The Wall Around Eden

by Joan Slonczewski

  Daniel said, “Their Queen would be the counterpart to a pregnant mother. Perhaps they think fire is a danger to their Queen.”

  “I wonder,” said Becca slowly, her two angelbees circling quietly overhead. “I wonder whether perhaps their thinking is more…symbolic. Perhaps the fire reminds them of some problem of their own. Perhaps not unlike some of ours.”

  Isabel asked, “What do you mean?”

  “It’s curious, isn’t it. The gardeners tend us along with a virtual Noah’s ark of other creatures that would have gone extinct without their care. Why, I wonder; why so much trouble over endangered species? Humans never gave a thought to the dodo bird or the passenger pigeon. We invented ‘endangered species’ only once we realized that our own headed the list.”

  As Isabel thought this over she felt a slight prickling at the back of her neck.

  “Surely not,” said Daniel. “The gardener, even the goatsnakes; they seem so peaceful.”

  “So would the attendants at the Taronga Zoo.”

  “In that case,” Daniel asked, “what do they expect of us, the three of us, kept here? Why isolate us from other people?”

  Isabel remembered the release program at the Taronga Zoo. “Sometimes the zookeepers train a few breeding pairs for release in the wild, that would be like Daniel and me. But this hypersphere is nothing like the deadland outside the Wall. Everything’s tended for us.”

  “Exactly,” said Becca. “Primitive survival is the last thing any of us survivors need to learn. But…there might be something else. Something we have yet to find.”

  “Why don’t they just tell us?” But Isabel already knew the answer to that. The Taronga zookeepers couldn’t just tell George and Martha to hunt and sink their eagle claws into wild mice and squirrels. The knowledge of survival had to well up out of the creatures’ own deepest instincts.

  Daniel said at last, “It always saddens me, all our preoccupation with survival. Will we never get beyond that to something better? Or will our generation be the last to remember?”

  “It certainly won’t be the first,” said Becca. “Remember the words of Chief Seattle, as his people gave up their ancestral lands to enter the reservation: ‘It is the end of living and the beginning of survival.’”

  Survival took up most of their energies over the next few days. Daniel managed at last to keep a small fire going inside the cell at the far end; he took care to get up and check it once or twice at night. While they were saving on matches now, still there was a never-ending supply of firewood to be collected, an arduous job with only Isabel’s pocket knife. Their diet was a change from what they were used to, and Isabel seemed to have chronic indigestion. She suspected giardia in the water; if only they had a pan to boil water, and the unpasteurized sheep milk.

  With her angelbee eye, she explored the hypersphere. She followed the stream from its source where the fountain sprang up out of the rock to its ending in a bog full of skunk cabbage, a place where the angelbees came for refueling. The stream seemed to trace an equatorial line about halfway around the hypersphere, presumably from the highest to lowest points of “elevation.” About three quarters of the land was forest, mostly conifers, with patches of hickory, oak, and locust.

  Once, her angelbee came across the keeper in an empty garden patch. Becca said she had never seen more than one keeper-gardener at a time, although she suspected that different ones took shifts. This one had all its goatsnakes and angelbees in attendance. The angelbees, like Becca’s angelbees, each had a curious feature that human eyes could not detect: a pattern of six bright dots evenly spaced around the outer edge of the eyespot. The infrared dots winked on and off in a pattern she could not decipher, though it reminded her of Braille. Was this how a keeper “talked”? Or could it be that angelbees had their own means of communication, perhaps independent even of their keepers?

  One of the goatsnakes was burrowing through the soil of the garden patch, presumably turning it over to prepare for some kind of planting. After a while the keeper moved just outside the patch, where it stopped. What was it waiting for?

  A bright streak appeared in the branches of a tree that overhung the garden patch. Isabel tried to send her angelbee closer, but it refused, keeping a cautious distance. Within the tree, whose canopy was largely transparent to infrared, a goatsnake had entwined its midsection around the upper trunk. Its head and neck wielded a cylindrical implement that emitted the bright streak, a beam of some form of energy. The beam sliced through the overhanging branches like butter. The branches fell into the garden patch where another goatsnake set to hauling them away.

