The Wall Around Eden

by Joan Slonczewski

  “You’ll do no such thing! Daniel, I have to know it’s there, or else I can’t go on.” The terror of the unknown flooded over her again, this hypersphere with its horrid goatsnakes lurking about. Nausea rose in her throat. “Promise, Daniel,” she said hoarsely. “Promise you’ll let it be.”

  Her breathing slowed to normal. After what seemed forever, Daniel said, “Thee must promise thee’ll never use it.”

  “I won’t use it, I promise.” What was a promise? Could God see into a hypersphere?

  They had to get out of this place, back to Gwynwood, and out to Sydney where Daniel and Becca could get help for their illnesses. But how? Freedom seemed more remote than ever, now…

  Somehow there had to be a way to turn the airwalls inside out.

  The angelbees. Becca not only saw through their eyes; she controlled them. Surely she could follow one through the airwall.

  Later they shared their more practical items with Becca, who was particularly delighted to see the soap. They also compared calendar notes, and found that the two newcomers were only a day off from Becca’s own records scratched into the wall of her cell. That was a relief to know.

  “I’ll show you around the garden today,” said Becca. “And you must return to the pylon tonight. You’ll see the most amazing things.”

  “Becca,” Isabel asked cautiously. “Did you ever try to steer your angelbees through the airwall, just to take a look?”

  “That’s dangerous,” said Becca flatly. “You’ll only get in trouble. Your mother would never forgive me.”

  Irritated, she dropped the subject. She gazed about the treetops, wondering whether a stray angelbee might trust her enough to wander down. Then she followed Becca down the zigzag rows between the garden plots kept trim by the goatsnakes. Isabel kicked one of the flat green animal droppings in the path. “Do the goatsnakes leave these?” she guessed.

  Becca nodded. “They make good fertilizer, I suppose.”

  Daniel observed, as he had before, “Someone has gone to a lot of trouble for us.”

  Why, Isabel wondered. What did the keeper-gardeners want from the humans? Could their freedom be bought?

  Daniel spent some hours working at the fireplace again, trying to get it waterproof somehow, so they would not use up all their matches. He carved some wax out of the wall of an empty cell and fashioned a cover out of it, but of course it melted in the heat of the flames. Meanwhile Isabel dug up potatoes from a garden patch and gathered wild strawberries from the woods. She wondered how she would ever manage to plan her escape, if it took them all day just to prepare dinner.

  In the evening, just as the “sun” was going dim, they set out with Becca and her angelbees to visit the pylon.

  When they reached the pylon, it was dark. There were two or three other angelbees lurking about, in addition to Becca’s. There was the nightly uproar of tree frogs, crickets, and various owls.

  “Look, there,” exclaimed Becca, pointing to the pylon. “The gardener is standing there, within the pylon. Two goatsnakes are slithering around. When I raise my hand, see—one of the goatsnakes rears up and bends its head forward imitating my arm. It’s munching on some sort of vegetation; I told you, goatsnakes will eat anything.”

  The pylon was dark. Daniel clutched Isabel’s hand, distressed. For a moment, it crossed Isabel’s mind that Becca might have gone mad. But then of course, she realized, Becca was seeing with angelbee eyes, and the pylon was designed to show infrared. Dependent on the visible, she and Daniel were the ones who were blind.

  XXX

  THE EMBERS OF Daniel’s fire went out again overnight, quenched by the rain that fell during the same early hours as it had the night before. According to Becca, it rained about the same every night, at about the same time.

  So they tried to set up a fire in one of the unoccupied cells, as distant as possible from Becca’s cell so as not to frighten off her angelbees. As the flames rose, the pile of sticks sank gradually into the melting wax of the floor. That gave Isabel another idea: the heat-softened wax could be used to fashion more cups and plates for herself and Daniel. She dug up some of the wax with her knife and started to shape it, taking it outside again to avoid the smoke, for there was no chimney.

  The wax proved easy to mold into any shape. She had just finished shaping two drinking glasses and was about to go and dig out some more wax when she noticed an angelbee just a few feet away watching her.

