Is it the wilds he’s hungry for—or is it only me? Teeg could not decide. His eyes would glaze over whenever she told him about the wilderness. But then, his eyes glazed over and his breathing quickened whenever she leaned close to tell him anything. He was so ensnarled in the mating rigmarole that she would probably be disentangling him for months before they could actually make love. In the meantime, whether or not he was hungering for the wilds, he was certainly hungering for her, and that appetite would have to do, until she could deliver him into the wilderness. Once he was outside, the sea and forest could work on him. If she had to be the bait that lured him out there, then bait she would be.
She had already reported to the other seekers, after her two weeks of prospecting, that Whale’s Mouth Bay would make an ideal location for the settlement. Tonight, when the crew met for an ingathering, she must speak with them about Phoenix, before his passion cooled or his wilderdread returned.
Bits of gravel crunched between her boots and the city’s metal floor as she made her way through the abandoned tank farm to the meeting place. A ghostly blue light filtered over from the neighboring gamepark. The whine of sirens and the high-pitched bleat of scoreboards rose above the city’s perennial hum. Occasionally, when the air-current shifted, Teeg could hear the voices of revelers, giddy with desperate pleasures. Except for those noises she might have been creeping over a pockmarked asteroid, for the tank farm, useless now that the petroleum supplies had given out, was being demolished to make way for an expansion of the gamepark.
The city devours itself, Teeg reflected. Stalking among the ruins of the tank farm, she was reminded of her mother’s handiwork in Portland and Seattle: buildings reduced to steel skeletons, skeletons reduced to lengths of girders, girders melted down into metal soup, congealed into ingots, shipped away for the building of the Enclosure.
Most of the pipes that had once led from this place to refineries on the mainland had already been carved up and recycled. Where oil tanks had stood there were now only circular black stains, like gigantic colonies of bacteria. Teeg avoided them, not wanting to leave oily tracks. In the vague blue light she found the tank where the crew always gathered. According to the numbers painted on its side, this would be the last one demolished. But how long before the wreckers would show up with their laser torches? How many more weeks to plan the escape?
She climbed the ladder, cranked the great spoked wheel of the valve. Quietly she lowered herself through the opening. After nearly two years of gathering here with the others each week to worship and to plan the settlement, she had grown accustomed to the way voices, footsteps, even breathing echoed and re-echoed within the cylindrical walls. But she had never overcome the feeling, as she crawled in through the valve, that she was entering the throat of a machine.
Inside, the others were already seated in a circle, meditating, four men and four women in silvery shimmersuits. She peeled away her gown and streetmask, stepped out of her boots, bowed low to the unseen presence. No one looked up as she settled cross-legged onto her mat. Now the circle was complete. Teeg stilled herself, waiting for the power, waiting for the inward voice to rise.
From the center of the ring a flare cast rainbows on the oil-slick roof and curving walls. The crew formed a rainbow of flesh, Teeg thought. There were Arda’s high-cheeked cinnamon, Jurgen’s chocolate, Indy’s olive, Sol’s velvety purple-black, the sandy skin of Coyt and Marie, the pale blond of Josh and Hinta. A rainbow of flesh, and a rich genetic pool for starting a new society.
In shadows beyond reach of the flare she could make out the bulky shapes of crates waiting for transport out through a pipeline to the coast. These supplies were the last they needed for the settlement, and would soon be hidden away in the basalt caves at Whale’s Mouth.
Her thoughts were still skipping about over the details of the escape when the first wave of power swept round the circle. It lifted her, let her fall again, as waves toyed with her when she bathed in the ocean. Center in, she urged her buzzing brain. Still yourself. Yet she found it hard to let herself go. With everyone anxious for departure, would they accept Phoenix? she kept wondering. And even if they did, would he be strong enough to survive outside?
The other faces around the circle were already on the threshold of trance, eyes lowered, jaws slack, and Teeg had to keep herself from rushing to catch up with them. Rushing never carried you inward to the still point. The only path to the center was through patient listening. Legs crossed, feet tucked up close, hands loosely clasped in her lap, she tensed all her muscles and then slowly relaxed them. After one last glimpse of Marie’s serene weather-beaten face and Sol’s stunning profile—white beard on black skin—she lowered her eyes. Sol and Marie, these were the two she liked to carry with her into the darkness, for they shone so brightly with the inner light.
The day slowly emptied from her: crowds shuttling through avenues, lightsigns commanding attention, gliders whizzing overhead, the blare of informats, the syntho-smells, the petty abrasions of a day in the city. The buzz in her head thinned away until all she could hear was breathing. Then the echoes of breathing dwindled away and she was bathed in silence. There were no words, no images, only stillness.
Wave after wave of power poured through her.
