“Don’t fret,” Zuni told her. “You will learn as much from Sventov as you would from me.”
“But I haven’t modeled myself on Sventov,” Marga protested. “I’ve modeled myself on you.”
Zuni interrupted her sorting of blueprints to study this young apprentice. The face was a cinnamon-colored blur, the hair a swatch of black. Solemn and reproachful, another earnest child of the Enclosure. “And are you certain you know what I am?”
Marga seemed startled by the question. “You’re the architect of humanity’s liberation from Terra,” she said, repeating a catch-phrase from the media.
“And you will carry on that liberation after I am gone?”
“Of course. But why should you leave us, with your head still full of visions?”
“My eyes are failing.”
“I’ll be your eyes. I’ll draw your ideas.” In her excited gesturing, Marga thumped the model of the Enclosure, setting the fretted globe swaying.
“That is kind of you,” said Zuni, “but I have other work to do now.”
“What can be more important than Project Transcendence?”
“In old China,” Zuni began patiently, “before the Enclosure, it was the custom for a person to devote her youth to learning and her adult years to community work. When she reached a certain age, however, she was free to withdraw from the world and pursue her quest for enlightenment.”’
Marga pondered this. “And you have reached such an age?”
“I have.”
“Nothing will make you change your mind?”
“No, my dear.” Zuni longed to tell this solemn young woman the truth, revealing the private self who had been kept secret during decades of public work. But the habit of deception was too old now to be broken. She would be freed from it soon enough.
“Enlightenment?” Marga repeated the word quizzically.
“Getting back in touch,” Zuni translated.
“With what?”
“With the source of things.”
“Isn’t that where we’re all headed? Back toward the state of pure energy?”
Zuni smiled, knowing it was foolish to speak of spiritual matters. “Sventov will teach you well.”
“I suppose he will.”
When Zuni busied herself once more with the stack of blueprints, Marga asked shyly, “Do you suppose I could have something of yours to keep?”
Zuni withdrew from her modest trove of mementos one of the drafting pens, and this she pressed into Marga’s hand. The touch was obviously a shock to the young woman, but not so great a shock as the kiss Zuni brushed on her cheek. “Now go on, leave me alone,” Zuni said, “and be sure you draw beautiful cities with that pen.”
After Marga left, Zuni sat for a long time at her desk, staring out over Oregon City, wondering if she could have made it more beautiful. Nothing lived in it except people, the human microbiota, and experimental animals. Old-timers reminisced about the abundance of life in the wilds, about hickory trees and strawberries and kangaroos, but they did not reminisce about typhoid and famine, about mercury poisoning and radioactive dumps. At least within the Enclosure people were shielded from toxins and drug-resistant germs. The apartments were stacked a thousand feet high, nearly reaching the dome, but no one lacked shelter. The algae-based food tasted like pap to anyone who could recollect dirt-grown vegetables, but it was abundant and pure. The young people, those born inside the Enclosure, had never seen dolphins or potatoes, had never seen anything except what humans had fashioned. The young did not reminisce about a lost world. Their parents and grandparents had quit the wilds, as irrevocably as their evolutionary ancestors had floundered up out of the seas.
At least Zuni hoped the move inside was irrevocable. Had she betrayed her species? No, no, she had settled that doubt long ago. To reassure herself that the move inside had been the sole path to survival, she needed only to recall the decades before the Enclosure, when more than a billion people died from heatwaves, hurricanes, flooding, drought, famine, epidemic disease, and other consequences of ecological breakdown. Besides, how could this indoor life be a betrayal if it was what people had always longed for? Wasn’t the Enclosure just a cave, a hut, a walled village, a shopping mall carried to its logical extreme, stretched out over the globe, hermetically sealed?
Before closing her office for the last time she looked carefully about to make sure no trace of her was left behind. Satisfied, she gave the hanging model of the Enclosure one last swing and shut the door.
