Terrarium

Scott Russell Sanders

Description

An imaginative novel about our environmental plight and attitudes.

With round-the-clock drugs, games, and eros parlors to entertain them and virtual weather to sustain them, humans live inside a global network of domed cities known collectively as "the Enclosure." Having poisoned the biosphere, we've had to close ourselves off from the Earth. The cities of the Enclosure are scattered around the globe on the land and sea, and are connected by a web of travel tubes, so no one needs to risk exposure. Health Patrollers police the boundaries of the Enclosure to keep the mutants and pollution out.

Phoenix Marshall decodes satellite images for a living. He has spent all 30 years of his life in Oregon City, afloat on the Pacific Ocean. He busies himself with work and various forms of recreation to keep boredom at bay. One morning he opens his door to find Teeg Passio. Teeg is the same age as Phoenix, but she's different; she's menacingly and enticingly wild. She grew up on the outside. Her mother oversaw the recycling of the old cities, and her father helped design the Enclosure. Teeg works maintenance, which allows her to travel outside the walls. When she introduces Phoenix to her crew, he is drawn into a high-tech conspiracy that may threaten everything he understands. Are humans really better off within the Enclosure? Is the Earth? Are Health Patrollers keeping us safe or just keeping us in?

Teeg seduces Phoenix out of his orderly life, enlisting him in a secret, political and sexual rebellion. Teeg and her co-conspirators, part mystics, part tech-wizards, dream of a life embedded in nature. Then one day, during a closely monitored repair mission on the outside, a typhoon offers the rebels a chance to escape the Enclosure and test their utopian dreams in the wilds.

Sujets

• Science-Fiction
• Toute la Science-Fiction
• Science Fiction
• Dystopian
• General officer
• General
• Fiction

Informations

• Publié par: Indiana University Press
• Date de parution: 22 janvier 1996
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780253017291
• Langue: English

Extrait

TERRARIUM
It is, after all, not man but the universe that is subtle.
- B ARRY H OLSTUN L OPEZ
This book is for Murray Sperber and for Fred Pfeil-
camerados
TERRARIUM

