OLD FOLKS AT HOME

Michael Bishop

1          “sold down the river”

At a stilly six o’clock in the morning Lannie sat looking at the face of her visicom console in their sleeper-cove, Concourse B-11, Door 47, Level 3. Nausea was doing its stuff somewhere down in her plumbing: bubbles and fizzes and musical flip-flops. And Sanders—Sanders, her blue-jowled lummox—he lay sprawled snoring on their bed; if Levels 1 and 2 fell in on them, he’d still sleep, and he didn’t have to get up for another hour. But Lannie intended to fight it; she wasn’t going to the bath booth yet, no matter how tickly sick she began to feel.

That would wake Zoe, and she wasn’t ready for Zoe yet, maybe not for the rest of the day.

Putting her arms across her stomach, Lannie leaned over the glowing console and tapped into the Journal/Constitution newstapes. Day 13 of Winter, 2040, New Calendar designation. Front page, editorials, sports: peoplenews, advertisements, funnies.

Then, in among the police calls and obituaries, a boxed notice:

WANTED: Persons over sixty to take part in the second phase of a five-year-old gerontological study funded by the URNU HUMAN DEVELOPMENT COMMISSION. Health and sex of applicants of no consequence; our selections will be based on a consideration of both need and the individual interest of each case. Remuneration for the families of those applicants who are selected. Contact DR. LELAND TANNER, or his representative, UrNu Human Development Tower.

Lannie, still clutching her robe to her middle, held this “page” on the console. After two or three read-throughs she sat back and gazed at the room’s darkened ceiling. “Eureka,” she whispered at the acoustical punctures up there. “Eureka.”

Sanders, turning his mouth to the pillow, replied with a beluga-like whistling.

* * * *

She wasn’t deceived, Zoe wasn’t. She read the news-tapes, too, maybe even more closely than they did, and if Melanie and Sanders thought they could wool-eye her with this casual trip to the UrNu Human Development Tower, they needed to rethink their clunky thinking. I wasn’t born yesterday, Zoe thought. Which was so ludicrous a musing that right there in the quadrangle, on the gravel path among the boxed begonias and day lilies, Sanders craning his head around like a thief and Melanie drawing circles in the gravel with the toe of her slipper, Zoe chuckled: Clucka-clucka-cluck.

“Mother, hush!”

“ ‘Scuse me, Lannie, ‘scuse me for living.” Which was also reasonably funny. So she clucka-clucked again.

Sanders said, “What does he want to meet us out here for? How come he can’t conduct this in a businesslike fashion?” Sanders was a freshman investment broker. He had had to take the afternoon off.

“Not everyone runs their business like you do,” Melanie answered. She was a wardrobe model for Consolidated Rich’s.

It was 2:10 in the afternoon, and the city’s technicians had dialed up a summery 23° C. in spite of its being the month Winter. The grass in the quadrangle, as Zoe had already discovered by stepping off the path, was Astro-turf; and for sky the young Nobles and Melanie’s mother had the bright, distant geometry of Atlanta’s geodesic dome. On every side, the white towers of that sector of the Human Development complex called the Geriatrics Hostel. Many of the rooms had balconies fronting on the garden, and at various levels, on every side but one (the intensive-care ward), curious faces atop attenuated or bloated bodies stared down on them, two or three residents precariously standing but many more seated in wheel chairs or aluminum rockers. Except for these faces, the Nobles and the old woman had the carefully landscaped inner court to themselves.

“Home, sweet home,” Zoe said, surveying her counterparts on the balconies. Then: “Sold down the river, sold down the river.”

“Mother, for God’s sake, stop it!”

“Call it what you want to, Lannie, I know what it is.”

“Leland Tanner,” a young man said, surprising them. It was as if he had been lying in wait for them behind a bend in the path, the concealing frond of a tub-rooted palm.

Leland Tanner smiled. More than two meters tall, he had a horsy face and wore a pair of blue-tinted glasses whose stems disappeared into shaggy gray hair. A pleasant-looking fellow. “You’re Zoe Breedlove,” he said to her. “And you’re the Nobles. ... I thought our discussion might be more comfortable out here in the courtyard.” He led them to a ginkgo-shaded arbor on one of the pathways and motioned the family to a stone bench opposite the one he himself took up. Here, they were secure against the inquisitive eyes of the balcony-sitters.

“Zoe,” the young man said, stretching out his long legs, “we’re thinking of accepting you into our community.”

“Dr. Tanner, we’re very—” Melanie began.

“Which means I’m being sold down the river.”

“Damn it, Mother!”

The young man’s eyes, which she could see like clear drops of sapphire behind the colored lenses, turned toward her. “I don’t know what your daughter and your son-in-law’s motives are, Zoe, but it may be that—on down the Chattahoochee, so to speak—you’ll find life a little better than it was on the old plantation. You may be freer here.”

“She’s as free as she wants to be with us,” Sanders said, mounting his high horse. “And I don’t think this plantation metaphor’s a bit necessary.” His foot always got caught in that wide, loose stirrup: his mouth.

Only the young doctor’s eyes moved. “That may be true, Mr. Noble,” he said. “In the Urban Nucleus everyone’s freedoms are proscribed equally.”

“The reason they’re doing it,” Zoe said, putting her hands on her papery knees (she was wearing a disposable gown with clip-on circlets of lace at sleeves and collar), “is ‘cause Lannie’s gone and got pregnant and they want me out of the cubicle. They’re not gonna get off Level 3 anytime soon, and four rooms we’ve got. So they did this to get me out.”

“Mother, we didn’t do it to get you out.”

“I don’t know why we did it,” Sanders said, staring at the gravel.

Zoe appealed to the intent, gracefully lounging young doctor. “It could sleep in my room, too, that’s the shame of it: it could sleep in my room.” Then, chuckling again, “And they may be sorry they didn’t think of that before hauling me up here. Like two sneaky Simon Legreedies, Lannie and Sandy.”

“Dr. Tanner,” Melanie said, “we’re doing this for her as much as for ourselves and the baby. The innuendoes about our motives are only—”

“Money,” Zoe said, rubbing her fingers against her thumb like a usurer. “I read that box in the newstapes, you know. You’re auditioning for old people, aren’t you?”

“Sort of like that,” Leland Tanner said, standing. “Anyway, Zoe, I’ve made up my mind about you.” Under a canopy of ginkgo leaves he stared down at the group huddled before him, his eyes powerful surrogates for the myopic ones on the balconies.

“Don’t take me,” Zoe said, “it’ll serve them right.”

“From now on,” the young man said, “we’re going to be more interested in serving you right. And in permitting you to serve.”

Sanders, her son-in-law, lifted his head and squinted through the rents in the foliage. “It’s supposed to be Winter,” he said. “I wish they’d make it rain.” But an even, monochromatic afternoon light poured down, and it was 23° C.

* * * *

2          to marry with the phoenix

She was alone with young Leland in a room opening onto the garden, and he had pulled the curtain back so that she could see out while they talked. A wingback chair for her, with muted floral-print upholstery. Her feet went down into a pepper-and-salt shag carpet. Tea things on a mahogany coffee table, all of the pieces a dainty robin’s-egg blue except for the silver serving tray.

Melanie and Sanders had been gone thirty minutes, but she didn’t miss them. It didn’t even disturb her that it might be a long while—a good long while—before she saw them again. The ginkgo trees in the garden turned their curious oriental leaves for her examination, and the young man was looking at her like a lover, although a cautious one.

“This is a pretty room,” she said.

“Well, actually,” he said, “it’s a kind of decompression chamber, or air-lock, no matter what the comfortable trappings suggest. Usually I’m not so candid in my explanation of its function; most prospective residents of the Geriatrics Hostel must be introduced into their new environment slowly, without even a hint that a change is occurring. But you, Zoe, not only realize from the outset what’s going on, you’ve also got the wit to assimilate the change as if it were no more significant than putting on a new pair of socks.”

“That’s not so easy any more, either.”

He tilted his head. “Your response illustrates what I’m saying. I judge you to be a resilient woman; that, along with my interview with your family, induces me to select you as a candidate for the second stage of our study. I can use a term like air-lock to describe this sitting room without flustering you. Because, Zoe, if you decide to stay with us, and to press your candidacy, you’ll be very much like an astronaut going from the cramped interior of a capsule—via this room, your air-lock—into the alien, but very liberated realm of outer space.”

“First a sold-down-the-river darkie. Now a spaceman.” Zoe shook her head and looked at the damp ring her teacup had made on the knee of her gown. “Well, I’m old, Mr. Leland, but I’m still around. More than you can say for slaves and astronauts, thank goodness in the one case, too bad in the other.”

Young Mr. Leland’s violet eyes (he had taken those hideous glasses off), twinkled like St. Nick’s, but he didn’t laugh, not with his voice. Instead he said, “How old are you, Zoe?”

“Sixty-seven. Didn’t they tell you?”

“They told me. I wanted to see if you would.”

“Well, that’s correct. I was born in 1973, before the domes ever was, and I came into Atlanta from Winder, Georgia, during the First Evacuation Lottery. Barely twenty-two, virgin and unmarried, though in those days you’d best not admit to the first condition any more than you had now. Met my husband, Rabon Breedlove, when the dome wasn’t even a third finished. But a third of my life—my entire youth, really—I spent in the Open, not even realizing it was dangerous, the city politicians even said traitorous, to be out there.” A few bitter, black leaves adhered to the robin’s-egg-blue china as she turned her empty cup.

“And how old is Melanie, then?”

“Twenty-eight or -nine. Let’s see.” She computed. “Born in 2011, a late child and an only one. Rabon and me had tried before, though. Four times I miscarried, and once I delivered of a stillborn who went into the waste converters before we had a chance to put a name on it. Boy or girl, they didn’t tell us. Then Melanie, a winter baby, when we thought we’d never have one. All the other times was forgotten, a pink and living tadpole we had then, Rabon and me.”

“Your husband died when she was eight?”

“Embolism.”

Young Mr. Leland stood up and went to the window drapes. She saw how the shag lapped over his work slippers, even though his feet were big: good and big. “The Geriatrics Hostel has two parts, Zoe, one a nursing home and hospital, the other an autonomous community run by the residents themselves. You don’t need the first, but you can choose to be a candidate for the second.”

“I got a choice, huh?”

“We coerce no one to stay here—but in the case of those committed to the hostel’s nursing sector it’s often impossible for the residents to indicate choice. Their families make the decisions for them, and we then do the best we can to restore their capacity for reasoned, self-willed choice.”

“What does it mean, I’m a ‘candidate’?”

“If you so decide, you’ll go into one of our self-contained communities. Whether you remain with that group, however, is finally up to you and the members of the group themselves.”

“S’pose the old fuddy-duddies don’t like me?”

“I view that as unlikely. If so, we find you another family or permit you to form one of your own. No losers here, Zoe.”

Very quietly she said, “Hot damn.” Young Mr. Leland’s eyebrows went up. “An expression of my daddy’s.”

And came down again into an expression amusingly earnest. “Your husband’s been dead twenty years. How would you like to get married again?”

“You proposin’?”

Well, he could laugh- With his voice as well as his eyes. She was hearing him. “No? no,” he said, “not for myself. For the first septigamic unit we want to introduce you to. Or for the six remaining members of it, that is. You’ll have six mates instead of one, Zoe. Three husbands and three wives, if those terms mean anything at all in such a marriage covenant. The family name of the unit is Phoenix. And if you join them your legal name will be Zoe Breedlove-Phoenix, at least within the confines of the Geriatrics Hostel itself. Elsewhere, too, if things work out as we wish.”

“Sounds like a bridge group that’s one short for two tables.”

“You’ll be doing more than playing bridge with these people, Zoe. No false modesty, no societally dictated inhibitions. And the odd number is a purposive stipulation, not merely a capricious way of messing up card games. It prevents pairing, which can sometimes occur on an extremely arbitrary basis. The old NASA programmers recognized this when they assigned three men to the Apollo missions. The same principle guides us here.”

“Well, that’s fine, Mr. Leland. But even with those astronauts, you’ll remember, only two of ‘em went down honeymooning.”

His horsy face went blank, then all his cheek- and jawbones and teeth worked together to split the horsiness with a naughty-boy grin. He scratched his unkempt hair: shag on top, shag around his shoes. “Maybe I ought to renege on the Phoenix offer and propose for myself, Mrs. Breedlove. All I can say to answer you is that honeymooning needn’t be what tradition only decrees. For the most part, the septigamic covenant has worked pretty well these last five years at the hostel. And your own wit and resilience make me believe that you can bring off your candidacy and marry with the Phoenix. Do you wish to become a candidate, Zoe?”

