Terrarium: A Novel

ONE

Phoenix thought of her as the barefooted walker. From the morning when she first loomed into view like an unpredicted planet, she set up fierce tides of desire in him.

On that morning the pressure inside Oregon City and inside his head seemed no greater than usual, no more conducive to visions. A blue wig dangled stylishly about his ears, facepaint disguised his features, and a portfolio of satellite film beneath one arm identified him as a man bound for the office. Chemmies regulated every bodily process that needed regulating. All his life was in order. But when Phoenix emerged from his apartment, ticking off the day’s plans in his mind (work, then breeze-tripping for lunch, electro-ball in the afternoon, and eros parlors in the evening), suddenly there she was, a barefooted woman pacing in the wrong direction on the pedbelt. Slap of naked flesh on the conveyor. By matching her stride to the speed of the belt she managed to stay at the same point in the corridor, just opposite his doorway. Bustling along, yet never stirring from her chosen spot, she reminded Phoenix of the conjoined whirl and stillness of a gyroscope.

Surely a madwoman. Escaped from the health patrollers. Phoenix backed rump against his apartment door just as it clicked shut. Embarrassed, he glanced down, but not before catching a glimpse of red hair escaping from the woman’s hood, her cheeks showing feverishly through a skimpy glaze of cosmetics, her green gown actually darkened with perspiration below the arms and around the neck. The corridor trapped her scent, forced him to breathe it. Smell of hot animal. Her knees, thrusting against the gown at each step, nudged a raw spot in his brain. Just a beast, a throwback, he thought—and he felt aroused and ashamed.

By lowering his gaze he hoped to give the woman a chance to recover her senses, to withdraw from his life. But down below were those naked feet, slapping the pedbelt, and they sent his gaze skidding back up along her flanks and spine to the hooded face. So he had the misfortune to be staring at her luminous green eyes when she turned on him and said, It’s called walking, you idiot.

Abruptly she stopped her pacing and tugged the hood closer about her face; the conveyor hustled her out of sight.

Phoenix blinked. Gone back to her cave, he thought. Crawled under her rock. Good riddance. He filled his lungs slowly, emptied them. The ventilator banished her smell within seconds. Well, that’s over, he decided.

But the image of her face—flushed, practically naked beneath the film of cosmetics—stuck fast in his memory. He went on to work, transferring from pedbelt to escalator to elevator, and eventually to the roller-chair that deposited him at his desk, where he bent as usual over the satellite monitors. But rather than hunt for signs of hurricanes, thermal inversions, radiation storms, for the thousand signs of Terra’s assault on the human system, his eyes kept tracing the shape of the woman’s face in the cloud patterns, the bulge of hip and breast in the contours of continents.

After work he yearned for something stronger than breeze-tripping or electro-ball, so he proceeded directly to the gamepark for a day-ending orgy in the eros parlors, where he hoped to wipe the woman’s image from his brain. At the door of the eros parlor he drew back, however. The rosy electronic din inside the lovebooths seemed distasteful. So he joined his cronies at the pharmacy, thinking he would take a chemmie. That would surely obliterate all memory of the barefooted walker. But as he tilted the drink toward his lips, something caught in his throat, and he set the chemmie back on the counter. As the shutters came down over the eyes of his companions, he slipped away from the pharmacy and rode straight home.

There was no barefooted woman pacing on the conveyor outside his apartment, of course, since both pedbelts were jammed with riders. Of course, Phoenix reassured himself. What do you expect? Patrollers would have caught her by now. Already be coaxing the beast out of her. Make her a good citizen of the Enclosure, no threat to anyone.

He spread his palm against the lockplate on his door, then stood there for a minute in the opening, glancing sidelong at the double stream of riders. All their feet were covered, their legs motionless, their heads properly hooded and wigged, their bodies hidden beneath gowns, their faces expertly masked. All as it should be. No one returned his wary glance.

