The Wall Around Eden

by Joan Slonczewski

  She did not refuse. She sat like a stone, the heat of her face relieved slightly by a gentle breeze, as much wind as they ever had in the hypersphere. Overhead the bats swooped after insects, and tree frogs and crickets competed for a hearing. Then a thought came to her, unbidden, and her heart beat faster. “Daniel…there is one last thing we could offer her.”

  Daniel put his plate down and faced her. “She’s still alive. Who knows what will happen. The keepers may yet see that she is sick, and decide to return her.”

  “Even if they did, what could we do for her? The cancer must have spread everywhere by now, even to her brain. There’s nothing to be done in Gwynwood, probably not even in Sydney.”

  “Doctors can be wrong.”

  Isabel felt her face grow warm, but she went on. “What do you think Becca herself would want? What if she thinks differently?”

  Daniel thought this over. “All of Earth’s great religions,” he began slowly, “maintain this one law: ‘What is hurtful to thee, do not to thy neighbor.’”

  “And isn’t it hurtful to her, to withhold her one last comfort?” Isabel got up from where she sat. “Let her choose. I will ask her.”

  Daniel rose swiftly, and his hand gripped her wrist. “Thee will not tell her. Thee must promise.”

  Startled, Isabel looked down at his hand on her arm, which held so hard that it actually hurt.

  Daniel looked down, too. He seemed surprised at himself. He released her hand, saying quietly, “The madness is in me, too.”

  For a while they both stood there, looking away from each other, not speaking, but listening. From the forest outside a barn owl called, its muffled note swooping upward. Then she remembered her mother agonizing over the defective babies, and how she herself had fled from that choice. Her spirits fell, lower than she had ever felt before. “I suppose,” said Isabel at last, reflectively, “the real Garden of Eden had no hospitals either. This is what it was really like. No wonder they ate the apple.”

  “The fruit of knowledge, of knowing and sharing another human soul.” Daniel nodded. “The fruit of compassion. Perhaps that was what angered God, that we might love a fellow human better than Him.”

  Three days later, they awoke to silence. There was no sound from Becca’s cell, and to Isabel even the birdsongs seemed muted.

  When they approached Becca’s cell, they found the windows completely sealed off, filled in with wax. Isabel cried and beat the window with her palms, and made a halfhearted attempt to dig through, in case Becca was still alive. But she knew it was pointless. Either Becca had died in the night, or else the keepers had taken matters into their own hands.

  Isabel stood up, gingerly as the baby’s limbs poked her insides, then she put the scales on her eyes and headed down the path to the pylon.

  The pylon was unresponsive as before, still caught in its endless loop of fireballs, one after another. Isabel went up to it, pressing into the airwall as far as she could, then raised her arm and pounded the air with her fist. “Let us go, do you hear!” she shouted. “You’re killing us all. I won’t go on; I won’t eat your haroset.”

  She took Keith’s cigarette lighter from her pocket and clicked on the flame. Her two angelbees beat a quick retreat to the treetops, watching from a distance her own glowing form, arm outstretched holding the piercing flame, the pylon repeating its mindless apocalypse.

  After a minute or so the lighter flame sputtered and died, its fuel finally spent. Her matches, too, were nearly done. She would have to watch the home fire now with extra care.

  XXXVII

  THEY TRIED TO mourn for Becca, as appropriately as they could. Daniel recited what little he recalled of the Hebrew kaddish, then he and Isabel spent some time in reflection on the many things their teacher had shared with them over the years, from the alphabet to Shakespeare, to the angelbees. Isabel remembered the scale in the candle box, which she had passed on to Peace Hope. She wondered whether her friend had ever figured out its use, or had the poor angelbee given up its futile pursuit?

  And poor Becca, why had the keepers taken her into the hypersphere? Had they gained whatever it was they sought? What more did they expect now from her bereaved companions?

  At night, Isabel redoubled her pursuit of the keeper in the garden. She grew bolder, approaching almost within arm’s reach of the goatsnakes. It occurred to her: What if she tried to snatch a cylinder from a goatsnake’s coils?

