The Wall Around Eden

by Joan Slonczewski

  “That I can’t tell you. Angelbees bud off every month or so; I can see on yours a swelling at the side, where the bud is taking shape.”

  “The keepers must take longer than that. Let’s ask.”

  “Based on what unit of time?” Becca asked. “That is what gave me trouble. The keepers would not think in Earth years.”

  “They certainly know the lunar cycle.” For the next hour, Isabel shaped figures to establish the lunar phases. Becca contributed a binary code that she had worked out. Then they tried to offer the human “generation time,” combining Becca’s Venus figure with two to the eighth power of lunar cycles, or about twenty years. But the numbers the pylon returned were much too large—around two to the thirteenth or fourteenth power, in lunar units, which meant about a thousand years.

  Isabel shook her head. “That can’t be right.”

  “Perhaps that’s not generation time but lifespan,” Becca suggested. “Perhaps they, or their Queen, live for a thousand years.”

  They paused to ponder this.

  Daniel said at last, “The sequoias lived for a thousand years. I wonder what it feels like. Perhaps that is why keepers move so slowly. Perhaps we seem like buzzing insects, to them.”

  “I wonder,” said Isabel. “If that is how they live…how do they die?”

  “Isabel,” Daniel warned.

  Before he could stop her, Isabel had shaped a polyhedral keeper in her hand; then she squeezed and crumpled it between her fingers, the pieces falling to the ground.

  In the pylon, there was a flash so bright that it sent her angelbee spinning out of control. By the time she got it back, a mushroom cloud filled the image of the pylon in three dimensions, rings of cloud expanding through the upper atmosphere, so real that her hair stood on end. Then she realized—that was how humans died, not keepers. She had shown a keeper, and the pylon returned the equivalent, about humans.

  Daniel grabbed her arm. “Thee’ll never learn.”

  “But, Daniel, I just want to figure things out.”

  “Not that way. We’re going home.”

  Isabel arranged herself in her well-worn sleeping place, a mat of sassafras leaves piled into a depression in the floor where the warmth of her body had gradually melted the floor down. She watched Daniel trimming his beard with the pocket knife, by the light of a crude candle with a wick made from fleece. She rather liked his beard; it made her desire him even more. “Daniel, it still puzzles me, what the pylon said…” she paused, hesitating to anger him again, but he looked up encouragingly. “I only showed one keeper dying, but the pylon showed how a whole lot of humans got killed at once. Does that make sense, one for many?”

  “That makes sense to me. Cain’s first act led inevitably to man’s last. The end of living began with Cain.”

  “That’s a depressing view. You’d agree with the astronomers who say the reason we never heard from extraterrestrials is that any race bright enough to send radio messages soon blows itself up.”

  “So, thee thinks that intellect is our problem?” He smiled at her ironically.

  “Extremes of any sort are a liability, in terms of evolution. Extreme intellect may be as bad for us as extreme physical size was for the dinosaurs.”

  Daniel faced her sternly. “God works through all of us, intelligent or not. Intelligence gives us the choice between life or death. ‘Choose life, that you and your children may live.’ The keepers lived to hear our radio signals. I believe they found a different path. They came here to help us, in the first place. They never started our war—that was just a sheep painted black on one side. They’re not destroying our ozone; they’re trying to replenish it, with electrical discharge, as Teacher Matthew says. And someday, when our Earth is habitable again, they’ll release us; but not before we’ve learned to treat it right.”

  She blinked at him. The candle flame shifted, and half his face was in shadow again. “You mean, they came here across all those light-years just to help us out?” She shook her head. “What do they get out of it?”

  “That’s just the point. What do they get out of us? Why would they have bothered to come here just to destroy Earth?”

  Isabel had no ready answer.

  “They must have learned to save themselves from their own worst instincts,” Daniel said. “Perhaps this is the key to survival: learning to help others without gain for oneself.”

  It was late, and Isabel felt her mind going numb. The part about the ozone was almost certainly true. But what were the keepers: guilty preservers, as Becca had suggested, or were they Daniel’s enlightened altruists?