Scott Russell Sanders
Indiana University Press
BLOOMINGTON AND INDIANAPOLIS
This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.
1985 by Scott Russell Sanders
Afterword 1995 by Scott Russell Sanders
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition.
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Sanders, Scott R. (Scott Russell), date Terrarium / Scott Russell Sanders. p. cm.
ISBN 0-253-32956-6 (cloth). - ISBN 0-253-21021-6 (pbk.) 1. Twenty-first century-Fiction. I. Title. PS3569.A5137T47 1995
813 .54-dc20 95-4805
1 2 3 4 5 00 99 98 97 96 95
Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Afterword
ONE
Phoenix thought of her as the barefooted walker. From the morning when she first loomed into view like an unpredicted planet, she set up fierce tides of desire in him.
On that morning the pressure inside Oregon City and inside his head seemed no greater than usual, no more conducive to visions. A blue wig dangled stylishly about his ears, facepaint disguised his features, and a portfolio of satellite film beneath one arm identified him as a man bound for the office. Chemmies regulated every bodily process that needed regulating. All his life was in order. But when Phoenix emerged from his apartment, ticking off the day s plans in his mind (work, then breeze-tripping for lunch, electro-ball in the afternoon, and eros parlors in the evening), suddenly there she was, a barefooted woman pacing in the wrong direction on the pedbelt. Slap of naked flesh on the conveyor. By matching her stride to the speed of the belt she managed to stay at the same point in the corridor, just opposite his doorway. Bustling along, yet never stirring from her chosen spot, she reminded Phoenix of the conjoined whirl and stillness of a gyroscope.
Surely a madwoman. Escaped from the health patrollers. Phoenix backed rump against his apartment door just as it clicked shut. Embarrassed, he glanced down, but not before catching a glimpse of red hair escaping from the woman s hood, her cheeks showing feverishly through a skimpy glaze of cosmetics, her green gown actually darkened with perspiration below the arms and around the neck. The corridor trapped her scent, forced him to breathe it. Smell of hot animal. Her knees, thrusting against the gown at each step, nudged a raw spot in his brain. Just a beast, a throwback, he thought-and he felt aroused and ashamed.
By lowering his gaze he hoped to give the woman a chance to recover her senses, to withdraw from his life. But down below were those naked feet, slapping the pedbelt, and they sent his gaze skidding back up along her flanks and spine to the hooded face. So he had the misfortune to be staring at her luminous green eyes when she turned on him and said, It s called walking, you idiot.
Abruptly she stopped her pacing and tugged the hood closer about her face; the conveyor hustled her out of sight.
Phoenix blinked. Gone back to her cave, he thought. Crawled under her rock. Good riddance. He filled his lungs slowly, emptied them. The ventilator banished her smell within seconds. Well, that s over, he decided.
But the image of her face-flushed, practically naked beneath the film of cosmetics-stuck fast in his memory. He went on to work, transferring from pedbelt to escalator to elevator, and eventually to the roller-chair that deposited him at his desk, where he bent as usual over the satellite monitors. But rather than hunt for signs of hurricanes, thermal inversions, radiation storms, for the thousand signs of Terra s assault on the human system, his eyes kept tracing the shape of the woman s face in the cloud patterns, the bulge of hip and breast in the contours of continents.
After work he yearned for something stronger than breeze-tripping or electro-ball, so he proceeded directly to the gamepark for a day-ending orgy in the eros parlors, where he hoped to wipe the woman s image from his brain. At the door of the eros parlor he drew back, however. The rosy electronic din inside the lovebooths seemed distasteful. So he joined his cronies at the pharmacy, thinking he would take a chemmie. That would surely obliterate all memory of the barefooted walker. But as he tilted the drink toward his lips, something caught in his throat, and he set the chemmie back on the counter. As the shutters came down over the eyes of his companions, he slipped away from the pharmacy and rode straight home.
There was no barefooted woman pacing on the conveyor outside his apartment, of course, since both pedbelts were jammed with riders. Of course, Phoenix reassured himself. What do you expect? Patrollers would have caught her by now. Already be coaxing the beast out of her. Make her a good citizen of the Enclosure, no threat to anyone.
He spread his palm against the lockplate on his door, then stood there for a minute in the opening, glancing sidelong at the double stream of riders. All their feet were covered, their legs motionless, their heads properly hooded and wigged, their bodies hidden beneath gowns, their faces expertly masked. All as it should be. No one returned his wary glance.
It pained him to enter the apartment. The room s orderliness, which had comforted him that morning, oppressed him now. The dials glinted on his console, row after row, perfect circle after perfect circle. The glittering angles of his metal furniture seemed too harsh. Nothing invited his touch. The photo-murals on the wall were just then shifting their kaleidoscopic designs to mark the beginning of a new hour, but they could not be touched, they were only patterns of light. Feeling like an idiot-she had called him that, an idiot-Phoenix stood in the middle of the room, tongue hanging out, sniffing and tasting. Dead air, without taste or smell. Beastly smell she had. Sweat? Green eyes like flares. He tossed a few pillows on the floor, left a cabinet standing open, and dragged half a dozen costumes from their hangers, but without any real hope of disturbing the order of the place. He oozed a dollop of veg from the food dispenser, sniffed it without appetite, then flung the green stuff down the recycle. Slumped in the softest chair, burning his lips on a cup of hot narco, Phoenix scrutinized the geography of his life, seeking some wild place that might accommodate the longing aroused in him by this barefooted woman.
Days ticked by. Each morning before work he peered out through the spyhole in his door, but with less and less fear-or was it hope?-of seeing her. Just when his life was composing itself again, when the clouds on the satellite monitors were beginning to resemble clouds again instead of lips and ankles, one day he looked out and there she was, pacing along in her sweat-darkened green. The lens of the spyhole made her appear swollen. Her naked feet seemed to dangle from a bulbous torso. Her head, with its fringe of red hair, bobbed ridiculously. Horrible, really, now that he had a good look at her. Wondering how such an unappetizing creature could have enthralled him, Phoenix boldly opened the door. It was a mistake. Her full stare caught him. Moist cheeks behind the glaze of makeup, long-boned feet, swim of legs beneath the gown.
This time she pronounced the words icily: It s called walking. You should try it. Melt away some of that flab.
By reflex, Phoenix smoothed the gown over his cushiony stomach. Flab? How dare she refer to his body! The chill in her voice told him she had no memory of their earlier meeting. All these days while he had been suffering around Oregon City with her image spiked into his brain, she had salted him away in the vaults of forgetfulness together with a million other once-glimpsed faces.
Do you mind? she said, never breaking stride. There s less traffic here. Fewer pedbelt zombies to compete with.
Looking away down the corridor he shook his head no, then in confusion nodded yes, unsure just what he was answering. The woman kept at her walking, matching the conveyor s pace. Phoenix shilly-shallied in his doorway, immobilized by a sudden vision of himself as he must appear to her: bouffant wig of iridescent blue, face painted to resemble the star of Video Dancers, every inch of flesh cloaked in a moodgown. And, yes, to tell the truth, a wee bit heavy in the paunch. He could not bear to look down at the fireworks of color he knew his gown would be making in its vain attempt to express his inner pandemonium.
I don t mind. He felt his nostrils flare with the scent of her. Why should I mind?
Good question. But there s a lot of drecks who do.
She smiled, and he winced. The smile, the private sharing of words, the eye contact, the exposed face-it was all coming in such a rush, shattering the rules of sexual approach.
Unable to bring himself to name a body part, he stammered, Y