Why aren’t we sucked into space, with our precious air? I am too astonished to feel afraid. Next comes the woman from Borneo amid a cloud of butterflies. Once again, child-light feet tiptoe along my spine, then up she climbs to the top of the tree and disappears. One by one, the other women follow her through the hole, taking the sound of their clapping with them.
I glance at Patrick, who watches me, the rainbow belt tightly balled in his fist. The sunlight has drained from his face. “It’s dicey,” he says, “but they may pull it off.”
The hull groans. The panicky voices of the crew swell in my ear.
The Pygmy skips in from the ring of men, stamping his feet, yet when he pounces on my back he weighs less than a cat. Up he goes, vaulting from my shoulders to the tree and on up from branch to branch and through the opening. Next the antlered herdsman, then the Siberian with his clanging copper amulets, then the immense Mongolian in his iron helmet and tuxedo, nearly weightless, all of them, skittering up my back. As each man vanishes, the cabin grows quieter.
Last of all comes Luke, in his bowler hat and red loin cloth, his face solemn above the white beard, the lightning streaks on his chest flashing. He glares at me. “You must not move, Constance. You are the threshold, our way in and our way out.” Then he climbs swiftly, and just before disappearing calls down, “Mind her, Patrick!”
The hull ceases to groan. The crew hushes. I hear only the thudding of my heart. Then a creek-water voice pours over me, calling, “Daughter! Daughter!” I lift my head, and feel the prickle of hot skin as my cheek peels away from my sweaty forearm.
“Hold still, Connie!” Patrick’s voice is muffled, as though he shouts through layers of cloth. “You’ll trap them out there!”
His hand on me is a fly I shrug off. “Grandmother,” I whisper. Her brightness dims the air. The bird mask is thrown back and her face is webbed in wrinkles, the mouth cinched tight with bitterness. Her silver braids gleam. In place of arms she has russet wings, folded now, and her toes are talons. The papoose gazes over her shoulder with my face.
“Come away, Daughter,” the bird woman murmurs.
There is a resistance in me, but it gives way before the pressure of her stare. I gather myself to rise, ignoring the man’s fumbling efforts to hold me.
“Come, child, I will take you to the soul’s country.” She opens her wings. The undersides glow with the soft luster of a full moon. The papoose gazes at me with my own eyes.
I am drawn to my feet. The wings open wider, and I step toward them, but a serpent coils around my waist and yanks me backward an instant before the wings can embrace me.
“Daughter!”
“Grandmother!” I wail, clawing at the rainbow snake that binds me, and I tumble backward, knocking the man down, but he pins me to the deck and keeps tightening the belt.
“Connie,” he hisses, “wake up!”
Suddenly I recognize the voice. “Patrick, you’re hurting me.”
“Is she gone?”
I gaze wildly about, but can no longer see Hawk Soars or the baby. I nod, sobbing.
Patrick loosens the belt a little. “Crikey, you’re strong when she gets in you.”
Between sobs, I say, “Why won’t you let me go with her?”
“And kill my wizards and crash the ship? I’d sooner throttle you.” As though to demonstrate his willingness, he picks me up and sets me roughly in my seat at the console. “Now put your head down, just like before.”
As my cheek touches the console, there is a sharp high whistle, and the cabin goes dark, the ventilator quits, my screens black out. The stewards grind to a halt. Gabble roars from the earphone, Sonya Mirek screeching, the captain barking orders, then static, then dead air. I hear a scuffle from above, a pounding on the hull, then nothing but my own gasps. The lights flare as the back-up power kicks in, then dim and go out. We are left in utter darkness.
Her strength is in me. The ship may die, but I can soar without it. I snatch the rainbow snake from my waist and fling it away. I smack the hand loose from my neck. I could snap this man like a twig. He pants, his voice gone small and fearful. “Listen, Connie. You’ve got to put your head down, or you’ll kill them. You’re their way back in.”
In the darkness I hear the scrape of talons on the floor, feel air move from the slow beating of wings. She waits for me. I can crawl onto her shoulders, become the papoose, fly with her. Or I can stay here in this life, puny, mortal, and walk on my own legs.
