Phoenix thought of her as the barefooted walker. On a day when the pressure inside Oregon City and inside his own head seemed no greater than usual, no more conducive to visions, he emerged from his apartment and there she was, pacing in the wrong direction on the pedbelt. By matching her stride to the speed of the conveyor the woman managed to stay at the same point in the corridor, just opposite his door. Bustling along, yet never stirring from her chosen spot, she reminded Phoenix of the conjoined whirl and stillness of a gyroscope.
This prodigy backed him rump against his shut door. He looked down, but not before catching a glimpse of red hair escaping from the woman’s hood, cheeks glowing through a skim of cosmetics, green gown actually darkened with perspiration below the arms and around the neck. The corridor trapped her smell, the reek of a hot animal. She was a throwback, he told himself, aroused and ashamed. By lowering his gaze he hoped to give the woman a chance to withdraw from his life. Sight of her naked feet sent his gaze skidding back up to her face, and so he had the misfortune to be staring into her luminous green eyes when she turned on him and said, “It’s called walking, you idiot.”
Abruptly she stopped her pacing, and the belt carried her out of sight, bare feet and all, beyond a curve in the hallway.
Phoenix emptied his lungs. The ventilator soon banished her smell, but the image of her face, flushed and naked beneath the film of cosmetics, stuck fast in his memory. He went on to work, easing from pedbelt to escalator to elevator, and eventually to the roller-chair that carried him to his desk, where he bent as usual over satellite monitors. But rather than hunt for solar flares, hurricanes, ozone gaps, storm fronts, or the thousand other signs of nature’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, instead of gaming or chemmie-tripping, he went straight home. There was no barefooted woman pacing outside his door, of course, since the pedbelts were crammed with riders. He pressed a thumb to his lockplate, then stood for a minute in the opening, watching the double stream of riders. Their feet were shod, their legs still, their heads properly hooded or wigged, their bodies hidden beneath gowns, their faces masked. No one returned his wary glance.
It pained him to enter the apartment. The room’s neatness suddenly oppressed him. Nothing invited his touch—not the sharp angles of his furniture, not the glinting console, not the wall murals that were just then shifting their designs to mark a new hour. The air smelled of nothing, tasted of nothing. He tossed a pillow on the floor, left a cabinet standing open, dragged a few costumes from their hangers, but without any real hope of disturbing the order of the place. Slumped in the softest chair, burning his lips on a cup of 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 clouds on the Earthsat monitors were beginning to resemble clouds again instead of lips and ankles, one day he looked out and there she was, pacing along in sweat-darkened green. The lens of the spyhole made her appear swollen. Her naked feet churned and her bulbous head, fringed in red curls, bobbed ridiculously. Wondering how such an unappetizing creature could have enthralled him, Phoenix 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, he smoothed the cloth over his cushiony stomach. Flab? How dare she refer to his body. The chill in her voice implied that, while he had been moping around with her image spiked into his brain, she had forgotten him entirely.
“Do you mind?” she said, never breaking stride. “There’s less traffic here. Fewer zombies to compete with.”
He shook his head no, then in confusion nodded yes, unsure what he was answering. The woman kept up her treadmill stride. Phoenix shilly-shallied in his doorway, immobilized by a snapshot view 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. He could not bear to look down at the garment, which was doubtless a fireworks of color, reflecting his inner pandemonium.
“I don’t mind,” he said, his nostrils flaring with the scent of her. “Why should I mind?”
“There are lots of drecks who do,” the woman said.
She smiled, and he winced. The smile, the private sharing of words, the eye contact, the exposed face—it was all coming in a rush, shattering the rules of sexual approach. Unwilling to name a body part, he stammered “Do your walking things 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?” he 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 belt and rode away out of sight.
For a long time Phoenix stood in his doorway, hoping. But traffic thickened in the corridor and the woman never reappeared. Or maybe she did pass again, duly costumed and painted, lost in the crowd. Passing, she might even have seen him, but without being able to distinguish him from the hundred others who were decked out this morning in iridescent blue wigs and the painted face of that video star. Phoenix felt paltry, lurking there on his threshold, at once conspicuous and invisible.
