The Wall Around Eden

by Joan Slonczewski

  Isabel was taken aback. She flipped farther through the sketch pad, till she reached the spacecraft, whose replica she had constructed. Each of the square sides had a small hexagon penciled in, a detail Isabel had forgotten. “But—they can’t be the same thing. Why would the angelbees decorate their spaceship with discarded eyespot scales?”

  “I wonder what it’s made of.” Peace Hope flexed her gripper, and touched the object to the tip of her tongue. “It tastes ceramic. Ouch!” The scale dropped. “It zapped me, like an electric shock. Practically burned my tongue off.” She rolled her tongue with a pained expression.

  Isabel felt her flesh tighten. She retrieved the scale, and returned it to the candle box, her hands shaking. “What if it’s something they want back?”

  “I don’t think so. They’ve got plenty more.”

  “That hardly makes it any better!”

  A distant look came into Peace Hope’s eyes. Absently she picked up her crutch and raised herself to sit at her desk, then she took a pen between her teeth, bending to dip the tip in the ink.

  “Scatterbrain, you can’t just draw at a time like this!”

  “Shh; it helps me concentrate.” Deftly she penned the outline of a baobab tree, a scene copied from Le Petit Prince. First the trunk, then the ridiculously cumbersome roots, strangling a planet impossibly small to support a tree, according to College Physics.

  Isabel watched until she could stand it no longer. “Of all things, why that stuff? Your own originals are so much better.”

  Peace Hope let the pen fall. “The narrator was a pilot, not an artist. One has to start bad, to get to be good.” She looked up. “Becca must have learned something about the scale. Maybe she figured out what it was for.”

  “What if it’s to do with the Wall? A control device?” That would be too much to hope for.

  “I wonder what the town will think of it.”

  “We can’t tell them,” said Isabel quickly. “They’ll just take it away. They’ll make us give it up, at the Pylon.”

  “It doesn’t seem right, not to tell them.” Peace Hope’s eyelids wrinkled around her blue eyes.

  “It’s a secret for the Underground,” Isabel insisted. “Remember, you pledged. I will tell Keith; he’s in the Underground.”

  Isabel rode her bike home, the headlight pulsing in the darkness in rhythm with her pedaling feet, the cool air whipping past her face, a sign of autumn. As she reached her home, she caught sight of a lone angelbee high among the branches of the chestnut tree. For an instant she was convinced it had followed her home. But then, angelbees were everywhere, she reminded herself.

  When Keith heard about the “scale,” he reacted with alarm. “A piece of hardware, maybe off their spaceship? With live electronics in it? Fair go, mate. The space cockies will catch up with you, and there’ll be hell to pay.”

  “Oh, come on. Nothing’s happened, yet. If it does, what’s a bit of fog? Keith, you joined our Underground, yet you won’t tell us one thing, not even about radio contact. You pledged your sacred honor.”

  He flinched and looked away, the muscles of his upper arm tightening beneath the tattooed snake. “All right then,” he said quietly. “I’ll tell you something. If you want to pick up something of interest on your shortwave, try a thousand megahertz.”

  A thousand megahertz; that was well outside her present range. Divided into the speed of light, that meant a wavelength of thirty centimeters, much shorter than she expected for long-distance transmission. She would have some fixing up to do, when the new parts arrived from Sydney.

  XII

  THERE WERE MANY days to pass yet before the next new moon. Daniel obtained from Ruth a picture of Teacher Becca, which he brought to show the Pylon when he kept vigil there at night. Isabel’s mother warned him that, with his added burden of teaching the grammar school, he needed to conserve his strength.

  The apples were coming in thick, some to be packed away in the cellar, others sent to the Browns for canning. At night Isabel did her homework until her study lamp ran out, then she fussed over her seven mice; Peewee had delivered a litter within two weeks of captivity. She built a second cage to enable separation of the sexes.

