Terrarium (7 page)

Soon after age sixteen she had given up the notion of creating glass refuges for nature, and had begun designing human habitats. All the plans were there in her files, graduated in scale from single-person dwellings to planetary skeins of cities. Leafing through those early drawings—tents for backpackers, two-person space arks, bubble-villages for the ocean floor, flower-shaped colonies—Zuni was amused by their modesty. Between dreaming up tents for a single person and dreaming up a planetary Enclosure, her mind had gone on a long journey.

Not her mind alone, of course. Nature always unfolded in many persons at once. Beginning with the designs for villages, most of the blueprints listed Gregory Passio's name alongside hers. Zuni found it hard to recall, from this distance in time, which lines Gregory had drawn and which she had drawn herself. Others shared the confusion, for people soon began to treat the two of them as a composite creature, Franklin-Passio. He had been the greater technician, she the visionary. Most often she would conceive a structure, and Gregory—trained in the harsh conditions of Venus, where any miscalculation converted a habitat into a tomb—would reduce it to numbers and materials. When one of their structures was being assembled, he would oversee the building, while she rested content with the drawings. The transformation from numbers on a page to airy geodesic skeletons arching against the sky never ceased to amaze him. One of those building-site visits cost him his life, when storms capsized his floating rig off the Alaska coast.

“I'm a random element,” that was how Gregory had always liked to describe himself. “I'm one of those little leaps nature takes every now and again. Most of us are flops.”

Looking at him, Zuni had found the evolutionary leap easy to believe. Gregory was a tiny man with an oversized head, and even in those early days he was already bald. His
vision as a child had been defective in such complicated ways that surgeons were forced to anneal multi-focal lenses to his eyes. Since he had no use for wigs or facepaint, his swollen dome and blue-veined face and faceted eyes were exposed for everyone to see, and made him look unearthly.

Zuni remembered most vividly their earliest collaborations, back in the first decade of the century, when she and Gregory and thousands of others had worked feverishly to devise a habitat that would preserve at least a remnant of humanity from the wreckage of the environment.

“What we need are a few billion self-sustaining modules,” Gregory had maintained. “Like the exploration capsules we used on Venus. One per person.”

At first Zuni had imagined he must be kidding. “Wouldn't that be a bit lonely, each of us in a separate box?”

“Oh, a man and woman could plug their modules together. Families could lock their units into a cluster.”

“And when people grew tired of one another, they could just unplug?”

“Correct. Like our bodies, only better.” There was no trace of a smile on Gregory's blue-veined face. “Doesn't that sound appealing?”

“It sounds awful. Like Brownian motion—dust particles bumping together and then careening off to some new collision.”

“So what's your alternative?”

“Cities.”

“You'd actually rather live in a city, jammed together with millions of other people, than in your own free-roaming capsule?”

“At least in the cities one could touch other people. And keep civilization alive.”

Confronted by such evidence of mental aberration, Gregory would shrug, wrinkle his expansive forehead, then lapse into silence. And that was how their early debates about future habitats usually ended.

Gradually she chipped away at his notion of living-boxes with the tool he most respected—numbers. “Fabricating and supplying a few billion private modules would take many-powers-more energy and materials than my cities would.”

“And where do we get enough materials even for your cities?”

“We mine the dumps and junkyards for metal. We dismantle the old cities, the burned-out factories, the abandoned machinery. We haul the rockets out of their silos and the wrecks out of the ocean, melt them down. There's plenty around to build a thousand cities or so, connect them with pipes, enclose them with domes. But not enough for your billions of hermit igloos.”

Once Gregory had conceded the materials argument, Zuni challenged his enthusiasm for the free-ranging nomad. “You'd really trust all those billions of people, swarming anywhere they wanted to?”

“Why not?” he countered.

“Poking their noses into the nuclear graves? Tinkering with the weather-monitors? Snipping data lines?”

“We never had much problem with that on Venus.”

“Because the population there is only a few thousand, and everybody's carefully selected.”