Finally he surrendered to the day, to work, an afternoon of lightshows, an evening of brain-puzzles at the gamepark, and then a restless night on the waterbed. The barefooted woman stalked through his dreams. An extra dose of narco failed to soothe him. A bout on the eros couch, with the gauge spun all the way over to visionary delight, offered only mechanical relief. Neither drugs nor electronics could blank the screen 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 a striving for idiosyncrasy. Phoenix wanted to be visible to the woman when he met her again. So he hauled out unstylish clothes and flung them on in outrageous combinations. His wigs grew increasingly bizarre. His face paint appeared slapdash, as if applied in the dark by a vindictive cosmetician. Wherever he went in Oregon City the glances of passersby nipped at his heels.
At work the satellite photos looked more than ever like a collage of lips and ankles 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 trying to discover some timetable in the 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 turn; blisters multiplied on his soles. After two weeks of this, questioning his own sanity, he could walk for half an hour without panting, and his feet began to leather over.
Training on the pedbelt was more risky, only possible late at night, when anyone else traveling through the corridor would most likely be as eccentric as he. Soon he was able to stay abreast of his room for an hour. Laboring to counter the belt’s motion, he did not feel like a gyroscope—he felt like a lunatic.
On one of his 3:00 AM training sessions, he was puffing along, oblivious, when her voice broke over him from behind:
“So you tried it?”
Glancing back, he met the achingly familiar stare. “Yes. I wondered what it was like.”
“And what do you think of it?”
“It’s interesting.” Witlessly he repeated, “Interesting.”
They 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.
“Good for the heart and lungs,” she said.
“I suppose so,” he replied, shocked by her language.
“And legs.”
He loosed this sexual word without thinking: “Legs.”
The woman blithely continued, as if she were in stage four of the mating ritual. “My name is Teeg Passio.”
He could sense the expectant twist in her body as she waited for a response. “My name? Oh. Sure. It’s Phoenix Marshall.”
“You’re not offended? About exchanging names?”
“No. I don’t really accept all the . . . well . . . the formalities.”
“They’re stupid, aren’t they?” She dismissed the mating code and his lifelong decorum with a stroke of her arm. “All this business of when you can look in another person’s eyes, when you can swap names, when your little fingers can touch! Idiocy.”
Phoenix heard himself agreeing. “Yes, it’s like a web.”
“Cut loose, is what I say.”
“Loose?” He stilled his tongue, alarmed by the turmoil she had stirred in him. Sweat trickled down his face, no doubt 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 along the borders of her hood. His fingers twitched. “Morning,” he said, quickly adding, “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 hastily.
“I know places we can walk without these conveyors.”
“Anywhere’s fine.”
“Shasta Gamepark, then, south gate, at 1600 tomorrow.” She lifted a palm in farewell.
“Wait,” he begged. In a panic he cast around 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.”
“And what brings you through here for exercise?”
“Looking for a walking partner.”
“Oh.” Again he scrambled for words. “And why do you walk?”
“I’m in training.”
“For going away.”
Unlikely as it seemed to Phoenix, Teeg did meet him at the gamepark, where they strolled for an hour on the glass pathways, avoiding chemmie guzzlers and merrymakers. “Remember skating on these,” she asked him, patting the scuffed walkway with her foot, “back when kids used their legs?”
Legs again. She would say anything. “Like so,” he replied, assuming the bent-knee stance he had perfected as a boy on skateboards.
Teeg laughed. “There’s hope for you yet.”
On the following day, they ventured down into the bowels of Oregon City, along pipelines marked EXPLOSIVE, through tunnels pungent with brine. His thighs quivered from the incessant thrum of pumps and extractors. “You forget the whole city’s afloat,” she told him, cupping a handful of ocean water to sniff, “until you come down here. We forget a lot of things.”