  At last she got a chance to read the Heinlein story which Teacher Matthew had given her. In the story, some people got stuck in a “tesseract,” a four-dimensional house built of eight cubical rooms. The rooms were folded into one another in the fourth dimension, so that each appeared to be adjacent to four others, plus one beneath the floor and one above the ceiling. You could run forever in an apparently straight line, from one room to the next; or you could run forever upstairs, or downstairs. Either way, you would always come up upon your own tracks again, like Piglet chasing the Woozle in Winnie the Pooh. If all the doors were open for four rooms in a row, you could look through them all to see the back of your own head. The thought made her queasy. She hoped that Becca had not ended up in a tesseract. If only Alice could manage to communicate something at the next new moon.

  In the micro lab, enough cloned ampicillin and tetracycline had been grown and tested to be put to use. At first Marguerite was reluctant to try it, for what if toxic impurities remained? But when Miracle’s strep throat failed to respond to the batch from Sydney, she prescribed the home-grown antibiotic instead. Almost overnight he was better, ready to run out and climb the Wall again.

  “Not surprising,” said Keith. “There’s little quality control on the stuff they ship abroad.”

  Isabel was shocked. “I must say, Keith, this city of yours sounds more and more wicked, to me.”

  “As wicked as Babylon. But we have our share of Bible bashers, too. I’m Catholic, myself.”

  Isabel nodded, recalling the cross that he wore. “You should tell Dad. Dad’s been looking for a priest. Are you a priest?”

  At that, he started to laugh, and he laughed so hard he could not stop. “Sorry, mate,” he managed to say at last. “If you ever find one, though, let me know.”

  In the second week of October, Alice refused her oxygen. There were hurried consultations between Marguerite and Liza. “Thee must tell her,” Liza insisted sternly, as if she thought it was the doctor’s fault somehow. “Thee must tell her it’s all right.”

  “I did tell her.” Marguerite was tired, and her hair was showing the first few wisps of gray. But her eyes flashed, alert as ever. “I told her we can afford it, we won’t have to cut the children’s vitamins or any such thing. But she knows our resources are limited. I’ve told her; what else can I say?” It worried her sick, Isabel knew, because at night Marguerite could not sleep, and she heard the sounds of her steps thudding up and down the stairs.

  Liza went in and spoke with Alice alone, then she fetched Nahum and Peace Hope to see her, and Grace, too. Alice had always been especially fond of Grace, and had spent many hours talking with her as a child.

  In the end Alice accepted the oxygen again, but it was too late, or perhaps it would have made no difference. On the sixteenth of October, Alice Scattergood died.

  She was buried the next day, a day that dawned crisp and clear, one of those days when one could see every needle of the pine trees in sharp outline. Everyone in Gwynwood came by the cemetery to drop a wildflower on the mounded earth, or to whisper a prayer perhaps. After the others had left, Isabel stayed on with Peace Hope and her family. Pensively she brushed the arms of her sweater of plain Dorset wool which Alice herself had spun and knitted long ago for the doctor when Peace Hope was delivered. It gave her a tingling sensation to think how the fingers that had knitted that sweater now rested cold underground.

  Among the pines, at least twenty angelbees hovered owlishly, each eyespeck rotating slowly around its globe. They seemed almost expectant, as if they did not quite believe that Alice was dead and would stay dead, like the sentries at the tomb of Christ. There were always one or two angelbees at a funeral, presumably more at this one because Alice had been their Contact. Isabel felt sorry for the Scattergoods; what an
intrusion on their grief. But Liza and even Nahum stood by stoically, not deigning to notice. They must have prepared themselves for this. Afterward she walked on, slowly, past the familiar headstones: Vera’s husband, Grace’s parents, Daniel’s parents, Aaron Weiss…It seemed to her that she knew more faces among the dead than the living.

  Beyond the leaning headstones the pines shriveled away before that other place of death, the Wall. The bones beyond the Wall were exposed, some half buried by sand and weeds. Most were scattered, but a few complete human skeletons could be spotted, the ribs neatly parallel, the arms and legs crumpled in, like fetal position. Isabel found herself wondering why nobody had given them decent burial. But, of course, there had been no one left outside to do so; only the voice of the wind against the Wall, keening in its dead language.

  How on Earth would the angelbees pick their next Contact? How had Alice been picked in the first place? No one seemed to remember. Andrés claimed to know. “The angel Gabriel will appear to the chosen one,” he told her.

