the packs scuffing behind him like corpses. She cupped hands about her mouth to call again. But remembering the baffled look on his face she knew he would not come back, and so she let her arms fall and kept still.

  In a moment her mother’s icy voice crept over her from behind. “Good riddance. Now go take off those city things.”

  “Mother … listen, I can’t understand what’s …”

  “You are home, my daughter. You will obey me.”

  “He’s a harmless, gentle person,” Teeg insisted.

  “He has lived all his life inside the Enclosure.”

  “And I’ve lived half mine there.”

  “With your robot father and that Zuni woman.”

  “So does that make me diseased?”

  Judith studied her dispassionately, as if examining a patient. “I cannot be sure yet.”

  Teeg was too shocked to reply. From the first chilling encounter on the porch, when her mother had refused to embrace her because of the shimmersuit, Teeg had prayed that the suspicion would be temporary. A chasm had opened between them in seventeen years, but surely it could be spanned. Wasn’t this the same woman who had taken her hunting for seashells, taught her to wait patiently for deer, filled her with love of the wilds? How can she fear me? Teeg wondered. Yet at every turn of the afternoon Judith revealed deeper and deeper layers of dread, a dread of the city as profound as any citygoer’s dread of the wilds. Each detail of the house, the gardens, her clothes, even the studiously antiquated language she spoke was a denial of the Enclosure. She was trying to erase the last three hundred years, and would tolerate nothing which reminded her of that banished epoch.

  Almost despairing, Teeg forced herself to keep talking, for fear her mother would regard silence as acquiescence. “If we stayed a few days, so you could see how harmless he is …”

  “He will not stay even one night within walking distance of this house,” Judith announced firmly.

  “But what can he hurt?”

  “My disciples have their orders.”

  Images of the dark-robed figures lurked in Teeg’s mind. “To do what?”

  Seated once again in her rocker, Judith swayed easily. “To see that your cityman and his paraphernalia are in the river before sunset. Whether he goes willingly or not.”

  There was no sign of Phoenix above the fountaining arches of the rose bushes. Could he hear them from there? Lowering her voice, Teeg said, “You’re so filled with hate I don’t recognize you.”

  Even this did not ruffle the older woman. “What you see as hatred I see as wise precaution.”

  “It’s pig-headed intolerance.”

  “I have labored to build this estate. Over the years I have turned away every threat.” The smile flickering in the shadow of the bonnet looked artificial. “I make no exceptions for you, simply because you are my daughter.”

  Memories from the afternoon crowded Teeg’s mind, stifling her—blood-soaked dirt out front of the slaughterhouse, weeds hanging from the kitchen rafters, a film of soot on tables, her mother’s woolen skirts dragging the floor. “But what have you built? You’re living an antique fantasy.”

  “It is a good life.”

  “You can’t go back. You can’t wipe out the last three centuries.”

  “Can’t I?” said Judith, with a lilt of amusement in her voice. “And what do you suppose you and your friends are doing in that tidy little settlement at Whale’s Mouth Bay?”

  Teeg thought longingly of Jonah Colony, its domes radiating from the center like daisy petals, a frail organism sheltered in the bowl of hills. Was it true—were they going backward? Were they trying to relive the past? No, no, they weren’t denying the modern world. They were adapting its technology to a gentler existence. She did not want to be a pioneer woman, inhaling smoke in dingy rooms, gnawing roots, chasing goats over the countryside, brain grown numb. She wanted to live lightly on the earth, in harmony with its rhythms, all her senses keen and her mind alive and her spirit awake. With deep conviction she said, “We’re not going back, we’re going onward. We’re gathering up all that’s useful and beautiful from our history and carrying it forward into a new life.”

  Her mother gave the feigned smile again, as if to say, A wise woman must be patient with a naive one. “It sounds very grand, my child. But you delude yourself. By bringing machines out here, you condemn yourselves to the same path. The Enclosure waits in your future.”

  “That is fatalism.”

  “It is the truth,” said Judith. “The only salvation is in the past,”

  Gazing at the tranquil face, framed in its linen bonnet, with the archaic house rising floor after balconied floor overhead, Teeg realized that one could go back, and in the same moment she knew she would never follow her mother into that stifling past. Too pained to speak, she jerked her head from side to side, like an animal balking at a cage.

  “Come, my daughter.” Standing, the older woman grasped Teeg by the wrist and drew her out of the chair. “We will soon cure you of your attachment to the city and to this cityman.”

  “I don’t want to be cured,” Teeg panted.

  Tugging firmly, the mother said, “Come upstairs, child. We will dress you properly.”

  The mother-lure was so powerful that Teeg actually followed her to the threshold of the parlor. Then a great panic seized her. She yanked her arm free. “Let me go!” she cried. Backing away, she joggled the hatracks, tumbled the umbrella stand. “I can’t breathe. …” She upset a rocking chair, backed down the porch stairs, still jerking her head and panting for breath.

  Judith watched her calmly from the front door, like a woman composed for a portrait. Only her lips moved, but Teeg could not hear what they were saying. Could they be offering words of peace? A bridge flung across the seventeen-year chasm? Teeg held her breath, straining to hear.