Other days, as they wandered among the green vats of the hydroponics district or between the huge whirling energy-storage wheels of the power zone, Phoenix discovered parts of Oregon City he had known about only from hearsay, and, in his anarchic talks with Teeg, he discovered parts of himself he had never known about at all. Signals kept arriving from neglected regions of his body—aches at first, then pleasures.
She was a squall of questions. What work do you do? Who are your parents? Any children? Ever go outside?
And so he told her about his training in meteorology, his job studying satellite images (“Because I have a good eye for patterns,” he boasted, “something the computers still can’t match.”), and he told her about his mother’s death in the 2067 fusion implosion at Texas City, about his father’s three-year drug coma; told her his sperm was duly banked away but remained unused; told her he had never stuck so much as his nose outside the Enclosure; told her, 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: most of her life spent in the wilds, shifting about the Northwest with her mother, who had been in charge of dismantling Anchorage, Vancouver, and Portland; her own work now back outside the Enclosure, in the wilds, fixing communications terminals; her eggs used for nine—or maybe eleven, she forgot—babies, all of them grown inside other women; mated three times, never happily, never long, twice with men and once with a woman.
“You’re licensed to go outside?” he asked.
“Why so surprised?” she answered. “You think all those pipes and tubes and transformers maintain themselves?”
“But aren’t you a risk, having grown up outside?”
“Not many people will take the work. Too messy in the wilds, too dangerous. And those who do, except the suicidal maniacs, know enough about the Enclosure’s defenses to forget sabotage. The most I could do is stay out there after some job and never come back.”
Phoenix pretended to be absorbed in watching his brazenly naked feet scuffle along beside hers. She had him so rattled, he had given up trying to calculate which mating rules they were breaking. “Do you think about that sometimes—staying outside?”
“Sometimes,” she confessed, then after a few more steps she said, “Often. All the time, in fact. I’ve only lived in the city maybe five or six of my twenty-seven years. Here’s the place that seems alien to me,” arms sweeping overhead, the loose sleeves fluttering like wings, “and outside is home. Coming back inside is exile.”
One moment the dome seemed to Phoenix impossibly high, higher than the unroofed sky, and the next moment it seemed a cruel weight pressing down on him.
“Coming back in,” she added, “is like crawling inside a huge sterilized bottle.”
A wave of claustrophobia nearly choked him, like the bitter taste of food long since swallowed. He stopped walking, halfway across Marconi Plaza, and the city snapped tight around him. Glide-rails sliced the air into hectic curves; towering offices and apartments shimmered with the trapped energy of a million lives, tower after tower as far as eye could see. The sudden pressure of the city was so intense that he did not notice for several seconds the lighter pressure of Teeg’s hand on his arm.
“You never felt that before?” she asked gently.
“I guess I did,” he answered, “I just never admitted it before. The frenzy—it’s always there, like death, waiting. But I shove it out of mind.”
“Keep things tidy.”
“Exactly. Tidy, tidy. And then at night I lie in bed and a crack opens in my heart, and blackness creeps out, engulfing me.” He stopped abruptly, ashamed of his passion.
“Yes?” she urged.
But he was too shaken to say anything more.
They parted without planning their next walk. Phoenix rode the belts home, aware for the first time in weeks of the alarmed glances provoked by his haphazard costume and bare feet. People must think he was crazed, afloat on chemmies, reverting to hairy beasthood. Somebody would report him to the health patrollers, for rehabilitation. But he could rehabilitate himself, could fight down the chaos that Teeg had loosed in him.
Safely back in his room, he put everything in its place, ran the sanitizer, gulped a pair of balancers. He scrubbed himself, dressed in his most fashionable moodgown and wig, then applied a fresh mask, painting carefully, copying the face of a crooner whose poster hung beside the dressing mirror.
All that day and the next he rode through the city, catching a lightshow, visiting eros parlors, simming a basketball game, clinging to his old entertainments. He played 4-D chess with one friend, designed murals with another, resumed lackadaisical mating rituals with two women who had nearly forgotten him. And yet he still felt the print of Teeg’s hand on his arm, still heard her voice, so confident in its anarchism, still saw around him, not a city, but a smothering bottle.
