“They should show us the Queen budding off keepers.” Daniel sounded disappointed. “They must be displeased with us again.”
Isabel frowned and her pulse quickened. Something was different about the pylon tonight; she could not put her finger on it, was it the pylon itself…or the platform on which it stood? “Daniel—that platform looks different. It’s not the same surface as usual, it’s a different hue and texture.”
Daniel’s angelbee floated closer to the airwall. “Perhaps so. What does that mean?”
“It means—” She swallowed and held the baby tighter, her heart pounding. “The pylon’s domain must have changed connection, through the extra dimension. Instead of giving out onto that place in the corridor, it connects…somewhere else.” To the Queen cell.
“Then it must be an invitation.” He put his arm around her. “Let’s go. Thee wanted to see the Queen.”
They walked slowly forward, angelbees ahead to penetrate the airwall. As they stepped onto the platform within the pylon’s domain, the familiar “lift” in gravity bounced in Isabel’s feet. Around them now, in all directions, rose the jointed panels of the dome, mostly hexagons with occasional pentagons to generate curvature, enclosing a space of about the volume of her mother’s house in Gwynwood. There were angelbees, a dozen or so, lurking above the pylon. Still, no sign of the Queen.
A thought struck her and she turned suddenly cold. “Daniel—what if they got the Queen? The Shades—that was their aim.” She dug her fingers into Daniel’s arm. “They could be here, ready to jump on us!”
“Easy, now. There’s no sign of danger—”
“They could be here any minute. Anyway, something’s got to be wrong. The Queen can’t just be gone.”
“Thee is right,” he quietly agreed. “Something is amiss. Let’s go.”
XLI
ISABEL DID NOT return to the pylon again. Daniel ventured there in the daytime, where the “connection” of the airwall seemed to have reverted to its usual site in the maze of fog-filled corridors. Yet, while his angelbees might explore at will, there could be no escape from the surveillance of the keepers.
During the day Isabel kept Jael fed and watched her grow, feeling the immense tug of Jael’s tiny hand clenching her finger. Between nursings Daniel would take the infant for an hour, staring into her eyes until she fell asleep. As Jael slept, with her eyes shut tight and her mouth drawn small between her rounded cheeks, her expression reminded Isabel of something she had seen before, but she could not recall where.
Isabel took to exploring the hypersphere again with her angelbee eyes, watching the drama of nature’s many creatures. The possum, the blackbirds, the mother skunk, all spoke to her loneliness.
“Isabel!” A voice came, one morning, a familiar voice, but not Daniel’s. “Where does thee come from, and where is thee going?”
“Peace Hope?” Hurriedly Isabel called back her angelbees. The airborne eyes returned to look upon herself, but no Peace Hope was to be seen.
Daniel got up quickly, his form luminously infrared, holding Jael. His eyes were wide with surprise, and he extended a hand to something Isabel’s angelbees could not see. Then, without sound or warning, he and Jael simply vanished. Isabel’s angelbees could see nothing left but a bit of unfocused blur in the foliage.
“Daniel, where are you?” She pulled off the scales and her eyes blinked furiously, blinded by the light until her pupils could readjust.
“Here I am.” Daniel was watching her, puzzled, his arm around Peace Hope.
“We’re here, silly.” Peace Hope stood there on her crutches, her long blond hair streaming over her shoulders. One blue eye was open, the other closed, capped by an eyespot scale, the angelbee hovering close at her shoulder. “Oh, Isabel, I’ve missed thee for so long. What is this beautiful Looking-glass Land?”
Isabel ran to hug her, and Daniel and Jael, too; for just an instant, she had lost them forever. Her heart was still slowing down, and she could barely speak. “It’s really you. I don’t know what happened—I couldn’t see you.”
Peace Hope said, “My angelbee couldn’t see thee, either, with thy scale on, nor the keepers. And the keepers can’t see me, so far as I can tell.”
Daniel shook his head. “I don’t understand. What’s going on?”
