The Wall Around Eden

by Joan Slonczewski

  “Look—another one.” Daniel pointed off to the right, where another green-sheathed body was busy coiling itself up a tree. It snapped off a two-inch-thick branch and proceeded to munch away at the leaves while holding the branch entwined within its coils.

  Isabel screamed and sprinted past the airwalled pylon, pulling Daniel after her. How many of the snake-things were there? Were the two humans surrounded? There was a path into the woods beyond, narrow like a deer trail. She plunged into the forest, half choking on sobs of terror.

  In what seemed a very short time, they came upon another cluster of pink honeycombed structures, similar to the one from which they had started. Isabel reached the waxen wall of the honeycomb and stopped to rest, still shaking all over. The sky overhead had its coat of pale colors, as before.

  “It’s all right,” said Daniel reassuringly. “I think we’ve lost them.”

  “For now. What repulsive beasts those were. I never heard of those in Gwynwood, even before Doomsday.”

  “At least they’re vegetarian.”

  “They could be omnivores.” She flinched, recalling the picture in Le Petit Prince of the boa constrictor that had consumed an elephant. But these were eyeless vegetarian boas, somehow associated with keepers…

  Then it dawned on her. “That’s how they got us out of the cellar.” She imagined those immense snakes coiling around the sleeping bodies, dragging them out of the cellar. For a moment she felt she would lose control of her senses.

  Daniel was trying to tell her something. “These little pink houses,” he said. “Who lives in them? Perhaps we’re not alone.”

  Isabel nodded. She managed to steady herself enough to creep along the side of the waxen structure until she reached an open window, similar to the window she and Daniel had climbed out of when they awoke. She felt embarrassed to just peek into somebody’s window like that.

  But the cell was empty, as far as she could see, just six walls with another window across the way, and a rather low ceiling. It might as well have been an abandoned storefront along the old highway.

  Disappointed, they moved along to the next cell. Daniel called out, “Is anyone home? We need help; we ask to speak with thee.” He peeked cautiously into the window and gasped with surprise.

  Their own jackets and sweaters lay there in a heap, just inside the far window.

  “We must have come around in a circle,” Daniel said.

  “But we didn’t come out this window. We went out that window, straight ahead—and we’ve been heading straight ever since. I don’t get that badly lost…” Isabel’s eyes widened. “It’s a tesseract, that’s what it is! They’ve got us trapped in an extra dimension, so no matter how far we run, we return from behind. Keith knew someone that happened to—but he came back.” There had to be a way out again. She clapped her hands in delight. Her terror was forgotten; instead, here was an elegant problem to solve.

  Daniel twisted his head as if trying to imagine it. “A tesseract is square, isn’t it? Eight cubes collapsed into one? Our horizon looks round to me.”

  “Then it’s not a cube, it’s a sphere with an extra dimension, a hypersphere. How would that work? Suppose we were ants, traveling along the surface of a sphere. No matter which direction we went, we’d always come back round where we started. We could see our starting point, too, because the light rays would curve along the sphere.”

  Daniel frowned, perplexed.

  “The trouble is,” Isabel went on, “we actually exist in three dimensions; the sphere is in a dimension outside us. So what about ‘up’ or ‘down’? Shouldn’t that be like an ant trail, too? What happens when we look up?” Isabel looked up. She certainly could not see herself and Daniel in the pale, multicolored sky. But that might only mean that the hypersphere had a distortion, that it was not a perfect sphere…

  Daniel said, “That doesn’t make sense, about seeing your starting point. What if there’s something in the way, to block the light? There’s bound to be something—”

  “That’s it! It’s the pylon,” she cried. “The little pylon must be directly opposite this place, on the equator of the hypersphere. If the ‘sky’ fills half the hypersphere, and the ‘earth’ fills the lower half, then there must be some place exactly opposite us, along the ‘horizon,’ where all the curving light rays intersect. That place is the pylon. So no matter where we look up from here, in the sky, we see light rays coming from the pylon. And when we’re at the pylon, we see pinkish light coming from the walls of these cells. In between, everything reflects gray-green, from forest or garden somewhere.”

