The Wall Around Eden

by Joan Slonczewski

  Her eyes relaxed again, and a few tears came out. Then she rose and felt along the windowsill until she hit the dresser opposite the bed. The bottom drawer hid the old candle box that Becca had left her, with its unanswered questions. The angelbees had given Becca her sight, not taken it away. To see people, after all those years; no wonder Becca had written, “You all shine like stars.”

  And yet, she had gone away with the angelbees. Why? And why had the angelbees, or their “keepers,” taken her?

  The floorboards vibrated as someone ascended the stairs and entered Isabel’s room. “It’s me,” came Marguerite’s voice out of the grayness.

  “More tests?” Isabel asked hopefully.

  “Sorry,” Marguerite whispered. “Ruth stopped by to give you this. She said you’re welcome to others, too, from Becca’s room. Until you get better, of course.”

  Isabel’s hand fell upon a book with a Braille title, The Torah, the first five books of the Bible. English Bible.

  She felt her way back to the bed and sat down with the book, starting with Genesis. She was out of practice at Braille, and it took her some time to remember all the three-by-two dot symbols. The translation was unfamiliar to her, neither New English nor King James. “God said, ‘Let there be an expanse in the midst of the water…’” Isabel had always pictured the biblical sky as a solid vault, like a cathedral dome above the Earth, not as an open expanse. As her fingers laboriously picked out the words, her attention wandered. She wondered about the angelbees and their exoskeletal keepers. Why had they ever come here from the sky? What were they getting from Earth?

  Later that afternoon her mother knocked on the door again. “Peace Hope is downstairs. She wants to know if you can have visitors.”

  “Goodness, yes. What do you think I am, contagious?”

  So Peace Hope came upstairs, her crutches thumping methodically on the stairs. Isabel could hear her coming across the floor; then suddenly Peace Hope’s cheek rested against hers, her chin leaning on her shoulder.

  Isabel hugged her hard and started to cry, and kept on crying until she was exhausted and her eyelids felt swollen. At last she let go of Peace Hope, sat up on the bed and pushed back her hair. “The worst thing is, I can’t even tell what I look like. How do I know if my hair’s combed straight? I probably look worse than Grace.”

  “Thee looks the same as ever,” said Peace Hope. “Like a Spanish aristocrat.”

  “I’d rather be a campesino. The Spaniards were slavers, just like the angelbees.”

  There was a pause. “Is the baby doing well?” Peace Hope asked.

  “Fine. She’s down the hall with Debbie; take a look.” She shuddered at the word.

  “Even the angelbees must have been impressed. They’re still watching at the window.”

  Isabel frowned. “My window?”

  “Oh no; the birthing room.”

  The birthing room was empty now. It made no sense.

  Then she remembered something else. “The Town Meeting last night. Whatever happened?”

  “We adjourned without a decision. We’re to reconvene this evening.” Peace Hope paused, then added, “My mother thinks that thy…injury will have some effect.”

  “Sure it will. You’ll all say, see what comes of standing up to angelbees. Scatterbrain, listen: the angelbees are just eyes.” Isabel grew excited again, remembering. “Just eyes—that spacecraft is really their other half, their ‘arms and legs.’”

  “That could be. We know there must be something more than angelbees. But why would their body parts evolve in two pieces? Could they have replaced one part with a machine? That spacecraft still looks mechanical, to me.”

  “So does an insect. Perhaps the keeper with the arms and legs evolved separately from the angelbees, and they came together in symbiosis. Like ants and aphids: ants milk the aphids for food. But the aphids aren’t social, like the ants; they reproduce by ‘parthenogenesis’. Angelbees reproduce by budding, so why would they need a Hive? It’s their keepers that need the Hive.”

  Peace Hope considered this. “If these keepers are the arms and legs, I wonder where the brain is.”

  “The keepers could have brains. Or the brain could be decentralized throughout the colony.” Isabel shook her head; it was too complicated to think about. “Oh well. Maybe I’m not quite a murderer, after all.” She half smiled. An eye for an eye—Keith was right at that. She asked guardedly, “Does Daniel know…what happened?”

