Dancing in Dreamtime by Scott Russell Sanders

Author:Scott Russell Sanders
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Published: 2016-11-27T05:00:00+00:00

Quarantine

The only troublesome items Zuni had not allowed the surgeons to replace were her eyes. Both lungs, one kidney, various joints, even the valves of her heart, those she had been content to let go, for they did not seem to be intrinsic parts of her. Let the doctors fiddle with her ears or pancreas, she would not care. But if she ever gave up her eyes, the ones she had used to design the Enclosure, to memorize the contours of Terra, to trace the shifting tones of daylight, then she would no longer be Zuni Franklin. Would surgeons consent to be fitted with new hands? They should have realized that an architect lives in her eyes.

So when drugs no longer cleansed the blight from her retina, she had to put up with dimming vision. And when she announced her plans to retire from the Institute for Global Design at age seventy-six, nine years early, everyone assumed her balky eyesight was to blame.

“Are you afraid blindness would spoil your work at the Institute?” an interviewer asked her on Meet the Magicians, a show that treated the ability to understand mathematics as akin to wizardry.

“It is true that I no longer see things as I once did,” Zuni answered.

“You mean you can’t see well enough to work on blueprints?”

“I mean that vision changes with age.”

The interviewer gave up trying to straighten out her replies. He knew that better minds than his had been stymied by Zuni Franklin’s ambiguities. They were seated in her office, surrounded on three sides by display screens and consoles. The room was as stark and impersonal as an operating theater. Zuni had deliberately kept any trace of herself from showing, for fear of giving away her masquerade. The fourth wall, of glass, overlooked the towers, plazas, and pedbelts of Oregon City, a dazzling metropolis she had largely imagined. The sky show for the afternoon was an electrical storm, so projectors flashed sullen clouds upon the inside of the dome and loudspeakers muttered with thunder.

“So what are your plans for retirement?” the interviewer asked.

“My plans would be puzzling to you, I’m afraid,” Zuni said.

“But surely you won’t abandon your lifework?” The interviewer gestured overhead at the suspended model of the Enclosure, a spherical web of tubes and nodes. Each tube represented a transport artery, each node a land- or float-city, and the emptiness inside the sphere stood for Earth.

Zuni pressed fingertips to fingertips and gazed at the earnest young man. They were all so earnest, these children of the Enclosure. “My mission is accomplished,” she declared.

“And now you’ll write a book about your career?” When Zuni waved the idea aside, the interviewer tried again: “Perhaps you’ll travel?”

“I have a journey to make,” Zuni conceded.

“To the lunar colonies? The asteroids?”

“Not so far.”

“Ah, then you’ll be traveling on Terra, exploring the Enclosure?”

“On Terra, yes. Where else but Earth?” Her white hair was braided and neatly coiled into a bun; her replies were neatly bound in a smile. Like the antiseptic room where she spoke, everything about her was scrubbed clean of self.

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