Terrarium (28 page)

“I'll mend hers by going there.”

“Perhaps, perhaps,” Zuni answered skeptically. “Just remember that some wounds are slow to heal. Some never do.”

Teeg imagined the older woman was thinking of her home village in the mountains, where lasers had left a scar of cinders and bubbled glass. “I promise to come back here, at least for a while,” Teeg said, “no matter what I find in Portland.”

“Me too,” said Phoenix.

His slightly crazed, devoted expression was that of a queen's fool, willing to follow his mistress to triumph or disaster, and Teeg realized that was exactly how she and Zuni had been treating him. A feeling of tenderness swept over her.

“Teeg, you are fortunate in love,” Zuni said, kissing foreheads with Phoenix.

“You sure are,” said Phoenix with delight.

In the morning Teeg discovered Phoenix stealthily moving gear from her pack into his own. His body, whittled
down by months of training inside the Enclosure and by weeks of labor out here, was thin but muscular. His movements had lost most of their city awkwardness, and he was growing more beautiful to her every day. What she liked most right at the moment were the muscles in his back, flexing as he bent to stow her things in his rucksack.

“You'll catch a cold traipsing around like that,” she murmured, opening her eyes as if just waking, “and then what earthly good are you?”

He turned to her, naked, and it was evident that his body had been dwelling on something other than a journey. They made love swiftly, fearfully, and Phoenix clung to her in silence long after climax. What was he thinking? What happened to last night's carefree fool? Who was this quivering child she held in her arms? His weight against her was a bag stuffed with mysteries.

Later they air-showered, then joined the others for breakfast. Everyone seemed glum. Because we're breaking the circle by leaving, Teeg realized. Coyt added to the gloom by reporting that he had overheard scraps of HP broadcasts: something about exiles and camp and the garbled name of a bay. He had tried in vain to catch the drift of the message, but the receiver would only pick up advertisements from the commercial channels. It couldn't possibly be us, he announced without conviction.

His news was received in silence. Even Jurgen, whose good spirit was normally as abundant as his flesh, pushed the food around on his plate and kept mum. Teeg was afraid the trip would begin that way, in gloomy silence. But as hands reached out to help them shoulder their rucksacks, Marie began the traveling song. Voice after voice picked it up, as they had picked up the song for Sol, and like the death song this one had the sound of rivers in it, the sound of wind through trees, the sound of earth's movements. With this melody in her ears Teeg led the way up Salt Creek to the falls. As she and Phoenix climbed the rockface, the voices merged with the sound of water.

From the top of the falls, looking down at the flower-shaped cluster of domes in the meadow, Teeg waved. Tiny figures waved back, then scattered to their various labors. One stayed behind longer than the others; Teeg knew her by the blaze of white hair. The old woman did not wave, but just stood there with face uplifted.

“She's found a daughter after all these years,” Phoenix said, “and now she's afraid of losing you.”

“I know,” said Teeg.

Diminished by distance, Zuni might have been a fleck of foam. The whole of Jonah Colony might have been froth on the meadow. The slightest breeze, and everything would vanish.

As if reading her thoughts, Phoenix said, “I wonder if there'll be anything here when we get back.”

Teeg shaded her eyes and studied the sky over the ocean, searching for the long-winged silhouettes of gliders. Blank sky, of course. The powers that swept down on you rarely showed their faces ahead of time.

“Who knows?” she answered. “Will the world still be there after you blink?”

Phoenix shrugged, or perhaps he was merely balancing his pack. Pointing upstream, he said, “Portland, two hundred kilometers,” and set off walking. They retraced the route Zuni had taken, along Salt Creek to its junction with the Wolf, past the burned-out site of her village. Even loaded down with backpacks, they made better time than she had, reaching the repair station after three days. The sight of the gleaming travel-tubes, these outflung arteries of the Enclosure, was unsettling after so long in the wilds.

