“Maybe not. Maybe I’ll learn something. I’ll read those books, too; there must be something true in them. Thee knows, the scale is the key to what Becca found out.”
“And what became of Becca? Is she ‘extinct’ like the tree frogs?”
“They gave Becca eyes. The worst they can do is give me arms and legs.”
Isabel looked away. Slowly she turned the scale over once more, then she set it down upon Peace Hope’s shelf next to the Red Queen. Unexpectedly, the act released a flood of fear inside her. She felt certain, now, something really was going to happen to her at the next new moon.
“Oh, Isabel—I’m so frightened for thee.” Peace Hope rubbed her eyes with the shell of her gripper-arm. “I’m so sorry, I can’t help it. If they take thee and Daniel away, like Becca, how will I ever know what happened? ‘Le mouton oui ou non a-t-il mangé la fleur?’” Would the Little Prince’s rose survive his sheep, or not?
Isabel hugged her tight. “It’s all my fault. I just wanted so badly to get us out of here, out to civilization. I tried so hard.”
“If you do go, will you get them to send us back a message? Send a picture of a sheep in the Pylon, if you’re okay.”
“I’m going nowhere without a fight, that’s for sure.” Isabel sat up straight. “I won’t give myself up at the Pylon. Let’s see what they can do about that.”
Her friends offered support in their own characteristic ways. Keith insisted that she stock up for a trip, just as he had when he got transported. Vials of antibiotics, analgesics, contraceptives, and Daniel’s anemia medicine went into her pockets. She did not ask what would happen when they ran out.
“There’s just one thing more.” Keith took a small pillbox from his pocket. It contained two tablets. “One for you and one for Daniel. Final friends.”
It took her a moment to figure out what he meant.
“Are you serious?”
“Absolutely. They were for me, originally, in case I found the bush just too much to bear. But it suits me fine now, thanks mainly to you and your mom and dad.”
“I see,” she whispered. Her lip twitched. “You and Mother. Are all you doctors murderers then, in the end?”
“Pace, Hippocrates. What else could one do for the dying after D-Day?”
Isabel shuddered. “I won’t give up that easily. How about matches? That’s the one thing angelbees are afraid of.”
“Have this.” Keith pulled out a metal object the size of a fat pencil. It took a minute for Isabel to recognize it as a cigarette lighter. Keith had not smoked since the day he arrived in Gwynwood.
Matthew paid a call on Isabel, and they spoke for some minutes about her science classes over the years. It seemed to her that he had something on his mind to tell her.
“You know,” he said abruptly, “I’ve been thinking about the airwall, that night when the snowflakes were falling through.” He sounded puzzled. “It’s rather odd that no one ever noticed that before, in twenty years.”
“Nobody ever looked before, besides Alice. She wasn’t exactly one for scientific curiosity.”
“That’s not quite fair to Alice. Besides, you weren’t the first to watch the Pylon from afar with binoculars. I did, more than once.”
Isabel’s scalp prickled. She did not know what to say.
“If snow could penetrate behind angelbees, all these years,” he went on, “why not insects? Why hasn’t the deadland been recolonized?”
“The deadland is poisoned. Things can’t live out there.”
“That was true only the first five years or so. Maybe for humans, it would still be true. But the grasses out there—they’re flourishing, not limping along like the first few years.”
The Pylon had let the snow fall through its airwall, deliberately, so that she would see. It had enticed her to enter its Looking-glass Land.
The new moon fell on a Sunday. Isabel tried not to feel self-conscious as she sat in the Meetinghouse, everyone knowing that this might be the last worship meeting she would ever see. She rubbed her hands to keep them warm and listened to the crackle of the wood stove. At least the fire kept out the angelbees, who kept their watch on her and Daniel from outside the window.
After the time of silence, Debbie Dreher read a passage from Martin Luther King, as was customary each year on the Sunday nearest King’s birthday. The passage she read described the power of Christian love to overcome oppression. The word King had used to name this power was agapē, from the classical Greek, a dead language they had not yet studied in Gwynwood. Debbie concluded by saying she hoped that King’s message might yet be of help to the prisoners of Gwynwood. Isabel listened respectfully, though she doubted that agapē would have any meaning for non-human oppressors.