  “All right, you don’t have to shout,” said Daniel. “But then, where does the ‘sun’ fit in?”

  “There is no ordinary sun. There must be an artificial light source, filtering in through the extra dimension.”

  Daniel shook his head. “What happens when you go straight up? Do you eventually start coming down again?”

  Isabel considered this. “The surface of the ground must actually be the inner surface of a spherical shell. The pylon lies directly opposite us, across the interior. Its reflected light rays all curve around toward us—that is why its image fills our entire view of the ‘sky.’”

  “Then why can’t we see the land curving all around us?”

  “Because the curvature is all in the extra dimension, when you’re on the ground surface. The two-dimensional ants would see no curvature along the ground, just an infinite repeating view. But if they were flying ants, if they could fly up along the upper shell of the sphere, then they might see—”

  Twigs snapped behind them, and there came a rustle of leaves. Isabel and Daniel grabbed each other’s arm and turned.

  From out of the woods stepped Becca Weiss. Becca wore a familiar blue print dress, faded from many washings. Her eyelids were closed, and upon each eyelid adhered a hexagonal scale.

  XXVIII

  “ISABEL,” BECCA SPOKE, in a voice that seemed to creak from disuse. “And Daniel, too. To see you, at last. I never imagined it would be like this, to see; that you would glow like angels.”

  Isabel stood as if transfixed. She wanted to cry out, to hug Becca tight—but those eyes.

  Daniel said at last, “We missed thee so, Teacher Becca. The children still ask for thee. Every day I begged God to keep thee safe.”

  “Prayers are tricky things,” Becca returned tartly. “I prayed to see you again; was it right that it came out so?”

  “Oh, Becca, I’m sorry,” said Isabel, choking back a sob. “You warned us, but how could I stop? Becca—tell us about your eyes.”

  Becca raised her hand to her right eye and removed the scale. A reddened area remained on her eyelid where the hexagonal shape had rested as if some kind of pressure had held it in place. “The scale tells my brain what the angelbee sees. How, I can’t say.”

  Suddenly Isabel was aware of the two angelbees hovering overhead, observing her and Daniel. She had grown so accustomed to their surveillance, she barely noticed angelbees anymore. But these two creatures, now, were actually linked to Becca. She gaped at them in astonishment.

  “You may try, if you like.” Becca offered her the scale.

  Isabel eyed the scale with caution. “Will it hurt?”

  “Not at all. Please, try it,” Becca insisted. “I want you to see that it’s true.”

  Isabel looked at Daniel, who nodded encouragingly. Then she accepted the scale. Her hand shook so that she nearly dropped it. At last, very carefully, she applied the object to her closed eyelid. It stuck with a gentle suction. It did not hurt, but she could not see anything, either.

  “Do you see?” Becca asked intently.

  “I don’t think so, I—” A flicker of light came into her closed eye, then disappeared. “There is something. It’s not distinct.”

  “You can imagine what it felt like for me, to see even that, after years of darkness! It takes the scale about twelve hours to adjust to a new eye. Then you’ll see everything.”

  But Is
abel removed the scale to return it. “I wouldn’t want to keep this from you.”

  “Thanks, but never mind. There are newborn angelbees all over the place; you can always get a new scale to pop out for you.”

  “Is that how you got them in the first place?”

  “Yes. You remember how the angelbees used to cozy up to me. One day, when I was pressing together some lumps of beeswax to melt into candles, an angelbee dropped that little scale right there on the table. I played with it out of curiosity; goodness knows why I put it on my eyelid, an ironic attempt to imitate the angelbee, I suppose. The gardener, of course, is plastered all over with scales. It can command at least half a dozen eyes at once.”

  “The gardener?”

  “It maintains the place, here. You’ll run into it soon enough.”

  Daniel observed quietly, “I think we already have.”

  “Excellent. But—why, you must be starved. Forgive me; instead of eyes, I should be offering food and drink. Please come.” Becca turned, and the two angelbees followed above her. She led Isabel and Daniel to her own cell, at the far end of the row of hexagons. The interior walls had hollow niches dug in where Becca had stored berries and apples, nuts, carrots, and even milk in crude containers shaped from the same wax that the walls were made of. “The sheep are tame enough to be milked,” Becca explained. “I only wish I could make a fire to cook things. I tried, but it frightened off my eyes.”