  She closed her eyes and lay down in her sleeping place. She tried to sleep, but her stomach felt worse than usual. Her breasts ached from lying against the hard floor, so she turned on her back, but still she felt sick. She heard the nightly rain patter on the roof, and the chorus of birds that began at dawn.

  At last it was too much; she got herself up and managed to reach over the window ledge just in time to empty her stomach outside.

  Daniel got up and put his arm around her, trying to comfort her. “Will none of these medicines help?”

  “I’ve tried all the antibiotics, except the giardia medicine. It’s got rather bad side effects.” Wearily she groped through the pill bottles until she found the right one. She flicked the cigarette lighter for a quick look at the label. Among the warnings, she read, “not to be taken by pregnant women.”

  She went cold all over. The bottle slipped from her hand. “Daniel, I haven’t bled for two months.”

  “Thee’s been under stress.”

  “I know but…I don’t think that’s it.” Her breasts felt sore all the time, and her clothes were tight at the waist.

  “But thee has been taking the pills.” Daniel’s voice rose, and he held her tighter, afraid now.

  “The pills must be no good. Mother rarely prescribes them; it’s hard to know. Like those bad antibiotics we got from Sydney. No quality control out in the bush.” She buried her head in his shoulder, and a sob rose in her throat. Unless they escaped, she would have to face childbirth here, without even the Gwynwood hospital.

  XXXIII

  THE NEXT DAY Isabel lay inside her cell, weak and despondent. She thought about pregnancy and childbirth with no doctor, no extra blood, not even boiled water. All she could see ahead was months of a nightmare, most likely to end in a painful death. She cried without stopping, until she could barely speak. Daniel tried to console her, but she pushed him away, overcome with her grief and anger, as the weight of her whole situation seemed to crash down upon her.

  At last she grew calm enough to think again. She wiped her face with her hands. “Let me be,” she told Daniel. “I want to be alone.”

  “Is thee certain, thee will be all right?” The pain in his voice was heartbreaking.

  She shuddered, but she could not bear to look at him. “Just for a while, let me be.”

  He left, climbing out the window. Outside a bluejay was calling, and a tree branch swayed from the weight of a squirrel. The sunlight came through the window, shining upon the eyespot scale that she had put off for the night. But none of these things were worth another thought, now.

  For the first time she seriously considered that final means of escape, the two white tablets that Keith had sent with her. But then, Daniel would remain here to grieve, alone with Becca, who was dying of cancer and never said a word about it.

  One of Becca’s angelbees appeared in the window, then Becca herself with the two scales on her eyes. Isabel looked up at her, feeling a bit sheepish.

  “Congratulations,” Becca said.

  “For what?” she replied indignantly.

  “For nature’s greatest gift. To create a new human being—it’s the power of a god. That’s why men invented Adam and Abraham, to take it away from us.”

  Isabel squinted suspiciously, wondering if her old teacher was poking fun at her. “I’ll never get that far. I can’t even keep food down; I’ll starve.�
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  “Eat the way Ruth did,” Becca suggested. “Like this hummingbird out here.”

  Isabel got herself up and leaned out through the window, her stomach still complaining though it was quite empty. A hummingbird was visiting a flower, dipping its beak deep within the nectar and pulling out, the tongue flicking rapidly. All day the tiny bird would hover from one flower to the next, feeding ceaselessly to keep its wings going at such a rate that they actually hummed.

  “That’s right,” said Isabel, recalling her mother’s instructions on Ruth’s card in the file. “Eat a little at a time to keep just enough in your stomach.” Debbie, too, used to eat the same way, a little at a time throughout the day, even snacking during Worship and late at night, to keep her digestion balanced under the stress of the hormones.

  Isabel’s practical sense came back to her: this was just another disaster to overcome, like the typhoid epidemic when she was ten, when they had to burn all the bed linens and disinfect whole houses, and even so Daniel’s parents had died. It might not be such a disaster after all; the first year after Doomsday had been bad, when all the babies were lost, but since then four out of five survived birth.