Unexpectedly, Nahum Scattergood rose to speak. “I am moved to recall a story from my grandfather,” Nahum began, his voice familiar yet unheard before in this Meetinghouse. “My grandfather was born into a large family on a farm during the Depression of the nineteen thirties. One day a knock came at the door, and the man of the house went to answer, rocking a baby in his arms to soothe it while the women were fixing dinner. The door opened, and there stood a stranger with a shotgun, demanding all the money in the house.
“The man of the house said, of course, the stranger could have what he wanted, but he’d have to hold the baby while the man went to fetch it and, meantime, wouldn’t he stay for dinner? Of course, the stranger had to put down his gun to hold the baby. It turned out the stranger was a farmer fallen on hard times, and after dinner the Scattergood family discussed how they could lend him some stock to tide him over. To drive home the story, my grandfather liked to end saying, ‘And I myself was that baby.’”
Nahum added, “Today let us hope that if we must give up our young ones to an unknown power, God’s purpose may likewise be fulfilled.”
That night, instead of going out to the Pylon, Isabel and Daniel huddled at home with the Scattergoods. Isabel’s parents waited with her, leaving Keith to look after the hospital. They kept the fire blazing in the fireplace, and candles all over, to ward off angelbees.
Around midnight, the front-door knocker clanged loudly. It was Anna with her two children, both wide-eyed with terror. “The Pylon’s gone crazy,” Anna said. “There’s a thick fog pouring out of it in all directions. I had to warn you.”
“It will blanket the whole town,” suggested Liza, “as it did before.” That had happened the time when the angelbee was shot down.
“I don’t like it,” said Anna. “The fog’s so thick, it even creeps into the house. What if it puts us to sleep again?”
Daniel said, “We should give ourselves up now. We can’t endanger the town.”
“No,” insisted Anna. “Your loss is the greater danger! Hide—in the cellar. How can they find you there?”
So the two of them went down into the cellar, with Isabel’s parents, while the others kept watch above. The freezing cold penetrated to their skin, even through their sweaters and jackets. They huddled together in the darkness, avoiding lanterns that would attract notice. Isabel could not say how long they waited there, but as she slipped out of consciousness, she had a vision of the skeletons beyond the Wall on a starless night, rising up to stand, their fingers wearing wedding rings for which they had no heirs. They greeted her thus: “You who sought our land for so long, welcome to the realm of the cold and the dark.”
XXVII
ISABEL’S EYELIDS OPENED. She squinted as drops of perspiration flowed into them. There was a bright light from somewhere. Slowly she pushed herself up on an elbow, and pulled feebly at the zipper of her jacket, for she was much too warm. She peeled off her sweaters and boots, and felt a chill as her accumulated perspiration evaporated. The epitheliomas on her arm itched terribly. She dropped her things onto the surface beneath her, a pinkish, waxy material. The surface extended several paces to a wall, built of the same waxy stuff. Six such walls surrounded her, with a low roof above.
The shock of i
t overwhelmed her. She stifled a scream, her hand clawing at her mouth. “Daniel?” she called hoarsely.
Daniel lay nearby, just beginning to stir. She hurried to pull off his hat and unzip his jacket, for he, too, was drenched with sweat. Her fingers were shaking still, but she was getting her senses back. “For God’s sake, how’d we get here? Where are we?”
In one of the walls a round window was cut crudely into the pink stuff, about half a foot thick. Outside was maple foliage within arm’s reach, and birds were singing a medley of different calls. The smell was of spring grass, with a faint whiff of skunk. Was she still in Gwynwood, somewhere? But it was winter, after all. Had she lain here for months, or years, like Rip Van Winkle?
She looked at her watch, an heirloom from her great-grandmother. The hands stood at eight-thirty. The date read January nineteenth. That encouraged her a bit though it did not rule out time dilation.
“Where are we?” she said again. She rummaged in her pocket and fished out the compass. The needle spun around and around as she tilted it, finding no horizontal direction. When held vertical, however, it registered a strong upward bias.