  It seemed to take a close interest in what she was doing with the wax. Isabel crumpled one of the drinking glasses into a ball, and she held it out toward the angelbee. The silvery globe descended closer, so close that she heard its winglets humming. She blinked at its brightness. Its eyespot faced her, almost within reach. The eyespot was smoothly round; its hexagonal scale had yet to come off.

  Isabel’s heart pounded fast. She was very careful, remembering the last time; she could ill afford to lose her sight again. She stepped forward and tentatively touched the eyespot with her hand.

  There was an audible snap, and something fell to the ground. A flat facet was now cut into the eyespot. Isabel looked down and picked up the fallen scale.

  She placed it on her left eyelid with her eye closed, just as she had done with Becca’s scale before. As it gently adhered, the angelbee retreated to the trees, startled, perhaps, by the influx of unfamiliar signals. For now, Isabel could see little in her eye, but she would put up with this temporary handicap if it brought her one step closer to escape.

  As she completed two dinner plates out of softened wax, Daniel returned with some vegetables for dinner. He stared in surprise at her eye. “Is this wise?” he asked. “Might it not damage your own retina in some way?”

  “We have to take some risk, or we’ll never get out of here.” She spoke sharply, then changed the subject. “Daniel, what are we going to do about our clothes? I can’t stand another day without a wash, it itches all over.”

  “We have one bar of soap.”

  “That won’t go far on clothes.”

  “I remember one year,” said Daniel, “when we ran out of soap, we used wood ash.”

  “That’s worth a try.”

  They scooped up ashes from the dead fire outside and packed them into their clothes, which they soaked and rinsed in the pool with the fountain, where they both enjoyed a good bath as well. Afterward, since they had no change of clothes, they wrung them out as best they could and put them back on again. The shirts were dingy gray, but at least they smelled better.

  In the meantime, Isabel was beginning to see flickers of something in her left eye. She closed her right eye to concentrate better. As she lay in the “sunlight” to dry her clothes, she managed to capture the image of a tree, glimmering red against an unexpectedly dim sky. The spectrum of the sunlight must be similar to that of Earth’s actual sun, which radiated low amounts of far infrared.

  The trees and foliage all glimmered various shades of infrared. Occasional bright spots swooped across; these, she realized, were birds. It was as if all the lights on a Christmas tree had miraculously come alive. Then, quite unnervingly, she suddenly saw…herself. Herself, and yet not herself, for her body shone like a statue of glass red-hot from the glass-blower’s flame. She caught her hand in her mouth, and as she did so, the glowing statue did the same, with the right hand, not the left, as would her image in a mirror.

  Startled, her right eye flew open again. She peeled the scale off her left and cautiously tested her own vision again, for despite her brave words she cared to keep her own eyesight. In fact, after a few minutes she could see as well as ever. The angelbees hovered a few feet above her shoulder waiting expectantly. So she replaced the scale, closed her right eye, and lay back in the grass.

  She spent the rest of the afternoon touring the hypersphere through the glimmering vision of her angelbee. She found that by concentrating she could direct the angelbee to glide ahead and to turn in its path. It sailed above the dull orange canopy of trees, passing over the honeyc
omb pattern of cells. One of the cells was strikingly white, brighter than anything she had seen so far; that must be where they had started the fire earlier in the day. As the angelbee rose higher, the forest and the ground below seemed to rear upward all around, like the sides of a giant teacup. There was no clear horizon; the distant regions faded into the sky above, where they must meet to complete the inner surface of the sphere.

  “Daniel, you’ve got to try this,” she told him at last. “It’s the most beautiful thing I ever saw. You should see yourself.”

  His face turned dramatically bright infrared as he blushed, extra heat rays emanating from his cheeks and forehead. “Tomorrow,” he said guardedly. “It’s time to be getting dinner ready.”

  Isabel walked slowly back toward the outdoor cooking oven, preoccupied with the extraordinary view from her new eye. She gathered up fresh kindling wood and, without thinking, she lit a match.