Sometime later a voice spoke. Teeg did not bother to attach a name to the speaker. She contained the voice, and the voice contained her.
“Praise the Lord,” it chanted, “praise the sun, praise the moon, praise the green world.”
The words sifted down through layers of silence into her mind.
Then another voice: “Lift the stone and you will find me, cleave the wood and I am there.”
And another: “One of the mystics said, ‘Whether you like it or not, whether you know it or not, secretly Nature seeks and hunts and tries to ferret out the track in which God may be found.’”
And a voice rose up and sang greenness until all the world was green, and every last cell of Teeg’s body was dancing. And she found words vibrating in her own throat, but what spoke was no more her voice than the others had been: “Another wishes to join us, a walker who is weary of the city. His heart longs for the wilds. Shall he become part of our circle?”
Silence for a time, then a whisper: “The flow unites all things, the living and the unliving. In the depths of me, within our circle, in every creature and gathering of creatures the river flows on.”
And later: “The city is a dam across the river. The people of the city are deafened. They do not hear the waters.”
More silence, an atmosphere of silence, and Teeg was floating inward to the source, and there was a shining in the stillness, and she was the shining, and there was nothing but light.
After a time stillness gave way to movement, silence gave way to the sound of blood in her ears. She had eased back into the supple envelope of her skin. Now she saw again through eyes of the body. Where the shining had been there was an oil-smeared patch of floor.
At last Jurgen’s baritone murmured, “Peace,” and the circle began to stir, bodies stretching, faces lifting to gaze at one another. The indrawing had been accomplished once again, they had touched the center, and the seekers were refreshed for another bout of work together.
Teeg remained still for a few moments, relishing the inward peacefulness. She knew she would have to speak for Phoenix convincingly. Thoughts of his callused feet and skittery rabbit eyes made her smile.
A hand grasped her from the right. Turning, she found Hinta’s depthless blue eyes fixed on her. “Tell us about your new recruit,” Hinta said.
Suffused with the tranquillity of ingathering, the other faces were watching her. Better now than later, Teeg thought, and so she began telling them about Phoenix. He was a global weather man, she explained, a seer of patterns and reader of maps. He knew how the satellite spy-eyes worked, so he might help them avoid detection by Security. He was twenty-seven, a walker, in good physical condition but in need of yoga training. Not a meditator, out of touch with the flow, he was all tangled up in the tendrils of the Enclosure, but she would remedy that, would teach him yoga and the arts of contemplation and loving, if they were willing to accept him. Both his parents were dead, and he had no siblings, no close relations, so far as she could tell no eros mates or even goodbuddies to bind him to Oregon City. And she kept on without knowing why she told these things, about his milky pale skin showing through the face paint, his shuffling walk and cockeyed wigs and his frightened heart.
“You want him very much?” Hinta asked quietly.
Teeg was saved from having to answer this by Jurgen, who demanded gruffly, “And his record?”
“Clean,” Teeg answered, grateful to him. Mountainous Jurgen, the rock. Depend on him to shrug eros aside and talk about nuts-and-bolts. “I scanned the net, and Security shows him a pure insider. Health board the same. He went to state nursery, school in New Mexico City, geo-meteorology institute at Baltic, then to work here in the big bottle.”
“Sounds like another sleepwalker,” Jurgen mused.
“But he’s waking up, I know he is.”
“Because of the attractions of one Teeg Passio?” Marie suggested in her grandmotherly way.
“Of course,” Teeg admitted without hesitation. She had danced the dance of sex with enough men and women to recognize the softening in the gaze, the heat of nearness, as if Phoenix were melting in the retort of his own body. “Sure, that’s part of it, the desire for me. Maybe at first that was all of it. But now I think he’s smelled the outdoors on me, and that’s drawing him on.” She didn’t know how true that was, but she wanted it to be true.
“It doesn’t matter,” said Marie. “Wilderness is wilderness, and you’re territory enough to keep him busy a long while.”
Coming from anyone but Marie, this remark would have embarrassed Teeg. But when this old woman—the veteran spirit-traveler, the keeper of songs—when she focused her gentleness on you and told you the truth, how could you be ashamed?
“We could use someone who knows maps and weather,” Sol observed, the words shattering into coughs at the end.
“So we could,” Jurgen agreed. He peered at her across the circle. Black curly bush of hair, then broad forehead crisscrossed with scars, then wide-set eyes and mashed-in nose. Battering ram, hammering a way forward. Lovely chocolate skin. He and Hinta were the nearest to being leaders of this leaderless crew. And now he was demanding, “You trust him?”
Teeg had settled that with herself the night Phoenix brought the fossil to her in his outstretched palm. “He won’t betray us.”