Knowing better than to invade the protector fields, they gave the station a wide berth, hiking northeast across the broad valley to meet the Willamette River. Teeg was grateful for the flat land after three days of scrambling along creek banks, grateful, after so many kilometers of worming through thickets or ducking under the boughs of trees, for the meadow flowers and grasses that stroked her thighs.
She and Phoenix took turns breaking a path. When he led, he would turn around occasionally to ask with his eyes whether he was heading in the right direction. She would point out the way and off he would trudge, the bulky pack swaying as he walked.

Near nightfall of that third day they struck the river, too near nightfall to risk launching the raft. Once the tent was inflated and the sleepsacks unfurled, Teeg went roving in the meadow to gather flowers while Phoenix heated algae-patties. Late bees hummed in the weeds. Off to the west, where the coastal hills rose like the spine of a sea serpent against a fiery sunset, two birds called to one another: Here I am, where are you? What other beasts filled the night with secret language? Teeg wondered. Except for a sluggish ground hog, three rabbits, and a clutch of squirrels, no four-leggeds had crossed her path.

Teeg loaded her arms with spiky purple flowers—Joe Pye Weed? was that what her mother had called them?—and was just standing up when she saw a dark head lifted above the grasses some few dozen meters away. She almost dropped the flowers. Narrow and long, with great shaggy whiskers, the head examined her. Who could it be? A renegade who'd avoided the HP all these years? A mutant? A bear? She was about to cry out—cry something, Help! or Hello!—when two pointed ears twitched forward on the shadowy head. Teeg flinched so violently the armful of flowers shook. The creature's head waggled. Suddenly Teeg realized that what she had taken for bushy whiskers was a bunch of grass caught sideways in a narrow jaw. Deer! She held very still, not wanting to frighten the animal, wondering how to signal Phoenix to come look. With stately movement the deer turned away from her and ambled toward the river. For a moment the dark body was visible against the even darker, glassy water. Seen thus dimly, it looked perfect, no tumors, no misshapen limbs. The only other deer she had ever seen had been crippled. This one pranced nimbly along the bank.

“Phoenix, look!” Teeg cried, wanting him to glimpse the creature before it disappeared.

Stately and elegant even in flight, the deer went bounding away, tail raised, easily leaping over the tallest weeds. It made scarcely a sound.

Moments later Phoenix came crashing to her side, axe in hand, puffing ferociously. “What's the matter?”

“A deer,” she said.

He peered in the direction she pointed, but the creature had been swallowed by darkness. “A deer?” He repeated the word as if it were the name of a mythical beast, a unicorn or griffin. “Is it dangerous?”

“No, it's the gentlest creature,” Teeg answered. Yet she trembled. There were not supposed to
be
any deer. The teachers had said so. But if deer—what else might thrust its head from the tangled weeds? Maybe a bear, to go with the pawprint Zuni had found?

After supper, while she and Phoenix sat on the bank watching the river flex and sway with the last gleams of daylight, the trembling seized her again. What was the trouble? Reminders of death could shake her like that. But why quake at this reminder of life? Like the deer with its ears pricked delicately forward, its muzzle lifted to catch a hint of anything stirring, Teeg strained all her senses to discover what lurked ahead.

“The river looks like skin over muscles,” Phoenix said, touching her shoulder, “like about right here, or here,” trailing his fingers along her throat, “or here,” gently massaging her back with both hands.

Teeg grew still under his fingers, heavy and powerful and calm like the river. While they made love she imagined the river entering her, filling her, and she became the river, there was only the river, surging and surging toward the sea.

Sunlight shone lemony through the polyfilm bubble of the tent. Teeg was able to savor the exquisite morning only briefly before scuffling noises outside drove her from the
sleepsack. The racket came from Phoenix, who was locked in a three-way wrestling match with the aerator and raft, and was evidently losing.

“How does this infernal thing go?” he demanded.

Teeg disentangled him from the clinging blue fabric, spread it out on the river bank, and within half a minute had the raft inflated. “Like so,” she said.

Phoenix stared at the gossamer craft as if she had conjured it out of thin air. “Why did you bring me along on this expedition, anyway?”