  Above the match, her angelbee saw a screaming blotch of white, much larger than the flame seen by her own eye. The infrared flame actually appeared to engulf her hand. Startled, Isabel cried out and dropped the match. The view dipped and rose with dizzying swiftness as her angelbee broke free of her mental control and headed upward, away from the danger.

  Daniel hurried over. “Is thee safe?”

  Isabel had pulled the scale from her eye, which was squinting now as the pupil readjusted to daylight. “I forgot, of course, the angelbee won’t tolerate flame. The temperature of the flame is so high that even the surrounding hot air looks blinding white. For a moment I thought my hand—” She shuddered. “Why would angelbees have evolved infrared vision, instead of the same visible range as ours? This infrared is so sensitive.”

  “It must have been an advantage in their habitat. Where did they evolve? A swamp, I suppose.”

  “A swamp, where the heat of the soil might indicate rich areas of methane production. Also, I bet there was fog all the time, which would have limited the visibility in our range of the spectrum.” The angelbees, and their keepers, certainly were partial to water vapor. That time when she had tumbled across the airwall at the Gwynwood Pylon, the other-dimensional corridor had been filled with a dense mist.

  After the meal was cooked, the two of them left the fire to eat their dinner with Becca. Isabel replaced the scale on her eye. As the sky’s extra-dimensional light source turned off and the foliage gave up its heat, the night forest became a light show of animals. Wherever she looked with her angelbee eye, the animals shone brilliantly against the dim background of underbrush and tree branches. A pair of young owls on a branch, tilting their hooked beaks. Raccoons, three or four of them, foraging in the underbrush, and another skunk doing the same, trailed by three tiny ones. And mice in the hundreds, popping in and out of burrows, their shapes lighting and disappearing like fireflies; remembering Peewee, she shed tears of homesickness. All of them, all warm-blooded creatures, were living stars in the night sky.

  They were finishing dinner when something happened to the sky above the honeycomb, something only Isabel’s angelbee could see. Enormous concentric rings of reddish tint appeared, centering far overhead. The rings were not perfectly round, but fluctuated in shape, perhaps bent by imperfections in the hypersphere. They were all gradually closing in toward the center, while new ones appeared at the perimeter. The contrast, between her left eye that “saw” and her right that saw only dark, took her breath away.

  Becca said, “It’s a summons.” There was a touch of excitement in her voice. “The pylon always has visions, but tonight they will be exceptionally communicative.” She added, as an afterthought, “Pick up a piece of wall-wax before we go.”

  As they approached the pylon, Isabel sent her angelbee soaring ahead to peer down upon the six-sided pyramid. Within its sides, an infrared pattern of concentric circles appeared. The circles faced upward, so they would appear to be flat in the sky across from the opposite point on the hypersphere, at the comb of cells where Isabel had watched before.

  Then abruptly the circles disappeared. In their place, as Isabel’s angelbee looked down, was an enormous human eyeball, seemingly alive. The lid of the eyeball blinked twice.

  Isabel stumbled in her tracks, and Daniel had to help her up. Becca laughed. “My dear, you’ve just exchanged an eye for an eye! But wait, this is only the beginning.”

  While Isabel tried to explain to Daniel this disconcerting vision, Becca had walked up to the airwall. She held out to the pylon a piece of wall-wax, which glowed slightly infrared from the warmth of her hand.

  The pylon returned a formless lump of infrared glow.

  Next, Becca split the lump in three. Three lumps of infrared appeared.

  “I see.” Isabel took out her own piece of wax and shaped the letter A. A letter A appeared in the pylon.

  “That’s useless, unfortunately,” Becca said. “It understands some English but it won’t actually speak it, unless…” She paused as if a thought had occurred to her.

  Isabel meanwhile had shaped a crude stick figure of a human. At first the pylon simply returned a five-pointed star. She frowned, then tried to improve the head and feet.

  A keeper-shape appeared, not a lifelike image but a stylized representation; the polyhedron was unmistakable. Above it were six angelbees in a row and, below, three goatsnakes.

  “A keeper,” Isabel exclaimed, “with all its eyes and arms! I shaped a human, and it returned a keeper.”