“My angelbee must be a variant strain,” said Peace Hope. “The biology book said that sometimes, when conditions get bad, one partner of a symbiosis may revert to an independent form. That must have been what happened to this angelbee,” she said, glancing over her shoulder, “the one whose scale Becca passed on to Isabel.” The one that had followed Isabel day and night, until the time she had popped its daughter. “But the ones Isabel is using now must be the keepers’ strain,” Peace Hope added. “That is why thee couldn’t see me.”
“So yours is somehow independent?” Isabel asked.
“Independent of the keepers,” Peace Hope explained. “It chose me as a partner. The two different strains must put out microwave interference, somehow, each to hide its own class of partners from the other. Maybe on the keepers’ planet there are predators—”
“Or warring bands of keepers.” Becca’s first angelbee must have been the original parent of the mutant strain. No wonder the keepers had sought to trap her.
“Isabel—is that adorable baby thine? What is his name, or hers?”
“Her name is Jael,” said Daniel, cradling her.
“But, Scatterbrain, Daniel disappeared, too, when he touched you. Does that mean we all can escape the keepers’ notice, with you and your mutant angelbee?”
Peace Hope considered this. “I hadn’t thought of that. Yes, that should do.”
“Then what are we waiting for? Quick, let’s get out—before they catch on.”
So the three of them crept slowly down the path to the pylon, Isabel and Daniel taking care to keep a hand on Peace Hope’s shoulder. Jael, thank goodness, was asleep, breathing noisily beneath Isabel’s chin. In the distance occasional angelbees hung among the tree branches. Isabel could not tell whether they were watching or not. “Does everyone know about the scales now? Do they know how the angelbees work?”
“I told only Teacher Matthew,” said Peace Hope. “After I saw Daniel in the Pylon, I told him. He helped me figure out what I was seeing.”
“Teacher Matthew?” Matthew had always been so cautious about the angelbees.
Peace Hope added, “I can’t imagine how you got used to two angelbees at once. It took me days to get my eye straight with one.”
“We had little else to work on,” observed Daniel. “No more college to study.”
The thought of college brought a sharp pang to Isabel. Here she was, on the run from the keepers, a baby on her back, and further than ever from her dream of attending the Sydney Uni.
But nothing would stop her, she vowed, with a sudden renewal of vision. When she got home, none of it would stand in the way of her getting a real education, one way or another.
Ahead of them stood the pylon, its rainbow-colored surface blank to human vision. Now Isabel and Daniel would have to follow Peace Hope with her angelbee blindly through the corridors of fog.
Isabel had second thoughts. “Those Shades—Did you run into anybody?”
“What do you mean?” Peace Hope asked. “I don’t think so.”
“What will become of us once we get back?” Isabel wondered. “Won’t the keepers catch up with us soon enough?”
“A good question.” Peace Hope stopped and leaned on her crutches. The crown of her lucky Red Queen poked out of her shirt pocket. “I’ve got some more eyespot scales in the candle box, from offspring of this one. They should all be the right strain of angelbee. They might protect you.”
“Why, soon there’ll be enough for everyone in Gwynwood, then. What’s more,” Isabel realized with growing excitement, “our angelbees can walk us through the Wall! We’ll be free!”
Peace Hope lifted her crutches, and her angelbee descended to pen
etrate the airwall. The three humans crossed through the pylon’s domain and entered the darkness. For Isabel it was hard, even harder than she expected, to follow blindly with no clear sense of what lay ahead. She reached out now and then to touch Jael’s cheek. Still, there was no sign of keepers nor of Shades. Perhaps Peace Hope’s luck was holding out.
Then an angelbee loomed out of the fog, a second one. Isabel gripped her friend’s shoulder hard and nearly fell over. “Look—they must have found us!” Her voice echoed down the corridor.
“No, I can see that one.” Peace Hope’s angelbee turned, its eyespot rotating. “That’s one of ours. It must be Teacher Matthew watching, in case I lose my way.”
At long last, a pool of yellowish brightness appeared out of the journey through night. It was sunlight, true sunlight, the first that Isabel had seen in nearly a year. As they emerged at the Pylon of Gwynwood, Matthew Crofts was there to meet them, his smile as radiant as the sun. Matthew hugged them all, laughing and shaking his head. “You made it,” he exclaimed. “What a surprise this will be!”