“For your cooking,” she replied with a straight face. “You do wonders for algae.” When he appeared to be genuinely downcast she felt a sudden swelling of love for him. Hugging him, she babbled, “And for your rabbity looks, your delirious ways in the sack, the great moony face you get when the world surprises you. For the way you dote on Zuni, for carrying half my gear in your rucksack, for taking off that stupid mask and wig and coming out here with a wildwoman like me. That's why.”

He looked at her with an effort of soberness, but the corners of his mouth pushed upward. “Is that all?”

“If I listed them all, we'd never get to Portland.”

The Willamette carried them toward Portland on its brawny shoulders all that day and the next and the next. Phoenix squatted in the front of the raft, Teeg in the stern, piloting them around snags and rocks. From repair missions, she was familiar with the buoyant craft and with stretches of the river. Unlike the larger ocean raft, this one was roofless, allowing them to see in all directions. The shore was mostly overgrown with alders and brambles, but here and there a meadow opened, aflutter with grasses and bright midsummer flowers.

It was hard telling how many unburned towns they passed, for these were smothered with vegetation and nearly indistinguishable from the surrounding fields. But the scourged places were easy to count, nine of them, for each was a heap of slag and bubbled rock where nothing grew. In
three days on the river they floated past eighteen spots where the soil was bare and chalky. Dump sites, possibly, or spills. Phoenix kept a tally in his notebook, where he also recorded the changes in radioactivity levels.

Twice they glimpsed deer, at dusk. Teeg imagined she saw wolves or hulking man-like beasts on the hills near the river, but invariably the shapes turned out, in the binoculars, to be rocks or bushes. Every now and again the raft would startle a beaver or muskrat, which plopped into the water and swam for cover. Occasionally a great blue heron would lurch into the air on its ungainly wings, or else sit in dignified composure on its fishing rock and eye them coldly as the raft drifted by. Smaller birds stitched the air constantly with their flight, tree to tree, bank to bank. Watching them, Teeg imagined the air over the river was a garment the birds kept in good repair.

Each evening they tethered the raft and made camp on the shore, while the sun burned down in a vast conflagration behind the sea-serpent mountains to the west. Teeg ate facing east. She doubted whether she would ever be able to look at the sunset again, or at fire, without remembering Sol's burning.

The third afternoon on the river, Teeg guided the raft to shore early. When Phoenix raised his eyebrows questioningly, she explained, “The map says there's only two more bends before the outskirts of Portland—or what used to be Portland—and I want to be fresh when we get there.”

By massaging her back that evening Phoenix tried to soothe her, but she could not relax. All night her mother's face kept rising into consciousness like a balloon. The lips moved, but Teeg could not hear what they said, could not even tell whether they spoke angrily or lovingly. Meditation, riding her breath, summoning the inner light to the center of her belly—none of these exercises brought calm. When at length she slept, dreams of swooping gliders and raging fires exhausted her.

In the morning she blinked awake to find a grotesque
antlered face leering down at her. She immediately buried herself in the pouch and screamed “Phoenix!” The beast roared and she screamed again, and then she stopped yelling as she recognized the roar … the laughter. Flopping the covers back and glaring, she cried, “Phoenix, you idiot! You nearly scared me to death!”

The familiar goofy mug grinned beneath the antlers. “Look what I found snagged in a bush,” he said, inclining his skull to display the horns. Clumsily strapped to his head with tape, they wobbled as he moved. “What do you call a male deer?”

“Buck,” she answered, still angry.

“Some buck lost these. Big fellow, too. Look at all the points.”

The rack was indeed a fine one. Teeg found herself admiring the way the points curved up gleaming, branch after branch, like a candelabrum. But she was reluctant to give up her anger. “You look ridiculous.”

“I know it.” He grinned and grinned, as if determined to drive all the night-fears out of her.

Phoenix wore the antlers while he fixed breakfast, still wore them as the loaded raft glided into the river.

“Will you take those stupid things off, so I can see what's ahead?” Teeg demanded crossly.

Without answering, he undid the tapes and stowed the antlers away. Then she felt bad, knowing he only clowned to distract her from brooding about the journey's end. But she did not want to be distracted. She had been circling back for too long to this place where her mother had died—or had not died—to give up brooding about it now.