Terra’s occasional rampages put the newscasters in a quandary. Reports of earthquakes and volcanoes and pestilence in the wilds made life within the Enclosure seem all the more desirable. But if the wilds actually broke through the skin of the human system? And if Terra, on one of these violent sprees, actually killed a few people, swallowed an Arctic research team down a sudden throat of ice, or drowned a repair crew in the ocean outside Oregon City? That sort of news would be disquieting. The trick was to remind people of Terra’s brutality without making them brood too much about the Enclosure’s fragility.
So the first half meter of newsfax unscrolling on Zuni’s desk brought her word of the typhoon, without mentioning damage or casualties, FREAK STORM LASHES OREGON CITY, the headline proclaimed, DOME UNHARMED. At least my architecture is sound, she reflected wryly. How had the travel-tubes fared? No mention of that in the lead story. Curious, she skimmed over the week’s fashion news, skimmed rhetoric tournament results and summaries of World Council debates, skimmed the daily geometries and mating announcements, until she found, eight meters from the beginning of the scroll, a brief notice of damage to the Oregon-Alaska seatube. Typhoon generates high waves, the article stated. Seatube cracks—vacuum partially destroyed—commuter traffic disrupted—protective systems activated—wildergoers quickly repair damage.
Who worked those repairs? With a heart-pounding premonition of what she might find, Zuni spun the newsfax rapidly, eyes skidding over the headlines, until she reached the fine print at the twenty-three meter mark. There were legal notices and production quotas and, scattered among them like somber floor tiles, the black-edged obituaries. With a magnifying glass she studied these death reports, and eventually discovered the tiny caption she had been seeking and dreading: WILDERGOERS DROWN AT SEA. Beneath the heading she found the nine names: Jurgen Marberg, Hinta Wood, Sol Musada, Marie O’Brien, Teeg Passio, Arda Ling, Indy Chavez, Josh Swenson, Coyt Russell. The words strung out below them were painfully small and blurred. She squinted, tilted the magnifier, struggling for sharper focus. At last she made out the words: shuttle demolished—no bodies recovered—died protecting the Enclosure. And so on through a few more perfunctory sentences.
The projector cast a new mural onto the wall in front of her. She glanced up at it, unseeing, then stared again at the black-edged box. No bodies recovered. Zuni shut off the newsfax, but remained seated there, hunched over the blank scroll, thinking. No bodies recovered. Had they used the storm as a cover for their escape? Or had they really drowned?
Another mural slathered onto the wall, and she irritably threw the projector switch. All the machines bothered her now. She hurried around the apartment, turning everything off—the food vendor and fragrancer and ion-generator and all the rest. Soon the place was quiet, dark, with only the lamp at her desk to break the gloom. She sat there absorbing the silence for a few minutes. Her hands lay in the lamp’s glow, palms up, cupping the light.
Could they actually have drowned? After all these years of planning, living a double life, with every detail of her journey plotted out—could it all come to an end in the blind smash of a wave?
Very easily, she admitted after a while. Very easily. The world was not set up to coddle us. It took no reckoning of our plans. Yes, they could very well have drowned. Or they could have survived the storm and slipped through Security’s fingers. The only way to be certain was by carrying through her plan. And if the gamble failed, if the crew had died, well, she would go through with the plan anyway. She was too old to plant new seeds of conspiracy.
She rose from the desk, stretched her arms toward the ceiling. An old woman, she thought, with half my organs manufactured. But the spine is still pretty good, the legs will carry me, and the brain keeps ticking pretty well.
There were many things to do. Vanishing was a harder business than being born. Uncertainty rode heavily upon her as she moved about the apartment, yet it did not slow her down. She had lived with uncertainty too many years to let it bother her now. She had danced with shadows, with hints of conspiracy and fading green memories of Oregon, with architectural visions and the ghosts of hope. She would not quit dancing now.