  One night, a goatsnake was using its cylinder to slice off the limbs of a diseased maple at the edge of the garden, while the polyhedral keeper supervised nearby, squatting on its six spiderlegs. Isabel sent her angelbee to watch up close. The energy beam from the cylinder appeared bright white to her infrared eyesight, but not quite bright enough to scare off the angelbee. A high-pitched whine could be heard as each branch parted like butter, and below the underbrush crackled as the energy beam reached momentarily to the ground.

  The goatsnake slithered down the trunk with its cylinder and paused to browse on the underbrush, its neck swelling as lumps of greenery were swallowed. Then it returned to the base of the tree and aimed its cylinder to bring down the trunk.

  The keeper must have expected the trunk to fall forward into the forest. Instead, it teetered backward toward the garden. The goatsnake dropped its cylinder and vanished in an instant, but the more ponderous keeper was slow to react. As the trunk fell, it crashed down at the side of the keeper, pinning two of its legs.

  Through her own two angelbees, Isabel watched, her mouth open in surprise. The keeper lay still; the cylinder lay beside the tree stump, inert. Two glowing goatsnakes lay in the underbrush, quivering, as if registering pain or shock. The keeper’s angelbees were nowhere to be seen.

  The cylinder. Isabel eyed it, her heart pounding so hard she could barely think. She stepped forward slowly, the leaves crackling beneath her feet, ready to flee in a moment. But there was no sign of any other keepers coming to the rescue.

  She reached for the cylinder cautiously, uncertain as to which end projected the energy beam. As she picked it up she held it at arm’s length, horizontal across her path, so that neither end pointed back toward her. At one end she noticed a band glowing faintly, encircling the cylinder. With her right hand she grasped the glowing band, which felt slightly warm to her touch. As she gripped harder, a sudden spattering of dirt erupted to her left.

  She dropped the cylinder and stepped back, choking in the dust that had been raised. Then she realized what had happened: the beam had turned on, from the left end. More confident now, she retrieved the cylinder and practiced turning it on and off by squeezing the banded end, while aiming the opposite end into the underbrush.

  The keeper; what was it up to? She turned quickly, but the keeper still lay there, its legs pinned down.

  Now was her chance, she realized. She could mow down the creature, and its goatsnakes, too, just as surely as it had taken Becca’s life. For once, she could strike back at her captors.

  Yet, as she raised the cylinder, her stomach sickened at the thought. Somehow the broken creature before her seemed less an enemy than a wounded animal, an animal capable of feeling. She had never even brought herself to slaughter a lamb, much less a creature such as this. She had watched it for too long not to think of it as thou.

  Her arm swung down, and she half turned to go. But the memory of the stricken creature would follow her. The keeper would lie there in pain, for how long she could not guess. It would suffer there, just as Becca had suffered. Yet no amount of its suffering could ever bring Becca back to her again.

  A flood of tears welled up unexpectedly. She sat down and let herself cry for some time, crying in a way that she had not been able to cry for Becca before, for her loss as well as her own helplessness and her fears for her future.

  When at last her tears subsided, she breathed deeply and took another look at the fallen tree that pinned the keeper down. She aimed the cylinder to slice through the trunk at intervals, just by the side of the kee
per, until there remained one segment small enough for her to lift off.

  As she removed the tree trunk from the keeper’s legs, it occurred to her that when the keeper recovered it might want its cylinder back. So she ran off with her find, intending to make good use of it as quickly as possible.

  With the cylinder she chopped firewood, several weeks’ worth, until she was exhausted and Daniel took over. It occurred to her that the beam might slice stone as well as wood; indeed it did, albeit more slowly. So, with some practice, she sculpted cooking pots out of stone, hollowing them out with brief bursts from the cylinder.

  The next day Daniel used the biggest pot to cook up a thick vegetable stew, the first they had tasted in months. The first spoonful brought back to Isabel memories of her father and the spicy stews he used to make. For an instant she saw her mother and father across from her at the table as they had sat for so many years.

  The keeper did not return for its cylinder. Daniel insisted that she return with him to the fallen tree, to see what had happened and offer further assistance if needed. But the keeper and its goatsnakes were gone, presumably either recovered or hauled off by others.