After three days of this charade, he gave up and called Teeg. She gazed boldly from the screen, her face unpainted, her mouth a grim slash. “I’ve been sick,” he lied to her.
“Sick.” She echoed the word as if it were a place he had gone to visit.
“How about a walk today?” he asked.
“No walks. I’ll come to your place tomorrow. Bring a map disk from work, okay? Thousand-to-one scale will be fine.”
“I’ll tell you tomorrow. Make sure it’s got the Oregon coast between latitude 43 and 46,” she went on in a voice as tough as the soles of her feet. “You’ll do that, won’t you?”
“Sure, but—”
Her face hovered on the screen like a forbidden planet, then vanished, leaving him to wonder what drove her to ignore the mating rituals, what urgency in her burned through all rules.
The relief map shone upon the wall screen as a snarl of dunes, cliffs, inlets, and river beds, each landform a distinct hue. The disorder of it made Phoenix feel slightly nauseous.
“You don’t carry your own maps on repair trips?” he asked.
Teeg was crouching near the screen, tracing the shape of a bay that hooked into the coast like a bent finger of blue. “No. My shuttle’s programmed to go wherever the job is. I climb out and work on transformers, maybe, or solar dishes, or travel tubes. I look around, but usually have no idea where I am.”
“Usually?”
“I recognize a few landmarks from knocking around with my mother, especially on the coast near Portland, the last place she dismantled.” Teeg crooked her finger to mimic the blue hook of water on the map. “This bay, for instance. Mother called it Wolf’s Leg. We used to go wading there.”
“In the ocean?”
Her eyes turned smoky, with the sudden anger he had glimpsed that first day after gawking at her bare feet. “Yes, the ocean. The stuff we’re floating on, the stuff we’re mining and tapping for energy and growing food in and pumping through the city every day in billions of liters. What’s wrong with wading in it?”
Phoenix forced himself to look at the muddle on the screen. The only straight lines were the tube routes, angling north to Alaska and south to California or trailing away eastward, where further maps would show them reaching the land cities of Wyoming and Iowa, the float cities on Lake Michigan and Ontario, then further east to the pioneer float cities along the New England coast. Every line not showing a feature of the Enclosure was crooked, jagged, bent. Queasiness finally made him look away from the screen. “You’re moving out there someday? To stay?”
“I might.”
“It’s madness. Sure death.”
“If you don’t know what you’re doing.”
“And you know, do you? A few childhood memories, and you think you know how to survive in the wilds?”
“I can survive.”
“Alone?”
Her fists unclenched, her body relaxed. “If need be.”
For the next few days her answering tape informed him she was meditating, or at the clinic, or on a mission, somewhere tantalizingly beyond reach. When he finally did track her down, overtaking her at the base of the fire stairs as she began her daily climb, she told him she was about to leave for a seminar in Alaska City. Something to do with thermionics.
Casting aside restraint, he pleaded, “Can I go with you?”
“Phoenix—”
“I can arrange leave. We can talk after your classes. Walk around. See the sights. The disney’s got mechanical beasts—”
“Phoenix, no. This trip I’ll be very busy. Understand?”
Breathless from the stairs, he halted at the next landing and let Teeg climb on ahead. The determined swing of her hips and the angry strength of her climbing, so alien to everything he had been raised to believe about the body, convinced him that she really would slip away from Oregon City one day, enter that chaos of the map, and never look back. That would mean annihilation—first of the mind, cut off from civilization, then of the body, poisoned or broken or devoured by the wilds. Dizziness sat him down upon the landing. The metal felt cold through his gown. With eyes closed he listened to Teeg’s bare feet slapping on the stairs above him, fainter and fainter as she climbed.