Because Zuni replied to speculations about her future with vague smiles and crooked answers, the media soon decided she was not the proper stuff of news. Her face and name vanished from the celebrity columns. Before long only her friends and her colleagues at the Institute still wondered what was going on beneath that meticulous coil of white hair. Even they couldn’t pry the secret from her. She had clutched it for so long that her will had sealed over it, like bark grown around a nail.
Left in peace at last, Zuni went about erasing herself from the city’s records. She could have settled her accounts at the bank, the housing office, the clinic and elsewhere electronically, but she chose instead to go in person. More often than not, when she arrived at an office she had to deal with mechanoes rather than people. She didn’t mind. The mechs were fun to puzzle, and they had no feelings to hurt. The glittering bulbous heads, like chromium balloons, purred ritual greetings at her. Was she certain she wished to close her accounts, terminate her insurance, cancel her lease? the mechs wanted to know. Yes, Zuni declared. Was she leaving Earth? No, she was returning. Perhaps she was planning to die? What human is immortal? Zuni countered. That answer never failed to silence the chromium heads.
“I am perfectly clear about what I am doing,” Zuni would say firmly. “Now kindly settle this matter as I have instructed.”
At that the glittering balloon head (or occasionally a human head, modishly wigged and painted) would nod obediently and comply with her requests. Her lease, her insurance, her media subscription, her allotment of food and energy were set to expire in a week. For seven days more she would remain a citizen, secured to the Enclosure by digits in databases, but then the numbers in every account bearing her name would go to zero, and so far as the human system was concerned, Zuni Franklin would cease to exist.
She spent much of those seven days riding pedbelts and gliders, tracing French curves through Oregon City. She had drawn those curves, once upon a time: And this was what kept her running errands in person through the city, this fascination with the glass and alloy shapes her blueprints had taken on. Many others had worked on the design of Oregon City, to be sure, but she had usually been given the final say. Her pen had moved armies of builders. So each soaring tower, each fountain, each plaza encircled by arcades, each sculptured facade echoed shapes that had lived inside her since childhood. The entire city bore the familiarity of an obsessive dream.
She could journey by tube to Bombay City or Arctic City or anywhere else within the Enclosure, and see much the same dreamscape. Once disease and weather had been eliminated, once the Enclosure had been sealed tight, once travel throughout the system had been made free, there seemed little point in concocting a different design for each city. The problems of feeding and housing millions of people did not change from place to place. The ocean yielded up the same materials everywhere. Media spread the same shows, ideas, products, and language around the globe.
The simulated weather during that last week was halcyon blue. Yet Zuni felt certain the weather outside the float city was stormy. When water trembled in drinking glasses, authorities blamed the extraction pumps or tidal generators, but she knew the shudder came from the ocean. As a young woman, she had stood atop cliffs on the Oregon coast watching storms, and had felt the stone tremble beneath her. Waters that could shake the basalt margins of a continent could easily shake a glass city.
Outside it would be March, a time of riotous green, a time for bursting out of shells. During all her years i
nside, where seasons did not matter and weather played out as electronic shows, Zuni had still kept track of the turning year. And now it was spring.
She went about saying good-bye to her friends beneath this virtual blue sky, knowing that the real sky, far above, would be changeable, now surly, now serene. Her friends had never been numerous, and several of the dearest had already taken the journey she was about to take. They had never been numerous because she was a difficult woman to draw near, at once passionate and aloof. “Like fire inside an icicle,” was how one of the draftsmen had described her.
Coyt, the draftsman, was old enough to remember seeing icicles, for he had grown up with Zuni in one of the Oregon lumber towns, back in the 2020s and 2030s, when the last of the North American rainforests were being clear-cut. He had studied forestry with her, and when she switched to the study of architecture he tried to switch as well. But exponential calculus baffled him, so he had to settle for becoming a draftsman in order to stay near her. Over the years he had trailed her from project to project, a timid shadow. Once he even worked up the nerve to ask her to mate with him, and she agreed. Much of her remained hidden, however, a cold inaccessible depth, and when they separated amicably after two years he was relieved. Living with her had been like walking in limestone country, where at any step one might plunge into a sinkhole or cave. Indeed, three mates had vanished after spells of living with her, and she had merely noted each disappearance with a hazy smile. All in all she was a woman to admire from a distance, Coyt decided. Still, no one inside the Enclosure knew her better than he did, or brooded more about her inscrutable plans.