  Isabel hesitated, then realized Becca meant the angelbees. “We’ll take care of that for you.”

  Daniel added, “We should keep a fire burning at all times, to save on matches and lighter fluid.”

  Becca’s hand lifted, and the tendons stood out in her wrist. “Be careful, please. The wax melts.”

  “Of course, Teacher Becca,” Daniel promised. “We’ll set up a fireplace outside, at a distance.”

  “Do take some breakfast first,” Becca insisted. “I must do well by your parents.”

  Isabel bit her lip against her painful thoughts, accepting the offer of milk with raspberries. She discovered she was indeed ravenous with hunger.

  Daniel said proudly, “We are married now. We plan to fix up our own house in the spring.”

  There would be no spring here, thought Isabel, though the “setting up house” would come sooner than planned. What a fix they were in.

  “I guessed as much,” observed Becca, “from your rings. My best wishes. I always knew you two would make a good pair, and now you even look well matched. What other news? How is Ruth, and my little Benjamin? Did she save the queenless hive? Did Debbie have her baby?”

  So as they ate their breakfast from Becca’s wax cups and spoons, they filled her in on baby Patience and all the children Daniel had been teaching, and Keith, of course, the most interesting new arrival in Gwynwood. It was hard to remember now that the Aussie doctor had not simply grown up with all of them. Isabel rubbed her eyes but made herself go on, answering all of Becca’s questions about home. All the while it was at the tip of her tongue to ask Becca the real questions—the questions everyone in Gwynwood had pondered after Becca’s departure. But somehow every time she glimpsed those two scales on Becca’s closed eyelids, she held back, dreading what nameless strangeness she might uncover.

  After breakfast she and Daniel went out to gather stones to build a fireplace with a makeshift roasting oven. They fueled the fire with fallen branches which smoked a lot but worked well enough to roast cobs of corn from one of the hexagonal garden plots and chestnuts gathered from the tree. The meal took most of the day to prepare, but at the end, as Isabel bit into the crisp corn, she felt she had never enjoyed food so much.

  Above in the sky, the light was fading, though there was no real sunset. The colors from the pylon faded to gray, a hazy darkness without a moon or stars. All sorts of animals came out, crossing right by the three humans as they dined outside Becca’s cell. There were raccoons foraging, lizards and peeper toads, even a mother possum laden with her brood. In the distance several different kinds of owl calls could be heard above the singing of the tree frogs.

  “Does it stay that loud?” Isabel wondered how she would ever get to sleep.

  “The night life is impressive,” Becca admitted. “What a lively place old Earth must have been before Doomsday.”

  “It is beautiful,” said Daniel. “It’s like a Garden of Eden.”

  “Complete with snakes,” Isabel recalled, and a chill went down to her toes. “But these snakes were never found on old Earth.” She had seen no more of them since morning, but she could scarcely forget them.

  Becca nodded. “You must be meaning the ‘goatsnakes.’ I call them that because, like goats, they’ll eat anything.”

  “Anything?”

  “Anything vegetable,” Becca reassured her. “I’ve never seen them capture so much as a mouse. They follow the gardener at night, munching the edges of the plots to keep them trim. They do all the heavy work for the gardener.”

  The “gardener,” Isabel realized, must be what she and Daniel called a keeper. “The goatsnakes must be radio controlled by the gardener, like the angelbees.” Isabel paused, then forced herself to ask. “Becca, why? Why didn’t you tell us in Gwynwood about the angelbees? Why did you…go away?”

  Becca waited as if gathering her thoughts. “When I first…saw things, in my eyes, I thought I’d gone mad. Yet it was a madness I longed for—can you understand that? I kept trying it in secret. By the time I figured out how the angelbees worked, the secrecy had become a habit.” Becca swallowed. “I began to wonder what people would think. Most of our good neighbors hate the creatures so. Would they have thought me possessed?”