  That evening, Isabel’s angelbee saw in the sky a curious pattern of infrared that she recalled from her earliest days in the hypersphere. It was the pattern of concentric rings, extending across the whole sky, collapsing gradually inward to the zenith while new rings formed above the horizon. “That’s from the pylon,” she reminded Daniel. “Remember, before, when it was ‘talking’ to Becca, and to us; the pattern of rings was in the pylon, and we could see it across the sky from here. Maybe the pylon is ready to talk again.”

  “It’s worth a try,” Daniel agreed.

  The pylon glowed with its concentric zebra rings, just as it had on the first night that Becca had brought her out with her angelbee eye. Isabel sent her angelbee racing ahead to face the hexagonal pyramid. As it approached, the giant human eyeball reappeared, displacing the pattern of rings. The eyeball stared back at her angelbee and blinked twice.

  “It’s back again!” Isabel clapped and shouted to Daniel. “The pylon’s talking. Maybe at last we’ll find out how to escape.” She fingered a lump of wax in her pocket and thought of all the questions she wanted to ask. Her steps slowed as she approached the airwall.

  The outsized eyeball faded away. In its place stood an image of the Queen of the keepers, its bulbous head trailed by the segments of keeperlike polyhedrons, each of which would someday bud off as a newborn keeper. The image was a still portrait, not alive with motion, but it was much sharper in detail than the stylized figure Isabel had seen before, when she had held up a wax-model of an expectant mother.

  “That is for thee,” said Daniel, arriving at her side. “They must know that thee is a mother now.”

  The Queen had huge mandibles curving up under its head, which she had not noticed in the earlier image. Were the mandibles for eating or for fighting, she wondered. Among honeybees, the Queen was a relentless killer, rarely permitting a sister queen to share the same hive.

  “Where is the drone?” Daniel wondered. “There must be a male somewhere.”

  “Maybe keeper Queens self-fertilize, or maybe they’re asexual, like the angelbees.” Without sex, only mutation would provide genetic diversity. She wondered whether mutation ever interfered with the symbiosis of the keepers and their angelbees and goatsnakes. It was hard to imagine a keeper getting along by itself; even for feeding it required the stuff regurgitated by its goatsnakes. But the angelbees often ranged far from their keepers, and they talked among themselves with their Braille-like code of winking dots.

  The image of the Queen was fading slowly. Nothing remained, at last, except for the domelike structure that had housed the creature. The dome was a geodesic patchwork of hexagons and other polygonal shapes. The structure remained there, unchanging, for some time.

  Puzzled, Isabel shifted from one foot to the other. Now in her eighth month, the baby had reached a size that made any position uncomfortable within a short time. Finally she shrugged and began to shape the wax from her pocket into a flat slab. She shaped a wall with a door cut out and swung it back and forth at the “hinges.” Surely the keepers knew the purpose of human doors. If only they would let her know what they required of her, to unlock their own.

  The dome from the Queen faded away. Now the pylon showed a flat floor leading into a hexagonal corridor.

  Isabel frowned. “That looks like the place in the extra dimension, the Looking-glass Land where I went inside before.” She sent her angelbees around the pylon, and the view rotated, showing a second corridor running in the opposite direction from the first. Her pulse quickened. “Daniel—what if they’re inviting us inside?”

  “Thee can’t be sure,” he warned. “They didn’t like it one bit, the other times we’ve tried.”

  “But it’s different now. They know us better; they must like the fact that I helped the keeper who got hurt.”

  “That was well done,” Daniel agreed. “But still—it’s too dangerous. Let’s wait until the baby is born before we try that again.”

  “The point is, I want the baby born in Gwynwood, not here, if I can help it.” She shuddered despite herself. “Look, let’s just step inside next to the pylon and let our angelbees do some exploring down the corridor.”

  They stepped in through the breach in the airwall generated by Isabel’s angelbee. This time, they stayed just within the pylon’s domain, the in-between place that switched between two places. No keepers appeared. With a scale cupping each eyelid, Isabel kept one angelbee hovering at her shoulder to look out for keepers, then let the other one venture through the airwall to explore the corridor.