I stare into the gloom, unable to see her. Why doesn’t she grab me, force me to go with her? Why leave me this choice? Seconds pass, like bubbles swelling and bursting.
“Grandmother?” I whisper. No answer.
“They’ll die, Connie,” the man cries. “We’ll all die.”
In the darkness and silence, I hold the spinning Earth inside me, the sheen of oceans, the continents with their snowy mountains and meandering rivers, the forests and prairies, and the host of living creatures, sadly diminished, battered, but beautiful still. At last I choose. “No, Grandmother, I will not leave.”
There is a rush of air, the sharp high whistle of a hawk, and she is gone.
The cabin lights flicker on, the ventilator hisses, stewards purr, monitors glow, and the earphone sputters with talk. The captain announces that Sonya Mirek has been sedated. All stations report systems normal. The ship appears to be undamaged.
I bend over the console and lay a wet cheek on my crossed arms. I weep and weep. Patrick strokes my hair.
Presently, a dusky foot appears through the hole at the top of the tree, then two bony legs, then the entire scarecrow figure of Luke Easterday, who eases down from branch to branch, steps on my back, and hops to the floor. “You frightened us, Constance!”
“Leave her alone,” Patrick says.
“The door was locked.”
“I said leave her alone. Can’t you see it tore her up?”
The old man grunts. The other shamans descend the tree and scramble over my back, heavier now, their trinkets and beads jangling. They encircle me, charged with triumph from their journey, chattering in their many tongues. Patrick translates for me. They have spoken to the powers, tuned the cosmic strings, sung the melodies of Dreamtime.
Have they truly? I don’t know what to believe. When I go back to my home on that miraculous, exquisite globe, I must walk in the woods, wade in creeks, hunt for wildflowers, search for birds and butterflies, foxes and frogs, to see if Earth has begun to heal.
No longer a stepping-stone, I rise and stretch. Every joint aches. I gaze at the spot where the hawk woman stood in all her splendor. Two long russet feathers lie on the deck. I pick them up and place one behind each ear. Noticing, Patrick smiles and runs his palm over my cheek. I have been wrenched out of a world I thought I knew and thrust into a bewildering new one, unsure what I have lost, what found.
Credits
Earlier versions of the stories in this collection were originally published in the following periodicals and books:
“The Audubon Effect,” “The Circus Animals’ Desertion,” “Dancing in Dreamtime,” and “Travels in the Interior” in Omni; “The Land Where Songtrees Grow,” “Sleepwalker,” and “Terrarium” in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction; “The Anatomy Lesson,” “The Artist of Hunger,” “Ascension,” “The Engineer of Beasts,” “Mountains of Memory,” and “Clear-Cut” (under the title “Tree of Dreams”) in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine; “The First Journey of Jason Moss” in Poet & Critic; “Quarantine” in Habitats, edited by Susan Shwartz; “Eros Passage” in New Dimensions 11, edited by Robert Silverberg and Marta Randall; and “Touch the Earth” in Edges, edited by Virginia Kidd and Ursula K. Le Guin.
“The Engineer of Beasts,” “The Circus Animals’ Desertion,” and “Mountains of Memory” were later adapted for the novel The Engineer of Beasts. “Terrarium” and “Quarantine” were later adapted for the novel Terrarium.
Author’s Note
Most of the stori
es in this collection behaved themselves and quit haunting me after they were finished. One of the exceptions was “Terrarium,” which kept stirring my imagination long after I had written the final scene. I wondered how Phoenix, this cautious man, would find the courage to abandon the Enclosure, the only world he has known, and escape with Teeg into the wilds. I wondered how Teeg acquired her daring, and her passion for nature. Would these seemingly mismatched lovers go outside alone, or with fellow conspirators? If there is a conspiracy, how was it formed? How would they escape? How would they survive in the wilds? Would the security forces discover them, and, if so, what punishment would follow? Has Earth begun to recover from the ecological breakdown that forced the move into the Enclosure? What species have survived the pollution and climate disruption, and what ones have perished? Is there any prospect for reconciliation between the human and natural worlds?