Zoe put her cup on the silver serving tray. “You know, Mr. Leland, you shoulda been a comedy straight man.” By which she didn’t mean to imply that he was even half so humorless as Sanders Noble. No, sir. That Sanders could stay sour in a room full of laughing gas.

“Missed my calling. But do you want to?”

“Oh, I do,” Zoe said, taking what he’d served up. “I do.”

* * * *

3          helen, and the others

Dr. Leland Tanner made a call on an intercom unit in the sitting room. Then, leaning over Zoe so that she could smell the sharp cologne on him, he kissed her on the forehead. “I’m going out now, Zoe. If you decide to stay, you’ll see me only infrequently; your new family will occupy your time and your attention. There’s no interdict, however, on associating with the culturally immature. If you like, you can see me or anyone else younger than yourself. Just let me know.”

“Then I s’pose I shall, Mr. Leland.”

“ ‘By,” and he strode through the whipping shag, saluted at the sliding glass doors, and went out into the quadrangle. In only a moment he was lost to Zoe on one of the foliage-sheltered paths, and the calm, curious ginkgo trees held her amazed interact until an inner door opened and a thin woman with close-cropped gray hair came in to her.

“Zoe Breedlove?” A Manila envelope clasped in front of her, the newcomer looked toward the wingback but not exactly at it. A handsome, frail woman with silverly opaque eyes and an off-center smile.

“That’s me,” Zoe said. The other’s eyes focused on her then, and the smile firmed up. The woman navigated through waves of carpet to a chair opposite Zoe’s, and they faced each other across the tea service.

“I’m Helen,” the woman said. “Helen Phoenix. Parthena and Toodles wanted another man, I think, but I’m happy Leland found somebody who won’t have to compete with our memories of Yuichan. That would have been unfair to you.”

“Yui-chan?” The word sounded foreign, particularly to a dome-dwelling Georgia girl. Whereas Helen’s accent marked her as no native to Atlanta. New York? Something cosmopolitan, anyhow: once.

“Yuichan Kurimoto-Phoenix. He was born in Kyoto, but he behaved like a raving Italian. Had execrable taste in everything; not a bit subtle. There’s an unpainted plaster-of-Paris squirrel on the bole of one of the trees in the garden: Yuichan’s doing.” Helen lowered her head. “A lovely man; just lovely.”

“Well, I hope the others don’t think I’m even going to try to take Yoo-chi’s place. I don’t even know anything about China.”

The woman’s smile died at the corners of her mouth, then slowly grew back. “Nevertheless,” she said, “you may be more like Yuichan than you know. Which is all to the good: a bonus for us. And the question of your competing with Yuichan’s memory won’t enter into our appreciation of you at all. I’m sure of that. Toodles only favored another man, I’m sure, because she’s a voluptuary and thinks Paul and Luther inadequate for our servicing.”

Servicing: that probably meant exactly what she thought it did. Zoe leaned over the coffee table. “Would you like some of this tea Mr. Leland left with me?”

“Please. And if you’ll push the service to one side, Zoe—may I call you Zoe?—I’ll introduce you to the others even before we go upstairs. That’s an advantage you’ll have over them, but probably the only one. We hardly begrudge it.”

“Good. I could use an evener.” And it was after pushing the tea service aside and while watching Helen take the photographs and printouts out of the Manila envelope that Zoe realized Helen was blind. The opaque eyes worked independently of her smile and her hands: the eyes were beautiful, somehow weightless ball bearings. Mechanical moving parts in a body that was all Siamese cat and animal silver. Without fumbling, Helen’s small hands laid out the pictures and the data sheets. Reminiscently, Zoe touched one of the photographs.

“You can examine it all while I drink my tea, Zoe. I won’t bother you.”

The top sheet on the pile was neatly computer-typed. Zoe held it up and tilted it so that she could read it.

THE PHOENIX SEPTIGAMOKLAN

Covenant Ceremony:

Day 7 of Spring, 2035, New Calendar designation.

Septigamoklanners:

M. L. K. Battle (Luther). Born July 11, 1968, Old Calendar designation.

No surviving family. Last employer: McAlpine Construction and Demolition Company. Septigamoklan jack-o-trades and activity-planner. Ortho-Urbanist, lapsed, age-exempted. Black.

Parthena Cawthom. Born November 4, 1964, o.c.; Madison, Georgia. A

son Maynard, a daughter-in-law, and three grandchildren: enfranchised UrNu citizens. Last employer: Inner Earth Industries. Sgk artisan and folk-lorist. Ortho-Urbanist, semiactive. Black.

Paul Erik Ferrand. Born October 23, 1959, o.c.; Bakersfield, California.

Family members (children, grandchildren, great-children) in the Urban Nuclei of Los Angeles and San Francisco. Last employer: (?). Unclassifiable Mystic, age-exempted. White.

Yuichi Kurimoto (Yuichan). Born May 27, 1968, o.c.; Kyoto, Japan.

Children, grandchildren, greatgrandchildren alive in Kyoto and Tokyo. Last employer: Visicomputer Enterprises, Atlanta branch. Sgk legislator. Neo-Buddhist, lapsed, nationality-exempted. Oriental.

Joyce Malins (Toodles). Born February 14, 1971, o.c.; Savannah,

Georgia. No surviving family. Last employer: Malins Music, Voice, and Dance. Sgk musician. Ortho-Urbanist, lapsed, age-exempted. White.

Helen Mitchell. Born July 11, 1967, o.c.; Norfolk, Virginia. A son in the

Washington UrNu, a daughter in the Philadelphia UrNu. Last employer: UrNu Civil Service, Atlanta branch. Sgk mediator. Ortho-Urbanist, semiactive. White.

Jeremy Zitelman (Jerry). Born December- 9, 1970, o.c.; No surviving

family. Last employer: University of Georgia, Urban Extension, Astronomy Department. Sgk historian. Recidivist Jew, age-exempted. White.

A mixed lot, Zoe decided: a party assortment. Over the capsule-biography of Yuichi Kurimoto the word DECEASED was stamped in large, double-lined red letters which did not conceal the information under them. Zoe looked at the photographs and tried to match them up with the resumes (they weren’t very good photographs); she got them all matched up, but it was pretty apparent that some of the pictures had been taken years ago. For instance, Paul Erik Ferrand, supposedly just over eighty, was a rakish, lupine man wearing a style of cravat that hadn’t been fashionable in two decades. Before their names and faces meant anything Zoe would have to meet these people: in the flesh.

“Is that what I’ll be—a septigamoklanner—if y’all like me?”

“That’s an institute word, Zoe, made up by someone who didn’t know what to call a family like ours. Don’t worry. None of us use it. You see, these information sheets contain only passed-upon, UrNu-validated ‘facts’: impersonal and bureaucratic. Jerry or I, either one, could have put a little pizzazz into the sketches. . . . Unfortunately, civil service sachems frown on pizzazz. . . .” Helen’s voice trailed off.

“Well, that’s encouraging—’cause I think I’d have a hard time thinking of myself as a . . . septigamoklansperson.” A mouthful, that “But in Yoo-chi’s biography here, it says he was the family legislator. Does that mean, since I’m coming in for him, I have to put on his shoes and be a legislator?”

“No, no. On these official data sheets everyone’s given a position, as if we were baseball players or chess pieces. Really, though, we do whatever we do best, and by defining ourselves in that way we become ourselves to the others. Later, someone will probably put a label on what you are. It won’t be a Phoenix who does it, though.”

“Mr. Leland?”

“Perhaps. A study is going on here, though we’re mostly oblivious to it, and studies demand statistics and labels. A cosmic law, like gravitation and magnetism and whatnot.”

“Well, if it was age-exempted, even an apple might not have to fall.”

Helen’s opaque eyes locked on her face. “An appropriate observation. But we do have a chance to do some naming of our own. Phoenix was our own choice, you know. Some of the other families in the Tower are Cherokee, Piedmont, O’Possum, and Sweetheart.”

“Oh, those are good ones, too.” They were, too; had what Helen would probably call pizzazz.

“Yes,” Helen said, pleased. “Yes, they are.”

* * * *

4          climbing jacob’s ladder

Zoe met them all at supper that evening. They ate in a room decorated with a quilted wall banner, and with several potted plants that Joyce Malins (Toodles) said she had bought from a slum-area florist in a place called the Kudzu Shop.

The Phoenix family had an entire suite of rooms, including a kitchen, on the Geriatrics Hostel’s fourth floor, and this evening Luther, Toodles, and Paul had shared the cooking: corn bread, frozen vegetables, and pasta with a sauce of meat substitutes. Better than Lannie managed after two hours of sloozying around in new clothes for the lechers at Consolidated Rich’s; better than Zoe usually did for herself, come to that. The table was round, and wooden, and big enough for seven people, a metal pitcher of cold, sweetened tea, and several china serving dishes. No attendants waited on them, Zoe noted, no nurses, no white-smocked young men with pursed lips. A biomonitor cabinet, to which they were all linked by means of pulse-cued silver bracelets, was the only alien presence in the dining room, and it kept quiet. (The people downstairs had a hookup to the monitor, though, she was sure of that.) Zoe self-consciously turned her own new bracelet, a handsome thing in spite of its being, also, a piece of medical equipment. Plugged in already she was, a rookie Phoenix.

Helen had introduced her. She was sitting between Helen and Jerry. Then clockwise beyond Helen: Parthena, Paul, Luther, and Toodles. Jerry was sitting in a wheel chair, a lap robe over his knees. The others, like Helen, looked pretty mobile—even the eighty-year-old Paul, whose eyes resembled a Weimaraner dog’s and whose mouth still knew how to leer.

“How old are you, Zoe?” he asked, after the opening small talk had faded off into mumbles and spoon-rattling.

Helen said, “Paul!” Like Lannie shushing her, Zoe; only nicer.

“Bet she ain’t as old as me. Three-to-one odds. Place your bets.” He smacked his lips.

“No one’s so old as that,” Jerry said. Jerry’s hair was a dandelion puffball: just that round, that gray, that delicate. His face was red.

“I’m sixty-seven,” Zoe said. Second time today. But saying so didn’t age you, just worrying about it.

“Young blood,” the wide-faced black man said: Luther. His hair (she was comparing now) was the kind of white you see on a photograph negative, a darkness turned inside out. His hands, on either side of his plate, looked like the mallets on sledgehammers. “Hooooi! Old folks, we’re being transfused, we’re gettin’ new blood.”

“Toodles ain’ the baby no mo’,” Parthena said out of a tall, stern Zulu mask of a face. Plantation accent, Zoe noticed. Luther sounded more like Paul or Toodles than he did Parthena; except for that Hooooi! Except for that.

“How ‘bout that, Toodles?” Paul said. “Puttin’ your foot on the bottom rung of Jacob’s ladder at last. I’m up the highest, but you’ve finally climbed on.” Toodles, whose mouth was a red smear, a candy heart (even though no one wore lip ices or eye blacking any more), lowered a forkful of squash to reply, but crazy old Paul turned to Zoe again: “I’m up the highest, but I’m never gonna die. I was born in California.”

“Which is your typical Ferrand-Phoenix non sequitur,” Jerry said.

“I’ve never made an issue of being the youngest one here,” Toodles interjected. “And I’m not disturbed by losing that position, either.” Her jowly face swung toward Zoe. “Zoe, I bought that fuchsia and the coleus for your arrival today. Parthena and I walked into that jungle off New Peachtree and haggled with the little Eurasian shopkeeper over prices. Then we carried our purchases back, pots and all, no help from these noble gentlemen.”

“Course,” Parthena said, “that ‘fo’ she knew how old you was.” Her Zulu mask smiled: perfect dentures. Taller than anyone else in the room, Parthena, even seated, loomed.

“Parthena, damn your black hide, you know that wouldn’t’ve made any difference! It wouldn’t’ve!” Toodles dropped her fork, her mouth silently working itself into a multiplex variety of lopsided O’s.

“Joke,” Parthena said. “Jes’ funnin’.”

“Well, what the hell’s funny about my being younger than you old cadavers?” Her mascara, tear-moistened, was making crater holes out of her eyes. “What’s so damn funny about that?!”

