Bokelskere.no

A feeling of claustrophobia rose in his throat, nearly choking him, like the sour taste of food long-since swallowed and forgotten. He stopped walking, halfway across Marconi Plaza, and the city snapped tight around him. Apartment towers glistened feverishly with the trapped energy of several million lives; the pedbelts and glider-paths sliced the airspace into hectic curves; offices repeated the same honeycomb pattern, like geometrical stuttering, as far as the eye could see.
[...] “You never felt that before?” she asked gently.
“I guess I did,” he answered. “I guess I’ve always felt that. I just never admitted it before. The frenzy—it’s always there, waiting. But I fight it down, hide it away.”
[...] “And then at night I lie in bed and a crevice opens in my heart, and the dread creeps out, a fog, engulfing me. Death, I suppose. Nothingness.” He stopped abruptly, ashamed of his passion.

“Wait,” he begged. In a panic he thought for ways to keep her, fearing that such an improbable creature might not survive until tomorrow.

[...] he kept feeling the print of Teeg’s hand on his arm, kept hearing the sound of her voice, so confident in its anarchism.
[...] her face, unpainted, her mouth a grim slash.
[...] “Chemistry.” She echoed the word as if it were a place he had gone to visit.

Home! As if that rat-maze of bubbles and pipes and electronic skies and painted faces could ever be home for an animal who has walked on the earth.

That brought a suspicious look from Gregory. His eyes reflected multiple chilly images of her.

The young people, those born inside the Enclosure, had never seen dolphins or potatoes, had never seen anything except what human beings had made. The young did not reminisce.

Her friends had never been numerous, because she was a difficult woman to draw near, at once passionate and aloof. “Like fire inside an icicle,” was how one of the draftsmen had described her.

Love for her had tugged him up the brick path from the river, as it had tugged him from Oregon City and Jonah Colony. Could she stretch his love so thin it would snap? What if one time she ran away and he didn’t follow?

“You aren’t what you own,” Teeg had scolded him one day.
“On my salary, that’s lucky.”
“Then why do you cling to all this stuff?” The sweep of her arm dismissed everything he had worked for years to buy. “Remember what Thoreau said: ‘ A person is rich in proportion to the number of things she can live without.’ ”
By that measure, Phoenix was growing richer all the time.

She prances up to me, palm thrust forward, to show me how the whorls in a shell resemble those on her thumb. “We're made the same,” she cries with pleasure.
“So you are,” I answer.