Yes, the work coordinator assured him, Teeg Passio was on a two-week leave. Yes, the Institute informed him, a Teeg Passio was signed up for the thermionics seminar. But when Phoenix reached Alaska City, driven there by his desire to see her, he found that she had not registered with travel control, nor with the health board, nor with the Institute. His return to Oregon City was delayed by a leak in the sea tube—one of his colleagues may have failed to warn about a tsunami—and by the time his shuttle was on its way he felt crazed. The curved walls, the molded seats, the loudspeaker babble: everything squeezed in upon him. Bottle, he kept thinking, glass bottle.
Back in Oregon City he could discover nothing more of her whereabouts. He was tempted to call the health patrollers and report her missing, but that would only get them both in trouble.
Nothing to do but wait, and turn over the possibilities one-by-one like cards in a game of solitaire: She had lied to him about going to Alaska? She had been mangled in some piece of machinery? She had gone outside to stay? Perhaps all she wanted from him were the maps. Discovering he was a meteorologist, she might have lured him into walking just to get hold of them. But no, that was foolish. How many people would have opened their doors to find her pacing, barefooted, and felt only revulsion? She couldn’t have predicted this craving the sight of her would trigger in him.
In those two weeks of fretting he discovered how little presence of mind his ordinary life required. He traveled through the city, performed the requisite bows and signals in conversation, processed skeins of images, fed himself, even played mediocre chess, all without diverting his thoughts from Teeg. He was convinced she had gone outside, into the chaotic world of the map. At odd moments—while a lightshow played or the eros couch worked its electronic charms—he would visualize the map in all its unruly colors, and imagine her as a tiny laboring speck lost in it, wandering through mountains, wading in the blue hooked finger of water.
If she came back—when she came back—he would find some way to keep her from ever again putting him through this agony. Make her take him along next time. But not outside. Somewhere human, safe, the inland cities, the spas. Anywhere but the wilds. He would beg her to change jobs, never leave the Enclosure. And if she insisted on going, he would inform on her as a health risk, get her wilder-license revoked.
Then she would be trapped in this bottle as surely as he was. Trapped, but alive, shielded from that disorder out there, from disease, from weather, hunger, beasts, pain. This yearning for the wilds was simple nostalgia, he told himself, a mix of childhood memories and old books. Yet part of him was not persuaded, the part that trembled when he was in her presence.
His fingers shook as he punched the health hotline number. He explained his concern to the rubbery, passably human face of the mechano on the screen, but without giving Teeg’s name.
“Only licensed wildergoers are permitted to leave the Enclosure,” the mech told him, its jaw slightly out of synch with its voice. “Such personnel must be sanitized before re-entry. Any persons breaking this code, either by leaving without authorization or by returning without decontamination, constitute an infection threat, and will be treated as beasts.”
“What does that mean?” Phoenix asked.
“One who deliberately endangers the human system becomes a part of Earth—a beast,” the mech explained. Within seconds a form headed INFECTION ALERT slithered from the printer.
Fingering the sheet, Phoenix said, “And if a wildergoer breaks the rules?”
“First offense, revocation of license. Second offense, quarantine. Third, exile. Fourth, execution.” The mech paused for what seemed to Phoenix a carefully measured interval, before asking, “Do you wish to report name and circumstances?”
“No. I’m just curious. I have no evidence.”
“Very well.” Again the measured pause, the scrutiny by a counterfeit face. “Infection from the outside is the gravest threat to the human system. You do not wish to report?”
Only when the mech vanished did Phoenix realize that he had been addressing it in polite mode, with face turned aside, eyes lowered, body rigid, as if this digital phantom were the most appealing of human strangers. Two weeks without Teeg, and already the web of inhibitions was tightening around him again.
The messages he left on her answering machine pleaded with her to call, yet when Teeg did finally appear it was not on the phone but at his door, hood thrown back to reveal an unkempt blaze of hair, face bare of paint yet reddened in a way he had never seen before. It was like having a bomb delivered.
“You’re just back from the seminar?” he asked her carefully.
“I never went to Alaska City,” she admitted.
Watching her pad familiarly about his room, Phoenix looked for some taint of wilderness. Her ankles and wrists, jutting from the hem and cuffs of her gown, were the same uncanny shade of red as her face. Did the sun do that? Her smell ran like a fire in his throat. He sensed a lightness in her movements, a thinning of gravity, as she pranced and fidgeted.