“What’s she takin’ on like this for?” Luther asked the table.

“Humor her,” Jerry said, winking at Zoe from under his puffball. “She thinks she’s in her period.”

Which brought guffaws from Paul and Luther and pulled the roof down on everyone else. Rearing back as if bee-stung, Toodles knocked her chair over and stood glaring at each member of her family in turn. Not counting Zoe.

“Jackasses!” she managed. Then, more vehemently: “Limp ole noodles!” Her mouth had begun to look like a pattern on an oscilloscope. Zoe, in fact, saw that one of the miniature screens on the biomonitor cabinet was sending delicate, pale comets back and forth across its surface: Toodles pulsing into the hysterical.

In person, Toodles left off glaring and, without looking back, moved painfully, heavily, out of the dining room. A minute or two after her exit, the pale comets stopped whizzing. Not dead, Toodles wasn’t; just out of range. Another cabinet would pick her up shortly.

“Silly biddy,” Paul announced, chewing.

“Jerry’s last remark was crude,” Helen said. “A sort of crudity, Zoe, that he usually doesn’t permit himself.”

“Please believe that,” the crimson-faced man said, wheeling himself back from the table. “Lately she’s been upset. That she was on the verge, though, I didn’t think. I’m sorry, I’m honestly sorry, you know.” The chair powered him out the door.

“Hot damn,” Zoe said. “Some debut.”

“Ain’ yo’ fault,” Parthena said. “She been eggcited. Las’ two week, she knew we was gonna fine a ‘placement for Yuichan, that’s all.”

“That’s true,” Helen said. “We argue like young married couples do sometimes, Zoe, but usually not before company and not very often. Ordinarily Toodles is a lovely woman. And the only explanations I can give for her behavior are the menfolk’s bad manners and her excitement. Courting’s always made her nervous; always.”

“As for the sort of crudity you heard from her,” Luther said, “that’s her style. She don’t mean nothin’ by it, though, even when she’s mad.”

“Silly biddy,” the time-blotched old Frenchman (or whatever he was) said. “Carry on like that, die before I will ... I ain’t gonna die.” He was the only one who finished eating what was on his plate. Once finished, long lips glistening, he let a red, translucent eyelid drop lasciviously over an amber eye: a wink. For Zoe.

* * * *

5          rotational reminiscence

Two hours later. The roof court of the UrNu Human Development Tower, geriatrics wing. Temperature holding steady at 21° C. Night had risen as the city’s fluorescent suns had been gradually dialed down.

The Phoenix had patched things up among themselves and now sat in a semicircle at a tower railing overlooking the Biomonitor Agency on West Peachtree and, ten floors down, a floodlit pedestrian park. All the Phoenix but that oddie, Paul: he still hadn’t come up. Zoe put that old codger out of her mind, though. The rooftop was open and serene, and she had never seen such a pretty simulated twilight. Not much chance on Level 3, under. Now, winking on across the city’s dying-into-the-violet skyscape, a thousand faint points of light. The breath sucked away just at the glory of it.

Jerry Zitelman-Phoenix maneuvered his wheel chair into position beside her. (Ramps and lift-tubes made it possible for him to go anywhere at all inside the complex.) “I want to apologize, Zoe, for my uncalled-for remark in your presence.”

“I always try to apologize to the person who needs it.”

“Me, too. Look, you can see she’s back.” And she was, Toodles: sitting with Luther, Parthena, and Helen and animatedly narrating another episode of her afternoon’s shopping. “But you, too, need an apology for the disruption I made,” Jerry said, “so to you also I say, ‘Sorry.’ “

Zoe accepted this apology, and Jerry began talking. He told her that on Thursday nights—alternate ones, anyhow, and it was Thursday night that night—the Phoenix clan had this screened section of the rooftop for whatever purpose they wished. He told her that tonight it was a game they called “rotational reminiscence” and that they were waiting for Paul, who never participated but who insisted on attending every session. The rules, Jerry said, were simple and would become clear once they started. Then, pointing to the darkened, concave hollow overhead, the honeycombed shell in which they all lived, he told her that in his youth he had been an astronomer.

“Even now,” he said, “I can look up there at night and imagine the constellations rolling by. Oh, Zoe, it’s just as plain as day—which is one more of your typical Ferrand non sequiturs, Zitelman version thereof. But it’s true, I can. There’s Cassiopeia, there’s Ursa Major, there’s Camelopardalis. . . . Oh, all of them I can see. The dome is no impediment to me, Zoe, but it’s certainly no joyous boon either. That it isn’t.”

He went on. He told her that the only advantage the dome offered him was that he could just as easily imagine the constellations of the Southern Hemisphere passing in procession across its face. Sometimes he so imagined: Canis Minor, Hydra, Monoceros. There they all were, so dizzying in their splendor that he felt sure he would one day power his wheel chair right up into their diamond-dusted nets and connect the dots among them with the burning tip of a raunchy, green cigar. “Cigars I’m not allowed any more,” he said. “Not even the neutered ones with no tobacco, no tar, and no taste. And stars . . . ?” He pointed at the doom.

“Well,” Zoe said, “we got three stars at least. And they move.”

Jerry’s puffball rolled back, his vein-blossomed cheeks shone with wan, reflected light. “Ah, yes. Girder-cars is what we’ve got there, Zoe. Torchlight repairs on the dome. So they send out the magnetized girder-cars at night and let us pretend, with these insulting sops to our memory, that the sky hasn’t been stolen. Pretty, though, I grant you.” He was right. Artificial stars—only three—on a metal zodiac. How did the men inside those topsy-turvy trolleys feel? What was that old song? She mentally hummed a bit of it:

Would you like to ride on a steer?

Carry moonbeams home from afar?

“Damn that old zombie!” Toodles suddenly said to them. “Let’s go on without Paul, he never contributes anyway.”

“Yeah,” Luther said. “Let’s start.”

Helen persuaded them to wait a few more minutes. OK with Zoe, A-OK. She listened as Jerry related how he had been involved in a bone-crushing, paralyzing automobile accident in 1989, when most of the old “interstates” were falling into disuse: cracked pavements, weed-grown shoulders, brambly medians. He hadn’t walked since. “When it happened, I’d never even had relations with a woman; impossible, after. At night, sometimes, I’d cry. Just like that fellow in the Hemingway book—except his legs, they weren’t crushed; it was something else. So I never got married until Dr. Tanner accepted me for the study here. Then three wives at once I got. Now, in my old age, poor Yuichan dead, I’m helping my spouses court a fourth one. Who can say it isn’t a strange and wizardly life, our pains and weaknesses notwithstanding?”

“Not me, Jerry,” Zoe said. “Not me.”

So Jerry went on and told her about how he had got his degree and then moved into the dome and tried to teach astronomy by means of textbooks, slide programs, and old films. He’d done it for almost twenty years, at which point the city decided it was foolish to pay somebody to lecture about a subject with so limited an application to modern society. “Fffft!” Jerry said. “Fired. Me and others, too. A whole program, kaput!” He had had to live on Teachers’ Retirement and future-secure benefits in a Level 6 cubicle until—

“Howdy,” Paul said. “Ain’t you started yet?”

“Sit down,” Luther said. “What have you been up to?”

Paul, running his fingers through tatters of thin hair, lowered himself creakingly to the fore-edge of a chair between Parthena and Zoe. “Fetched up some night things for our fiancée. She didn’t bring none with her.” He looked at Zoe. And winked. “ ‘Gainst my better judgment, too.”

“You mighty sweet,” Parthena said. “Now let’s get on with it.”

They did. The rules were these: 1) Silence while the person whose turn it was thought of a pre-Evacuation experience he wished to evoke for himself or, better, himself and the others. 2) An evocation of that experience in one word, the settled-upon word to be spoken, very clearly, only once. 3) An after-silence in which this word might resonate. 4) No repetitions from previous games. 5) An automatic halt after each Phoenix had had two turns. 6) In order to avoid a debilitating preoccupation with the past, no mention or replaying of any of the game’s reminiscences before or after the sessions themselves.

Helen, a new Gardner-Crowell braille-writer in her hands, recorded the evening’s twelve reminiscences and called down anyone who repeated any of the old shibboleths. As Zoe discovered, accusations of encroaching senility flew around the circle when this happened. No worries tonight, though. She had never played before, and there’d be no whistle-blowing no matter what words she spoke into the quiet ring of their anticipation.

“Three months,” Toodles said. “It’s been three months since we’ve done this. Back when Yuichan was ill.”

“Go ahead, then,” Helen said. “You start, Toodles.”

The group’s silence grew. The girder-cars above them slid in slow motion down the steeps of the dome. In three or four minutes Toodles dropped a word into the pooling dark, the well of their ancient breaths:

“Fudgsicles,” she said.

Paul, Zoe noticed, had his head thrown all the way back over the top of his chair, his eyes all goggly and shiny. The old man’s mouth was open, too. If he hadn’t already moved his butt back into the chair, he would have fallen to the roof tiles.

It was Parthena’s turn. Three or four minutes after Toodles’ reminiscence, the tall black woman said,

“Scup’nins.” Scuppernongs, that meant. A kind of grape.

When the word had echoed in their heads for a while, Luther said, “Paul isn’t going to say nothin’, Zoe. You go ahead now. It’s your turn.” No, he wasn’t going to say anything, Paul: he was still mouthing Parthena’s word.

As for Zoe, she was ready. She had thought of it while Jerry was explaining the rules to her. But it wouldn’t do to blurt it out, it wouldn’t do to show she’d been thinking ahead of the game. (Surely, they all did it, though.) So she waited. Then, leaning forward to look into the pedestrian park below, she gave the word to her new family:

“Fireflies...”

* * * *

6          mount fujiyama and the orpianoogla.

In their suite on the fourth floor the Phoenix slept in a circular common room, their beds positioned around a hub where the self-locomoting biomonitor cabinet (the first of three on the floor) had already taken up its brooding watch. Each bed had a nightstand, an effects-bureau, and an easy chair in its vicinity, as well as plasti-cloth dividers that, at a finger’s touch, would roll automatically into place. Since no one seemed to use these, Zoe, grateful to Paul for having fetched her a nightgown, got ready for bed in front of the others.

Like having six Rabons in the room with you. Well, five: Jerry had powered himself off somewhere. “Like some time to himself ‘fo’ turnin’ in,” Parthena said. But even five Rabons was plenty, even if they were decent enough not to devour you with their eyes. (Rabon never had been.) Old Paul, of the five, excepted. Again.

Anyhow, it didn’t take this creaky crew long to start plying the waters of Nod. No, sir. Everyone off, it seemed, but Zoe herself. She even heard Jerry come whirring back into the snore-ridden room and hoist himself out of the wheel chair onto his bed, In five or ten minutes he, too, was rowing himself under. Only Zoe had her head clear, her whole, fatigued body treading against the desire to be drowned in sleep. My sweet lord, what a day! Every bit of it passed in front of her eyes.

Then Zoe heard the sobs. For a long time she listened to them. It was Toodles, two beds away, heart-troubled Toodles.

Feeling for slippers that weren’t there, Zoe got out of bed. She walked barefooted to the easy chair beside Toodles, sat down, and smoothed back the woman’s moist, frizzly bangs. “Can you tell me what it is?”

Unnhuh; nope. Strangled, desperate noises.

“Is it about that supper-time business, Toodles? Hope not. Up against you I look like the . . . the Wicked Witch of the North.” Which was a Glinda-the-Good lie if she’d ever told one; white lie, though.

Subsiding strangles—”It . . . isn’t . . . that”—trailing off into hiccups. “Really . . . it . . . isn’t . . . that” Apparently to prove this contention, Toodles pulled herself up to a sitting posture Across her rumpled lap she reeled in, inch by hand-wrung inch, a dressing gown that had been spread out over her bedclothes. A corner of it went to her throat, and was held there.

“What, then? Can you say?”

A modicum of control now. “Yuichan,” Toodles said. “I was thinking of Yuichan. You see this robe, Zoe. . . . He gave me this robe.” It was too dark to see well, but Toodles turned the robe toward her and displayed it anyway, an occasional hiccup unsteadying her hands. All Zoe got was a musty whiff of a familiar, kidneylike odor.

“Here,” Zoe said, and punched on the reading light on Toodle’s headboard. A circle of paleness undulated on the dressing gown. Execrable taste, Helen had said. And rightly: On one side of the robe, an embroidered, snow-covered peak; on the other (once Toodles had lifted the limp lapel so that she could see them), the words Mount Fujiyama. An ugly and smelly garment, no matter how you hemmed or whiffed it.

