Terrarium by Scott Russell Sanders Page B

there will be no one left outside except the sick and the vicious and the mad.
    I only have Anchorage and Vancouver left to dismantle, and the small coastal cities in Oregon, and then my commission expires. “If you refuse to come in when the work is finished,” Gregory warns, “if you insist on reverting to bestiality, you still must deliver my daughter to Oregon City.” “Teeg stays with me,” I insist. “The Enclosure Act, the health board—” he huffs at me, but I break contact and his voice withers away.
    The stain on this page comes from Teeg’s muddy paw, plumped down here to display a treasured fossil. I make no attempt to wipe it clean.

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SIX
    While friends and journalists speculated about her plans for the future, Zuni quietly went on severing the ties that bound her to the Enclosure. She delivered the last of her scheduled lectures (on the psychology of disembodied mind), speaking as usual for two hours, without notes, holding the audience spellbound, and then she declined all further engagements. She resigned from boards of directors, task forces, committees.
    For the better part of a month she sorted through her files, assigning to the archives whatever she thought might be of use to future planners, piping the rest to recycle. There were sixty years’ worth of blueprints here, beginning with plans for a ten-kilometer-square greenhouse she had designed at sixteen. Even so large a greenhouse, she had discovered, would not sustain a complex eco-system. Trees might thrive in it, but hawks could not. And if she altered the design to accommodate hawks, the ferns might die. Cyber simulations taught her that the smallest environment capable ofsustaining a continent’s menu of life would be the size of the continent itself.
    Soon after age sixteen she had given up the notion of creating glass refuges for nature, and had begun designing human habitats. All the plans were there in her files, graduated in scale from single-person dwellings to planetary skeins of cities. Leafing through those early drawings—tents for backpackers, two-person space arks, bubble-villages for the ocean floor, flower-shaped colonies—Zuni was amused by their modesty. Between dreaming up tents for a single person and dreaming up a planetary Enclosure, her mind had gone on a long journey.
    Not her mind alone, of course. Nature always unfolded in many persons at once. Beginning with the designs for villages, most of the blueprints listed Gregory Passio’s name alongside hers. Zuni found it hard to recall, from this distance in time, which lines Gregory had drawn and which she had drawn herself. Others shared the confusion, for people soon began to treat the two of them as a composite creature, Franklin-Passio. He had been the greater technician, she the visionary. Most often she would conceive a structure, and Gregory—trained in the harsh conditions of Venus, where any miscalculation converted a habitat into a tomb—would reduce it to numbers and materials. When one of their structures was being assembled, he would oversee the building, while she rested content with the drawings. The transformation from numbers on a page to airy geodesic skeletons arching against the sky never ceased to amaze him. One of those building-site visits cost him his life, when storms capsized his floating rig off the Alaska coast.
    â€œI’m a random element,” that was how Gregory had always liked to describe himself. “I’m one of those little leaps nature takes every now and again. Most of us are flops.”
    Looking at him, Zuni had found the evolutionary leap easy to believe. Gregory was a tiny man with an oversized head, and even in those early days he was already bald. Hisvision as a child had been defective in such complicated ways that surgeons were forced to anneal multi-focal lenses to his eyes. Since he had no use for wigs or facepaint, his swollen dome and