“So where did you go?” he said.
She yielded him a faint smile. “Away.”
“Outside? For two weeks?”
“Wolf’s Leg Bay, to be precise. Look.” From the pouch in her gown she tugged the map, now tattered from repeated folding. Cross-legged on the floor, she spread it across her lap and eagerly pointed where he expected her to point, at the blue finger of ocean that hooked into the Oregon coast about 44 degrees. “It was the place Mother and I used to go, all right. The water’s colder than I remembered, and the beach is narrower, but it’s still lovely.”
“You were there all by yourself? With beasts and poisons?”
“The only beasts were a few bedraggled sea lions and gulls.”
Illustrations recollected from childhood began streaming through his mind. “You saw actual sea lions?”
“Not only saw them—heard and smelled them. And the rock flowers! The spray! You’ve got to come see.”
And so she went on and on, in a delirium of talk, tracing her explorations on the map, pulling at his hands as if to lead him there that very moment, looking up occasionally to read his face. The desire he felt for her, and the dread, swelled to encompass the sea lions, the gulls, the ferns and flowering bushes she described in her rapt voice.
“Fossils!” she cried, as if the word alone should convince him to share the delirium with her. “Leaves and shells and even—once—a three-toed footprint between the layers of slate. And in the shallows of a drowsy river I found some tall reeds. Cattails, Mother used to call them. Isn’t that a name? And birds! Why doesn’t video ever show any landscape with birds and trees? Oh, just come look!” And she grasped both his hands and tried to dance him round the room. But his legs would not bend, his whole body was rigid. He wrenched his hands free.
“Teeg, promise me you’ll never go outside again.”
She laughed once, harshly. “How can you say that? Haven’t you been listening to me?”
“You can’t recreate the old world. You can’t crawl back into your mother’s lap. All that’s finished.”
“I don’t need to create anything. It’s all there, waiting. All I have to do is walk into it.”
“To a brute’s death.”
Stretching her arms wide, she spun in a circle, gown and hair aswirl. “Do you see any wounds?” He shrugged, avoiding her stare. But she tugged him around until he was facing her again, looking into her inflamed eyes. “Hasn’t your body taught you anything after all these months of walking? We were made to live out there, shaped to it,” she said, her voice softening. “Humans have lived in the Enclosure thirty years. And before that our ancestors lived outside for hundreds of thousands of years.”
“In misery, sickness, and fear.”
“Not always, not everywhere. Some people lived well, in peace and plenty.”
“In Eden, I suppose.”
“Listen, Phoenix, I know what I’m doing. I’ve been stashing supplies and equipment outside one of the stations ever since I went to work on the repair crew.”
“You can’t go back.”
“Who said anything about going back? I’m going forward.”
“No!” He clapped hands over his ears, frightened by what she was offering.
“Phoenix, please listen—”
“No no no!”
When at last he looked up, she was gone, the door standing open. On the threshold lay a hand-size wedge of grey stone. Stooping warily over it, he could see the faint imprint of a leaf in the surface. With a stiff tablemat he scooped up the stone, held it near his face. There was a damp, dusty smell. The veins of the leaf formed a riotous maze of lines that reminded him of the map’s labyrinth of rivers. Had it been decontaminated? Where had she found it, in what mire out there? For a long time he hesitated, fingers poised above the stone. Then at last, gingerly, he touched the mazy ridges. The delicate lines of the fossil proved hard, harder than his cautious fingers.
The stone felt cold in his palm, slick with perspiration, as he shifted from foot to callused foot before her door. This was her doing, the calluses, the twitching in his legs, the yearning for escape. Passengers streamed by on the belts, whipping him with glances as he debated what to do. But he ignored them, and that also was her doing. Should he report her, get her license revoked, then try to talk her into sanity again? Could he betray her? Or should he let her make those journeys outside, each one longer, until, one day, she failed to return? Could he actually go out there with her? His heart raced faster than it ever had from their walking or stair-climbing.