  Isabel stared long and hard at the cylinder with its energy beam. What a useful tool that would be—and even a weapon. If only she could got hold of one.

  Daniel managed to acquire an angelbee as Isabel had done, by attracting it with a shaped ball of wax. Now he could join Isabel, exploring the world of infrared.

  “Isn’t it lovely?” she said. “It looks like a different planet.” Of course, it was not even a planet, she reminded herself. For all they knew, they could be light-years away from Earth by now. Perhaps all her family had long ago aged and died. She suppressed tears.

  Daniel gently touched the shiny scale on his eyes as if puzzled. “It reminds me that nearly everything we see through our human eyes is reflected light, not light which emanates intrinsically from the thing itself. I wonder whether angelbees, and their keepers, have a world view that differs from ours because they perceive things by their own light.”

  Isabel shook her head. “I couldn’t begin to guess. Daniel, have you figured out what the angelbees are doing with those six blinking dots? Can you control the pattern on yours?”

  Daniel tried and Isabel tried, but neither could “will” the eyespots to change their lighting pattern.

  “Eventually we’ll get it to work,” insisted Isabel. “I’m sure it just takes focusing one’s brain the right way.”

  “I wonder whether it’s safe to keep controlling them like this.”

  “It seems okay. Becca’s done it for months.”

  “I meant, safe for the angelbees. Tu es responsable pour toujours de ce que tu as apprivoisé.”

  “Of course, you’re responsible for what you tame. Haven’t you ever raised a lamb on a bottle?”

  “No, I haven’t,” said Daniel. “Actually I’ve never had much to do with animals. I was sickly as a child, and Aunt Liza was always afraid I’d catch something.”

  “That’s silly.” But Isabel was reminded of his blood deficiency, and she felt a touch of fear. “How are you doing now? Is your medicine still working?”

  “I feel fine, most days, so long as I get enough sleep.”

  They had to get back home, she reminded herself. “Daniel, I’ve been thinking. I don’t think those keepers are training us for anything. Instead, I think they’ve just put us here like on a reservation: a place to keep us alive while they take the rest of us off the Earth for good.”

  “Why would they do such a thing?”

  “Because they want to reshape the Earth, to remake its climate to something that suits them better but excludes us. Turn it all into a foggy swamp.”

  “It could be,” he admitted, “but we’ve no reason to think so.”

  “It makes sense to me. The point is,” she added, “we can’t just sit here, letting them do what they want to us. We have to fight back. Above all, we’ve got to escape our cage.”

  Daniel’s lips tightened. “What does thee have in mind?”

  “The airwall around the pylon. It’s the one exit.” The airwall enclosed their hypersphere as surely as it enclosed the world outside.

  “The keepers will come after us.”

  “Perhaps not. It’s daytime, remember. Even the pylon will be asleep.”

  Daniel looked very reluctant, but she knew he would follow. She jogged down the wooden path to the pylon, her angelbee soaring ahead of her.

  The pylon itself was blank except for its usual
shifting colors; even her angelbee saw nothing more than surface swirls of infrared. Remembering her adventure with the rope and skillet at the Gwynwood Pylon, Isabel walked cautiously toward the airwall until its pressure was palpable. Then she brought her angelbee down, just a couple of feet ahead of her, and willed it forward. As it went, the wall pressure receded and she could walk another step toward the pylon.

  The angelbee vanished. Its vision was gone and a rough invisible hand shoved Isabel back. She fell, hitting the back of her head. As she tried to pick herself up, nausea rose in her throat. She turned over, trying to get her bearings.

  “Isabel? Is thee hurt?” Daniel asked anxiously.

  “Not badly.” Her head and side were throbbing with dull pain. She stretched and let Daniel help her to stand. “I can’t see a thing. What happened to that angelbee?” She touched the scale on her eyelid. It seemed to be in place.

  Suddenly the vista reappeared: the brilliant shapes of birds and grass over the clearing, the dull red outline of the pylon. “There, my angelbee came back. It must have returned through the airwall.”

