Terrarium by Scott Russell Sanders Page A

“What do you think I’ve been wooing you for, you colossal idiot? We wanted a few more people, to build a little colony.” A shove from her boot sent the case skidding across the floor. “So when you came out walking I thought maybe you wanted your body back. Maybe you wanted out of the bottle.”
    â€œYou never told me.”
    â€œI didn’t want to spell it out. I wanted you to hunger for the wilds the way I do.” Her anger drove her prowling back and forth in front of him. Beyond her, directly under the hanging blue lamps, he could see a glass tank filled with a writhing mat of green. Plants? In the city? Her angry stalking drew his eyes away.
    â€œBut how can I want what I’ve never had?” he protested. “This is all I know.” With outspread arms he gestured to indicate the floating city, the thousands of miles of travel tubes, and the dozen other cities he had lived in or visited, always inside, always insulated from the beast world.
    She stopped her prowling in front of him. In the clinging shimmersuit her body trembled like quicksilver. Her stare no longer made him wince. And he noticed her eyes were almost the same gray-green color as the slate he still held stupidly in his hand. “All you know,” she murmured, grasping him by a wrist. “Then come look at this.”
    She led him to the glass tank, drew him down to kneel with her and peer through the translucent wall. Inside was an explosion of tendrils, petals, stems, dangling frail seed pods, fierce blossoms like concentrations of fire, all of it in greens and browns and reds so vibrant they made Phoenix tremble. His eyes hunted for a leaf that would match the fossil she had given him, while his thumb searched out the delicate imprint in the stone. But there was too muchactivity in this amazing green stillness for him to see anything clearly.
    â€œIt’s a terrarium,” Teeg said. “A piece of the earth.”
    He ran his fingers along the glass wall, expecting to feel heat radiating from these intense creatures. But the tank was cool, sealed on all sides. “They’re alive?”
    She laughed at what she saw in his face. “Of course they’re alive. That’s dirt, the brown stuff.”
    â€œBut how—closed in like that?”
    â€œWise little beasts, aren’t they?” And she used the word beasts tenderly, as he had never heard it used before. “There’s your chaos,” she said. “That’s what you’re saving me from.”
    Phoenix started to protest that this was only a tiny fragment of the earth, without animals, without tornadoes or poisons or viruses, without winters. But his tongue felt heavy with astonishment. His eyes would not move from this miniature wilderness, at once so disorderly and so harmonious.
    â€œWell,” she said, her fingers tightening on his wrist, “will you go?”
    â€œI might,” he answered. And then, uncertainly, “I will.”
    1 July 2028 — Whale’s Mouth Bay
    There is a humbleness in stones, a patience, a yielding to weather and to the restlessness of earth. Teeg gathers them by the bucketfuls, stooping low over the gravel bed so her little bottom rises like a peach. The sun turns her a warm sienna hue. When a stone amazes her, she brings it in her muddy palm for me to admire. Look, Mommy, another miracle!
    Together we study fossils, cracking the slate with a hammer. She thumbs through my old ragged field guide for pictures that match what we find in the hearts of rocks. We walk around on so many thicknesses of history.
    More and more I feel like a fossil myself, squeezed beneath the enormous burden of the future—at least what Gregory assures me is the inevitable future, the life shut up inside the antiseptic human system, life barricaded from what he calls the beast world. The Enclosure Act is not even two years old, and already the resistance movements are broken.
    Soon