  “When Daniel heard,” said Peace Hope, “he was very angry indeed.”

  “Angry at me?”

  “Not at thee, I think. He said to me, ‘Thee sees, I was right to refuse.’”

  Isabel let out a long sigh and squeezed her eyelids shut again, but they could not shut out the grayness. “He picked a fine time to join the Underground, with you and Keith quitting and me knocked out of action.”

  “We didn’t really quit. We just stepped back for a bit. Thee knows, Quakers were always revolutionary. The early Friends used to denounce wicked preachers for removing God from the sight of ordinary men and women. They got so excited over it, they ran naked in the streets.”

  “Is that right? I’ll bet that’s what your dad did when they put the cross up on the ‘steeplehouse.’”

  Peace Hope laughed. “I’ll bet he did. Isabel, will thee come to the Meeting tonight?”

  “No way. I’m not about to show up like this, so Sal and Deliverance can smirk in front of me. How can I go to class now?”

  “I copied out some text for you in Braille—”

  “Really? Physics?”

  “I started on that, but I have to figure out how to do the equations. This is from Le Petit Prince.”

  “Oh.”

  “We’re almost done with it in French class,” Peace Hope added hurriedly, “the Little Prince is just about to leave Earth and go home to his own little planet. Teacher Debbie said we can try Tristan, then.”

  After Peace Hope left, Isabel fingered her way through the lines of French that Peace Hope had punched in painstakingly with a Braille tool. The Little Prince had just found a well in the middle of the desert; a likely idea, about as likely as most of his adventures. The narrator, instead of getting his plane fixed like any sensible aviator, was helping the Little Prince to get a drink of water from the well, and this led him to muse about his youth during Christmas time. Here or there was a word Isabel did not know, but she could work it out. Most of French was just mutant Spanish, after all: “la lumière de l’arbre de Noël,” had to be la luz del árbol de Navidad, the light of the Christmas tree.

  It occurred to Isabel that Christmas was less than a month off, and she might not see the lights this year. She shuddered and pressed her finger again through Peace Hope’s text, until she reached an unfamiliar word, aveugle. Les yeux sont aveugles. “The eyes are…” Blind? It had to be, although it looked nothing like the Spanish ciego. Aveugle was better, she liked the sound of it, somehow; it conveyed the horror of not being able to see. But what was this? Had the Little Prince gone blind in a chapter she had missed? “Les yeux sont aveugles. Il faut chercher avec le coeur,” one must seek with the heart.

  A knock at the door startled her.

  “Yes, Mom?”

  “It’s Daniel, to see you.”

  She felt warm in the face, then suddenly cold, until she thought she would pass out. “No,” she managed to say. “I mean, I can’t make it downstairs.” She could not bear to have him see her this way.

  “Of course. He’ll understand.”

  “Wait, Mom. Tell him that—” She swallowed, turning over a decision in her mind. “I guess what I’m trying to say is—I want to be there tonight at the Town Meeting.”

  XIX

  THE INTERIOR OF the Meetinghouse was a confusion of voices and children’s cries. Isabel navigated the aisle gradually between her parents, until they found her a seat.

  As Town Clerk, Liza opened the Meeting, which was to take up Daniel’s refusal to serve as Con
tact. Almost immediately Carl’s voice was heard. “Some of us have pursued a suggestion from last night,” he said. “Remember, we considered offering the Pylon a substitute Contact, a youngster of age and character comparable to Daniel. I would like to put forward the name of one who would be willing to serve: Deliverance Brown.”

  “Deliverance!” Isabel whispered at her father. “That ignorant wretch. No sabe ni la a.”

  Andrés chuckled. “What does Carl think we need, a vestal virgin? The gods do not take substitutes.”

  In the meantime, Deliverance was assuring the Meeting that she would accept this duty, and Vera was saying how proud she would be of her daughter.

  “Thank thee for thy offer,” Liza said to Deliverance. “Nevertheless, I believe some of us wish to discuss first the accident that has befallen one of us.”

  There was dead silence. Isabel imagined that all heads had turned to look at her. “Dad, can I—can I say something?”