It pained him to enter the apartment. The room’s orderliness, which had comforted him that morning, oppressed him now. The dials glinted on his console, row after row, perfect circle after perfect circle. The glittering angles of his metal furniture seemed too harsh. Nothing invited his touch. The photo-murals on the wall were just then shifting their kaleidoscopic designs to mark the beginning of a new hour, but they could not be touched, they were only patterns of light. Feeling like an idiot—she had called him that, an idiot—Phoenix stood in the middle of the room, tongue hanging out, sniffing and tasting. Dead air, without taste or smell. Beastly smell she had. Sweat? Green eyes like flares. He tossed a few pillows on the floor, left a cabinet standing open, and dragged half a dozen costumes from their hangers, but without any real hope of disturbing the order of the place. He oozed a dollop of veg from the food dispenser, sniffed it without appetite, then flung the green stuff down the recycle. Slumped in the softest chair, burning his lips on a cup of hot narco, Phoenix scrutinized the geography of his life, seeking some wild place that might accommodate the longing aroused in him by this barefooted woman.

Days ticked by. Each morning before work he peered out through the spyhole in his door, but with less and less fear—or was it hope?—of seeing her. Just when his life was composing itself again, when the clouds on the satellite monitors were beginning to resemble clouds again instead of lips and ankles, one day he looked out and there she was, pacing along in her sweat-darkened green. The lens of the spyhole made her appear swollen. Her naked feet seemed to dangle from a bulbous torso. Her head, with its fringe of red hair, bobbed ridiculously. Horrible, really, now that he had a good look at her. Wondering how such an unappetizing creature could have enthralled him, Phoenix boldly opened the door. It was a mistake. Her full stare caught him. Moist cheeks behind the glaze of makeup, long-boned feet, swim of legs beneath the gown.

This time she pronounced the words icily: It’s called walking. You should try it. Melt away some of that flab.

By reflex, Phoenix smoothed the gown over his cushiony stomach. Flab? How dare she refer to his body! The chill in her voice told him she had no memory of their earlier meeting. All these days while he had been suffering around Oregon City with her image spiked into his brain, she had salted him away in the vaults of forgetfulness together with a million other once-glimpsed faces.

Do you mind? she said, never breaking stride. There’s less traffic here. Fewer pedbelt zombies to compete with.

Looking away down the corridor he shook his head no, then in confusion nodded yes, unsure just what he was answering. The woman kept at her walking, matching the conveyor’s pace. Phoenix shilly-shallied in his doorway, immobilized by a sudden vision of himself as he must appear to her: bouffant wig of iridescent blue, face painted to resemble the star of Video Dancers, every inch of flesh cloaked in a moodgown. And, yes, to tell the truth, a wee bit heavy in the paunch. He could not bear to look down at the fireworks of color he knew his gown would be making in its vain attempt to express his inner pandemonium.

I don’t mind. He felt his nostrils flare with the scent of her. Why should I mind?

Good question. But there’s a lot of drecks who do.

She smiled, and he winced. The smile, the private sharing of words, the eye contact, the exposed face—it was all coming in such a rush, shattering the rules of sexual approach.

Unable to bring himself to name a body part, he stammered, Your walking things …

My feet?

Yes. Do they hurt?

Never. That’s why I go barefoot, to keep them tough.

And why have them tough?

So I can walk barefoot.

But why walk at all? Phoenix demanded in vexation. Before he could slice into her circular reasoning, passengers trundled around the curve, and the woman, with no attempt at disguising her smile, crossed to the other pedbelt and rode away out of sight.

For a long time he stood in his doorway, hoping. But traffic thickened in the corridor and the woman never reappeared. Or perhaps she did pass again, duly costumed and painted, camouflaged in the crowd. Passing, she might even have seen him, and still not been able to distinguish him from the hundred others who were decked out this morning in iridescent blue wigs, and whose faces were patterned after that video actor. Phoenix felt paltry, lurking there on his threshold, at once conspicuous and invisible.