Gregory had always found it difficult to understand ordinary people, and so Zuni's catalogue of possible mischief gave him pause. “Cut data lines? Scatter the plutonium? Would people actually
do
such things?”

“Listen, Gregory, if you turned seven billion people loose to go anywhere they wanted on this planet, each in her own capsule, there would always be a million people eager to work any sort of stupidity you could imagine. And a great many sorts you couldn't imagine.”

Having been persuaded that Terra's population was less trustworthy than the elite population of space colonists, Gregory began adding to the catalogue of possible mischief. “Just think of the transformers, the deserts full of mirrors,
the tide-generators. Somebody could block a laser avenue. And the whole electromagnetic spectrum is vulnerable to jamming.”

“You see,” said Zuni. “And suppose people keep dumping their wastes? Who's to stop them? And how much more will the eco-system absorb before the balance gives way completely?”

That brought a suspicious look from Gregory. His eyes reflected multiple chilly images of her. “Once we're sealed inside—capsules or cities—what does eco-balance matter? The planet's hostile already. We can cope with a little more hostility.”

“Not really hostile, not when you think of Venus, say.”

The wrinkles were plowing across his great forehead. “Zuni, you're not turning into some sappy nature-lover, are you?”

Here was unstable ground. At any moment a fissure might open, separating them forever. Zuni phrased her answer carefully. “It's not a matter of loving or hating. It's a simple question of survival. We're scrambling now to put a roof over our heads before the environment collapses. Why make matters worse?”

“True, in the short run. But in the long run, who cares? If the algae die, and carbon dioxide builds up, we can always get oxygen from rocks.”

“Of course we can,” Zuni soothed. “But the ocean's still doing a pretty good job with oxygen. Let's just help it keep working, and we'll be free to build the habitat.”

“As soon as we're safe inside,” Gregory insisted, “the eco-system can go smash, and we'll get by without it.”

Gregory's yearning for liberation from the planet ran so deep in him that Zuni treated it as she would treat any religious impulse—with tolerance and silence.

Always a lover of solitude, whose idea of the perfect life was a one-man interstellar flight, Gregory had been reluctant to accept her scheme for a global network of cities. He was not even moved by her argument that no other plan
would preserve as many people from Terra's mounting inhospitality.

“Humanity's the one item we have in surplus,” he commented sourly.

What had finally convinced him to work on the Enclosure was a combination of esthetics and religion. He discovered that it was far less challenging to design a one-person capsule than to design an entire city. And he eventually admitted that only the Enclosure was large enough to sustain a civilization; only a sophisticated technical civilization could ever lift entire cities free of Terra. After a few decades of operation on Terra, the system Zuni proposed might be sufficiently perfected and powerful to venture off into space, not merely to establish a colony elsewhere, but to
be
a colony, a wholly human world free to drift forever through the universe. Project Transcendence, Gregory had named it. And that leap into space was the vector he had been riding since childhood.

Zuni realized this was a vector that ran through the hearts of many people, perhaps most people, on earth. Build a shelter. Condition its air, its heat, its light. Put it on wheels, on wings, on rockets, so you can move it wherever you will. Scrub your hands, spray your armpits, paint your skin, eradicate all the imperfections of flesh. Break free of Terra's antique constraints, break free of gravity and frostbite, banish infection, banish stink. This desire arrowed through the hearts of billions of people, as potent and unfaltering as gravity itself. It was a force Zuni could tap.

At the time she announced her retirement, in the early months of 2051, Zuni had been tapping that force—that human longing for escape from Terra—during more than five decades. It made her regretful, now, in her spartan office, to leaf through so many blueprints bearing the name of Gregory Passio. But there was no use regretting those years of falsehood. Gregory would never have understood her deeper motives for advocating the Enclosure. Had she tried to explain, he would have furrowed his brow more and
more deeply, would have glared at her with those unearthly eyes, and then dismissed her as a hopeless romantic, a throwback to the tooth-and-claw days.