  “… sad to discover the infection so deep in you, my child,” her mother was saying. “You are lost, lost …”

  Teeg did not want to hear any more. Her boots thudded on the bricks as she hurried away. She had to find Phoenix and leave here, quickly, before she smothered. The rucksacks were leaning against a rose trellis, but no Phoenix. Had he gone? Driven down the hill by hatred? The disciples! In a frenzy she hunted through the rose garden, through the labyrinth of hedges, fearing any moment to stumble into those dark-robed disciples. And then at last she found him, in the Japanese garden.

  He was bent over the goldfish pool, his nose only a few centimeters above the surface. When she drew near him, panting, the goldfish scattered and he looked up with an expression of anguish. “It’s all right,” he said, “I understand. I’ll go.”

  She gasped and gasped to catch her breath.

  His crouching body trembled. “She’s your mother, right? And who am I?”

  “You’re my … partner,” she managed to say, “and you’re not … going anywhere … without me.”

  Conflicting emotions swept across his face like tremors after an earthquake. “You’re going back to Jonah?”

  “Yes … both of us … right now.”

  His eyes grew wide. “But your mother?”

  “She has her world, I have mine.”

  She grabbed his hand and led him running past hedges, pools, rock gardens,
to the trellis of roses. She did not mind the weight of the rucksuck as they hastened down the hill. In the pasture Phoenix turned round to look at the antique house. But the sight of it was too vivid in Teeg’s mind, and the image of her mother, framed there in the doorway like a pioneer woman in a daguerreotype, was too painful for her to need another look, and so she hurried on between the neatly trimmed thickets to the river landing.

  The shrieking of the mill greeted them. Within a minute Phoenix had the raft inflated and the rucksacks aboard. Teeg huddled on the brick terrace, exhausted, watching him labor.

  “How does this infernal air-drive go?” he asked her. He was trying to jam the cylinder backwards through the motor mount.

  “Help me in,” she said wearily. Clinging to him, stepping off the terrace into the raft, she felt like another piece of baggage. With a great effort she mounted the air-cylinder. “There, like so. Now cast off.”

  The current swept them sideways. Within moments a dense cloud of bubbles swarmed behind the raft, nudging them sluggishly upstream. Teeg knew the watchtower of the house would be visible, high on the ridge of Washington Park, a wink of light. She would not let herself look for it. Better the single sharp pain, the brutal amputation, than one small cut after another.

  Portland slipped by along both shores—brick husks of buildings, mossy skeletons of houses, concrete abutments like broken bones. The forest of Portland.

  Phoenix kept looking round at her, searching her face intently.

  It was hard for her to concentrate on the river. At sunset, darkness seemed to rise rather than fall, like a murky fluid gathering in the forest, pouring across the countryside, engulfing hills, thickening upward into the sky. Thrust up where it could catch the sunlight, Mt. Hood was the final landmark to disappear, a luminous fist shoved up from the surrounding gloom.

  Phoenix was scarcely more than a voice to her when at last they pulled to shore, well upstream from Portland. “You’re sure this is what you want?” he asked.

  “I’m sure,” Teeg replied. “Zuni was right. Some reunions are not possible.”

  * * *

  * * *

  TWENTY-FOUR

  There was an old proverb about never looking a gift horse in the … what? Ear? Nose? Mouth? Phoenix could not recall how it went. Nor did he have any clear notion what a gift horse was. But he knew the proverb had to do with accepting presents humbly, not inquiring too closely into their origins, and that was why it kept springing into his mind. He was content to have Teeg back from her mother’s antique house without demanding to know why she had come. The simple gift of her was enough.

  “She has her world, I have mine,” Teeg had explained simply. During the late afternoon on the river that was all the explanation she offered. In the sleepsack that night she was fidgety but silent, and he did not question her. He stroked her timidly, grateful to have her within reach. She kept her own hands fisted tightly against her belly, as if to squeeze the pain into one spot and hold it there.

  From the look of her eyes next morning, she had not slept much. As he mouthed the algae-brew that passed for breakfast, he thought of suggesting they vary their diet with some roots and frogs. Fried lichens, maybe. Any bit of nonsense to lift her gloom. He would have tried walking on his hands across the river to please her. There was something pure about her silence, however, as he imagined a field of new-fallen snow would be pure, and he did not trample on it.

  When they boarded the raft Teeg occupied the tiller seat, on the unspoken assumption that she would do whatever guiding there was to be done in this partnership. But her mind was clearly not on the river. Several times Phoenix had to cry out for her to pull hard right or left, to avoid snags he could see looming in front of them. Each time he looked round at her she was brooding on something, eyes unfocused, mouth working. He offered to change places with her but she refused. Just a daydream, she said.

  One of her daydreams ran them against a half-submerged boulder, very nearly tipping them into the icy river. After he clawed them back to safety with a paddle, she said, “All right. You steer a while.”

  Now you’re in for it, he thought, seizing hold of the tiller. The air-drive spewed a froth of bubbles out behind, shoving the raft against the current. The sizzling noise made conversation difficult. From the bow the river had never looked so infested with menacing humps and ripples.