Finally he surrendered to the day, to work, to an afternoon of lightshows, to an evening of brain-puzzles at the gamepark; and then he surrendered to the return home, to the waterbed, to sleep. Dreams of the barefooted woman stalked through his skull. An extra dose of narco did no good. A bout on the eros couch, with the gauge spun all the way over to visionary delight, offered only mechanical relief. Electronics could not reach the territory in his mind where the woman’s image kept burning and burning.

Desire melted away what little order remained in his life. The apartment grew shabby. Friends stopped scheduling daykillers with him when he failed to show up a second time or a third. His costume suffered, at first from neglect and then from his deliberate search for idiosyncracy. He wanted to be visible to the woman when he met her again. So he hauled out unstylish clothes, ones that paid no attention to his body chemistry but just hung upon him in outrageous combinations. His wigs grew increasingly bizarre. His facepaint appeared slapdash, as if applied in the dark by a vindictive cosmetician. Wherever he went in Oregon City the glances of passersby slithered along at his heels.

He wondered how long he could traipse around like this before the health patrollers carted him away for a little hormonal therapy. Perhaps he should even turn himself in for a checkup. Judging by all he had been taught concerning health, he was a profoundly sick man. Yet he did not feel sick. He felt exhilarated.

At work the satellite photos looked more than ever like a stew of lips and breasts and trailing hair. His supervisor made him rewrite a third of the eco-warnings and advised him to cut back on the narco. But Phoenix was not applying narco or any other balm to his inflamed heart. Nothing half so vivid as this love-ache had ever seized him before, and he was in no hurry to escape the exquisite pain.

Days off work he spent vainly trying to discover some timetable in the barefooted woman’s exercise. But he had no more luck than the ancients had at predicting sunspots. When she did loom into sight, he kept indoors, not yet ready to meet her again. Every night he paced with naked feet around the perimeter of his room. Five steps and then turn, five steps and then turn: the blisters multiplied on his soles. After two weeks of this, questioning his sanity at each step, he could walk for an hour without panting, and his feet began to leather over.

Training on the pedbelt was more risky, only possible at two or three in the morning, when anyone else traveling through the corridor would most likely be as eccentric as he. Soon he was able, with very little puffing, to stay abreast of his room for half an hour. Struggling to defeat the conveyor’s ceaseless motion, he did not feel like a gyroscope—he felt like a lunatic.

On one of his three A.M. training sessions he was striding along, engrossed in the study of his feet, when her voice broke over him:

So you tried it.

Looking up, he met the achingly familiar stare. Yes, he mumbled. I kind of wondered what it was like.

And what do you think of it?

Oh, it’s interesting. Witlessly he repeated, Very interesting.

For several seconds the two of them paced side by side, two lunatics out for a stroll. From the corner of his eye Phoenix enjoyed the woman’s profile, her skin showing more nakedly than ever through the paint, her legs kicking against the loose fall of gown. Elegant concentration of energy. The eyewall at the center of a typhoon, that’s what she was.

Good for the heart and lungs, she said.

I suppose so, he agreed, shocked by her language.

And legs.

He loosed the sexual word without thinking: Legs.

The woman calmly continued, as if she were in stage seven of the mating ritual. My name is Teeg Passio.

Passio?

Something wrong with that?

It’s just a famous name, that’s all.

Famous for the wrong reasons, she said. My father … she began in a tone of bitterness. There was a spell of silence, broken only by the pad of feet, the rumble of the conveyor. And don’t you have a name? she eventually asked.

Phoenix could sense the expectant twist of her body as she waited for a response. Name? Sure, sure. My name’s Marshall.

Only Marshall?

The back one’s Marshall. Front one’s Phoenix. Phoenix Marshall.

Her green eyes seemed to be measuring him. You’re not offended? About exchanging names?

No, no, certainly not, Phoenix boasted, with a show of bluffness. I don’t really accept all the … well, you know, the formalities.

Stupid waste of time, aren’t they?

Stupid, yes indeed.

All this business about mating rituals, she proclaimed, dismissing his lifelong code of behavior with a sweaty stroke of her greensleeved arms, and when you can exchange names, and when you can look in another person’s eyes, and when your little fingers can touch. Ye gods. Idiocy.

