Terrarium Read Free Page A

left from a skategame kids used to play,” Teeg explained, patting the scuffed walkway with her foot, “back when kids used their legs.”
    Legs again. Apparently she would say anything. Blinking at the body-word, Phoenix answered, “I remember, you hunched down like this,” and he assumed the bent-knee posture he had perfected as a boy on skates. Looking up, he found amusement in her green eyes, and quickly looked away.
    â€œSo you were a skater?” she said, and then she was a squall of questions. What work do you do? Who are your parents? Any children? Ever go outside? How do you like living in Oregon City?
    And so he told her about his training in geo-meteorology, his job studying satellite images (“Because I have a good eye for patterns,” he boasted shamelessly, “something the cybers still can’t match”), and he told her about his mother’s death in the 2027 fusion implosion at Texas City, about living with his father who tested chemmies in New Mexico City, then about his father’s bad trip and the eleven-year drug coma that followed. He mentioned his twenty-one years of schooling, the move to Oregon City a year ago after his father’s death, the days at work and nights at the gamepark. His sperm was duly banked, he told her, but sofar as he knew, none had been used. Eugenics probably thought one of him was enough. He admitted that he had begun the mating ritual with a bevy of women, but had rarely pursued it to—he paused, reticent—consummation. He confessed that he knew all about weather but had never stuck so much as his nose outside the Enclosure, confessed, in a voice that surprised him with its urgency, how restless he felt, how lonely, how trapped.
    All the while Teeg was nodding yes, yes, that is truly how it is, and between questions she was telling about herself: She had spent most of her childhood in the wilds, traveling about the northwest corner of the continent with her mother, who had been in charge of dismantling Portland, Vancouver, Anchorage, lesser places. Her father was one of the architects of the Enclosure, a monster of rationality.
    Teeg’s last name finally plunked into a slot in his brain. “Passio? Gregory Passio? You’re his daughter ?”
    â€œYes,” she replied. “That’s the particular monster. You’ve heard of him?”
    â€œHe was one of my childhood heroes. He and Zuni Franklin. They made me want to be an architect.”
    â€œThen why’re you a weatherman?”
    â€œI got hung up on third-order topology. When the cyber simulated my buildings, they kept falling down.”
    â€œYou don’t need math for meteorology?” Teeg asked wryly.
    â€œSure, but not so much, not where I come in. After the cybers spit out the weather maps, I see the patterns. Gestalts. Kind of a right-brain thing.”
    She looked at him skeptically, the kind of look you would give a food-stick that seemed off-color. What did she think of him? Blue-wigged noodle-brain, or stage-seven lover? Impossible to tell. Talking with her was like tracking a typhoon—you never knew which direction she would take.
    â€œGregory Passio was my father all right. And not much of one. You could have picked a better hero.” She paused. Her facepaint was so thin he could actually follow herturbulent emotions with a sidelong glance. “Don’t mix him up with Zuni Franklin. She’s a different fish altogether.”
    â€œFish?” he said.
    â€œYou know, swimmy-swimmy?” She laced her fingers together and wriggled her joined palms in the air before her. Evidently the confusion still flickered in his eyes, for she explained: “I just meant that Zuni Franklin and my father both helped design the Enclosure, but for very different reasons. She’s no monster.”
    â€œI don’t understand.”
    â€œYou couldn’t,” she said bluntly, and she went on to tell Phoenix how