  The main thing was for her to keep herself in shape, like the primitives who delivered out in the field, since there would be no help to push the baby out. That afternoon Isabel staked out a jogging trail, down the path to the pylon and back around the other way, crossing the stream, in a longitudinal circle around the inside-out planet. She found she actually felt better while she was running. Lap after lap, the circular forest passed beneath her feet, like the rungs of Peewee’s exercise wheel. She wondered about Peewee, and whether her father was still taking care of the little mouse. Of course he would be; what other remembrance did he have? That and a couple of faded crayon drawings from her childhood, still tacked on the wall upstairs…

  Afterward a swim in the fountain pool soothed her wonderfully, almost letting her forget the unsettled feeling in her stomach.

  That evening Daniel cooked a special dinner of stuffed squash and berry pudding. Isabel reminded herself that she would have to tame another ewe for milking, since her diet would demand extra.

  Later she put a cup of roast cornnuts by her sleeping place, to calm her digestion before morning. As she was combing out her hair before bedtime, Daniel watched her with an anxious look. She frowned back at him, shadowed in the candlelight. “What’s wrong?”

  “Will thee…forgive me?”

  “For what?”

  “For getting us into this mess.”

  “Oh for goodness sake.” She put down the comb with a sigh. “As if it’s your fault. Look, you always wanted to be a father.” Illustrations from the obstetrics manual pierced her mind—ectopic pregnancy, placenta previa, toxemia—but she bid them vanish, useless as it was. She reached out to Daniel for comfort. He returned her embrace hungrily, kissing her forehead, her lips, the nape of her neck. They pulled off their clothes, clumsily in their haste, and for a while nothing else existed but their own passionate universe of each other.

  When they came to rest again, the candle had drowned in its pool of wax, and the darkness was full. Isabel listened to the cicadas and the owls outside.

  An image from the pylon came back to her: the glowing skeleton, with the tiny fetus curled up behind the ribs. Her heart raced suddenly, and she gripped Daniel’s arm hard.

  “What is it?”

  “That—that message, the skeleton. It seemed like a warning, it must have been.”

  Daniel pulled his fingers through her hair. “That is an ancient fear, the death of the mother and child. It’s a fear we have faced since the first Adam and Eve.” He paused, then added reflectively, “As a warning, it could mean many things. It could remind us that eternity might have an ending.”

  An ending. How many bits of eternity had already met an ending, outside the Walls, and in the Gwynwood graveyard? Yet her own life with Daniel, so longed for, was just beginning. “Drink to me only with thine eyes…”

  She squeezed her eyes shut until she thought her head would burst. “It’s too much, Daniel. If there is a God, He must be a very bad joker.”

  Daniel’s face turned toward her. In the dark she could not see him, but she ran her fingers down his chest, feeling the soft hair uncovered, vulnerable. He, too, was alone, she realized suddenly; alone, away from the Scattergoods, the spiritual support of Gwynwood that enveloped one continually, shielding one from the hollow-eyed gaze of the skeletons outside the Wall. Isabel raised herself on her elbow and faced him through the darkness. “What do you think?”

  “About what?”

  “About God. Do you believe?”

  “Yes,” said Daniel. “I’ve yet to see a bit of creation unmarked by God’s fingerprint.”

  “Even the Wall? Even this place?”

  “Even so.”

  Isabel was silent, somehow disappointed. She remembered Andrés with his rosary, and the words he had taught her; “I believe in the Father, and in the Son…” “Well I don’t believe a thing,” she announced, renouncing her Catholic heritage as well as that of the Friends. “Maybe God was alive for Moses, but He died long before me.”

  Her words entered the silence. No walls caved in.

  “Indeed?” Daniel’s voice was quiet, with a note of curiosity. “What does this unbelief mean for you? Is everything permitted? Would you lie, cheat, steal?”

  “Good heavens, no.” Murder, maybe, for a good cause. But she could not make herself say it aloud.

  “No? Why not?”

  “Well…” Why not, indeed. “Look, you still have to do right, no matter who’s watching or not.”

  Daniel absorbed this; then he tossed his head back with a burst of laughter. “So you obey God even though He’s dead. God says, ‘Would that men forsook Me, if only they kept My law.’”

  “Who said that?”