  Daniel commented with quiet amusement, “An I for a thou. All right, thee has convinced me it’s worth it.”

  “Try to shape a pylon next,” Becca insisted suddenly. “You must: this is very important. It worked for me, but only the first time…”

  With a nod, Isabel crumpled the wax in her palm. She pressed six sides into it, pulling out the tip to form a pyramid. She set the pyramid on her palm.

  In the pylon, a pattern of horizontal bars appeared, fuzzy and shifting. Then abruptly, there was a figure of a woman. The figure moved and spoke but was flat, like a movie, not three dimensional, like the other infrared images she had just seen. The woman was a stranger, Caucasian features with doll-like curls, wearing an old-fashioned dress with a scoop neckline, early twentieth century, perhaps. She stood gesticulating toward the right. Then a second figure appeared, a man with arched eyebrows and a rather well-fed look, in a suit with his hair slicked down like Andrés’s. The couple appeared to engage in some foolish antics, though it was hard to tell without voices. “Is that meant as a comment about us?”

  “No, no,” said Becca. “Wait.”

  After some further antics, the pair of characters abruptly disappeared. There appeared a large heart shape, like a valentine, containing letters in script: I Love Lucy.

  “Daniel—It’s I Love Lucy!” Her hair stood on end. “How on Earth—did they pull that out of my head?” She had never seen the video before. From Peace Hope’s sound track, she had always imagined the couple wearing overalls, like herself and Daniel.

  “It’s television, you see,” said Becca. “The pylon is like infrared television in three dimensions.”

  “But why Lucy? How’d they read my mind?”

  “No,” Becca insisted, “they don’t read minds. There must be more I Love Lucy out in space than any other show from the early days of broadcast. This is my theory: I think the early TV broadcasts were the first sign of intelligence on our planet that the gardeners picked up, way out in space. The scene you just saw was the same one they showed me—the first time I shaped a pylon.”

  “The first human signal—the first pylon,” said Isabel.

  “That’s right,” said Becca.

  “So once they found us, they closed in for the kill.” Veni, vidi, vici, except that vidi came first.

  “Not exactly. They came, and they waited; that’s all we can say,” said Becca.

  “But why?”

  “Why indeed,” Becca wondered. “Why all these gardens; what is it to them?”

  A thought came to her. “Be
cca…I’m going to light a match.”

  Becca was silent. “You’re right. We need to try this, but my ‘eyes’ won’t stand the heat. I will go home now; you let me know what happens.”

  After she left, Daniel turned to Isabel. “Won’t your angelbees fly off, too?”

  “Stand here,” Isabel directed him, “just by this side of the match. So the pylon sees the flame, but my angelbee doesn’t.” She pulled out a match, struck it, and heard it hiss as it came alight.

  The pylon went dark. For a moment, her angelbee saw nothing in the pylon. Then a faint figure began to appear; a human shape but—

  It was a skeleton. A female skeleton, with narrow shoulders and broad pelvis. It was lying in a crouched position, like some of those behind the Wall. Below the rib cage, cupped in the pelvis, was a tiny curled up skeleton of a baby, a fetus it must be, small as a squirrel. A pregnant skeleton.

  The skeleton grew brighter, much brighter than the figure before. Suddenly the angelbee turned away, and the landscape seemed to whirl around. Isabel gasped and ripped the scale from her forehead, dropping the match.

  “God forgive us,” Daniel exclaimed.

  In the pylon, the image was so intense that it shone with red heat now, even to the human eye.

  XXXI

  THE NEXT MORNING over breakfast, Isabel told Becca what she had seen.

  “A remarkable response,” said Becca. “If that is what they think of fire it’s certainly frightening enough.”

  “But why that image in particular?” Isabel thought of the skeletons behind the Wall. “Was it meant as a warning to us?”

  “Not necessarily. Remember, the pylon’s responses are reciprocal. You showed fire; the pylon tried to communicate to you what fire means to them, the gardeners.”

  “Why should they fear fire so much?” Isabel wondered. “The keepers are far too advanced; they must have had their own Prometheus long ago.”