The Wall Around Eden

by Joan Slonczewski

  Peace Hope looked up from where she sat and stared, tilting her head to the side, then back. “It looks like the Golden Mean.”

  “The what?”

  “Keep cutting off the biggest square, and the ratio of what’s left stays the same. The Greeks used the Golden Mean. So did Leonardo.”

  “Uh-huh.” Suddenly the Pylon felt closer, its creators more human. Isabel disliked that. “They’re just fooling us.”

  Peace Hope opened another book. “‘There was a wall. It did not look important. It was built of uncut rocks roughly mortared. An adult could look right over it, and even a child could climb it.’”

  That was true of an airwall; even Miracle could climb the Wall. “That’s from Le Guin.”

  “Sure, silly. Remember this part: ‘Like all walls it was ambiguous, two-faced. What was inside it and what was outside it depended upon which side of it you were on.’”

  Isabel blinked twice. Of course, the Pylon was inside its little airwall; and yet it was outside Gwynwood, in the sense that things passed outside there through some intangible doorway, like the neck of a Klein bottle. But could there be any sense in which Gwynwood was outside the outer Wall, and the rest of the universe was enclosed? Could the angelbees be thought of, somehow, as prisoners of the universe? “What do they want from us,” she muttered and recalled that Daniel had asked that very same question.

  Isabel shook herself and looked at the sky. Twilight was falling, and the fireflies were coming out, the bright sparks swooping upward, then winking out for the descending flight. Above in the sky, the traces of orange fire were beginning to appear.

  “They’re at it again. Let’s give them a taste of real fire.” She dug out a patch of bare earth to avoid setting the dry grass on fire. Then she piled up wood and kindling, right there next to the airwall.

  As flames leapt from the wood, three angelbees darted into the airwall with unnerving speed. Then, unaccountably, all three of them vanished.

  “Look, quick! Did you see that? Where’d they go?”

  Peace Hope was opening the dinner basket and arranging empanadas on two plates. She looked up apologetically. “I’m sorry, I wasn’t looking, I—” She stopped. Her face froze, and her mouth hung open.

  “What is it?”

  “Look—in the Pylon.”

  An orange glow had appeared, in the side of the Pylon just facing the fire. The glow seemed to emanate from within, not from the surface, as if buried, deep within the Pylon. It was an image, she realized, a fuzzy mirror image of the fire she had created.

  The angelbees were scared by her fire. Was the Pylon trying to scare her in return?

  VI

  IN THE HOSPITAL room upstairs, next to the birthing room where Ruth had delivered, lay Alice Scattergood.

  The coverlet was folded back from Alice, her frail head propped up on two old pillows, the skin drawn into her cheeks. Beside her was a tray with a bowl of soup, unfinished.

  Liza sat at the bedside, clasping Alice’s hand. “I am sorry, my dear,” she said in a low voice. “But we must know if what thee has seen resembles…what we have seen.”

  Isabel sat with Peace Hope, a few steps back from the bedside, while Marguerite hovered about the other side, watching Alice’s heart rate trace out on the monitor. By now everyone knew, and many had seen, the image of the fire projected within the Pylon. Isabel had slept most of Tuesday, the day after her vigil. Then on Wednesday, Marguerite had given permission to approach Alice.

  Alice’s eyelids fluttered and shadows moved in the lines of her cheeks. “Thee sees, then. Thee sees, as well as I? That is good; I can feel at peace, at last.”

  “Not quite, dear mother,” said Liza. “We have seen only something…”

  “Something reflected,” Isabel offered. “A sort of mirror image of our fire.”

  “The pictures were always lined in orange,” Alice said. “It reminded me, somehow, of an old daguerreotype, etched in scarlet.”

  “Did the pictures move, Grandmother?” Peace Hope asked.

  “Move?”

  “Motion, like a motion picture,” said Marguerite. “Like television, remember?” The angelbees forbade television as well as radio. Only the Herald was permitted, presumably under heavy censorship.

  “No,” said Alice, “just a still tableau, quite fuzzy. The most common picture was just a Sydney boy wrapping our monthly package in black plastic, for delivery. Of course, I can’t say for certain he was from Sydney, but he was not one of us.” Alice thought some more, then added, “The one I’ll always remember was the figure of a handsome young man in a very well cut suit. He became thy husband, Friend Andrés.”