Once, when Zuni hinted that saving the whales might be a pleasing side effect of the Enclosure, Gregory had flared at her, “Why all this moaning about stupid brutes that haven't even figured out how to hoist themselves out of the sea? Millions of years of evolution, and what have they got to show for it? Songs. Zuni, sometimes you remind me of my wife. Wilderness, wilderness, that's all she thinks about. She's out there in the wilds now, dismantling the old cities. Wriggling her toes in mud and smushing her face in green things. And she's infecting my daughter with the same wilderness disease.”

That was the first time Zuni ever heard him mention Teeg, then four years old, and it was the last time she ever hinted at her own deeper motives.

No, it was no use regretting that her collaboration with Gregory had been woven of truths and lies. Surely he took some of his own secrets with him into the frigid Alaskan waters.

Eventually her files were sorted, and all but a few blueprints disposed of. These few she would take away with her, including plans for a twelve-person geodesic dome, a miniature tidal generator, and a fish pool. The other mementos she kept from her office were tools: drafting pens and rulers, pocket cyber, 4-D modeler, scrolls of plax, ink, everything small enough for hiding in a beltpack.

Her apprentices and her few remaining projects she assigned to other master architects. When one of those apprentices, a young woman named Marga, begged to remain with her, Zuni replied:

“Surely you will learn as much from Sventov as you would from me.”

“But I have not modeled myself on Sventov,” Marga protested. “I've modeled myself on you.”

Zuni interrupted her sorting of blueprints to study this troubled visitor. The mask was a cinnamon-colored blur, the wig a swatch of black. Solemn and reproachful, another earnest child of the Enclosure. “And are you certain you know what I am?”

Marga seemed startled by the question. “You're the architect of humanity's liberation from Terra,” she said, repeating a phrase Zuni had seen in print a dozen times.

“One of them, perhaps,” Zuni conceded. “A very minor one. And you will carry on that liberation after I am gone?”

“Of course, of course. But why should you leave us, with your head still so full of visions?”

Zuni held a blueprint against the viewlight, squinting. “My eyes no longer serve me.”

“I'll see for you, I'll draw your ideas.” In her excited gesturing, Marga thumped the model of the Enclosure, and the fretted globe wobbled overhead.

The young woman's intensity reminded Zuni of Teeg. But Marga's intensity was directed inward, ever deeper into the Enclosure, while Teeg's—as Gregory had feared—was directed out into the wilds.

“That is kind of you,” said Zuni, “but there are other things I must do now.”

“What can be more important than Project Transcendence?”

“In China—” Zuni began patiently. Then, realizing that Marga would only know the domed cities on the Asian mainland or the float cities in the Japanese Sea, places scarcely distinguishable from Oregon City, she explained, “In old China, before the Enclosure, it was the custom for a person to devote her youth to learning, her adult years to community work. When she reached a certain age, however, she was free to withdraw from the world and pursue her quest for enlightenment.”

Marga pondered this. “And you've reached such an age?”

“I have.”

“Nothing will make you change your mind?”

“No, my dear.” Zuni longed to tell this solemn young architect the truth, reveal to her the private self who had been kept secret during six decades of public work. But the habit of deceit was too old now to be broken. She would be freed from it soon enough.

“Enlightenment?” Marga repeated the word quizzically.

“Getting back in touch,” Zuni translated.

“With what?”

“With the center, the origin of things.”

“Isn't that where we're all headed?” Marga said. “Out of this stink of matter, back towards the state of pure energy?”

Zuni only smiled, knowing it was foolish to speak of spiritual things. “Sventov will teach you well.”

“So you say.”

When Zuni busied herself with the stack of blueprints again, Marga asked shyly, “Do you suppose I could have a little something of yours to keep?”

Zuni withdrew from her modest heap of mementos one of the drafting pens, and this she pressed into Marga's hand. The touch was obviously a shock to the young woman, but not so great a shock as the kiss Zuni brushed on her cheek. “Now go on, leave me alone,” Zuni said, “and be sure you draw kindly cities with that pen.”