  “An ancient rabbi, interpreting the book of Jeremiah.”

  “Well, it’s the only sensible word about God I ever heard. Those rabbis knew a thing or two.” Then she remembered that her father had a Jewish grandmother, the one who had emigrated because the Germans did not consider her a person. “I should have known I was a Jew.”

  XXXIV

  THE NEXT DAY, Isabel told Becca of her discovery that she was a Jew. Becca, who was busy puzzling over the calendar scratched on the wall of her cell, seemed less impressed than she had expected. “You don’t have enough troubles, you want to be Jewish?”

  Isabel was disappointed. “Isn’t there anything special I ought to do?”

  “There are the ten commandments. There are the holy days.” Becca looked again at the calendar. “If you like, you can help me celebrate Passover next week. I think the Nisan full moon falls on April first, appropriately enough for us.”

  “Passover? That’s when the slaves came out of Egypt?”

  “Z’man cheruteynu, the season of our freedom.”

  Isabel liked the story of Moses. Harriet Tubman had been called “the Moses of her people.”

  “If you’d like to do a mitzvah,” Becca added, “you could give me some more of that medicine of yours.”

  Isabel swallowed hard, turning away from the stare of Becca’s angelbees. “That was my last, I’m sorry,” she whispered.

  Without the painkillers, Becca was more alert, but at what cost could only be guessed. She spent a lot of time sweeping out her cell for her Passover: “cleaning out the chametz,” the imagined crumbs of leavened food. For the seder, the ritual meal on the eve of Passover, Isabel dipped long candles, using chunks of wall-wax melted around the fire and threads unraveled from her shirt for wicks.

  In the absence of a table, the settings for the seder had to be made on the floor of Becca’s cell, which she had immaculately cleaned. For the symbol of the Pesach lamb, Daniel roasted a red beet dug out of the garden, which Becca assured them was an accepted vegetarian substitute. Juice was pressed out of apples to serve for wine. Corn cakes served for ma
tzah, dandelion greens for bitter herbs, and for the eggs a roasted potato. Becca wrung her hands over this, and over the absence of salt in the water for dipping. “It won’t be authentic,” she muttered.

  “Will it not count if it’s not authentic?” asked Isabel.

  Becca looked up sharply. “Of course it will count. Does God expect of us the impossible? Besides, among Americans it’s traditional to be unauthentic, and to complain about it.”

  Isabel blinked and said nothing more.

  After the artificial twilight was gone, the candles were lit and Isabel sat with Daniel and Becca around the seder place settings, including the fourth one for the absent Elijah. Crickets sang outside, and moths came in to flit among the candle flames. Becca had put aside her eyespot scales for the occasion, knowing that the angelbees would only be scared off by the flames. Besides, she said, she had done the seder sightless for years; it felt part of the tradition, for her.

  Becca poured the first cup of fermented apple juice. “‘And there was evening and there was morning, the sixth day…’” So began the service, in the first mythic Garden where’s God’s creation began. Following the prayers and the breaking of the afikomen, she lifted the platter and began the story of Passover. “‘This is the bread of poverty which our forefathers ate in the land of Egypt. Let all who are hungry enter and eat; let all who are needy come to our Passover feast. This year we are here; next year may we be in the Land of Israel. This year we are slaves; next year may we be free men and women.’”

  She set down the platter and looked up at Isabel and Daniel. “Remind me, which of you is the younger?”

  “I am,” said Daniel, who was younger by six months.

  “Then you can read the four questions.” Becca pointed to the wall, next to the “calendar,” where she had scratched in several lines of writing.

  Daniel read out the questions, beginning with, “Why is this night different from all other nights of the year?” Becca then retold how the Hebrews had entered Egypt as guests and been turned into slaves, until their God chose to set them free. Through Moses, God had asked that his people be allowed to go out and worship Him. As Pharaoh refused, ten times, the ten plagues were sent. To symbolize the ten plagues, each participant dipped a finger in the fermented apple juice ten times. Despite Isabel’s best intentions, she could not help but feel a little foolish, coming from her Quaker background which was sparing of ritual. This practice felt even odder than Andrés saying prayers over his rosary.