As I wrote my way toward answering such questions, the stories “Quarantine” and “Touch the Earth” emerged, and eventually the tale of Phoenix and Teeg grew into a novel called Terrarium. To give you a taste of the novel, which is also available from Indiana University Press, here are two sample chapters. In chapter 4, while outside on a repair mission, Teeg surveys a bay on the Oregon shore as a possible site for a colony. She tries to imagine what her mentor, Zuni Franklin, a designer of the Enclosure and an advocate for moving humankind inside, would make of the plans for an escape into the wilds. In chapter 10, Teeg takes Phoenix to a meeting of the conspirators, in hopes that he will pass their test and be accepted as a member of the group. With or without him, they will make their move soon.
CHAPTER FOUR
On the beach at Whale’s Mouth Bay, amid boulders and sea gulls, Teeg lay roasting in the sun. Against her naked back and rump the sand felt like a thousand nibbling flames. Salt-laden wind fanned her hair. Even through the breathing-mask she could smell the ocean. Between repair missions, when she was required to stay inside the Enclosure, more than anything else she missed the feel of sun on her skin.
During this trip she quickly finished her assigned job—replacing fuel cells on a signal booster atop Diamond Mountain—and had three hours left over for scouting. Most of the time she used for discovering how hospitable a place the bay might be, testing for radiation, toxins, soil nutrients, the quality of water. These last few minutes of her allotted time she lay basking in the sun, as a celebration for having found the right place at last. She would have to make sure Whale’s Mouth had been omitted from the surveillance net. It probably had, since no tubes or laser channels or signal avenues passed anywhere near the place. Just another piece of real estate long since erased from human reckoning. She hoped so. Phoenix could tell her for sure. And she would need to spend a week here, later on, to run more tests on plants and microbes and air before she could assure the other seekers that this was indeed the place for the settlement.
Phoenix’s maps had led her straight to the bay, her shuttle flying low and coasting along on compressed air to avoid the patrollers and the sky-eyes. On each repair mission, stealing time to explore locations for the settlement, she was more and more tempted to stay outside alone. But whenever she wavered, all she had to do was close her eyes, think about the plans for the settlement, and the faces of the seven other conspirators would rise within her silence. She was one of them, a limb of their collective body.
Lying there on the beach, she felt the sweat gathering in her navel, between her breasts, on the slopes of her thighs. The crash of surf against the volcanic walls of the bay sent shudders through her. Occasionally an eddy in the wind snatched the odors of fir and alder from inshore and filled her with the pungency of green. Thoughts swung lazy as hawks through her mind.
A sound pried her eyes open. Two gulls squabbling over a fish. Life was creeping back into the land, the ocean, though on nothing like the scale her mother used to tell about. Her mother. Dead up north in Portland. Murdered. Will I ever gather the courage to go there, Teeg wondered, and look at the place where they killed her?
The cliffs surrounding the bay bristled with young trees and bushes. Life reclaiming the land. The plants seemed hardier than animals; they recovered more quickly, perhaps because they had evolved in an atmosphere even more toxic than the present one. She had noticed on this flight that there were fewer scars of bare soil in the countryside. Perhaps, as Zuni always insisted, Enclosure had been the only way of halting the energy slide, the famine for materials, the poisoning of the planet. If it was halted. An oceanographer had confided to Teeg (one did not say such things in print or on video) that it might take another fifty years for all the toxins to wash off the land masses into the seas, and perhaps another fifty years before the oceans showed whether they could survive the poisons. “We might already be dead and not know it,” he had whispered. “Or then again, the ocean may surprise us with her resilience.”
Resilience. She liked that, the springing back of nature. She smeared the sweat across her belly, enjoyed the springiness of her own flesh. Womb inside there, where never babe did dwell. Enclosure. The great domed cities, wombs spun of glass and alloy and geometry. Mother helped provide the materials for them. Zuni and Father helped provide the designs. And I? I want out.