“Surprise? You mean—”
“We decided not to tell,” said Peace Hope. “So nobody else would be in danger if we failed.”
Matthew’s eyes were smiling despite the wrinkles grown around them. Another recruit to the Gwynwood Underground.
XLII
THE SITTING ROOM was full of visitors. The true sun shed its red evening rays across the old couch where Isabel sat between her mother and her father, who cradled Jael in the crook of his arm and made exaggerated faces at her. The baby wore proper clothes for the first time, a clown suit donated by Debbie Dreher, who sat with Carl and the children nearby. Marguerite clung to Isabel and kept stroking her hair, as if her daughter might disappear again at any moment. Daniel and the Scattergoods were there, and Peace Hope sat enthroned in the big armchair, with an extra lilt in her voice, clearly making the most of her role as rescuer. “The keepers can’t come after them again,” she explained, “because our own angelbees will hide them in time. We’ll make sure of that. Anna is keeping watch on the Pylon, to give warning.”
The townspeople absorbed this. Carl cleared his throat. “Suppose they put us all to sleep again?”
Isabel said, “We can get out this time. Our angelbees can lead us out through the Wall.”
Her words produced an unexpected hesitancy among those gathered. Debbie sat back suddenly, clutching her chubby one-year-old, Patience, transformed from the infant Isabel remembered. Matthew gripped the arm of his chair until his knuckles turned white.
Only Deliverance smiled, her eyes wide. “Why that means we can all go and live outside now! Isn’t it marvelous?” she asked her mother.
Vera bit her lip and looked away.
Isabel was perplexed. What had she said? Could they not see that freedom was at hand?
Liza spoke at last, her Quaker cap pinned neatly as always. “We all long to cross the Wall, when we are ready. The town will consider this immediately. But now, Isabel, can thee tell us, did thee learn any better what the creatures wanted of thee, and Daniel and Becca; why did they take you from us?”
“We’re an endangered species,” said Isabel. “The whole human race.”
Daniel added, “The keepers wanted us to learn that compassion is the key to survival. That is what I think. The accident with the keeper, when Isabel took the cylinder; that was a test for us, I’m convinced.”
“But that’s a lesson we all know,” said Liza.
“Of course,” Daniel agreed. “John Dickinson taught us that.”
Isabel disagreed. “Those Shades didn’t learn a thing from John Dickinson. Nor from the keepers, either.”
“But for the keepers,” Liza persisted, “why was it so important? Why did they voyage across space to rescue Earth?”
Daniel opened his mouth to answer, but thought better of it. “The truth is, we can’t say for sure.”
“We never saw their Queen,” said Isabel. “I thought they would let us see her, somehow, to ask…I’m not sure what. But instead they led us to an empty cell.” As if she herself were the equivalent of a Queen, with her new baby.
A knock came at the door. Isabel’s first thought, as always, was someone for the doctor. Keith got up and headed for the door.
It was Anna, bundled in her coat, her slick black hair slightly askew. Isabel stood up quickly and hurried to meet her.
“The Pylon,” said Anna. “It’s—it’s on fire. I don’t know how else to describe it. It’s gone all orange, with leaping flames inside, like the time we lit the bonfire around, remember? Only this time, there’s no fire of ours.”
The flames burned on within the Pylon by night and by day. Still there was no sign of fog, nor of keepers coming to seek their two runaways. After two days, Isabel and Daniel got up the courage to return to the clearing and see for themselves. The sight made Isabel’s hair stand on end. No angelbees were needed to recognize the outpouring of light and heat—in fact, any angelbee that came close would be driven away.
“They’ve sealed us out,” she told Daniel. “They’re afraid of our new strain of angelbees. They’ve sealed out the contagion.”
Daniel stood in the grass, his trim beard blowing back in the brisk autumn breeze, a breath of air not felt by them all that time in the hypersphere. Jael was strapped in a sling across his chest, soon to waken for milk time. “Perhaps we’ve been banished for choosing human company over their garden.” The angels with the flaming sword. Even Yahweh was always such a jealous God.