  Isabel pretended not to hear. She asked Keith, but of course he had no idea since there was no Contact in Sydney.

  In the cemetery most of the angelbees had departed, but one or two continued to hover above the grave. The new moon was approaching, but Alice would not be there at the Pylon to seek word from Becca. There was talk of starting another bonfire at the Pylon. The monthly shipment from Sydney appeared as usual, and Daniel picked it up. Isabel rushed over to the Scattergoods’ place to see what had come.

  To her delight, the new parts for the radio were there, as well as the fetal heart monitor. “We’re in luck, Scatterbrain! We’ll get the radio working, and get to test it, too.” Before hurrying back to her workshop, she skimmed the Herald. Still nothing new on that blast at the harbour. The Taronga Zoo featured its bottle-nosed dolphins, alive nowhere else in the world.

  Outside Isabel’s garage workshop, a gentle rain fell all day, the raindrops trickling down the windowpanes. The mice scampered contentedly in their two cages. Isabel pulled out the pieces to the fetal monitor and matched them to the instructions. The printer unit would sit on a shelf, but the two sensor disks for contractions and fetal heart rate would be taped to the woman in labor. The printer and sensors beamed microwaves at each other, so there were no connection cords to restrict the mother.

  Within twenty minutes she had the instrument hooked up and a signal trailing across the display, with jagged squiggles appearing whenever she tapped one of the sensors. Now she would be able to test whether her radio could pick up the signals, too.

  Marguerite was pleased to see the monitor working. “I’ll try it out at Debbie’s next visit.” After some thought, she added, “It’s still going to have to be a cesarean.”

  “A cesarean? We’ve never done one of those.”

  “Keith has fresh training in surgery. You’d better start calling in the blood donors. Starting next week, we’ll need as many pints on hand as we can manage.”

  There was a cold spell. Isabel’s fingers were so numb she could barely turn a screwdriver. No longer could she sleep out in the garage; she had to move her bedclothes back upstairs, along with College Physics and the rest of her books. Peewee’s family came, too, and they all slept on top of one another in a big ball of fur. The second floor was dead quiet with the windows closed, and the grating of Peewee’s wheel was enough to wake her early in the morning.

  In her workshop she spent hours tinkering with connections. She turned on the fetal monitor for a signal, but no sound broke the static from the tiny speaker box. It gave her a start to hear Peace Hope at the garage door call over, “Hey, silly. How’s it going?”

  “Um,” she mumbled, a clip in her mouth. “Hand me that pliers, will you?”

  Peace Hope lurched forward, laid down a crutch, and picked up the pliers in her metal gripper. “Guess what? Le Petit Prince just arrived on his seventh planet—Earth.”

  Isabel knew this was meant to annoy her, as her grade had slipped on that last test. Between the bees, and the hospital chores, she hardly had time to study. “He can take un viaje a Marte for all I care.”

  After another hour’s work, the hiss and static gave way to a clear tone. The tone went off and on as she flicked the switch of the transmitter.

  “We’ve done it!” Isabel threw her arms around Peace Hope, who nearly lost her balance. “We’ve really done it. We just have to hope it will work at Keith’s frequency.”

  “What exactly will you find on that frequency, did he say?”

  Isabel shook her head. “Keith is too cagey. Never mind, Peace Hope: Radio Free Gwynwood is in business.”

  The tone from the monitor came steadily clearer as she worked on the receiver, but still only hiss came from the band where Keith had said she would find something “interesting.” Then one day, after she replaced the battery and moved the antenna, she thought she had something—something different. Something not just background hiss. It was a sort of squeal that rose and fell at odd intervals. Definitely not a voice; but then maybe the signal was coded?

  Isabel went to fetch Keith, but he was upstairs in the hospital with Marguerite, learning a test for giardia that he had not covered in medical school. She ran back down to the garage.

  She found that she could move the antenna different ways to get the best signal. In fact, the signal seemed to have a rather precise direction. That was suspicious. Could the source of the signal be quite close—perhaps here in Gwynwood?