For the next few days Zuni went about erasing herself from the city’s records. She could have settled her accounts at the bank, the housing bureau, the clinic and elsewhere by vidphone, of course, but she chose instead to go in person. More often than not, when she arrived at an office she had to deal with mechanoes rather than people. She didn’t mind. The mechanoes were fun to fool with crooked answers, and they had no feelings to hurt. The glittering bulbous heads, like chromium balloons, purred ritual greetings at her. Was she absolutely certain she wanted to close her accounts, terminate her insurance, cancel her lease? the mechanoes wanted to know. Yes, Zuni declared. Was she perhaps dead? No, she did not think so. Was she planning on dying? In a fashion, yes; in a fashion, no. That answer never failed to silence the chromium heads for a moment. Evidently the mechanoes possessed no polite formulas for responding to news of quasi-suicides.
“I am perfectly clear about what I’m doing,” Zuni would assure them at last. “Now kindly settle this matter as I have instructed.”
At that the glittering balloon head (or occasionally a human head, modishly wigged and painted) would nod in obedience and carry out her orders. From one tape after another her name was erased. Her lease, her insurance, her allotment of food and energy were set to expire in a week. In a week her vidphone would go dead, the lock on her apartment would cease to open at the touch of her palm. For seven days more she would remain a citizen, secured to the Enclosure by a chain of numbers—the numbers of policies, licenses, bank balances. Then at week’s end all the numbers would rush to zero, and, so far as the Enclosure was concerned, Zuni Franklin would cease to be.
She spent much of those seven days riding pedbelts and gliders, tracing French curves high in the air above Oregon City. She had drawn those curves, once upon a time. And this was what kept her running errands in person, back and forth through the city, this fascination with the glass and alloy shapes her blueprints had taken on. Many others had worked on the design of Oregon City, to be sure, but she had always been given the final say. Her pen had moved the armies of builders. So each tower soaring domeward, each fountain, each plaza encircled by arcades, each sculptured facade echoed the shapes that had lived inside her since childhood. The entire city bore the familiarity of an obsessive dreamscape.
The simulated weather during that last week was halcyon blue. Yet Zuni felt certain the weather outside the float city was stormy. When water trembled in drinking glasses, authorities might blame the extraction pumps, but she knew the shudder came from the ocean. As a young woman she had stood on the Oregon coast watching storms and had felt the cliffs tremble beneath her. Waters that could shake the basalt margins of a continent could easily shake a glass city.
Outside it would be early April, a time of green explosions, a time for bursting out of shells. Through all her years inside, where the seasons did not matter, where weather had been reduced to an electronic ballet played out on the dome, she had kept track of the turning year. And now it was spring.
She went about saying goodbye to friends beneath this illusory sky of blue, knowing that the real sky, far above, was dark and heavy with rain. Her friends had never been numerous, because she was a difficult woman to draw near, at once passionate and aloof. “Like fire inside an icicle,” was how one of the draftsmen had described her.
Richard, the draftsman, could remember seeing icicles, for he had grown up with Zuni in one of the Oregon lumber towns, back in the 1970s and 1980s, when the last of the old growth forests were being cut down. He had studied forestry with her, and when she switched to the study of architecture he tried to switch as well. But exponential calculus baffled him, so he had to settle for becoming a draftsman in order to stay near her. During the sixty-odd years since childhood he had trailed her from project to project, a timid shadow. Once he even worked up the nerve to ask her to mate with him, and she agreed. Much of her remained hidden, however, a cold inaccessible depth, and when they separated peaceably after two years he felt relieved. Living with her had been like walking in limestone cave country, where any step might plunge you through the earth’s riddled crust. Indeed, three mates had vanished after spells of living with her, and she had merely noted each disappearance with a hazy smile. All in all she was a woman to admire from a cautious distance, and that was where Richard lingered.
If he did not guess the truth about her plans, Zuni calculated, no one would. So he was the last person she called on to wish goodbye. She found him at his apartment studying plans for a space habitat. Even though the details were blurry, she recognized the drawings at once: Project Transcendence, a space-going version of the Enclosure.
His palms kissed her in greeting. “You go tomorrow?”
“Yes.” Zuni sat across from him at the glass viewing table. While they spoke, blueprints of the space habitat glowed up at them through the surface.