  Isabel looked away.

  “The angelbees were always solicitous,” Alice remembered. “They would come down so low that I could tickle them under the chins…” Her eyelids half closed, and her head sank back slightly.

  “That’s enough.” Marguerite was at the door, her hand firmly on the doorknob.

  They filed solemnly into the dim hallway. Peace Hope’s chin nudged Isabel at her shoulder. “What we saw wasn’t like that.”

  “No?”

  “It wasn’t just a picture.”

  “No, it had depth, like a hologram.” Isabel had once seen a hologram, in a promo for Aussie football in the Herald.

  “More than that—it moved, it flickered just like the flames; it was alive.”

  “Yet it was just a reflection of what we made. Not a message at all.” Isabel shook her head, puzzled. “Or was it? What do you suppose would happen if we surrounded the Pylon with fire?”

  Peace Hope opened her eyes wide. “Let us ask Mother what she thinks.”

  They caught Liza outside before she left. “Liza,” asked Isabel, “what if we make a bonfire around the Pylon?”

  Liza looked hard at her and stood still. “We must consider this…carefully.”

  By evening the word had spread, and everyone had a different fierce opinion on it. At dinner, Marguerite shook her head. “I’m bearish,” she told Andrés. “What if the Pylon overloads somehow? What if it breaks down? What if the Sydney shipment stops?” No more vitamins, no more oxygen for Alice. “Yet we have to do something,” Marguerite added. “We can’t lie down and take it forever.”

  “Well, well.” Andrés served up the corn, a dozen ears of it. He had spent all morning filling bushels of it, which Isabel had delivered around the town. “You Americans are so impatient. Only twenty years of solitude, and you’re climbing the walls.”

  “It means our survival.” Isabel ate her corn hungrily. If Liza agreed, and Anna Tran, and the Browns…

  A frantic knocking sounded from the front door. Isabel hurried to open it. There was Faith Dreher, her pigtails askew, breathing heavily from a hard ride on her bike. “It’s my sister,” she gasped. “Charity’s fallen off the swing, and her leg’s twisted real bad.”

  Marguerite already had her kit in hand. “Remember to check Alice once an hour.” She passed Isabel on her way out, adding as usual on such occasions, “Back in the saddle again.”

  The sun had just set, Thursday evening. Fireflies were winking on as they flew upward, then off again. The Pylon still wore its coat of shifting colors, now barely visible, fading soon to white.

  The fire was to be set up in a broad circle around the Pylon, just out of reach of the miniature bubble of airwall that closed it. About two dozen people were gathered, while Liza directed the digging out of the grass and the placement of firewood. Not everyone was fully satisfied with the plan. “A waste of good firewood,” muttered Vera Brown. “What if the wind whips it out of control?” someone asked. But soon the flames began to crackle and whoosh; black smoke rose, blowing westward, with an acrid odor of pine. Kim and Terri Tran cheered and laughed with typical preteen antics.

  Isabel was exhausted from chopping and hauling wood. She sat down next to Peace Hope and watched the flames, and the fireflies winking across the lawn. She thought, with satisfaction, at last the town was
taking a stand, if not so bold as Harriet Tubman’s. Even Daniel was there, though Nahum had stayed home, saying he believed in Christian submission to the rulers of this world. Anna Tran and her children were there, sitting on a blanket with their thermoses. Andrés was poking the wood to get the flames coming higher. Marguerite was back at the hospital, taking a closer look at the Dreher girl’s leg, which seemed to have worse than an ordinary fracture.

  Within the Pylon, the mirrored flames came to life, leaping higher even than the actual flames outside the airwall. There was uneasy shifting of feet.

  “We should get the kids home,” someone murmured. “What will it do to us?”

  Peace Hope said, “I never heard of angelbees hurting anyone, directly. Maybe they have a ‘peace testimony,’ as we do.” The Quakers had an absolute testimony against killing of human beings.

  “Sure, that’s why the angelbees killed six billion in the Death Year.”