“He would submit to the test of our ingathering?”
“He would have to.”
“And if he fails?”
“We leave him behind,” Teeg whispered.
Hinta wrapped her long healing fingers more tightly around Teeg’s hand. Sol grasped the other, with the uncertain grip of an ailing old man. All around the circle hands joined, a chain of flesh. There was a lull in the talk, then a deeper silence, as the questioning turned inward. Each person listened into the communal silence. Teeg’s last thought before entering the stillness was that schools of fish veered that way, spontaneously turning, as if guided by an inner signal.
Sometime later Jurgen rumbled, “My sense is that we should accept this new one into our circle. But he is to learn no secrets until he dwells in the light with us.”
“I agree,” said Hinta.
“That speaks my mind,” muttered Sol.
“And mine. And mine.” The welcome carried from voice to voice around the circle until all had agreed, and so the decision was made.
Blueprints of the settlement soon appeared on the overhead screen, superimposed on a map of Whale’s Mouth Bay. The oil tank hummed with technical discussions of heat-gain, amino-acid balance, heliostat orientation.
Amid that babble, Teeg heard someone mention the name of Zuni Franklin. Curious, she asked, “What about Zuni?”
“We’re going to adapt some of her early dome-flower designs for the settlement,” Sol explained.
“Does she know about that?”
Sol’s eyebrows tilted upward, white strokes on his plum-dark forehead. He was aging, eaten up by the plutonium lungrot, and it pained her to see it. “You don’t imagine we’d tell her, do you?”
“I’ve been tempted,” she confessed.
All eight faces swiveled toward her then. The mixture of feelings was hard to sort out—alarm, regret, surprise. Hinta was the first to say what the others apparently felt, for heads nodded as she spoke:
“Teeg, we all have reason to be grateful to Zuni. She’s done each of us favors. But in the end we all had to break away from her influence, because she’s identified herself with the Enclosure.”
“Yes, yes, I know.”
“And now she’s a danger to us. If she knew about our plans to move back outside she’d have Security down on us in ten minutes.”
“And yet,” Teeg objected, “she gave each of us a little shove that helped land us here in this grimy tank, plotting escape. Doesn’t that seem a bit odd, for a woman as private as Zuni Franklin?”
“She’s private, secretive, but she’s influenced many thousands of people,” said Jurgen.
“Influenced them to come inside, yes. But what about us? Here we are trying to get back in touch with earth—and what does that have to do with Zuni?”
Jurgen heaved his massive shoulders. “That’s puzzled me for years.”
“Well, it’s too late now to do anything about it,” Hinta insisted. “We’ll do well to integrate your new recruit before we have to clear out of this place. We’d never be able to convert such a devout leader as Zuni in the time we have left.”
“No, I suppose not,” Teeg said reluctantly.
“Then it’s settled?” Jurgen looked from person to person, seeking consensus. “Do we need to submit it to an ingathering?”
No, no, the heads gestured.
“Then the circle has decided,” Jurgen announced. “After Teeg’s recruit, we will take no new seekers.”
Teeg unbent her legs. Shuffling across the oil-slick floor to record on the map the data from her last trip to the bay, she realized from the stiffness in her body how tense she had been during the silent gathering. She took a deep cleansing breath and allowed herself to smile. Zuni was lost to her. But at least they had agreed to risk opening the conspiracy to this gawky friend of hers, with his callused feet and visionary eyes. Now all she had to do was transform Phoenix into a true wildergoer and mystic.
17 January 2030—Seattle
Lonely. I can summon up books on the informat, music and theater and games on the video, data on the Cybernet. What I can’t summon up is an adult companion, let alone a mate. Wreckers are a hard lot, men and women both. For most of them, dismantling is the only work they can get. I find it hard to stand more than one night’s mating with any of them.
Inside the Enclosure—as Gregory informs me, dried old prune that he is—there would be potential lovers in abundance. But they all prance about in costumes and masks, hiding that shameful thing, the body. And sex is fenced round by so many rules, even looking into someone else’s eyes requires months of labor. I don’t see how anyone has the patience to work through all the levels of loving. Hence the eros parlors, I suppose. They give the quick fix. Libido express. Just lie down, insert your credcard, and the orgiastic field embraces you.
I guess if you can’t eradicate the flesh you can trivialize it, with eros parlors, or etherealize it, with mating rituals.
In our solar room Teeg and I go naked. She enjoys her body—the toes like kernels of corn, the seashell ears, the pouting nipples and the little silken purse between her legs. She has learned every yoga position I have to teach her, and she practices them with a gay seriousness. The pleasure in her body, like the limberness, is easy at age nine, out here in the wilds where no one has taught her that the flesh is something one must escape.