Idiocy, he mumbled, swept up by those passionate gestures.

It’s like a web, all these rules. Every time you want to open your mouth or lift your hand there’s a rule binding you.

Phoenix heard himself agreeing earnestly. Like a web, exactly. Everywhere you go you get tangled in it.

Cut loose, is what I say.

Cut … loose? He stilled his tongue, alarmed by the turmoil her talk was stirring in him. He could feel the sweat trickling down his face, streaking the paint, dampening the collar of his moodgown.

How often do you walk? she asked.

Oh, every day. Sometimes twice a day.

Any special time?

His eye was caught by the surge of flame-colored hair around the edges of her hood. His fingers twitched. Morning, he said, then quickly added, or night, just about any time. My schedule’s flexible. And you?

Her smile seemed to raise the temperature in the corridor several degrees. I don’t keep a schedule. But maybe we could set a time, meet for a walk. That is, if you—

I would. Yes, very much, he said with a rush.

I know places we can walk without these jackass conveyors getting in the way.

Jackass? he wondered. But all he said was, Anywhere’s fine.

How about Shasta Gamepark at 1600 tomorrow? South gate?

Sure, he agreed, reduced to monosyllables. Fine.

Peace. With palm lifted, she began to drift away on the pedbelt.

Wait, he begged. In a panic he thought for ways to keep her, fearing that such an improbable creature might not survive until tomorrow. Do you live in Portland Complex?

She jerked a thumb domeward. Seven floors above you. Walking again, she kept her place on the belt. Arched above her face the hair formed a red border of turbulence.

And what brings you through here for exercise? he asked.

Looking for a walking partner.

Oh. Again he scrambled for words. Her bluntness dried up his throat. And why do you walk?

The smile again, crippling all his faculties. I’m in training, she said.

Training?

For going away.

11 October 2026—Astoria, Oregon

Teeg and I watch an acorn woodpecker hammer a hole in the trunk of a dead fir, red topknot catching the sun. When the opening is just the right size and roundness, the bird taps an acorn snugly into it. Squirrels cannot dig it out. But the woodpecker can, and will, some February day when the bug population is running low.

Teeg’s five-year-old eyes open wide in wonder. Is it killing the tree, Mommy? she wants to know.

The tree is already dead, I tell her, poisoned from the things people sprayed, and the woodpecker is using it for a cupboard.

And all the open cities are becoming husks, abandoned shells, as people flood into the domes. At least we can salvage the steel and copper, the aluminum and chrome, the bits of Terra tied up in the old places. The dismantling of Portland is nearly complete. Sad, plucked city. Brick streets and wooden houses are all that remain. I mourn by bringing Teeg out here to Astoria for a weekend, where we admire the acorn woodpecker. Astoria, thank God, will not be recycled, for it is built mostly of wood. The salt and wind and birds can have it. We have seen fourteen birds since yesterday morning, six of them able to fly.

TWO

Unlikely as it seemed to Phoenix, Teeg did meet him at the gamepark. Afraid she might not recognize him in the crowd of merrymakers and chemmieguzzlers, he wore the same mask and costume as yesterday. He would have dangled a sign about his neck, if need be, to attract her attention. Who cared a fig about the stares? He stood on a bench to make himself a landmark, high above the passing wigs, and presently he spied her slipping toward him through the crush of people. Facepaint instead of mask, baggy robe kicking at her feet, hood tied crookedly about her head. Thrown-together look, as usual.

So you came, she announced, with what seemed like mild surprise. She drew him away from the racket of electronic warfare, past the simulators where people lined up to pretend they were piloting rockets or submarines, past the booths where ecstatic customers twitched upon eros couches.

Zoo time, Teeg muttered, leading him on. She said something else, too, but Phoenix could only make out her bitter tone and not the words, for two opponents were haranguing one another on a nearby shouting stage.