  Isabel bit her lip and looked away.

  “Surely not, Teacher Becca,” whispered Daniel.

  “The angelbees showed me things in the Pylon,” Becca added. “Much more than Alice ever saw, I’m certain. Living pictures, moving and breathing, as if they might step out upon the ground. One day they began to show pictures of myself, entering the Pylon, going away, to a place that looked like heaven. The pictures were insistent.”

  There was silence for a long while. The grass outside the waxen cells was thick with fireflies, winking on and swooping upward.

  “I visited your mother,” Becca added, “for a pain that I had, a dull persistent pain in the abdomen.”

  “I know,” Isabel whispered.

  “Your mother was honest about what she could do—and what she couldn’t. I thought to myself, Perhaps these advanced creatures can do something more for me.”

  Isabel swallowed once. She nearly fainted as memories of Becca’s brother Aaron flooded back, his last days in the hospital, when even the opioids no longer quelled his pain. Becca had lived through that too. “Did they…help you, then?” Isabel managed to ask.

  “It’s no matter, really.”

  “I packed some codeine tablets, before the new moon, once it became clear that—”

  Becca turned on her, and both angelbees hovered close. “Did you really?”

  Isabel got up to fetch her the painkiller. There was enough to last six weeks perhaps, if taken sparingly.

  When she returned, she gathered the courage to ask one last question. “Teacher Becca…what did the angelbees want you for?”

  Becca faced her thoughtfully. “That is what I have spent my time here trying to figure out.”

  XXIX

  EXHAUSTED BY THE day’s food gathering, Isabel fell asleep more quickly than she expected. She awoke in the early morning to the sound of raindrops pattering on the leaves outside. She looked over at Daniel, still asleep beneath his winter coat which served well enough as a blanket. His face, with his eyes shut beneath the wisps of hair on his forehead, seemed to her at that moment indescribable. She whispered a German expression of her father’s, “so fein.”

  From outside came the cry of a sheep, “Mah-ah, mah-ah.” Isabel quietly pulled herself up onto the windowsill and let herself through. The rain had stopped, but th
e damp grass soaked her feet. The woods were full of birds extinct on Earth—finches, blackbirds, orioles, all calling an in unimaginable variety of songs. She followed the sound of the sheep to just outside Becca’s cell. Becca was milking the sheep, capturing the spray of milk into a pail fashioned of wax. The fleece of the ewe was thick and knotted, as if it had never been shorn.

  “The sheep run wild here,” said Becca, “but this one, Hannaleh, is quite friendly. Even the deer will come up to my window at times.”

  Hannaleh was nibbling contentedly at some corncobs piled against the wall of Becca’s cell. After the milking was done, the ewe bolted away for no apparent reason, as sheep were apt to do. Isabel felt oddly reassured. She had missed the sheep, since her marriage.

  “I will see if I can tame another one,” said Isabel. “We’ll be needing more milk now.”

  “The flock can usually be found down by the river.”

  “Yes,” said Isabel, remembering, “the fountain in the pool on the way to the little pylon.”

  “Any way you go, it leads to the pylon. I’ll take you there later. You’ll see amazing things in the pylon.”

  After breakfast, Isabel and Daniel took stock of their resources. Isabel laid out on the floor her boxes of matches and cigarette lighter, her useless compass, her old Swiss army knife with its multiple blades, her first-aid kit and pharmaceuticals. At the last minute she had stuffed one book in her jacket, the biography of Harriet Tubman, with its portrait of the bold slave-rescuer in her flowing skirt, a rifle clutched in her hands.

  Daniel had packed a sewing kit, a bar of soap, and of course a Bible. He frowned at one item in Isabel’s store, a bottle containing two pills marked simply, “Death.” “Shouldn’t the label be more specific?” he asked. “What use is this medicine?”

  “It’s in case the keepers torture us or perform experiments on us. Keith didn’t say what it is, and I didn’t ask.”

  He stared at her in shock. “That would be evil in the sight of God. I’ll dispose of this…poison, and that’s the end of it.” He reached for the bottle, but Isabel caught it first.