“And you won’t tell me where?”
“Do you really want to know?”
Images of the colossal orb of cities hovered in the glass. Fitted with sails and great looming scoops, the gauzy sphere was designed to voyage through space without being anchored to any planet or sun. It would glean what energy and materials it needed from the interstellar dust. The entire population of the Enclosure could be housed inside. Transcendence. Zuni repeated the word to herself as she waited for Richard to answer.
At length he said, “I’ve always respected your secrets.”
“Then indulge me this one last time.”
“At least tell me if it’s suicide.”
“Many people would think of it that way, yes.” “Would I?”
She studied him, lips pursed, recalling their talks of Oregon. “No, I don’t think so.”
“Then I can see you again?” Richard asked hopefully.
“Time will tell.” Her fingers traced the frail outlines of the space habitat. His hands skated toward hers across the glass tabletop, then shyly retreated.
“You’re like a squirrel with acorns about this,” he said in exasperation.
That was one of the things that had endeared him to her, the way he still spoke in the archaic language of nature. Squirrels and acorns. She nearly asked him what else he remembered from those years of growing up in the Oregon forests. But no, those were the wilds, taboo. “Promise,” she said, “you won’t sniff around when I’m gone and dig up the secret?”
“I can’t believe you’d quit now, with Transcendence on the drawing board.”
“Promise?”
“Yes,” he answered glumly. Then he stammered, “I just don’t understand. You’ve never given up before.”
If he wanted to believe she had been defeated by the complexities of the new space architecture, then let him. That might be the kindest illusion she could leave with him. “So that’s the future?” she said, pointing at a diagram of the gossamer habitat.
He looked puzzled. “What other future is there?”
“Yes, what other future?” she echoed. The gauzy construction of interlacing filaments brought back childhood memories of spider webs, dew-soaked, each strand beaded with water diamonds.
“That’s where we’re bound to go next,” he said passionately. “It’s where you’ve been pointing all these years.”
She nodded. “Transcendence.”
“Cut free of Terra.”
“Free,” she said.
“Flow with the cosmic energy.”
“Energy,” she echoed.
He clapped with pleasure. “That sounds like my old Zuni. Never lost your vision.”
“No, I haven’t,” she assured him.
Packing her few remaining things in the apartment that night, Zuni thought regretfully of Richard. Once she had imagined he might go with her. But gradually she had realized his mind was too brittle. It would have snapped if he had tried to follow her. So she must go alone.
She selected from her library two of the rare paper volumes, Woolman’s Journal and Noncinno’s Whalecall. The other paper books she tagged as gifts for the Incunabulary. The remaining volumes, all fiches and tapes, she heaved by the armload down the recycle chute. Her visual and audio libraries soon followed. My little boost to entropy, she thought. The appliances were all standard issue, food dispensers and videowalls, and so were the furnishings. She ran the sanitizer over them and left them in place.
Alongside the two books in her beltpack she loaded the drafting materials from her office. That left just room enough for a first-aid kit, lighter, insul-blanket, knife, some high-cal food, a compass and the much-folded map. The health-security pass would pin to her traveling gown. After much hesitation she tucked Richard’s gift into the beltpack as well. It was a model of the Enclosure, small enough to fit in the palm, with threads of silver to represent the transport tubes, silver beads for cities, and, inside, a blue-green sphere of glass to represent Terra.
As she strapped the pack to her waist, with its tiny cargo of mementos, she recalled how the ancients had loaded graves with tokens for the journey to the other world. Instead of miniature boats, grains of wheat, god dolls, she carried fragments of her own days.
With a thick moodgown slung from her shoulders and draping to the floor, the beltpack did not show. She set that gown aside and then dumped the rest of her clothes down the recycle. From vacuum storage she recovered the cotton shirt, wool trousers and leather boots. The boots were cracked but serviceable. Although the colors seemed to have faded on the shirt (or perhaps her stubborn eyes would no longer perceive colors as brightly as her mind recalled them), the cotton still felt soft against her neck.