“Oh, I know it’s not to everybody’s taste,” Toodles said. “But it reminds me of Yuichan. He mail-ordered it from San Francisco four years ago when he learned that there was a very sick Japanese woman in the nursing section of the hostel. That was just like Yuichan. He gave the robe to that poor woman. A coupla years later, when the woman died and her son threw away almost all of her effects, Yuichan brought the gown back and gave it to me. Oh, it was tight on me and it smelled like urine, all right, but I knew what spirit Yuichan gave it in and I had it washed and washed—till I was afraid it’d fall apart in the water.” Toodles spread the dressing gown over her knees. “And tonight . . . tonight ... it reminds me of him ... of Yuichan . . . just ever so much.” And propped her elbows on her shrouded knees and lowered her face into her hands.

The consolation Zoe gave Toodles was that of sitting beside her until the poor, blowsy woman, mascara long since washed away, fell into a sleep as mortally shallow as the crater holes of her eyes.

* * * *

But the next afternoon, in the room they called the recreation center, Toodles sat at the battery-powered orpianoogla and led them all in a songfest: thin, strained vocal cords reaching for notes those cords couldn’t remember. In fact, only Toodles had an unimpaired range, a bravura contralto that could soar like an under-course glissador or tiptoe stealthily through a pianissimo lullaby. With one arm she led their singing, with her free hand she rippled the keys, punched buttons, flipped toggles, and mixed in the percussion. Nor did her heavy legs keep her from foot-pedaling like an unbeliever on burning coals. The whole suite of rooms reverberated with Toodles’ music, and Zoe, clapping and croaking with the rest, wondered dimly if she had dreamed, only dreamed, the midnight despair of this boisterous Phoenix.

“Very good!” Toodles would shout at them between choruses. “Ain’t you glad we’re too old for them jackasses who passed the Retrenchment Edicts to come in here and shut us up?!”

Zoe was. Outlawed music they were souling on, outlawed lyrics and proscribed morals-corrupting rhythms. Old times. As they clapped and sang, Helen told Zoe that Toodles had once been a renaissance-swing headliner in a New Orleans hookah club. “Turn of the century and a few years after,” Helen stage-whispered in her ear as they all clapped to the rumbling orpianoogla. “When she was forty she was doing a bushman, pop-op-rah review in D.C. Forty! Quite professional, the old newsfax say.” Since ‘35, when the ward reps and urban councilmen panicked, those kinds of performances had been totally nyet-ted, at least in Atlanta. Who knew, these days, what other cities did?

“All right!” Toodles shouted. “This one’s ‘Ef Ya Gotta Zotta!’ Way back to twenny-awht—tooo, evwerbodddy!”

So they all sang, the orpianoogla singlehandedly—literally singlehandedly—sounding like the entire defunct, blown-away, vinyl-scrutchy Benny Goodman Orchestra of a century ago. Or Glenn Miller’s, maybe. This was the chorus:

Ef ya gotta zotta

Thenna zotta wa me:

Durnchur lay ya hodwah

On tha furji Marie.

Ef ya gotta zotta,

Then ya gotta zotta wa me!

My sweet lord! Zoe remembered the whole song, every kapomi word of all seven verses. She and Rabon had danced to that one; they’d done the buck-and-wing jitters in the remodeled Regency lobby ballroom. My sweet lord, she thought: “Ef Ya Gotta Zotta!”

But after the last sing-through of the chorus, Toodles barreled out of the renaissance-swing retrospective and into a hard, hard computer-augmented tour of late-twenties/early-thirties racked-and-riled terrorism. With the advent of this deliberate cacophony, old Paul stopped stomping and let his mouth fall open, just as it had during the rotational reminiscence. The others, like Zoe, irresistibly fell to swaying in their chairs.

Toodles sang the ominous lyrics, and sang them so certainly that you could look at her full, jowly face and see that despite the sags, and wens, and ludicrous, smeared lips, she was living every note, vivisecting every lurid word and dragging its guts out for the purpose of feeding her own and her listeners’ irrational fears. (Which was fun: a musical horror movie.) Toodles sang, and sang, and sang. She sang “Walnut Shell Nightmare,” “Tomb of the Pharaohs,” “Crimson Clay Tidal Wave,” and “Outside Sky.” When the last note of the orpianoogla died away, a rain of bravos fell down on the (incredibly) beginning-to-blush Miz Joyce “Toodles” Malins-Phoenix. Even Paul joined in, though he stomped like a jackass rather than hallooed.

“Her first concert since Yuichan died,” Helen whispered.

“Encore!” Jerry shouted. “That we wish more of!”

“Hooooi!” Luther said. “I ain’t heard her sing or play so well since Year-end Week in ‘38.”

“I’m in as fine a voice as I was thirty years ago,” Toodles said, turning on her stool. “It’s hard to believe and it sounds like bragging, but by God! it’s the gospel truth.”

“Damn straight,” Luther said.

“You ain’ done, though,” Parthena said. “Finish out now like we awways do, ‘fo’ we have to go eat.”

Toodles, turning back to the keyboard, honored this request. Ignoring the buttons, switches, and resonator pins on the console, she played with both hands: an old melody, two hundred years almost. Everyone sang, everyone harmonized. Zoe found that, just as with “Ef Ya Gotta Zotta,” she remembered the words—every word, each one called to her lips from a time-before-time that had nothing to do with the Urban Nucleus, or with Sanders and Lannie, or with Mr. Leland and the Geriatrics Hostel. And it wasn’t timesickness or nostalgia that fed her recollection of the lyrics (some things you don’t ever want to go back to), but instead a celebration of the solidity of the present: this present: the moment itself. They all sang:

‘Way down upon the Swanee River

Far, far away,

There’s where my heart is turning ever,

There’s where the old folks stay.

They even sang the stanza about the old plantations and the plaintive line “Oh, darkies, how my heart grows weary,” Luther and Parthena too, and none of what they sang distressed them. Stephen Foster somehow was and wasn’t Stephen Foster when interpreted by an orpianoogla. Sticks and stones, Zoe thought, and names can never...

Why, only a week ago her own daughter had called her, during a moment of ill-concealed morning sickness, a mummified witch. Zoe had chuckled: Clucka-clucka-cluck. What else could she do? When you’re two steps from the finish line, you laugh at the self-loathing insults of also-rans. You have to. Even in the melancholy performance of a nigh-on dead-and-gone work of a sure-enough dead-and-gone composer, Toodles’ whole body laughed. Toodles was two steps from the finish line. They all were. And it certainly wasn’t death they were running at, not as Zoe saw it. No, sir. Something else altogether; something else.

* * * *

7 parthena

That evening, after the orpianoogla-assisted songfest, Parthena, Helen, and Jerry saw to the cooking of supper. And after supper Zoe helped these three clean up in the galley beside the dining room (whereas, downstairs, three levels under, Lannie and Sanders had only a kitchen board in their cubicle and no dining room at all). A beautiful day it had been, a zippity-doo-dah day if she’d ever lived one. Not since Rabon...

“You quilt?” Parthena asked her as they put the last of the china away. But Zoe’s attention was momentarily elsewhere. Jerry, in his wheel chair, was handing the plates to Helen, and the blind woman was stacking them cleanly in the hanging plastic cabinet over the sink. Before beginning, Helen had produced a pair of miniature black goggles, or binoculars, from a dress pocket and snapped these on over her eyes with seemingly only a thin metal bridge-piece to support them. With these in place she moved as if sighted. And yet this was the first time she had worn the goggles in Zoe’s presence.

“Hey, Zoe,” Parthena said again. “You quilt?”

“You mean stitch squares together? Sew? Maybe. Things with my hands I could always bluff through. I’m a bluffer.”

“Shoot, we ain’ even axed you yet what you good at. Where you work ‘fo’ you got put on the Ole Folk Dole Role?”

“Photography,” Zoe said. “I took pitchurs. Still ones and moving ones. And I was good, too, you know. If you want to know the truth, some of my still pitchurs are pretty moving.”

They all laughed. Zoe told them how she and Rabon had been a team for both the Journal/Constitution combine and one of the visual-media affiliates; neither wrote copy (“I didn’t have the schooling and Rabon hadn’t put his to use that way”), but they could both wield cameras, video portables, and the instant-print-making varieties. She had been better than Rabon was, but from ‘01 to ‘09 she had been taken out of action four times by the onset of motherhood and he had got more commissions by virtue of his being insusceptible, as he put it, to pregnancy. But it had all been planned, and after Melanie was born the UrNu Sitter Mission Program had freed them both to pursue their careers. Sort of. They got docked an incredible number of earnies to have Lannie mission-sat for four hours a day, four days a week, she and Rabon splitting up the remaining hours and working less frequently as a team. But they’d done it, she and Rabon, and maybe it was only Lannie’s having been their only child that had caused her to grow up a gimme girl and a sometimes-sweet, more-usually-petulant young woman. What lovely portraits Zoe had made of her when she was little, ole sweet-treat Lannie. In a telecom to her that morning Zoe had asked her daughter to bring from her sleeper-cove only the few clothes she had there and the photographs on the walls, and Melanie had said she would bring them: maybe Mr. Leland had them already.

“Well, if you can shoot pitchurs,” Parthena said, “you can he’p us knock off that new wall banner what you seen on the quiltin’ frame in the rec center. So you c’mon now, Zoe.”

They were finished in the galley. Parthena led them out of there and down the corridor: seventy-six years old and as straight and skinny as a broom handle.

“Other work I got this evening,” Jerry said. “If you all will excuse me.” And he zoomed around them in his winged chair and disappeared into a room Zoe hadn’t been in yet. A closetlike alcove between the rec center and the dining room.

Luther and Toodles were already at the quilting frame when they got there: a monstrous, plastic contraption over which the layer of sewn squares, the synthetic cotton batting, and the underlining had all been tautly spread and whipped down. Zoe had seen this thing—”a Wright brothers plane made of sewing scraps”—during their afternoon songfest, but it had been behind them and partially hidden by a moving screen and no one had volunteered to explain its purpose or its function to her.

Now the screen had been shoved back against the wall, and Toodles and Luther were sitting at opposite ends of the frame pushing and pulling their needles through the three layers of material. Helen, still wearing her goggles, sat down between them, and Parthena and Zoe took up chairs on the other side of the frame, which was tilted like an aileron. It was 1903, and they were Orville and Wilbur, crazy-quilt pilots at a Kitty Hawk where the sands of time had transmogrified into linoleum tile.

“Helen,” Zoe blurted, “with those goggles on you look like you’re gonna fly us right out of here—right up to the dome.” Ooops. Was that the right thing to say to a blind person?

Helen raised her head and stared at Zoe. Straight on, the goggles—or glasses, or binoculars—gave her the look not of a biplane pilot but of an unfriendly outerspace critter. “Aren’t they hideous?” Helen said. “I’d wear them all the time except for the way they look.” And, expertly, she began plunging her own needle into the layers of cloth and forcing it back through.

Parthena showed Zoe how to do it, giving her a needle and thimble and making her watch her technique. “I taught us all how to quilt—but Paul he don’ like it and use his weekend to think on keepin’ himsef a-live for awways. Jerry he got real bidness to tend to. Otherwise, he ‘most awways here. Now you keep yo’ thumb in that thimble, gal, or that needle it gonna bite you. Look here—”

Well, Zoe had sewn before and she’d always been pretty handy anyway. Easy, take it easy, she told herself, and pretty soon she was dipping in and digging out as well as any of them, stitching those jaunty, colored squares—yellow, green, and floral-print blue in a step-pin’-’round-the-mountain pattern—to batting and lining alike. Much concentration to begin with, like a pilot taking off; then, the hang of it acquired, free, relaxing flight Nobody talked, not anyone.

When had she ever felt so serene and at peace? Serene and at peace, yes, but with a tingle of almost physical pleasure throwing off cool little sparks up and down her backbone. The quiet in the room was a part of this pleasure.

Then Parthena began to talk, but not so that it violated the silence they were working in: “I use to do this up in Bondville, when my son Maynard jes’ a little flea and the dome ain’ even half finished yet. Oh, the wind it blow then, it didn’ have no dome to stop it, and we use these quilts to sleep unner, not to hang up on them ole broke-up plasser walls of ours. I still ‘member how Maynard, when I was workin’, would get himsef up unner the frame—a wooden un my husban’ made—and walk back and fo’th like a sojer so that all you could see was the bump of his head goin’ from one end of that frame to the other, up and down, till it seem he warn’ ever gonna wear out. Laugh? Lord, I use to laugh him into a resentful meanness ‘cause he didn’ unnerstan’ how funny his ole head look.”

