Free Terrarium by Scott Russell Sanders Page A

Northwest where she grew up, about my dismantling work—I find myself drawn to her. And can this possibly be the visionary of the Enclosure? The hater of flesh?
    After fifteen minutes of talking about the Cascade Mountains and the old timber industry, she has still not mentioned sending Teeg inside. Fearing that she soon will, I break contact.

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SEVEN
    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,