  “Take care,” said Daniel. “That was a bad fall.”

  “I’m fine. I’m going to try again, keeping the angelbee closer this time.” She brought the angelbee down, just above her forehead. This time it crossed just into the pylon’s domain, without disappearing. Very slowly, she inched toward the invisible wall, pressing ahead one step, then another. Then abruptly she fell forward, catching herself just in time to meet the ground with her hands.

  Her ears popped, as if the air pressure had dropped. Her own eyes saw misted darkness; but her angelbee saw a corridor ahead, outside the airwall, which now enclosed her. She was turned around face-to-back, like the last time she had crossed an airwall at the Gwynwood Pylon.

  Carefully she followed her angelbee out into the corridor.

  She was chilled, and she hugged her arms for warmth. The ground beneath her was not the grassy clearing in the woods. It was a floor similar to the platform of the pylon. At either side, a metallic wall rose at an obtuse angle, then folded inward halfway up toward the ceiling, forming a hexagonal corridor, through which her infrared eye saw clearly despite the mist. Along the obtuse lower walls of the corridor ran rows of panels glowing infrared—at just the right height and angle, she thought, to be pressed by a keeper’s foot.

  She got up, keeping her balance with difficulty, as half her weight seemed to have fallen away. Was this the degree of gravity keepers were used to on their own planet?

  She willed her angelbee to turn, slowly above her head. There was the pylon behind her, as if it, too, had been transported instantaneously to the corridor. A cry of surprise escaped her. There stood Daniel, a moving shape of infrared contained within the pylon, waving at her frantically. By contrast, the pylon her own eye saw was completely dark.

  “Daniel?” she called, but he could not hear her. She waved back, then signed, I see you, waving her hand forward and back before her eyes.

  Daniel signed back the same way, adding too, his hand with the index fingers extended tapping together twice. Then his hands opened into fives, and the flat palms moved downward in waves: Fear. He added, Come back now, emphatically, thrusting both hands forward with the palms up.

  Wait, she signed back, for her curiosity was inescapable. She sent her angelbee floating slowly around the pylon, and as it did so, Daniel’s image vanished off the side, the view within rotating until the entire circuit around the pylon had been covered. So that was how the keepers watched her and Daniel through the pylon. But where were the keepers? Was this their Hive? She picked herself up, shivering, and resolved to bring her winter coat next time. The keepers must prefer a cooler climate.

  She sent the angelbee off, slowly, down the corridor. Other angelbees appeared, flashing their six-dotted code. Surely the keepers would have spotted her by now. But they were slow to react, and there was no sign of them yet, nor of their goatsnakes.

  Ahead in the corridor stood something luminous, exactly what she could not tell; the resolution of her angelbee was far from twenty-twenty. As she hovered closer, though, the shape became clear: It was another pylon.

  This new pylon, too, contained visions of infrared within. As her angelbee circled around it, she made out trees, exotic trees with cascading branches of giant leaves and birds with enormous beaks, the like of which had never been seen in Gwynwood. This was a different kind of habitat altogether, another house of the “zoo.”

  A keeper appeared to her own eye, looming out of the fog, its spindly legs rising up and down.

  She had let her angelbee loiter for far too long; now how could she call it back in time to flee back to Eden? Immediately she willed it to return, down the corridor, but it came slowly, much too slowly.

  Through her angelbee, she saw that goatsnakes were slinking beside the keeper. Isabel’s mouth opened, but she was too frightened to scream. Her angelbee watched from a distance, a distance that narrowed too slowly. The keeper lifted one of its legs to a panel on the wall. Something made a hissing sound, the sound of an invisible gas escaping. The sleep-gas enveloped her until she lost consciousness.

  She awoke in the sunlight of the hypersphere, the pinkish sky overhead. Daniel was holding her hand and speaking to her, trying to get her awake. She rolled over and pushed herself up on her elbows. “I’m all right,” she said groggily. “What…what happened?” She looked up at him questioningly.