So Coyt was the last person Zuni called on to wish good-bye. If he did not guess the truth, no one would. She found him at his studio, working on a design. Even though the details were blurry, she recognized the drawing as Project Transcendence, a space-going version of the Enclosure.
His palms kissed hers in greeting. “You leave tomorrow?”
“Bright and early.” Zuni sat next to him at the drawing console.
“And you won’t tell me where you’re going?” he asked.
“Do you really want to know?”
Images of the colossal orb of cities glowed on the screen. Fitted with sails and great flaring scoops, the gauzy sphere was designed to voyage through space, gleaning energy and materials from interstellar dust, freeing humankind from Earth. Transcendence: Zuni repeated the word to herself as she waited for Coyt to answer.
Finally he said, “I’ve always respected your secrets.”
“Then indulge me this one last time.”
“Are you contemplating suicide?”
“Many people would think of it that way, yes.”
“Would I?”
“No.”
“Then I can see you again?” Coyt asked, suddenly hopeful.
“Probably not.” Her fingers traced the outlines of the space habitat on the screen.
His hands reached toward hers, and then shyly retreated. “You and your secrets. You’re like a robin building a nest in a bush.”
Coyt’s habit of speaking in the archaic language of nature endeared him to her. Robins in bushes! She longed to ask him what else he remembered from those childhood years in the Oregon forests. But no, those were the wilds, taboo. “Promise,” she said, “you won’t sniff around when I’m gone?”
“Like a hound dog after a raccoon?”
“Promise?” she insisted.
“Yes,” he answered glumly. Then he stammered, “I just don’t understand. You’ve never given up before.”
If he wanted to believe she had been defeated by the complexities of the new space architecture, then let him. That might be the kindest illusion she could leave with him. “So that’s the future you want?” she said, gesturing at the diagram of Project Transcendence.
He looked puzzled. “What other future is there?”
She kept silent. The gauzy construction of interlacing filaments brought back memories of spider webs, dew-soaked, each strand beaded with water diamonds. Were there still spiders?
“That’s where we’re bound to go next,” he said. “It’s where you’ve been pointing all these years. Escape from Terra.”
“Escape,” she echoed.
“Merge with the cosmos.”
“Finally go home,” she said.
He clapped with pleasure. “That sounds like my old Zuni. You’ve never lost your vision.”
“No, I haven’t,” she assured him.
Packing her few remaining things in the apartment that night, she thought regretfully of Coyt. Once she had imagined he might go with her. But gradually she had realized his mind was too brittle. It would have snapped if he had tried to follow her. So she must go alone.
She selected from her library two of the rare paper volumes, Carson’s The Edge of the Sea and Lopez’s Elegy for Whales. The other paper books she tagged as gifts for the archives. The remaining volumes, all flexies and discs, she heaved by the armload down the recycle chute. The appliances were all standard issue, and so were the furnishings, so Zuni scrubbed them clean and left them in place.
She snugged the two books into her beltpack, along with the drafting materials from her office. That left just room enough for a first-aid kit, dehydrated food packets, a compass, and the much-folded map. The health-security pass would pin to her traveling gown. After some hesitation she tucked Coyt’s gift into the pack as well. It was a model of the Enclosure, small enough to fit in her palm, with threads of silver to represent the transport tubes, silver beads for cities, and, inside, a blue-green sphere of glass to represent Terra.
As she strapped the pack to her waist, with its tiny cargo of mementos, she recalled how the ancients had loaded graves with tokens for the journey to the other world. Instead of miniature boats, dishes, and icons, she carried totems from her own days.