  Peace Hope closed her eyes. “Sometimes, Isabel, it’s hard to have thee for a friend.”

  Isabel winced. “Come on, Scatterbrain. I just try to keep the record straight.”

  “Sure, silly.” She rested her head on Isabel’s shoulder, the nearest she could get to a real hug.

  The sun was long gone. The black sky burned with the orange streaks that had filled it since Saturday. Isabel watched, until she felt something prickling on her leg. Several black ants had crawled up, for she had sat upon an anthill unaware.

  She got up and approached Matthew Crofts, who was watching the Pylon intently through the flames. “Teacher Matthew, what do you think it’s made of? To keep changing appearance so.”

  “I don’t know. Liquid crystal surface, maybe. But there has to be more to it.” Matthew pulled out a stick that burned at one end, and he stood to hold it aloft, above the main fire. Within the Pylon the image of the flame appeared. “Observe the size of that image, and its shape. It is larger, not just fuzzier. It is responding not to the visible spectrum, but to the infrared, including the cooler part of the flame we can’t see.” He dropped the stick back to the fire, and sparks flew up. “I wonder what else we can’t see.”

  Then it happened: the puffs of fog appeared, blossoming, as if from nowhere, filling the hemisphere of the airwall. But the heat from the fire seemed to pass through the airwall, drawing off the fog. As the fog melted away, the spidery spacecraft appeared, surprisingly small and squat, with six black, jointed legs, each like the one leg Isabel had seen poking out of the cloud on the first night. The faces of the polyhedron alternated square and hexagonal, and there were angelbees sitting atop several of them.

  The neighbors exchanged exclamations, and several rose to leave. But Peace Hope got out her pencil and fumbled for her pad in the darkness. Isabel got the pad out from her pocket for her. Peace Hope held the pad in her grippers, put the pencil between her teeth, and began sketching rapidly.

  Aside from the soft hissing of the cloud substance, the craft made no sound, or at least none that could be heard above the crackle of the fire. Within the fiery circle, through the rising air, it was then at last that something else appeared in the Pylon. A luminous shape appeared within the hexagonal pyramid, not an angelbee, but a formless shape of red light. The light grew and spread, like the red heat around an electric burner, till it crystallized suddenly into a human form. A face in a bonnet, then arms and dress extending downward, as if an invisible hand had sketched it in. A flat, still figure, like a snapshot.

  It was Alice Scattergood, the Contact, outlined in glowing red, standing within the Pylon.

  Peace Hope gasped, and the pencil fell from her mouth. Isabel thought, A good thing Nahum was not here to see this “graven image” of his mother in the Pylon.

  From beside the circle of fire, Liza rose to her feet. “Friend Alice is ill,” her voice called above the crackling flames to the spacecraft. “That is why she has not been to the Pylon. Thee will have to speak with us.”

  The apparition did not change.

  Then Liza did an extraordinary thing. She took a stick from the fire and raised the burning end far overhead, the sparks falling past her gray bonnet. “Our sky is burning.” Her voice wavered with strain. “This is not a good thing. Thee must put a stop to it.”

  Abruptly the fog expanded out from the airwall, in a silent explosion, cloaking everyone. It was so thick that Isabel could see nothing but grayness. She tried to cry out, but she felt dizzy, and her head grew numb; everything seemed to echo from a distance. Her last thought was, the airwall was breached; how…

  The next thing she knew, she was awakening with her head on the ground. She squinted and tried to pull herself up, though her arms felt heavy as if she were carrying pails of milk. Peace Hope and most of the others were still asleep, in odd positions as if they just dozed off. She heard a quiet clicking sound, the beads of her father’s rosary as he sat on the blanket, staring pensively at the charred circle.

  The fire was out, and the angelbee spacecraft and their apparition were gone.

  The dawn was just edging over the horizon. There were stars yet, hanging in a strangely peaceful sky. Isabel thought a moment, then she remembered. The stars had not been seen at peace since the night she and Daniel went out to watch the Pylon.

  “Dad—the sky is clear.”

  “So it is, Belita.”

  Liza came to join them, her skirt damp and wrinkled from the night spent on hard ground. “Can it be that our prayers were answered?”

  “You’re a brave woman,” said Andrés.