  Teeg emerged from her brooding only once, to suggest they keep on going as late as possible, until nightfall if he felt up to it. He did not feel up to it, but he kept going anyway, wanting to put as many kilometers as he could between her and that bonneted anachronism up in Portland. He tried to imagine how it would feel to have your mother seemingly rise from the dead after so long and then to lose her again so quickly.

  The river was a gleaming tongue of blackness when Teeg finally consented to halt for the night. “Let’s build a fire,” she suggested. “Give the bears and HP a clue where we are.” As if the detectors needed light: once they locked onto you, Phoenix knew, body-heat was signal enough. In the glow of firelight, sun, flare, even in darkness he marveled at her. The way her tongue flicked over her lips as she ate, the way her foot kicked free of the shimmersuit at bedtime—everything she did since reclaiming him like a wayward child at the goldfish pool seemed fresh, as if she were a package newly opened.

  Later, in the darkness of the tent, she broke her silence. Evidently her spirit-wrestling was over, for the words trickled out calmly. “I never dreamed she could become such a stranger. I always thought of her … the way she used to be when I was a child. I guess she was pretty bitter even back then. She hated Father and Zuni and everything to do with the Enclosure. But her life wasn’t eaten up with saying no.”

  Her breathing filled the tent. Waiting for her to continue, Phoenix tiptoed a pair of fingers along her ribs.

  Presently she resumed: “The most I hoped for was to find out how she died. I wouldn’t let myself believe she could still be alive. At first Portland looked so wild—no trace of her left, I thought. Then we heard the mill and there was fresh grain in the shed, and I was running up the brickway. And there was a house where there couldn’t possibly be a house. And there was this old-fashioned woman rocking on the porch. ‘Teeg,’ she said, as if I’d just returned from a few minutes’ walk. ‘Hello, my daughter.’ I was so busy yelling and crying that it took me a moment to see how much she’d changed. I danced up to hug her and she drew back. ‘Not in those foul garments,’ she said.” Teeg’s voice broke under the pressure of memory. “My own mother wouldn’t touch me.”

  Her grief struck Phoenix dumb. Reverently he traced a finger along her collarbone, into the shallow at the base of her throat, down the valley between her breasts. He stroked her as if the grief were a wrinkle he could smooth away.

  Just when he was beginning to think she might have been soothed to sleep, she murmured: “Zuni was right. Time forces people down many separate branchings of the path. Mother’s away off over there somewhere, and I’m here. Right here.” Her leg came against his, her fingers lit on his chest. “That’s what marriage is—right?—two people keep choosing the same path to follow.”

  Marriage? he thought. The word seemed as old as blood. Journeying together. “Sounds good to me,” he answered. He could not imagine her choosing any path, even into the ruby throat of a whale, that he would not choose also. Terrified, maybe, and quaking—but he would go.

  Her face was hot and wet on his shoulder as she rolled against him. Hooking one arm across her back he coaxed her all the way over, covering himself with the blanket of her body.

  For the remaining three days on the river they steered the raft by turns. With each passing kilometer Teeg seemed more gay. She transformed the shores into vivid tapestries with her chatter about deerferns and sandstone and long-eared bats. When Phoenix had his shift at the tiller she tipped back her head and bellowed songs about shipwrecks. When her own shift came, she crooned about lovesick maidens. She could sing for hours, song after song,
until the Willamette Valley was peopled with coal miners and whaling-ship captains and moonshiners and other extinct characters.

  Gradually she was escaping the orbit of Portland and entering the orbit of Jonah Colony. Her talk filled with speculations about the settlement. How was Zuni getting along? And Buddha-faced Marie with her garden? The runnerbeans should be ready for harvesting. Had the new bluegill survived? Were the ingatherings deep, even without dear old Sol? They’re probably short-circuited without us, eh, Phoenix?

  He would grin yes to whatever she asked him. Half of it he could not hear because of the constant buzz from the air-drive. Her gaiety was all that mattered. Each time he imagined his love for her had grown as vast as it possibly could, her red hair would blaze in the sunshine or her quick body would twist round to behold some passing wonder on the shore, and his love would swell a little more.

  In the evenings he inflated the tent and built a fire while Teeg collected nosegays of flowers. After splashing and scrubbing with filtered riverwater, she went blissfully naked, but Phoenix always wriggled back into his shimmersuit. Though he realized the patrollers could only track him as a tiny spark in a cyber-field, just as he had once tracked clouds, still he could not quite shake the feeling that he was being watched. Observing his modesty, Teeg remarked, “You can take the boy out of the city—but can you take the city out of the boy?”

  Probably not, Phoenix admitted to himself later, in the dark of the tent, in her arms. I will always be a halfbreed with muddled heart, caught midway on a bridge between the city and wilderness.

  When at length they reached the point on the river where they had first launched the raft, they shouldered the backpacks and headed overland. There was no need to give the repair station such a wide berth, since the HP knew of them already. Teeg declared she did not care a fig about the patrollers or their snooping satellites. Her mother had explained that little bands of wildergoers were kept under observation all over the globe, the way you observe a bacterial culture in a petri dish to see if it will spread or wither.