  Daniel’s expression was oddly wooden. “I saw it all, this time.” He stopped as if he couldn’t go on. “The goatsnake carried thee out.”

  “Oh, God, I’m sorry, Daniel—” she tried to hug him, but he would not respond.

  “What if thee had never come back?” Daniel demanded. “What if thee was dead? What was I to do? Thee might think of that, for once.”

  “Of course I think of that. I said I was sorry.” His anger bewildered and frightened her.

  “Thee must promise never to try that again.”

  “But, Daniel—how else are we to get out of here?”

  “Never mind that. Our keepers will let us know their intentions in good time.”

  “But what if it’s too late? What if your medicine runs out? What will I do then?”

  “Never mind. Thee must promise.”

  “All right,” she sighed, “I promise.” For now.

  XXXII

  ISABEL WONDERED ABOUT the airwall, and how she might slip by the keepers. At times she found herself wondering whether she might slip past Daniel as well, to try again. She immediately felt remorse, for it had never before occurred to her to deceive him.

  She talked often with Becca, who could never hear enough about home, all the children in her class, and of course Ruth and little Benjamin. The baby had just been sitting up and starting to say “Ah-bah,” before Isabel had left. It embarrassed her that she remembered little more, for she took little notice of infants once they were safely born, aside from giving them DPT shots at checkup time.

  “And how were the beehives getting on?” Becca inquired. “The honey flow was a good one? Are you sure the new queen took?”

  One of the hives had had to be requeened because the old queen had died, and for some reason no new queen cells were made. So they had ordered a new queen from Sydney, the Italian variety, and she had taken well.

  “Of course, the Italian queens are the hardiest,” Becca assured her.

  “Still,” said Isabel, “you would think all the worker bees would instinctively recognize and destroy any queen of alien ancestry. Once the queen takes, the old workers are a dead breed, and they don’t even know it.”

  “It’s a miracle,” Becca agreed. “Their nurturing instincts must surpass the call of the genes. They come from the tribe of Rachel and Leah.”

  Isabel thought again how the angelbees had watched over the beehives, presumably directed by their keepers. A thought came to her about the pylon. “Becca—do you suppose it’s the Queen of the keepers who ‘talks’
to us through the pylon?”

  “I would not be surprised,” said Becca. “The keepers themselves never seem to take notice of us.”

  “Except when we try to escape,” Isabel noted ruefully. “Have you found out much else from the pylon since you came here? What does the Queen look like?”

  Becca considered this, as if trying to explain. The shiny scales on her eyelids twinkled in the light from the cell window. Keith had said, “They took her to see the Queen.” Tears of homesickness filled Isabel’s eyes, and she rubbed them out. “It’s hard,” Becca said at last, “I’m not used to describing the look of things. Come see for yourself.”

  So the three of them paid another visit to the pylon. Night had fallen, and a number of bats flitted across the clearing, their silhouettes black to human eyes, brilliant orange to the eye of Isabel’s angelbee. For the pylon, Becca shaped a piece of wax into something like a Venus figurine, with a tiny “baby” that could be placed in and out of the pregnant belly. Presumably the pylon would return an image of the “Queen” which gave birth to keepers.

  In the pylon appeared an enormous many-legged creature, at first glance resembling a giant centipede, or perhaps a Chinese dragon. The head of the creature was bulbous, without recognizable features. The rest of the body was composed of angular segments with spiderlegs, almost as if a line of keeper-shaped polyhedrons had been squashed together. The segments appeared more clearly articulated toward the end of the tail; in fact, the final segment looked just like a keeper, down to the hexagonal facets for angelbee scales to attach. As she watched, the keeper split off from the tail end. It stretched its sticklike legs feebly, then took a tentative first step.

  “Why, the keepers bud off just like the angelbees do,” Isabel exclaimed. “This creature is their Queen.”

  “She looks nothing like a honeybee queen,” said Daniel.

  “Of course not, but the point is, her body is structured for reproduction, unlike that of the keepers. Keepers are like worker bees; they can’t reproduce. Only the Queen can generate new keepers.” She paused. “I wonder what their generation time is. Becca, do you know?”