Terrarium Read Free Page B

her father had made her come inside when she turned thirteen, legal breeding age. And then he had drowned while up supervising the construction of Alaska City. Now she worked mostly outside the dome, back on land, as a troubleshooter repairing tubes and transmitters and auto-machinery. Her ova had been used for eighteen—or perhaps twenty, she forgot—children, all of them grown inside other women. She had been mated three times, she told him, never happily, never long, twice with men and once with a woman.
    â€œEighteen offspring?” Phoenix whistled. In a steady-state population that was an astonishing number. Worthy of Eve in the old garden.
    â€œThat’s what comes of having bright parents.”
    â€œIs your mother still outside?”
    Teeg smiled crookedly. “I guess you could say that.”
    â€œDo you see her when you go on repair missions?”
    â€œThey killed her.”
    â€œWho killed her? What? The wilds?”
    Instead of answering, Teeg swung away down the path, back toward the clanging heart of the gamepark.
    A few days later they spent an afternoon at the disney, studying the mechanical beasts. “Timber wolf,” a sign proclaimed, and there stood a shaggy creature with jaws agape and ribs protruding. Awful, Phoenix thought, as Teegpressed the button and the wolf’s jaws clapped open and shut, howling. But Teeg seemed to take some bitter delight in making the beasts perform. She led him on from “griffin” to “pterodactyl” to “African elephant,” pressing every button, her mouth pursed and her eyes hard.
    On other days they hiked around the hydroponics district, along hydrogen pipelines marked EXPLOSIVE , down aisles between huge whirling energy-storage wheels. Teeg’s ID opened gateway after gateway. With each expedition she led him deeper into the mechanical bowels of the city, down several hundred meters below sea level where minerals and food and power were extracted from the ocean. Was it because of her famous father, Phoenix wondered, that Security allowed her to venture down here among these life-and-death machines? Red-eyed surveillance cameras greeted them at every turn. The few people they met in those lower reaches—technicians intent upon some repair or adjustment—pretended not to see them.
    Phoenix discovered parts of Oregon City he had only known about from video. In his increasingly anarchic talks with Teeg, he discovered parts of himself he had never known about at all. Signals kept arriving from forgotten regions of his body, aches at first, then pleasures, as if nerve and muscle were conspiring with heart to make him love her.
    Some two weeks after their first walk they descended one afternoon to the bottom-most level of the city, a labyrinth of tunnels reeking with brine. Teeg scooped up a handful of ocean water from one of the desalinization tanks, and said, “You forget the whole city is afloat, until you come down here.”
    Phoenix suddenly felt queasy, vulnerable, the way he felt when something reminded him of death. Yes, the ocean was always there, ready to burst the human bubbles that floated upon it. He gazed around at the mammoth pumps and extractors, listened to the slosh of water. Afloat. He recalled how Oregon City appeared in the satellite monitors: thecentral dome, and clustered around it the ring of smaller domes for manufacturing and aquaculture, for cancer wards and corpse freezers and mutant pens, then radiating outward from each dome the pipelines and tubes that linked the city to the rest of the human system. Viewed from the sky, set off against the vast curve of ocean, how fragile it all seemed.
    He was relieved when they ascended to the workaday level of Oregon City again, up where the dome shut out sky and ocean, where the honeycombed buildings and pedbelts and shuttles reassured him of the power of mind over matter. Up here, nature did not exist. People everywhere, and the shiny