The hair pricked on her scalp. “Maybe we’re not on Earth.”
Daniel’s eyes widened. He leaned toward her and touched her shoulder. “But where else could we be?”
“Who knows? Wherever their Hive is, maybe.” She remembered the red satellite tracking across the sky.
For just a moment a hint of fear crossed Daniel’s face. Then he looked at the floor and scraped it, as if puzzled.
“What is this stuff, do you think?” Isabel pounded the floor once, then harder, and her palm left a definite dent. With her fingernails she dug up curls of the stuff, and found that with kneading it turned soft and slightly sticky in her fingers. Not bad, she thought; if the whole prison were made of that stuff, she would be out in no time. But then, this “cell” with its window was already open. It could not be that easy.
Something flew in the window and buzzed right in her face, like a large bumblebee. Alarmed, Isabel threw up her arm reflexively, but the thing buzzed out as quickly as it came, alighting on a tree branch just outside the window. Isabel got up and looked outside.
It was not a bee, but a tiny bird, the smallest adult bird she had ever seen. It had a dark coat and head, with a white collar, and an exceptionally long needlelike beak. As its head tilted and caught the light, the dark patch below the beak turned bright scarlet. “Daniel—it’s a hummingbird. But they’re extinct…”
There were trees: maple, black walnut, a sassafras with its lobular asymmetrical leaves. Birds hovered everywhere: cardinals, bluejays, and a number of others that Isabel had never seen before.
Daniel came to stand at her elbow. “The angelbees must have collected them, before Doomsday.”
There were no angelbees in sight. A pair of deer bounded across the woods, and a raccoon came out from behind the oak tree, its black-masked head sniffing deliberately at the ground. It disappeared into a patch of sunflowers. Behind the sunflowers there appeared to be other patches of vegetation in orderly array, like a garden.
Isabel leaned out of the window and craned her neck upward…
The sky took her breath away. Pale colors of every hue swirled across the sky, as if all of Peace Hope’s paints had upset and dribbled down the pallet. Mauve and violet and bluish green, yellows and golds, in huge arcs that swept and faded across the sky. Higher up, toward the zenith, the colors faded into white, no distinct sun but a diffuse white light too brilliant to stare at, merging with the pulsating sky.
Daniel came to look out beside her. He gripped her arm with a sudden fierceness, as if in dread of the inexplicable. Isabel felt her skin tighten all over. This was not a natural place, no matter how much “nature” there was.
The cell had no door, so Isabel cautiously climbed out the window and peered around. Several more pink waxen cells were stacked alongside there, like a honeycomb, each cell with its one round window. She peaked in the window of the one next door to her right, but there was no sign of occupancy.
Beyond the garden patches extended a level forest. How far did the forest extend, she wondered. Would they eventually run up against an airwall?
Daniel came out behind her and took her hand. With a rush of gratitude she squeezed hard. How ghastly it would be to find oneself in the midst of this strangeness all alone. She found herself thinking, perhaps the whole of Gwynwood no longer existed. For her and Daniel, it might as well no longer exist.
They took a few tentative steps away from their cell, toward the garden patches, where Isabel saw ripening corn as well as pea vines. As they went the sky above faded into a uniform tint of green-brown. Squinting at the sky, Isabel crouched defensively. “A storm coming on?”
But the gray-green was not the color of any storm cloud she had ever seen. The air was still and quiet, except for the birds. The temperature was moderate, with no sign of impending change.
Her attention turned to the garden. Ahead of her rose a neat plot of corn, about ten yards across, the stalks tall with brown tassels. The plot was not square, but cut off to either side at an obtuse angle. Next to the plot was a bare path dotted with curious animal droppings, dark green, more compact than horse dung. There was an adjacent plot also of corn, only the green shoots about a foot high as they would be earlier in the season.
Isabel frowned. What season was this, anyway? Spring, summer, or fall?
She walked the path between the young corn and the ripening corn, until the path between them forked, forming a Y, with a plot of pea vines extending ahead of her. She turned back to survey the corn patches again. “Angelbees like nothing but hexagons,” she told Daniel as he approached.