Why so angry? he wondered, following her along the pedbelt. As the conveyor banked around a curve, Teeg swayed to one side and her hip swelled against the fall of her robe. She seemed unconscious of her body. How could he begin mating ritual with a woman who ignored the simplest sexual rules? She might rip off his mask and lick his chin in front of everybody. Who could predict?

Soon they reached a deserted corner of the park, where the pedbelts gave out. Antiquated amusement booths, with shattered windows and dangling wires, were heaped on both sides of a disused footpath.

This is left from a skategame kids used to play, Teeg explained, patting the scuffed walkway with her foot, back when kids used their legs.

Legs again. Apparently she would say anything. Blinking at the body-word, Phoenix answered, I remember, you hunched down like this, and he assumed the bent-knee posture he had perfected as a boy on skates. Looking up, he found amusement in her green eyes, and quickly looked away.

So you were a skater? she said, and then she was a squall of questions. What work do you do? Who are your parents? Any children? Ever go outside? How do you like living in Oregon City?

And so he told her about his training in geo-meteorology, his job studying satellite images (Because I have a good eye for patterns, he boasted shamelessly, something the cybers still can’t match), and he told her about his mother’s death in the 2027 fusion implosion at Texas City, about living with his father who tested chemmies in New Mexico City, then about his father’s bad trip and the eleven-year drug coma that followed. He mentioned his twenty-one years of schooling, the move to Oregon City a year ago after his father’s death, the days at work and nights at the gamepark. His sperm was duly banked, he told her, but so far as he knew, none had been used. Eugenics probably thought one of him was enough. He admitted that he had begun the mating ritual with a bevy of women, but had rarely pursued it to—he paused, reticent—consummation. He confessed that he knew all about weather but had never stuck so much as his nose outside the Enclosure, confessed, in a voice that surprised him with its urgency, how restless he felt, how lonely, how trapped.

All the while Teeg was nodding yes, yes, that is truly how it is, and between questions she was telling about herself: She had spent most of her childhood in the wilds, traveling about the northwest corner of the continent with her mother, who had been in charge of dismantling Portland, Vancouver, Anchorage, lesser places. Her father was one of the architects of the Enclosure, a monster of rationality.

Teeg’s last name finally plunked into a slot in his brain. "Passio? Gregory Passio? You’re his daughter?"

Yes, she replied. That’s the particular monster. You’ve heard of him?

He was one of my childhood heroes. He and Zuni Franklin. They made me want to be an architect.

Then why’re you a weatherman?

I got hung up on third-order topology. When the cyber simulated my buildings, they kept falling down.

You don’t need math for meteorology? Teeg asked wryly.

Sure, but not so much, not where I come in. After the cybers spit out the weather maps, I see the patterns. Gestalts. Kind of a right-brain thing.

She looked at him skeptically, the kind of look you would give a food-stick that seemed off-color. What did she think of him? Blue-wigged noodle-brain, or stage-seven lover? Impossible to tell. Talking with her was like tracking a typhoon—you never knew which direction she would take.

Gregory Passio was my father all right. And not much of one. You could have picked a better hero. She paused. Her facepaint was so thin he could actually follow her turbulent emotions with a sidelong glance. Don’t mix him up with Zuni Franklin. She’s a different fish altogether.

Fish? he said.

You know, swimmy-swimmy? She laced her fingers together and wriggled her joined palms in the air before her. Evidently the confusion still flickered in his eyes, for she explained: I just meant that Zuni Franklin and my father both helped design the Enclosure, but for very different reasons. She’s no monster.

I don’t understand.

You couldn’t, she said bluntly, and she went on to tell Phoenix how her father had made her come inside when she turned thirteen, legal breeding age. And then he had drowned while up supervising the construction of Alaska City. Now she worked mostly outside the dome, back on land, as a troubleshooter repairing tubes and transmitters and auto-machinery. Her ova had been used for eighteen—or perhaps twenty, she forgot—children, all of them grown inside other women. She had been mated three times, she told him, never happily, never long, twice with men and once with a woman.

Eighteen offspring? Phoenix whistled. In a steady-state population that was