  “Yes, go ahead. Stand up so they hear.”

  She stood. It was odd to speak into blankness, yet in a sense easier not to see all those eyes. “The angelbees are just…eyes,” she croaked. “That is what I think. That is why they…retaliated against my eyesight.” She went on quickly, “Somehow, we have to get the Pylon to reveal its hands, and its brain. Somehow…” She had no way of telling how her words were received or comprehended. Feeling dizzy, she managed to sit down.

  “Yes, Anna,” called Liza.

  “It was more than an eye for an eye.” Anna’s voice was indignant. “It was two eyes for one. Maybe let’s shoot out ten of theirs and see how they like it. What’s a few days of fog?”

  There was a chorus of “Amen,” and a muttered, “Can’t let them get away with this.”

  Perplexed, Isabel had not expected this reaction. A heated argument ensued between those who wanted a substitute Contact, and others who wanted to start shooting angelbees. To her chagrin, Isabel found herself agreeing with Carl and Vera.

  “Calm, Friends, please.” Liza’s voice grew, with a rare note of strain. “We may have missed a central point of Friend Isabel’s mishap. It seems that at first the angelbee actually approached her, seeking some kind of contact, in an exceptionally direct manner. Is this not so?”

  “Yes,” Isabel admitted, “it seemed so.” In retrospect.

  “It may be that these angelbees, or the creatures to whom these ‘eyes’ belong, are at last seeking more open contact with us. This may be a time for a group of us to approach the Pylon together. We could join Daniel in visiting the Pylon at the next new moon.”

  There was a pause while people thought this over.

  “I would consent to Aunt Liza’s plan,” said Daniel.

  “I won’t,” called someone else. “Not unless Isabel gets better.”

  The Meeting closed after prolonged discussion, having finally agreed to Liza’s plan to approach the Pylon as a group. That night Isabel slept fitfully, with dreams whose waking was terrible because she could see in sleep so clearly what she could not see awake. The next day brought no relief to her eyes. She made herself go downstairs and began to get around better by herself, creeping along the walls. She held and smelled the scent of the tall beeswax candles that Debbie had sent to the doctors, for delivering Patience. But feeding herself was the worst; she could never tell what was on her plate, and spooning cereal for breakfast was impossible.

  “You’ve eaten little, Belita.” Her father’s voice was low and tentative, as if he had volumes he could not speak.

  Isabel tried to figure out where to push the spoon. “I can’t stand it, making a mess that I can’t even see.”

  “You’re managing all right.”

  Isabel gave up on the spoon and squeezed her eyes shut to see if it would get darker. It did not.

  “How are you feeling this morning?” he asked.

  Isabel sighed. “I feel like I’ve lived a thousand years in a day.”

  “So you have.”

  Tears rose in her eyes again, but she forced them back. Then she felt her way to the sitting room. She had left her reading there, the Braille Bible and Le Petit Prince. It was hard to believe she had no work to be getting after today, nothing to do but read. That was what a real college was supposed to be like.

  “Can I help you with anything, Belita?”

  “Thanks, Dad; I’ll be okay. You go look after those sheep. Make sure they get their foot-rot medicine.” She opened to the final chapter of Genesis. “If you run into Ruth, you might ask her to drop off some more Braille books. Anything will do; I’ll go crazy reading the Bible all day.”

  She heard the door close as he left. From outside, the autumn wind sighed and rattled the last of the brittle leaves. She read for over an hour, until her fingertips ached from scraping across all the tiny dots.

  A knock came from the door. Isabel got up and felt her way down the hall, past the open passage to the kitchen, coming to an abrupt halt at the outer door. She patted the door panels until her hand fell upon the door handle and opened it. The door pulled back, and the November wind blew in. “Who’s there?” she called.

  The visitor hesitated. “It’s me,” said Daniel. “Sorry—I’ll leave, if thee’d rather.”

  “No, no.” A wave of heat came over her, but she kept her composure. “Come in, please.”