From the top shelf of her closet she retrieved a scarlet wig and a face mask meant to resemble an Aztec sungoddess. They had been given to her as a joke some years earlier by fellow architects, who knew she would never paint her face or tint her hair, let alone wear such a frightful get-up.
When the closets were empty, the cupboards bare, every surface in the apartment gleaming, Zuni lay down on the airbed to wait for dawn.
Next morning the screen of her vidphone refused to glow when she tapped the keys. The food spout yielded nothing but a faint sucking noise. Bank, clinic, every agency replied with zeroes when she signaled them to see if they remembered her.
She felt a fool, tugging the wig over her neat bun, strapping the mask onto her face, hanging the moodgown over her shoulders. On her way out she paused at the hallway mirror to see if she recognized herself. A grotesque stranger gazed curiously back at her.
Outside the apartment she pressed her palm against the lockplate, to make sure it had erased her from its memory. The door refused to budge.
The pedbelt was jammed with people. Towering headdresses, wigs of every hue, phosphorescent robes, sequined bodysuits—the normal office-going crowd. When Zuni stepped onto the belt (scarlet tresses wagging, gown flapping over the cracked tops of her boots) no one looked up from newsfax or chemmiedream to notice her. No one paid her any attention as she rode across Oregon City to the shuttle terminal, past the honeycombed towers, beneath the curving gliderways. With sadness, and with an almost giddy joy, she watched the city pass.
The ticket machine flashed questions at her when she requested passage to shuttle stop 012. Was customer aware 012 was repair terminus? Yes, Zuni replied. Was customer authorized to enter vulnerable zone? For answer, Zuni slipped her health pass into the machine, and a ticket wheezed out.
Today the ocean was not stormy, for the shuttle raced through the seatube without so much as a tremor. As Zuni rode toward the mainland she tried not to think of all she was leaving behind. Medicine, for example. Her least reliable implant—a kidney—was probably good for another twenty-five years or so, time enough for her to reach 100, if none of her original organs failed first. That was ample time. To dream of living longer would be greedy.
When the shuttle began decelerating for 012, the regular commuters looked up in mild puzzlement. There should have been no stops until Cascade Mountain Nexus, another twelve minutes away. Zuni soothed them by calling, “Just routine repairs,” as she ducked out of the car onto the platform. The doors clapped shut behind her and the shuttle sighed away down the tube.
The emergency repair station was deserted. At each turn locks scanned her health pass before they would let her through. Near the last checkpoint she tossed her mask and wig and gown into a vaporizer. Then she entered the sanitation chamber, a gleaming white sphere that was the Enclosure’s outermost defense against the wilds. Her last act as a citizen was to punch into the cybernet a code, known only to masters of health and security and design, which erased all record of her movement from the Enclosure’s memory. After she satisfied another series of locks, finally a round hatch swung open and she stepped outside into the blinding green jumble of an Oregon forest.
She stood for a long time with eyes lowered, sniffing the mosses and ferns, listening to wind sizzle through the needles of new-growth firs, feeling the sponginess of soil beneath her feet. She ached.
At length she unfolded the map and blinked at it. Tears made her vision even more hazy than usual, blurring the lines, so she tucked the map into her beltpack and set off through the woods along a pathway of memory.
If I do not let Teeg go inside for a visit, Gregory threatens to send the HP after her, as he certainly can now that she’s reached breeding age. Unlucky thirteen. All he wants is a visit, just two weeks with his daughter, he swears solemnly on the vidscreen.
“And will they breed her up like a prize cow?” I ask him.
He clears his throat. His gleaming bulbous head wobbles on the screen. “I rather doubt it. Her—how shall I say it?—her middle section—”
“Pelvis?”
“Well, yes. It’s narrow, they tell me. Other women are better suited for bearing her children. The eugenics board will simply preserve her”—he tiptoes gingerly around the word—“eggs, and match them with suitable”—again the hesitation—“male seed.”
“Are you sorry we made Teeg in the old-fashioned way?” I ask him.
His eyebrows lift and lift, rippling the vast forehead, his multi-lensed eyes soften, and for a moment I think he is going to smile, an event as remarkable and rare as the northern lights.