She propped herself on elbows and surveyed the bay. Yes, this was the place to build a colony—hills shouldering down to within a few hundred meters of the shore, then a meadow traversed by a sluggish river, and then the beach of black sand and black volcanic boulders. The north arm of the bay was a massive headland, topped by the ruins of a lighthouse. There was even an abandoned oil pipeline running along the old roadbed nearby, connecting across eighty kilometers of ocean to the tank farm in Oregon City. Ideal for smuggling out equipment and supplies.
When she had first visited this place as a child, on one of those rapturous holidays with her mother, the pipe had still carried oil and the shoreline had been half a kilometer farther west. Snags of the old coast were still visible as gray outcroppings, great broken teeth, farther out in the bay. On one of their recent outings Phoenix had assured her that the polar icepacks had stopped melting. “One more benefit from the transition to solar living,” he explained. That meant the new coastline would probably remain stable for a while.
A strand of marsh grass blew along the sand, clung to her ribs like a green wound. She peeled it away and wrapped it about her left thumb. Will Phoenix decide to come out here with us? she wondered. The grass made a vivid ring on her sun-pinked flesh. Sitting up, she hugged her knees. Can he shake himself free of the city? And will the others let him join our circle?
A bank of clouds shut away the sun, and the air grew chill. Teeg rose, slapped sand from her legs and buttocks. Cleaning grit from her back would have to wait until she took an air-shower at the sanitation port. Despite the chill, her body still felt atingle from the sun. She slithered into boots and shimmersuit, tightened the breathing-mask over her face. Through goggles the bay still looked beautiful. Running shadows marked the passage of clouds across the knobby black walls of the cliffs. Surf exploded rhythmically on the boulders. She wanted to make love with that roar in her ears.
Aloft in the shuttle, Teeg hovered for a minute over the beach, before heading inland toward the nearest port. She skimmed across the meadow, sun winking in the river, then she climbed the foothills at a height some ten meters above the tips of spruce and hemlocks. There was joy in balancing the tiny craft on its cushion of air, riding the thermals like a falcon. From above, the slopes looked solid green, a carpet of moss, as if you could walk from treetop to treetop without ever touching the ground. Some patches still showed brown where the last clear-cuts had not yet mended, or where toxins had concentrated. But everywhere the forest was coming back. The oceans provided cheaper substitutes for cellulose, without all the mess of lumbering.
Between the first range of hills and the somber mountains, she could just make out stretches of the old coastal highway. Scraps of concrete and tar showed through the weeds. In places the ocean
had backed into valleys and covered the roadbed. A charred clearing beside the road and a scattering of rubble marked the location of a dismantled town, probably some fishing port. The map Phoenix had given her mentioned neither road nor town, identified nothing but landforms and the frail web of tubes.
From the peak of the next range she spied, away down in the mountain-shadowed Willamette Valley, the glowing travel-tube. Its translucent glass pipes, frosty white and glittering like an endless icicle, stretched north toward Vancouver City and south toward the clustered domes of California. Whenever she glimpsed the tube system or the domes from outside, she was amazed at their grace, and she thought of her father. Whatever shape you could reduce to a mathematical formula, he would weep over. But that was the only beauty he had ever learned to see.
While Teeg watched, a freighter poured its flash of blue lights through the northbound tube.
She let the shuttle skip lightly on the updrafts along the far side of the coastal range, dipping down into shadows. The valley stretched away north some two hundred kilometers to Portland, her mother’s place, the place of death. Teeg shivered, trying to shut the scene back in its mental cage. Yet I must go there, she thought, go and face whatever remains of her.
In the shadowed valley she looked for the yellow beacon that marked a gateway to the Enclosure, her thoughts drifting, as they often did, from her mother to Zuni, who had grown up in one of the lumber towns on these slopes. Sheep used to graze in this valley, Zuni would tell her, and the hills were green with mint, and fruit trees covered the terraces like ornate stitchery. Teeg had always been surprised, the way the older woman’s eyes would soften when she told about the Willamette Valley.
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