She laughed in a way that made Zoe join her. “Now he got three babies of his own—Georgia, Mack, and Moses—and a wife what can do this good as me; better maybe, she so spry.”

They quilted for an hour. When they broke off, Parthena insisted that Zoe come back to the dormitory common room and see the “pitchurs of my gran’babies. Shoot, you like pitchurs and babies, don’ you?” So Zoe went. She sat in the easy chair while Parthena, having lowered her bed to an accommodating height, sat like an ebony stork on its edge.

“This one my pert Georgie,” Parthena said, handing her a picture of a handsome little black girl. “She twelve now and one sassy fas’ chile. She gonna get out of Bondville all by hersef, jes’ on charm and speed.” The two boys were older and a little meaner-looking; they probably had to be. None of them were babies. “I jes’ want you to see I had me a fam’ly ‘fo’ the Phoenix. I ain’ like Luther and po’ Toodles what suffer till they was pas’ sixxy without finin’ a real home. Now, though, they got us an’ we got them—but they come a long road, Zoe, a long road. Jerry, too. Sometimes I jes’ lif up a prayer for how lucky I been.”

“I never did pray much,” Zoe said, “but I know what the urge is like.” Like loving somebody in a way that didn’t permit you to tell them: Zoe remembered.

They talked while some of the others got ready for bed. Parthena showed Zoe a set of dentures that had been made for her in 2026; she even made Zoe take them in her hand and examine them as if they were the teeth of an australopithcine. “They clean,” she said. “I ain’ wore ‘em since ‘29. The reason I show ‘em to you is ‘cause they made by Dr. Nettlinger.”

“Who?”

“Gee-rard Nettlinger. You ‘member, Zoe. He that fellow what shot Carlo Bitler. Stood up in the middle of the Urban Council meetin’ and shot that tough, holy man. The day I heard that, I took out them dentures and never put ‘em in again. They shoddy-made, anyhow. Only keep ‘em so Maynard can sell ‘em one day. People go all greedy-crazy over doodads what b’long to ‘sassins. People crazy.”

“Yep,” Zoe agreed. “My daddy said it was the new idolatry.”

“It idle, awright. Don’ make a mussel-shell worth o’ sense.”

Then, somehow, their conversation got around to why the original family members had chosen Phoenix—rather than something light like Sweetheart or O’Possum—as the group’s surname. Zoe said she had supposed it was because Atlanta was sometimes called the Phoenix City, having risen again from its own ashes after the Civil War (which Zoe’s grandfather, even in the 1980s, had insisted on calling the War Between the States—as if that made some kind of significant difference). And when the dome went up in that decade linking the old century with the new one, Atlanta had undergone still another incarnation. Were those part of the group’s original reasons?

“They part of ‘em awright,” Parthena said. “But jes’ part. Another one is, we all come out of our own ashes when we ‘greed to the cov’nant. We all bone again, Zoe, like in Jesus.”

“Well, I thought that, too, you know. That’s what makes the name so good.”

“Yeah. But Paul he like it ‘cause the phoenix a ‘Gyp-tian bird what was imortal, you see. It only look like it die, then it spurt back up jes’ as feathery and fine as befo’. He a mean man on that pint, Paul is.”

“He ought to be happy with the Ortho-Urban Church, then. It says the same sort of thing happens to people after they die.”

“Ain’ the same, though, Paul say. ‘Cause people do die, no lookin’-like in it, and they don’ get a body back at all. Paul he hung up on the body.”

“You don’t say? It’s good to know he’s not just a Dirty Old Man.”

“Oh, he that, too, he sho’ is.” They chuckled together. “But it the other thing keep him thinkin’ and rockin’ and figgerin’. The Phoenix lucky. Mos’ of us still got our mines. But Paul he eighty-some-odd and his been goin’ ever since we marry. Mr. Leland awmos’ didn’ ‘cept him in this program five year back, you see. Res’ of us made him say yes. So Mr. Leland fine’ly ‘cepted him, hopin’ we could haul him back on the road. We done it, too. Pretty much.”

“Did Paul suggest the name?”

“No. Maybe. I don’ ‘member zackly. What I do ‘member is that the name fit, it fit fo’ all kinds o’ reasons. One other, and maybe the bes’ un, was a story my gran’daddy tole that his own daddy tole him. It was ‘bout a slave chile, a little gal, what was made to watch the two-year-ole baby of the boss man, the ‘marster’ as gran’daddy say his daddy say.

“Well, that little baby fell down the steps while the slave gal was watchin’ it: she took her eye away a minute and it bumped down them ole steps and took on a-hollerin’. Scared, you know, but not kilt. Well, when the white mistresses in the house heard this, they took on a-cryin’ and carryin’ on terrible—jes’ like that baby been murdered. They kep’ on till the marster himsef come strollin’ in and axed them what it was. When they tole him, he pick up a board and hit that little slave gal in the head. Kilt her. Then he gathered ‘round him a bunch of niggers (my gran’daddy he tole it this way, now) and ordered ‘em to thow the gal in the river. The gal’s mama begged and prayed and axed him to spare the gal fo’ buryin’, but he paid her no mine and made ‘em thow the chile in.

“Now this where the story get magical, Zoe. The little girl’s name was Phoebe, and five slaves and the girl’s mama went down to the river with her—the biggest nigger in front, carryin’ little Phoebe with her bloody head hangin’ down, mournful and cold. This big nigger he thew the gal in like the marster order him to, Phoebe’s mama jes’ moanin’ and beatin’ on hersef, and then he walk right in affer the girl and hole himsef unner water till he drown. The others they resolve to do the same. And they do it too, the mama goin’ in las’ and prayin’ to God they all be taken up together.

“One night later, the white folks from the big house is walkin’ by the river and all at once they see seven small, ugly birds fly up outa the water and go sailin’ straight at the moon. The higher they get, the brighter and purtier and bigger they get too—till at las’ they stop in the sky like stars and stay still over the big house where them white folks live. A new constellation they become, which ewyone on that plantation call the Phoenix—’cep’ this constellation don’ move like it s’posed to but jes’ sit with its wings spread, wide and haughtylike, over the marster’s house.

“And that the story, Zoe. Jerry he say he never heard of no constellation call the Phoenix. But with that dome up there who gonna ‘member zackly how the sky look? Nobody; not nobody.

“An’ I believe it still up there somewhere.”

* * * *

8          flashforward: at the end of winter

Almost three old-style months after entering the Geriatrics Hostel, not as patient or prisoner but as a genuine, come-and-go-as-you-please resident, Zoe sat on the roof one evening and recalled the steps of her slow immersion in the Phoenix clan. Supper was eaten: a calming warmth in her stomach and bowels.

Pretty soon the family would decide. When you’re streaking toward either seventy or eighty—as well as that something else that isn’t death—long courtships are as foolish as whirlwind ones. Three months is plenty to decide in, maybe too much. Anyhow, they were formally going to pass on her, and it might be that in giving her this hour of solitude, this retrospective moment on the darkening rooftop, they were already engaged in the process of their decision. Was it in doubt? And hadn’t they been so engaged all along, every day that Zoe had lived among them sharing their lives?

One girder-car tonight, and a flight of pigeons wheeling together in great loops in front of a huge, neon Coca-Cola sign.

Look what had happened in these three old-style months: For one thing, she had found out that the septigamoklans in the Tower weren’t living there as welfare recipients solely, as so many helpless mendicants on the Old Folk Dole Role. Most of them had spent their lives paying into the medicaid and future-secure programs of the city; since 2035, the year young Mr. Leland’s study had begun, the quarterly benefits of all the people in the hostel had been pooled and invested. This was done with permission from the residents, only a scant number of whom denied the UrNu Human Development Commission the legal administration of their estates. And against these holdouts, no penalty at all. In any event, the dividends on these pooled investments and the interest on several well-placed accounts financed the feeding and the sheltering of the residents and even provided them with personal funds to draw on. They also helped remunerate the surviving families of those who came into the study.

Each family had a budgeter: Helen was the Phoenix budgeter, and, wearing those little, black, vision-assisting binoculars, she kept books like a born-and-bred C.P.A. (which was C.U.A. now, Zoe remembered). Other times, she used her braille-writer. Anyhow, they weren’t dole-riders, the people in the Tower—although Zoe had to admit that the hostel’s system was dependent upon the good offices and business acumen of those who administered their benefits. This drawback was partially offset by the budgeter of each septigamoklan’s having a seat on the Commission Board of Financial Planners, as well as by the judicious appeal to market-forecasting computers.

Down on Level 3 with Sanders and Melanie, Zoe’s quarterly allotments—only a day or two after the future-secure printout chit arrived—had been eaten up like nutmeg-sprinkled oatmeal. The Nobles garnisheed the entire value of the chit, without even so much as a countersignature, for granting Zoe the privilege of living with them. Only the coming of their child and the prospect of a lump-sum reward from the commission had induced them to hand Zoe over. Just like a prisoner-exchange, or the sale of a decrepit and recalcitrant slave. Yessir, Zoe thought: Sold down the river. But a river out of which it was possible to fly like a sleek bird, dripping light as if it were water. An old bird, Zoe was; a bird of fire being reborn in the Lethe of Sanders and Melanie’s forgetfulness and neglect.

“A pox on self-pity,” Zoe said aloud, surprising herself. Overhead, the torchlit girder-car had almost reached the acme of the dome.

Well, what else? What else? Lots of things. She had met members of other septigamoklans, the O’Possums and the Cadillacs and the Graypanthers and oh! all the others, too. There’d been a party one Saturday night in the garden, with food and music and silly paper decorations. Hostel attendants had closed the patio windows and pulled the acoustical draperies in the intensive-care rooms, and everyone else had gone to town. Young Mr. Leland, at their invitation, had been there, and nobody but Paul of all the Phoenix went to bed before 4 a.m. Sometime after midnight Toodles led everybody in a joyful, cacophonous version of “Ef Ya Gotta Zotta.”

Then there were Sunday afternoons, alone with Paul or Luther or maybe, just maybe, one of the girls. During the week, field trips to the Atlanta Museum of Arts (“Boring as hell,” said Paul) and Consolidated Rich’s and the pedestrian-park flea markets. Two different excursions to the new theatre-in-the-round opera house, where they had watched a couple of interesting, council-sanctioned hologramic movies. They were OK, sort of plotless and artsy, but OK. Back in their own fourth-floor suite, though, they could show old-fashioned, two-dimensional movies; and just since Zoe had been there, the Phoenix had held a Rock Hudson festival and a mock seminar in the “Aesthetic of Late Twentieth-century X-rated Cinema,” during which Jerry had turned off the sound tracks and lectured to quite humorous effect with the aid of a stop-action button and a pointer.

After one such lecture, when the rooftop was theirs, Luther and Zoe had laid out a croquet course; and, except for Jerry, in 23° C. weather (the internal meteorologists had given them one or two cold days, though) they had all played without their clothes! Nude, as Helen said. And that had been one of those rare occasions not requiring meticulous attention to detail—quilting, putting away dishes, keeping books—when Helen wore her goggle-bin-oculars. And, not counting the pulse-cued bracelet, only the goggle-binoculars. The idea, lifted from an old book of short stories, had been Toodles’, but Paul had given it a vigorous seconding. And so Zoe, like a girl going skinny-dipping in the before-the-dome countryside, shed her paper gown, her underthings, her inhibitions, and let the temperate air swaddle her sensitive flesh and her every self-conscious movement. Much merriment. And no repugnance for their blotched and lignifying bodies; instead, a strange tenderness bubbling under the surface merriment.

What, after all, did the bunions, and the varicosities, and the fleshy folds signify? Zoe could answer that: the onset of age and their emphatic peoplehood, male and female alike. Finally, that day, she forgot the sensuous stirrings of the dome winds, lost herself in the game, and became extremely angry when Parthena sent her ball careening off into an unplayable position. Yessir, that had been an all-fun day.