  The keepers did not seem to mind. As her angelbee and Daniel’s floated on, they soon discovered a network of corridors, linking airwalled pylons throughout the Hive. Not all the pylons contained views of Edenic gardens. One appeared to be the main square of a town full of little huts with thatched roofs. Another pylon actually seemed to stand within a building of some sort, with crude unfinished walls, perhaps made of concrete.

  Did all of these little pylons connect to hyperspheres, she wondered; or did some of them return to Earth?

  XXXVIII

  OVER THE NEXT week, Isabel and Daniel sent their angelbees to explore the Hive, while keeping themselves to the relative safety of the pylon’s domain. All the while, the baby seemed to swim around inside her like a goldfish in a bowl, active day and night. Her size had increased so fast that she could not get on her overalls; Daniel had to cut a deep slit down the back, where an opening would be least immodest. But, aside from needing extra sleep, Isabel felt well, much better than she had in the early months.

  One afternoon, as their angelbees roamed the mist-filled corridors, they came upon a pylon whose view set her heartbeat racing. There was the grassy clearing, and the oak trees beyond—surely the trunk with the big crook in it was the one just past Anna Tran’s house? As Isabel’s angelbee circled round the pylon, the view rotated around the clearing. Then, unexpectedly, a person appeared in view.

  It was Peace Hope, seated in the grass with her crutches to the side. She was playing chess with herself as she contemplated the Pylon.

  “Peace Hope!” Isabel shouted involuntarily, though she knew it was useless. Peace Hope had been looking out for her, trying to reach her, all this time; and there was the way back home to Gwynwood.

  “Wait here,” exclaimed Daniel. “I’ll bring help.” He stepped through the airwall and made a dash down the corridor.

  Isabel tried to follow, but the airwall held her in. Quickly she directed the other angelbee at her shoulder to slip through. She ran as fast as she could down the corridor, stumbling with the unaccustomed drop in gravity. Daniel had already vanished from sight, trying to outrun any keepers with their goatsnakes. The fog chilled her, but at least her second angelbee above her shoulder enabled her to see her way ahead.

  As an opening to the branch cor
ridor came up, she paused, trying to remember if this was the turn her exploring angelbee had taken to the Gwynwood Pylon.

  Something grabbed her from behind, across her chest and smothering her scream. A goatsnake, she thought as she struggled to free herself. Her eyes opened, and the two scales popped off, leaving her lost in the fog.

  But the flesh that her fingers sank into wore a shirtsleeve, distinctly human: a human arm.

  “What is it, Dirk?” came a harsh whisper, an Aussie accent. Two burning torches loomed out of the fog.

  “It’s a girl, can’t you see?” The man holding her had a deep voice, American, with a slurred edge. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”

  “Not another girl,” said the Aussie.

  “You watch it, you dags,” came an indignant female voice. “Look at her, she’s preggo. Bob, you watch yourself.”

  “A preggo girl,” Bob amended with a note of exasperation.

  “Cut that shit.” Dirk shoved her to the wall and forced her through a narrow crevice. She gasped as her belly scraped through.

  The place behind the wall looked nothing like the corridor outside. Jagged structures jutted out at various angles, and one had to step carefully over the uneven flooring. Fortunately the fog seemed to lessen, so that the torches were more effective than they had been out in the corridor. But that was little comfort to Isabel as she was dragged along with the four or five strangers. At one point an obstruction blocked their path, and Dirk lifted a keeper’s cylinder. Its beam played upon the obstruction, which quickly smoldered away. To her amazement, she saw that all the strangers wore cylinders slung across their backs. How had they obtained so many?

  “Halt,” called Dirk at last. “Time to take stock. Everybody make it?” Dirk leaned into the wall, breathing heavily. Bob and three other men ranged around him. The woman, a petite figure with curly brown hair, smiled encouragingly at Isabel, but the effect was odd with her eyes covered by mirrorshades. The four men wore mirrorshades, too, poking out through their tangled hair and beards, including Dirk whose long hair shone sandy-colored in the wavering torchlight.