The sunlight wavered and slipped away like the last image of a fading dream, and Tamela was back in the Room.
A single, dim lantern hung from the stone ceiling, hungrily devouring oxygen. In the flickering light, she could make out the copper outlines of her mother's face, and the shadowy form of another person crouched in the background. The air was filled with voices from beyond the Room--calling, shouting, crying. And everywhere, so deep and pervasive that it vibrated the stone floor beneath her fingers, Tammi could feel the whoosh and thump of the Ventilator. She listened to its breath and heartbeat, and knew as they all knew that the machine was dying.
"Tammi?" She was vaguely aware that someone had called her name, and wished it was her mother. But the voice was too deep, and she recognized it instead as that of the Doctor.
"Tammi, where were you just a moment ago?"
Did they have to go through all this again?
"Tammi?"
"In the Garden," she said finally. "I've told you about it before."
"Tell us again," her mother urged, taking Tammi's hand and holding it reassuringly. And for Mother she was willing to explain it all again.
"It's big and open," she said slowly. "Above ground, and the sky is clear and the air is good. There are green plants and beautiful flowers, and a gentle breeze." Tammi wanted to call the green place back to her mind, but the whoosh and thump of the Ventilator intruded on her thoughts, and she could not escape. Darkness and stone closed in around her. She leaned against her mother's shoulder and cried.
Mother stroked her head and soothed her, but Tammi felt a change in her mother's touch; a faint trembling, as of sorrow. Tammi pulled back and gazed at her mother's face. It was worn as always, weathered by the storms of suffering. But the lines had deepened while Tammi had been in the Garden. With the dreadful dawning of realization, she understood why.
"Where's Mikka?" Tammi asked, though the answer already hung over her like a dark shadow.
Mother would not look at her, turned away so that Tammi would not see the wetness in her eyes. "There was an accident," she said. "Part of the machinery collapsed. Mikka was caught... he couldn't get away when the bad air seeped in and they sealed off his section..."
Tammi buried her face in her mother's robe. Mikka had been her last brother. It wasn't fair that she had to lose him, too, because an angry atmosphere wouldn't let the people live on the surface as they should. It wasn't fair that Mother had to cry.
"Tamela."
She looked up, and found that she had been staring blankly into the flowers. She shook herself and once more became aware of the chirping of birds, the fresh air brushing past her face. The Equilibrateur stood beside her on the cobblestone path.
"The Room again?" He asked her.
She nodded absently and began to move slowly through the garden, reaching out to feel the flowers, the satiny touch of their petals. They were not nearly as comforting as the warmth Mother's cracked, leathery hands.
"What was happening there?" The Equilibrateur asked.
She shook her head, as though trying to recall the fragments of a dream momentarily forgotten. "I don't remember. Mother was there."
The Equilibrateur sighed. "Tamela. We've been through this before. You don't have a mother."
"I do there. I have a brother, too." Her brow furrowed. "At least, I did. I think he died." She did not feel remorse and was ashamed at herself for her coldness. She wanted to cry as she had in the small, dark, room with Mother at her side. But emotions were a thing long abandoned among her people, and she could not make the tears come. She did not want to face the Equilibrateur beside her, so she moved forward through the Garden's swath of green and color.
He trailed her though, and his voice floated towards her like a rebuke from her own conscience.
"Tamela, it is not uncommon to long for the intensity of emotion our people shared many generations ago, or to yearn for the comforting presence of known parents to guide you through life. But we have chosen to abandon these aspects of our existence, to focus upon the intellect, the mind, and its free expression. That, we know, is done best when the young are raised as equals, beneath the same tutors, and without the interference of biological parents who, for all their good intentions, tend more to interfere with the pursuit of knowledge than to aid it."
She had heard the argument many times before, and she could find no true flaws in its reasoning. Nevertheless she felt empty.
Her mind, with all its training in mathematics and sociology, could find no logical resolution to the troubling, only half-felt longings that stirred in the pit of her stomach. Somehow, she felt certain that her mother would have known the answer.
The gentle chirping of the birds was drowned out by a deafening crash and the hiss of pressurized gas escaping from the pipes. There was shouting and the rush of feet. The lantern flickered in the sudden rush of air, and Tammi scented the familiar sting of surface air that was leaking into the caverns.
Her mother pulled out two filter masks and placed one over Tammi's mouth. The Doctor had vanished in answer to the cries of pain echoing through the caverns. The familiar whoosh and thump of the ventilator stuttered and became uneven. Tammi crouched on the shuddering floor and felt her mother's comforting arms around her.
"Are we going to die?"
"Of course not," Mother's voice sounded odd and raspy through the air filter. "The technicians will seal the breach. They'll keep the machinery working."
"But for how long?"