  “It could be chance,” Liza reflected. “They may simply be done with their…work, for now.”

  “But the last time the sky burned, it went on for a full two weeks. Our fire worked, I’m sure it did.” Isabel’s spirits soared; she felt a sense of lightening inside, an excitement she had not had since the new lambs came in March. She tugged at Peace Hope’s shoulder. “Wake up, Scatterbrain. Look what’s happened.”

  Behind them, Anna and her daughters were getting up, and others were hurriedly packing their things to leave. The night’s events had been more than they had counted on.

  Peace Hope pulled herself up on her gripper-hands, and Isabel brushed the tousled hair from her friend’s forehead. As she did so she noticed the sketch of the “spacecraft,” crumpled from where Peace Hope had fallen across it. Isabel picked it up for a closer look.

  The form of the little spacecraft fairly leapt off the page: the six spiderlegs, each with a cuplike foot, and the polyhedral body, eight hexagonal faces alternating with six square faces. Upon each square face, Peace Hope had drawn a curious rounded scale with a hexagonal facet, something Isabel had not noticed at all. The detail was striking, for all of fifteen minutes’ work.

  Matthew stood by the charred remains of the fire, speaking with freckle-faced Jon Hubbard.

  “Teacher Matthew, come look at this,” called Isabel. “We got a custom portrait of our masters’ spacecraft.”

  Jon looked pale and drawn, despite Matthew’s reassurances. But he came over with Matthew for a glimpse of the spacecraft. His eyes actually brightened a bit. Peace Hope glowed to see how impressed he was. “Why, you can actually see it,” said Jon, “just as if it came out in daytime. You must have touched it up a bit.”

  “I did not,” said Peace Hope sharply. “I sketched it just as it was.”

  “That was well done, Peace Hope.” Matthew studied the sketch intently. “Well done,” he repeated. “Our friends love symmetry, and delicate construction. And yet…no sign of propulsion, or wings for lift. Do the angelbees sit inside?”

  “They sat on top,” said Peace Hope. “Four of them came off, before the fog rolled out.”

  “Do they always travel so,” Matthew wondered, “through tunnels outside our universe?”

  “The craft looks flimsy enough,” said Isabel. “No wonder our masters don’t want us to see it.”

  There was silence as everyone pondered the implications.

  Jon’s face twitched, th
en he broke away as if it were too much to bear.

  “They are not our masters.” Daniel spoke from behind her shoulder. “They just think they are.”

  Startled, Isabel turned to face him. She looked into his eyes, thinking if only he would tell her what he really meant by that, and other things.

  Daniel returned her look, more intently than he usually did. Then his gaze fell, and he turned to Liza. “Thanks for guiding us, Aunt Liza. If it pleases thee, I’ll be walking home.”

  He wanted her to follow, Isabel thought, though she could not say why. Her heart beat very fast. Hurriedly she folded up her blanket and tossed it in the carriage for her father to take home. Then she headed down the road, catching up with Daniel just past the Trans’ house. They walked together, past the trail up Gwynwood Hill where they had climbed to watch the Pylon from afar.

  “Why did you say that?” asked Isabel. “Are the angelbees not our masters?”

  “They must answer to the same master that we do.”

  Isabel frowned. Overhead a jay squawked noisily, and the rising sun slanted through the pines. “I still don’t believe angelbees have souls.”

  Daniel considered this. “I suppose it’s hard enough to think humans have souls.”

  This remark caught her off guard. Before she could respond, Daniel added, “That was brave of thee, and of Aunt Liza, to reach out so.”

  “I’m glad the town agreed. We’re showing some backbone at last.”

  “And yet…” His steps slowed. They turned onto the highway, stepping around the cracks, passing the boarded-up stores. The gas station still had a faded sign in the window, the upper part torn off, displaying the word “Cola” and an arm holding up a bottle to a vanished head.

  “I hope we did not send the wrong message,” Daniel concluded.

  “What do you mean?”

  “The message of fear and hatred.”

  “It only makes sense to hate them,” she said, “like you would hate a cancer.” When he did not respond, she added, “Even if they do have souls, it hardly matters if we hate them. We’re in no position to hurt them.”