Dancing in Dreamtime (23 page)

“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.”

“What for?”

“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?”

“Not at the present time.”

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.