“But what about the Sydney shipments?” asked Isabel. “Will those be banished, too?”
“That is the price of freedom.”
It turned out that the Sydney shipments had become increasingly erratic, in any case, over the year past. Marguerite was hoarding and stockpiling medicines. Supplies for building were scarce, delaying the plans of Sal and Jon who wanted to reopen an old storefront on the highway and set up a grocery store, of all things. Meanwhile, there were hopeful signs from the Herald, reports that here and there the Walls were lifting. Overall, it seemed that the keepers were losing their grip.
Had the Shades really got the Queen? If so, what would happen next? Would the keepers take revenge at last? Isabel could not shake off a sense of foreboding.
At the Scattergoods’, boarders had taken up in their former rooms; Liza just could not get on without a full household. The boarders offered to leave, but of course Isabel declined, insisting on bringing Daniel back to her old room on the hospital floor. Her father had kept everything as it was before, even Peewee in the cage, now grown too obese to fit inside her exercise wheel. The only thing new was a nest of bluejays that had set up house in the old gutter beneath her dormer window.
Jael had a hard time adjusting at first to the new surroundings. She threw fits of crying, spreading her limbs and throwing her head back, refusing to be diapered. At other times, though, she was developing a curious quiet alertness, a deeply watchful interest in her world.
While Jael was napping, Isabel slipped away to tell Peace Hope all about the hypersphere, and to find out what all had really gone on in Gwynwood for the past ten months. Peace Hope gave Isabel three eyespot scales which she had collected from angelbee offspring, one each for Isabel and Daniel, and one for Keith who wanted to try it out. The angelbees floated dutifully around the Scattergood house, all descendants of Becca’s original angelbee, the one whose defection must have so scared the keepers that they took her away.
“I wish I could have stayed to see more of your Looking-glass Land,” said Peace Hope wistfully. “I’ve never drawn a hummingbird from life before.”
“Well I’m just glad to be out, thank you,” Isabel assured her. “At least I didn’t return empty-handed,” Isabel added, thinking of Jael. Her breasts were feeling full already. She peered curiously at the latest stamp Peace Hope was drawing, an abstract model of balls and sticks. “What’s that supposed to be?”
“That’s an organic mole
cule, ‘buckminsterfullerene.’ A new line of stamps I started, inspired by chemistry class.”
“Chemistry class?” Isabel was envious.
“Chemistry with Teacher Matthew, classical Greek with Mother, and I’m teaching art class. En archēi ēn ho logos.”
“Of all the rotten luck, to miss chemistry.”
“You only missed a month. You can take my book home.” Peace Hope let the pen drop from her mouth and reached with her gripper-hand to a pile of envelopes on her desk. “I have something to show thee. I have a pen pal in Sydney. He’s an engineering student at the Uni. His name is Christopher, and he writes lovely letters.”
Isabel opened an envelope and removed a letter with a photo of a rather attractive young man, tawny-haired with freckles, one leg missing, probably to cancer. She read the letter halfway through, then looked up. “Scatterbrain, he sounds worse than that Pirate!”
“Doesn’t he, though. I plan to visit him when I attend the Uni, after the Walls fall.”
Isabel grew serious again. “The Walls are as good as fallen, already. What’s the matter with this town? Why aren’t they eager to get out?”
“It’s not so much the Wall itself,” said Peace Hope. “It’s what lies outside.”
“The keepers?”
“No, silly. The skeletons.”
Of course, los huesos, the old pile of bones surrounding the town, bleached by twenty summers of sun. “That’s no problem. We can clear our way through those.”
“Isabel, the elders—they know all those people. They watched them all die.”
She thought this over. “Okay, but—that was two decades ago, before I was born.” Two decades seemed a long time to Isabel.
“To them, it’s still like yesterday. I know. I asked Matthew, one night after chemistry class. He told me all about it. He talked on till daybreak.” Peace Hope paused. “It was after that that he joined the Underground.”
“Well, let them all talk it out, then, once and for all.” That had been Becca’s last wish, too, Isabel remembered.
The Wall Around Eden Page 27