  There were footsteps on the doorsill, and the door closed. Daniel’s arm slid under hers to help her back to the sitting room. She sank back into the old sofa, then she felt the cushion sink as he sat next to her.

  “What happened to thy hands?” Daniel asked.

  Isabel looked automatically at her hands. She felt the sore fingertips; the pain worsened, and something moist came away on her thumbs. “I’m not used to reading Braille. Goodness, I must look like Lady Macbeth.”

  “I’ll get you a cloth.” Daniel arose, then returned with a cloth moistened with cistern water.

  As Isabel soothed her fingers, the silence lengthened in the grayness between her and Daniel, and she had a sudden need to fill it with words. “You know, even normal eyes are blind throughout most of the spectrum. The spectrum spans everything, from radio wave and microwave on the long end, through infrared, through visible; then there’s ultraviolet, and X rays, and gamma rays, the shortest and deadliest of all. Our eyes see just a tiny slice of it: red through green through violet, all sandwiched into the slot between infrared and ultraviolet. Of course animal eyes have different ranges; honeybees can’t see red, but they see ultraviolet. Some flowers that look white to us look bright colored to them.”

  “And the angelbees are eyes that see infrared,” said Daniel. “Eyes, perhaps, that serve some greater creature.”

  His voice was so beautiful, even more so than when she could see him. It was almost worth the blindness to be able to hear him this way.

  “Thanks for coming, last night,” Daniel added. “Thy reasoning was helpful. I feel that I know the creatures better now.”

  “You don’t…blame me then, for what I did?”

  “It was unfortunate, but understandable. Of course, thee was afraid.”

  In fact, she had felt anger more than fear. “I still hate them,” she said honestly. “I can’t help it.”

  “Hate is the first step. Afterward comes understanding.”

  Isabel turned, and she found herself squinting at him, in vain. “How do we get there? How do you suppose we’re to ‘earn our freedom’? Didn’t the slaves have to fight for it?”

  “There are different kinds of freedom. The reason the Quakers freed their slaves was because the condition of slavery prevented obedience to the Light.”

  “So you think we are free enough, just because we’re free to worship in the Meetinghouse?”

  “The Meetinghouse is not essential to worship. It’s just a convenient reminder. Every moment of life must be an act of worship. Otherwise, we’re as dead as those beyond the Wall.”

  Her fingers gripped the sofa, and pain shot up through them. It was t
oo unsettling to think of all those moments, hating angelbees, hating Carl Dreher sometimes, even hating her own parents when they fell short of perfection. Human beings—the product of a billion years of evolution, still capable of hatred and murder.

  “It’s too hard, Daniel,” she exclaimed. “Why can’t it be enough, just striving to live?” She thought of the determined green weeds out in the deadland, pushing up among the charred tree trunks.

  “There’s nothing wrong with striving to live. The angelbees never interfered with that, either.”

  “Then why did they come in the first place to touch off Armageddon? Why do they still keep us behind airwalls and burn off our ozone?”

  Daniel was quiet. The pause lengthened, and the wind whistled outside. The scent of pine came from the fireplace. “I don’t have an answer. If I did, if I felt called, then it would be much easier. Do you know the story of the Quaker who came to a very wicked city and was much troubled by its wickedness. When he could stand it no longer, he began to preach in the main square about the wickedness of the city. So the people promptly locked him in jail. In jail, he prayed to thank the Lord for setting him free.”

  “Well, our town isn’t that wicked. There’s no jail to put you in.”

  “No. No, there is no jail, here. Not in Gwynwood.”

  For some reason this made her uneasy. What sort of jail could he be thinking of? Did he want to get transported? “Daniel, what did you come here for?”

  “I came…to see thee. Isn’t that enough?”

  “You ignored me for weeks. I thought you didn’t like me anymore.”

  “No, that’s impossible.” His voice became lower, full of hurt. “If anything, I thought I might like you too well.”

  That puzzled her. “Why, Daniel?”

  He said slowly, “It wouldn’t be right. Dr. Chase said I might not live past thirty.”

  “But you’re doing better on Keith’s medicine.”

  “Better, for now. I still need to get to Sydney for a bone-marrow transplant.”