Mother did not answer. Her face was drawn and worn, and her eyes stared moistly at the lamp, watching it stir with each uneven thump of the Ventilator's massive pistons.
The Equilibrateur was standing before her again. She was annoyed that he continued to pull her back to the Garden just when she needed Mother's comfort most. She did not like having emotion wrenched from her so suddenly, even if the emotion was fear.
"We're all going to die, you know." She said. "Down in the tunnels. Maybe not today. Maybe not even in my lifetime. But we'll all die. They can't hold the Ventilator together forever."
The Equilibrateur looked pained. "Tamela, you can't keep jumping back and forth like this. You can't live half your life in fantasies, no matter what needs they fill for you. You must cast them aside and live in the real world."
Tamela walked a few steps further and fingered the stem of a rose. "Ah, but which world is that?"
"That's not a decision I can make for you," The Equilibrateur sighed. "You're going to have to examine your inner self, and decide which place is real, and which a dream."
"You make it sound so easy," she murmured. "But you can't recognize a dream while you're in it. When I'm here, the Room seems nightmarish, impossible. But when I'm actually there... Well, then it's this Garden that seems dreamlike."
The Equilibrateur was not daunted. "Then you must take my word on the matter, Tamela. I am not a figment of your imagination. This garden is real. So is are the birds. So is the sky. If you really had lived your whole life underground, how would you know of these things?"
"I don't know!" She whirled on him, secretly pleased that a thread of anger and frustration filled her voice. So emotion was not impossible for her after all. Just difficult.
The Doctor was calling her name again. But it was the rasping breath and faltering heart of the Ventilator, not the Doctor's voice, that brought her back. The filter was gone from her face, and the surface air no longer slipped through the tunnels. So the machinery would last for another day, or another year. Maybe even for another generation.
That knowledge did not lift the dark shadow of doom from Tammi's shoulders, though. The crumbling bones of the Ventilator had already taken her brothers from her. Long before that, the deadly breath of the planet above had whisked her father away. She knew that her mother would be next.
The Doctor was talking to her, urging her to stay with them, not to let herself slip away again. But the whoosh and thump of the Ventilator drowned him out, and flickering lamp cast shadows on his face.
"Why should I stay here?" She asked when the machinery ceased its rumblings, or at least softened them for a time.
"Because it's real, blast it!" The doctor shouted, and she knew he believed what he was saying. "You can't spend your life in a fantasy, locked away in your own private dreams. You have to stay in touch with the human race, with people, sharing their struggles, living your life with them, no matter how hard it is!"
She shook her head in frustration an turned to her mother. Haggard, patient Mother who always seemed to be there beside her. Uneducated, wise Mother who always knew what to say.
"Mother, I want to make the right choice, but I don't know what it is! I don't know what's real anymore. Maybe I never did."
"Then you must go where you will be happiest, Tammi," Mother said just loud enough to be heard over the Ventilator's groanings. "That's all ever wanted for you. To be happy."
Tammi sat and felt the vibrations of floor beneath her, watched the lamp flicker dimly, always on the verge of death. The darkness seemed to cave in about her, and she felt suffocated by the very mass of stone that hung between her and the sky. She felt the Garden calling her--the sun and the rain and the evening breeze. She glanced back at her mother's face, and made her choice.
"I'm sorry Mother. I love you, but I can't stay here."
Tamela had not been back to the Room in more than three months, but she still visited the Garden regularly. It was the only place, in the static, intellectual world she had chosen, where she felt close to the intense emotions that she had abandoned. She walked the cobbled paths, or sat on the engraved benches with a pen and pad of paper.
The Equilibrateur walked the Garden paths, too, and it was there that he found her. She resented his intrusion on her private recollections. When he asked her what she was writing, she stubbornly ignored him.
He repeated the question.
"If you must know, I'm writing a letter to my mother."
The Equilibrateur sighed. "Tamela, you cannot cling to these threads of fantasy. You must put them behind you, and continue with your life."
"No. I did what you wanted. I made a choice, I picked a place to stay. And despite what you say I have no way of knowing whether I've abandoned fantasy or whether I'm living in it now." Tamela's face hardened. "But I won't give up Mother."
The Equilibrateur spread his hands. "Tamela, you must listen to me--"
"No, it's your turn to listen. Somewhere, either in my mind, or in the reality outside of it, there's a frightened little girl in a room with her mother. Maybe, as I write words on a page, she scribbles the sentences out as well. And maybe it brings her mother comfort to know that I'm content here."
The Equilibrateur did not give up. Week after week and year after year he spoke to Tamela when she came to the Garden, but he could not persuade her to forsake her last memories from the Room where her mother sat.
In a small dresser drawer in Tamela's room, a pile of handwritten pages grew steadily over time. Sometimes Tamela opened the drawer and read the letters, but mostly she just wrote them. It was good to keep in touch with Mother.