And what else? Well, the Phoenix had given her a still camera, and for the first time in ten or fifteen years she had begun taking pictures again. The camera was an old but still beautifully operable Double-utility Polaroid, and the first project Zoe undertook was the capturing in stark black and white of the faces of her new family. Posed photographs, candid ones, miniatures, darkroom enlargements: group portraits, singles, double-exposure collages, meditative semiabstracts. The best of these went up in the rec center. The Wall of the Phoenix, this gallery became, and it was framed on both sides by bright, quilted wall banners.

Paul and Toodles both grew quite vain about certain of these portraits and occasionally got caught staring at their favorites: teen-agers ogling themselves in a mirror. Vanity, vanity, saith somebody or other, Zoe remembered. But Helen never donned her little binoculars to look at her own photographed image, even though she had more justification than either Paul or Toodles. One day Zoe asked her why. “I haven’t looked at my own face since I was thirty,” she said, “because I am quite content with the self-deluding vision of my thirty-year-old one that still resides up here.” She tapped her head. Then she showed Zoe an old photograph of herself, one that glinted in the common room’s fluorescents and revealed a woman of disgusting, not-to-be-gainsaid beauty. “I can feel what I look like now,” Helen said. “I don’t have to look.” Even so, Zoe’s portraits of Helen did her no disservice; in fact, they launched a thousand tiresome accolades from the men, Paul in particular—when, that is, he wasn’t mesmerized by his own amber-eyed, celluloidally distanced self. Well, why not? Zoe’s pitchurs were damn good, if she did say so herself, just by way of echoing the others.

The month Spring was coming on. What else could she recall about Winter in the hostel? Visits by Melanie and Sanders. The prospect of a grandchild. This last excited her, tickled her like air on her naked body, and for it alone did she anticipate the biweekly drop-ins of her daughter and son-in-law. No, that wasn’t true. Lannie she always had a hankering to see, whether a baby was growing in her womb or not. Her daughter Lannie was, her own flesh and that of dead Rabon: her daughter. Only fatuous Sanders did she have difficulty tolerating, and he had never once called her anything as brutal as a mummified witch, not ever in his life. So what did you do?

Zoe, for her part, never visited them in their Level 3 cubicle, and when they came to see her, thereby perfunctorily carry out their filial duty, she always greeted them in the quadrangle where they had first put her on the block. That made Sanders uncomfortable: he scuffed his street slippers in the gravel and craned his neck around as if looking for the one mean old codger in the hostel who would use his balcony advantage to shoot him, Paul, with a blowgun or pellet rifle. Minor sport for Zoe, watching her son-in-law sidelong as she asked Melanie how she felt—if the morning sickness had gone away yet (“There are pills for that, Mother!”)—what sex the Jastov-Hunter test had said the child would be—other things that Lannie was at last willing to talk about.

But she never used her freedom to visit them on Level 3, and they never extended her such an invitation. No, sir. Not once.

Zoe tilted her head back and saw that the girder-car she had been following was nowhere in sight. My sweet lord, hadn’t she been up on the Tower roof a long time? And hadn’t the time flown by? They were reaching a decision on her, the Phoenix were. That was it.

Was the outcome in doubt? Would Mr. Leland send her into another incomplete septigamoklan (if one existed) because of a single person’s snide, blackballing veto? As Mr. Leland had explained it, they could easily do that, blackball her. How would she feel if they did? As far as that went, did she herself want to marry with the Phoenix, to join with them in a new covenant?

Well, the answer to that was an easy one. The answer was yes; yes, she wanted to marry with Luther, Parthena, Toodles, Paul, Helen, and Jerry. And her reason for wanting to was a simple one, too: she was in love.

* * * *

9          spending the afternoon with luther

On her first Sunday among the Phoenix, Toodles told Zoe that although it was her, Toodles’, turn to spend the afternoon with Luther, she would be happy to yield to Zoe. “I don’t feel all that good,” she explained, “and, besides, it’s the only really hospitable way for me to behave, don’t you think?” Propped up in bed, Yuichan’s awful Fujiyama robe bundled about her shoulders, Toodles was eating a breakfast roll that a cartlike servo-mechanism had wheeled into the common room from the galley. A hairline smear of artificial-peach jelly rode Toodles’ upper lip like a candied mustache, and Zoe wanted to take a tissue and daub it away.

“If you don’t feel well, should you be eating jelly rolls?”

Toodles winked. “You know the ole saying: jelly rolls is medicine. But I’m having mine this morning and don’t need a dose this afternoon.”

“Does ‘spend the afternoon’ mean what the young drakes and duckies call ‘bodyburning’?” Why was she asking? She already knew the answer. Parthena and Helen were off to an Ortho-Urban service somewhere on West Peachtree, Paul was asleep across the room from them, and Jerry and Luther had both got up early and gone down the hall toward the rec center. Zoe had declined an invitation to attend services with Parthena and Helen. Now she wished she were with them.

“You ain’t slow, Zoe,” Toodles said. “I’da been blunter, but it embarrasses Errol.”

“Errol?”

Flipping up the bed linen and extending a heavy leg, Toodles put one bunion-afflicted foot on the tray of the servo-cart. “Errol,” she reiterated. The cart hummed and backed up, but Toodles got her leg off the tray in time to avoid a nasty spill. A doughnut did drop to the floor, though. “Temperamental, Errol is. . . . You’re not thinking of saving yourself for after the covenant ceremony, are you?”

“Well, if I am, I been saving myself so long that my interest’s now a whole lot greater than my principles.” That was the punch line of a joke Rabon used to tell. It didn’t suit Zoe’s mood, which was cautious and a bit skeptical, but it perfectly suited Toodles’—she was delighted. I always play to my audience, Zoe thought; can’t seem to help it. Aloud, attempting to recover, “I never was one to kiss on the first date, Toodles; just not the sort.”

“Oh, I always said that, too. Anyhow, you’ve already slept in the same room with the Phoenix, you know. It’s not like you’d be sacking out with some bulgy-britches thugboy.” And at last she wiped the peach-jelly mustache off her upper lip. “Please say yes. Luther’s liable to be hurt.” And with her little, gold remote-con box Toodles beckoned Errol (who, Zoe noted with some annoyance, was something of a whiner) closer to the bed so that she could pick up another breakfast pastry.

“OK,” Zoe answered, almost as if it were someone else: not her.

So that afternoon she and Luther walked through the pedestrian courts outside the Geriatrics Hostel and stopped to eat lunch at a little restaurant that seemed to be made entirely of plate glass; it was nestled under the stone eaves of a much taller building, though, and had green, reed-woven window shades to keep out the glare of the dome’s day lamps. Atmosphere, Rabon would have said the shades gave the place.

They sat in a simulated-leather booth with potted ferns on both sides of them to cut off their view to the front door and drank scotch and water while waiting for the steward to bring them their meal. A Sunday drink. Well, that was something the Retrenchment Edicts hadn’t outlawed. You could get one right after your favorite Ortho-Urban services, which was what half the people in this place, it looked like, were doing. The other half were sharing table hookahs and letting the thin smoke coil away from them through the decorative ferns.

“Good food,” Luther said. “They do know how to throw together good food here.” He was a little nervous, Zoe could see. He kept putting his malletlike hands on the table, dropping them to his lap, taking a sip of his drink, then sticking those heavy purplish hands back on the table. “You ain’t disturbed that Toodles pushed you into this, are you now?” he said, his brow comically corrugating.

“Luther, my daughter and son-in-law pushed me into this, not Toodles. And they don’t even know when they’re doing me a favor.”

That loosened him, more than the scotch even. He asked her questions about her family, he told her about himself. Their meal came—a vegetable dinner featuring hydroponically grown snapbeans, zucchini, tomatoes (stewed), and some sort of hybrid greens—and Luther, between bites, kept on talking. A warm rumble.

“I was born the same year Dr. King was assassinated,” he said at one point. “That’s how I got my name. The shame of it is, I lived to see that sort of business over and over before the cities went undercover—and then after the doming, too. I wasn’t quite six when I saw a young man shoot Mrs. Martin Luther King, Sr., and several other people right in the old man’s own church. My church, too. Then. More died after the dome was up. That young Bitler he was the last one, and it’s been eleven years since we’ve had to walk our hungry-children miles to some good man’s grave.

“You know, I was so sick I almost shot myself that year, I almost took a razor to my wrists. Back when you could breathe, when you could look up and see a sun or a moon, some men used to be born in the year a comet come through and wait their whole lives till it come back again so that they could die. That year, I was so down I knew it had been written that Luther Battle was supposed to come in and go out with another man’s assassination.

“But I was in my thirty-second year with McAlpine Company in ‘29, and we had a lot of work that year. Bitler had done made a lot of people angry, he had got a lot of ole dead asses movin’. After he was shot, there was all kind of uproar to tear down the surfaceside slums and stick up some kind of halfway decent housing on top of the streets instead of under ‘em. I was on McAlpine’s demolition crews, not the construction ones. Sixty years old and I was workin’ off my anger and grief by wreckin’ ole tenements; it was the only way they let us make anything of our own. I bossed the demolition of fifteen buildings that year, workin’ it all out so that walls come down clean and the guts got hauled off neat. Cranes, cats, tractors, trucks, all of ‘em doin’ this and doin’ that ‘cause of how I told ‘em to go. Only thing that kep’ me sane, Zoe: tearin’ down another century’s toilets and doin’ it with that century’s equipment. Then the uproar quieted off, the work contracts run out, and the Urban Council didn’t do nothin’ to start ‘em up again. We still got some damn ghettos in Atlanta, no matter what the ward reps say. Bondville, one of the worst. Parthena’s boy and her gran’chillun still live there. . . . But that bad year was over, and I had survived it, Zoe.

“Retired, then. Lived alone on 7, under, just like I had all the years I was with McAlpine. The company had been my family since all the way back to ‘97. My mama and daddy was lucky: they died before they had to see a dome go up over their heads. Me, I wasn’t lucky: I had to sign on with McAlpine and help build that damn thing up there.”

“You helped build the dome?” Zoe said. She’d never met anyone who had, not anybody who’d admit to it at least.

“I did. They were twelve different outfits, different companies, workin’ to do it, everybody goin’ from blueprints they had run off a computer somewhere up East or maybe in California. We were a year behind New York and Los Angeles, McAlpine told us, and we had to catch up. He was still sayin’ this in ‘97, the year I come on, three after the Dome Projec’ started; and no one ever asked why the hell we had to catch up with this foolishness that New York and L.A. was pursuin’. Most of us hadn’t had any kinds of jobs at all before the projec’, so we shut up and did what all of a sudden the city was givin’ us money to do. Yessir, Zoe. We started in a-buildin’ a pyramid, a great ole tomb to seal ourselves into and never come out of again. Slaves in Egypt might have to work twenty years to build a House of the Dead for Pharaoh, but they didn’t have to lie down in it themselves. We was more advanced. We done ours in ten and managed it so we could put the lid on ourselves from the inside. No Moses anywhere to say, ‘Hey! wait a minute, you don’t want to live in this place forever!’ But we were pullin’ down some decent cash, even if they was UrNu dollars, and didn’t think there’d ever be a day you couldn’t see at least a little square of sky somewhere, at least enough blue to make denim for a workingman’s britches. It was an adventure. Nobody thought he was just another one of Pharaoh’s slavin’ niggers. I didn’t, anyhow. Even when I first come on with McAlpine, I felt like I was the chief mucketymuck myself.”

“How come?”

“Well, we had to go up to the sections of the dome’s gridwork that we’d completed, and we always went up in girder-cars, just like the ones you see comb-crawlin’ along after dark with their torches alight. You worked on platforms or from harnesses on the girder-car, and you was always right out there over the whole damn state, you could see everything—even when the wind was streamin’ by you like it wanted to shake all your hard labor into rubble and scrap. Stone Mountain. All kinds of lakes. The mountains up by Gainesville.

“And kudzu, Zoe, kudzu like you’ve never seen or can even remember. That ole madman vine ran itself over everything, telephone poles and broken-down barns and even some of them cheapjack townhouses and condo-minny-ums they hammered up all las’ century. The whole world was green, dyin’ maybe ‘cause of that kudzu but so green it made your eyes ache. And up there above the whole world Luther Battle felt like Kheops himself, or King Tut, or whichever one of them mean bastards built the bigges’ tomb. And I never did say, ‘Hoooi! Luther, why are we doin’ this?’ “

After their meal, Zoe and Luther went back to the hostel and rode the Tower lift-tube up to the fourth floor. Although she hadn’t let him do it in the pedestrian courts on the walk home, in the lift-tube she gave him her hand to hold. Ten years after retiring from the McAlpine Company, he still had calluses on his palms, or the scars of old calluses. In the lift-tube he didn’t talk. He was embarrassed again, as if his talking at lunch had been a spiritual bleeding which had left him weak and uncertain of his ground. Well, she was embarrassed too. Only Luther had an advantage: a blush on him wasn’t so all-fired conspicuous as it was on her.