From vacuum storage she recovered the cotton shirt, wool trousers and leather boots that she had saved for this journey. The boots were cracked but serviceable. Although the shirt’s color appeared to have faded (or perhaps her eyes could no longer perceive colors as brightly as her mind recalled them), the cotton still felt soft against her neck. She would cover these garments with a moodgown, which would also hide the beltpack. The rest of her clothes she dumped into the recycle chute. From the top shelf of her closet she retrieved a scarlet wig and a face mask meant to resemble an Aztec sun goddess. They had been given to her as a joke years earlier by fellow architects, who knew she wouldn’t even paint her face or tint her hair, let alone wear such a frightful get-up.
When the closets were empty, the cupboards bare, every surface in the apartment antiseptically clean, Zuni lay down to wait for dawn.
Next morning the screen of her phone refused to glow when she spoke to it. The food spout yielded nothing but a faint sucking noise. Bank, clinic, every agency replied with zeroes when she queried to see if they remembered her.
She felt a fool, donning the wig and mask, enveloping herself in the flashy moodgown. On her way out she paused at the hallway mirror to see if she recognized herself. A grotesque stranger gazed curiously back at her.
Outside the apartment she pressed her palm against the lockplate, to make sure it had erased her from its memory. The door made no response to her touch.
The pedbelt was jammed with riders. Towering headdresses, wigs of every hue, phosphorescent robes, sequined bodysuits—the usual office-going crowd. When Zuni stepped onto the belt (scarlet tresses wagging, gown flapping over the cracked tops of her boots) no one looked up to notice her. No one paid her any attention as she rode across Oregon City past the honeycombed towers, beneath the curving guiderails, to the shuttle terminal.
The ticket machine quizzed her when she requested passage to shuttle stop 012. Did customer know that 012 was a repair terminus? Yes, Zuni replied. Was customer authorized to enter a vulnerable zone? For answer, she waved her health pass at the scanner, and a ticket wheezed out.
The sea must have calmed, for t
he shuttle raced through the tube without any hint of turbulence. As Zuni rode toward the mainland she tried not to think of all she was leaving behind. Medicine, for example. Her least reliable implant—a kidney—was probably good for another twenty-five years or so, time enough for her to reach 100, if none of her original organs failed first. To wish for a longer life would be greedy.
When the shuttle began decelerating for 012, the other passengers glanced up in mild puzzlement. There shouldn’t have been any stops before Rocky Mountain Nexus, another hour away. Zuni called reassuringly, “Just routine maintenance,” as she ducked out of the car onto the platform. The doors clapped shut behind her and the shuttle whooshed away down the tube.
The repair station was deserted. At each turn, locks read her health pass before they would let her through. Near the last checkpoint she tossed her mask and wig and gown into a vaporizer. Then she entered the sanitation chamber, a gleaming white sphere that was the Enclosure’s outermost defense against the wilds. After the security locks were satisfied, a round hatch swung open and she stepped into the damp green tangle of an Oregon forest.
She stood for a long time with eyes lowered, smelling the mosses and trees, listening to wind sizzle through the needles of new-growth firs, feeling the sponginess of soil beneath her feet. She ached.
After a spell she unfolded the map and blinked at it. Tears made her vision even hazier than usual, blurring the lines, so she tucked the map into her beltpack and set off through the woods along a pathway of memory. When she had last walked these slopes, fifty years earlier, they had recently been clear-cut. Raw dirt, oil cans, bone-white slash. Even though the fir and hemlock and spruce had grown back abundantly since then, she still recognized the contours of the land. Without pausing to rest, she continued past remembered outcroppings of granite, past waterfalls, over sand dunes, until the ocean was in sight. Even the spectacle of breakers didn’t slow her, and she kept on, trotting now, down the last slope into the cove where the domes clustered. She laughed aloud at the sight of the colony, at the timid way the windmills and greenhouses and gardens huddled together. Yes, what this place needed was a good architect.
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