“Perhaps,” he said. “They must think we like nothing but squares.”
They walked on together down the zigzag patch among the hexagonal plots, having to choose right or left each time the path forked. The arrangement would drive any human gardener nuts, Isabel thought. Soybeans in their hairy pods, ripe tomatoes leaning over, young cabbages just getting started—how to keep track of it all? It would be easy to get lost among these paths, which one could never see to the end. Isabel was beginning to worry when abruptly the path opened into a clearing with the forest of pines beyond. Three deer grazed calmly, undisturbed. What kept them out of those tidy plots? she wondered.
For that matter, how had she and Daniel gotten here? How had the angelbees gotten them out of the cellar?
Daniel said, “Is that water running, somewhere?”
She listened. Beneath the birdsongs came a faint rushing, lapping sound, the sound of a fountain or waterfall. She walked through the forest in the direction of the rushing sound. The sound grew into a burbling and splashing, and there it was: a gush of water rose from a cleft rock, falling endlessly into a pool which let out into a stream that coursed across their path, muddying into marshland off to the right. In the pool, black minnows darted beneath the surface, and a school of pollywogs huddled at the edge. The bank was thick with tiger lilies, columbine, and coneflowers. There were insects flitting from the water’s surface to the bank, dragonflies, horseflies, even fireflies with their little pink tail ends. And butterflies two inches across, some mottled orange and black, others black with white vertical bands and blue spots along the edge. She had never seen those before, except in pictures.
Daniel scooped up a handful of water and drank. “It’s very good.”
Isabel winced, thinking of giardia and strontium-ninety and other nasty things the stream might harbor. But then, this was no natural stream. She peered critically at the water gushing from the rock. “For plumbing, it’ll do.”
Daniel blinked as if startled from another thought. “Yes, of course. Plumbing. Someone has gone to a lot of trouble for us.”
“Zookeepers always do.” A cage was a cage, no matter how well gilded.
It was then that an angelbee appeared from among the trees, just overhead. Isabel’s pulse quickened,
and she gripped Daniel’s hand again. “There’s the keeper.” Or a zoo visitor, perhaps. A sightseer, to gawk at Bin-Bin the gorilla playing football.
The angelbee came down just within reach. It had a rounded eyespot, not the kind with the flat hexagonal face. After hovering for a moment, it moved slowly back among the trees, as if beckoning the two humans to follow.
Isabel and Daniel crossed the stream by stepping from one mossy stone to the next. Then they followed the angelbee, pausing only to let a skunk pass at its leisurely pace. Isabel wrinkled her nose; an overabundance of skunk was one thing she could have done without.
The trees gave way at last to a grassy clearing, about an acre in size. The sky was playing tricks again; from gray-green it had slid into a sort of peach color, like the walls of their cell.
In the middle of the clearing stood a pylon, similar to the Gwynwood Pylon, only smaller, barely taller than Isabel. Like the one at home, this pylon was covered with the palest of colors migrating across its surface. The sky had looked like that before, a giant version of a Pylon…Something odd was going on here, if only she could fit it together.
Isabel moved closer, and she felt the rising pressure of an airwall, just like the Pylon back home.
Daniel stopped and caught her arm. “We mustn’t stay here.”
“Why not? What more can they do to us?”
Daniel grabbed her arm. “Isabel, look.”
Behind them stood a keeper, in broad daylight. Its polyhedral shape, about as tall as herself, was a shiny dark brown, like the material of the hexagonal scales. Its black, double-jointed legs moved up and down as the creature slowly advanced. From the underside of the body came puffs of water vapor, bathing its surface and leaving behind a foggy trail.
Something caught Isabel’s eye, in the grass ahead of the creature, something that moved. It had a long, sleek green body, as thick as Isabel’s leg, and it slid its length through the grass like a snake. Its body disappeared, then reappeared unnervingly out of the grass several feet closer to her. At one point it briefly raised its upper end, an eyeless head whose mouth was stuffed with half-chewed vegetation.
The Wall Around Eden Page 18