In the common room, which was unoccupied by group design and agreement, Luther took her to his bed and made the automatic room dividers roll into place. Body-burning, the young people called it now. That’s what it was for her, too, though not in the way the term was supposed to suggest and not because Luther was a snorting dragon in the act. No, it had been a long time. Rabon was the last, of course, and this ready compliance to the rule of the Phoenix surprised her a little. For years she had been (what was Melanie’s amusing vulgarity?) mummifying, and you couldn’t expect to throw off the cerements, vaporize the balms and preservatives, and come back from your ages-long limbo in one afternoon.

So that afternoon Zoe experienced only the dull excitement of pain; that, and Luther’s solicitude. But each Sunday—the next one with Paul, the one after with Luther, the following one with Paul, and so on, depending on inclination and a very loose schedule—it got better. Since she had never really been dead, it didn’t take so long as might the hypothetical, attempted resurrection of a Pharaoh. Not anywhere near so long as that. For she was Zoe, Zoe Breedlove, and she no longer remembered her maiden name.

* * * *

10        jerry at his tricks

What did Jerry do in that mysterious alcove between the rec center and the dining room? Zoe wondered because whenever Jerry had a moment of free time—after dinner, before bed, Sunday morning—his wheel chair, humming subsonically, circled about and went rolling off to that little room. And Jerry would be gone for fifteen minutes, or thirty, of maybe an hour, whatever he could spare. What provoked her curiosity was the midnight vision of his puffball hairdo and his sad hollow eyes floating out of the corridor’s brightness and into the darkened common room after one of these recurrent disappearances.

On the Sunday night (more properly, the Monday morning) after her conversations, both social and carnal, with Luther, Zoe had this vision again and heard the crippled man unmindfully whistling to himself as he returned from that room: “Zippity-Doo-Dah,” it sounded like. And up to his unmade bed Jerry rolled.

Jerry rolls in at night, Zoe thought, and jelly rolls in the afternoon. A muddled, word-fuzzy head she had. It all had something to do with Toodles. And Helen, Parthena, and Luther. Only Paul left out, to date anyway. But these members of the Phoenix were all sleeping.

Sitting up and lowering her feet to the floor she said, “Jerry?”

“Who is it?” She couldn’t see his eyes any more, but the macrocephalic helmet of his silhouette turned toward her, dubiously. “Is it Zoe?”

“Yep,” she said. “It’s me. Can’t sleep.” She pulled on her dressing gown (Sanders had brought most of her things to the hostel on Saturday afternoon, but had not come up to see her) and walked barefooted on the cold floor over to Jerry’s territory.

The Phoenix could certainly saw wood. No danger of these buzz saws waking up; it was enough to make you wish for impaired hearing. Except that each one of the sounds was different, and interesting: an orchestra of snorers. There, a tin whistle. There, a snoogle-horn. Over there, a tubaphone. That one, a pair of castanets. And . ..

Jerry grinned quizzically at her and scratched his nose with one finger. “Can’t sleep, heh? Would you like to go to the galley for a drink? Maybe some wine. Wine’s pretty good for insomnia.”

“Wine’s pretty good for lots of things,” Zoe said. “What I wanted to ask was, what are you up to when you get all antisocial on us and shut yourself up in that closet out there?” She nodded toward the door.

“You’re a nice lady. You get a multiple-choice test. A) I’m concocting an eternal-youth elixir. B) I’m perfecting an antigravity device which will spindizzy all of Atlanta out into the stars. C) I’m performing unspeakable crimes of passion on old telescope housings and the jellies in Petri dishes. Or D) I’m . . . I’m . . . My wit fails me, dear lady. Please choose.”

“D,” Zoe said.

“What?”

“I choose D. You said multiple-choice. That’s what I choose.”

As if struck with an illuminating insight (for instance, the key to developing an antigravity device), Jerry clapped his hands together and chuckled. “Ah. Even at this late hour, your wit doesn’t fail you,” he said. “I am bested.”

“Not yet. You haven’t given me a real answer yet, and I’ve been talking to you for almost two minutes.”

“Oh ho! In that case, dear Zoe lady, come with me.” Jerry Zitelman-Phoenix circled about in his subsonically humming chair and went rolling through the common room door. Zoe followed.

Down the corridor Jerry glided, Zoe now more conscious of the raw slapping of her feet than of his wheel chair’s pleasant purr. Which stopped when he reached the mysterious room. “I would have preferred to wait for tomorrow, you know. But over the years I have learned to honor the moods of insomniac ladies. And, besides, what I have been working on is finished. It won’t hurt for you to get a foreglimpse of the issue of my labors. It won’t hurt me, anyway. You, on the other hand, may merely aggravate your sleepless condition.”

At two in the morning, if it wasn’t later than that, Jerry was a caution, a nonstop caution. Not much like Thursday night on the roof when he had talked about unseeable stars and his lifelong paralysis. Fiddle! Zoe knew better: he was just like he was Thursday night, if you were talking about the underneath part of him; the seeming change was only in his approach to the revelation of this sell. Then, candor. Now, a camouflage that he stripteased momentarily aside, then quickly restored. Oh, it wasn’t hard to undress this man’s soul. You just had to warn yourself not to destroy him by letting him know that you could see him naked. Nope. Keep those pasties in place, wrap up the emotional overflow in an old G-string. And smile, smile, smile.

Because he was funny, Jerry was. In spite of his tricks.

They went into the little room, and he hit the light button. Zoe, standing just inside the door, saw a counter with some sort of duplicating machine on it, reams of paper, an IBM margin-justifying typer (they had had those in the offices of the Journal/Constitution combine), and a stack of bright yellow-orange booklets. There were little inset docks in the counter (put there by Luther) so that Jerry could maneuver his wheel chair into comfortable working positions.

Booklets. You didn’t see booklets very often. One good reason: The Retrenchment Edicts of ‘35 had outlawed private duplicating machines. Everyone had a visicom console and better be glad he did. The Phoenix had two such consoles in the rec center, though Zoe couldn’t recall seeing anyone use either of them. Why, since she’d been at the hostel, she hadn’t tapped into one at all. And now she was seeing booklets: booklets!

“I always wondered where Atlanta’s pamphleteers holed up,” Zoe said. “You preachin’ the overthrow of our Urban Charter?”

Jerry put a hand to his breast. “Zoe lady, the name is Zitelman, not Marx, and I am first—no, not first, but last and always—a Phoenix.” He took a copy of one of tha booklets from the counter and handed it to Zoe, who had moved deeper into his crowded little den of sedition, “This issue, which has been in preparation for three or four weeks now, nay, longer, is for you. Not just this copy, mind you, but the whole issue.”

Zoe looked at the booklet’s cover, where on the yellow-orange ground a stylized, pen-and-ink phoenix was rising from its own ashes. The title of the publication was set in tall, closely printed letters on the bottom left: Jerry at His Tricks, Beneath that: Volume VI, No. 1. “What is it?” she asked.

“It’s our famzine,” Jerry said. “All the septigamoklans have one. Family magazine, you see. Of which I am the editor and publisher. It is the True History and Record of the Phoenix Septigamoklan, along with various creative endeavors and pertinent remarks of our several spouses. One day, dear Zoe, you will be represented herein.”

Leafing through the famzine, Zoe said, “Don’t count your chickens ...”

“Well, as an egghead who has already hatched his personal fondnesses, I am now seriously counting.” He pointed a wicked, crooked finger at her. “One,” he said in a burlesque, Transylvanian accent. “One chicken.”

She laughed, patting him on top of his wiry puffball. But it was not until the next day, before breakfast, that she had a chance to read through the booklet—the advance copy—that Jerry had given her. In it she found artwork signed by Parthena, Helen, and Paul, and articles or poems by everyone in the family. Several of these were tributes, brief eulogies, to the dead Yuichan Kurimoto. The issue concluded with a free verse poem welcoming Zoe Breedlove as a candidate for marriage with the Phoenix. It was a flattering but fairly tastefully done poem. It was signed J. Z-Ph., and at the bottom of this last page was the one-word motto of the clan:

Dignity.

It was all too ridiculously corny. How did they have the nerve to put that word there? Zoe had to wipe her eyes dry before going into the dining room for breakfast.

* * * *

11        in the sun that is young once only

Of all of them Paul was the hardest to get to know. Parthena had spoken rightly when she said that part of the difficulty was that his mind was going, had been going for a long time. He seemed to have a spiritual umbilicus linking him to the previous century and the time before the domes. He had been nine years old at the time of the Apollo 11 moon landing, thirteen at the time of the final Apollo mission, and he remembered both of them.

“Watched ‘em on TV,” he said. “Every minute I could of the first one. Just enough of the last one to say I saw it.”

And he talked considerably more lucidly about his boyhood in California than he did about everyday matters in the hostel. His other favorite subject was the prospect of attaining, not in a dubious and certainly vitiated afterlife, but in the flesh, immortality. His only real grounding in the present, in fact, was the unalloyed joy he took in Sunday afternoons, at which time he performed creditably and behaved like a mature human being. The leers and the winks, it seemed, were almost involuntary carry-overs from a misspent youth.

“He gone sklotik up here”—Parthena tapped her head—”from the life he led as much as from jes’ gettin’ ole.” (Sklotik, Zoe figured out, was sclerotic.) “Drugs, likker, womens, card playin’. Brag on how he never had a real job, jes’ gamble for his keep-me-up. Now Mr. Leland ‘fraid to use on him them new medicines what might stop his brain cells a-dyin’. Easy to see, he done los’ a bunch.”

And with his washed-out, Weimaraner eyes and raw, long lips Paul sometimes seemed like his own ghost instead of a living man. But he could still move around pretty good; he drifted about as effortlessly as a ghost might. And one day, three weeks after Zoe’s arrival, he drifted up to her after dinner in the rec center (she was making a photo-display board) and pulled a chair up next to hers. She turned her head to see his raw lips beginning to move.

“It’s time for one of my services,” he said. “You don’t go to the Ortho-Urbanist ones with Helen and Parthena, so I expect you’re a fit body for one of mine. This Sunday morning, right in here.”

“What sort of services?”

“My sort.” A wink, maybe involuntary. “The True Word. Once every quarter, once every new-style month, I preach it.”

“The True Word on what? Everybody’s got his own true word, you know.”

“On how not to die, woman. The basis of every religion.”

“No,” Zoe said. “Not every one of them; just the ones that don’t know exactly what to do with the here-and-now.”

His long lips closed, his eyes dilated. She might just as well have slapped him. In eighty years no one had told him that an ontological system didn’t have to direct its every tenet toward the question of “how not to die.” Or if someone had, Paul had forgotten. Even so, he fought his way back from stupefaction. “The basis,” he said archly, “of every decent religion.”

Jerry, who had overheard, powered himself up to the work table. “Rubbish, Paul. And besides, if tomorrow we were all granted everlasting life, no better than struldbrugs would we be, anyhow.”

Zoe raised her eyebrows: struldbrugs? Paul kept silent.

“That’s someone,” Jerry explained, “who can’t die but who nevertheless continues to get older and more infirm. Two hundred years from now we’d all be hopelessly senile immortals. Spare me such a blessing.”

That ended the conversation. A ghost impersonating a man, Paul got up and drifted out of the room.

On Sunday morning, though, Luther went down to the rec center and took a box of aluminum parts, the largest being a drumlike cylinder, out of the closet where they kept the dart boards, the croquet equipment, and the playing cards, and assembled these aluminum pieces into ... a rocking horse, one big enough for a man.

It was a shiny rocking horse, and its head, between its painted eyes, bore the representation of a scarab beetle pushing the sun before it like a cosmic dung ball. Zoe, who was in the rec center with all the Phoenix but Paul, went up to the metal critter to examine it. The scarab emblem was so meticulously wrought that she had to lean over to see what this horse had crawling on its forehead. A blue bug. A red ball. Well, that was different: funny and mysterious at once. “What’s this?” she asked Luther, who, mumbling to himself, was trying to wedge the cardboard box back into the closet.