At last he rang, and the door clicked open. For the first time he entered her lair, smelling her, but unable to see anything in the dim light. He groped his way forward. “Teeg?”
“In here,” she called.
Her voice came from a second room, visible only as a slip of blue light where the door stood ajar. With halting steps, hands raised to fend off obstacles, Phoenix picked his way through the darkness toward the stroke of light. As he approached, the door eased open, forcing him to shield his eyes. In the brightness he could make out Teeg’s silhouette—not naked, surely, but with arms and legs distinctly outlined.
“I found this,” he said, lifting the fossil in open palm.
“That was for you to keep,” she said. “A gift for parting.”
“I didn’t come to return it. I want you to tell me what it means . . . what you want . . .” He halted in confusion. The hard edge on her voice, the blue glare, the inner turmoil made his eyes water. “You’ve got to be patient with me.”
“So you’ll have time to file that infection alert?”
“I didn’t mean for you to see that.”
“No, I’ll bet you didn’t.”
“I won’t file it. I can’t.”
She studied him. “Why did you get it, then?”
“I wanted to keep you safe, keep you inside.”
“Well, I won’t be kept inside, not by you or the healthers or anybody else.”
His eyes still watered, but he could follow her swift movement as she paced about the room gathering vials and cassettes and food capsules into a suitcase. It was a shimmersuit she wore, silvered to reflect sunlight, skin-tight to allow for work on the outside. Even in stage five of the mating ritual he had never seen a woman so exposed.
“You’re not going back outside?” he demanded.
“I’m not waiting here to be arrested.”
“You’re going right now?”
“I hadn’t planned on it. Not yet, not alone. I wanted a few others, to build a little colony.” A shove from her boot sent the case skidding. “But I’m tired of explaining. You’re the fifth one I’ve tried, the fifth walker, and you’re all the same. Maybe you want your body back, I tell myself, maybe you want out of the bottle. But no.”
“You never asked me to go with you.”
“I didn’t want to spell it out. I wanted you to hunger for the wilds the way I do.” Her anger drove her prowling back and forth in front of him. Beyond her, under hanging blue lamps, he could see a glass tank filled with a writhing mat of green. Could they be plants? In the city?
Her glimmering figure drew his eyes. “But how can I want what I’ve never had?” he protested. “This is all I know.” His gesture was meant to include the domed city, the travel tubes, and the other nodes of the Enclosure he had visited, always inside, always insulated from the beast world.
She stopped her prowling in front of him. In the clinging suit her body trembled like quicksilver. Her stare no longer made him wince. Her eyes were the same grey-green as the slate he still held stupidly in his hand. “All you know,” she murmured, grasping him by a wrist, “then come look at this.”
She led him to the tank, drew him down to kneel with her and peer through the glass wall. Inside was an explosion of leaves, tendrils, stems, dangling seed pods, bright blossoms like concentrations of fire, all of it in colors so vibrant they made Phoenix quiver. His eyes hunted for a leaf that would match the fossil she had given him, while his thumb searched out the imprint in the stone. But there was too much activity in this amazing green stillness for him to see anything clearly.
“It’s a terrarium,” Teeg said. “A piece of Earth.”
He ran his fingers along the glass, expecting to feel heat radiating from these intense creatures. But the tank was cool, sealed on all sides. “They’re alive?”
She laughed at what she saw in his face. “Of course they’re alive. That’s dirt, the brown stuff.”
“But how—closed in like that?”
“Wise little beasts, aren’t they?” And she used the word “beasts” tenderly, as he had never heard it used before. “There’s your chaos,” she said, “that’s what you’re saving me from.”
Phoenix started to protest that this was only a scrap of Earth, without animals, without tornadoes or poison ivy or viruses, without winters. But his tongue felt heavy with astonishment. He could not shift his gaze from this miniature wilderness, at once so disorderly and harmonious.
“Well,” she said, her fingers tightening on his wrist, “will you go?”
“I might,” he answered. And then, uncertainly, “I will.”