  The whole rig would not fit on her bicycle, so she dumped it into the carriage, then she set off to collect Peace Hope. With Peace Hope adjusting the antenna, they rode up the street in the direction pointed by the antenna, and the squealing got a little clearer. Then the noise seemed to drift away; they had to retrace a bit, and then back, until at last Peace Hope suggested they turn up the road to the Meetinghouse. That road was winding, but on balance the noise still increased.

  They rode up, passing the old abandoned burned-down house, then on all the way to the Meetinghouse. The noise was suddenly very loud indeed.

  Isabel felt the hairs prickle behind her neck. She reined in the horse. The building was still, its log walls musty, spotted with fungus in little fan shapes. Above the tar-paper roof, the sky was clear except for wisps of cirrus overhead in the height of the Wall’s dome.

  Peace Hope said, “What’s the matter, silly? Got cold feet?”

  “You see where we’re at?”

  “Maybe the Underground escaped here in secret, and dug a hole beneath the Meetinghouse. It would be the best place to hide. Like ‘The Purloined Letter.’”

  The source of the noise was close by. But the Underground, here? It made no sense. Thirty centimeters—for some reason, that wavelength…

  Isabel lifted the reins, and Jezebel plodded on slowly. They passed the Meetinghouse, then moved slowly toward the cemetery.

  She snatched the reins so hard the horse whinnied. “Turn it off! Turn it off, for Christ’s sake!”

  Above the cemetery hovered a single angelbee, still watching the grave of Alice. Thirty centimeters was about the span of an angelbee, a good size for an “antenna.”

  The signal was coming from the angelbee, watching and transmitting to someone, somewhere.

  She cornered Keith afterward. “Why didn’t you tell me it was angelbees?”

  Keith said, “Well, why didn’t you tell me you’d picked up a signal before you ran off after it? Of all the bloody fool things to do.”

  “You should have told me what it was I’d be picking up. What did you expect I’d do when I found it—go pray in the Meetinghouse?”

  “It’s true,” he admitted. “We doctors should know better.” Keith looked pensively out over the porch rail and put two fingers to his lips, as if smoking an invisible cigarette; he had taken Peace Hope’s advice.

  “Radio wave transmission—how on Earth do they manage that?” Isabel exclaimed. “I always thought angelbees were, well, like animals.”

  �
��Plenty of animals have organs that sense an electric field, like the bill of a platypus. Besides, remember, these ‘animals’ have technology far beyond ours. Maybe they all have electrical implants.”

  “They sure don’t look that smart; they act so dumb most of the time. Anyway, now they know about my radio. What am I going to do?”

  “The best thing to do would be to leave it out by the Pylon, and let the angelbees dispose of it.”

  “But to give up my radio, after all that work.”

  “You can build another one, out of my allowance.”

  At that she felt ashamed, knowing how badly Keith missed the City, and how pitifully little his allowance bought. “I already spent Peace Hope’s, as well as mine. I can’t just take yours.”

  “Why not? We’re all in the Underground together. We pledged our fortunes, remember?”

  Isabel squeezed his arm. “Thanks for the offer, anyhow. You’re a real friend, Keith.”

  But there was no way she would give up her radio so easily. She had not seen any angelbees at the house yet, so how would they know where to find the radio? She would hide it in her room upstairs, in a bottom drawer beneath her winter clothes. Another thought: She would keep a candle burning, to scare them away.

  As she was opening the drawer, she caught sight of Becca’s candle box lying on the dresser. She stopped with a sudden thought. Opening the box, she took out the hexagonal scale and set it on the dresser. She turned on the radio and tuned it to Keith’s frequency.

  The faint tone returned, from the angelbee in the cemetery, nothing more. She tried other frequencies, but still nothing. Disappointed, she picked up the scale to return it to the box.

  A screech jabbed her ears, as soon as she touched the scale. She dropped it and covered her ears. Instantly the noise stopped, though her head was still throbbing.

  She turned down the volume, then cautiously reached for the scale again. All it needed was a touch to set off its signal, somehow. It was communicating—with angelbees, somewhere. The angelbees knew, every time she held the object in her palm.