“Pulpit,” he said. He thought she meant the whole thing. No sense in trying to clarify herself, he was still shoving at the box. But pulpit was a damn funny synonym for rocking horse.

After wedging the parts box back into place, Luther dragged a tall metal bottle from the closet and carried it over to the biomonitor cabinet next to Toodles’ orpianoogla. Then he set it down and came back to the ring of chairs in front of the rocking horse. A silly business, every bit of it. Zoe put a single finger on the horse’s forehead, right on the blue bug, and pushed. The horse, so light that only its weighted rockers kept it from tipping, began to dip and rise, gently nodding. No one was talking. Zoe turned to the group and shrugged. It looked like you’d have to threaten them all with premature autopsy to get anyone to explain.

“Don’t ask,” Jerry said finally. “But since you’re asking, it’s to humor him. He asked for the horse the second month after our covenant ceremony in ‘35, and Dr. Tanner said OK, give it to him. Now, four times a year, he plays octogenarian cowboy and rides into the sunset of his own dreams right in front of everybody. It’s not so much for us to listen to him, you know.”

Zoe looked at the five of them sitting there afraid she wouldn’t understand: five uncertain, old faces. She was put off. They had been dreading this morning because they didn’t know how she would react to the living skeleton in their family closet: the de-ranged range-rider Paul Erik Ferrand-Phoenix. Well, she was put off. All somebody’d had to do was tell her, she was steamingly put off. “O ye of little faith,” she wanted to say, “go roast your shriveled hearts on Yuichan’s hibachi. All of it together wouldn’t make a meal.” But she didn’t say anything, she sat down with the group and waited. Maybe they didn’t think she had Yuichan’s compassion, maybe they didn’t think she was worthy to replace their dear departed Jap...

Just then Paul came drifting in: an entrance. Except that he didn’t seem to be at all aware of the impression he was making; he was oblivious of his own etiolated magnificence. Dressed in spotless white from head to foot (currently fashionable attire among even the young, matched tunic and leggings), he wandered over to the metal horse without looking at them. Then, slowly, he climbed on and steadied the animal’s rocking with the toe tips of his white slippers.

He was facing them. Behind him, as backdrop, one of the quilted wall banners: a navy-blue one with a crimson phoenix in its center, wings outspread. Zoe couldn’t help thinking that every detail of Paul’s entrance and positioning had been planned beforehand. Or maybe it was that this quarterly ritual had so powerfully suffused them all that the need for planning was long since past. Anyhow, knowing it all to be nonsense, Zoe had to acknowledge that little pulses of electricity were moving along her spine. Like the time she had first quilted with the group.

Slowly, mesmerizingly slowly, Paul began to rock. And softly he began to preach the True Word. “When we were young,” he said, “there was fire, and sky, and grass, and air, and creatures that weren’t men. The human brain was plugged into this, the human brain was run on the batteries of fire and sky and all of it out there.”

“Amen!” Luther interjected, without interrupting Paul’s rhythm, but all Zoe could think was, The city still has creatures that aren’t men: pigeons. But the rocking horse began to move faster, and as it picked up speed its rider’s voice also acquired momentum, a rhythmic impetus of its own. As Paul spoke on, preached on, an “Amen!” or a “Yessir, brother!” occasionally provided an audible asterisk to some especially strange or vehement assertion in his text. All of it part of the ritual. But then Zoe was caught up in it in a way that she could see herself being caught up. Very odd: she found herself seconding Paul’s insane remarks with “Amen!” or “All praises!” or some other curiously heartfelt interjection that she never used. This increased as the rocking horse’s careering grew more violent and as Paul’s eyes, the horse going up and down, flashed like eerie strobes.

“Then before our lives was half over, they put us in our tombs. They said we was dead even though we could feel the juices flowin’ through us and electricity jumpin’ in our heads. Up went the tombs, though, up they went. It didn’t matter what we felt, it didn’t matter we was still plugged into the life outside our tombs, the air and fire and sky. Because with the tombs up, you really do start dyin’, you really do start losin’ tie voltage you have flowin’ back and forth between you and the outside. Just look at yourself, just look at all of us.”—Could anything be more ridiculous than this reasoning?—”It’s slippin’ away, that current, that precious, precious juice. It’s because our brains are plugged into the sun or the moon, one socket or the other, and now they’ve stuck us in a place where the current won’t flow.”

Even as she said: “Yessir!” Zoe was thinking that he, Paul, must have been plugged into the moon: loony.

But in another way, an upside-down way, it made a kind of loony sense, too. Even though everybody knew the world had been going to hell in a handcar before the domes went up, it still made a loony kind of sense. Maybe, at a certain time in your life (which was already past for her), you learned how to pass judgment on others, even unfavorable ones, without condemning. Zoe was doing that now. She beheld the madly rocking Paul from two utterly opposed perspectives and had no desire to reconcile them. In fact, the reconciliation happened, was happening, without her willing it to. As it always had for her, since Rabon’s death. It was the old binocular phenomenon at work on a philosophical rather than a physical plane. Long ago it had occurred in Helen, too, the Phoenix “mediator,” and just as Helen’s little black goggles brought the physical world into focus for her, this double vision Zoe was now experiencing brought the two galloping Pauls—the demoniac one and the human one—into the compass of her understanding and merged them. Since this had happened before for her, why was she surprised?

“. . . And the key to not-dying, and preserving the body too, is the brain. That’s where we all are. We have to plug ourselves into the sun again, the sun and the moon. No one can do that unless he is resurrected from the tomb we were put in even before our lives were half over...”

The horse was rocking frenetically, and Paul’s voice was swooping into each repetitive sentence with a lean, measured hysteria. The bracelet on Zoe’s wrist seemed to be singing. She looked at the biomonitor cabinet beside the orpianoogla and saw the oscilloscope attuned both to Paul’s brain waves and his heartbeat sending a shower of pale comets back and forth, back and forth, across its screen. The other six windows were vividly pulsing, too, and she wondered if someone downstairs was taking note of this activity. Well, they were certainly all alive: very much alive.

Now Paul’s eyes had rolled back in his head and the rocking horse had carried him into a country of either uninterrupted childhood or eternally stalled ripeness. He was alone in there, with just his brain and the concupiscent wavelets washing back from his body. Still preaching, too. Still ranting. Until, finally, the last word came out.

Only then did Paul slump forward across the neck of his aluminum steed, spent. Or dead maybe.

Zoe stood up—sprang up, rather. Amazingly, the other Phoenix—Toodles, Helen, Jerry, and Parthena—were applauding. Luther exempted himself from this demonstration in order to catch Paul before he slid off the still rocking horse and broke his head open.

“That the bes’ one he manage in a long time,” Parthena said.

Since the applause continued, Zoe, feeling foolish, joined in too. And while they all clapped (did sermons always end like this, the congregation joining in a spontaneous ovation?), Luther carried Paul over to the biomonitor cabinet, laid him out, and administered oxygen from the metal bottle he had earlier taken out of the closet. After which the wraithlike cowboy lifted his head a bit and acknowledged their applause with a wan grin. Then Luther put him to bed.

“You have to let him hear you,” Toodles said. “Otherwise the old bastard thinks you didn’t like it.”

But he wasn’t much good for three days after the sermon. He stayed in the common room, sleeping or staring at the ceiling. Zoe sat with him on the first night and let him sip soup through a flexible straw. In a few minutes he waved the bowl away, and Zoe, thinking he wanted to sleep, got up to leave. Paul reached out for her wrist and missed. She saw it, though, and turned back to him. His hand patted the bed: Sit down. So she lowered herself into the easy chair there and took his liver-spotted hand in her own. For an hour she sat there and held it. Then the long, raw lips opened and he said, “I’m afraid, Zoe.”

“Sometimes,” she said carefully, “I am, too.” Now and again she was, she had to admit it.

The mouth remained open, the Weimaraner eyes glazed. Then Paul ran his tongue around his long lips. “Well,” he said, “you can get in bed with me if you want to.”

And closed his eyes. And went to sleep.

* * * *

12        somewhere over the broomstick

It had never been in doubt. Maybe a little, just a little, in jeopardy the first night when the menfolk insulted Toodles. Or maybe a bit uncertain with Paul, until after his rocking-horse oration and subsequent collapse. But never really perilously in doubt.

So when Luther came up to the rooftop on that evening at the end of Winter and said, “You’re in, Zoe, you’re in,” her joy was contained, genuine but contained. You don’t shout Hooray! until the wedding’s over or the spacemen have got home safely. Zoe embraced Luther. Downstairs, she embraced the others.

* * * *

On the morning after the group’s decision, they had the covenant ceremony in the hostel quadrangle. Leland Tanner presided. Day 1 of Spring, 2040, New Calendar designation.

“All right,” Mr. Leland said. “Each septigamoklan has its own covenant procedure, Zoe, since any way that it chooses to ratify its bond is legal in the eyes of the Human Development Commission. The Phoenix ceremony owes its origin to an idea of Parthena’s.” He looked at the group. They were all standing on a section of the artificial lawn surrounded by tubbed ginkgo trees. A table with refreshments was visible in the nearest arbor. “That’s right, isn’t it?”

“That right,” Parthena said.

And then, of all crazy things, Mr. Leland brought a broom out from behind his back. He laid it on the wiry turf at his feet and backed up a few steps. “OK,” he said. “What you all do now is join hands and step over the broomstick together.” He reconsidered. “Maybe we better do it in two groups of three, Zoe, you making the fourth each time. Any objections?”

“No,” Parthena said. “So long as she cross it in the same direction both times, so none of it get undone.”

OK. That’s the way they did it. Zoe went first with Helen, Toodles, and Luther, then a second go-round with Parthena, Paul, and Jerry. Jerry had to drive his wheel chair over one end of the broom handle.

“I pronounce you,” Mr. Leland said, “all seven of you, married in the Phoenix. Six of you for a second time, one of you for the first.” He took them all over to the arbor and passed out drinks. “Viva the Phoenix.”

Zoe drank. They all drank. Toasts went around the group several times. It was all very fitting that when you were sold down the river, into freedom, you got married by jumping over a broomstick. How else should you do it? No other way at all. No other way at all.

* * * *

Paul and Toodles, the oldest and the second youngest in the family, died in 2042. A year later Luther died. In 2047, two days short of her eightieth birthday, Helen died. In this same year Dr. Leland Tanner resigned his position at the Human Development Tower; he protested uninformed interference in a study that was then twelve years old. Upon his departure from the Geriatrics Hostel his programs were discontinued, the remaining members of the ten septigamoklans separated. In 2048 Jeremy Zitelman died in the hostel’s nursing ward. Parthena and Zoe, by the time of his death, had been returned to their “surviving families,” Parthena to a surfaceside Bondville tenement, Zoe to the Level 1 cubicle of Sanders and Melanie Noble. Oddly enough, these two last members of the Phoenix died within twelve hours of each other on a Summer day in 2050, after brief illnesses. Until a month or two before their deaths, they met each other once a week in a small restaurant on West Peachtree, where they divided a single vegetable dinner between them and exchanged stories about their grandchildren. Parthena, in fact, was twice a great-grandmother.

* * * *

After the broomstick-jumping ceremony in the garden court Mr. Leland took Zoe aside and said that someone wanted to talk to her in the room that he had once called an “air-lock.” His horsy face had a tic in one taut cheek, and his hands kept rubbing themselves against each other in front of his bright blue tunic. “I told him to wait until we were finished out here, Zoe. And he agreed.”

Why this mystery? Her mind was other places. “Who is it?”

“Your son-in-law.”

She went into the air-lock, the decompression chamber, whatever you wanted to call it, and found Sanders ensconced in one corner of the sofa playing with the lint on his socks. When he saw her he got up, clumsily, with a funereal expression on his face. He looked like somebody had been stuffing his mouth with the same sort of lint he’d been picking off his socks: bloated jowls, vaguely fuzzy lips. She just stared at him until he had worked his mouth around so that it could speak.

“Lannie lost the baby,” he said.

So, after Lannie got out of the hospital, she spent a week in their Level 3 cubicle helping out until her daughter could do for herself. When that week was over, she returned to her new family in the Geriatrics Hostel. But before she left she pulled Sanders aside and said, “I’ve got some advice for you, something for you to tell Lannie too. Will you do it?”

Sanders looked at his feet. “OK, Zoe.”

“Tell her,” Zoe said, “to try again.”